Night Calypso

by Lawrence Scott

  ‘I can’t have you off work, holding up the research.’ Vincent pretended to be stern.

  ‘No, Doctor.’ She heard her Papa’s voice. ‘You concentrate on your research. Be a good nurse.’ And that is what she had become. She hoped that he would be proud of her. She tried now, not too proudly, to let him know this in her letters home. In his last letter, he hinted that he might make the transatlantic trip. But then he described everything as so troubled in Europe.

  ‘Now let us see to the serious matter of your foot. Let’s help her up to the examination table. Just lie back. Can you arrange her skirts?’ Vincent indicated to Sister Luke. ‘I need to see the ankle and the surrounding area. The cut is close to a main artery. More warm water, cotton wool, Dettol. Ah, this should have stitches. Sister, in my bag.’ The infirmarian threaded the needle with gut. ‘Now you can have a little chloroform or we can proceed?’

  ‘Proceed.’ Sister Thérèse was being brave.

  ‘Are you sure?’ The infirmarian looked worried.

  ‘Yes.’ Sister Thérèse was insistent.

  ‘Very well done. You will be half way to canonisation after this.’ There was a cough of disapproval from Sister Luke again, to get things back on the right track. Vincent began the stitching.

  Sister Thérèse had assisted him at the hospital. She had noticed his gentleness; his way with the patients which put them at their ease, how they relaxed with his jokes and so dealt better with the pain; those who felt pain. He was particularly good with the children.

  Sister Thérèse closed her eyes and bore the pain. She winced and then screamed.

  ‘Chloroform!’ Vincent ordered. ‘Don’t jump and yell. Won’t be good for my sewing.’ He stitched her wound.

  The last words she heard were Doctor Metivier’s voice ‘There’ll be a scar. But who’ll see it?’

  The voices disappeared into a tunnel.

  The distant thunder broke into Sister Thérèse’s chloroformed sleep. The anaesthetic intensified her unconscious retrievals, echoing from afar. It scared her, as she lost consciousness and re-entered her dream. The whole room was moving to the rhythm of the lifted curtain, to the swelling sea below the cliffs. Light, then shadow, sliced through the jalousies. She dozed off. Then there was that thunder again, and a word, one of her father’s words, in Doctor Metivier’s voice. Pogrom. Her father had told her about the pogroms. And, now, here it was on her lips, the word which meant thunder. Grom, Grom, Grom. It travelled down through the ages, now under the cliffs in the caves, in the thunder over an island.

  The waves had changed their rhythm now. She heard them sounding like rain lashed by the wind, slapping the rocks. The interrogation began again.

  Sea crabs scuttled on wet rocks as bright as magenta.

  She had to defend her name. Yet, she was hiding it, insisting on her religious name instead. She had been part of a long queue waiting to be interrogated. She needed to show papers. She had no papers. She had her name. They did not like her name. It was like in the novitiate at Tulle.

  There were looks and sniggers at the novitiate at Tulle. It was the colour of her skin, the shape of her eyes, the darkness of her hair.

  Was it the novice mistress interrogating her in her dream? Yes, that cruel joke she overheard in the laundry about her nose. ‘Something indefinable,’ one sister had intimated, ‘makes you different from anyone I’ve met before.’ Different? ‘Do you feel different? It must be so odd to be you,’ the sister had added.

  She felt that they were jealous of her because of how well she had done in her exams; how she was complimented by Doctor Rothmann, a friend of her father’s at the Tulle teaching hospital, who had praised her ability to notice mutations in her cultures that the others had not. ‘Your father’s daughter,’ he had said out loud. ‘Natural instincts.’ She remembered that phrase and, ‘Born looking into a microscope,’ so that the other sisters looked up at her, and then buried their eyes in their own microscopes again. She did not want it this way. She closed her mind to these irks. She convinced herself that they were petty. She escaped into her training, into medicine.

  The world that moved beneath her microscope obsessed her: mycrobacterium leprae. It was part of her reason for choosing the mission at El Caracol when she was given the choice. There was the persistent thought, ‘Get away from it all’. There would be an opportunity to carry on her research in the field. But it meant leaving her father, leaving him in a dangerous world at a troubled time. The doubts about her decision grew each day. His parting gift was his microscope which she had been allowed to keep.

  She had his letters. Every month or so, the mail came with the ships of the French Line which sailed from Le Harvre to Southampton, then embarked on the transatlantic voyage. Or there were the banana boats, Elders and Fyfe, bound for Kingston via Porta España. She lay awake, imagining her father’s letter in the mailbag, crossing the ocean next to a giant tarantula, making the return journey. News grew more and more alarming.

  In the day, she threw herself into the present. With the new Doctor Metivier, there was more work to do, research to pursue. He valued her work like Dr Rothmann did. Dr Metivier was a doctor like her father. He was dedicated to his work. But it was never just research with him. She had found that out soon after meeting him for the first time. It was always linked to the practical care of the patients. ‘We do it for them,’ he had said, leaning over the bed of a patient to take off a bandage. Yes, she thought, he has the priorities: care and research, hand in glove.

  But she was not permitted to have conversations with him. She could not depend on him for praise. He was not supposed to be talking to the sisters about their work in that way. He reminded her of her father and how he sometimes talked when he came to visit her at the novitiate. ‘Research, research, research.’

  Mother Superior had warned her only the other day, outside the pharmacy. ‘Dr Metivier has his own ideas, Sister. You, on the other hand, must follow the ideals of our Order.’ Now, she was not at all sure what Mother Superior meant by her precise remark. She supposed that it was Doctor Metivier’s, ‘Eyes to your microscopes. That’s what you’re here for.’

  When Sister Thérèse came out of the anaesthetic, the first face she saw was that of Doctor Metivier. ‘It’s taken five stitches,’ he was saying. ‘Not many, but needed.’

  Vincent left the infirmarian to clear up while he washed his hands at the sink. ‘I recommend a day of rest.’ Vincent turned from his ablutions, pouring the rest of the warm water from the kettle into an enamel bowl. He noticed that there were no towels. ‘Towel, Sister?’ The infirmarian realised that she would have to go to the cupboard in the corridor. She clearly did not want to leave the doctor alone with Sister Thérèse. ‘Clean bandages,’ Vincent added, as she left on the errand.

  Sister Thérèse sat up on the examination table. ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’ He could see that she was troubled. ‘Pain?’

  ‘No. Not this. When you crossed the bay early this morning, did you see the German destroyer?’

  ‘Yes. It was a surprise to see it. Extraordinary. Jonah tells me it’s a training ship. The fishermen know everything. He went alongside and talked to one of the sailors who spoke fluent English. They’re training in the South Atlantic. Had to stop to do some repairs. They were leaving as I came across. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I saw it last night from the window of my cell. There was a sailor singing a love song.’

  ‘A love song? What kind of love song?

  ‘Die Liebe ist’s allein. I think it’s from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Just two lines over and over, Yes, yes, it is love alone.’

  ‘I see.’ He smiled at the pretty nun.

  ‘Then my window shattered.’

  ‘There was a squall, high winds. I slept right through it. I needed to.’ Vincent did not tell his story of Theo.

  ‘There was thunder. I heard it repeatedly in the distance. They’ll kill my father. Grom…’

  At that moment Siste
r Luke re-entered the infirmary. Vincent changed the conversation, but was inwardly alarmed by Sister Thérèse’s mention of her father, and her startled use of the word, Grom.

  ‘Now let’s put some fresh bandages on your wound. Then you must get some rest. You make sure you’re out tomorrow. We can’t do without you at the hospital.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Doctor.’

  Sister Luke was out of the room again for an instant, clearing up.

  ‘I must tell you about my father. Something happened in my cell. They don’t listen here.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Get some rest. She needs a good breakfast,’ Vincent said, as the infirmarian re-entered. He smiled as he finished his cleaning up.

  As Sister Luke stepped out of the infirmary with the soiled bandages and the debris of the little operation, Sister Thérèse grasped her moment again. She began hesitantly. ‘I’ll be there for research.’

  ‘Good.’ Vincent Metivier dried his hands again as he turned to face her.

  ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I talk to you when we’re at Saint Damian’s?’

  Vincent noticed his patient’s hesitancy. Yet there was an undertone of urgency.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Then, the infirmarian re-entered the room. He respected his patient’s confidence and left.

  Sister Thérèse stood at the window before returning to her cell. She stared out onto the convent’s garden with the nun’s cemetery. It was one of the first places she had been taken when she first arrived, in order to see the grave of Sister Matilde, who had been one of the original sisters. She remembered being moved to tears on seeing the name inscribed on the pitted stone over the grave: Sister Mathilde Le Clercq. Born, Clermont Ferrand, France, 1850. Died, El Caracol, 1935. Was this to be her own future? she had asked herself, learning that Sister Matilde was one of the few nuns who had eventually succumbed to the disease. Had she, Thérèse, herself, escaped one danger only to be exposed to another?

  Saint Damian’s

  Theo had kept Vincent awake again with another tale. He was exhausted after another week of his crazed calypso. He did not know how he was going to continue to care for the boy. He did not want to believe in possession. What had Father Dominic landed him in? What had he taken on? The boy was wrecked by his tale. He needed to tell his story. He had had to lift him from the floor and take him to his bed last night. In the morning, Vincent knelt beside him. ‘Theo, come boy, is time to get up. Remember, we going to Saint Damian’s today.’ Vincent did not want the boy out of his sight.

  After breakfast, they waited on the jetty for Jonah. They watched the put-putting pirogue come round the point. Jonah looked surprised. ‘Like we have an extra passenger today, Doc.’

  Vincent looked at Jonah. ‘He’s shy.’ He spoke under his breath. ‘You take a seat in the bow, Theo.’ He sat in the middle.

  Jonah crouched in the stern with his hand on the tiller. The pirogue cut out from the jetty.

  Vincent watched the dark green mirror of the bay crack and ripple away from the sides of the pirogue. Far above them, a frigate bird soared, a cross in the sky. On the other side of the wide Chac Chac Bay, Vincent could see that the nuns’ launch was leaving from their jetty at Embarcadère Corbeau.

  The tiny, black specks in the far blue above were vultures. When some dead thing in the bush, or on the shore, alerted them, they spiralled down, turkey buzzards, intent on the dead.

  The nuns’ launch, Maria Concepción, sat deep in the water, churning away at the callaloo of green, the Orinoco’s stain. The squat bow ploughed ahead, not like the pirogue’s chevron, raised in flight, now that Jonah had it at full throttle. The speed did not last. The engine spluttered and had to be started again. A whiff of gasoline from the motor mixed with the salt air.

  Jonah stood now, firmly balanced, with a hand on the tiller, the engine racing again. ‘We go beat them today, Doc!’ It was his little game to reach the Saint Damian’s jetty before the nuns.

  Vincent held onto his Panama. He smiled at Jonah’s enthusiasm. ‘Take it easy, Jonah. Mind, Theo,’ he called out.

  ‘We go reach, Doc. Hold tight, boy.’

  Would Sister Thérèse be on the launch today? She had had something to tell Vincent. They’ll kill my father. Her words echoed even now from the nuns’ infirmary a week ago. He still saw her cuts and bruises, the wound on her ankle. She should be in today for him to take the stitches out. He had been missing her, his best nurse, all this week on the wards. The enclosure of the convent had folded about her. ‘She’s resting, Doctor,’ were Mother Superior’s words when he asked why he had not seen her.

  Theo was staring resolutely ahead. A flotilla of pelicans, disturbed by the pirogue’s roar, rose from the choppy waves, then plunged as suddenly back into the sea. Vincent leant over and touched his shoulder. ‘Look.’ Theo winced.

  Vincent looked back at Jonah. He was beaming, braced by the dawn, and the fact that he was winning the race, as usual. ‘We go win, Doc!’

  Vincent waved. ‘You always do,’ his voice made inaudible by the racing motor.

  He crept up to Theo at the bow and knelt behind him, looking over his shoulder. He took care not to touch him. How was he going to tackle the difficult subject of Saint Damian’s itself? ‘Over there, Theo, to your right, is the leprosarium.’ Vincent looked for a reaction in the boy’s face. He knew that he was good at his vocabulary, Father Angel’s bright boy, so the chances were that he would know the word leprosarium. ‘You see the hospital? Go up so from the jetty, the low building with the long verandah. That’s the childrens’ wards.’ Vincent saw a twitch on his face at the word children. What was he imagining? He realised that this talk was more his nervousness than a real need to inform Theo.

  Theo was humouring him. Did Vincent really think he did not know what was happening on the island? He had seen the new patients, the girl Christiana, brought over the day he arrived. He had seen her crying. He maintained his usual mute self. ‘Then, over here, see.’ Vincent continued pointing. ‘Those are the huts, where some of the adult patients live who can take care of themselves. The lower row is for the women, the ones on the higher terrace over there are for the men.’ Vincent looked for a reaction.

  ‘Not long again, Doc.’ Jonah was guiding the pirogue. Just then, the Maria Concepción, was gaining on them.

  ‘Like the nuns late this morning, Jonah?’

  ‘Everybody late. Storm last night.’

  ‘That’s the boat belonging to the nursing sisters, Theo. They work at the hospital with me, looking after the patients.’

  Jonah had trouble navigating the pirogue this morning, because of the wind and the choppy waves out in the bay.

  ‘You know about leprosy?’ Vincent asked the question directly. ‘It’s in the gospel. Remember, Jesus heals the leper. Cocobay. You hear that expression from the calypso, cocobay. Well that is Coco Bay where the jetty for Saint Damian’s is. That is how leprosy here get that name. This is where they bring those who have leprosy.’ Vincent hummed the calypso tune, ‘lf a man has money today.’

  With a small voice, under his breath, Vincent heard the completion of the couplet. ‘People do not care if he has cocobay.’

  ‘That’s it, Theo.’ He’s engaging, Vincent thought. ‘Yes, my patients have cocobay. No money though. Leprosy, and I’m trying with the sisters to heal them. We look after them. And some of them are children. I want you to meet Ti-Jean. He’s about your age. But remember, cocobay is not a nice word. There’s no need to be scared though.’

  Vincent carried on talking, trying to allay the fears he imagined the boy must have. He was sure that he must have heard descriptions in the country. He might even have seen someone with the disease, with blanched skin patches, without fingers or toes, or, at least, heard of the fear which the presence of the disease in the village would cause.

  As Theo crouched forward on his seat, Vincent saw again the scar down his spine. It looked like a raised welt now, blistering the length of his
back. He was marked with his own blemish. What was the tale there? ‘Here Theo, put on your shirt now for school.’

  As they neared the shore, the rusty galvanise roofs caught the sun. The leprosarium looked like an abandoned fishing village where the huts were being encroached upon by the bush, entangled by wild vines. The pink coralita, running riot, embroidered itself onto the decaying wood.

  Vincent continued to point out the landmarks to the boy. Just up from the jetty and in the valley under Monte de Botella, the small, wooden Roman Catholic Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, an echo of the original evangelisation of the island, spired between the mahoe chardon and the gommier trees. Next to it was the Anglican church, in colonial gothic, with its wooden fret work. Pinnacles of a Hindu Mandir, turrets and dome of a Muslim mosque shone white. Stuck in the muddy shore, the Hindu jhandis, saffron and white prayer flags tied to tall bamboo sticks, fluttered in the morning breeze, catching the light, taking prayers to Hanuman, the monkey god. The white statue of the Virgin Mary, Stella Maris, kept guard at the end of the jetty, gazing implacably out to sea. An abundance of faith! What could they do for his patients, these faiths? Vincent always asked himself.

  As they drew nearer, they saw the old people on crutches, leaning on each others’ shoulders, descending from the huts. He would have to introduce Theo to this reality. He was nervous. Theo stared, unmoved. The patients were coming down the red dirt tracks to the meeting place under the large, shady almond tree outside the stores. Already, the boys and girls were hanging out on their verandahs in front of their wards. Theo was now all ears and eyes. Vincent noticed his sudden agitation.

  Suddenly, a squall swept off the gulf. Torrential rain burst down, fighting with the burning sun, clattering on the leaves. The hills steamed. The wet leaves shone like green enamel. The parrots screamed.