“Not to your English sensibilities, I s’pose.” Elizabeth laughed. Finally, she had something to lord over her cousin, however unexpected—her more rugged stomach.
They left Vicki’s expectant beau in the lurch, and Vicki, leaning heavily forward, clutching Elizabeth’s arm with both hands, climbed to bed.
It would be a fleeting sanctuary. For the rest of the night, Vicki didn’t know which end to stick in the toilet, an unfortunate state of affairs for her and the rest of the hall, which shared the WC. Elizabeth slept soundly, content that this was divine retribution. By dawn, Vicki, already wan, was spent. She crawled into bed and slept for the morning, then begged Elizabeth to help her find a doctor.
There was a clinic not far from the hotel, it turned out. The hotel clerk hailed them a taxi, and once in, her cousin drooped her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder, which was enough to prick her conscience. She laid her hand on Vicki’s.
João Silva Gonçalves had been making a few halfhearted notations on a clipboard, his stethoscope dangling from his neck. His patient, a barrel-chested old veteran of the Spanish Civil War with arteries hardening beyond a doctor’s reach, sat quietly humming to himself. The man was lonely and looking for company, and Gonçalves had nothing much to do anyway. He listened to the soft whoosh of blood through the man’s carotid artery, as his enlarged heart tried to push the fluid through the thickening plaque. It was a pleasing sound, João thought, not a death rattle but signaling death was coming nonetheless. He wondered if it would be a stroke or heart attack.
“You know, young fella, I have to confess I fought on the wrong side,” the old man confided. “I didn’t think so at the time. I hated the Republicans. That’s what I was taught. But just think if they had won, if they had beaten Franco and his fascists…”
He shook his round head, his wattles a beat behind. “How different things would be. You know, Salazar couldn’t have stuck around. Franco gave our own fascists the air to breathe. And look where it got us.”
The old man laughed quietly to himself. João nodded, unwilling to commit such overt subversion but by no means eager to defend the regime either.
Keeping regretful old men company wasn’t what he had gone to medical school for. He had been one of the top students in his class. He had been a particularly distinguished diagnostician among the international student body at King’s College in London. He was too young to be this weary, he thought, to sigh, as it were, at his fate.
The clinic’s one and only nurse stuck her head into the exam room.
“Doctor Gonçalves, two young Englishwomen are here. Vomiting, diarrhea. Acute dehydration, it looks like.”
“Both of them?”
“No, just one. The prettier one,” she said with a sly little wink.
“Senhor Sousa, I’m sorry, but I must see another patient.”
The old man flashed João a lascivious smile as he pulled on his trousers.
The lab room, one of two, was surprisingly cheery, a light peach color suffused with the sunlight that poured into a small window. Vicki miserably pushed herself up to the examining table and sat in exhausted silence. She tried to remain as still as possible. The crinkling of the paper stretched over the cracked vinyl upholstery hurt her head. Elizabeth was glad of the quiet. She perused faded anatomical drawings tacked to the wall, their genital areas prudishly omitted. There was something charming about a repressive Catholicism that reached even into this rural health clinic.
“Hello, ladies, I’m Doctor Gonçalves,” a voice said in mellifluous but hushed English. João extended his hand first to Vicki, who barely glanced up and did not meet it with her own. He pivoted to Elizabeth without a thought, a gesture she appreciated immediately.
If she had had to guess what the doctor in this clinic looked like, Elizabeth would have conjured an old man in the twilight of his medical practice, semi-retired but in need of some spare change to supplement his pension. He’d be portly from a lifetime of good eating, or leathery and thin, browned by decades of sun reflecting off white sand, his excess skin hanging off bony arms. She hadn’t guessed she’d be looking at a man not much older than herself, with brown eyes so dark they were almost black. His cheekbones were prominent, hollowing out an olive-skinned face and making his lips delicate as their corners stretched to fill the hollows. Black hair, a lot of it, with waves that defied a comb, sat atop his small, nice head. Elizabeth smiled.
He lifted Vicki’s shirt to press on her abdomen, then reached around her back, probing with his stethoscope. Elizabeth watched his movements across her cousin’s creamy, hairless expanse of skin, watched as the tips of his fingers sunk gently into her belly, above, then below, then to the left, then the right of her naval. If it had been her, she thought, she would have let out a little sigh of encouragement, a purring, low “hmmm.”
“I studied medicine in London. King’s College. Hated the place,” the doctor said quietly as he took Vicki’s pulse with bare fingers. He was a little awkward; his white lab coat hung off his shoulders like a shroud. He was not as tall as he looked, but six feet seemed willowy on a man so thin—and young, twenty-seven at most. He must still be a student, Elizabeth thought, a resident, interning for the summer by the sea.
“You would be surprised how many patients we see like this,” he said, addressing Elizabeth. “Salazar’s revenge. We don’t exactly have the same meat storage standards as you do. It’s justified as free-market principle, but really there’s no money for inspectors. Two bags of IV fluid, and she’ll feel good as new.”
Vicki had not uttered a word.
“Ah well, ‘sweets to the sweet.’” He smiled at her, patting her hand as he turned to fetch the nurse.
Elizabeth unconsciously reached to check that her ponytail was in place, that her unruly hair was not escaping around her forehead, before venturing forward. “Oh, come now, doctor, Hamlet is a bit overwrought for the occasion. Vicki here is not Ophelia.”
João looked at Elizabeth with a sideways glance. He was not expecting to hear from the escort at all. The patient was indeed the pretty one, although her pallor—a very light green—and her sour expression took some of the charm out of her delicate features. There was something about this other one, though. Her eyes were some searching shade of blue-gray. She had soft cheeks, doughy but not flabby, and a kissable mouth. And she gazed into his face straight on. British women, he thought. Having a reputation for frigidity, born of century-old Victorian novels and etiquette manuals, they could always be counted on to bridle at the stereotype and be quick to buck it. He could imagine, moreover, how frustrated this one might feel in her prettier companion’s shadow, how needy that might make her.
“Yes,” João said, his mouth turned upward. “Yes, and how would you have known that?”
“Does a Portuguese doctor quoting the Dane mean to ask an Englishwoman on the Algarve how she knows Shakespeare? And Hamlet, no less,” she asked, straining her tone of incredulity. “If you’re testing me, try something slightly more obscure. ‘Take note, take note, O world! To be direct and honest is not safe.’”
“Othello, hardly more obscure in this Moorish part of the world,” João responded. “And technically, I was quoting the queen of Denmark, not the prince.” He smiled shyly again and ducked from the room.
The IV bags took hours to drain. Vicki slowly perked up, sipped water the nurse brought, and took an antiemetic when she felt well enough. The doctor came in to look over her vitals one last time, deliver the discharge papers, and urge her to take a rest—and stick to soup, “not gazpacho either, a clear broth.” They packed up and prepared to leave, when Elizabeth did something she had never done before.
“Doctor Gonçalves,” she chimed sweetly. “Would you care to meet us for a drink tonight? You can make sure Vicki here is drinking her tea.”
He wrinkled his eyebrows in misgiving. He was no novice with British women and their forward flirtations, and he wasn’t a bronzed cabana boy, there for the touristas to throw off the
ir inhibitions and grab a taste of guilt-free Latin.
Undeterred, Elizabeth put on her quotation voice. “‘I have seen a medicine that’s able to breathe life into a stone.’”
Alright, this is an odd woman, he thought to himself. He knew the type—upper crust, no doubt. She didn’t have a trace of cockney or even middle class in her voice. But she was different somehow, not as put together, not as sure of herself as the well-to-do Brits he had known. Her boldness was a little forced, meant to overcome a truer nature, perhaps a shyness not usually associated with her class. He admired the effort and wondered at the inadequacy. He was intrigued.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“No Hotel O Peixe No Mar,” she answered a little too quickly.
João laughed. “I know the place, ‘the fish in the sea,’ a little joke on the tourists, as in, ‘There are other fish in the sea.’ Not my usual hangout. ‘Hither they come, to see; hither they come, to be seen. This is a place for the chase, not the chaste.’”
Elizabeth gave him a querying look.
“Ovid,” he said slyly.
She cocked her head gently and gave him a look of appreciation. “Ovid,” she repeated slowly. “So, nine o’clock?”
Elizabeth looked at Vicki, who sighed. She had this coming.
“I suppose I could make that.”
“Wonderful,” Elizabeth replied.
João Gonçalves approached the bar, where Elizabeth sat alone. His white shirt ballooned around his chest, a well-worn linen that waved under his arms in the ocean breeze. His jeans were fashionably tight around the waist and edged outward from his knobby knees. His eyes darted, looking at the other men at the bar, a small sign of discomfort with these surroundings. He spotted Elizabeth and walked cautiously, though he had rehearsed his opening line for more than an hour.
“All’s Well That Ends Well,” he said, half meeting her eyes. “Act two, scene one.”
“Doing your homework, I see.”
“I must admit you stumped me back in the clinic. And a medical quote from Shakespeare should be something I have in my bag of tricks. Where’s your friend?”
“Cousin, actually. She’s sleeping off her illness. Didn’t get much rest last night.”
Elizabeth expected the doctor’s face to darken at this news. They always did. Not this time, though. He seemed to have no reaction at all. In truth, João Gonçalves figured the pretty cousin was out of his league. He never could see himself as attractive to women. He knew intellectually that a young doctor would be desirable to a certain sort, craving stability and stature if her own position in society was tenuous or low. But Elizabeth’s and Vicki’s were clearly neither. As a boy, he had been gangly and uncoordinated. The park near his home in Lisbon was crowded with his schoolmates playing soccer or playing tough. He stayed away. He feared them, or more accurately, feared their response to him. He was not athletic. He was not funny or silly. Honestly, he was a bit of a mama’s boy, being all that his mama had to live for. He was Maria Gonçalves’s little man, the insubstantial rock she leaned on while his father was out with his latest mistress. She would wake early, at five in the morning during the school year, to cook his eggs and sausage and order his books and fuss over his outfits. Such tasks had given her so much pleasure in an otherwise pleasureless existence that he took it upon himself to enhance her happiness in any way he could, mainly by eating her breakfasts with relish, wearing her foppish little outfits without protest, and studying diligently. All of which helped isolate him from the other boys. Medical school was his sole concession to his father—a thing, it should be noted, he did not do without protest.
João stared at the girl for some time, trying to divine her appeal. It was not immediately obvious. Her face was oddly featureless, a plain collection of sleepy eyes, weak chin, unremarkable cheekbones, a nose that was slightly too large for its frame. The countenance was slightly sallow, her hair seemed unattended to. But there was a subtle curve of her waist into her hips, and an athletic firmness to her ass; he could imagine running his hand from the base of her spine and resting it there.
He began to understand that the appeal of this Elizabeth was less the girl than the girl looking at him. Her eyes searched his face as he spoke, waiting for the next word, and her mouth turned up in approbation at his turns of phrase. He felt handsome under her gaze, and it flattered him.
Elizabeth fixated on his throwaway line, “something I should have in my bag of tricks,” and was equally surprised by her own stirrings. She had focused on his shy manner, the way he averted his eyes before the end of each sentence. But the promise of some sort of expertise attached to the self-effacement sparked some excitement. Funny, she thought to herself, how men are so attracted to the virginal, while women craved some sense of experience. To be taught.
“What are you drinking?” Elizabeth asked.
“A Sagres is fine,” he said, “but…”
He realized he should be the one ordering for them, but Elizabeth had already caught the bartender’s attention before he could recover.
“Doctor Gonçalves,” Elizabeth went on, “it’s a bit embarrassing to ask, but I don’t know your first name.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, genuinely ashamed. “João, João Silva Gonçalves.”
She offered him her hand, which seemed appropriate to her but which of course was entirely inappropriate. He recognized the gesture from film more than anything else, took her hand, and kissed it so as not to embarrass her.
“Tell me about your grasp of the Bard,” she continued.
“Well, I wasn’t only studying medicine in London. I wanted to act. That was to be my life, but my father had other thoughts, and I was dutiful. ‘In time, the savage bull doth bear the yoke.’”
“Much Ado”—Elizabeth smiled—“and ‘savage bull’ does not exactly fit the man.”
His love of Shakespeare hadn’t started as a cheap come-on. He read it in Portuguese at first, and it was what inspired him to learn English, so he could read it in the original language. He would never have bothered studying medicine in London if he had not fallen for Shakespeare. The Globe Theatre was gone, but he figured he could still find some of that Elizabethan inspiration. This strange woman was reminding him of that.
“What brings you to Albufeira?”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to ask you?”
“Well, you could, but the answer would be obvious,” Elizabeth replied. “But a young doctor, from Lisbon, I’d imagine, educated in London…”
He nodded.
“In a little tourist village for the summer, ministering to the likes of my nauseated cousin, it hardly seems like a challenge, much less a career.”
“It’s something of a summer off, a gesture from my government before it puts my skills to its chosen task.”
He stopped there, took a long draw from his beer bottle, and looked out over the bar to the sea. The two listened as the waves gently lapped the shore. “Ever heard of Angola? Guiné? The British call it Portuguese Guinea. I’m heading to Africa soon to ply my trade. The Americans haven’t won the hearts and minds over in Vietnam, but they’ve given our own fascists an idea on how to calm down the colonies. ‘How can tyrants safely govern home unless abroad they purchase great alliance?’ With a little medicine, first aid more like it, they seem to feel we can make some allies yet.”
“Henry the Sixth…Part three,” Elizabeth chimed in.
João couldn’t decide at first whether this game was captivating or annoying. He really was heading off to war, and it was no laughing matter. Then again, he was entitled to some fun, especially because he wasn’t particularly adept at having it. As he drank more, he found himself giving in to Elizabeth’s Shakespearean advances. He genuinely enjoyed the conversation. They talked of tutors and Tudors, London and Lisbon. They had a lot in common—overbearing, aristocratic fathers, aimless childhoods, a love of literature that threatened to blot out too many other pursuits. Of course, João’s p
arents ultimately forced him on a path to useful adulthood. Elizabeth’s practically precluded it. Then again, where did it get the two of them? The taxpaying citizen was about to go off to war. The isolated, barely educated one felt like she had torn off her blinders and could do as she pleased.
“‘Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily,’” João, now drunk, said of his draft notice.
“Oh dear, João, how horrifying,” Elizabeth said with a slight slur. “War? How dangerous will it be for you?”
He shrugged, his gaze drifting above her head.
“I’ll be a doctor, maybe very far from the fighting, but if all goes poorly, the fighting will be coming to me, won’t it?”
“Do you see a role for an assistant? Me, for instance?” Elizabeth chimed in coyly.
He looked her in the eye and smiled.
“Florence Nightingale in Bissau. That would be something.”
As he expected, Elizabeth knew nothing about Portugal’s wars in Africa. And though he evoked doom lightly now, if such a thing is possible, in quieter moments he feared what Africa would bring. The draft board had assured him there was no real danger involved in battlefield medicine. He would not literally be on the battlefield, far from it. But there was a vagueness to those reassurances that let his mind fill in the blanks. This was war, after all, and a war that most of his contemporaries were trying mightily to avoid. They were not fools. Such thoughts were surely far away from the privileged head of this vacationing Englishwoman, next to whom he now sat very closely. In more animated moments, he allowed his hand to touch her thigh, which gave softly under the thin cotton of her dress. And she allowed her fingers to graze his, he noticed. Their eyes would meet, and she would smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her shoulders rising. A strap would slip off and down her arm, and linger there long enough for his eyes to drink in her nakedness. Then she’d brush it back up and smile at him again. He had to admit it, he was enjoying himself.
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