by Basu, Kanal
His father gripped his hand, digging in his nails. Shocked, Antonio broke free, and spoke urgently. “How long have you been like this?” There was no answer.
“When did the rash appear?” The pustules seemed more than a few months old, angry and ripe to bursting point. “How long since you’ve treated them?” He raised his voice.
“Four months.” Standing behind him, Rosa replied for his father.
“Shhh …” Antonio silenced her. “In which part of the body did you get them first? Go on, tell me.” He took a close look at the groin, at the glistening bud on the member, and brought his face even closer to his father’s ear. “What have you done? You must tell me what happened.”
“He can’t hear you.” Rosa Escobar spoke haltingly. “He is deaf as dead.” She started to sob.
“Nonsense!” Antonio tried to shoo her away, making her wail uncontrollably.
“He wanted to die before you to saw him like this, but I begged him to write you one last time.”
“You begged him?”
Rosa nodded. “Only you can save him, his own Tino.”
It took considerable effort for Antonio to turn away from his father and face Rosa. Then he asked her to name the symptoms, all of them, as clearly as she could, starting with the appearance of the rash. She told him about the crushing pain in the bones in the early days of his father’s sickness, as if he had fallen off a galloping horse. “He stays awake all night from dreadful colic, sleeps all day then wakes up to the pain as it starts all over again. Some nights he can’t sleep at all, has the sense of flames bursting through his pupils like fireballs. Can’t eat a morsel of food or gulp down a drop of water. He has the tongue of an ox. And his body shakes like a rabbit caught in a trap.”
It couldn’t be true, Antonio thought he was dreaming an ugly dream. Even without the droning words of Rosa Escobar, he could recite the full list of symptoms: insomnia and inflammation, acute neuralgia, chronic fatigue, distress of the bowels and vital organs, paralysis and dementia.
Morbus Gallicus … It took him no time to add up the symptoms, to confirm his worst fears. He ran out of the room, with Rosa behind him. She begged him to stop, to give her a chance to describe the condition of the patient in full. “Your father has gone mad!” she wailed. “He’s afraid of ghosts and clings to me day and night. He talks of hellfire, and of angels who are poisoning him.” Rosa grabbed his arm and shook it. “He’s dying, Tino!”
Antonio prowled his room at the country house, the door barred. That’s why he had run from Lisbon. … How foolish of me not to have known! He remembered the storm of rumors that had chased his father all the way to Cabo São Vicente. How could he get away with his secret? He blamed himself for ignoring the gossip. What can I do to save him now? Tertiary syphilis brooked no cure, he knew too well, there was nothing bigger than the venereal pox, nothing better than to put a bullet through his head.
Back in his father’s room, he smashed the bottles full of Rosa’s potions bought from “traveling doctors” and amateur herbalists. Quacks! He crushed the vials of arsenic and mercury under his feet, upturned vats of almond oil and buckets full of leeches. Prize idiots! Arsenic never cured anyone of anything. Leeches simply sucked blood. Mercury gave you bad teeth. Chocolate-coated gold pills did no more than color the bowels. Quacks! Quacks! Quacks! Quacks! He went stamping over them, scattering the shards.
“Save me, Tino.” His father wept like a child, when he managed to look into his son’s eyes.
The one he loved most. The father who’d carry him on his shoulders at the bullring. The one who’d counsel him to shoot the principal – the old fool – and spare his pigeons.
“Save me, Tino. …”
Who could’ve infected him? An album of faces opened up before Antonio’s eyes. He stared hard at Rosa. Could she have …? She ran behind the cupboard when he took a few menacing steps toward her, as if he meant to examine her forcibly.
“No, Tino, it wasn’t me. I’m clean. Look!” She pulled her bodice down and showed him her bare and unblemished breasts. “I didn’t give it to him. He was sick when he came here.”
“But you knew, didn’t you?” He looked accusingly at Rosa. “Why didn’t you write to me earlier?”
“Because your father forbade me.” She pointed at the door. “He kept it locked to stop me from going out to the market even. I had to sneak out when he was sleeping. He stopped me from telling anyone. He’d mix his own medicine in the mortar, and make me rub his body with it. He thought he could cure himself, that you’d find him healthy when you came home. Then …”
“Then what?” Antonio looked at his father, dozing with his eyes open.
“Then he gave up. Asked me to bring him his gun.” Rubbing her eyes with her apron, Rosa sobbed. “He tried to kill himself when I fell asleep, cut his wrists with his surgical knife. I threw away his box of instruments, but then he tried again with drops he had kept hidden under the bed.”
“Did anyone visit him here?”
“No.” Rosa shook her head. “Just him and me. Till I begged him to write you just once.”
Antonio left the house to walk among the cedars. Summer’s light had cast loving shadows among the trees, but he couldn’t rid his thoughts of his father’s ugly body, and his pathetic pleas. He should know I can’t help him. No doctor can. … He must know all about poxes. Even from far away he could hear the cry of the syphilitics of Lisbon camping in the Monastery of Jerónimos: rotting whores and rogues let out of prison by their fearful guards, orphans of sick mothers, idiots and cripples. And the child monsters who had suckled the poison from their mothers’ breasts and were covered from head to toe in leopard’s spots. Even lepers ran at the sight of them. Shopkeepers chased them with sticks; hospitals slammed doors in their faces. Kind priests hurled rocks through their windows to keep them away.
At the All Saints Hospital they called it serpentine sickness, worse than the dark plague, than the poison of scorpions or the bite of a rabid dog. He’d flee whenever he encountered the symptoms of syphilis, make excuses, hand over the patient to fellow doctors. Let them be the ones to make fools of themselves. Shutting the door behind him, he’d put his ear to the wall and chuckle as he heard them struggle to name the mischief maker disguised as harmless gout or plain eczema, a touch of nerves, time honored rheumatism, even hypo chondria. Syphilis! He’d want to scream his warning to patient and doctor through the wall. Call it by whichever name – French disease, Spanish itch, German rash or Polish pox – it was the same old curse Dom Columbus had brought home from Hispaniola along with gold and talking parrots.
If forced to treat a victim, he’d puzzle his assistants by advising them to take the patient to the Jesuit asylum. “But he isn’t mad!” “He will be soon,” he’d alarm them. “The patient will sing! If a composer, he’ll pen a symphony, paint a masterpiece if an artist. Might even plunge a knife into his doctor’s heart like a champion of the bullring.”
He must’ve caught it in Lisbon then fled to the country. Antonio recalled his father coming to see him often at the All Saints, but never staying back to spend a night with him. He’s off to one of his rich lovers, he’d think. Maybe he was infected by them, or by their servants. He thought of the happy ladies of Praça da Alegria and shuddered. Could his father have caught the pox from someone he knew himself, from the lot of his own lovers?
Watching the fireflies dance, he brooded over everything he had learned about the pox. The nervous face of Rosa appeared at the window to call him back. Antonio waved her away, but she pleaded with her eyes to let her speak to him just once.
Tired from his travels, he fell asleep. The tune of a marching band played in his dreams and he fretted over a million regrets. An anxious Maria Helena called out to him to cut her free from a fisherman’s net with his surgical knife. Friends cheered him on as he entered the bullring dressed as a matador. He couldn’t remember his fight with the bull, except his father picking him up from the sawdust and speaking quiet
words of assurance into his ear. One day you’ll be a champion, Tino. …
When he woke Antonio thought he was still dreaming about his father sobbing among the cedars of Cabo São Vicente the day his mother died. The sound seemed to find its way into every corner of the house, like a wind that has a seed of madness in its vortex. He went down to his father’s room. He found him kneeling by the bed, an arm around Rosa Escobar, who was on the bed dressed up like his mother. She was lying still in the posture of death wearing an old bridal gown, the veil covering her face. Her eyes were shut, her face gripped with fear. He saw his father weeping at her feet. He turned toward Antonio and spoke in a choked voice.
“Come Tino, it’s time to take your mother to her new home.”
His nightmares started there at his father’s bedside. Every night since the feast of St. Anthony, he woke in terror at the thought of his father among the howling syphilitics, showered with rocks and chased with sticks.
From Cabo São Vicente to Coimbra, Antonio wasted no time reaching the Faculdade Medicina. He needed to consult urgently with Dr. Alfred Martin, the only one he trusted on medical matters. Waiting for the baby-faced Scot who had taught him the proper grip of the scalpel, he rehearsed a single line over and over in his mind, the one he’d offer Dr. Martin if asked why he had come to see him. My father is suffering from syphilis. He wondered if he should put it more plainly. … My father is dying of syphilis, given that his diagnosis indicated nothing better than imminent death. His teacher might ask him to recite the details, and he made a quick mental list of the symptoms.
Dr. Martin swept into his office, and greeted Antonio with a flourish. “Ah! the mischief maker!” He looked every bit a baby without a line on his face, ruddy cheeks and an infectious smile, the teacher who loved arguing and had the reputation among his colleagues of being a student in disguise. Settling into his deep lounge chair and lighting up a water pipe – a favorite among bohemians – he sized up his quiet visitor, and wondered aloud what had brought him over to the Faculdade after so many years, unlike his friends who were in the habit of dropping in every now and then for free consultations.
“What mischief brings you back now?”
“It’s about a patient who shows signs of paresis resulting from infectious chancre. An infection that’s about to enter the tertiary stage.” Antonio answered grimly.
“A patient of syphilis, you mean.” Dr. Martin was quick to follow. “How do you know the tertiary stage is near?”
“Because dementia paralytica has set in. All signs point to a breakdown of personality leading to erratic behavior.”
“Ah! You mean he’s unable to recognize near and dear ones, claims to hear the angels in his ear, thinks himself to be the emissary of the devil!” Dr. Martin sniggered. “Just like our dear principal here, don’t you think?” He let out a stream of smoke from his pipe. “Might as well call the undertakers then!”
“The patient is my father.” Antonio whispered.
A frown appeared on Dr. Martin’s face, making him look suddenly aged. He drew quietly on his water pipe. Light through the slatted windows cut the room in half, leaving him in the dark and his student bathed in the color of green maple that surrounded the Faculdade Medicina.
“He hid it from everyone, and so there was no chance of treating him earlier.” Antonio let out a deep breath. “Unless, of course, he had tried to cure himself.”
“But it would be of no use.” Dr. Martin sighed. “He must’ve known the final outcome.”
“He couldn’t have known of any new treatment though, something that’s only recently been discovered?” Antonio probed cautiously. Perhaps Dr. Martin, known for his blasphemous views, had a surprise or two up his sleeve.
The Scotsman shook his head. “Not since the time you were here. There hasn’t been a successful treatment in four hundred years, I’m afraid.” He rose to open the window and draw in the afternoon sun to light up the bookshelves and the cabinet of surgical tools. “We doctors have failed shamefully when it comes to fighting the pox. It’s over to heretics now. Nothing else will do.”
Antonio was upset. It was all talk with Dr. Martin, and the play of clever arguments. Sleepless from his travels, he felt cheated by the Faculdade, and was moved one last time to press on arguing with his teacher. “But there’s no shortage of heretics. Why haven’t they found a cure?”
“Because we distrust them.” Recovering his spirit, Dr. Martin bit the stem of his water pipe and spoke vigorously. “No one even believes in a cure for syphilis anymore. The French have given up on the French disease! In Paris they’re threatening to hang the victims. There’s talk even of branding them with red-hot irons. In Madrid the syphilitics have been removed from the records and turned into ghosts! Mothers have been told to nurse their own children, men to avoid public baths. And Italy? The less said about the Italians the better!” He stopped to catch his breath then went on. “In Naples they’ve built walls inside hospitals to separate the patients from the poxies, just as in Glasgow, where the police have replaced doctors on the wards. In the lands of Calvin they’ve been left to die as punishment for their sins. The civilized world has simply given up.”
“And the English?” Antonio was yet hopeful of the wonderfully inventive English. His teacher laughed.
“Yes, they’ve found one – the English cap – made of sheep’s intestines to wrap around your member in case you meet the gin palace whores!”
As he listened to his teacher, Antonio’s thoughts returned to his father’s bedside. I’ve lost him already. … He had seen enough to be convinced that it was true. Syphilis had brought about a change in his character, scattering his memories like dust. He was unable to grasp his own thoughts anymore, chasing after them like butterflies. The time has come to put him in a madhouse.
“It’s over to quacks then?” He spoke wryly and passed his hand over the trephine lying on the desk.
Dr. Martin noticed the dismay in his student’s voice. Privately he chuckled at the qualities of Antonio Maria that had endeared him to his teachers. The young bull who refused to accept defeat. The streak of obstinacy that had marked him out for future success, showed all that was good and bad in a doctor.
“It depends on who you call quacks and who doctors.”
“That’s clear. Those who believe in the curative power of menstrual blood, gaic wood and dead lizards, those who …”
“They are charlatans,” Dr. Martin was quick to interject, “that are fit to be locked up and put away. But what do you make of the Hopi, the Yoruba, the Aztecs and the Incas?”
“Our hope lies in spirit doctors then? We might as well trust in the Golden Mermaid!”
“Our forefathers too worshipped serpents and lizards, the moon goddess and the sea.” Just as when instructing his pupils on the correct use of the circular trephine, Dr. Martin interrupted Antonio with a lengthy treatise. In the end, his student had learned much more than he cared to about the Yoruba, who expelled harmful germs – the kokoro – with ritual baths; about the Egyptian Imhotep, called the “prince of peace,” who could treat over two hundred diseases with herbs and plants; the mathematics of Al-Kindi, used to calculate the precise nature of a sickness; about the Ayurvedic masters of India, and the Nei ching – the Yellow Emperor’s Canon.
“The Yellow Emperor?” Antonio asked his teacher, as he prepared to leave.
“The ruler of the yellow race. His laws of medicine are older than our oldest ancestors. A Chinese doctor can tell a man’s sickness simply by placing a hand on his wrist.”
“So can we,” Antonio shot back. “By checking the tongue, by putting a nozzle to the heart, by tapping the soles of the feet. Anyone can name a sickness, can the Yellow Emperor cure it?”
Dr. Martin smiled. “We don’t know. But the heretic must believe in that possibility.”
What can I do to save my father now? Rising, he spoke irritably. “My patient will die before a cure is found.” Perhaps the time had come to think the unthi
nkable – putting him to sleep before the devil took over his mind.
“A remedy must surely exist even if you don’t find it described in the gold-trimmed volumes of the Biblioteca Nacional.” Gazing out of the window, Dr. Martin followed a flock of gulls circling the banks of the Mondego. His face glowed in the falling light. He smiled kindly at his student’s anguished face. “It’ll take a bit of mischief, Antonio. You might have to stop being a doctor, go far from your patient in order to find him a cure.”
Back in Lisbon Antonio skipped his daily rounds at the All Saints and sent Ricardo Silva word to meet him at their favorite pastelaria. His friend would be surprised, he knew, demand an explanation for his sudden escape from the festa. It’d be harder to tell Ricardo about his father than telling Dr. Martin. His favorite English tea tasted bitter as he rehearsed his opening line, ignoring the come-hither looks of a vixen who had planted herself across from him. She blew him the smoke of an imported cigarillo, but Antonio kept staring into his cup as if it held the answers to his pressing problems.
He was relieved to see Ricardo, smelling like a Parisian on a casual stroll, although he must’ve rushed in from his stables to meet Antonio, unable to hold back his curiosity. He poured himself a cup of the tea and patted Antonio on the back. “You’ve called me over to give me the big news, haven’t you? Want to tell me first before you announce it to the world?”
