Carvalho insisted that João sit with him in the front seat, next to the driver, who had stashed their bags. Renato climbed into the back with Elizabeth.
“That’s where it all started to go wrong.” He signaled toward the waterfront, where a dozen or so Guineans loaded hulking sacks of rice and peanuts onto small Portuguese cargo boats. “That’s where we white Portuguese opened fire on our supposed black brethren. It was just a labor dispute really, a strike. Now it’s a lot more.” The Portuguese buildings clung to the edge of the waterfront, whitewashed, with sloping, red-tiled roofs, charming but faded. The shipping clerks inside, marooned by one company or another, tried their best to keep up appearances, but holding at bay the greenish mold that crept up the walls from the puddles on the ground or scrubbing away the gray slime that trickled from the bat-infested rafters was futile. The Portuguese there counted their days, as if their jobs were fixed tours of duty. The guerrillas were still no threat to Bissau, but they were moving inexorably toward the center. The port functionaries would be lucky if their eventual escape brought them home and not to the next doomed port, to Beira in Mozambique, maybe, or Luanda in Angola. At least in Luanda, they were told, a decent meal, a nice hotel, and a white whore could be had with their paychecks. Enough of their countrymen had been lured to Angola by the promise of land and riches to effectively build up a white underclass: failures in Portugal, failures in the fertile highlands outside Nova Lisboa—now cabdrivers, maids, stevedores, and whores in Luanda, wondering if they’d ever see Lisbon again.
João was to work in the military hospital in Bissau at first. Elizabeth and he would live on base, in the officers’ quarters. After a time, they could decide whether to stay or move into town, into one of the more graceful flats, with mahogany floors and great, hardwood ceiling beams. They would be colonials, Elizabeth imagined, sitting on a veranda with servants bringing peppery dishes under languid ceiling fans stirring dense, tropical air. Or they might be moved to one of the forward bases, where João would show the natives the miracles of modern medicine, or at least dispense some aspirin and antibiotics. Elizabeth would befriend the native women, play peekaboo with charmed children, and doze in the shade of oil palms.
The jeep drove past the governor’s mansion, surrounded by palm trees that were sculpted into giant fans, ready to cool Spínola’s troubled head. The city then quickly gave way to tin shanties and roadside shacks where men sat drunk on palm wine. Children squatted around little fires and cheap hammered-metal woks where they braised corncobs and peanuts in salt and garlic. Goats stupidly chewed their cud. It was a fine, sunny day, but the air stunk, a pungent mixture of wood fires, charcoal, and human shit. In her imaginings of Africa, Elizabeth could conjure movie images: The African Queen, Zulu, Stanley and Livingstone. She never thought to wonder about the smell, but it was that and the heat—not the tumult of greens and browns, the palms, the children, or the market women in their colorful print wraps—that were overwhelming.
The jeep driver pulled up to an unconvincing guard post in front of a rusted barbed-wire fence. Carvalho lifted an arm casually, and a white soldier waved them into a compound of barracks, narrow, single-storied, long buildings arranged in military order. The grounds were stripped of grass and foliage. It was a scraped landscape of rusty brown hardpan, deeply rutted where jeeps and troop carriers slogged through mud in the rainy season—which was just about on them. Off along the fence line, a dozen or so Guinean women were laundering fatigues and pressing military-issue khaki boxer shorts with heavy irons. They heated the irons to a glowing red over charcoal, dipped them in water to clear off the ash, and then bore down on the shorts tossed casually over a split log that had been flattened and smoothed with use.
“Lord, in this heat?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Why are those women ironing knickers?”
“You’ll be thankful for them. I assume they’ll be ironing ours as well,” João replied over his shoulder. “Botflies. They lay their eggs in damp clothing left to line dry. The eggs hatch into tiny larvae that burrow into the inviting flesh of your buttocks. At first, you think it’s a mosquito bite, then a maddening boil that grows harder and more painful by the day, until one day it bursts open and out of your flesh come a new crop of flies that scatter to find their next victim. Those irons kill the eggs. Worth the price of their service, no doubt, though I imagine their price is not high.”
“That’s just the beginning,” Renato jumped in cheerfully. “Then there are the round worms you pass in your stools, the guinea worms that hatch on your legs. You wrap a stick around the head and slowly tug them out, little by little, day after day, so they don’t break and leave part of their body to rot under your skin. Schistosomiasis, passed on from freshwater snails that pick it up from the human piss in the creeks and rivers. The lesions are unsightly, but then there’s the fever, fatigue, diarrhea, abdominal pains. Guiné is a parasite paradise. It’s not hard to imagine why we Portuguese pretty much left it alone until the Guineans wanted to formalize the arrangement.”
The driver dropped the four off at a low-slung, white building. An exceptionally thin woman, so thin she looked tall though she wasn’t, rushed out to greet them, speaking in rapid-fire Portuguese. She met their eyes only in fleeting glances, deferentially looking down at the ground as she excitedly motioned them inside. The Guinean women who worked on the base had been anticipating the arrival of this new Portuguese couple. Husband and wife was something they could understand, and newlyweds, well, that was cause for celebration.
“Ask her her name,” Elizabeth told João, who passed the request on to Carvalho. The officer fired off a quick question.
She looked puzzled. He tried again, then again, gesticulating to her, to himself, to Elizabeth, until finally he elicited a simple enough answer: Maria.
“I don’t think she speaks Portuguese,” Carvalho told João.
Renato shrugged. “Most don’t,” he said. “Their tribal languages come first, dozens of them. They’ve converged on the capital, really just in the last few years, with the war, the bombing, and all the soldiers and officers and people like you arriving to pay them. The Tower of Babel that Bissau would be with all these different tribals is bridged by a kind of pidgin—Kriolu. Creole.”
Maria motioned to Elizabeth, smiling through crooked yellow teeth and leading her to the end of a long hallway that smelled of disinfectant and mold. The room she showed her was larger than it should be, given local standards, even for the soldiers. But it was as depressing as Elizabeth had imagined—bare white walls, a dirty, tiled floor, a ceiling fan that hadn’t worked in years. The Portuguese army—or the Guinean women it relied on for such things—had found an extra-large piece of foam to lay across a square of plywood perched on cinder blocks to make a conjugal bed. A thin cotton sheet and blanket added a measure of domesticity, but yellowing stains from the humidity diminished the appeal. The women of the base had procured a small bamboo chest of drawers, handcrafted, on top of which whirred a marvel, an oscillating, slightly rusted steel fan.
Maria, as the representative of the women who had acquired these treasures, beamed with pride. This was a welcome gift worthy of a queen, they clearly believed. Elizabeth, aware of Maria’s obvious satisfaction, thanked her profusely, theatrically, in a language she could not possibly understand.
“João, I need to learn Portuguese,” she said, turning to her husband.
“I don’t think this woman can help you, but we will find someone who can. Rest up, Elizabeth, we’re to have dinner with the governor tonight.”
After their dinner with the general and Major Carvalho, Elizabeth and João returned to their room in silence. João understood what was expected of him. He was to help bring respectability to colonial suppression, to help make it clear that Portugal had only the best interest of its subjects in mind.
“What was he saying back there?” Elizabeth asked furtively.
“Not much that would have interested you. A lot about tactics to counter the guerr
illas, the size of the medical corps, that sort of thing. He was very big on the notion that I am somehow a decisive part of the campaign to win over the natives.”
“You?”
João looked at his wife.
“Well, don’t look so surprised.”
“I didn’t mean anything, João. It’s just that, you know, how’s one additional doctor going to change a war?”
João looked down at the tiled floor. “I wish I knew.”
“João, I loved watching you in there. My doctor and the general.” She stepped toward him and laid her hand gently on his cheek, the base of her palm cupping his chin. “You were beautiful.”
He smiled and gently kissed her waiting mouth.
In the heat of the Guinean night, she slowly unbuttoned her drab military shirt and unzipped her loose-fitting skirt. Never had she felt more attractive than she did shedding so unattractive a sheath. João feverishly followed suit, and they fell onto their slab of foam drenched in each other’s sweat. The thin walls silenced their outcries but not their fervor. Elizabeth wanted to be taken by João, this doctor, this caregiver, this man facing so many horrible expectations. She lay on her side, his chest pressed hard against her back, and held his right hand to her breast, urging him to grab her hard as she lifted one leg up and back, guiding him. His breath quickened in her ear.
The medical chief was busy the morning João arrived at the colonnaded colonial hospital, so he wandered the main ward on his own, dazed by what he saw, bed after bed of wounded men. A few Africans stared vacantly at the ceiling, recruits to the colonial army, maybe even a guerrilla or two making good on Spínola’s hearts-and-minds order. Their black skin only highlighted the whiteness of the rest of the patients.
Infections were wasting men away. They lay trembling with fever, vomiting into cheap tin buckets, or virtually comatose. Their eyes darted aimlessly or sunk into their skulls beneath papery lids. Nurses wiped sweat from foreheads, changed bedpans, and held hands as they gently tried to coax the pus out of wounds. João had introduced himself to the more lucid men as a new doctor on the ward. He smiled gamely, wondering what he would do beyond the initial trauma treatment. He also felt strangely exhilarated.
A young man shuffled from bed to bed pushing an IV pole, his hospital gown falling off his rail-thin, otherwise naked body. As he approached their beds, some men would bark and swat him away; others vacantly watched his progress, while still others took no notice. Moans created a low hum in the emptiness. Morphine muffled the ward like a pillow over the face. The squeak of the nurses’ rubber soles reverberated across the polished terra-cotta tiles.
João drifted to the side of a moaning soldier, his left arm amputated just below the elbow, his right with a gaping wound. At first, he thought the small white shapes were bone fragments, but then he caught their movement. Maggots. He absently reached his fingers toward them, when Renato Araujo startled him.
“Leave them. They’re debriding the wound. Some bugs are useful.”
Araujo gently swatted away João’s bare hand, snapping him out of his trance.
“Let’s make rounds together this morning,” he said. “You’re not in medical school anymore, Doctor Gonçalves. You’re about to embark on an entirely new education.”
They floated down the ward, Renato flipping through clipboards at the foot of the beds, João mainly staring.
“We have learned much from the Americans in Vietnam—the golden hour, the rush to treatment. The soldiers that are wounded in ambushes will generally survive if we can get them here quickly, and the helicopters do it well. NATO has blessed us with the Huey Cobra for air ambulance work. Our biggest problem is infection. Bacteria grow here like topsy. Amputation is too often our only recourse. In many cases, it’s not enough.”
“Where do the wounded go? The amputees?” João asked. The beds were arranged neatly, side by side, spanning the long hallway, but each of its inhabitants seemed to display a unique horror show, a blasted jaw, a lost eye, a suppurating wound on an elevated arm, an infected stump. “We don’t see them in Lisbon. I had no idea this was happening.”
“You wouldn’t. We have convalescent hospitals in Luanda, settlers’ communities in Nova Lisboa. If you stay long enough, you’ll see it all. German engineers, on Portuguese contract, are building this massive dam in Cabora Bassa. That’s Mozambique. Caetano intends to settle a million Portuguese there. A million.” He paused for drama’s sake. “The first inhabitants will likely be missing a few limbs.
“Look here.” Renato paused at a young man’s side and lifted his sheet to show off a ghastly abdominal wound, livid purple around the edges. The smell was putrid, like rotting meat over whatever stewed in his bedpan.
“The initial wounds usually aren’t horrendous—small-arms fire from ambushes. We’re the ones that really wreak the carnage, with bombs and incendiaries, the kind of weaponry that sears flesh and mangles bodies. The guerrillas don’t know it, but their most effective weapons are the flies that swarm the bullet wounds and the filthy water the soldiers wash the blood away with.
“And the heat—you’ve noticed it—grows flora like a hothouse. We’ve got bacteria you’ve never heard of. It grows like weeds.”
The soldier’s eyes—dirty, brownish yellow—looked searchingly at the new doctor. João recognized the jaundice, probably liver failure. Renato frowned as he halfheartedly lifted the urine bag hanging from the bedrail, its tube snaking up to the catheter hidden from sight.
“Not a drop in it,” Renato confided quietly as they wandered to the next bed. “His kidneys are shutting down. He’s a dead man.”
“So young,” João muttered.
“We’re all so young.”
Just before noon, João heard the thump-thump of a helicopter approaching the roof, and then a higher pitch as the rotors slowed to a halt. A single soldier was wheeled into the operating room with a bullet lodged in the inner curve of his hipbone, a bleeding hole in his groin showing its path. He had snapped out of his torpor and was screaming with every bump of an errant wheel over the rough tile floor. Blood soaked through the sheet hanging half off the bed.
“Triage,” a male nurse shouted, as he inserted an IV.
“He’s yours, João,” Renato said calmly. He leaned a shoulder against the doorway of the wounded ward, arms crossed casually. He wanted to watch the reaction of his new doctor.
João followed the male nurse, a woman nurse, and a uniformed soldier as they pushed the gurney. He was unsure of what to do, but when the wounded young man was in position and sedated, João acted on instinct, quickly scrubbing down, donning a surgical mask and cap, then reaching in for the bullet without the aid of a scalpel. He could feel the warmth of the body through the surgical gloves, the squish of human tissue softened further by trauma, then the bullet, hard, jagged, and so foreign.
It was remarkably small given the size of the wound. A higher-caliber weapon must do horrible damage, he thought. He irrigated the wound with sterile water, scanned it for bleeding arteries, and asked the nurse beside him for forceps to remove a few bone fragments. Then he suctioned it, inserted a clear tube into the wound, then a rubber instrument with a bulbous end so fluid could be drawn out even after the wound had sealed.
As he began suturing, he allowed himself a long look at the boy’s face. Fine wisps of facial hair helped bead the sweat on his upper lip. His eyes were closed, as if he were summoning the concentration needed to stay alive. The wound was not life-threatening, but one whose life had been so short and circumscribed to that point could not have known that. His cheeks were almost chubby. Black, wavy hair was plastered to his forehead.
I’ll have to write a letter to his parents, João thought, as he reached to touch that forehead, tell them their son is going to be fine.
Later, the patients would all blur together. It wouldn’t be long before João stopped allowing himself such indulgences—the promises to himself, the searching looks into the wounded soldiers’ faces. He never wro
te a letter.
His heart raced again a little more than two hours later when the same low thumping broke through the hospital clatter. This time, he ran toward the roof with the other medical staff. Four soldiers lay groaning on litters. One soldier had tripped a mine. His right foot was ripped off, his lower leg mangled to halfway up the calf. Bone fragments mixed with muscle tissue, raw beef in a blender. This was trauma João had never seen before. Another appeared near death. The others were collateral damage: shrapnel wounds from the mine, a bullet from the guerrillas that had lain in wait.
Another doctor, Andréas Pelegrin, took the most grievously wounded, calmed the patient, sedated him quickly, and without hesitation amputated what was left of the leg just below the knee, leaving a flap of skin from what was his shin to tuck over the stump. João peeled off and took the bullet wound.
In the time it took João to deal with that one bullet wound, Pelegrin had amputated a leg, pushed aside a soldier he deemed well enough to wait, and written off a patient with an abdominal wound that had spilled out too much of the contents of his large intestine. The dose of morphine he injected had stopped the screaming; even from a slight distance, João could see the quantity was enough to kill him. The boy would not be waking up.
That’s the man I want to be, João thought. Just give me a few months. I can do this.
“Nasty work,” Pelegrin said as he ripped off his surgical garb and scrubbed his sticky arms. “You get used to amputations, really. The worst part is watching the men wake up. They often have no memory of the explosion. They’re disoriented. They’re out of the bush, out of their base, in this strange hospital. There are women around, white women. Heaven. Then they find they’ve lost a leg, or an arm, or both.”
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