An Imperfect Lens (2 page)

2

IT WAS LATE WINTER, in Paris.

The famous scientist Louis Pasteur received in his laboratory at the École Normale a package of papers from the Academy of Science. It contained, among the thick sheets now spread out on his desk, this report from October 1831 in the
Sunderland Herald,
based on the report of two English doctors, Barry and Russell, who had seen for themselves the ravages of the disease in St. Petersburg. He read:

Early symptoms are giddiness, sick stomach, slow pulse and cramp
at the tops of fingers and toes. This is followed by vomiting or purging
of a liquid like rice-water . . . the face becomes sharp and shrunken,
the eyes sink and look wild, the lips, face, neck, hands and feet, and
the whole surface of the body is a leaden blue, purple, black. The
tongue is always moist, often white and loaded but flabby and chilled
like a piece of dead flesh. The respiration is often quick but irregular.
Urine is stopped. All means to restore the warmth of the body should be
tried without delay. Poultices of mustard to the stomach. Twenty to
forty drops of laudanum may be given. No remedy of this disease has
been discovered, nor has any cure been sufficiently successful to recommend its use, but the greatest confidence may be expressed in the intelligence and enthusiasm of the doctors of this country, who will surely
find a method of cure.

Cholera was bred in water, dirty water, water with feces, water with urine, water with sweat, water with tears, water with blood and mucus floating in it. Cholera was fond of sewage and clung to the lumps of obscure matter that floated and sank, that rose and bobbed with the flow of the thing, invisible to the human eye. Cholera was a water baby, a water flower. It hid in the water. It fed in the water. It bred in the water. Its brief days were wet and its purpose, to make more of itself, fulfilled in streams of water, in bubbles of water, in droplets of water, in foam and mud. It clung to moisture as naturally as man clings to air.

The Germans read the news in their papers. The doctors in Berlin and Hamburg are uneasy. They gather old journals published by the Academy of Science in London. At the university in Vienna they hold a conference. It is well attended. Prominent scientists from Brussels and Amsterdam give papers on the known treatment for afflicted patients. Methods are compared. Opiates such as laudanum, hot water, tonics, brandy, calomel, salines, and wrapping the body in blankets, all are found wanting. Theories are offered: it is the uncleanliness of the poor that brings the disease; it is the wrath of God against the sins of man; it is the result of foreign traders and their spices and silks. All over Europe, letters are written to relatives who live in the countryside, suggesting a possible visit by wives and children in the coming months. In the end there is nothing to do but wait. Dr. Robert Koch, the scientist who had been a country doctor until he had made his reputation by discovering the tuberculosis bacterium, was on his way to Alexandria to find the cause of cholera.

PASTEUR WAS SITTING in his worn patched green velvet chair, the one he preferred over all others. A piglet, the runt of the litter, was curled in his lap. Pasteur cradled the small animal in the crook of his arm and stroked the small snout with his good hand. The animal was making snuffling noises of contentment. The letter Pasteur was writing to the Minister of Health was open on the desk before him. He was requesting funds to send a mission to Alexandria. The cholera microbe would be found. The glory should belong to France. It should belong to France’s premier scientist and his lab. Pasteur stared at his page.

Pasteur was old now. When he woke in the morning his knees were stiff and his eyes blurred. He was afraid of dying in Egypt, away from his wife and his daughters. He would send Emile Roux and Louis Thuillier. He had already written this to the minister. Thuillier was young, but he had proved that he would work hard, that he was loyal, that he had the imagination to do the unexpected, to look again at the obvious and see something else. He had worked at Pasteur’s side as they injected cows with anthrax, bored into the brains of the resulting carcasses in Hungary, in Alsace. Emile was already making a name for himself in Paris. He was thorough, imaginative, and passionate about his work. Pasteur intended to appoint Edmond Nocard as the third member of the mission. They would have to use animals, and Nocard knew how to do this with as little pain to the beasts as possible. He was a veterinarian. He was swift and accurate. Pasteur himself did not have the courage to cut into an animal’s skull. It made him weep to watch it done. He would send Nocard to Alexandria, stout, near-sighted, loud Edmond, whose laugh came from deep in his throat and exploded out into the air. If he could raise the money he would send his laboratory boy, Marcus, along with the others. Marcus would be useful in making arrangements, providing food, and carrying things. The ministry did not want to provide funds for Nocard and Marcus. They informed Pasteur of this in a letter. He immediately sent off a fierce response and wrote to other members of the Academy of Science, including his old friend Duclaux, the head of the academy, asking help in explaining the necessity of a full team for this mission. He called on old friends in government. He urged the Chancellor of the Treasury to support the reputation of France in this matter. He mentioned the tragic consequences of German triumphs in the race for knowledge. The ministry gave in.

CHOLERA WAS BORN in India. Pasteur himself knew the names of India’s gods, Krishna, Vishnu, the elephant god Ganesh. He knew it was hot in Bombay and there were beggars on the streets and the English stayed in their clubs and played croquet while native servants bowed before them and brought them tea on silver trays. Its major river was the Ganges. The Ganges merged with the Yamuna at the city of Allahabad, and naked Hindus at festival times bathed in the waters, large numbers of them pressing down to the shore. While Pasteur was extremely curious about the chemistry of chlorides and acids, he was less curious about the customs of India.

The Ganges and the Yamuna, brown and muddy at the shallow shore, dark and swift at the center, flowed out of the snow-tipped Himalayas across the great plains of northern India and into the primal oceans. The gods lived in those mountains, reaching their long arms up to the sky and sliding into the crevices of the darkest, sharpest rocks. Long ago the gods and demons churned the waters, grabbing treasures from their depths, but there was a fight, a terrible booming clash between the demons, naked but for the red and green turbans that streamed after them through the air, a fight for the final bounty, the coveted
kumbh,
a pitcher holding the sweet-tasting liquid of a most-desired, ever-elusive immortality. In the chase toward the heights of the Himalayas, some of the elixer spilled into the Ganges, some onto nearby cities, marking them instantly as holy, holy places for pilgrimage, riverbanks from which ordinary men and women would plunge, following swamis, gurus, wise men and their disciples, all seeking renewal in a bath of sacred water, shocking the skin, leaving teeth chattering and heart uplifted. Dogs and cows and monkeys waded in the water. Also sewage of the towns and the villages seeped over the shores of the river bank—foul, lumpy, swirling down with the currents, turning blue water brown and brown water to the color of tar. So was Immortality forced to keep humble company.

In the running waters of the Ganges a small vibrio microbe swam, pulsing forward by contracting and expanding its spongy form, thrashing its long, always unseen thread of a tail. Another treasure whirled into existence by the gods at the beginning of time or at a time when no man had memory, before man, when the dark and crawling things, swimming and eating undisturbed by floating net or knifing boat keel, or by five-fingered hand, multiplied and divided and consumed what they needed to consume. These were crescent-shaped creatures, millions of new moons invisible to the naked human eye. In their time they would become travelers, hitchhikers on merchant ships carrying satins and silks, wood and spices, clay vessels, beads, seeds, slaves. They were stowaways on water barrels, on cracks in hands and feet, thriving in the dark planks of wood damp with river smell, breeding everywhere in droplets of water, bubbles of organic proteins, tiny sacks of floating scythes, so small a foot couldn’t crush them, but carrying in their ooze neither eternal life nor holy peace, but quick death, bowels spilling, blood vessels leaking, cracking: Cholera.

Louis Pasteur took down a heavy book from his shelves. It was Macnamara’s
History of Asiatic Cholera,
published some twelve years before in London and already a classic. He read:

The people of Lower Bengal had for a long time past worshiped the
goddess of cholera, it appearing that a female while wandering alone in
the woods met with a large stone, the symbol of the goddess of cholera.
The worship of the deity through this stone was according to the prevailing ideas of the Hindoos the only means of preservation from the influence of this terrible disease. The fame of the goddess spread and people
flocked from all parts of the country to come and pray at her shrine in
Calcutta. There was in a temple at Gujurat in Western India a monolith
dating back to the time of Alexander the Great, the inscription of which
said, “the lips blue, the face haggard, the eyes hollow, the stomach sunk
in, the limbs contracted and crumpled as if by fire, those are the signs of
the great illness which is invoked by a malediction of the priests, that
comes down to slay the brave.” Hippocrates described the diarrhea
death. He had seen it on the ships entering the Grecian ports. He had
examined the liquid ooze that flowed from the bodies of the victims and
seen flakes of mucus in their bowels. In the Sanskrit writings found on
tablets in the buried city of Hemoltius by the upper branches of the Nile
there was a description of the devastation caused by the same plague. In
1563 a Portuguese physician at Goa, Garcia del Huerto, wrote down his
experiences throughout the epidemic which lasted half a year as it paralyzed the city, emptying the fruit stalls, closing the orphanages, leaving
no one alive in the monastery on the hill until almost every household
mourned and the dead were carted away and burned in large fires whose
flames leapt up at the sky month after month and the smallest breeze
brought in from the far edges of town the odor of the burning flesh.

Unnamed, unseen, this tiny life, a curved shape with a waving tail, floated in the rivers where the great gods had splashed, drifted by rocks on which the women were beating the sheets, cleaning them of the stains of love and reproduction, blood and saliva, mucus, pus, fecal trace, bronchial clots. The beings had no poetry of their own, no myths sustained them on their way, but still they thrived on the bellies of fish and hid in the crevices of crabs where legs bent and claws opened and there they multiplied in the algae bunched together swiftly drifting in the currents, down to the sea. What was the purpose of this vibrio, what was its place in the master plan, if there was a master plan? Did it serve Satan in its meanderings, or was it simply a thing in itself, striving to continue, containing no memory, but blessed with a ferocity greater than the great tiger’s, greater than the force of a waterfall, greater than the thunder in the sky, a ferocity focused on its own journey? Was this vibrio simply another one of nature’s temper tantrums against humanity?

In Bengal as well as in the poor farm villages, all unknowing, sometimes people would sicken and quickly die from the comma-shaped form that floated in their waters, traveled in afflicted intestines, stayed in their streets waiting for a cleansing rain, hid in the folds of cloth, survived in the excrement of children. From time to time, at their own pleasure—uninvited, unwelcome—the not-yet-seen, not-yet-imagined, not-yet-named, crescent-shaped, mindless but hardly helpless organisms traveled long distances and arrived at the door of Europe, the port of Venice, or cruised up the Nile on ships bringing bolts of cloth or pots of clay or baskets of cardamom, curry, cumin, and entered the stone patios of merchants, hiding in palm-tree-planted gardens as well as in shacks and drainage ditches and irrigation canals, surviving in the warm armpits of slaves chained to the beams of rocking ships, out of Africa and into Arabia, where pilgrims to Mecca took it back to their wives and children. They, multitudes, more than the stars, more than the grains of sand on the beach, crossed long heaving oceans to the docks of New Amsterdam, the streets of Moscow, the alleys of London, serving up carcasses for the cemeteries of Paris, while en route to the ports of Japan and China.