He peered at the numerous representations of the Virgin. And, even in the eerie thickening half-light of the blackened basilica, he began to notice something peculiar about the icons. Each painting of the Madonna was subtly different from every other one. The Virgin’s face was a disturbing, pale nuanced green, but her expression, by no means uniform, became subtly attractive to James Miranda Barry. The woman gazed outwards, unblinking, unafraid. Her identity was self-contained, remote. She received all comers with indifference. Barry had seen that peculiar, insouciant detachment on the faces of prostitutes dying of consumption. He stared at face after face after face. The Madonna stared back, her pure indifference now bordering on transcendent grace. James Barry stood transfixed before the incorruptible, eternal body of the woman whose mystery saturated the dark.
‘I say, Barry, come on.’ James was at his elbow. ‘Let’s view the miracle. This chap running the show wants to let in the mob.’
Barry nodded, taking the other man’s arm, and they stepped into a tiny chapel, a mere indentation in the wall, which contained the miraculous icon.
Here was yet another green-faced Madonna. But she was not like the other icons in the squat medieval church. She was unsmiling, but bolder in her glance than the more secretive Virgins. The child, a dwarf, painted out of scale, sat ignored in her lap. She had a round chin with a festive dimple and huge dark eyes. There was something about the set of her shoulders inside the jewelled robes that was determined and fierce. Barry peered up at her. The icon was unusual. This was not the hieratic, remote face of the saint, but a woman larger than life, larger than any man who looked at her. As he watched, the painted wood glistened strangely, and then, uncanny yet undeniable, two huge tears rolled down her inflexible face. A woman who cared so little for the daily griefs of this world would never weep, never pray for us sinners, neither now, nor at the hour of our death. She reminded him of another woman whose gaze was as deliberate and unashamed. She reminded him of Alice Jones.
Barry’s eyes were barely level with the Virgin’s calmly folded hands. On the shelf beneath the icon a communion plate overflowed with coins. Barry touched the money, which was surely the point of the exercise, and the hovering priest lunged forwards. James gazed up at the damp face, impressed. The priest began clucking gently. He indicated that the soldiers should kiss the icon. His long grey beard was yellowed round his lips and his black robes white with dust. Barry surveyed him from head to toe. His feet were bare and purple with ingrained dirt. His body smelt stale, unwashed. Barry wrinkled his nose in disgust.
‘Give these creatures some money, James. I wish to leave.’
Barry’s imperious manner amused rather than offended the younger man. James grappled in his pockets for some loose coins while Barry strode out of the basilica. The side door was very low and narrow, but he did not stoop and he cast not another glance at the weeping icon.
When James caught up with him, Barry was standing smoking in the cloisters. He looked tired and two fluid spots of red illuminated his pale face. James knew the signs. Barry was very angry.
‘Good show, eh?’
‘That weeping piece of painted board is quite clearly a theatrical fabrication on the part of these foul-smelling monks to delude and rob the innocent and credulous,’ Barry snapped. ‘Come on James, we’re not staying here.’
Barry delivered his opinion as if he were giving an order, but what he did not say, even to himself, was that the icon had disturbed him because her face had reminded him of a woman he used to know.
* * *
In April of the following year, when the acacias were already blooming with honey blossom, and James Barry was walking among his lemon trees in the sun, wondering at the precocious heat of the season, he noticed a figure in black toiling up the rocky track towards his house. There were two ways up to Barry’s residence, either the longer winding dust road which circled easily up the hill, where each visitor paused to look up at the white mountains and then down to the sea far below, or the far steeper eroded rock path, which became an informal and impassable torrent during thunderstorms. This route was the more direct, but the more exhausting. The figure was an old woman, veiled, but as sure-footed as her own goats. Barry recognised her at once. The witch woman was coming to call upon the doctor. It was a very unusual hour to visit anyone.
Barry’s high-handed arrogance in medical matters did not extend to shamans, faith-healers, herbalists, sorcerers or the keepers of cauldrons. Upon his arrival in the island he had immediately demanded the identity and address of the local witch. The Deputy Governor was taken aback. The witch had no official existence and could not therefore easily be traced. Barry called in his servants. They were too frightened to give him a direct answer. Barry went down to the village and sat on the low wall that surrounded the spring, by the recently installed and therefore suspect pump, and there he waited for her to come to him. And sure enough, before many minutes had passed the little square had emptied, and here she came, very graceful and steady, like a black ship in full sail, all flags hoisted, festive in the rigging and atop the mast.
The witch was an elderly widow, wealthy and respectable, cocooned in swathes of handsome black lace. She lived in a grand house with copious plantations masking the verandah. Her vines stretched up the hill behind her. She employed three workers, full-time. She boasted a weird collection of china dolls. She had a sense of the literary, could read English perfectly well, and possessed not one black cat but two. She was very honoured to meet the famous Dr Barry. The entire village watched through the cracks in their shutters as Madame Diaconou welcomed Dr Barry into her house.
Barry asked about the weather. What climatic changes and seasonal variations affected the patterns of illness among both populations on the island? He took careful notes concerning the location and efficacy of particular icons. He asked which local saints concerned themselves with childbirth, wounds, the shakes, infectious diseases, putrid fevers and general paralysis. He enquired after the herbs which were easily available and possessed powerful healing properties. He reported his suspicions concerning some of the unappetising local fish, which were nevertheless considered delicacies, and asked for her opinion. He was informed, affable and courteous. Madame Diaconou was disposed to reveal that she put a great deal of faith in the antiseptic qualities of wild thyme and had had great success with sore throats and bronchitis. She spoke an intriguing mixture of Greek and English. Her husband, God rest his soul, had been a converted Turk, who had seen Venice once and who, to her relief and the personal desperation of her mother-in-law, had died in the arms of Holy Church. He had been particularly susceptible, poor man, to violent inflammations of the lungs. Barry revealed that he too was a great believer in infusions. They were both very small people who sat eyeball to eyeball, and as the conversation continued, the red curls and the lofty coronet of black lace drew closer and closer together. The omens were favourable.
The witch was perfectly clear in her own mind that Barry had come to do a deal, preferably cash on the table and all above board. She was waiting for him to reveal his hand. And so, to gain the advantage, she moved into areas where Barry’s expertise was bound to be unequal to her own. She was an expert on all forms of possession, either by evil spirits, the unquiet dead, passing malfaisances, or the devil himself. Her charms, which took a day or two to concoct, had caused many a ghoul to depart, consumed with a white-hot burning rage, gnashing his fangs in frustration. Upon the departure of his satanic majesty, the victim always reported an agreeable sense of freshness and restful cool. Her love potions were expensive, but much sought after. Barry confessed that he had never mixed one and the witch raised her eyebrows in feigned amazement. She also had the power to cause spontaneous abortions in sheep and goats, but she was too amiable to market this considerable facility. She preferred to avoid village disputes about land.
Matters became tricky when the subject of fees was broached. It was Barry’s practice never to charge the indigenous populatio
ns. The Friday clinics were therefore subsidised by the hospital and at times out of Barry’s own pocket. The witch was, in terms of the average fisherman’s income, very expensive. Barry had hoped to draw a clear demarcation line between their separate areas of professional concern. He had no knowledge of love potions, which was the most lucrative side of Madame Diaconou’s business, and, listening to her confident pronouncements, he was unworried about her expertise in childbirth. The fluids she dispensed to ensure the birth of sons were a little alarming, and would have dramatic consequences for the digestive tract, but they were not dangerous. Her advice on sexual technique – how, for example, can a young bride be cured of frigidity? – was flawless. But there remained the difficult issue of demonic possession. Barry had come across many demons in Africa, but in the worst case he had seen of agony sent by the evil spirit, the man had also suffered from stomach ulcers and gallstones. Demonic possession had occasionally been proved to coexist with a wandering pregnancy and an inoperable cancer where, when he peered into the interior, he saw the tumours wonderfully intertwined like a lush black vine throughout the dying body.
Barry looked speculatively at the mass of china dolls, hoping that one of them would wink to him with some knowledgeable advice on how to handle the witch. But they sat, rigid and unblinking, all along the dresser in the dim rooms, ranked according to size, taking up the usual place of household plates. The doctor was relieved to hear, upon further enquiry, that cases of demonic possession were increasingly rare and that the local priest, a close friend of Madame Diaconou, was a noted exorcist.
But they could not agree upon fees.
For the first year of Barry’s tenure in the post of Deputy Inspector General, there was an uneasy truce established between the doctor and the witch. Their first clash came over the spring blood-letting. When Barry forbade the general release of bad humours from the blood of the village population, the people gathered before the witch’s house in droves and often came down with infections or anaemia, and were carried back up to the hospital. Within a year or two Barry had put a stop to the practice, but he could only do so by buying off the witch with an enormous sum, and giving his official blessing to her nettle tonic, which purified the blood by other means. Nettles were good for the blood, as Barry well knew, but the witch’s clients could have brewed up the potions themselves, far more cheaply, with the same results. Barry could not grasp that this terrible spending of money on a prophylactic they could not afford was, in fact, part of the cure.
Then there was a breakthrough. Somewhat to the doctor’s surprise, the widow appeared at the head of the queue during his Friday clinic. Everyone else stood aside, murmuring, as her prodigious bosom breasted the crowd.
Barry saw each patient separately with his interpreter, George Washington Karageorghis, resplendent in uniform, standing to attention behind him, and delivering the translation, if necessary, with a military bark. ‘He says he has pains everywhere, sir!’ was a common description of the symptoms. And it took Barry a few weeks to realise that this was often simply an opening gambit to impress the gravity of the case upon the doctor. But it was not easy to see each patient separately. Illness was a family affair. And the entire family usually came too, each brandishing a medical opinion and years of experience of all known diseases. Barry systematically separated wives from their husbands and mothers-in-law, thus generating a lot of scandalous gossip and bruised feelings. He insisted on subjecting the unfortunate sufferers to an interrogation in tongue-tied privacy and sometimes ended up shouting at the patients. Very few were malingerers. But the psychological labyrinths from which these narratives of illness emerged often defeated the doctor. Some diseases were hereditary and some were obligatory. Particularly intractable were sodomy and incest, both of which produced alarming, incurable symptoms. Some illnesses proved to be the guilt caused by not being ill, like my mother, my father, my aunt. He confronted women stricken with marital breakdown. He could not prescribe divorce. He never knew how to help them.
Barry became grateful for running sores, venereal seepages, varicella, dengue fever, measles, trachoma and hookworm. He knew what he was looking at and what to do.
But here was the witch, Madame Diaconou, in his clinic for the first time, beaming.
‘Good day, Doctor,’ she said, in English, majestically.
Barry rose, bowed, kissed her hand. Everyone in the waiting room peered round the door. The witch had not shut it and Barry did not either, realising that their conversation was intended to be public.
The widow sat down.
She bent forward, black drapes crackling, and unbuckled her shoes with some difficulty. Then she presented him with a magnificent smelly yellow corn, upon which her charms had proved fruitless. The doctor’s first look of surprise blossomed into a merry smile as he reached for his scalpel and his antiseptic swabs, reeking of alcohol.
After that, the witch and the doctor became not only colleagues but friends.
And now here she came once more, picking her way up the hill by the shortest route, the witch woman coming to call upon the doctor, at a most unusual hour.
Barry met her in the shadow of a gigantic grapefruit tree, hung with gleaming yellow balls. She was a fat woman, and a little out of breath. The doctor took her arm, smelling the sinister kindling of the sun impregnating her fronds of old black lace. At first she did not speak. She gazed out to sea.
‘I have come to report a death, Doctor,’ she said in Greek. ‘But this is not an ordinary death. The man was brought to my house early this morning from another house in the village, where he had lain, without my knowledge, for two days. He was terribly emaciated. He vomited even the clear water we gave him and his faeces were black and putrefying. He had a high fever. An hour ago he expired. I could count his ribs. He was not yet thirty years old. He had been a fine strong fisherman, from the outer isles.’
‘Not dysentery?’
‘No. He sicked up the black bile.’
The doctor’s hands were cold. He said nothing. The witch read his silence.
‘The visitation is upon us, then,’ she murmured quietly.
Barry nodded.
Cholera.
* * *
The year was 1817.
The disease rose up in the hot swamps of Bengal and set forth upon its journey down the rivers, devastating the villages through which it passed, leaving in its wake the bonfires of damp wood, the incense-ridden pyres, and the sound of weeping behind locked doors. Gathering up its dark cloak of heat, the stench of vomit and bile, the hectic cheek of fever, and the sweat of superstition and fear, the pestilence moved steadily east towards China, dividing its force, turning back to Persia and Egypt in the west. The slum quarters of Cairo were the first to be attacked, but the disease did not rest among the poor. Remembering the first plagues, it crossed the well-swept tiled thresholds and fountained gardens of the rich, crept through the ornamental patterns on their alabaster screens, swept past the doors of mosques and cathedrals, climbed up from the servants’ quarters, every step up, up, up to the well-fed tables of each reigning class to become a member of the feast.
All climates, all lands, fell victim to its passage. The pestilence moved northwards, adapting swiftly to the dead wastes of ice and snow. After 1824 it circled towards the great steppes, hurried across the mountains and the wheatfields of Russia, traversed the vast expanses of deserts and the rich black earth, softly awaiting the plough’s touch, rushed onwards beneath the great skies. By 1831 the pestilence had reached England.
Its spread was attributed to miasmatics, or bad air. Bonfires were supposed to have powerful disinfective properties. Their purifying, guttering breath was like a beacon, marking the passage of evil. But in fact no one knew how the disease was transmitted or spread from the outlying villages into the cities, how it clambered up from the poor man’s hovel to the beds of the rich, crossed empty tracts of barren land, leaped oceans with one giant stride. Nothing was safe from its touch. No one knew why o
ne person was taken and another spared. The disease was a judgement, a warning, the herald of a prophecy, a message from those heavenly powers, now clearly displeased, who destroyed the peasant, the burgher, the bishop and the king alike, without hesitation, without pity, without compassion. Whole families were wiped out, both the decrepit and the newborn.
The pestilence could not be held at bay, neither by penitence nor by supplication. Clusters of candles weathered the icons, to no effect. The strictest quarantine enforced by the army proved useless. Whole sectors of cities were cordoned off, streets disinfected like firebreaks in a forest. But the scourge stepped effortlessly over the barriers, evaded the guards, rode with the death carts out to the perimeters of every zone. Then swept on. The disease stole past the watch at the gates, at the doors, by the ports, its paw marks silent on the roadways, invisible in the dust. This eyeless enemy moved in a thousand forms, ignoring the Passover marks on every door.
Cholera.
Barry stood for a few minutes, alone among his lemon trees, watching the witch renegotiate the uneven descent. Then he called Isaac and ordered him to saddle the bay. He was going to call upon the Governor at once. No, he would eat nothing.
* * *
The Governor was taking a siesta. He lay peacefully asleep in his oriental suite, overlooking the sea. He was still red-eyed and confused when Barry was shown into his private rooms. But it was not his midday somnolence which accounted for his difficulty in understanding Barry’s alarms and demands. It was the seductive colours of his gardens and the pure, tideless blue of the Mediterranean in the spring. It is impossible to believe in impending catastrophe when you have taken up residence in an earthly paradise. Barry’s talk of blockading the port, severe quarantine restrictions on all shipping, suspension of the fishing industry between the islands, and the possible destruction of The Middens, fell not so much upon deaf as upon uncomprehending ears. He also demanded a vastly increased budget for the hospital, permission to transform the maternity ward into an isolation unit, and money for more staff.
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