A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page B

series of break-ins and robberies, and they had their house wired with live wires, so that if someone broke in, the intruder would be electrocuted; they had forgotten to turn off the wire leading to or around the swimming pool, and the Acting Governor General was electrocuted. Lying in his coffin, he looked black, as if he had been scorched from the inside. His funeral was practically a pageant, and Antigua had never seen anything like it. The man who succeeded him, the second Acting Governor General in two months, got sick at this funeral. He said he felt sick. He vomited. He was taken home in a car; then he got better. While attending the funeral of another big person, he fainted. He vomited. Doctors, attending the funeral as ordinary mourners, said there was nothing really wrong, but just to be sure, they looked at him, had him admitted to hospital. (The hospital in Antigua is so dirty, so run-down, that even if the best doctors and nurses in the world were employed, a person from another part of the world—Europe or North America—would not feel confident leaving a domestic animal there.) The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, but just to make sure, just to be on the safe side, he was placed in Intensive Care. The Intensive Care part of the hospital is the only part of the hospital that would inspire confidence in a sick person, and for a man as prominent as he was that was the only thing to do. His friends visited him in the hospital. He told jokes. They laughed. They said, “See you tomorrow.” They left him. He died. They were surprised, because he had seemed his old self. It was his heart; he had had a heart problem. He was poisoned; how can your heart make you vomit and froth at the mouth and fall down in a stupor and then revive and go on as before? Twice, he got sick at funerals, so it must have been something he ate. Bradley Carrot (the name of the third Acting Governor General in two months) is looking over his shoulder. All of the ministers in government go overseas for medical treatment. Not one of them would stay in the hospital here.
    Eleven million dollars that the French government gave to the Antiguan government for developmental aid has vanished. A high government official got millions of dollars in bribes for allowing a particular kind of industrial plant to be built. The salt floating around in the Antiguan air soon caused the plant to rust. All the airwaves in Antigua are owned by the government or ministers in government. On the airwaves, the opposition parties are never mentioned except to denounce them and to say that they are Communists and that they have received money from Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi. Antigua was going to have an oil-refining industry. West Indies Oil, it was going to be called. The government built the big tanks to hold the oil before it was refined and the oil after it was refined. They built a platform far out at sea, where the large tankers would load and unload the cargo. The government built a refinery. Something went wrong. The refinery is rusting. The tanks are rusting. The platform is rusting. The foreigner who did the bad things in the Far East was involved in this. He is not rusting. He is very rich and travels the world on a diplomatic passport issued to him by the government of Antigua. He has more plans. He wants to build for the people of Antigua a museum and a library. The papers of the slave-trading family from Barbuda (the Condringtons), the records of their traffic in human lives, were being auctioned. The government of Antigua made a bid for them. Someone else made a larger bid. He was the foreigner. His bid was the successful bid. He then made a gift of these papers to the people of Antigua. And what does it mean? The records of one set of enemies, bought by another enemy, given to the people who have been their victims as a gift. The people who go into running the government were not always such big thieves; nor have they