Take Me to Paris, Johnny Page 14

  He dreamed. One night his grandmother came to him and offered him a mango from the tree in her yard, but when he bit into it, peeling back the smooth skin with his teeth, the flesh was a mass of worms.

  All that month Dr Wall was away on holidays. We received no joy from the young doctor who stood in for him at the clinic. He routinely renewed the prescriptions for Zantac and Imodium as though he were prescribing pills for a headache. But what about the loss of weight? Didn’t he see that this couldn’t go on? Didn’t he recognise an emergency when he saw one? Well, perhaps he did: but Dr Wall would be back in a couple of weeks and this was his responsibility.

  I phoned the alternative doctor and we took a cab across to the tinkling garden. The doctor went through his usual motions and looked grave and sat down at his desk on the far side of the room near the leaded window. Still lying on the couch where he had been examined, Juan raised himself on one elbow. It was time for the evasions, the kindnesses, the determined optimism to come to an end.

  ‘Do I’m dying, doctor?’ he asked.

  The doctor had not been listening. ‘I’m sorry, Juan, what was that?’

  He repeated the question, his voice thick and low. ‘Do I’m dying?’

  Perhaps it was the curious trick of his syntax that distracted the doctor. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t catch what you said.’

  And so for a third time he asked. ‘Do I’m dying?’ The words hung in the air, no more than a whisper.

  The reply was slow in coming. Then, simply, ‘I don’t know Juan. I don’t know.’

  That was the last time we saw the alternative doctor.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As the greatest misery is sickness, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude.

  —John Donne, ‘Devotions’

  Writing out yet another prescription for the hospital pharmacy, Dr Wall was evidently debating with himself.

  ‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘perhaps you should come in so we can do a thorough check.’ On our side of the desk Juan’s hand searched for mine. Relief mingled with fear. ‘Coming in’ meant that we had reached the next stage of the sickness. Yet the doctor talked cautiously, and there were still few signs of that fatal blossoming that clinicians defined as full-blown AIDS, as though the disease were some dark rose with a terrible perfection of its own. Before that appalling ripeness was achieved there was a stage, it was said, that was diagnosed as ARC: and if one had to label it, this was now Juan’s condition. In this evolutionary view of the disease there was still time. That was a comfort. And Dr Wall’s decision was, after all, only a second thought, and the prospect of a stay in hospital, or indeed of any decisive intervention, relieved the helplessness we both had felt in that long summer.

  Going to hospital is like preparing for a long journey, only more solemn. On the Saturday morning before he was due to be admitted, Juan packed his airline travelling bag and despatched me on a shopping trip to the city with a precise list: slippers, four pairs of thick ski socks, three fleecy tracksuits in bright colours in lieu of the odd assortment of singlets and pullovers he normally wore in bed, and a dressing gown—or rather, in his words, a bathrobe. The bathrobe gave his preparations a certain grandeur. He had never possessed one. They had not been regarded as a high priority in revolutionary Cuba, and even in bourgeois societies there were a hundred and one more economical ways of keeping warm between the bed and the bathroom. But if you went to hospital, he imagined, there were certain proprieties to be observed and minimal standards of elegance to be maintained. Happily, he was delighted with the white Italian creation I brought back from Myer’s; so pleased, in fact, that he offered to make a similar one for me. ‘When I come home,’ he said.

  They had promised to call us some time during the weekend, as soon as a bed became available. By Sunday afternoon we had still not heard. I rang the hospital and was answered by a Prussian voice which said that it had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘Please do not waste my time,’ it barked, managing to imply that I was a nuisance caller who specialised in harassing medical angels. ‘You do not appear to realise that I have some very sick patients to attend to.’ Well, I replied, I was very sorry (though not surprised) that his patients were so sick, but I also had a sick and very anxious patient who was waiting to come in. ‘I know nothing about it,’ said the Prussian angel, and hung up.

  Half an hour later a call to the registrar produced a more helpful response. Yes, there was a bed available and Juan should come in when he was ready. The Prussian, who was only a resident, had been ill-informed. Still musing over this unexpected introduction to the arcane hierarchies of the hospital world, we walked down the street in the early evening, and Juan delivered himself as instructed to the care of the charge nurse on Ward 3 North.

  When I arrived at the appointed visiting hour the next afternoon, he was asleep: sedated, I supposed, after the investigation. Slipping into the vinyl chair by the bed, I leafed through the Penguin copy of Thomas Mann’s letters that I had been reading, trying to remember where I had left off. A 1920 reference to Death in Venice caught my attention. The subject of that story, Mann explained to his correspondent, was ‘passion as confusion and as a stripping of dignity—what I originally wanted to deal with was not anything homoerotic at all’. Nevertheless, he had no objection to ‘that emotional tendency’. He did indeed draw the line at ‘repulsively pathological elements’ which ‘may be and frequently are involved’. But when he contemplated the examples of Michelangelo and Frederick the Great and Stefan George, he concluded that there was a ‘good deal of high humanity in the tenderness of mature masculinity for lovelier and frailer masculinity’. Where, I wondered, would I fit into Thomas Mann’s scale of disembodied, sexless manhood? Repulsively pathological? Tenderly mature? And what about that frailer and lovelier piece of masculinity that was still asleep in its canary-yellow tracksuit on the bed beside me? Did frailty exclude maturity? For all his liberal instincts, Thomas Mann on homosexuality, I decided, was a sentimental ass. It occurred to me that he would have found the subject of AIDS irresistible: pathology, passion and youthful death. Savagely and unreasonably, I was glad he was not around to write about it.

  Absentmindedly, I left the book on the bedside table. It was still there in the morning when the ward inspection took place. In ward time, this inspection was the ceremonial high point of the day. Somewhere around mid-morning a procession of doctors formed. Moving from bed to bed, they drew the curtains around their solemn deliberation and then, like priests emerging from the sanctuary, they reappeared, always observing the same order. First came the director of gastroenterology, reserved, formal, moving with all the gravitas that befits the head of a distinguished department. Black, polished shoes, I noticed. Next came Dr Wall, in brown suede. Behind him came the registrar, with blond curls and Scotch College good looks that Juan found decidedly sexy. Then, bringing up the rear, came the Prussian.

  It was not usual for visitors to penetrate the sanctum behind the drawn curtains, but I was there anyway. Not much was said. They were waiting on the results of yesterday’s tests. But the Prussian who was only a resident had to be put through his paces. Juan met his clinical questions with a brevity that might have been interpreted as surliness, and his voice sounded slightly slurred. The Prussian, who had probably boned up on AIDS overnight in the latest textbook, must have suspected a neurological disorder. Getting nowhere with Juan, he turned to me.

  ‘Is he always speaking like this?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, his eye fell on the copy of Thomas Mann’s letters.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Thomas Mann. He is one of our greatest poets. A difficult writer. If he is reading Thomas Mann, then there is no problem.’

  The director’s face remained impassive, and there was no way of knowing how he assessed the literary diagnosis of his resident. But the registrar gave a sexily subversive shrug of his shoulders. And Juan, half turning away from the phalanx of medicos, gave me a long slow wi
nk that broke into a mischievous smile.

  By late afternoon when I returned, he was alert and taking a lively interest in the comings and goings on the ward. The bed in the far corner was now vacant. In the next bed by the door was a businessman with a jaundiced face and a horribly distended stomach. Mid-fifties, Juan reckoned. A trio of junior executives appeared and grouped themselves uneasily around his bed, surreptitiously glancing at their watches, evidently more at home with their office routine than with the embarrassing duty of consoling a dying boss. Mostly his wife sat beside him, expensively silver-haired and navy-suited. Once she spoke to me while we waited for the lift.

  ‘Your friend looks very ill,’ she said. ‘So young.’

  Two days later when they took her husband away and she came to collect his things, she sat for a while with Juan.

  ‘May I give you a goodbye kiss?’ she asked, with that impulsive kindness that grief can release. She kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he replied.

  The fourth bed was occupied by a modest little man to whom fate, or some youthful vulnerability, had attached a thoroughly immodest wife. From her ample exposure in the media I recognised her at once. She was, in fact, a Dame Commander of the British Empire, and such was her capacity to command, it seemed a shame there was so little Empire left to benefit from her talents. From her post by her husband’s bed she issued one salvo of orders after another, more or less indiscriminately, at anyone who strayed into her field of fire. She had begun her distinguished career as a nurse, and in her day they would not have tolerated the slovenly and unprofessional behaviour she encountered in the girls in this hospital.

  ‘To think’, she said, ‘that this place once had a reputation. It’s a disgrace.’

  She glared at Juan, not from any particular concern for him but because that seemed to be the way she regarded the world in general. ‘An absolute disgrace,’ she repeated, demanding the confirmation which Juan obligingly supplied.

  ‘I think so too,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued, whooping with indignation, ‘and they pay my husband no attention whatsoever.’ (Which, I thought, might well have been a relief for the poor man.) ‘He had a hypo in the night and they phoned me at two in the morning and I had to come in all the way from the suburbs and the taxi fare was twenty dollars.’

  In view of his alleged neglect, the little man’s recovery was not far short of miraculous. On the third day of Juan’s stay he was almost ready to leave. But first he would need to be spruced up, said the Dame, who sailed in with her personal hairdresser in tow.

  ‘I’ve brought Kevin in,’ she announced, as though she were introducing a pet parrot. We watched while Kevin set up an improvised salon by the little man’s bed, flouncing and snipping with exaggerated artistry.

  ‘Such a queen!’ said Juan, in a tone that was intended as an aside to me. Instead, his comment carried around the ward. The Dame looked daggers, but Kevin enjoyed the attention and cocked his little finger more archly by way of acknowledgment.

  Next it was Juan’s turn to move. However diverting the society of the ward may have been, occasionally the lack of privacy was also distressing. Twice he missed the emergency pan beside the bed, which left a puddle of reddish diarrhoea on the floor. Apart from the stench, the nurses were worried about the risk of infection, and when the opportunity arose they moved him to a single room on 5 North, a light, white room with a large window that looked west over a single claret ash by the wall of the hospital chapel. It had been a cool, moist summer and the ash, I noticed, was still a lustrous green that was unusual for that time of the year.

  Juan was the first AIDS—or ARC—patient on the ward, and one of the first in the whole hospital. That, and his Peter Pan youthfulness, gave him a special status. ‘And those baby eyes,’ Arlene remembered. Arlene was the charge nurse, genially bossy but anxious too, like most of the nurses, about how she and her team would cope with nursing an AIDS patient. ‘We were a bit irrational for a while in handling it,’ she told me later. ‘Afraid. Afraid of not knowing.’

  Quite apart from the virus, for some of the nurses I was a problem too, as I realised when I encountered one of the students at the corner store.

  ‘Are you finding it difficult?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘of course we have to take special precautions, but it’s not too bad.’ She paused and blushed. ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being homosexual,’ she said. ‘It’s just that, well, I never really knew one before.’

  That their nursing betrayed no sign of their apprehension was due in no small measure to Val. In her capacity as the infection control officer, Val ranged freely through the hospital sniffing out golden staph, inspecting nurses’ fingernails, radiating commonsense and now calming the fear of AIDS. The fear was worst with the food assistants. They may not have seen the sign attached to the head of the bed on which was written in black letters: BLOOD PRECAUTIONS. But they certainly knew the gossip, and it was confirmed by the tell-tale signs of the red plastic bags near the door, bags that contained infectious, high-risk soiled lined. And so, until Val intervened, they dumped his dinner on a table outside the door and left it to go cold.

  Juan was outraged. It was not that he wanted their bland food. In fact, after the first week he refused to touch it and preferred instead that I should prepare his meals and bring them in and eat with him. Was this OK with the staff? I enquired. ‘Certainly,’ they said. ‘Lots of patients with ethnic food requirements do that.’ Ethnic? I was startled to hear it said so matter-of-factly that our food was ethnic, though I could see what they meant. We were different.

  The food assistants learned. In the evenings there was even one who called Juan ‘possum’ and brought the coffee and cakes to his bed with an extra cup for me, which was strictly against the rules. But the TV man, from whom we hired a set for fifteen dollars a week, was incorrigible. Juan kept a twenty-dollar note ready for him in the top drawer of his bed-table, but the man would not enter the room, relying on me to pay him at the door. He was the living embodiment of Juan’s recurring nightmare of isolation, of detachment from human society, and he had to be dealt with.

  ‘Make him come in, Johnny,’ Juan pleaded. So with the bed between me and the door I would hold out the money like a morsel of fish to entice a frightened cat. And like a frightened cat he edged forward and snatched it, retreating to the safe distance of the doorway to produce the five dollars change which he left on a convenient chair.

  Within a few days the room began to assume a homelier, lived-in look. The TV reproduced the familiar sights and sounds of our domestic evenings: the six o’clock news, Sale of the Century, The Colbys and Dynasty, Dallas and the pre-season football. Val produced a poster of a super-athletic Nureyev in full flight which we blu-tacked on the wall. Paul and Tim, just back from their Spanish expedition, brought a tiny pilgrim statue from Compostela which shared pride of place on the bed table with Juan’s own album of studio photos. He had asked me to bring them in to show Arlene and Val, for though he would never say so in so many words, he wanted them to see how once his legs had danced, and how accomplished, how beautiful he once had been.

  And there were flowers, from Rickard, and from the garden. Late summer flowers, worlds removed from the thripped-out, delicate, diaphanous things of spring, flowers that poured their energy into raw tough colour: zinnias and marigolds and ‘Papa Meilland’ roses charged with the warm concentrated perfume of the season. And from Murray, who had just begun to work with a city law firm and was enjoying the delight of having money to spend, there were gerberas from the best florists. Originally they came, I once observed, from South Africa, and yet they were so sunny—like Murray, Juan said—that it was unthinkable to be too political about them.

  ‘Why should the whites have all the best flowers?’ Juan said; so we appropriated them to ourselves—as blacks—and assigned to the whites by way of compensation the whole hideous tribe of the proteas
.

  At the end of the first week Dr Wall had good news to report. Standing with his back to the bank of flowers and beaming like Father Christmas surrounded by a halo of gerberas, he explained that they had identified the cause of the dysentery-like condition as shigella, which could be treated with antibiotics. It was a small victory, he cautioned, but nevertheless, a definite breakthrough. Victories had been hard to come by in the last few months, so this one called for a celebration. That evening, when Dr Wall looked in, he found us dining on lobster and champagne.

  Trying to gauge the extent of this triumph, I looked up shigella in the medical library. It was ‘a genus of entero-bacteriaceae of the family escherichia that invade intestinal epithelial cells and cause bacillary dysentery’. More interestingly, it was named for the Japanese bacteriologist Shiga who, I learned, had worked in Germany with Paul Ehrlich who was the uncle of Hans and Klaus of the Jewish textile family. Juan was pleased with this piece of information, as though it gave him an insider’s advantage over the bacteria. In an odd way, it helped to be able to place them.

  The antibiotics began to do their work, and the evidence was there in the daily record of his faeces: reddish, then less reddish, then brownish and less runny. The tendency was in the right direction, though the descriptions struck me as amateurish, unexpectedly impressionistic, compared with the usual scientific jargon of the doctors. Why didn’t they adopt a standard colour code, or at least something more aesthetically pleasing, like the names in the box of Derwent pencils we had used as children: ochre, raw sienna, burnt umber?

  The medical textbook included another, less welcome piece of information about shigella. In AIDS patients, it said, shigella was often resistant to therapy and tended to return after treatment. As Dr Wall had warned us, the improvement was only a small victory, a temporary respite. How long was temporary? And how energetically would Dr Shiga’s bacteria reassert themselves? One question gave rise to another, obsessively. What about the weight loss? He was down now below forty kilograms. Would the antibiotics stop that? And what else could we expect? If this was not yet full-blown AIDS, what new horrors were lurking down the track? And how long would he have to stay in hospital, and how many bunches of gerberas would we need? And what if he came home in this weakened condition, barely able now to walk to the end of the corridor? The teaching year at the University was about to begin, and then how could I manage to be in two places at once? Compassionate leave? But did the University give leave to the partners of gay men, or was that something reserved for proper marriages? And the Immigration Department? What if they should now discover his condition and then, after twelve months of silence, decide that he was not eligible for permanent residence after all? The frenzy of questions exhausted me. I wished I could accept Dr Wall’s advice, as Juan seemed to be doing, and take things step by step.