“Is there something you say, some kind of formula?” João asked.
Pelegrin looked at him sympathetically, a slight smile crossing his face.
“You do what you can,” he replied. “That’s the moment you learn what kind of doctor you are, really, what kind of man.”
Renato told João he could go back to the base, “check on that wife of yours,” when the last helicopter came that day. This time, the response was a little less frantic. The nurses walked up the ramp to the rooftop with a couple of orderlies, drew open the steel storm doors, tilted against the sun and rain, and casually wheeled in two patients, jet black, bathed in sweat. João looked at the African patients and thought back to that first night in Africa, when Spínola had tried to explain his role in the war. “We will take care of them all,” the general had said, “hearts and minds and all.” But that simple formula yielded one bit of complexity. What of success? Do you return a guerrilla to his people, to his battlefield? João had asked.
“No,” Spínola answered. “There are prisoner-of-war camps in Angola. I haven’t seen them. I’m sure they’re grim. Yellow fever rips through them, but we try to keep that quiet. Work camps in Mozambique, the Cabora Bassa dam. I guess they figure the fight in Guiné is not the fight in Angola or in Mozambique.
“I wouldn’t be so sure, though,” Spínola had continued, arguing with himself as he poured from what must have been the fifth bottle of the night. “Look at the PAIGC leadership: Cabo-Verdianos, light skinned, they don’t even look like Guineans. But they fight hard. Why wouldn’t a Guinean fight in Nova Lisboa or Beira? Perhaps we do go too easy on them.”
“Perhaps we do go too easy on them.” João played the line in his head as the softening light of the late afternoon fell on one of the new arrivals, a boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve. He was in shock, glassy-eyed, with a head wound that was deceptively grave. He was bandaged well, but from the pink seepage, João could tell the skull was open. In another hospital, in another country, he might be saved. A large enough piece of the skull would be carefully removed to allow the brain room to swell, then heal, with the patient monitored closely in a medically induced coma. Not here, though, not with this child. The boy’s father was conscious. He looked fierce, angry, even on the stretcher, a wounded animal choosing fight over flight but unable to land a paw. A bullet was lodged in his thigh, not serious at all. But he had an intensity to him, a panic in his face, that told João there was something else. His speech was raspy, a light breeze from the shallows of his lungs, and he coughed with the little force he could muster.
João moved to his side, then tore away what was left of his pant leg. As João leaned over to clean the wound, the patient grabbed his shoulder roughly. Surprised, João turned and locked eyes with him.
“Doctor, save my son if you can,” he said in accented but clear Portuguese. “I have seven others, three wives, all soldiers of Guiné. We will keep coming. Doctor, when you are done with him, get out. Get out of Africa. This is not your fight. The Tuga will be driven off this continent soon. The dam will break, and when it does, it will not be water that flows.”
There were only a handful of other European women on base, the wives of officers. They weren’t that much older than Elizabeth, in their young thirties at most, but Elizabeth felt the deficiency of her twenty years acutely in their presence. They chatted in Portuguese, a language that slides and swirls, unforgiving for outsiders trying to understand but lyrical to listen to. In their shrugs and sighs, they seemed like prisoners, jaded and waiting for release. But they tried to make the best of it. Some joined the auxiliary nursing corps. Most devoted their time to domesticity, a complex task on a military base in West Africa, involving the organization of help from Guinean women happy to have the work but mindful of their collaboration, and the procuring of some decent ingredients, if not from the PX then from care packages ordered from home. In a pinch, the market in Bissau would do. Certainly, it was good for basics: peanuts, garlic, chilies, onions, dried macaroni, bananas—small but sweeter than any in Europe—and mangos by the crateful in season. But staples like manioc did not agree with the Portuguese palate, and the produce was generally bleak. Tomatoes were shriveled and flaccid. Greens, actually leaves of indeterminate provenance, crawled with bacteria.
Her first morning, Elizabeth stood staring at the unmade bed, wondering if she should smooth the still-damp sheets into place or find a laundress. She had already unpacked her suitcase and João’s duffel bag. The small dresser was plenty large for the few items she had to put away. The room had a narrow closet and a few wire hangers. A mousetrap inside, long sprung, held the decayed contents of its target. Well, at least it’s a little one, she thought, mentally noting a task for her husband when he returned.
It felt good to be domestic, and as she folded João’s military-issue boxer shorts, she fantasized about feeling his arms wrapped around her from behind, supporting her weight as she leaned against his thin body. She decided to make the bed, when there was a knock on the door. A welcoming crew of base women stood, one of them holding a bouquet of tropical flowers—orchids plucked right out of the notches of trees on the base perimeter, some birds of paradise, others Elizabeth had never seen.
“Bom dia,” they shouted, practically in unison. “Bem vinda a Bissau. Meu nome e Paula,” a tall, handsome woman said as she stepped forward, her hair jet black and lustrous, swept back into a ponytail, her white, loose cotton shirt and flowered skirt pressed taut, not for the sake of fashion but the elimination of botflies.
As she went on in machine-gunfire Portuguese, the others all giggled, Raquel blushing as she looked at her feet, shuffling in still-bright white canvas sneakers. Not that Elizabeth had understood, but she had just been informed that the young woman named Raquel was the envy of the lot, the wife of the Portuguese Air Force commander, dashing in his little Fiat G.91, which he buzzed low near the military base, with a dipped right wing, to show off for the women.
Raquel was a honey blonde, a rarity of rarities in Lisbon. A beauty. Her angular nose was more Roman than Iberian, her cheekbones swelled to perky soft mounds in a round face bronzed in the African sun, then flushed in the rising morning heat. She was petite, maybe five foot three, one hundred fifteen pounds if that. Her sundress demurely covered her shoulders but the backline plunged seductively. She was everything Elizabeth wasn’t, and quickly, the thought arose that João would see this woman and regret his choice, that this gorgeous woman’s presence could cause her endless heartache.
Elizabeth shook hands, smiled broadly, and fumbled for words. Pointing to herself and speaking as if to children, she managed, “I am Elizabeth.”
There was a pregnant pause before Paula ventured, “Você fala Português?”
This, Elizabeth understood from the first day of her arrival on the Algarve. She smiled sadly. “Não, eu não falo Português. Sou inglês, da Inglaterra. My husband is Doctor João Gonçalves.” She had picked up the message of husband-as-identification even through a language she could barely decipher.
Raquel stepped forward. “I speak leetle Englis,” she said, smiling. It could have been a moment to heighten Elizabeth’s jealousy to a new level of dread, but that smile melted her. Raquel’s teeth were lustrous white, a little too big, an endearing flaw, Elizabeth thought, and those high cheekbones were now accented with little dimples. “I am Raquel, not Raquel Welch,” she continued, the others laughing. “Rachel in Englis, like de Bible, de wife of Jacob.”
“I have to learn Portuguese,” Elizabeth said earnestly.
“That is no problem,” Raquel assured her.
The woman called Ana set down the flowers in a plain glass vase on the dresser, and arranged them to perfection. They would be an explosion of color and smell for João’s return.
They set off to show their new charge around: the laundry where Guinean and Cape Verdean women washed clothes, hung them to dry, and ironed them to the edge of burn; the PX stocked with Portuguese dry
goods; the officers’ mess where Elizabeth and João had dined with the commander and governor of Guiné the night before. There was a room set aside for the base wives, a simple affair with low ceilings and terra-cotta tiled floors, but successive waves of women had adorned it with femininity: rugs of baby blues and pale pinks, tasseled couches and love seats, chairs with embroidered pads, knitted blankets, and doilies on side tables. Spínola had said Elizabeth would be wise to keep herself busy with hospital work, and maybe it was so. But it was obvious most of the women had found hobbies of a more prosaic sort.
As Elizabeth looked around the room appreciatively, Raquel walked in with a willowy Cabo-Verdiana, her hair clipped short, her skin the color of café au lait.
“Thees ees Angélica.” Raquel motioned to her. “She ees speaking de Englis better dan me.” Raquel turned to the girl, smiling broadly and motioning for her to step forward, her right arm gesturing in a rapid circular spin. Angélica smiled as she looked down but quickly covered her mouth, missing a tooth, with one hand. Angélica, like all the Cabo-Verdianas Elizabeth had seen, was remarkably thin. By now, Elizabeth had decided this was a national trait, not a sign of mistreatment or starvation, some end process of centuries of intermingling blood.
The Cape Verde islands had been uninhabited rocks far off the coast of Senegal. One island, Fogo, had the drama of the live volcano that had created it and continued to rumble and spew, lifting it farther and farther from the sea. Beyond Fogo, the islands were dead. Rainstorms more often than not could be seen dumping freshwater into the ocean a mile or so offshore. The archipelago’s biggest asset was the vast airport that Portugal had built on Praia, just outside the capital. It served as a refueling point for Portuguese planes flying to Mozambique and Angola—and not wanting to brave what passed for an airport in Bissau. More important were the South Africans and Rhodesians. Commercial flights from New York and Europe to southern Africa, unwelcome anywhere else on the continent, stopped in Praia for refueling, sometimes for mechanical repairs as well—and always for the extortionary landing taxes demanded by the Portuguese authorities.
Cabo-Verdianos came to understand the value of currency more than work as their barren islands attracted commerce in the oddest ways. Portuguese fishermen, eager to harvest the rich waters off Cap Skirring, could not land their catch in Senegal, lest the French colonials take their cut. So they skittered to the rocks of Cabo Verde and built fishing communities in coves devoid of rain and vegetation, bringing Africans with them for help. Passing fishing vessels deposited their own refuse or stowaways over time. Cabo Verde stewed with colors that ultimately blended into a lovely, light brown.
Those fishermen eventually made their way to New England, establishing Cape Verdean communities far larger than any that existed on the mother isles. They invariably called themselves Portuguese, and the New Englanders never thought to quibble. But these were not Iberians. They were toughened on desert islands and trained to haul fish by the ton.
Angélica had learned her English in the rough bars and waterfront restaurants of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her father had brought her over with him when she was young enough to attract a good husband and old enough to be put to work, washing dishes at first, waiting tables later, where the tips were good even if the weathered hands were far too liberated for a father’s taste.
Angélica’s few years in those back kitchens had ended badly. The migre had launched one of its crackdowns in the spasm of law-and-order anger that swept Richard Nixon to the White House. They may have called themselves Portuguese, but the angry whites in Southie didn’t see Ireland or even Italy in that olive skin. An INS raid swept Angélica into a holding pen outside Boston. With her father out to sea and without a lawyer or money or a clue what to do, she found herself back in Praia, penniless. A cousin told her there was work in Bissau for the Portuguese military. The colonialists were increasingly wary of bringing Guineans onto base. Angélica’s English would put her in good stead—an educated African, good to show off to the NATO and Red Cross inspectors.
“Good morning, ma’am,” she said, extending her hand toward Elizabeth. “My name is Angélica Cardoso. How are you adjusting to Africa?”
The voice rang out forcefully, the accent pure New England. “Ca-dozo, how ah you adjusting?” Elizabeth was overjoyed. She understood then how isolated and lonely she had been without someone to talk to, the struggle it had been to reach out with so limited a tongue. Beaming, she took Angélica’s hand a bit too eagerly.
“Very well, thank you, now that I’ve met you, Angélica,” she said with palpable relief. “We’re going to be great friends.”
Chapter Eight
Under the terms of my contract, I was granted one weekend off a month, and I needed to claim it. Little Steve, one of Maggie’s housemates, was in the hospital in Haywards Heath. He was a mess. He had been on his motorcycle, not going fast really, but motorcycles are exposed things. A little old lady had swung open the door of her Reliant Robin outside the Sainsbury’s in a village north of Brighton. Little Steve crashed into it, really just clipped it. But that was enough. “Oh dear, quite sorry I’m sure,” I imagined her saying as the young man writhed on the street.
Little Steve’s right leg, after three surgeries, was an inch shorter than his left. He had been short to begin with, too short to look hard in the heavy cowhide biker gear he sported. To make matters worse, he had a head of curly black hair that he wore long, like a seventies rock star.
“Steve, if you’re going to be a poseur, why don’t you at least stay current with the other poseurs? Depeche Mode or something, not Jimmy Page,” Big Steve would say before that unfortunate accident.
“Whadya know of Jimmy Page, you lout?” Little Steve would reply.
Poor short Little Steve would now have a limp to go along with his stature. We figured we needed to pay him a visit.
Maggie’s house was a pit. The red brick on the Buxton Road row house, just off the five-way intersection above the railway station, had weathered to brown. The carpeting in the hallway was threadbare and hadn’t been cleaned for decades. The living room was a parlor of sorts in the front of the house, strewn with pillows, ashtrays, and wrappers from the chippy down the road. The electricity ran on a meter fed by fifty-pence pieces kept in piles in a basket—no change, no juice. There were two kitchen sinks but one was out of commission. In that one, dirty dishes had been stewing for months, but the greasy water had grown so rancid, the film on top so toxic, that no one would reach in to pull the plug and let it drain out. So it was ignored, never to be spoken of.
The house captured the moment. Britain was a nation exhausted by decline, sullen in its defeat, with a dominatrix in No. 10 Downing Street trying to whip it back on its knees. Margaret Thatcher had broken the miners’ strike in the north. Just down the road, in Brighton’s Grand Hotel on King’s Road, Patrick Magee of the Provisional Irish Republican Army had nearly blown her and her government to smithereens. The near miss of the Brighton bombing left everyone I knew terribly disappointed. Her bathroom was destroyed, but the damned sitting room where she was poring over her speech to the Conservative Party conference was unscathed. She changed her clothes, calmly walked from the hotel, then privatized British Telecom. We shook our heads as we passed around the bong.
The house was big and full. Big Steve, from Luton, always tried to look hard, in his dirty fatigues and torn flannel shirts. He wasn’t all that big, maybe just over six feet, but size is relative. His body would build up over the summer on construction jobs, then soften slowly over the course of the school year. The resident philosopher, he led discussions of the present—“It’s like God has killed love,” he moaned over AIDS—and of the future, which usually revolved around which city offered the best housing subsidies for the unemployed (Edinburgh), where the dole could be stretched the farthest (the Lake District), or where the best squats were opening up (London). No one, it seemed, had any intention of ever working. The amount of effort, the soaps and gels a
nd dyes, that went into Big Steve’s Mohawk made him more a misguided fop with a working-class accent than a threatening punk. No one should have to work that hard to look like a thug.
Little Steve’s motorcycle was the most prominent signifier of his identity. He was maybe five foot five, shorter than me, with pallid skin made more pallid by the curly rocker locks that framed his face. He studied engineering, something no one would have guessed by looking at him, and was the one member of the house who more or less eschewed dope. Then there was Astrid the hippie, with her tattered poncho from Mexico and her hand-knit beret covering long, unkempt, sandy-blond hair, a joyous literature major, enamored actually with my world: Kerouac, Dylan, Burroughs. She gave me a book of poetry written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who waxed credulously about the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The diehards in the States, probably Ferlinghetti too, had grown weary of the whole thing. Reagan was on his way out. The struggle with the Contras was ebbing. But Astrid thought Iran-Contra had something to do with her poncho, and I wasn’t going to stomp her buzz.
Suzy was the sanest one of the bunch. Tidy, she had a closely cropped head of dark, curly hair and told mundane stories of a suburban childhood south of London. She was particularly fond of the one when she mistook the bathroom cleanser—the Brits called it Flash, the Americans, Comet—for bubble bath when she was filling her tub. “‘Mum,’ I screamed, ‘I got Flash in my vag!’” She’d laugh uproariously every time. One of the thrilling little things about Britain, I discovered, was the absolute immodesty over all things to do with genitalia: “willy,” “fanny,” “vag,” even “cunt,” all words for genitals, all used in the politest of company. There wasn’t anything physically attractive about Suzy, nothing exotic or exciting. But her relative affluence and suburban childhood reminded me of home, and I think I craved her company because of it.
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