‘If he was on the fast track like you say, how was he derailed?’
‘In the development of that fantastically able brain, nothing went wrong. He grows better year by year. In his private life, everything.’
‘Do you care to tell me?’
He considered for some moments, then said: ‘No. But I will tell you this. The moment I heard you speak aboard the Galante, and learned that you were not married, I almost shouted: “There’s the one! She’s the one that could do it!” ’
Thérèse laughed, then explained: ‘Oh, Mr. Carmody, at college the girls used to sit around and tell gruesome case histories that always ended: “So, girls, there it is. Never marry a moral cripple. Spend that little extra effort and find yourself a real man.” ’
‘Dr. Vaval, believe me, this man is no cripple. He needs to have his soul set free. Someone to help him become the man he could be.’
Soberly she said: ‘I suppose you could say that of many men.’
‘He’s different. He’s worth it.’ While she was pondering this, he said rather boldly: ‘On the second night of Carnaval, when I saw you and Ranjit sitting together, you looked as if you, too, for the moment had been set free.’
‘You should have joined us.’
‘It was clear you wished to be alone. Now it’s clear that you wish you were back in Trinidad.’
Thérèse, biting her knuckles, stared at the Caribbean and its white wave tips dancing by in pirouetting joy, but she felt only sadness in leaving this sea of her choice. She would miss its golden grandeur and its varied people, especially the man in Trinidad who knew it even better than she. Then came the quiet voice of the college counselor, as if he were talking to a student having trouble with algebra, except that in this instance the trouble was with the student’s heart: ‘Dr. Vaval, since you’re from Haiti, I must assume you’re Catholic, and he’s certainly a Hindu. As a Catholic myself, and immersed in Trinidad, I must in all decency warn you that such radical differences are almost irreconcilable. But yet, it seems to me, with you and Ranjit the similarities are much greater than the differences, are they not?’ And she whispered: ‘Yes.’
Carmody, sixty and aware that his years as a teacher were ending with the job undone—he had not got his one brilliant student properly started—took Thérèse’s hands in his and said: ‘You too are growing older, my dear. Twenty-five doesn’t last forever, and thirty-five brings panic in all of us, especially women. I’ve seen it. So two lives are at stake, his and yours … and I have the feeling that the peril is almost equally shared.’
When she said nothing, but did leave her hands in his, he continued: ‘A college guidance teacher deals with two kinds of students, those who need to discover the fundamental truths for themselves, nudged by his quiet prodding, and those who need to be told in the simplest and sometimes most brutal terms: “Francis Xavier, change your ways or I will throw you out of this college.” ’
‘And you think I’m the latter?’
‘I know it. So I’m giving an order. When the Galante docks in Miami tomorrow, you and I will grab a taxi, rush right out to the airport, and catch the next plane back to Trinidad. You’re needed there.’
Alarmed by the impetuousness of the step she was about to take, she asked in a burst of anxiety: ‘Would I be insane if I did fly back … I’ve known him only two days?’ and the older voice said quietly: ‘Love is the self-revelation of two souls. Sometimes it comes in a blinding moment in only one day, sometimes after a slow awakening of eleven years. God takes no cognizance of the timetable.’
So next morning when the ship was safely moored, the two popular instructors bade their students farewell, caught a cab, and sped to Miami International.
When Thérèse Vaval walked up the steps of the Sirdar’s House and knocked on the door, her first words were abrupt and intense: ‘I was drawn back by a thousand magnets, Ranjit. Your ideas, your potential, and above all, by the fact that you need me to unlock the frozen doors.’
When he did not respond, she spoke of her own frozen doors, of her engagement to Dennis Krey and of her confusion in Haiti. By his quiet smile she knew that he guessed these to be peripheral reasons, so she told of her conversation with Carmody and his insistence that she fly back immediately, since the rest of her life was in jeopardy. Only then did he realize that she had been as wounded by life as he. There was silence for a moment. Then, clearing her throat, she said: ‘Now, Ranjit, tell me how it was with you.’
Mustering his courage and licking his dry lips, he said: ‘When you sailed away at the end of Carnaval, I learned what torment was. I lingered at the dock till your ship was out of sight, mumbling to myself: “There she goes. The one light in this world.” And when I thought that I would never see you again, I was disconsolate … books were tedious. It was then I discovered what love was.’
‘As the ship sailed I was feeling the same, Ranjit. But the questions remain: Who are you? Why are you here and alone?’
Fear almost paralyzed him as he wondered how much he should tell her, how much he dared tell without frightening her and driving her away again. Seeing no escape, he blurted out: ‘I had an overpowering desire to be a scholar in the States, but my permit to stay was running out. I had to do something. So I went to a man who made a business of arranging marriages for foreign students so they could get American citizenship … and I married his sister. But it turned out that she had a real husband, a Nicaraguan, and three earlier fake marriages … no divorces. It was shameful and I was part of it.’
Thérèse shivered, wondering what was to come next, and the burst of revelation shattered the quiet room like the gusts of a hurricane: ‘A bed in the cellar … punched me … her husband with a knife at my throat … the Immigration hearing … the expulsion.’ When he saw she was numbed he stopped, rummaged among his notebooks, then held before her the front page of the Miami paper from the day of his deportation: JEALOUS NICARAGUAN LOVER MURDERS …
Now she asked only one question, but it was astonishingly blunt: ‘Is your banishment for life?’ and he replied: ‘I think so,’ and she said firmly: ‘Well, I don’t. And I shall devise some way to get you back into the States … permanently … and find you a job teaching!’ Then, as if a dam had broken, she threw her hands over her face, and from the convulsions of her shoulders he knew that she was silently sobbing. Finally she dropped her hands and looked straight at him: ‘We’ve never even kissed … and here I am, proposing to you.’
He did not, as an ordinary man would, rush to embrace her; instead, he stood fearfully apart and said in a low voice: ‘I was married to Molly Hudak for nearly two years and she allowed me to kiss her only once, at our wedding when the clerk said almost menacingly: “Now you may kiss her.” Apparently I’m not the kissing kind.’
This broke the spell, and she came toward him, arms held wide. But he drew back, hesitant, for there was one more thing he was bound in honor as a gentleman to do. Softly he asked: ‘Thérèse, will you marry me?’ and then, moving forward evenly, they kissed, and she whispered: ‘We’re children of the golden sea … its destiny and ours are linked … and together, you and I shall help it find its way.’
FURTHER READING
A novel like this serves a commendable purpose if it encourages the reader to consult other books on the subject. The University of Miami, where I worked during the writing, has a library with a wealth of Caribbean material. No matter how obscure the subject on which I required information, the librarians invariably found the books I needed. From the hundreds I consulted, I recommend the following. Most of these titles, if not in your bookshop, should be available through your local public-library system.
Maya. To supplement my research on the ancient cities of the Yucatán Peninsula, I found The Ancient Maya by Sylvanus Morley (Stanford University Press, 1983) and The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization by J. Eric Thompson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966) to be particularly helpful.
Columbus. In his magisterial biography Admir
al of the Ocean Sea (Little, Brown, 1942), Samuel Eliot Morrison summarizes standard views of the great discoverer. Salvador de Madariaga, in Christopher Columbus (Hollis & Carter, 1949), assaults the argument that Columbus was, in any way that mattered, an Italian and argues instead that he was probably a wandering Jew.
Spanish Caribbean. In Caribbean Sea of the New World (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), Germán Arciniegas provides a brilliantly composed defense of Spain’s accomplishments in the Caribbean. Strongly argued, rich in detail. On the stories of Cartagena, Eduardo LeMaitre’s comprehensive Historia General de Cartagena has not yet been translated from the Spanish, but an abbreviated account in English does exist (no date, but 1980s) and is worth the search.
Pirates and Buccaneers. Nobody knows for sure the spelling of the man’s name or his nationality, but in 1684, Alexander Esquemeling published in London a powerful, some say mendacious, personal reminiscence of Henry Morgan and other pirates, The Bucaniers [sic] of America (Scribner, 1898, reprint). In a modern work of great merit, Dudley Pope’s Harry Morgan’s Way (Alison Press, 1977) gives a less hysterical but more astonishing account of Morgan’s exploits. And The Sack of Panama by Peter Earle (Viking Press, 1972) brilliantly re-creates Morgan’s most memorable, indeed incredible, adventures.
Sugar and Slavery. Sugar and slavery will forever be linked as the glory and shame of the Caribbean Islands, and for this inexhaustible subject three books were particularly valuable: Sugar and Slavery by Richard B. Sheridan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean by Lowell J. Ragatz (Century, 1928); and A Jamaican Plantation by Michael Crayton and James Walvin (University of Toronto Press, 1970).
British Islands. Alec Waugh, elder brother of Evelyn, gives a fine portrait of an imaginary English colony in Island in the Sun (Farrar, Straus, 1955). The gallantry of the Cavaliers on Barbados in offering to fight the entire British Empire in defense of King Charles I is told by N. Davis in his The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados (Argosy Press, 1887). James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies (Scribner, 1897) is probably the worst travel book written by any historian on any subject at any time. A boastful champion of white supremacy and a merciless reviler of blacks and Irishmen, the author reveals himself as such a consummate ass that the modern reader alternately shudders and guffaws.
The Seamen of England. If the battles for naval supremacy in Europe were rehearsed in the waters of the Caribbean, two English sailors contributed monumentally to the course of history. The exploits of Francis Drake are well recorded in The Life of Francis Drake by A. E. W. Mason (Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), and his major claim to fame in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly (Jonathan Cape, 1959). Chronicling the extraordinary career and unashamedly venal temperament of Horatio Nelson are The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey (Constable, 1916) and Carola Oman’s classic Nelson (Doubleday, 1946).
The French Connections. Cuba’s finest novelist, Alejo Carpentier, in his Explosion in a Cathedral (first published in Mexico in 1962 and now available in Penguin Books, 1971), gives a dramatic portrait of Victor Hugues, with a background prior to his ‘reign’ in Guadeloupe much different from the one I offer. An excellent book.
Haiti. Haiti’s fight for independence under a brilliant black general who outfoxed the French, the Spanish and the British is well told in The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture by the Reverend John Beard (Ingram Cook, 1923). The subsequent pitiful course of that independence is well covered in Black Democracy, The Story of Haiti by H. P. Davis (Dial Press, 1928) and in Haiti, the Politics of Squalor by Robert I. Rotberg (Houghton Mifflin, 1921). I especially recommend the work of a brilliant Trinidad scholar, C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (Secker & Warburg, 1938).
Trinidad. The complexities of an island shared equally by ethnic heritages of Africa and India are well cited by Morton Klass in East Indians in Trinidad (Columbia University Press, 1961). Her emergence as an independent republic is ably reported by Donald Wood in Trinidad in Transition (Oxford University Press, 1968).
Jamaica. There is a wealth of material on Jamaica, written at all stages of her history. Oliver Cox’s Upgrading and Renewing the Historic City of Port Royal, Jamaica (Shankland Cox, London, 1984) is an enchanting official report replete with maps and plans. Robert F. Marx’s Pirate Port, the Story of the Sunken City of Port Royal (World Publishing, 1967) provides a capitulation of the basic facts. On the tragedy of the Morant Bay rebellion under the governorship of John Eyre, Australian apologist Geoffrey Dutton, in The Hero as Murderer (Collins, 1967), depicts Eyre as an unquestioned hero during his tenure in Australia and as the cool-headed savior of the white man in Jamaica. In The Myth of Governor Eyre (Woolf, 1933), Lord Olivier, a later governor of Jamaica, proves his predecessor to have been a bumptious fool. For current books on Jamaica generally, two contemporary Jamaicans have made excellent contributions. Sir Philip Sherlock’s West Indian Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 1973) and Clinton V. Black’s History of Jamaica (Collins, 1961) pull no punches, albeit in their own gentlemanly fashion. Sherlock was personally most helpful in guiding me toward experts on many aspects of Jamaican life, past and present.
Cuba. Of many instructive books, I used three which pertained directly to my story. R. Hart Phillips’ Cuba, Island of Paradox (McDowell, Obolensky, 1959) is the intimate report of steps leading to Castro’s triumph, by the mother superior of newspaper correspondents. Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (Lippincott, 1933) is the standard pre-Castro warning of a liberal observer. Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer’s The Cuban Invasion (Praeger, 1962) is a gripping account of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Of the more formal histories, I profited from Jaime Suchlicki’s Cuba from Columbus to Castro (Scribner, 1974).
Rastafarians. Two books attempt to explain the many confusing aspects of this mystifying religious movement. Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica by Joseph Owens (Sangster, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976) and The Rastafarians by Leonard E. Barrett (idem, 1977) are supplemented by a gripping biography of reggae star Bob Marley by Timothy White, Catch a Fire (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1983).
Cricket. The importance of the Caribbean’s other main religion, cricket, is rarely appreciated by the outsiders, but I have not exaggerated its significance. From the score of technical treatises I recommend two delightful reads: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (Pantheon Books, 1984), a reminiscence of boyhood in Trinidad, and Frances Edmonds’ Another Bloody Tour: England in the West Indies 1986 (Kingswood, 1986), the irreverent report of an Englishwoman intellectual married to a professional cricketer. (England was massacred by the islanders, 5 matches to 0.)
Caribbean. I found that most islanders pronounce this Car-ib-bee-an, and dictionaries give that as preferred, with Ca-rib-ee-an in second place as acceptable. A wag explained: ‘The hoi polloi use the first, but intellectual snobs prefer the second.’ And so do I. I have been unable to pin down when the word was first used to designate the sea which now bears that name. We know for sure that this confusion started with the first Spaniards who saw that the all-important Isthmus of Panama ran not vertically north to south, as laymen would always believe, but horizontally east to west. This caused early mariners to refer to the Pacific Ocean as La Mar del Sur (South Sea) and the future Caribbean as La Mar del Norte (North Sea). Sir Francis Drake did not sail into the Pacific on his historic circumnavigation of the globe: he ventured into the South Sea, and this usage continued through the sixteenth century and probably into the seventeenth. Sir Henry Morgan and his pirates ravaged the North Sea, not the Caribbean, and I have seen maps printed as late as 1770 still using the older terminology. I would appreciate instruction clarifying this interesting geographical puzzle.
THE SETTING
971,400 square miles, of which land is only a small portion
BY JAMES A. MICHENER
Tales of the South Pacific
The Fires of Spring
Return to Paradise
The Voice of Asia
The Bridge
s at Toko-Ri
Sayonara
The Floating World
The Bridge at Andau
Hawaii
Report of the Country Chairman
Caravans
The Source
Iberia
Presidential Lottery
The Quality of Life
Kent State: What Happened and Why
The Drifters
A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970
Centennial
Sports in America
Chesapeake
The Covenant
Space
Poland
Texas
Legacy
Alaska
Journey
Caribbean
The Eagle and the Raven
Pilgrimage
The Novel
James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook
Mexico
Creatures of the Kingdom
Recessional
Miracle in Seville
This Noble Land: My Vision for America
The World Is My Home
with A. Grove Day
Rascals in Paradise
with John Kings
Six Days in Havana
About the Author
JAMES A. MICHENER, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.