At the end of the track, they could see a hut set apart from the rest. As they walked towards it, a bent figure covered in rags crossed from the bush to the hut. Vincent was immediately reminded of such a figure shuffling away from behind the stores, near the jetty one afternoon, when he was leaving Saint Damian’s. He had meant to inquire the next day, but it had slipped his memory. There were, periodically, reports of food stuffs missing from the stores, depleting the already meagre rations.
Vincent and Sister Thérèse approached the hut into which the figure had disappeared, then recoiled from the retching smell which they recognised from their work on the wards with the most deteriorating patients. Dead flesh!
They dreaded the worst. The door of the hut was jammed. They had to push hard, at the same time calling out, if anyone was there.
In the gloom of the hut, the smell was so intense, that Sister Thérèse turned away. She had to go outside and bend down at the side of the track and vomit.
Vincent noticed several figures who had retreated far into the corners of the hut, covering themselves, hiding in the gloom, not wanting to show themselves. He steeled himself, holding back his feelings, his instinct to be sick.
‘There’s no need to be afraid. I want to help you.’ He repeated this phrase. ‘Help you, help you.’
Sister Thérèse, now recovered, echoed her doctor antiphonally.
There was heavy breathing, but no words came from the gloom.
The figures began to stir. They moved towards Vincent together. When they were on their knees they extended what was left of their arms. Some, who still had fingers, clasped them in a prayer. Claw hands were raised in the gloom.
‘This is the bad leprosy,’ Sister Thérèse whispered as Vincent knelt to be at the same level as the patients in front of him. The sight which met his eyes at such close range was horrifying because of the disintegrating faces. He had to fight against his revulsion. This was Lepromatus Leprosy at its worst, unattended kind.
These people had retreated here out of shame. It was a shame which had started in some village when they were first detected with the disease. They had had to come on the enforced journey to El Caracol. It was a paradox. Some had wanted to come because of the pain of being shunned. They welcomed their exile. Others wanted to hide.
‘This has to change,’ Vincent whispered to Sister Thérèse, trying to observe all the worse signs of the deteriorating condition before him. Then he spoke to the patients in front of him again. He had now worked out that there were at least six of them. He was not sure, as yet, who were men and who were women. ‘We want to help you. We will help you. You mustn’t stay here.’
They unlatched the wooden shutters of the hut and secured the door open. Light shone in like a searchlight, and frightened the huddled mass of six back into the corner, with their backs turned, their faces against the walls.
The wind moved dry leaves and newspaper on the floor. ‘You must allow air into the room. You must wash yourselves at the stand pipe. Later, we’ll bring up new clothes, as well as dressings for your wounds.’ Vincent could see that one of the patients was only a torso in a bundle of rags. This person was being carried by two others. He thought it was a man, but could not really tell. He hated to think how this situation had arisen. How had this been allowed to continue?
Dr Escalier had grown old and not been able to cope. That was clear. But also Vincent continually found, in the older religious, a resignation which depended on prayer, not on science, as he was fond of repeating. He looked at the young sister at his side and hoped that she was the beginning of new blood among the nursing nuns. He hated to think of the worse stories of the marooned groups in the hills. He had his work cut out for him, as Jonah was so keen to remind him.
In the late afternoon, the rooms were smoked and disinfected. The patients had to be deloused at the stand pipe outside. Vincent and Sister Thérèse came back with fresh bandages. They made a record of those for whom a treatment by Chaulmoogra Oil injections would be suitable. They knew that they were working in a potentially infectious area, because of the long-term neglect. Vincent watched the nun’s young hands, her young face. His concern was more for her than for himself. They both registered the other’s battle with revulsion to the sores and the disfigurements. The next day they would begin a gradual rehabilitation of the patients onto the different wards.
Coming down the stairs, to the clinic, Vincent turned towards where the light poured through an open window onto the counter. Sister Thérèse was standing with her back to him, preparing medicines, so that all he saw of her was the white cotton veil which fell wide over her shoulders, halfway down her back. It was as if she was behind a screen. She turned, as the staircase creaked. He suddenly saw her differently.
He concentrated on her face, her dark eyes peering out of the tight under-veil, taut beneath her chin and stretched over her forehead. It was damp with perspiration. The full veil fell from the crown of her head over her shoulders forming a tight cocoon. Her face peered out of a hole, as if cut in a sheet. Her skirts fell to below her ankles, just above her sandals and stockinged feet. Her arms were covered in full sleeves to her wrists. A scapular fell loose from her shoulders, over her flat chest and down her back. She was girdled with a leather belt and a black string of rosary beads, the Fifteen Mysteries, hung at her side. The sleeves were folded back from her wrists, to prepare the drugs on the counter. But, beneath these full sleeves, and cuffs, were other tighter sleeves and cuffs, buttoned down at her wrist. Her face and her hands were her only exposed skin. Her eyes were black. They shone.
All of her presence came up into those two eyes, peering out of that face. Her skin was creamy, but cinnamon with the sun. Her cheeks were raddled, like rouge. She smiled. Her skin was pulled back by the tight veil. There was nothing to distract from her face, her eyes, except her hands which she wiped on a blue apron. She put her arms away, folding down her sleeves, hiding her hands. She lowered her head as Vincent stood at the bottom of the stairs staring at her. He noticed the slightest wisps of jet black hair escaping from beneath her taut veil near her temples.
He had just recently attended to her as her doctor, lifting her skirts above her ankle. But now, suddenly, he was looking at her differently. Had it been the shared intensity of their earlier experience, finding those abandoned patients?
The afternoon sunlight was a halo behind her. ‘Sister?’ he exclaimed. She was both holy-looking and ravishing.
‘Doctor?’
She reached out and touched his hand. She had not done that before. He saw that her eyes were full of tears. Something was the matter. They had not completed their chat about her father and her worries. He had not listened to the news that day. The BBC’s World Service was their life line. She was seeking reassurances. ‘I’m sorry, no news, not today, Sister.’
She began again. ‘So far away. Yet, so close.’ She pressed her hands on her heart.
‘We must wait for letters.’
‘I think news will become even more difficult now than ever to get.’
‘We’ll see. My brother, Bernard, he’s over there. Somewhere in England. My mother has not heard much. We don’t know what will happen.’
‘Yes, I must not think just of myself.’
‘We’ve got our work. We’re lucky,’ he said reflectively.
‘Yes.’
She held onto his left hand. He put his right one over hers. They stood alone in the clinic.
The last couple of weeks had been too intense. He put it down to that.
They both seemed shocked at the same time, as they looked around them, standing alone. ‘Here we are,’ Vincent said nervously. The realisation of what was afoot in the world was creeping closer, staggering them, as they stood together and looked out of the window and saw the fragile huts, the rusting galvanise roofs of the hospital and the stores down by the jetty. It was a strange encampment.
There was the congregation of patients under the almond tree.
; A group of girls were skipping on the verandah. The two holding the rope had one leg each. One balanced herself on the bannister of the verandah, the other held onto the door. The girl who was skipping had no arms below her elbows. Her face was pure joy. She screamed with laughter.
‘There’s the new girl, Christiana. How pretty she is. How long will it last? You say she’s not got the disease.’ Sister Thérèse folded her arms away into her sleeves.
Vincent watched the children playing. ‘We don’t know.’
‘I must return to Theo.’ Vincent interrupted their meditation. ‘Beatrice will want to be leaving.’
‘Theo, Lover of God. God has come to live with you, Doctor.’
‘Just a boy with a lot of needs.’
Vincent headed for the jetty. He turned. Sister Thérèse was still standing at the door of the clinic. He waved. She waved back.
As the pirogue rounded the point into the next bay, Vincent did not feel his usual elation on arriving home. He had grown fond of the place very quickly. After a day at the hospital, he was more than delighted for the peace of the empty house, the jetty, fishing on his own. The pink and white house wavered and fractured, reflected in the yellow and lilac water. But because Vincent anticipated his meeting with Theo, the house appeared sinister, holding the boy’s presence. There was no sign of him or Beatrice.
As they drew close to the jetty, a figure looked out of the upstairs window, quickly vanishing, then reappearing on the verandah downstairs. Vincent waved. But Theo stood and stared without response, then disappeared.
‘Okay man, see you tomorrow.’
‘Watch yourself, Doc. You sure you don’t want me to stay?’ Jonah had picked up Vincent’s anxiety about the boy.
‘No, Jonah. Is fine.’
The two men waved goodbye. Vincent pushed the pirogue away from the jetty.
Theo was not on the verandah, or in the drawing room. The kitchen was cleared from the night before. The wares, pots and pans washed. There was no Beatrice either. ‘Beatrice.’ There was silence. The house was dead quiet.
The stairs creaked as they always did when he climbed to the bedrooms. Theo’s bedroom was empty. Vincent went into his own room and found that the bed had been made. The dressing table had been tidied. The floors had been swept. ‘Theo!’ he called again. ‘Theo!’ There was no reply.
As Vincent descended the stairs, he heard a creak, which was not one of the usual creaks, the music of the house, the tune it played as he walked about on the pitch pine floors, its expansions in the heat of the day and the contractions in the cool of evening.
As he stood listening, the sea breeze banged the bathroom window. It unhooked the latch on the kitchen door and entered. It got wild. He had to dash about closing the windows which faced the sea. The waves rose and rushed the small beach at the side of the jetty, sucked back out by the tide.
A percussion of pots and pans falling off the shelves in the kitchen alarmed him. Loose sheets of galvanise banged on the roof. The wind whistled through cracks in doors and windows.
Vincent called, ‘Theo,’ and listened again to the particular creak near him. It came from under the stairs. When he opened the door, it was dark and smelt of mildew. Vincent could not see anything unusual, at first. But when he bent down, to look into the furthest recesses under the slope of the stairs, he discovered the crouching boy in the gloom. He was bare backed and wore only his short khaki pants. He crouched with his back to Vincent, his head between his legs.
‘Theo. Come, boy. You don’t want to be sitting in here, alone.’ The boy did not move. Vincent touched his bare back and read the same story he had read earlier. ‘Come Theo, I can’t leave you here. Let’s go out and catch some nice sea breeze. What about fishing? We could go on the jetty and fish.’
Theo did not speak, but he allowed the doctor to coax him out of his hiding place into the glare of the verandah, into the astonishment of the setting sun. The wind had died down.
Why had the boy been hiding, when only a moment before he had seen him on the verandah? He wanted the doctor to come and find him, a small child’s hide and seek.
That evening Vincent and Theo fished together from the end of the jetty, but the fish were not biting. They only got two crapeau fish. They threw them back into the water. But, with a last try, Theo landed a small red fish. As he unhooked his catch, Vincent thought he saw a smile, not quite, but a flicker in the glow of the kerosene lamp.
Vincent made hot cocoa for them both. They went to bed early after fried fish and bake. Sleep seemed the best way out of their wordless communications. The windows at the front of the house facing the bay let in the moonlight.
Vincent woke to the voices as insistent as the sea.
MY EYES get big big. My ears nearly drop off with Mama talk, hot from big house. I on top the bed jumping up and down. Mama brisk brisk, taking off she dress, standing in front the window in she white silky petticoat, Mistress give she. She drop it on the floor. It look like a pool of milk for Curly, the cat, to lap up.
Mama caress she self in panty and brassiere. Mama gaze out the window. Breeze rustle the sapodilla tree. It go quiet. Fowl peck the soft dirt under the window. Now and then, cluck cluck.
Stop that jumping. All the coconut fibre busting out, already. Who go bring mattress for Mama? Who go make feather pillow? Look at the bed. Straighten up the counterpane.
Mama gaze. I look up at she. She gaze out the window. Gaze at the blue hills. The sweet breeze move the curtains.
Mama talking talking all the time, talking, talking, talking.
No one go stop Mister, walking in Esperance. Or, stop Mistress and the children take a train into town from Pond Road Station, to stand on the station and wait for a train in the afternoon.
That is what Mama say. Mama say it like, she is Mister. Like she is Mistress self.
It was like many voices all at once. Vincent was frightened by the strange lucidity.
AND THEN, Emelda say, No one going come with hoe and spade and big stick to march up into Mister yard. No one going come with iron and rock stone to pelt this house. She raise she self up. Big house on the hill. This is a house that hide secret in turret room. Is a house that have cellar for the best wines bring from Burgundy and Beaujolais. I see the label them. Special room with special aquarium for crab, for the special crab and callaoo soup that every Monsieur Marineaux like to suck.
Trouble go come, Emelda say, with a look in she face which say that she know more than Mister. She feel more than Mister. Emelda know more than Mister. All know, all who in the yard, all who meet under Chen shop, that these people who Mister call niggers and coolies on the march from Fyzabad to San Fernando, go reach town with their noise and demand. They go out do Mr A. A. Cipriani in town which still echo with the 1919 calypso.
Gal, who you voting for?
We don’t want Major Rust to make bassa bassa here.
Cipriani
We don’t want no Englishman, we want Trinidadian
Cipriani.
One good apple in a rotten barrel. Captain A. A.! Mister say he gone England and come back with Labourite ideology. Now he walk barefoot with coolie and nigger. He own people self watch him, and know that this kind of thing dangerous. Even if they feel is from inside their own house he come out. They have him down as a madman.
Like they have Butler down like a madman too.
But they bound to think he mad. Buzz!
Mama boy read the news, cut out the picture and writing from The Gazette.
Mama, you see Butler! They take out he picture in San Fernando bandstand, Harris Promenade. She boy read like an Exhibition Class boy, who never go in San Fernando, or move from Pepper Hill self, but plenty time get a promise to go town to ride tram and trolley bus.
Child what nonsense you reading, and messing up the house with all this cut up newspaper? Is that they does teach you in Exhibition Class?
All the time Mama talk, she look over her shoulder and pretend to read the news. Mama
can’t read.
‘Theo. Stop now.’ The boy was in a sweat, as if wakened from a fevered sleep, thrashing around, gesticulating, inhabiting now this voice, now that, himself a character in his own story. Vincent understood Father Dominic using exorcism. But of course it had not worked. How could it?
‘Come, Theo, let’s get you to bed.’
The fluency of this night-time tale, this calypso, as the boy had called it in the nights before, was as if it were written down. Indeed, it did go here and there and then come back to the main road, as Father Dominic had said it would.
What was the drama between Mister and the boy’s Mama? How had he imbibed the Labour riots of the last few years so clearly? Butler and Cipriani, political figures entered as principal players of his drama. Vincent marvelled at this orchestration of voices, this recall, this living history.
But the engine which drove this story was fuelled by something else. Why was he so full of it? Why was he mute in the day, talkative at night? For Theo, to come again tonight, and perch at the end of his bed, startled Vincent.
Early the next morning, the fishermen came close into the bay. Vincent heard them under his window, with bottle and spoon, and hoarse rum-stricken voices, reach their do re me with:
‘What does the Austrian corporal expect to do
His plan for invasion must eventually
End in the ruin and destruction of Germany.’
Versailles
‘You feel time could stay so sweet, Doc?’ Jonah asked, beaming. The sweet season of Christmas, with its soft breezes, brought 1938 to an end. Jonah strummed his cuatro, playing parang. ‘Maria Maria Maria, Maria Magdalena.’
Singh and Vincent joined in with their own more raucous song. ‘Drink a rum and a puncha creama, drink a rum, on a Christmas morning,’ beating bottle and spoon, trying to sink their differences with the spirit of the season and the rum.
Night Calypso Page 8