A Burnt Out Case (7 page)

‘Medicine. Magic. An appeal to his God Nzambi.’

‘I thought he was a Catholic.’

‘If I sign a form I call myself a Catholic too. So does he. I believe in nothing most of the time. He half believes in Christ and half believes in Nzambi. There’s not much difference between us as far as Catholicism is concerned. I only wish I were as good a man.’

‘Will he really die tomorrow?’

‘I think so. They have a wonderful knack of knowing.’

In the dispensary a leper with bandaged feet stood waiting with a small boy in her arms. Every rib in the child’s body showed. It was like a cage over which a dark cloth has been flung at night to keep a bird asleep, and like a bird his breath moved under the cloth. It was not leprosy that would kill him, the doctor said, but sicklaemia, an incurable disease of the blood. There was no hope. The child would not live long enough to become a leper, but there was no point in telling the mother that. He touched the little hollow chest with his finger, and the child winced away. The doctor began to abuse the woman in her own language, and she argued unconvincingly back, clutching the boy against her hip. The boy stared passively over the doctor’s shoulder with sad frog-like eyes as though nothing that anyone said would ever concern him seriously again. When the woman had gone, Doctor Colin said, ‘She promises it won’t happen any more. But how can I tell?’

‘What won’t happen?’

‘Didn’t you see the little scar on his breast? They have been cutting a pocket in his skin to put their native medicines in. She says it was the grandmother who did it. Poor child. They won’t let him die in peace without pain. I told her that if it happened again, I would cease treating her for leprosy, but I daresay they won’t let me see the boy a second time. In that state he’s as easy to hide as a needle.’

‘Can’t you put him in the hospital?’

‘You’ve seen what sort of a hospital I’ve got. Would you want a boy of yours to die there? Next,’ he called angrily, ‘next,’ and the next was a child too, a boy of six. His father accompanied him, and his fingerless fist rested on the boy’s shoulder to give him comfort. The doctor turned the child round and ran his hand over the young skin.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you should be noticing things by this time. What do you think of this case?’

‘One of his toes has gone already.’

‘That’s not important. He’s had jiggers and they’ve neglected them. It happens often in the bush. No – here’s the first patch. The leprosy has just begun.’

‘Is there no way to protect the children?’

‘In Brazil they take them away at birth, and thirty per cent of the babies die. I prefer a leper to a dead child. We’ll cure him in a couple of years.’ He looked up quickly at Querry and away again. ‘One day – in the new hospital – I’ll have a special children’s ward and dispensary. I’ll anticipate the patch. I’ll live to see leprosy in retreat. Do you know there are some areas, a few hundred miles from here, where one in five of the people are lepers? I dream of movable prefabricated hospitals. War has changed. In 1914 generals organized battles from country houses, but in 1944 Rommel and Montgomery fought from moving caravans. How can I convey what I want to Father Joseph? I can’t draw. I can’t even design one room to the best advantage. I’ll only be able to tell him what’s wrong after the hospital is built. He’s not even a builder. He’s a good bricklayer. He’s putting one brick on another for the love of God as they used to build monasteries. So you see I need you,’ Doctor Colin said. The boy’s four toes wriggled impatiently on the cement floor, waiting for the meaningless conversation between the white men to reach a conclusion.

II

Querry wrote in his journal: ‘I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings to do anything for them out of pity.’ He carefully recalled the scar on the immature breast and the four toes, but he was unmoved; an accumulation of pinpricks cannot amount to the sensation of pain. A storm was on the way, and the flying ants swarmed into the room, striking against the light until he shut the window. Then they fell on the cement floor and lost their wings and ran this way and that as though they were confused at finding themselves so suddenly creatures of earth not air. With the window closed the wet heat increased and he had to put blotting paper under his wrist to catch the sweat.

He wrote, in an attempt to make clear his motives to Doctor Colin:

A vocation is an act of love: it is not a professional career. When desire is dead one cannot continue to make love. I’ve come to the end of desire and to the end of a vocation. Don’t try to bind me in a loveless marriage and to make me imitate what I used to perform with passion. And don’t talk to me like a priest about my duty. A talent – we used to learn that lesson as children in scripture lessons – should not be buried when it still has purchasing power, but when the currency has changed and the image has been superseded and no value is left in the coin but the weight of a wafer of silver, a man has every right to hide it. Obsolete coins, like corn, have always been found in graves.

The notes were rough and disjointed: he had no talent to organize his thought in words. He ended:

What I have built, I have always built for myself, not for the glory of God or the pleasure of a purchaser. Don’t talk to me of human beings. Human beings are not my country. And haven’t I offered anyway to wash their filthy bandages?

He tore the pages out and sent them by Deo Gratias to Doctor Colin. At the end a half-sentence had been thrust out into the void – ‘I will do anything for you in reason, but don’t ask me to try to revive . . .’ like a plank from a ship’s deck off which a victim has been thrust.

Doctor Colin came to his room later and tossed the letter, crumpled into a paper ball, on to his table. ‘Scruples,’ the doctor said impatiently. ‘Just scruples.’

‘I tried to explain . . .’

‘Who cares?’ the doctor said, and that question ‘Who cares?’ went echoing obsessively on in Querry’s brain like a line of verse learnt in adolescence.

He had a dream that night from which he woke in terror. He was walking down a long railway-track, in the dark, in a cold country. He was hurrying because he had to reach a priest and explain to him that, in spite of the clothes he was wearing, he was a priest also and he must make his confession and obtain wine with which to celebrate Mass. He was under orders of some kind from a superior. He had to say his Mass now that night. Tomorrow would be too late. He would lose his chance forever. He came to a village and left the railway-track (the small station was shuttered and deserted: perhaps the whole branch line had been closed long since by the authorities) and presently found himself outside the priest’s door, heavy and medieval, studded with great nails the size of Roman coins. He rang and was admitted. A lot of chattering pious women surrounded the priest, but he was friendly and accessible in spite of them. Querry said, ‘I must see you at once, alone. There is something I have to tell you,’ and already he began to feel the enormous relief and security of his confession. He was nearly home again. The priest took him aside into a little room where a decanter of wine stood on a table, but before he had time to speak the holy women came billowing in through the curtain after them, full of little pious jests and whimsicalities. ‘But we must be alone,’ Querry cried, ‘I have to speak to you,’ and the priest pushed the women back through the curtain, and they swayed for a moment to and fro like clothes on hangers in a cupboard. All the same the two of them were sufficiently alone now for him to speak, and with his eyes on the wine he was able at last really to begin. ‘Father . . .’ but at that moment, when he was about to lose the burden of his fear and responsibility, a second priest entered the room and taking the father on one side began to explain to him how he had run short of wine and had come to borrow his, and still talking he picked up the decanter from the table. Then Querry broke down. It was as though he had had an appointment with hope at this turn of the road and had arrived just too late. He let out a cry like that of an animal in pain and woke. It was raining hard on all the tin roofs, and when the lightning flashed he could see the small white cell that his mosquito-net made, the size of a coffin, and in one of the leper-houses near by a quarrel had begun between a man and a woman. He thought, ‘I was too late,’ and an obsessional phrase bobbed up again, like a cork attached to some invisible fishing-net below the water, ‘Who cares?’ ‘Who cares?’

When the morning came at last he went to the carpenter in the leproserie and showed him how to make the kind of desk and drawing-board that he required, and only when that was done did he seek out Doctor Colin to tell him of his decision.

‘I am glad,’ Doctor Colin said, ‘for you.’

‘Why for me?’

‘I know nothing about you,’ Doctor Colin said, ‘but we are all made much the same way. You have been trying an impossible experiment. A man can’t live with nothing but himself.’

‘Oh yes, he can.’

‘Sooner or later he would kill himself.’

‘If he had enough interest,’ Querry replied.

CHAPTER 4

I

After two months a measure of natural confidence had grown between Querry and Deo Gratias. At first it was based only on the man’s disabilities. Querry was not angry with him when he spilt water; he kept his temper when one of his drawings was smeared by ink from a broken bottle. It takes a long time to learn even the simplest tasks without fingers and toes, and in any case a man who cares for nothing finds it difficult – or absurd – to be angry. There was one occasion when the crucifix which the fathers had left hanging on Querry’s wall was broken by some maladroitness on the part of the mutilated man and he expected Querry to react as he might have reacted himself if a fetish of his own had been carelessly or heartlessly destroyed. It was easy for him to mistake indifference for sympathy.

One night when the moon was full Querry became aware of the man’s absence as one might become aware of some hitherto unnoticed object missing from a mantelpiece in a temporary home. His ewer had not been filled and the mosquito-net had not been drawn down, and later, as he was on his way to the doctor’s house, where he had to discuss a possible cut in the cost of building, he met Deo Gratias stumbling with his staff down the central road of the leproserie as quickly as he was able on toeless feet. The man’s face was wet with sweat and when Querry spoke to him he swerved away into someone’s backyard. When Querry returned half an hour later he stood there still, like a tree-stump that the owner had not bothered to move. The sweat looked like traces of the night’s rain on the bark and he appeared to be listening to something a long way off. Querry listened too, but he could hear nothing except the rattle of the crickets and the swelling diapason of the frogs. In the morning Deo Gratias had not returned, and Querry felt an unimportant disappointment that the servant had not spoken a word to him before he left. He told the doctor that the boy had gone. ‘If he doesn’t come back tomorrow will you find me another?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘I only gave him the job so that he might stay in the leproserie. He had no wish to go.’ Later that day a leper picked up the man’s staff from a path that led into the thickest bush, and brought it to Querry’s room where he was at work, taking advantage of the last light.

‘But how do you know that the staff is his? All the mutilated lepers have them,’ Querry asked and the man simply repeated that it belonged to Deo Gratias – no argument, no reason, just one more of the things they knew that he knew nothing about.

‘You think some accident has happened to him?’

Something, the man said in his poor French, had happened, and Querry got the impression that an accident was what the man feared least of all.

‘Why don’t you go and look for him then?’ Querry asked.

There was not enough light left, the man said, under the trees. They would have to wait till morning.

‘But he’s been gone already nearly twenty-four hours. If there has been an accident we have waited long enough. You can take my torch.’

The morning would be better, the man repeated, and Querry saw that he was scared.

‘If I go with you, will you come?’

The man shook his head, so Querry went alone.

He could not blame these people for their fears: a man had to believe in nothing if he was not to be afraid of the big bush at night. There was little in the forest to appeal to the romantic. It was completely empty. It had never been humanized, like the woods of Europe, with witches and charcoal-burners and cottages of marzipan; no one had ever walked under these trees lamenting lost love, nor had anyone listened to the silence and communed like a lake-poet with his heart. For there was no silence; if a man here wished to be heard at night he had to raise his voice to counter the continuous chatter of the insects as in some monstrous factory where thousands of sewing-machines were being driven against time by myriads of needy seamstresses. Only for an hour or so, in the midday heat, silence fell, the siesta of the insect.

But if, like these Africans, one believed in some kind of divine being, wasn’t it just as possible for a god to exist in this empty region as in the empty spaces of the sky where men had once located him? These woody spaces would remain unexplored, it seemed likely now, for longer than the planets. The craters of the moon were already better known than the forest at the door that one could enter any day on foot. The sharp sour smell of chlorophyl from rotting vegetation and swamp-water fell like a dentist’s mask over Querry’s face.

It was a stupid errand. He was no hunter. He had been bred in a city. He couldn’t possibly hope to discover a human track even in daylight, and he had accepted too easily the evidence of the staff. Shining his torch on this side and that he elicited only stray gleams and flashes among the foliage which might have been the reflection of eyes, but were more probably little pools of rainwater caught in the curls of the leaves. He must have been walking now for half an hour, and he had probably covered a mile along the narrow path. Once his finger slipped on the trigger of the torch and in the moment of darkness he walked off the twisting path slap into the forest-wall. He thought: I have no reason to believe that my battery will see me home. He continued to digest the thought as he walked farther in. He had said to Doctor Colin to explain the reason for his stay, ‘the boat goes no farther’, but it is always possible to go a little deeper on one’s own feet. He called ‘Deo Gratias! Deo Gratias!’ above the noise of the insects, but the absurd name which sounded like an invocation in a church received no response.