“She wrote a very uncharacteristic letter to my father, and she seems unlike herself,” Noemí said, trying to put her impressions into words. “She has changed.”
“Tuberculosis doesn’t change a person, it merely intensifies the traits the patient already possesses.”
“Well, then, there’s definitely something wrong with Catalina, because she’s never possessed this listlessness. She has such an odd look about her.”
The doctor took out his glasses and put them on again. He must not have liked what he saw and frowned.
“You did not let me finish,” the doctor muttered, sounding snappish. His eyes were hard. She pressed her lips together. “Your cousin is a very anxious girl, quite melancholic, and the illness has intensified this.”
“Catalina is not anxious.”
“You deny her depressive tendencies?”
Noemí recalled what her father had said in Mexico City. He’d called Catalina melodramatic. But melodramatic and anxious were not the same thing at all, and Catalina had definitely never heard voices in Mexico City, and she hadn’t had that bizarre expression on her face.
“What depressive tendencies?” Noemí asked.
“When her mother died, she became withdrawn,” Virgil said. “She had periods of great melancholy, crying in her room and talking nonsense. It’s worse now.”
He had not spoken until then, and now he chose to bring that up, and not only to bring it up but to speak with a careful detachment, as if he were describing a stranger instead of his wife.
“Yes, and as you said her mother had died,” Noemí replied. “And that was years and years ago, when she was a girl.”
“Perhaps you’ll find certain things come back,” he said.
“Although tuberculosis is hardly a death sentence, it can still be upsetting for the patient,” the doctor explained. “The isolation, the physical symptoms. Your cousin has suffered from chills and night sweats; they’re not a pretty sight, I assure you, and codeine provides temporary relief. You cannot expect her to be cheery and baking pies.”
“I’m concerned. She’s my cousin, after all.”
“Yes, but if you begin to get agitated too, then we won’t be better off, will we?” the doctor said, shaking his head. “Now, I really must be going. I’ll see you next week, Virgil.”
“Doctor,” she said.
“No, no, I will be going,” the doctor repeated, like a man who has become aware of an impending mutiny aboard a ship.
The doctor shook Noemí’s hand, grabbed his bag, and off he went, leaving her upon the grotesque settee, biting her lips and not knowing quite what to say. Virgil took the spot the doctor had vacated and leaned back, aloof. If there ever was a man who had ice in his veins, it was this one. His face was bloodless. Had he really courted Catalina? Courted anyone? She could not picture him expressing affection toward any living thing.
“Dr. Cummins is a very capable physician,” he said with a voice that was indifferent, a voice that indicated he would not have cared if Cummins was the best or worst physician on Earth. “His father was the family’s doctor, and now he watches over our health. I assure you, he has never been found lacking in any way.”
“I’m sure he is a good doctor.”
“You do not sound sure.”
She shrugged, trying to make light of it, thinking that if she kept a smile on her face and her words were airy, he might be more receptive. After all, he seemed to be taking this whole matter lightly. “If Catalina is ill, then she might be better off in a sanatorium close to Mexico City, somewhere where she can be tended to properly.”
“You don’t believe I can tend to my wife?”
“I didn’t say that. But this house is cold and the fog outside is not the most uplifting sight.”
“Is this the mission that your father gave you?” Virgil asked. “That you would come here and snatch Catalina away?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“It feels like it,” he said briskly, though he did not sound upset. The words remained cold. “I realize that my home is not the most modern and most fashionable there is. High Place was once a beacon, a shining jewel of a house, and the mine produced so much silver that we could afford to cram armoires with silks and velvet and fill our cups with the finest wines. It is not so anymore.
“But we know how to take care of ill people. My father is old, he’s not in perfect health, yet we tend to him adequately. I wouldn’t do any less for the woman I’ve married.”
“Still. I would like to ask, perhaps, what Catalina needs is a specialist in other matters. A psychiatrist—”
He laughed so loudly she jumped a little in her seat, for until now his face had been very serious, and the laughter was unpleasant. The laughter challenged her, and his eyes settled on her.
“A psychiatrist. And where might you find one around these parts? You think he might be summoned out of thin air? There is a public clinic in town with a single doctor and nothing more. You’ll hardly find a psychiatrist there. You’d have to head to Pachuca, maybe even to Mexico City, and fetch one. I doubt they’d come.”
“At least the doctor at the clinic might offer a second opinion, or he might have other ideas about Catalina.”
“There’s a reason why my father brought his own doctor from England, and it’s not because the health care in this place was magnificent. The town is poor and the people there are coarse, primitive. It’s not a place crawling with doctors.”
“I must insist—”
“Yes, yes, I do believe you will insist,” he said, standing up, the striking blue eyes still unkindly fixed on her. “You get your way in most things, don’t you, Miss Taboada? Your father does as you wish. Men do as you wish.”
He reminded her of a fellow she’d danced with at a party the previous summer. They had been having fun, briskly stepping to a danzón, and then came time for the ballads. During “Some Enchanted Evening” the man held her far too tightly and tried to kiss her. She turned her head, and when she looked at him again there was pure, dark mockery across his features.
Noemí stared back at Virgil, and he stared at her with that same sort of mockery: a bitter, ugly stare.
“What do you mean?” she asked, challenge peppering the question.
“I recall Catalina mentioning how insistent you can be when you want a beau to do your bidding. I won’t fight you. Get your second opinion if you can find it,” he said with a chilling finality as he walked out of the room.
She felt a little pleased to have needled him. She sensed that he had expected—as had the doctor—that she would accept his words mutely.
* * *
—
That night she dreamed that a golden flower sprouted from the walls in her room, only it wasn’t…she didn’t think it a flower. It had tendrils, yet it wasn’t a vine, and next to the not-flower rose a hundred other tiny golden forms.
Mushrooms, she thought, finally recognizing the bulbous shapes, and as she walked toward the wall, intrigued and attracted by the glow, she brushed her hands against these forms. The golden bulbs seemed to turn into smoke, bursting, rising, falling like dust upon the floor. Her hands were coated in this dust.
She attempted to clean it off, wiping her hands on her nightgown, but the gold dust clung to her palms, it went under her nails. Golden dust swirled around her, and it lit up the room, bathing it in a soft yellow light. When she looked above, she saw the dust glittering like miniature stars against the ceiling, and below, on the rug, was another golden swirl of stars.
She brushed her foot forward, disturbing the dust on the rug, and it bounced up into the air again, then fell.
Suddenly, Noemí was aware of a presence in the room. She raised her head, her hand pressed against her nightgown, and saw someone standing by the door. It was a woman in a dress of yellowed antique lace.
Where her face ought to have been there was a glow, golden like that of the mushrooms on the wall. The woman’s glow grew stronger, then dimmed. It was like watching a firefly in the summer night sky.
Next to Noemí the wall had started to quiver, beating to the same rhythm as the golden woman. Beneath her the floorboards pulsed too; a heart, alive and knowing. The golden filaments that had emerged together with the mushrooms covered the wall like a netting and continued to grow. She noticed, then, that the woman’s dress was not made of lace, but was instead woven with the same filaments.
The woman raised a gloved hand and pointed at Noemí, and she opened her mouth, but having no mouth since her face was a golden blur, no words came out.
Noemí had not felt scared. Not until now. But this, the woman attempting to speak, it made her indescribably afraid. A fear that traveled down her spine, to the soles of her feet, forcing Noemí to step back and press her hands against her lips.
She had no lips, and when she tried to take another step back she realized that her feet had fused to the ground. The golden woman reached forward, reached toward her, and held Noemí’s face between her hands. The woman made a noise, like the crunching of leaves, like the dripping of water onto a pond, like the buzzing of insects in the pitch-black darkness, and Noemí wished to press her hands against her ears, but she had no hands anymore.
Noemí opened her eyes, drenched in sweat. For a minute she didn’t remember where she was, and then she recalled she had been invited to High Place. She reached for the glass of water she’d left by the bedside and almost knocked it down. She gulped down the whole glass and then turned her head.
The room was in shadows. No light, golden or otherwise, dotted the wall’s surface. Nevertheless, she had an impulse to rise and run her hands against the wall, as if to make sure there was nothing strange lurking behind the wallpaper.
6
Noemí’s best bet for obtaining a car was Francis. She didn’t think Florence would give her the time of day, and Virgil had been absolutely irritated with her when they had spoken the previous day. Noemí remembered what Virgil had said about men doing as she wanted. It bothered her to be thought of poorly. She wanted to be liked. Perhaps this explained the parties, the crystalline laughter, the well-coiffed hair, the rehearsed smile. She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.
Well, she definitely did not feel liked in this house, but Francis was friendly enough. She found him near the kitchen, looking more washed out than the previous days, a slim figure of ivory, but his eyes were energetic. He smiled at her. When he did, he wasn’t bad looking. Not quite like his cousin—Virgil was terribly attractive—but then she thought most men would have had a hard time competing with Virgil. No doubt that’s what had hooked Catalina. That pretty face. Maybe the air of mystery he’d had about him too had made Catalina forget about sensible matters.
Genteel poverty, Noemí’s father had said. That’s what that man has to offer.
Apparently also a rambling, old house where you were liable to have bad dreams. God, the city seemed so far away.
“I’d like to ask you for a favor,” she said after they’d exchanged morning pleasantries. As she spoke she linked her arm to his with a fluid, well-practiced motion, and they began walking together. “I want to borrow one of your cars and go into town. I have letters I’d like to post. My father doesn’t really know how I’m doing.”
“You need me to drive you there?”
“I can drive myself there.”
Francis made a face, hesitating. “I don’t know what Virgil would say about that.”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to tell him. What, you don’t think I can drive? I’ll show you my license if you want.”
Francis ran a hand through his fair hair. “It’s not that. The family is very particular about the cars.”
“And I’m very particular about driving on my own. Surely I don’t need a chaperone, and you’d make a terrible chaperone, anyway.”
“How so?”
“Who ever heard of a man playing chaperone? You need an insufferable aunt. I can lend you one of mine for a weekend if you’d like. It’ll cost you a car. Will you help me, please? I’m desperate.”
He chuckled as she steered him outside. He picked up the car keys hanging from a hook in the kitchen. Lizzie, one of the maids, was rolling bread upon a floured table. She did not acknowledge either Noemí or Francis even one bit. The staff at High Place was almost invisible, like in one of Catalina’s fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast, that had been it, had it not? Invisible servants who cooked the meals and laid down the silverware. Ridiculous. Noemí knew all the people who worked in her house by name, and they certainly were not begrudged their chatter. That she even knew the names of the staff at High Place seemed a small miracle, but she’d asked Francis, and Francis had obligingly introduced them: Lizzie, Mary, and Charles, who, like the porcelain locked in the cabinets, had been imported from England many decades ago.
They walked toward the shed, and he handed her the car keys. “You won’t get lost?” Francis asked, leaning against the car’s window and looking down at her.
“I can manage.”
True enough. It wasn’t as if one could even attempt to get lost. The road led up or down the mountain, and down she went, to the little town. She felt quite content during the drive and rolled her window open to enjoy the fresh mountain air. It wasn’t such a bad place, she thought, once you got out of the house. It was the house that disfigured the land.
Noemí parked the car by the town square, guessing both the post office and the medical clinic must be nearby. She was right and was quickly rewarded with the sight of a little green-and-white building that proclaimed itself the medical unit. Inside there were three green chairs and several posters explaining all matter of diseases. There was a receiving desk, but it was empty, and a closed door with a plaque on it and the doctor’s name in large letters. Julio Eusebio Camarillo, it said.
She sat down, and after a few minutes the door opened and out came a woman holding a toddler by the hand. Then the doctor poked his head through the doorway and nodded at her.
“Good day,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Noemí Taboada,” she said. “You are Dr. Camarillo?”
She had to ask because the man looked rather young. He was very dark and had short hair that he parted down the middle and a little mustache that did not really age him, managing to make him look a bit ridiculous, like a child mimicking a physician. He also wasn’t wearing a doctor’s white coat, just a beige-and-brown sweater.
“That’s me. Come in,” he said.
Inside his office, on the wall behind his desk, she indeed saw the certificate from the UNAM with his name in an elegant script. He also had an armoire, the doors thrown open, filled with pills, cotton swabs, and bottles. A large maguey lay in a corner in a yellow pot.
The doctor sat behind his desk and Noemí sat on a plastic chair, which matched the ones in the vestibule.
“I don’t think we’ve met before,” Dr. Camarillo said.
“I’m not from around here,” she said, placing her purse on her lap and leaning forward. “I’ve come to see my cousin. She’s sick, and I thought you might take a look at her. She has tuberculosis.”
“Tuberculosis? In El Triunfo?” the doctor asked, sounding quite astonished. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”
“Not in El Triunfo proper. At High Place.”
“The Doyle house,” he said haltingly. “You are related to them?”
“No. Well, yes. By marriage. Virgil Doyle is married to my cousin Catalina. I was hoping you’d go check on her.”
The young doctor l
ooked confused. “But wouldn’t Dr. Cummins be taking care of her? He’s their doctor.”
“I’d like a second opinion, I suppose,” she said and explained how strange Catalina seemed and her suspicions that she might require psychiatric attention.
Dr. Camarillo listened patiently to her. When she was done, he twirled a pencil between his fingers.
“The thing is, I’m not sure I’d be welcome at High Place if I showed up there. The Doyles have always had their own physician. They don’t mingle with the townsfolk,” he said. “When the mine was operational and they hired Mexican workers, they had them living at a camp up the mountain. Arthur Cummins senior also tended to them. There were several epidemics back when the mine was open, you know. Lots of miners died, and Cummins had his hands full, but he never requested local help. I don’t believe they think much of local physicians.”
“What sort of epidemic was it?”
He tapped his pencil’s eraser against his desk three times. “It wasn’t clear. A high fever, very tricky. People would say the oddest things, they’d rant and rave, they’d have convulsions, they’d attack each other. People would get sick, they’d die, then all would be well, and a few years later again the mystery illness would strike.”
“I’ve seen the English Cemetery,” Noemí said. “There are many graves.”
“That’s only the English people. You should see the local cemetery. They said that in the last epidemic, around the time the Revolution started, the Doyles didn’t even bother sending down the corpses for a proper burial. They tossed them in a pit.”
“That can’t be, can it?”
“Who knows.”
The phrase carried with it an implicit distaste. The doctor didn’t say, “Well, I believe it,” but it seemed there might be no reason why he shouldn’t.
“You must be from El Triunfo, then, to know all of this.”
“From near enough,” he said. “My family sold supplies to people at the Doyle mine, and when they shuttered it, they moved to Pachuca. I went to study in Mexico City, but now I’m back. I wanted to help the people here.”
Mexican Gothic Page 6