‘Yes, Docta.’ There was a chorus across the ward.
Sister Thérèse knew that when Vincent lectured he was not ordering her or his patients. He was speaking out against the imposed economies, the lack of rations. He was talking out for the Colonial Office in Porta España to hear. She had overheard the loud arguments in Mother Superior’s office.
She tried her best. She was his ally. ‘Yes, Doctor.’ She winked at Ti-Jean and they moved on. She liked this conspiracy of three.
‘You have a story to tell me.’ Vincent spoke directly to Sister Thérèse as he leant over to take a clean bandage from her hands.
‘Doctor?’
‘Your father?’
Sister Thérèse’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Papa.’ Her voice betrayed a guilt, as if she had been caught not keeping vigil over his memory. ‘Not now. Not here.’
‘Later, then. Yes?’ He smiled, not teasing this time, respectful.
She continued to hand him clean bandages. Then she said, ‘He’s a doctor too.’
‘Ah. Why will they kill him? And who are they?’ Vincent asked directly.
‘I know it sounds wild. Well, the stories you hear. He’s Jewish.’
‘Your surname, yes, Weil? What about your mother?’
‘She died five years ago.’
‘I’m sorry. A Jewish Catholic?’
‘Me, yes. My mother was Hélène du Bois. They fell in love at the Sorbonne. She was brilliant.’
‘And you are a brilliant nurse, right across from the other side of the world.’
‘Yes. I mean…’
Vincent smiled. ‘We’ll talk later.’
Ti-Jean amused the patients with his jokes and tricks, dropping his crutches and then crashing to the ground after them, or keeping his balance and proclaiming a miracle. ‘See what Docta do!’
‘No, Ti-Jean, you can perform your own miracle. So can you all.’ Vincent looked back at the ward as he left. ‘Next ward.’ Sister Thérèse and Ti-Jean followed.
‘You’re right to be worried about what is going on in Germany. But France?’ Vincent continued as they walked along.
‘My father always maintained that the bigotry was European. He says it’s a matter of time.’
‘So, you lost your mother recently. I was the same age when my father died.’
‘Oh.’
‘This will take up all our time and all our thought.’ Vincent looked down the ward.
Nothing he had experienced before had prepared Vincent for this work. They were exhausted by the time they had finished with the mens’ ward. ‘Run along to school now, Ti-Jean, and bring Theo back with you.’ He and Sister Thérèse crossed the yard to the pharmacy.
‘I wonder what I’m doing here sometimes.’ These were the moments when Vincent was tempted by the thought that he should have chosen a private practice in Porta España.
‘It’s a vocation.’
‘You have the vocation. This is my job.’
‘I don’t think you mean that, from what I can see. You talk as if it’s a vocation also. It’s what my father believes.’
‘Yes, but you know what I mean. How did your father feel about you joining up, coming out here?’
‘He wants me to be a good nurse.’
‘Well, you are that.’ Sister Thérèse bowed her head. ‘No, I mean it. But a nun?’
‘It happened when my mother died. I was drawn to the sisters.’
‘I see.’ He had cousins who had entered the priesthood and the religious life. He remembered the fathers at college trying to encourage young fellas to join up. He knew how it happened.
‘I’ll scrub up now.’ He watched her at the sink. She was young to be experiencing all the change she had undergone. She was right. It was a vocation.
He knew he had been sent to El Caracol because he was young, he had concluded after his interview, or, at least, younger, twenty-eight, straight back from university, needing a job. He would have the latest experience, the knowledge, they thought. He had enthusiasm. But Vincent felt that he was being tested. If he got through this appointment with success, any job might be open to him in the colonial structure of appointments. But, now, just inside a year, he had fallen for the challenge.
He had not started his study straight out of school. He had had a bout on the Versailles cocoa estate straight after the accustomed education at the college of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in town, Porta España, built in the nineteenth century by the Catholic priests for the sons of the cocoa planters. But while he had wanted to help and please his mother after his father’s death, he knew that life on a cocoa estate was not for him. The job had then fallen to Bernard, his younger brother.
Vincent and Sister Thérèse watched the life of the yard from the verandah of the pharmacy. Life on El Caracol had congregated under the almond tree outside the main entrance of the outpatients’ ward which was for those who came from the huts on the hills. ‘I’m not Jesus of Nazareth,’ Vincent laughed, pulling Sister Thérèse into conversation again. She had been instructed to use her spare moments between tasks for meditation, or as an opportunity to recite a decade of the rosary on her beads. ‘I cannot say, take up your bed and walk. Drop your crutches and run. I cannot send them into the yards shouting that they’ve been healed.’ Sister Thérèse was pulled between Vincent’s musings and her prayers. ‘They look in all their disarray and disfigurement like a congregation of sick on the shores of Galilee, wanting to be healed by the Messiah.’
Sister Thérèse smiled, trying to be polite to her doctor, but also trying to keep her religious observances.
Krishna Singh was holding forth. Jonah was adding his bit under the almond tree. He watched the two men, the East Indian and the Negro. They represented the enforced migrations which had peopled this place. They represented the great mingling of peoples. Vincent wanted to be part of that. The older people sat listening. ‘Bread, Justice, Rights, Wages,’ punched the air. Then there was a mumble of agreement.
‘My father is a Communist. If he was younger he would have fought in Spain.’ Vincent realised Sister Thérèse was taking in everything, despite the evidence of the rosary beads passing through her fingers. She was a strange mixture, he thought, more than met the eye. He could see that she had been well trained. Visions and science were mixed inside of her reason and faith.
‘They are looking for a Messiah, for a Moses. They are looking for someone to take them out of the land of Egypt into the Promised Land.’
This would not be his own language now, but maybe the end was the same. There were those with crutches, but mostly they were without, walking hip-hop on the stumps of legs, and sometimes, on all fours, with the stumps of hands. Some of the more adventurous propelled themselves along on pieces of board and galvanise, tobogganing themselves over the grit and gravel of the paths from the huts. A dangerous journey. More adventurous boys made box carts, and their journey to the clinic or school was like play. While the descent could be exciting for the young, the ascent back for the elderly was very hard work.
‘There is a spirit in these people,’ Sister Thérèse added.
‘See these people, Doc, they not go take anything, you know. Not any more.’ Jonah came and stood beneath the verandah. ‘Morning, Sister. Things go have to change. Come and talk to them.’
‘I’ve just done my rounds of the wards, Jonah. That’s my pulpit. That’s where I give my sermons on hygiene. Where I talk about nourishment.’
‘Each of we, go do we own thing, Doc.’
Vincent relented and left Sister Thérèse to her meditation, and walked over to the almond tree with Jonah. He looked at his patients, or at the people, as Krishna Singh addressed them.
‘People of El Caracol.’ Those with tuberculoid leprosy were the least disfigured. They carried noticeable blemishes on their skin, both on their hands and faces where the skin had died. But there was no major external disfigurement. But there were those poor wretches who were covered with nodules, whose features had caved
in to give them that proverbial lion-face look, with their flattened noses, the absence of eyebrows, foreheads and cheekbones which had thickened. This was Lepromatus Leprosy.
Vincent had discovered, from his examinations and observation, that these patients had little control of their facial muscles, and that it was often difficult to tell the difference between a smile and a grimace. Joy and sadness presented themselves with ambiguity.
Vincent stood with Jonah and listened to Krishna Singh putting the case for better conditions. ‘He should’ve been a lawyer.’ Jonah leant over Vincent. ‘His father dead. They ent have enough money save to send him to London. He have to support his mother and sisters.’
During applause, Jonah carried on with the story of Singh. ‘He make Exhibition Class, try for School Certificate, get a training as apprentice pharmacist. The best job they give him is here.’ Vincent looked at Singh anew. ‘Law was his first ambition. But now is people. We people,’ Jonah concluded.
Vincent looked back at Sister Thérèse. She was still on the verandah, looking on, distracted from her meditations, caught by Krishna Singh’s speeches. He noticed that Theo was standing by her side.
‘Jonah, make certain Singh keeps this thing under control. I don’t want my patients risking their health for his revolution.’ The crowd under the almond tree had doubled in numbers since yesterday. Word was spreading.
‘Trust them.’ Jonah pointed at the crowd.
Vincent paused on the verandah. Sister Thérèse looked up and smiled. He stood at the balustrade and gazed out to sea. Theo and himself watched Ti-Jean swing his way on his crutches into the yard to hear the old fellas under the almond tree. ‘I play football, you know.’ Vincent was astonished at Theo’s spontaneous remark.
‘Good.’
Theo jumped down from the verandah and ran over to join Ti-Jean. Then he saw the girl Christiana join them.
‘They’re doing well.’ Sister Thérèse was looking over to where Ti-Jean and Theo stood at the edge of the crowd.
‘Yes, Ti-Jean’s learnt about his illness. He’s active in his recovery. We can see the signs in the body. It’s different with the mind.’
‘The mind?’
It was out before he had time to think whether it was the right thing or not. ‘Theo. Something is not right.’ Vincent told Sister Thérèse about the nocturnal tales.
‘Frightening. His mother and father?’
‘Yes. Well, there’s a mother. The father? It seems less clear who he might be.’ Vincent did not reveal his suspicions. It seemed complicated at the moment to go into those details, to divulge a history when he was not sure of her, how intimate he could be with her. He should not be talking like this to a nun anyway.
‘You’re worried about the state of his mind?’
‘Well, he does seem a troubled boy. Troubled by his past. He’s clearly not dumb. He speaks eloquently.’
‘Bring him to school again. Good for him to be with the other children.’
‘I’ll see what he’s thought of today.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on him. And Ti-Jean. Ti-Jean will be his friend.’
‘Well let’s not rush. Otherwise Ti-Jean might well wonder why he can’t live in my house as well. We need to get those stitches out. I can see you are not putting the usual pressure on your ankle.’
Having embarked on the story of Theo, Vincent did not then want to continue with the intimate details.
While Vincent prepared to take out the stitches from the wound above Sister Thérèse’s ankle, Sister Luke hovered. He was getting used to working with nuns.
At a moment when the infirmarian was out of the clinic disposing of the old dressings, Vincent said, ‘Let the boy’s stories be our secret for the moment.’
‘Yes,’ she looked at him, realising that he was expecting her to hold some knowledge confidential between them, knowledge which she was being invited to keep from her sisters, and in particular from Mother Superior. She had entrusted him with a confidence of her own about her father, her fear for her father. Maybe it was because of that that he felt that he could exchange a confidence with her. Without immediately answering about the boy, she returned to her father.
‘I’ve got a letter from my father, Papa. It came yesterday. He tells of the mounting tensions on the streets in Germany. Then I saw the headlines in the local papers in Mother Superior’s office. It happened the night the German sailor sang a love song under my window.’ She hummed the tune. ‘Die Liebe die Liebe ist’s allein.’
‘Yes, there were terrible attacks on Jewish establishments.’ He watched her eyes, he heard her tune.
At that moment, Sister Luke re-entered the room. Vincent and Sister Thérèse looked at each other, sealing their secrecies. She brought her skirt down over her ankles and stood up.
‘I’m better now. Thank you, Doctor.’
‘Now, you take care.’ She still limped a little. He watched her leave the room with her anticipation of pain.
When Theo joined Vincent to return to the doctor’s house they met Mr Lalbeharry.
‘Is your son, Doctor?’ Theo could not stop staring, so that Vincent hoped that Mr Lalbeharry was not hurt and embarrassed.
‘No, Lal, this is a young friend of mine staying with me for a while. Have you not seen him about the yard? Theo, meet Mr Lalbeharry.’ Vincent held Theo’s head, his fingers in his sandy hair. Mr Lalbeharry put out his claw hand for Theo to shake.
‘Hello, young fella.’
Theo did not respond. He kept his hand behind his back. He could not take his eyes of the face of Mr Lalbeharry who had the classic lion-face look, with the collapsed nose bridge. He had the shortened fingers giving him the claw hands. There were blemishes and patches on his skin. His speech was impaired, because of his nasal disfigurement. Theo continued to stare.
‘The little fellow not accustomed to us yet?’ This was typical of Mr Lalbeharry’s openness. He was one of the most confident of the older patients, despite his considerable disfigurements. He patted Theo on the shoulder. Theo froze. ‘We don’t bite,’ he said, and smiled.
‘He’s a shy boy, Lal.’ Vincent, using his affectionate name for Mr Lalbeharry, came to Theo’s defence.
Theo tugged at Vincent’s hand. ‘What’s it, Theo?’
Then the boy slumped to the ground. Vincent knelt next to him.
‘I feeling bad,’ Theo whispered. Then he fainted.
Hiding
The house was again rocked by the boy’s calypso in the night. Theo’s fainting, the fear generated by seeing Mr Lalbeharry, had precipitated a night of sleep walking. Vincent was kept up, wandering about the house, having to comfort the boy as he sobbed his heart out. There were no words, only the music of tears. In the morning, Theo refused to go to the school. He had had a fright. This was a child with extraordinary sorrow.
Vincent had to arrange again for Beatrice to spend the day at the house.
‘I go cook him something nice, Docta. Come boy, stay with me,’ Beatrice comforted him.
Vincent waved to them on the jetty from the pirogue.
Jonah had the boat at full throttle.
When Vincent and Sister Thérèse met again, they were taken up in their work. There was no time for teasing this morning, as Vincent donned his white coat. There was no time for the nun’s tale, for their shared secrets. They were busy administering the dosage of Chaulmoogra Oil, the interminable injections under the skin, to the long queue of patients who had come down from the huts in the hills. Some had come from Indian Valley beneath the lighthouse on Cabresse Point, others came from the terraces built into the hills above the hospital.
There were some tapia huts, some of the original wattle huts of the nineteenth century, which were even more remote, ruins of the original leprosarium. No one came from there. Vincent had never ventured there on his rounds. He trusted the older nurses, who said, ‘No one live there now, Doctor.’
‘What good does this do?’ Vincent dumped a broken syringe into the rubbish bin
. He washed his hands at the sink in the clinic, then sat at his desk, taking a rest from this painful routine, lighting up a cigarette, taking a long draw and exhaling as he leant back in his chair. ‘What possible good?’
‘Doctor, you must not let them doubt their recovery.’ Sister Thérèse was preparing the new batch of injections. ‘They think it does them good, particularly the older ones,’ she argued.
‘But at what a price!’ Vincent was thinking of the sores the injections themselves could create. ‘Escalier’s cure! Between the Chaulmoogra and the putrid stench, I don’t know which is worse.’ In the old Frenchman’s time some of the patients had had more than a hundred injections a week.
Indeed, it was the common treatment of the time. In the absence of the new Sulfa drugs they had heard about, it was all they had.
‘You see, this is where Singh is right,’ Vincent argued. ‘We should be trying those new drugs. Our patients have a right to them. Anyway, they don’t prevent the infectious sores, the loss of joints and limbs, their inability to feel pain.’
‘Doctor,’ she tried to calm him.
‘They think they can just throw people off Sancta Trinidad into this backwater, give them the free nursing of nuns, one misled doctor with fantastic ideals, and that’s their problem solved.’
‘You’re not misled. Just frustrated. Your ideals aren’t fantastic. They’re the right ideals.’ She left the room, tossing her veil from her face as she walked into the sea breeze blowing onto the verandah. The routine got to her as well.
Vincent watched her through the mosquito screen as she went along the line, preparing the patients for their injections, accompanied by Sister Rita. There was more independence in her today. He noticed that her body still anticipated the pain she might feel if she put full pressure on her sore ankle. She expected the pain to send its signal, but she was getting better. Her wound had healed. Her wound had not rotted. She was well. She had the natural gift of pain. How could he get his patients to feel pain, or at least to compensate for the fact that they did not? Chaulmoogra Oil was not the way.
Night Calypso Page 6