Night Calypso (6 page)

‘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.

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.

Later that morning, Vincent prepared to give the first of a series of lectures to all the nurses and their assistants. A lecture might have been too grand a title. This was a new idea. Another of his fantastic ideals, he thought. He wanted his hospital, no matter in how small a way, to be a teaching hospital.

Mother Superior was the first, at the front, in the row of chairs arranged on the verandah outside the nuns’ common room. She had eventually relented, giving her permission. Between Mr Krishna Singh with his political speeches under the almond tree, not to forget Jonah Le Roy, the tall black man, as she always referred to him, looking more like Moses than Jonah, and now this new, free-thinking doctor with his lectures, she wondered where she could make her impression, except in the Chapter House of her convent.

She invited Father Meyer, the chaplain, to come along, as a kind of inquisitor, Vincent thought. Maybe he would be taken out and burnt at the stake afterwards for heresy.

Sister Thérèse sat with Sister Rita at the back. Those other nuns who were not on duty filled up the other seats. Krishna Singh was at the front. Jonah was standing at the back, near the steps.

Vincent placed a small table in front of his audience, laid out his papers, securing them from the relentless wind with a stone. Sister Claire brought him a chair from the common room.

The gist of Vincent’s lecture was education. The stigma, as old as the disease, making outcasts of the lepers; the image of people bandaged in rags, shunned, forced to ring a bell to announce their arrival, so that others could get out of the way, had to be resisted. ‘We’ve got to educate the public and the authorities.’ Vincent looked up from his paper. He saw anxiety and disapproval on the faces of Mother Superior and the sisters near her. But he continued. ‘We’re quarantined here. Our patients are exiles in their own home. We must change that view.’

He needed to catch some other eyes. ‘There’s the shame our patients feel when they first come to us. We see it whenever the
bumboats
arrive. There’s the loss of self brought by this disease. It’s as if their very history has taken their self-esteem away.’

Before he moved on from the social stigma of the disease, he
looked up and thought he saw the faintest glimmer of a smile on Sister Thérèse’s lips. Her bright eyes encouraged him.

Singh looked ahead proudly, sitting next to the chaplain and Mother Superior. Jonah was beaming from the back, ushering in some of the older patients, like Mr Lalbeharry, who sat on the steps. Vincent gained in confidence.

‘Where the infectious, incurable form of the disease exists, there is relentless deterioration. It can seem an endless task: suppurating sores, joints that rot away, faces which collapse. Yet shining through, like in some of our boys, Ti-Jean, for instance…’ Vincent looked up and smiled proudly. Everyone knew that the boy was his hero. ‘Or, take Ma Rosie! We see the individual no matter the state of their body.’ He paused to mention other particular patients, to drive his point home. ‘You, Lal.’ Mr Lalbeharry smiled from the back. ‘We can get depressed that, after all our advice, we see the little care some of our other patients take of themselves. Why is this? They burn themselves. They stump their limbs. They cut their skin. We need to remind ourselves that this is not the disease itself. Yes, it’s a job of clean bandaging. It’s a matter of looking after wounds and sores. But, there’s more. There’s understanding the complexity of this disease. What can we do to heal? What can we do to prevent deterioration?’

Lastly, Vincent said, ‘A bit of love, sisters. Let them experience that. And, dare I say it, a bit of pleasure.’ Jonah stamped his feet with approval. Singh applauded. Mother Superior moved her chair deliberately as if to get up and leave, then remained sitting, bolt upright with an unflinching face. The chaplain coughed profusely. Vincent had noticed that this was a nervous reaction on his part throughout the speech. ‘The general well-being of our patients, the opportunity for a full life.’ Vincent caught Sister Thérèse’s eyes. ‘By encouraging full relationships, sisters, we can bring happiness amidst so much sadness.’

Mother Superior came up to Vincent when he had finished. ‘I’m glad that you appreciate the individual soul, Doctor.’

‘Soul? Who said anything about the soul? I mentioned the individual. It’s their mortality I’m interested in improving. I know nothing about immortality. I leave that to you, Mother, and Father
Meyer here. You deal with the invisible. I’ll deal with the visible, even though I may need your entire community looking into a microscope to find it.’

‘You think words will heal. You joke. You charm. But you don’t charm me Doctor.’

‘Just the opposite. Understanding what the disease is, how it works, how it’s prevented. We know more than we did. This is what lies behind research. Research and education is allied to treatment. That is the valuable work your nuns can do. Meticulous, relentless research in order to extend our understanding helps us prepare our treatment.’

‘They’re just poor people. They know more than any of us how to suffer and to accept the cross Christ has given them to carry. We can assist in that.’

‘I see no cross. Poor, yes. But that means they deserve even more, surely. Even your religion teaches us that.’

‘The poor will always be with us, as Christ says in the gospel.’ Father Meyer, within earshot, contributed.

‘Well, yes, if you think that way, we can then rely on the poor always being with us. My work is to help them, so that they can work themselves out of poverty.’

The other sisters moved away in embarrassment, their loyalties stretched.

‘Don’t underestimate the gift of patience which they have, and what it allows us to witness. Suffering, Doctor, is the way of the Lord.’

‘I admire my patients’ endurance. Don’t get me wrong. But I want to harness it to improve their health, their self-esteem, not remain silent receivers of charity.’

Father Meyer smiled. He preferred his battles over a few rum punches and Wagner on the gramophone. He patted Vincent on the shoulder in order to quieten him. He patronised both him and Mother Superior with his smile, as if their discussion was beneath him. Seemed to Vincent that his philosophy was that charity was to keep the poor poor, even if not expressed so bluntly. ‘They allow us to advance in virtue, as they themselves grow in that very same virtue.’

‘And don’t forget, Doctor, that my nuns are brides of Christ.’ With that parting salvo, Mother Superior turned her back and walked away.

Singh, leaning up against the balustrade of the verandah, caught Vincent’s eye. ‘I see you on our side now, Doctor.’ He patted Vincent on the back.

‘I hope we’re on the side of our patients.’

‘People. People, Doctor.’

‘Words, Krishna. You heard Mother Superior.’ Vincent smiled. ‘How many brides does Shiva have?’

‘And Mohammed?’

‘Religions! They’ll keep the poor poor.’

‘Opiates!’ Singh proclaimed.

Later that afternoon, finishing his rounds, Vincent turned to Sister Thérèse who carried a tray of bandages. Resting it down, she passed the lint through her fingers, snipping with her scissors. He knew she was one of the best on the wards. She was firm in her purpose, but delicate and gentle. He watched her hands turn in the light. He watched her fingers in the strips of cotton cloth and muslin lint, a gold band on her marriage finger. She was Christ’s bride. He watched her wash wounds and clean suppurating sores. What had brought this young girl to El Caracol?

‘
Le village.
The village.’ She spoke phrases in simultaneous translation. It was a kind of nervousness, a kind of being in two places at once, being in two minds at the same time. After her doctor’s lecture, and the public response from her Mother Superior, the air was tense. She spoke in her French accent, opening conversation on something other than their work as doctor and nurse. She talked about the place from where she had come. ‘We went to Provence in the summer and vacations. Otherwise, we were in Paris.’

They were not supposed to have personal conversations. When Vincent had first arrived, Mother Superior had always insisted that Sister Gertrude, a woman of nearly seventy, should be his ward assistant. Then he used to look at the young sisters giggling together, catching them in an off-guard moment in the pharmacy.

He had requested Sister Thérèse Weil because of her research experience. He was getting used to her as his best assistant. She was looking up at him from where she bent over her work. ‘What’s it, Sister?’

Her eyes were always being lifted from below a bowed head, an irritating gesture of humility, learned in some spartan, Jansenist novitiate in France. Not her natural demeanour, he thought. She extracted from her copious sleeves an envelope which was as blue as the Antillean sky. ‘A letter from Papa.’ The paper had faded with its passage, and was creased with its secrecy, secreted into the folds of her habit, now withdrawn between the tips of her fingers. Once read, already censored, it should have been destroyed. That is what Mother Superior would have wanted.

‘You’ve not given up the world, Sister, that you long for its news so,’ Vincent teased.

‘Papa, you know. I’ve told you of his letters.’ She smiled, refolding the letter, indicating its author, putting it back into her sleeves, secreting it further, somewhere deep in all those folds. He could not imagine where it eventually encountered her flesh.

Women who had worked in his mother’s house lifted their blouses and inserted money and keepsakes in the depths of their bosoms. Hers were flat. She seemed like a boy in girl’s robes. What had she done with her breasts? ‘No, go ahead, Sister. I would be delighted to share your news. I’m of the world. I long for its news.’ Vincent smiled.

‘Papa is worried. He hears from friends,
les amis
.’ There were tears in her eyes. What was he to do with a crying nun? He moved to comfort her, then stopped, folding his arms. Better to keep those out of the way.

‘What does your father say? What has he heard from a friend?’

‘Events in Germany will encourage ideas in France. It’s a long history.
Kristallnacht
. It sounds pretty. Like the name of an opera, or a piece of music.’

‘Yes Sister, it was in the local paper. It was on the radio.’

‘
C’est dangereux
. For France.’