Wild Child (9 page)

He came into the world like all the rest of them—like us, that is—brown as an iguana and flecked with the detritus of after-birth, no more remarkable than the date stamped on the morning’s newspaper, but when I cleared his throat and slapped his infant buttocks, he didn’t make a sound. Quite the contrary. His eyes snapped open with that searching myopia of the newborn and he began to breathe, calmly and quietly, with none of the squalling or fuss of the others. My nurse, Elvira Fuentes, who had spent fifteen years working on the cancer ward at the hospital in Guadalajara before coming home to devote herself to me, both as lover and helpmeet, frowned as I handed the infant to his mother. She was thinking exactly the same thing I was: there must have been some constriction or deformation of the child’s vocal apparatus. Or perhaps he’d been born without it. We’ve seen stranger things, all manner of defects and mutations, especially among the offspring of the migrant workers, what with the devil’s brew of herbicides, pesticides and genetically engineered foodstuffs to which they’ve been routinely exposed. There was one man I won’t name here who came back from the cotton fields of Arizona looking like one of Elvira’s oncological ghosts, and whose wife gave birth nine months later to a monster without a face—no eyes, ears, mouth or nose, just a web of translucent skin stretched tight over a head the size of an avocado. Officially, we labeled it a stillbirth. The corpse—if you could call it that—was disposed of with the rest of the medical waste.

But that’s neither here nor there. What I mean to say is that we were wrong. Happily, at least as it appeared. The child—he was born to Francisco and Mercedes Funes, street vendors whose tacos de chivo are absolutely poisonous to the digestive tract, and I advise all who read this to avoid their stall at the corner of Independencia and Constitución if you value your equilibrium—was soon groping at his mother’s breast and making the usual gurgling and sucking noises.

Mercedes Funes, twenty-seven years old at the time, with six children already to her credit, a pair of bow legs, the shoulders of a fullback and one continuous eyebrow that made you think of Frida Kahlo (stripped of artistry and elegance, that is), was back at her stall that evening, searing goat over a charcoal grill for the entertainment of the unwary, and, as far as Elvira and I were concerned, that was that. One more soul had entered the world. I don’t remember what we did that night, but I suppose it was nothing special. Usually, after we closed the clinic, we would sit in the courtyard, exhausted, and watch the doves settle on the wires while the serving girl put together a green salad and a caldereta de verduras or a platter of fried artichoke hearts, Elvira’s favorite.

Four years slipped by before I next saw the child or gave more than a glancing thought to the Funes clan except when I was treating cases of vomiting and diarrhea, and as a matter of course questioning my patients as to what and where they’d eaten. “It was the oysters, Doctor,” they’d tell me, looking penitent. “Onions, definitely the onions—they’ve never agreed with me.” “Mayonnaise, I’ll never eat mayonnaise again.” And, my favorite: “The meat hardly smelled at all.” They’d blame the Chinese restaurant, the Mennonites and their dairy, their own wives and uncles and dogs, but more often than not I was able to trace the source of the problem to the Funes stall. My patients would look at me with astonishment. “But that can’t be, Doctor—the Funes make the best tacos in town.”

At any rate, Mercedes Funes appeared at the clinic one sun-racked morning with her son in tow. She came through the door tugging him awkwardly by the wrist (they’d named the boy Dámaso, after her husband’s twin brother, who sent small packets of chocolate and the occasional twenty-dollar bill from Los Angeles when the mood took him), and settled into a chair in the waiting room while Elvira’s parrot gnawed at the wicker bars of its cage and the little air conditioner I keep in the front window churned out its hyperborean drafts. I was feeling especially good that morning, at the top of my game, certain real estate investments having turned out rather well for me, and Elvira keeping her eye on a modest little cottage at the seashore, which we hoped to purchase as a getaway and perhaps, in the future, as a place of retirement. After all, I was no longer as young as I once was and the Hippocratic frisson of healing the lame and curing the incurable had been replaced by a sort of repetitious drudgery, nothing a surprise anymore and every patient who walked through the door diagnosed before they even pulled up a chair. I’d seen it all. I was bored. Impatient. Fed up. But, as I say, on this particular day, my mood was buoyant, my whole being filled with an inchoate joy over the prospect of that little frame cottage at the seashore. I believe I may even have been whistling as I entered the examining room.

“And what seems to be the problem?” I asked.

Mercedes Funes was wrapped in a shawl despite the heat. She’d done up her hair and was wearing the shoes she reserved for mass on Sundays. In her lap was the child, gazing up at me out of his father’s eyes, eyes that were perfectly round, as if they’d been created on an assembly line, and which never seemed to blink. “It’s his hands, Doctor,” Mercedes said in a whisper. “He’s burned them.”

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Before I could say “Let’s have a look” in my paternal and reassuring tones, the boy held out his hands, palms up, and I saw the wounds there. The burns were third degree, right in the center of each palm, and involved several fingers as well. Leathery scabs

—eschars—had replaced the destroyed tissue and were seeping a deep wine-colored fluid around the margins. I’d seen such burns before, of course, on innumerable occasions, the result of a house fire, smoking in bed, a child blundering against a stove, but these seemed odd, as if they’d been deliberately inflicted. I glanced up sharply at the mother and asked what had happened.

“I was busy with a customer,” she said, dropping her eyes as if to summon the image, “a big order, a family of seven, and I wasn’t watching him—and Francisco wasn’t there; he’s out selling bicycle tires now, you know, just so we can make ends meet. Dámaso must have reached into the brazier when my back was turned. He took out two hot coals, Doctor, one in each hand. I only discovered what he’d done when I smelled the flesh burning.” She gave me a glance from beneath the continuous eyebrow that made her look as if she were perpetually scowling. “It smelled just like goat. Only different.”

“But how—?” I exclaimed, unable to finish the question. I didn’t credit her for a minute. No one, not even the fakirs of India (and they are fakers), could hold on to a burning coal long enough to suffer third-degree burns.

“He’s not normal, Doctor. He doesn’t feel pain the way others do. “Look here”—and she lifted the child’s right leg as if it weren’t even attached to him, rolling up his miniature trousers to show me a dark raised scar the size of an adult’s spread hand—“do you see this?

This is where that filthy pit bull Isabel Briceño keeps came through the fence and bit him, and we’ve gone to the lawyer over it too, believe me, but he never cried out or said a word. The dog had him down in the dirt, chewing on him like he was a bone, and if my husband hadn’t gone out into the yard to throw his shaving water on the rosebushes I think he would have been torn to pieces.”

She looked out the window a moment, as if to collect herself.

The boy stared at me out of his unblinking eyes. Very slowly, as if he were in some perverse way proud of what had befallen him or of how stoically he’d endured, he began to smile, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d make a first-rate soldier in whatever war we were prosecuting when he grew up.

“And do you see this?” she went on, tracing her index finger over the boy’s lips. “These scars here?” I saw a tracery of pale jagged lines radiating out from his mouth. “This is where he’s bitten himself—bitten himself without knowing it.”

“Señora Funes,” I said in my most caustic tone, the tone I reserve for inebriates with swollen livers and smokers who cough up blood while lighting yet another cigarette, and right there in my office, no less, “I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth here. This boy has been abused. I’ve never seen a more egregious case. You should be ashamed of yourself. Worse: you should be reported to the authorities.”

She rolled her eyes. The boy sat like a mannequin in her lap, as if he were made of wood. “You don’t understand: he doesn’t feel pain.

Nothing.

Go ahead. Prick him with your needle—you can push it right through his arm and he wouldn’t know the difference.”

Angry now—what sort of dupe did she take me for?—I went straight to the cabinet, removed a disposable syringe, prepared an injection (a half-dose of the B]21 keep on hand for the elderly and anemic) and dabbed a spot on his stick of an arm with alcohol. They both watched indifferently as the needle slid in. The boy never flinched. Never gave any indication that anything was happening at all. But that proved nothing. One child out of a hundred would steel himself when I presented the needle (though the other ninety-nine would shriek as if their fingernails were being pulled out, one by one).

“Do you see?” she said.

“I see nothing,” I replied. “He didn’t flinch, that’s all. Many children—some, anyway—are real little soldiers about their injections.” I hovered over him, looking into his face. “You’re a real little solider, aren’t you, Dámaso?” I said.

From the mother, in a weary voice: “We call him Sin Dolor, Doctor. That’s his nickname. That’s what his father calls him when he misbehaves, because no amount of spanking or pinching or twisting his arm will even begin to touch him. Sin Dolor, Doctor.

The Painless One.”

The next time I saw him he must have been seven or eight, I don’t really recall exactly, but he’d grown into a reedy, solemn boy with great, devouring eyes and his father’s Indian hair, still as thin as a puppet and still looking anemic. This time the father brought him in, carrying the boy in his arms. My first thought was worms, and I made a mental note to dose him before he left, but then it occurred to me that it must only have been his mother’s cooking and I dismissed the idea. A stool sample would do. But of course we’d need to draw blood to assess hemoglobin levels—if the parents were willing, that is. Both of them were notoriously tightfisted and I rarely saw any of the Funes clan in my offices unless something were seriously amiss.

“What seems to be the problem?” I asked, rising to take Francisco Funes’ hand in my own.

With a grunt, he bent down to set the boy on his feet. “Go ahead, Dámaso,” he said, “walk for the doctor.”

I noticed that the boy stood unevenly, favoring his right leg. He glanced first at his father, then at me, dipped his shoulder in resignation and walked to the door and back, limping as if he’d dislocated his knee. He looked up with a smile. “I think something’s wrong with my leg,” he said in a voice as reduced and apologetic as a confessor’s.

I cupped him beneath his arms and swung him up onto the examining table, giving the father a look—if this wasn’t child abuse, then what was?—and asked, “Did you have an accident?”

His father answered for him. “He’s broken his leg, can’t you see that? Jumping from the roof of the shed when he should know better—” Francisco Funes was a big man, powerfully built, with a low but penetrating voice, and he leveled a look of wrath on his son, as if to say that the truth of the matter was evident and the boy would have a whipping when he got home, broken leg or no.

I ignored him. “Can you stretch out here for me on your back?”

I said to the boy, patting the examining table. The boy complied, lifting both his legs to the table without apparent effort, and the first thing I noticed were the scars there, a constellation of burns and slashes uncountable running from his ankles to his thighs, and I felt the outrage come up in me all over again. Abuse! The indictment flared in my head. I was about to call for Elvira to come in and evict the father from my offices so that I could treat the son—and quiz him too—when I ran my hand over the boy’s left shin and discovered the swelling there. He did indeed have a broken leg—a fractured tibia, from the feel of it. “Does this hurt?” I asked, putting pressure on the spot.

The boy shook his head.

“Nothing hurts him,” the father put in. He was hovering over me, looking impatient, expecting to be cheated and wanting only to extract the pesos from his wallet as if his son’s injury were a sort of tax and then get on with the rest of his life.

“We’ll need X-rays,” I said.

“No X-rays,” he growled. “I knew I should have taken him to the curandero, I knew it. Just set the damn bone and get it over with.”

I felt the boy’s gaze on me. He was absolutely calm, his eyes like the motionless pools of the rill that brought the water down out of the mountains and into the cistern behind our new cottage at the seashore. For the first time it occurred to me that something extraordinary was going on here, a kind of medical miracle: the boy had fractured his tibia and should have been writhing on the table and crying out with the pain of it, but he looked as if there were nothing at all the matter, as if he’d come into the friendly avuncular doctor’s office just to have a look around at the skeleton on its stand and the framed diplomas on the whitewashed walls and to bask in the metallic glow of the equipment Elvira polished every morning before the patients started lining up outside the door.

It hit me like a thunderclap: he’d walked on a broken leg. Walked on it and didn’t know the difference but for the fact that he was somehow mysteriously limping. I couldn’t help myself. I gripped his leg to feel the alignment of the bone at the site of the fracture. “Does this hurt?” I asked. I felt the bone slip into place. The light outside the window faded and then came up again as an unseen cloud passed overhead. “This?” I asked. “This?”

After that day, after I’d set and splinted the bone, put the boy in a cast and lent him a couple of old mismatched crutches before going out to the anteroom and telling Francisco Funes to forget the bill—“Free of charge,” I said—I felt my life expand. I realized that I was staring a miracle in the face, and who could blame me for wanting to change the course of my life, to make my mark as one of the giants of the profession to be studied and revered down through the ages instead of fading away into the terminal ennui of a small-town practice, of the doves on the wire, the caldereta in the pot and the cottage at the seaside? The fact was that Dámaso Funes must have harbored a mutation in his genes, a positive mutation, superior, progressive, nothing at all like the ones that had given us the faceless infant and all the other horrors that paraded through the door of the clinic day in and day out. If that mutation could be isolated—if the genetic sequence could be discovered—then the boon for our poor suffering species would be immeasurable.