1993 - The Blue Afternoon (13 page)

He woke up, his head canted against the rim of the wheel, the keening whine of a mosquito in his ear. He slapped it away and stood up, shakily, stiffly, stamping the circulation back into his legs. He could not believe he had slept like that…He moved to the light from the window and checked his pocket watch: 2.30 a.m. Music and chatter still emanated from the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ and peering in through a gap in the shutters he saw that the place was still crowded and, more irritating, that Wieland and his cronies were still engrossed in their gambling. This was absurd, he said to himself, now what was he supposed to do? To walk past Wieland at this time of the night would simply encourage more ribald speculation. He paced up and down the yard, thinking, disturbing the dozing poultry further. Wieland, at this rate, could be there until dawn. And Annaliese would have been in bed hours ago, he realised, no doubt further disgusted at his behaviour. He walked down to the foot of the yard, set an old box against the wall and hauled himself up on to its crumbling top. In front of him was only darkness, but a shifting sighing darkness that suggested vegetation—no glimmer of light was to be seen. He hoped that his pale grey alpaca suit would not become too soiled and that the drop down would not be too steep. Tensing himself, he pushed off.

Mud.

Up to his knees, he stumbled, reached out to steady himself and his hand went into the softness up to the elbow. He straightened, swayed and just held his balance. He took a couple of sucking, clinging steps, his hands held before him like a blind man. His fingers brushed leaves, thick, glossy, with a small serrated edge and he stepped forward, out of the filth of the path and up on to blessedly firm and drier earth around the bole of the tree. Mango, he thought. He turned to look back at the glow of lights from the rear elevations of the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ and the establishments on either side on Gardenia Street. The path he had dropped into must run along the backyards of the houses at this end of the street, recipient, no doubt, of every kind of slop and detritus imaginable and unimaginable. He was not going to attempt to walk out of this particular spot until he could see where he was placing his feet. He lowered himself carefully on to a wide exposed root: there was nothing for it but to sit it out.

First light arrived just before 6. It had been a brain-deadening wait: he had smoked all the cigarettes he had on him—seventeen—had planned his future career in the smallest detail and had sung and hummed every melody, it seemed, he had ever heard, and still the slothful night crawled on. But now it was dawn and the mud on his clothes was almost dry. He rubbed his jaw feeling the roughness of stubble on his palm. Home, as quickly and discreetly as possible.

The tree he had waited under was a mango, it turned out, part of a small grove that, once traversed, gave on to a prospect of misty cane and paddy fields and, beyond them, the low bluey mass of Manila’s northern suburbs, blurred by the smoke of morning cooking fires, a mile or so away. He set off, trudging down a path along the top of a dyke making for San Miguel and, he hoped, the first horse tram he could board.

It proved more complicated going than he had expected. The path had joined a dirt track but he had taken a wrong turning, as he discovered when the track looped away northwards again, and he had to retrace his steps. Then he had to make a detour round a brackish meandering estero of the Pasig and pick his way southwards once more along the squelching fringes of more paddy fields before he saw, in the middle distance, the glowing terracotta roof and white walls of the Malacanan Palace through some woods ahead—Governor Taft’s official residence. Now he knew where he was. He consulted his pocket watch again: almost 8 o’clock: with a bit of luck he would be home within half an hour.

He knew there was a ferry across the Pasig not far from the Palace and so followed a path that led directly towards it, abandoning the one he had been following. Another mistake, as it turned out, when the path terminated at a semi-demolished bamboo barn. He hurried on, nevertheless, cutting across the middle of a mogo bean plantation towards a thick grove of acacia trees. In his travels across country he had acquired a busy swarm of persistent flies, attracted, though he hardly dared to speculate, by some noxious ingredient in the Sampaloc mud that still daubed his trousers. He swatted wildly at them, tried vainly to outsprint them and then, pausing, removed his jacket and twirled it like a demented bullfighter around his head and shoulders as he went on his way.

It was cooler among the acacia trees and the path was well trodden and the going easier. But as the sweat began to dry on his brow this relief proved to be temporary: he started to reflect on what had happened over the previous few hours and he began to generate a potent anger at himself. What could have persuaded him to go to Sampaloc, to a bordello? But then, having made his choice, why had he not been more worldly with Wieland, more of a man among men? What was so disgraceful, in that company especially, of admitting that one occasionally visited a prostitute? Really, he must have seemed absurdly, laughably prim, stalking off through that door like a virgin importuned by a leering cad. And look where his sudden attack of craven dignity had landed him: a mosquito-infested, shame-tormented, mud–encrusted, exhausting, cross-country—

He actually saw—actually saw—the arrow as it flew towards his unsuspecting face.

He had turned, alerted by a rip and flap of foliage, reflexively snapping his head to the right, and saw the missile fly at him. He could not remember if he had stopped or ducked or flinched but he felt the child’s breath of its passing on his cheek and then he heard the whungggg of its impact in the acacia tree beside him. He turned. Head high. Its white fletch still vibrating.

He dropped to his hands and knees and scrabbled behind a bush, a little whimpering noise in his throat, waiting for other arrows to fly at him, waiting for his assailants to surge from the undergrowth, razor–edged bolos swinging sharp in the morning air.

Silence. No twig-snap, no…Then he heard it, not far off. Laughter. Women laughing.

He pulled the embedded arrow out of the tree trunk and paced back along its trajectory, feeling the anger in him distort his face, drawing it down almost as if he were trying to make a snarling snouty point out of his features, to force his brows, nose, mouth, cheeks into a furious and threatening horn with which to gore his persecutors. The fear had gone, the terror was over: people were laughing at him, women were laughing.

He pushed brutally through a dense dark screen of cogal bushes, scratching the backs of his hands, and found himself blinking in the brightness of a sunlit lawn. In front of him stood three round canted archery targets and beyond them stood half a dozen women, white women, in leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouses and long drill skirts, wearing straw hats against the sun, carrying bows, with quivers of arrows slung across their shoulders. One of them was actually fitting another arrow to her bow, drawing it back—

“STOP!” he screamed, emotion cracking his voice. “Stop now, you bitch of hell! God damn you!”

He strode out to confront them, brandishing the arrow.

“One inch more and this would have buried itself in my head,” he shouted at them. “Less than an inch, you mindless idiots! Less than an inch and I would have been killed by your foolishness, your foolish stupid carelessness!”

They stared at him, big-eyed, ogling, mouths gaping, completely astonished. He felt his rage begin to vent from him, as if a plug had been pulled, and self-consciousness rush in to fill the void. He saw them now, clearly: these were respectable American women—Good God—young women. What must he have looked like advancing out of the wood, covered in mud, unshaven, screaming his anger? Had he sworn? Oh God, he had a sudden terrible memory of using an oath, a foul oath.

“Who is the person responsible?” he carried on gamely, not wanting now to lose the advantage his outrage gave him. “Who is the person who fired this arrow?”

A woman stepped forward at once and he swivelled to confront her. A tall woman. Broad-shouldered. Pale strong freckled face. Some rare quality about that face, he thought, suddenly, throat tightening. Something he had never seen. Reddish brown hair held in a loose bun. The details came fast: she had a slightly hooked nose, he saw rapidly, with small arched nostrils, and he saw rapidly too, how the leather strap of her quiver separated the soft roll of her bosom into two distinct breasts.

She faced him. Square, strong. Small pale-lashed brown eyes. Odd, that combination. White skin, freckle-spattered, but very white. You’d think blue eyes. But no, brown, like unmilked coffee, a fierce stare. Tiny blisters of perspiration in the well-defined groove of her top lip.

“I shot it,” she said. A soft accent. Shaht. Southern, was it? “I’m very sorry, it was a complete accident. I’m just learning—”

His tongue sat inert in his dry throat.

“—and it just sort of kicked up when I fired it. It went way high into the trees. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s an outrage,” he managed to say, weakly. “I could have died. Apology. I demand apology. Your name.”

“Look, I’ve already apologised several times. I’ll apologise again: I’m sorry. No-one was hurt. It was an accident.”

“What is your name?” It came out almost as a shriek.

She looked at him.

She sighed. “My name has nothing to do with this, or with you,” she said, her tone changing, becoming angrier, no-nonsense. “Whoever you are, you silly little self-important man. Your behaviour is most unreasonable, not to say offensive. Would you now please be on your way as you are interrupting our lesson.”

T
he Chinese boy had died in the night, suddenly, but not unexpectedly. Ever since his operation it had been obvious he was ailing: he was feverish, he had absolute constipation, his tongue—which had been healing admirably—began to ooze pus and blacken around the sutures. Listerism and asepsis had achieved marvels. Even here in Manila, in San Jeronimo, the recovery rate in his wards was five times better than in Cruz’s, but when he saw these signs he knew his ability to intervene was over. It was rare to find peritonitis associated with erysipelas of the throat, but he had encountered it two or three times before. He assumed the streptococcus reached the serous membrane through the blood somehow. Anyway, he had dosed the boy with opiates, tried to make him comfortable and stood uselessly by as he had died. He knew the worst when he had come into the ward and seen the boy lying on his back, his knees drawn up, his fluttering hands held above his head to increase the capacity of the thorax. His face was already gaunt, his eyes restless, his hands cold and damp. He began to vomit regularly and his abdominal wall grew rigid, board-like. Meteorism became present, the abdomen tense and tympanitic on percussion. He complained not only of a burning pain in his gut but of a tormenting thirst. He was given a rectal injection of cold water. He drank a little iced milk and soda water, the tongue was painted with a solution of glycerine in an attempt to keep it moist. To no lasting avail. The boy’s pulse grew rapid, hard and wiry. He began to hiccough violently, a most disturbing symptom that Carriscant knew marked a serious failure in prognosis. He developed the classic face grippee, pinched and sunken, the naso-labial crease very deep. His tongue became coated and faul and the vomited matter was highly offensive. Sordes were present on the teeth and lips. Carriscant watched the boy’s piteous restlessness—there was no blessed coma in cases of peritonitis to ease the suffering—and watched as his limbs became cold and blue. In the act of dying there was a great gush of foul and brownish fluid from the mouth and rectum. Moments like these tormented Carriscant with a vision of the huge void of his ignorance and helplessness. His instruments were sterile, his operating theatre clean and disinfected, his hands were scrubbed pink, he wore freshly laundered white gowns and yet somehow, from somewhere, the dreaded streptococcus infected the boy’s blood, corrupting it. From ‘somewhere’…that vague supposition alone was bad enough. An incision in the tongue had produced an infection of the serous membrane in the abdomen. He knew the intestines would be covered in an exudation of pus and fluid, a thick layer of ly
mph
along the lines of contact between the various coils of the bowel. Once infected, the patient’s body succumbed inevitably to the toxin of bad blood and a new impotency took over as you watched and waited for death. Bad blood…At times like these he understood his benighted precursors’ vain obsession with leeches and bleeding.

He looked at the boy’s naked body as it lay before him on the dissecting table in the mortuary as he prepared to examine its morbid anatomy. Slightly plump with almost girlish breasts and a small scribble of pubic hair above the clenched genitals. He touched the cool, yielding flesh, pressed down on the rib cage, allowed his hands to shape the contours of the youth’s belly. He knew every component of that individual body, everything hidden behind that pliant but tough integument of skin. The inside of a man or woman was as familiar to him as the face of a friend or the layout of his sitting room, but it was a familiarity afforded only after death. The head, the chest, the spine, the heart…He did not dare advance across that threshold while the body lived. Here he was, a highly trained surgeon, the equal, he liked to think, of any in the entire civilised world and yet to all intents and purposes he was trapped, pinioned by fear and the pathetic limits of his knowledge. He was like a man of vast wealth who has purchased a palace of immense and unparalleled splendour. He can wander in the grounds, circle the exterior, peer through the windows, admire the gilded furniture and the lavish textiles, the fabulous works of art and glittering chandeliers. It is all mine, he could think, and yet he was for ever denied entry, on pain of death. On pain of death.

He turned the boy over. Of course, he thought scornfully, one is always allowed access to the bladder or rectum, and those other portals the body provided itself, where catheters and probes, pincers and scalpels, could reach. How many times had he patiently ground down a suffering man’s bladderstones, his thin instruments deep inside the bladder, sawing and grinding. He was renowned for the delicacy of his manipulation: of the dozens of operations he had performed in the bladder only three had subsequently died of peritonitis. He knew at once when his touch had let him down. As the lithotrite was withdrawn or the catheter extracted from the penis, there was that small fatal signature of blood. Then the silent prayer: oh Lord, let it only be a scratch on the bladder wall. Even the tiniest of punctures seemed to bring down the heaviest of sentences…