Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  No wonder crowds had not thronged us at the port. The vaccine had preceded us. For the moment, it must have seemed to Don Francisco that he had crossed the oceans for nothing.

  “What a show they put on this morning!” Don Francisco shook his head bitterly. “What do they take me for, a fool?”

  “And to acquire the vaccine from an enemy! I thought the British attacked this city. Oh, uncle,” his nephew commiserated.

  Soon, I thought, our director would get past his disappointment and recognize the stronger pull: an epidemic had been threatening the island. To wait for a ship that could take weeks upon weeks to arrive with a vaccine that might have expired midocean when the cure was a boat’s ride away, why surely everyone could see the reason on the far side of our grievance.

  Some members of our expedition did. Dr. Salvany, for one. During the morning welcome, he and Dr. Oller had discovered they had attended the same college of medicine in Barcelona, albeit more than twenty-five years apart. Dr. Oller had invited Dr. Salvany as well as our director to stay at his house in San Juan during our visit. Dr. Salvany had obliged. But our director—even before he knew the truth—did not want to be diverted from his mission. “Since we are to vaccinate here and in the house across the way, it’s best for me to be right on these premises. I thank you for your kind offer, Dr. Oller.”

  Our director did not see the color drain from the doctor’s face. Of course, by then I knew it would be difficult to find anyone to vaccinate in San Juan.

  The truth from the start would have been most honorable. Certainly, it would have cleared Dr. Oller and the governor from any blame over what ensued.

  When the carriages arrived that evening to take our party to the banquet prepared for us, Don Francisco sent his excuses. The expedition was divided over whether to attend out of courtesy to the governor or stay back in support of Don Francisco.

  It was not a contest for me. As I said, I now had a new mission. Don Francisco’s faith was faltering. It was up to me to keep alive his belief in a dream that from the very beginning had been too deeply rooted in his self-esteem.

  I stayed back, and perhaps that was the night I felt the closest to him.

  DON ÁNGEL WAS AT my door. “The director is ill,” he said. I had no idea what hour it was. Without a large sky above and the pilot’s voice calling out the hour of the watch, I had lost the ability to tell time. “He wants to speak with you.”

  I threw my shawl over my shoulders and hurried my loose hair back into its cap. Down the long gallery I followed to the room where Don Francisco sat collapsed in a chair. His face was pale, beaded with perspiration. “Doña Isabel, I have a favor to ask,” he began, trying to rouse himself but sinking back, unable to summon the strength he thought he had at his command.

  “He won’t let me call for help,” Don Ángel said. In the flickering candlelight the nurse’s face was portentous with shadows.

  “We have sent for my things,” Don Francisco corrected. His nephew and Dr. Gutiérrez were this very moment rowing out to the ship to fetch Don Francisco’s bloodletting equipment and apothecary. Don Pedro Ortega and Don Antonio Pastor were sleeping with the boys in the large dormitory room downstairs, tired out after their first day on land chasing after the little boys, wild with their release from the confines of a ship. Meanwhile, Dr. Salvany, Dr. Grajales, and the practicante Lozano and nurse Bolaños had gone off to the palace for the banquet and comedy performance afterward.

  “Perhaps we should send for Dr. Oller?” I inquired of Don Ángel. The name had come to mind, as all I knew of Puerto Rico was the governor, the bishop, two little girls, and a half-dozen servants who knew gossip but could not bloodlet. And of course, the doctor who had beaten Don Francisco to the prize and brought the vaccine to the island.

  The name Oller did what a lancet might not have done. Don Francisco struggled forward in his chair. He was fine. No one was to call anyone. He had probably caught some dysentery from the change in diet.

  Reluctantly, Don Ángel agreed not to seek further help from our hosts. Instead, he was sent below for a tisana. “Ask the cook. She will know what leaves to brew,” Don Francisco smiled wanly. The country people knew more than our science gave them credit for. I remembered what his nephew had told me, the begonia and agave cure for the great pox Don Francisco had learned from a medicine man in Mexico.

  “Meanwhile, Doña Isabel. I want you to write down some instructions for me.” I wondered why he did not have his very own secretary transcribe his words. I understood once Don Ángel had disappeared. Our director had a personal letter to dictate, in case anything should happen to him. I suppose he was not so sure he would recover from whatever fever was afflicting him. My dear Josefa, it began. Though by the following day after several infusions of Juana’s tisana and bloodletting by Dr. Gutiérrez, Don Francisco felt considerably improved, and by the second day “cured,” and by then, too, the letter he had entrusted me to deliver was back in his hands, its contents were etched forever in my memory:

  My dear Josefa, I do not know whether I shall succeed in the great enterprise for which I forsook you and all that I hold dear. After a most trying crossing, with what might possibly have been sabotaging by members of our expedition either from jealousy of my appointment or as a means of returning us to Spain owing to cowardice, we arrived in Puerto Rico only to find that various inept ingrates, as a means of garnering honor to themselves and perhaps causing His Highness to call off our glorious mission, have introduced a so-called vaccine, using that dubious method of threads, which will prove injurious, I have no doubt. Now I find myself ill and perhaps foreseeing an abrupt end to all my efforts, I want to assure you that it was not for lack of love that I left your side. Although I now begin to doubt my own intentions, I trust that what first sent me off on this risky journey was the very love I feel for you extended to every living being. Perhaps it was an error to think that I could carry such a large soul in my narrow character and mortal body. But if we do not make the attempt, we shall not enlarge our humanity even by the smallest whit. In the dark days ahead, no matter what evil tongues might say of me, remember that what I bore to the far reaches of the world was not only the vaccine but the love, which you, Josefa, planted deep inside me.

  By the time he had finished, tears were coursing down my face. Indeed, I worried that I would blur the very words I was writing down.

  I don’t know if our director heard me sniffling or saw that I was crying. He had closed his eyes as he had been dictating, his head resting back in his chair, as if imagining his beloved Josefa. “What is it, Doña Isabel?” he asked in a kind voice.

  I shook my head. What was I to tell him? That I wept because no man would ever write me such a letter?

  I collected myself and did not breathe a word, but Don Francisco knew. “Some day someone will write you such a letter, Doña Isabel. And you will think of me, perhaps.”

  “I will think of you always, Don Francisco,” I confessed. “You have carried that love already into many hearts. We will not let it go out. And you must not let it go out either,” I dared. “No matter the storms that blow,” I added more faintly.

  He let his head fall back on his chair. His eyes were closed again, but he was smiling. “Doña Isabel, I would be a better man if you were by my side every step of this journey.”

  My heart leapt. If only he knew how much I hoped to be! “If you could use my help,” I managed. “But what would be my duties?”

  “To remind me,” he replied, opening his eyes, smiling.

  IN THE DAYS AHEAD, I tried to remind him.

  But along with his good health, his stubbornness returned. The very next evening, he was already afoot, issuing announcements, preparing instructions for local doctors, not listening to reason. Even Juana, the cook, had said that the infusions worked best with rest. No, no. Our director knew better than all of us put together. He had already waited a day more than he should to vaccinate Andrés Naya and Antonio Veredia and to hold our first
public session. Vaccinations must commence immediately!

  The problem was that everyone who needed a vaccination in San Juan had gotten one. So common had the procedure become that children were vaccinating each other as a game in the schoolyard.

  “How can this be?” Don Francisco questioned Señor Mexía, who bowed his head as if beseeching the very tiles on the floor for help. As a city councilor and general factotum, he no doubt knew the right answer could be the wrong answer depending on who was questioning him. I could not help thinking of Doña Teresa’s rages, how it was always best at those moments to refrain from crossing her. “Does the governor and the so-called doctor Oller know that by doing so they might have imperiled His Majesty’s expedition? Where are we to acquire the next set of carriers? Do they not know that one must not vaccinate wholesale but in succession in order to perpetuate the vaccine over time for the next generation?” Our director paced back and forth, wringing his hands.

  I admit I, too, worried about the fate of our mission. Only one carrier would soon be left, Benito, whom I could not vouch for. Of course, I had inspected the boy thoroughly, and there was not a mark on him. But he might still prove immune. A second, sure carrier had to be found to receive the fluid from Antonio’s and Andrés’s vesicles in another week or so. Woe to our expedition should this last vaccination fail us. And woe to me: the fault would lie directly at my feet.

  I hurried downstairs with two urgent requests for Juana: one was for a tea to calm the director’s nerves, the second for a baby who had not received Dr. Oller’s vaccine. In exchange, I offered her my necklace of rosary beads and a few trifles of jewelry I had inherited from my mother and sister (an ivory bracelet, a silver mourning pin). Juana had told me that many servants had been hiding their babies from Dr. Oller, disbelieving that “you could have smallpox not having it.” But Juana trusted me. After all, I was putting my own little Benito forward as a carrier of “the safe vaccine from the king.”

  I went back upstairs with good news for our director. First, I offered him a cup of guanabana tea. I had already sipped a cup downstairs and felt much relieved, though my relief might have come from the good news I now delivered to him. Juana had a niece who had given birth a month ago. That healthy baby boy had not yet been vaccinated!

  “That is wonderful news, Doña Isabel,” Don Francisco agreed absently. He nodded for me to set the cup down wherever I might find a clear surface. He would drink it presently. He was in the midst of dictating a letter to Don Ángel, addressed to Governor Castro. Dr. Oller’s vaccine was false and must be publicly discredited on pain of treason to His Majesty!

  Don Ángel shot me a grim glance. As I stood by, while they finished the letter, I was sure we would all be hanged once the governor read it.

  ALONG WITH THE LETTER, Don Francisco sent the governor a copy of his translation of Moreau’s treatise on the vaccine. Hopefully, His Grace would study it, as high as your penetration might go, lacking as Your Lordship is in these lights.

  I don’t know what angel was looking down on us, but instead of militia men with a rope and manacles, the governor came in person to respond to Don Francisco’s missive. Perhaps after fighting off the English invaders, he was determined not to let a mere doctor shake his equanimity.

  His greetings were cordial as if our director’s incendiary letter had been written to some other person. He brought along toys for the children, tops and little carved soldiers, as well as sugarcane candies stuffed in a painted basket made of straw, which we were to hang from a high branch and which the blindfolded boys were to strike at with sticks. Oh dear, what a wild time they had in the courtyard! I tried to keep down the uproar but to no avail. A few of the boys were clobbered over the head, but at least no one was shot through with an arrow. From the ship had come the news that the steward was going to wring the neck of every last one of the boys should he see them again.

  The shouts and screams of my little piñata warriors probably accounted for why I did not hear the strong words that were exchanged between the governor and our director. It seems Don Francisco took a long time in coming out to greet His Grace, and then with a dark look and a curt bow. Don Ángel told me that the governor produced a list of all those whom Dr. Oller and his assistants had vaccinated. Every prominent name was on it, including Bishop Arizmendi, Dr. Oller’s own sons, the governor’s two daughters.

  “All of these people are in grave danger,” Don Francisco declared. “Your Grace must send out a proclamation stating that Oller’s vaccine is in error. Revaccinations must begin immediately!”

  In a more reasonable tone, the governor advised that instead of trying to summon hundreds of people, why not test a handful? He had perused the Moreau book that Don Francisco had so graciously sent him—Don Ángel said the knife flashing in the word graciously was sharp enough to cut a hangman’s rope. The good doctor Moreau himself had written in his prologue that even an average talent who knew no medicine could form a correct idea of vaccination. (Indeed, I had learned to vaccinate!) By revaccinating a handful, Dr. Balmis would be able to verify whether the earlier vaccinations were false or not. If there was no reaction to the new vaccine, Dr. Oller’s vaccine would be proven to be effective after all and the island of Puerto Rico be spared an enormous and undue cost.

  How could the director argue with that? But he did, according to Don Ángel. He had not come across an ocean, enduring tribulations, risking the lives of so many innocents, in order to do the cleanup work of some local charlatan. Either all 1,557 vaccinations were redone, or Don Francisco would not repeat a one. And with a nod and a “Good day,” he left the room, and the governor was left still holding the list. It is a wonder, Don Ángel claimed, that the paper did not burst into flames, so fiery red was the govenor’s face.

  Dr. Salvany was ill with the same fevers and faint feeling that had afflicted Don Francisco. From on board the ship, news came that Orlando and several of the crew were suffering the same indisposition. Could it be a mild dysentery or malaria or the dreaded ship’s fever? Don Francisco planned a trip to the María Pita to examine his shipmates. As for Dr. Salvany, who was still a guest in Dr. Oller’s home, Don Francisco ordered him back to our house to be treated by a legitimate physician.

  Perhaps to clear his good name or to argue the inadvisability of moving Dr. Salvany at the moment, Dr. Oller appeared at the house that same afternoon during the siesta hour. I was having my coffee cup read by Juana in the back of the house. A long journey. (“Come, come, Juana,” I chided. “There needs no soothsayer to divine that!”) No children, many sons. (I sighed impatiently.) A broken heart, a happy life. I sat up. How could that be? Wasn’t love necessary for happiness? Juana shrugged. She only read the future, she didn’t invent it.

  Don Ángel and Don Antonio Pastor were resting in hammocks strung from post to post of the open gallery as the boys played in the courtyard. Periodically, when their games became rough, one or the other nurse would threaten to send them all to their mats in enforced siesta if they didn’t behave. When I heard that Dr. Oller had come to have a little talk with our director, I headed for the front room. I didn’t need coffee stains to predict what would happen if spark and gunpowder should come together.

  Dr. Oller looked nervous as he waited to be received by our director. They were about the same height and age, though Dr. Oller seemed shorter and older with the stout paunch of a successful professional. He was blind in one eye, which stayed blank and unmoving while the other gazed back at you, giving him an unfortunate sly look. “Doña Isabel,” he bowed when I entered. He had remembered my name! “I come with news of your colleague and to explain … this unfortunate matter.”

  Like all frightened people he had begun his explanations to the first ready listener. “I trust Dr. Salvany is better?” I put in, hoping to set him at his ease by talking about a mutual concern of ours. I was also hoping to convince Dr. Oller that I would carry whatever news to our director who was upstairs resting. In his present agitated state, Don
Francisco would not, I was almost sure, be open to Dr. Oller’s explanations.

  Dr. Oller finished his report on his guest, which I promised to deliver to our director. I was steering him toward the door when we heard Don Francisco’s voice behind us. “Stay, Dr. Oller. I want you to repeat your lies to my face.” The doctor continued out the door, which only incensed our director further. His next command was a shout, heard, no doubt, all the way down the street. Later, I learned that Dr. Oller was deaf in one ear, and what the director had taken as an affront and a sign of the local doctor’s guilt was the mere faultiness of his hearing.

  This time, the doctor heard the shout. He turned, and stood, shaking visibly, his face pale with anger. Both eyes seemed now to be looking boldly back at his accuser. “You will be proven the liar,” he returned, throwing fire into the fire.

  HOW HAD THINGS GONE so horribly wrong! All of San Juan was now transfixed, waiting to know the outcome: Was the vaccine which most everyone in the city had received a good vaccine or a bad vaccine? Should one trust the British or the Spanish cowpox, as they were becoming known? Meanwhile, the outlying towns were left to battle the epidemic with no vaccinations at all.

  Finally, Bishop Arizmendi interceded. He convinced the governor to recall the earlier vaccination and have everyone revaccinated “so that the public will be served as the king wills.” The bishop came to deliver the news to our director. He himself would be revaccinated as an example so that others would be persuaded.

  By now, Don Francisco’s fevers and faints had returned. But there was no tea Juana knew of that could change a person’s character. Meanwhile, Dr. Salvany returned to our side, much recuperated and growing stronger every day, while our director became paler and weaker. I wondered if he would survive Puerto Rico.

  THE DAY OF REVACCINATIONS was set for February 28, a Tuesday. Given the large numbers expected from outlying provinces, all members of our expedition were to be in attendance, including the nurses and myself. I had become quite adept at assisting the doctors, handing them instruments, and, most especially, calming the children to be pierced with the lancet.