by John Foster
The daily routine of hospital life provided a buffer against these tormenting uncertainties, and within the institution we discovered moments that we could make entirely our own. Juan always had last use of the bathroom, another precautionary measure that had more to do with the shigella than with AIDS, and although he had to wait till mid-afternoon for his bath, he converted this necessity into a luxury. By the time the room was free, the westering sun filled it with a tropical warmth that became infused with the scent of bath oils and the eucalyptus that he used in generous quantities. When I perched on the edge of the bath, shampooing his hair and soaping his back, there was nothing to disturb the simple pleasure of our intimacy.
One afternoon, when he sent me back to the ward for a box of tissues, I encountered the new senior resident in the corridor (the Prussian had been transferred). In our brief conversation the unstoppable questions welled up again. What might we expect? How long? And this time, shockingly, there was an answer.
‘I’m afraid we have to face the fact that he is dying,’ he said. Hesitantly, knowing he was taking a risk, he added: ‘I’d be surprised if he had more than six weeks.’ I collected the box of tissues and returned to the bathroom.
‘Were you talking to the doctor?’ Juan asked. Reluctantly, knowing that his hearing was very sharp, I said yes and resumed my position on the edge of the bath.
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing much. I mean, he thinks they might have to do a few more tests.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘Well,’ I said, stalling, wishing I had never asked for this information, ‘he really didn’t say anything.’
He persisted. ‘Did he say I’m going to die?’
He had asked this question so often, though mostly of himself. He wanted to know, and there would be no easy way to tell him. I said, ‘Yes.’
Without raising his eyes, he considered this for a while.
‘How long?’ he asked, in a strange flat voice.
Had he trusted me less, I would have lied, though my evasion would never have stood the test of his scrutiny; but I was committed now, by all that our relationship had become. ‘He said perhaps six weeks.’
With his head bowed over the water, he traced a circle with his index finger round a medallion of medicinal olive oil that was floating on the surface. In that moment there was just us; and the tap was dripping.
It was Juan who broke the silence. ‘I’m getting cold,’ he said, which was the signal to help him out and dry him.
The next morning he must have confronted Dr Wall with the opinion of the senior resident. He didn’t mention it to me, and nor did Dr Wall, yet the slight reserve in the doctor’s usually amiable manner seemed to indicate that he knew what had transpired, and disapproved. The senior resident should have kept his opinion to himself. As far as Dr Wall was concerned, we had certainly not reached the end of the road yet. With the shigella apparently under control, he wanted to tackle the gastritis or aesophagitis that made eating so nauseatingly difficult. The newly released drug, DHPG, that he wanted to use would have to be infused intravenously. In Juan’s condition, he explained, that could more comfortably be done by using a porto-cath through which they could access a vein near the heart for the twice-daily hour-long infusions.
Implanting the porto-cath meant surgery. At Dr Wall’s suggestion we went upstairs to talk with a woman who had lived with one of these devices for the past year. The sight of it was hardly reassuring. Juan stared at the plastic plug that seemed to have grown into her shrivelled chest. He had no questions, or at least none that he could articulate. If this thing was necessary, he would accept it.
They performed the operation, a relatively minor affair, though the surgeon must have hated dealing with infected blood. There was a mishap. One of Juan’s lungs collapsed, which raised the fear of pneumonia. They passed a tube into his chest to allow the air to be evacuated so that the lung could re-inflate. At the second attempt, they succeeded. Then the infusions began, with nurses gowned and masked, fearful of an infection that could spell disaster. When he bathed now, the porto-cath had to be protected with plastic and taped. The paraphernalia of sickness was proliferating around him.
Still there were worlds that remained intact and whole, places in his mind where the virus did not invade and disfigure and deform. One afternoon when he was hooked up to the drip, making a desultory attempt to concentrate on the pullover he was knitting, he announced a request.
‘Johnny, I want you to buy me some turrón.’
‘Some what?’
Out of his Cuban childhood the wish seemed so self-evident, so normal, that he flared up at my incomprehension and then, more patiently, attempted to explain.
‘It’s something you eat. There are two kinds: turrón alicante and turrón jijona. I want both. You can get it at the Casa Ibérica in Fitzroy. They will have it there.’
It turned out to be a kind of nougat made with honey and ground almonds. When I brought it back in triumph, he made no attempt to eat it, but, insisting that I try it, he broke off a piece and popped it into my mouth like a communion bread. The remainder he put in the drawer of the bedside table where it went sticky, and we threw it out when he died.
Then, even more perplexingly, he wanted caña. Sugar cane. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ If he wanted sugar cane then somehow, by one means or another, he would have it, though where or how it could be procured in Melbourne I had no idea.
Walking down Collins Street later that day, impressed with the strangeness of the mission he had entrusted to me, I happened to pass the Queensland Government Tourist Office. On a hunch I went in. The receptionist was a study in hairspray and mascara. She sat at a desk in front of a large poster advertising the joys of the Sunshine State, a place, I recalled, where they had banned an HIV-infected three-year-old from her kindergarten and hunted her out of the country. When the receptionist wanted to know if she could help me, sir, I decided to waste no time with niceties. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my lover is dying of AIDS and he needs some sugar cane to chew before he dies. Can you tell me where I can get some?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have that kind of information,’ she said. They wouldn’t, I thought, but I tried again, making an effort to be more conciliatory. Surely she had some directories or address books, I suggested. They must be up to their necks in sugar cane in that part of the country, I reflected, and if you believed the papers they were certainly knee-deep in cane toads from Cape York to Brisbane, and what did cane toads have for breakfast if it wasn’t sugar cane? But she was unyielding. Her business was holidays.
My business was finding sugar cane. At home I looked up the Yellow Pages and ran through the list of mills and refineries. They were no help at all, except, finally, for a suggestion that I might ask the people at the Queensland Department of Agriculture. They referred me in turn to a Sugar Research Institute in a place I had never heard of, and in this unknown dot on the cane-filled steppes—or whatever they are called in Queensland—I struck gold. They had twenty varieties under experimental cultivation, I was told, and did I have any specific requirements? A vision of the Berlin salami shop rose before my eyes, but resisting the temptation to panic, I replied, ‘I’ll leave that up to you. Just make it the sweetest and juiciest that you’ve got.’
‘No worries,’ said the man. ‘We’ll air-freight it down within the hour. Will five kilos be enough?’
At 7.30 next morning the parcel arrived with the cane neatly packed and wrapped in wax paper, and inside the box was a note that said, ‘With our compliments and best wishes.’ Queensland, it seemed, might even be worth a holiday.
Of all the changes and chances that accompanied his illness, none was more uncanny than the intervention of the African woman. With her husband and children she had been the previous occupant of our apartment. Juan had never met her, but when I saw her on the street outside the hospital one day, it occurred to me that she, who shared his tall lean blac
kness, might be a welcome visitor. ‘Ward 5 North,’ I told her. ‘Come in any time after four.’
She had been, I explained to Juan, a refugee whom the parish had helped to resettle and support. What I did not know, but subsequently learned, was more important. When she had first left her native village for the big city, her mother had blessed her and told her that whatever else befell her in the city she should remember that she was an Anglican. Later, when her husband was out of the country and the city was convulsed with violence and she feared for her life and the safety of her children, the Lord Jesus wonderfully befriended and protected her. He opened her eyes, and she saw that her former devotion to Him had been mere lip service. Really loving Him demanded something more.
As promised, she arrived at four. When she came in, Juan brightened perceptibly. She pulled a chair close to the bed and, after the briefest of pleasantries, she began.
‘Juan, I want to bring you a message from the Lord.’
Suddenly there flashed into my mind the memory of a Baptist preacher who had once worked over my own dying mother. Sensing what was coming, I tried to head her off. We didn’t need to talk about these things now, I said, but she would be pleased to know that Father Jim came every Sunday morning with the sacrament. Unfortunately, she didn’t think much of Father Jim’s religion. It was doubtful if he was saved, and anyway she wanted no truck with a veiled presence or wafers that were hardly even bread. What need of all of this when she knew the power of Jesus who could make her body leap and shake with faith and inflame her heart and speak His message on her ecstatic lips. If only Juan would talk to Jesus, really talk! It was hard work containing her, and I was grateful when another visitor came in and stopped the flow.
The Lord expects His friends to be resourceful, and in this respect the African woman was no slouch. When I arrived at my usual time the next afternoon, I found that she had been and gone already, and Juan was sobbing into the pillow. She had given him the full converting message.
‘What did she say?’
‘She told me about the devil, and hell.’
In my head I raged against the woman; I hated her; but my mouth stayed calm, and I heard it saying that I didn’t believe in the devil and there was no need to listen to her crazy preaching.
‘But my grandmother said the same,’ he said, and I felt the shadow of Clara de la Rosa passing over us. ‘If there is heaven, there is also hell. If there is God, there is also the devil.’
There was no profit in disputing with his grandmother. All I could do was sit on the bed and hold him.
‘I’m so confused,’ he sobbed. ‘I don’t know what to believe.’
With one arm around his waist to avoid the porto-cath and the drip, I just kept holding on. Later in the evening, when I was leaving, I pocketed the Gospel Ministry tape she had left and instructed the charge nurse never, on no account, not ever to let her back. And when I saw her husband, a genial, stately man of whom I was fond, I gave him the same message.
The sequel to this saga I heard from Father Jim. The next night he had a phone call from the husband to say that his wife was not well and the priest should come. Responding to this call, Jim hurried to the house where he found the woman lying on the bed in a trance, her eyes wide open, her hands moving rhythmically and her lips repeating a hypnotic chant. Having been prevented from returning to complete her work with Juan in the hospital, it seemed that here she was contending for his soul alone, and Father Jim would be her witness. She was locked in a mighty struggle with the powers of darkness, straining desperately toward a hard-won victory. But assuredly it was a victory.
The Lion of Judah has prevailed by the Blood of the Lamb,’ she exulted. ‘He has trampled down Satan under His feet.’ And so the battle chant continued until, in triumph, she announced the glorious news. ‘Juan has been saved!’
After a few minutes another woman mysteriously appeared. Kneeling by the bed as the African thrashed and then subsided into a quiet exhaustion, she set up her own refrain, protecting her sister in her weakened state from the wiles of the devil.
‘I bind you, Satan, by the Blood of the Lamb. You will not touch the servant of the Lord. Jesus, cover her with your wings. Wash her in your Blood. I bind you, Satan ...’ And so it continued.
In this unexpected way the process of Juan’s salvation was accomplished, and when Satan was securely bound as well, the woman left as silently as she had come and went home, I suppose to wash the dishes. When the African woman had recovered and risen from her couch, it was time for Father Jim to leave too. Calling in at the hospital on his way home, he found Juan still wide awake, watching the TV, and Collingwood going down to yet another inglorious defeat in the night series.
It was several days before Juan reverted to the visit of the African woman. ‘Why doesn’t she come?’ he wanted to know. ‘She promised to come.’ This time I did lie.
‘Perhaps she has forgotten,’ I said, and changed the subject.
While, unbeknown to Juan, the fate of his soul had been determined, the fate of his body was still under active consideration. Almost a year to the day since they had received his application, the Department of Immigration officials finally satisfied themselves that he met their requirements and sent a letter to that effect. Subject, of course, to a medical examination for which he should present himself, with the enclosed form, at the Department of Health. This was standard procedure, and in other circumstances we would have received the news with rapture. Now, on 17 March, 1987, it seemed like a cruel joke. Had he suffered from tuberculosis, epilepsy, convulsions or fits, from depression or high blood pressure? What was the state of his digestive tract, of his urogenital system? Was he pregnant? Were there other abnormalities: hernias, varicosities or psycho-neuroses that might affect his ability to earn a living? There are times when it is better not to open mail, times when it is better not to know. I put the letter back in its envelope and wondered what to do.
After pondering the matter for the best part of a week, I phoned the immigration people and told them with reference to application V83/293 78 that Mr Céspedes would not be able to keep their appointment because he was away from home for a while.
‘Oh,’ they said, ‘where is he?’
I was tempted to tell them that he had gone to Ayers Rock for a holiday, but that would not have been helpful when they expected us to be at home together jointly paying the gas bills. So, with a desperate collapse of imagination, I said, ‘Actually, he’s in hospital, and he’ll be in touch with you as soon as he comes home.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ they wanted to know, and I told them limply that I didn’t know. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘I’m not quite sure. It’s complicated. But we’ll be in touch.’
When Juan asked, with one of those unpredictable rushes of anxiety, if the Immigration Department had been in touch, I said, ‘No.’
I was disturbed by the decisions that the disease was forcing on me, uneasy with the interventions and subterfuges, the disclosures and withholdings that it seemed to make unavoidable. I was spending more and more of each day in the hospital, yet with each visit the established balance of our life together shifted, almost imperceptibly, but certainly. Each step of mine into the outside world of work and mail and telephones, of connected activity, reinforced my sense of his captivity. Each night when I walked home with the dirty dishes—we always used the willow-pattern plates he had wanted as a Christmas present—I carried with me the guilty freedom of a deserter. ‘Don’t go yet, Johnny,’ he would beg. The official visiting hours finished at eight, though after the first week we had never observed them. ‘Stay till they bring the coffee.’ ‘Stay till the end of the programme.’ ‘Wait till the night nurse comes on.’ Stay! Wait!
He had so much time in the hospital that he was beginning to lose track of it. ‘How long have I been here?’ he asked me one day. I couldn’t remember exactly. It was certainly a long time, because all of a sudden his toenails needed clipping. And from the window I noticed th
at the claret ash had begun to turn, and a dark wine colour was seeping into the green. Six weeks, I calculated.
Apart from the drip and the complications of the porto-cath, there was no reason why he should not revisit the world. Indeed, he was hungry for it. He blazed with pleasure when Sebastian, the priest’s son, invited him to a family dinner in honour of his eighteenth birthday. What kind of restaurant would he prefer? He chose Mexican. ‘Do you remember?’ he asked me. I did: the first time he had taken me to dinner in New York, at a Mexican taco bar where he knew the waiters and wanted to impress them with his friend from Australia. They had been, I recalled, obligingly complimentary.
By the usual standards of the restaurant-going public our evening as the guests of Carlos Murphy was undistinguished. Getting out of the car, Juan fiercely resisted my attempt to support him and stumbled over the bluestone cobbles in the gutter. We packed his chair with cushions and stared down the guests whose eyes kept darting at his gauntness. The tacos were soggy. The chilli had no bite. And he brought his dinner up anyway and we covered the mess on the plate with a paper napkin. We had coffee with Ann and Father Jim in their sitting room, which was more comfortable, and as we were leaving Juan expressed his gratitude.
