Take Me to Paris, Johnny

by John Foster

  But then Dr Wall had not been present in the day ward after the gastroscopy was completed. He had not seen the cleaners move in while Juan lay still drowsy on the bed; he had not seen how they moved quickly and nervously in their white masks and gloves, swabbing and sweeping and even vacuuming the holland blinds and pronouncing him with their rituals of hygiene to be a leper, a plague-bearer, a polluted being.

  ‘Do they normally do this?’ I asked the nurse.

  ‘They have their job to do,’ she said.

  We walked home, stopping off at the corner store to buy a bottle of Lucozade. According to the label Beecham Bros supplied this energising drink by appointment to HM the Queen, which Juan imagined she probably swigged in large quantities to fortify her in her battles with Mrs Thatcher. He was becoming increasingly preoccupied with food. Between the consoling visits to Dr Wall there had to be something he could do to arrest the loss of weight, to take control of this thing, to ward off the fear. For a couple of weeks he consumed prodigious quantities of carrot and celery juice. Then he heard from a friend that a watercress diet might be beneficial for his stomach. Fortunately the first bunch we bought at the market was so full of grit that he rapidly decided there was more to be said for another suggestion: a massive intake of cruciferous vegetables.

  Unconvinced by these dietary experiments, I was grateful when Ann in her practical way produced a more promising alternative, a cookbook called The Taste of Life based loosely on the Pritikin diet to which the author had been converted when her husband had been diagnosed with cancer.

  Juan went through the book methodically ticking approved recipes: corn fritters; chicken chow mein; fish in mango sauce; kokanda, an African fish dish with bananas and chilli and lime juice. All of this was perfectly in character. Astonishingly, though, he also ticked his way thickly through the pasta section. How many times had I listened to his set piece—in restaurants, at dinner parties, in the supermarket—about the nauseating smell of boiled pasta that conjured up the rationed poverty of his childhood? For all my attempts to cajole and persuade him, he had remained rigidly, monumentally opposed to eating pasta. And now, without comment, he suddenly relented, though he had the presence of mind to underline one sentence in the introduction for my benefit: ‘A gradual change in diet is recommended. This will allow your digestive system to appreciate the changeover without too much wind.’

  Sadly, The Taste of Life was no more successful in settling his stomach or arresting the weight loss than my own improvised recipes. And the sense of crisis heightened when, despite the evidence of the billabong drawing, eating became painful for him. Simply swallowing a full meal was now an achievement, followed, as often as not, by the disappointment of regurgitating it a few minutes later. Night after night we sat down to dinner, our one firm, unalterable ritual of normality, and ended with a plate of vomited food and tears. ‘Try smaller meals more frequently,’ the hospital dietician advised. ‘Six times a day.’ By now it was early November; the teaching year at the University was mercifully finished and I sat at the kitchen table with bundles of exam essays, obsessed with food and dividing my attention unequally between lentil soup and the rise of fascism. Six times a day.

  Sitting on the carpet in front of the gas fire he regularly monitored the changes in his body. On the lower part of his legs the skin had begun to flake and he rubbed them with coconut oil the way Indian mothers rub their babies. At the back of his legs where the calf muscles ought to have been there was an ache. He would pull up his tracksuit bottoms and take off his ski socks and say, ‘Give me a treatment, Johnny.’ And then, because his back ached as well, one day he stripped off entirely and lay face down on the carpet for what he called a full treatment.

  It was odd, as I suddenly realised, that I had not seen him naked for some weeks. In using the bathroom he had always been very private; in bed he had taken to sleeping almost fully clothed. But here, stretched out on the carpet where the coffee stains were, there was no concealing his wasted condition. I was shocked; shocked by my own blindness; shocked by the weeping red eye of his culi, as he affectionately called his arse; stunned by the loose dark Buchenwald folds of skin that were all that was left of his buttocks. Searching for words, I found none. I said nothing, just as I had said nothing when he told me he could no longer get an erection. But he seemed not to expect words. He simply took my hands and guided them, as if I were a blind man, to the points on his spine and shoulders and his neck where I could knead away the pain.

  He knew better than I did when it was unnecessary to speak. He also knew, more freely and fantastically than I did, how to dream and, in a fitful kind of way, how to hope. We were hearing reports of AZT, a new drug that was being trialled in the States, and these refocussed his thoughts on America, regenerating in him the old illusion that if only he were in a different place he might somehow discover himself to be a different person. In America he had not been sick, or at least not sick like he was now; and if they were going to discover a cure, a wonder drug that would knock out this virus, surely it would come from there. He believed, he very much wanted to believe in America.

  Yet America had not saved Rock Hudson. It did nothing for the desperate men from Los Angeles who were running the drug trail to Mexico in search of a miracle cure. AZT sounded more promising than the do-it-yourself cures of the AIDS underground; but the more he thought about it, the more both AZT and America itself receded into an unattainable dream. Everything about the idea of returning was hopeless. We could hardly afford the airfare, let alone the obscene price that Burroughs Wellcome found it proper to charge for their new drug. And even if we made it to New York, there was no apartment, no family, no medical insurance to come home to. At the end of the road there would be at best a public hospice. That prospect shattered the fantasy. In his battle with New York City, beginning with those immigrant days in Hell’s Kitchen, Juan had come out on top, and he wasn’t about to let it claim him as a victim now. He did not want to die, he told me, like a common faggot.

  ‘To die’: the words slipped out more as a rhetorical flourish than a statement of personal fate, as though dying were a condition that applied in the streets and hospital wards of New York, on the other side of the world. Nevertheless, in those weeks when the gas fire was still burning late into the spring, it was evident that he was circling around the notion of death, brooding over it, hardly daring to name it. It was on his mind the night when he slipped back into bed after a trip to the bathroom and I felt him sobbing. ‘I’m so frightened,’ he said, and that was all. It surfaced on the night when we farewelled Paul and Tim, two friends who were leaving on a European holiday and spending Christmas at Santiago de Compostela. ‘Yes,’ he said brightly, ‘I would like one day to go to Compostela,’ and then a cloud passed over his face, which they remembered when they came to the place and lit a candle in the cathedral there.

  Most memorable was the night of the Thanksgiving dinner. In the normal course of events Thanksgiving would have slipped by in our corner of the world unremarked and unobserved, someone else’s festival. But when that someone else was Juan, it was an occasion that demanded to be celebrated. So the cast of the birthday party was reassembled, minus the bishop and his wife, and we moved the venue next door to the priest’s dining room which could more easily accommodate the crowd. A 1959 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Cook Book, a ten-cent bargain that Juan had picked up at a University book fair, provided the recipes and ritual rules. The book told us we should remember to be grateful for our liberty, which sounded reasonable, but it made no mention of speeches or toasts. Did one make speeches at Thanksgiving? Juan obviously thought so. At the end of the meal he was on his feet at the head of the table, composed, unusually quiet in himself and wanting to speak. He wished to thank Father Jim and Ann for their hospitality; he was glad that we had come as his guests. He knew that there were some of us who didn’t think much of America and he wasn’t going to argue about that. He wanted only to say that for him thi
s was a special occasion.

  ‘It’s my last Thanksgiving.’ There was a pause and then, as though he were shocked at the import of his words and their frankness, he added, ‘I mean, as an American.’ He asked us to fill our glasses for a toast, and in the moment all the million things that are America contracted to the span of Juan G. Céspedes.

  ‘To America!’ he said, and we drank to him.

  Last celebrations, last performances, last things. This was one way of imagining the possibility of dying. Of course this quality of lastness was not always as sharp, as definitive, as easily recognised as that Thanksgiving. Sometimes—it must have been like this with his erections—there was simply no last to remember, only the dull sense that there must have been a last because there would be no more. But most certainly there was a last dance. It was on the night after Thanksgiving in the parish hall. Why the parish was having a dance I no longer remember. Perhaps they were raising funds, as they usually were, to repair the bits of the church that were continually crumbling and falling down; or perhaps, because it was spring, they simply wanted to dance. And so did Juan.

  We arrived late. He was always late, but apart from that, it took him longer to prepare himself now, longer to arrange his ringlets so that the thinness would not show through, longer to re-iron the shirt that I had ironed too haphazardly for his fastidious taste. He tucked the shirt and two pullovers into the top of his leather pants, and then, going to the wardrobe, he took out the fur coat that had hung untouched throughout the winter and draped it extravagantly over his shoulders. He considered the effect in the mirror, and then, as a final touch, he put on a pair of reflecting sunglasses that had been de rigueur in the butchest heyday of Christopher Street. He was ready for the ball.

  For much of the evening he sat at one of the tables arranged around the edge of the dance floor, chatting and accepting the attention of friends and well-wishers like the celebrity he undoubtedly was. When he danced, swaying slowly so that the coat rippled around him, it was with a Peruvian woman he had met at Mass the previous Sunday. She was a nervous, birdlike creature, more Indian-looking than Spanish, with a waif of a daughter called Delicia and a drunken Australian husband who had brought her back like a souvenir from a South American tour. The marriage was less than satisfactory, and as she spoke no English and the husband spoke no Spanish, the means for resolving their matrimonial difficulties were severely restricted. All of this, it appears, she confided to Juan as she danced and nuzzled her face from time to time into the fur of his coat. He was speaking in Spanish, for the first time—as far as I knew—since he had left New York. Later in the evening he approached the husband.

  ‘You must look after your wife and the little girl,’ he said. ‘And you must stop drinking.’ The man was too drunk or too surprised to take offence. Whether he stopped drinking, I never heard, but in due course Juan was pleased to hear from Father Jim that the woman and child had been returned, as they wished, to their native land.

  That was the last time Juan danced. He was a star that night, and he shone more brightly because his sickness was so evident. He no longer attempted to mask it, but drew attention to himself as if to say, ‘This is my coming out.’ People asked each other, ‘Is it cancer?’ They asked me, ‘Is it terminal?’ They couldn’t quite bring themselves to say, ‘Is it AIDS?’ They had never seen AIDS. No one in our circle had seen it. Only Juan, who had nursed Jerry on his deathbed.

  *

  It is sometimes said, and as frequently denied, that suffering can be ennobling. I don’t think it ennobled Juan. What it did, though, was induce in him a fuller acceptance of that responsibility for himself that he had so long resisted. He made decisions; and, as far as it was possible, he took charge of his own fate. He wanted to find an alternative doctor. Not that he had any reservations about Dr Wall, nor any principled objection to orthodox medicine. But the intervals between the three-weekly appointments with Dr Wall at the hospital were becoming too long and, inevitably in a public hospital, the consultations, though they were never hurried, always seemed too short.

  So we found an alternative doctor, who, we were told, conducted his practice as though it were a form of meditation. He had grown up in the East and so it seemed unsurprising when we arrived at his house to find that his garden tinkled with chimes like a Buddhist temple. From the entrance hall we caught a glimpse of his living room, an Aladdin’s cave of silks and batiks and oriental lace artfully draped and piled high on tables and flung nonchalantly over the chairs. Out of this cave emerged a woman with white skin and black eyes who guided us with a gesture of her bejewelled hand toward the surgery and into the presence of the alternative doctor.

  Where Dr Wall was jovial and chatty as far as the situation would decently allow, this doctor approached his craft and his patients with a kind of mystical reverence. In the dim light of the surgery he moved silently, he wrote his prescriptions in silence, and when he spoke, the sound of his voice seemed rather to enlarge the silence than to diminish it. On Juan the impact of this cloistral atmosphere was immediate and, ever sensitive to the ambience of his surroundings, he responded to the doctor with a soft passivity. For each suggestion of the doctor he was grateful. Yes, he agreed that it would help if he were to sit each day in a beautiful place, a garden for example, and open his mind to the influence of its serenity. Certainly he would practise the doctor’s suggestion and try by the exercise of his will to hold his bowels a few seconds longer. And of course he would take the vitamin supplements that the doctor recommended.

  Whatever the power of positive thinking, and however great the restorative powers of nature might be, Juan’s belief in them evaporated rapidly when we left the surgery. As far as he was concerned, the most beautiful place to sit was where his culi was not sore and his back would not ache. That place was the second-hand armchair that he had bought on a shopping expedition with Murray. It was massive and ugly, but you could pad it with pillows and you could snuggle into it in front of the TV and enjoy the beauties of nature—he liked watching Jacques Cousteau—in something approximating comfort.

  The pain in his back grew more acute, and in his neck as well. He determined to consult a chiropractor. He chose a name almost at random from the yellow pages. It was a name of which the owner was evidently extremely proud, for when we entered his premises we were confronted with the name again, framed in gold and displayed prominently in the reception room, where it seemed to confer a special prestige on the Californian institution which attested to the doctor’s manipulative skills. But more than the large ego and the trans-Pacific credentials, it was the snakes, or rather the wall charts with their snakish representations of human spines, that prompted in me a wary reserve. And what was one to make of the slogan that announced: ‘The spine is the human switchboard controlling health and vigour’?

  I was glad that Juan took charge. After briefly indicating the nature of his problems to the doctor, he raised the question of the fee and began to haggle about the price as though he were dealing with a New York street vendor or a cut-price electrical goods store. Chiropractors—or their patients—were not covered by Medicare, and so the 50 per cent discount that Juan negotiated meant big savings. And in retrospect the half-price deal that he secured seemed well justified: the pain in the neck went away but the back, said the doctor, would require a more extended treatment.

  After the initial visit I was pleased to be excused from further attendance, something that never happened with a real doctor. But this was after all more like visiting a gym than a surgery, and for Juan it felt more like home ground. Even so, it was humiliating, painful to bare his body, so pathetically thin, and to measure it against the husky muscularity of the snakeman. Of the reason for his frailty, he said nothing.

  Twice a week at 11.30 he went for this treatment. Then, with the old careful planning of his day that I remembered from his student days in New York, he would walk to a Chinese cafe in the city where you could buy a plate of barbecue pork and rice for a coup
le of dollars. From there he went on round the block to the State Library, taking the lift to the newspaper room on the second floor. He wanted to help me complete some research I was doing on colonial gardens. For two hours, or as long as his bowels permitted, he would work through the microfilm reels of nineteenth-century papers, indexing the articles in the gardening columns. He would have stayed longer, but the springs in the clapped-out seats pressed intolerably into his buttocks so he had to stand, stooped over the microfilm readers until his back could take no more. Those afternoons, and that pain, were a present to me. The entries in his spiral notebook finished abruptly with 9 September 1871: ‘The Function of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens.’ It was then that he lost control of his bowels and the mess ran down the inside of his legs and seeped through the seat of his cotton pants. He cleaned himself up in the lavatory where nobody could see his tears.

  That was in mid-January. The diarrhoea was becoming more virulent. Each meal demanded a new effort of will and brought a new disappointment when it ended in a pool of vomit. His weight was still falling. How long could this go on? If his muscles were dissolved and his skin shrunken and stretched on the bones, how much more weight could he lose?

  They were restless nights that January. Mostly he made it to the bathroom in time, but sometimes there was no warning. A change of sheets, a fresh diaper; everything seemed to proceed in slow motion in the yellow night light, and then we would settle again. I wanted to hold him, but he grumbled that my arm across his back was too heavy to bear. When I turned over to my side of the bed so that we lay back to back, he took it as a rebuff. Or worse. ‘Are you afraid to hold me?’ he asked.