The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “What did Cruz do with this fellow, Panta?” he asked.

  Pantaleon checked his notes. “He thought it might be malaria, or else—you’ll like this—obstinate constipation.”

  “Good God.”

  “He applied a hot fomentation over iodide of potash. Look, you can see the remains of the blistering.”

  Carriscant felt disgusted. “You know, sometimes I feel we might as well be living in caves fighting dinosaurs. This man’s dying of perinephritis and Cruz is smearing ointments on him to blister his skin.”

  “Don’t forget the morphia given as a suppository.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “And a diet of beef tea.”

  Carriscant laughed loudly, joined by his theatre nurses. You had to laugh, he supposed. If people knew what misplaced trust in their physicians subjected them to…

  The incision was held apart by retractors and Carriscant looked at the exposed organ. What he could see of it was an unhealthy grey, there was a lot of fat and fibrous tissue obscuring much of the surface. He inserted his finger into the cavity, feeling between the kidney and the diaphragm. There was a spurt of pus that spattered on to his sleeve. He smelt its farinaceous sweetness, noting that it was a brackish green in colour. He had found the abscess, about the size of a tangerine, he guessed.

  “How’s the new project going?” he asked Pantaleon as he stitched the wall of the abscess cavity to the lip of the wound.

  “Very well. I must say the standard of local carpentry is astonishing. They’ll make anything.”

  “I know.” Carriscant pulled away with his fingers loose sloughs of cellular tissue and shook them off into a bowl. “I remember having some marquetry replaced by a fellow who lived in Tondo. Just a little shack really. This stuff had been done in Japan. When he’d finished you couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “You should see the propeller blades, exquisite. How much longer? Pulse is a bit thready.”

  “Five minutes…Dressing forceps, Nurse.”

  Carriscant pulled away more of the adipose tissue. “Depends if there’s a fistula, I suppose.” He felt with his finger. “Don’t think so.”

  “I hope to have all the panels done by next week.”

  “Really? Fast work…Lot of suppuration here.”

  He washed out the abscess cavity with a solution of carbolic acid and inserted a drainage tube. He had found out where the Gerlinger school was, where the American woman worked. Bad idea to wait there while the children were studying. Later in the day perhaps. He closed up the wound with some sutures. One of the nurses laid a large wadding of soaked cotton wool over the wound.

  “That should do it,” he said. “And I think a large and abundant enema might be called for.”

  Pantaleon chuckled. “Cruz would certainly approve.”

  “And some ergot of rye. Two doses for the next three days. Wheel him out.”

  He walked over to the sink to wash his hands. Stink of pus clung to you. How Annaliese hated that. Carried the smell of your work home. Like being married to a fishmonger.

  “What’s up next?” he called to his nurse.

  “Volvulus of the small intestine.”

  Busy day, he thought, busy day.

  ON THE LUNETA

  The Gerlinger school was down a side street off Escolta, a hundred yards or so from that prosperous stripe of elegant stores and the tinselly allure of the Chinese fancy goods emporia. It was a former barracks of the guardia civil and still had a somewhat institutional and cheerless aspect although some attempt had been made to pretty it up recently by planting a border of zinnias along the foot of the facade. The children were gone by the time Carriscant arrived at the end of the afternoon.

  An old woman swabbing down the stone flags in the entrance hall directed him to the teachers’ common room where a trio of youthful nuns confirmed that Miss Caspar had gone for the day.

  “Is it urgent business?” one of them asked, politely.

  “Ah, no, Sister, it’s…” He paused: how to express this? “A personal matter.”

  Something of his anguish must have irradiated the familiar phrase because the three nuns all glanced sympathetically at each other and then one of them volunteered the information that it was Miss Caspar’s habit to take a walk on the Luneta before she went home. Especially if the Constabulary band was playing.

  The Luneta was a small park between the battlements of Intramuros and the sea wall where traditionally the citizens of Manila gathered for the paseo at dusk. The custom had survived the arrival of the Americans and it was one of the few occasions during which foreigners, mestizos and native Filipinos encountered each other in some sort of relaxed and egalitarian social mix.

  When Carriscant arrived at the modest esplanade around which most of the ostentatious parading and covert scrutiny took place a few people were beginning to saunter away and the last Angelus could be heard tolling faintly from the old city. All the same there were over a hundred carriages still making their steady clockwise circuit around and around, beneath the now glimmering streetlights. He ordered his driver to stop and he proceeded on foot down the central paved area, with some difficulty through the dawdling crowds, towards the bandstand, from where the sound of a competently played Strauss waltz was carried to him on the sea breeze. He glanced about him rapidly as he went, scanning every white, female face, completely confident that his eye would pick her out—rather in the way one’s own name leaps out from any printed page—from the mass of people wandering to and fro, chatting, flirting, ogling, commenting on the burnished landaus and victorias and the lacy finery of the women they contained. There were many American soldiers present in their dress whites with their soft pinched hats, rich Chinese in vibrant silks, Englishmen in boating coats and solar topees, and here and there an old friar would shuffle past nervously, dreaming of the old days before the Revolution and the Americans came. On his right was the wide placid bay, its waters dark now the sun was dipping behind the Bataan headland, the darker shapes of the moored ships riding at anchor pricked out by coloured lights.

  He waited by the bandstand a few tense interminable minutes but could not see her. In spite of the cool of the evening his fretful excited mood was making him perspire. He mopped his brow and dried his moist palms with his handkerchief before crossing the road to the sea wall where he stood for a while, eyes closed, telling himself to relax and fanning his glowing face with his panama. As he began to calm down a new mood of sober rationality began to infect him…What in God’s good name did he think he was doing running about the Luneta like a lovelorn youth? He was Dr Salvador Carriscant, surgeon-in–chief of the San Jeronimo hospital; any number of people here would recognise him. He glanced tentatively left and right; it was just as well dusk was advancing—beyond the streetlights’ glow most people’s faces were shadowed. And if the woman had been at the school, what would he have done, he rebuked himself further? He had had some story ready about wanting to enrol a mythical niece in the school but the first elementary questions on her part would have exposed his visit for the evident sham it was. He felt a forceful disgust at his senseless impetuosity: it was not dignified. He settled his hat on his head and turned for home thinking with rueful wisdom that dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

  And then he saw her.

  With two other women and, he saw a moment later, two male companions walking behind, two men in drill suits, all of them approaching the bandstand, upon which the band had now struck up an irritating oompah-pah Souza march.

  He crossed the roadway, darting between the carriages, and began to follow the group, hanging back some way off to the side. She wore a small hat, which made her look more neat and formal than that day on the archery field, but he could see that her face was animated, she was enjoying herself, and for the first time he saw her smile.

  They gathered round the bandstand and the music changed again to a brassy but plaintive rendit
ion of ‘Quando me’n vo’ from La Boheme. He moved to a position obliquely behind her, where her face was in quarter profile, and watched her clasp her hands to her throat in delight as she mouthed the words of the aria to herself, rejoicing in the music. His eyes dropped and he watched her haunches sway to and fro, pliantly twirling the folds of her long skirt this way and that as she shifted weight, almost dancing with herself, swaying to the poignant rhythms of the melody.

  This was too much for him: this was too much for anyone in his position to bear. He felt a kind of hopeless swoon come over him, a lightness, as if his body had emptied, and he stood there, a husk, capable of being carried away by the lightest breeze.

  Her two women companions stood a little way in front of her. One of the men at her side pointed out a girl selling candied sweets and nuts. She nodded and dispatched him to purchase some while the other man made the same request of the two women. Was one of these fellows her beau, he wondered? Or were these simply colleagues from the Gerlinger school? She stood now, alone for a few seconds, lost in the music. Three strides took him to her shoulder.

  “Miss Caspar,” his voice was low, intimate, “excuse me, please…”

  She did not respond, did not turn. He repeated her name, raising his voice somewhat. Nothing. He reached out and with trembling fingers touched the material of her air-blue blouse.

  She turned with a little shudder of surprise and he looked into that face once more.

  “Miss Caspar, excuse me, I wanted to see you. I waited—”

  “Who are you? I’m afraid I don’t…” Her fingers brushed her forehead above her right eye as she focused on him. Her frown tightened.

  “Good Lord, it’s you. You’re the mad fellow who rushed screaming out of—”

  “Miss Caspar, I came to apologise. I wanted personally to—”

  “Stop. Please. The matter is closed. No need.”

  There was a token smile and she began to turn away. On the periphery of his vision he was aware of her two men friends returning with their sweetmeats.

  His voice became urgent: “Miss Caspar—”

  “Listen if you call me that once more, I’ll—”

  “—Rudolfa, then,” he said, bravely. “If I may, Rudolfa, I would like to explain—”

  “What? What are you talking about? Rudolfa?” She stepped back abruptly. “Would you kindly leave me alone or I’ll call the police.”

  One of the men appeared suddenly at her elbow. He could sense all was not well and said to Carriscant, aggressively: “What do you want?” He turned back to the woman. “Is everything all right, Delphine?”

  Delphine…

  “Excuse me,” Carriscant said, somehow managing a small bow. “Forgive me, a case of mistaken identity.” He strode off up the esplanade, bumping into people as he went, heedless, face set in a haughty seigneurial grimace to mask his coruscating embarrassment, thinking only: You damn fool, Paton Bobby, you damn stupid big American fool.

  THE HOUSE AT SAN TEODORO

  Carriscant watched his mother shuffle on to the azotea, her arm held by a young girl, and then settle herself with some difficulty in her favourite chair. The cane blind on the east side was raised to allow the weak morning sunshine to warm her briefly. The house at San Teodoro (about a sixty-mile journey from Manila) was large and simple, two storeys high and made up of big square rooms with highly polished wood floors. It had belonged to his mother’s family for generations and his father had always seemed a little out of sorts in it, a little lost, dwarfed by its massive generosity—what did one want with four public rooms on the ground floor?—and he never appeared truly comfortable within its walls. It was as if, as a foreign interloper, he were being haunted by the shades of the swaggering, complacent mestizo landowners who had run their fiefdom of San Teodoro for a hundred years, secure and unreflecting, until the Americanos came. Who is this pale, sandy-haired engineer, these ancestral voices seemed to echo, what has this meek fellow from his distant rain-lashed country to do with this family, its heritage and its responsibilities?

  And his father had felt it, Carriscant recognised now, as he supervised the laying out of the tea things, he was happier riding up and down his railway or in the syndicate offices in Manila. Whenever they came to stay at San Teodoro something in him seemed to shrivel and cower, until their carriage bore them away again, through the avenue of nassa trees that lined the driveway, and his father’s spine seemed to straighten and his shoulders flex, and he was Archibald Carriscant, Dundonian, engineer, once again.

  He poured out some corn coffee from the English teapot as his mother stared silently out at the clump of madre de cacao trees in the garden, just coming into bloom. He was used to his mother’s silences, in fact he enjoyed the freedom of not having to make conversation, so he sat back in his chair and sipped the sour brew. Since his father died she had become increasingly eccentric, not taciturn or withdrawn exactly, but moody, in the sense that she allowed whatever mood she was in absolute sway over her demeanour. If she was merry then she was delightful company; if she was depressed then she was melancholia personified. She made no apologies for these swings, in fact she regarded her refusal to pretend as a positive virtue. Carriscant glanced at her: today was a little hard to evaluate. ‘Preoccupied’ perhaps, or ‘thoughtful’—nothing too grim anyway. Along with this new honesty she seemed to have cast off some of the pretensions of her mestiza sophistication, and as she had aged she appeared to have darkened too, as if her india blood were seeping to the surface of her skin, an old pigmentation re–establishing itself. She had rejected her Spanish and European wardrobe for more traditional clothes. Today she wore a simple broad-sleeved abaca blouse over a black velvet skirt and around her shoulders lay a panuelo fringed with lace and heavily worked with delicate embroidery. A small ebony fan hung from her wrist and every minute or two she would snap it open and fan her face vigorously as a matter of reflex rather than need. Her face was sunken and seamed with wrinkles like a peach stone but her brown moist eyes were alert and suspicious. She still ran the household at San Teodoro and had regular meetings with her farm managers. Once a quarter the tenant farmers would travel down from the estates in the north and present her with copies of the monthly accounts.

  Carriscant sipped at his coffee and set it down: the stuff was vile, he thought, he only sipped at it to please her. No doubt her newfound taste for it was another move back to her forebears.

  “You haven’t asked me how I’m feeling,” she said. “What’s the point of having a doctor for a son if he has no curiosity about your state of health?”

  “Because I can see you’re fine. You look wonderful.”

  “I’m not fine. I’ve felt terrible since Flaviano was killed. Nothing’s been the same.”

  Flaviano had been her major-domo, he had been killed in the war.

  “Well, we’ve got peace now,” he said. “Life will return to normal.” How easy it was to express the sentiment: he almost believed it himself.

  “We’re all Americans now,” she said. “That will be interesting. Not that I shall live to see it.”

  “Better this than what we were,” he said halfheartedly.

  She looked at him full of scorn. “There were other options, you know,” she said. “It wasn’t a simple case of either or.”

  “Realistically…”

  “Do you know any of them? Americanos?”

  “Plenty. Very friendly people.”

  “Don’t forget I’ve seen how friendly they can be,” she said darkly, turning away to look out at the garden. She did not need reminding—and neither did he—of the day a company of the 3rd Wyoming Volunteers had visited San Teodoro.

  “Look, I’ve got no quarrel with the Americans,” he said. “From my point of view—with a few exceptions—they’ve done nothing but good. At least they’re trying. We were rotting out here before. Backward, neglected. We were like some eighteenth-century province of Spain, all friars and hidalgos. This is the twentieth century, Mother
—” He stopped when he saw her face and changed the subject. “How’s your hip?”

  “Terrible. This last rainy season it was agony. Awful. I remember your father suffered from arthritis, I used to think he was making a ridiculous fuss. Now I know.”

  Carriscant thought about his father, how little he had known him. A fair decent man, kind, not very demonstrative…All of a sudden he wished his father were alive, wished he were here so he could ask his advice. He was surprised at the strength of this emotion. He missed him, and he felt the ache in his chest. And then he tried to dismiss the idea as absurd. Oh, Father, I’ve fallen out of love with my wife and am obsessed with an unknown American woman, what should I do?

  “When you married Father,” he asked his mother abruptly, “was your family opposed? Did they mind?”

  “Why should they mind? We’d already intermarried. Anyway, my father knew I wanted to, and he wouldn’t have stopped me.”

  “An enlightened man.”

  “An intelligent man.” She wagged her fan at him. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.” She looked sharply at him. “Who said that?”

  “Ah…Voltaire?”

  “Pascal, foolish boy. The great Pascal. When you’re in that position there’s nothing you can do. You might as well follow your heart. At least that way you might find some happiness.” She looked at him shrewdly. “For a while, anyway.”

  Carriscant thought about this and gazed out over the garden. Some doves were wooing beneath the madre de cacao trees, pacing to and fro, wobbling featherballs of lust.

  He stood up. “I should be going,” he said, suddenly decided.

  “Go on, go on. You’ve been here long enough. Go back to your darling Americanos.”

  Smiling, he bent and kissed her cheek. He rested his hands on her shoulders and felt the thin bones through the material. She held his face between her skewed and knuckly hands and kissed him on the brow.