Take Me to Paris, Johnny Read online

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said to Ann. ‘I didn’t expect to see this room again.’

  The night nurse welcomed him back. ‘Did you have a good evening?’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Fantastic.’ I undressed him and helped him into bed, and they came in with the drip which was several hours overdue.

  Having regained a toehold in the outside world, he was eager to keep it, though he conceded now the need for a wheelchair. Whenever the weather permitted we went out in the afternoon, enjoying the dappled light under the elms in Royal Parade. From time to time he asked me to stop, to feel the breeze on his face, to watch a tram, to contemplate the students coming out from their classes in the Spanish mission-style conservatorium across the road. At the first corner we turned left by the high school to avoid crossing the gutter, then down the long row of poplars and beneath the high wall of the veterinary institute where he had wanted me to send the sick chooks. At the bottom of this path, where the pavement became rougher, he would invariably begin to protest, whether from the pain in his seat, or the fear of fouling himself, or the sheer cussed delight of asserting himself I could never decide. We covered the last stretch in a hurry. Safely back in the hospital foyer, taking care to avoid the Spanish-speaking woman at the reception desk, he would order a milkshake with a fine disregard for the inevitable consequences.

  Then there was another opportunity for an outing. It was the day of the parish fete, a quaintly Edwardian occasion that has survived into the nuclear end of the century because people cannot resist a bargain or a pot of home-made jam. This year, unusually, it was being held in Lent, a breach of tradition that must have meant the parish was once again strapped for cash. In that case, it should have appreciated our custom, because Juan was in the mood to buy. After a couple of hours, which was as long as he could endure the discomfort of the wheelchair, we were back in the hospital with two dozen jars of preserves. For the nurses, he said, counting them off and matching them up with their jars: Lily, Angie, Lisa, Jackie, Bronwyn, Val, Arlene. Strawberry for Lily, he decided, because she was getting married, and marmalade for Angie because she was Scotch. And red plum for the one with the ruby lips.

  He wasn’t always so generous in distributing largesse. Occasionally he was vehemently, irrationally possessive. Like the time when Mario wandered into his room and helped himself to a fistful of plums from the basket of fruit on his table. It made no difference that Mario was demented and drifted around the hospital with a sign on the back of his pyjamas that said, ‘If found, please return to Ward 5 North.’ I heard Juan bellow from the end of the corridor, and by the time the nurse had removed the offending Mario and pointed him in another direction, Juan was in tears. ‘He’s stolen my plums,’ he said, and the whole misery of his defencelessness flooded over him.

  Jam. Plums. Food. We were never far from the subject of food. Together, we still went through the morning ritual of ticking off choices on the hospital menu of lunches and dinners that he would not eat. Nor would he drink the Survimed, a complete food preparation that came like a soup-mix in little granules and two flavours, banana and oxtail. Out of deference to my efforts he would still struggle with some rice and chicken in the evening. Otherwise, by the time we entered the eighth week, he was surviving only on fruit. He had an insatiable desire for mangoes, the fat orange and green ones, until the season ended, and then the creamy-coloured thin ones that came with little gold stickers from the Philippines. And custard apples. When he first came in, he had been able to spit the pips across the room and hit the wall, and once he had scored a bullseye when he hit Nureyev in the crotch. Now he simply dribbled them on to a sheet of newspaper that I spread across the bed, and when he was finished I had to wipe the juice from his chin.

  He was going down fast. Low thirties now. As the textbook had predicted, the shigella came back, and they started their colour count again. He was still on the drip, though whether it was doing any good, whether it had ever done any good, I never knew. The question was academic. He was dying.

  There are books about death and dying. I hadn’t read them. But I did have a vague sense that death was a process that one was supposed to talk about, to address, to work through. There were stages I was supposed to recognise and respond to. Yet since the day when I had broken the news in the bathroom, we had not mentioned the word. Juan alluded to it once or twice, indirectly.

  ‘What will I do with my things?’ he asked me one evening, and as so often the question seemed to surface out of nowhere.

  ‘You’ll have to think about that,’ I replied, and my answer was swallowed up in his silence.

  And then, most cruelly, in a way that I found unbearable, he was assaulted, battered with the idea of death. Not death in general, not as an abstract principle or a spiritual reality, but death as a victim of AIDS. In the weeks that he had been lying in hospital, Ms Ita Buttrose and her colleagues at the National Advisory Council on AIDS had been preparing a campaign to alert the general public to the gravity of the epidemic. There were 442 cases of AIDS in the country; 238 deaths were already recorded. They needed an approach that would shock, that would stop people in their tracks. ‘We want to make it explicitly clear that AIDS has the potential to kill more Australians than World War Two,’ Ms Buttrose announced. So they hired an advertising agency and unleashed the Grim Reaper on the television screens of the nation.

  It would run for only two weeks, they said. But what comfort was that if they were the last two weeks you would spend on this earth; and when you were struggling to make sense of what was happening to you they confronted you with this fantastic cowled creature, socket-eyed and scythe-swinging, knocking down its victims like pins in a bowling alley? No mercy, was the message; violent, impersonal, death as a complete wipe-out.

  The first time we saw it, I felt ambushed, stunned. The second time I got up to switch the channel, but Juan said, ‘No, no. Leave it. It won’t take long.’ It was, after all, only the TV, and he hadn’t spent all those hours, thousands of them, watching TV without knowing how it produced its effects. He knew that AIDS was not like that. And as for dying—well, we would see.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Enter with riches. Let your image wear

  brocade of fantasy.

  —Denise Levertov, ‘To Death’

  On the eighth day of the Grim Reaper, into the second week of the AIDS campaign, it was Palm Sunday. And the surprising fact was that the approach of this festival absorbed him more, far more than the neo-baroque chamber of horrors that Ms Buttrose and her team had sponsored on the TV screen. It is difficult to know what attracted him so powerfully to that day. It may have been the crowds, the crowds that would be in church, and the ancient crowds of Jerusalem, hosanna-ing and waving their palm branches, not so very different, perhaps, from the crowds that Fidel had gathered in his wake when he swept into Havana, except that Fidel did not come on a donkey.

  ‘You have been there, haven’t you, Johnny?’ he said, and I recalled for him again the memory of my visit to Israel, and how I had walked down the Mount of Olives and followed the procession of palms through the city gate and into the courtyard of the Latin Patriach.

  ‘Tell Jim,’ he said to me, ‘that I will be in church for the palms.’

  The measure of his eagerness was such that, when I arrived at the hospital that morning, he had long since been ready. He had organised the nurses to complete their work with the drip and to pack a day’s supply of pills and boxes of Kleenex and an emergency bedpan, and he had commandeered the best wheelchair on the ward and had it stationed by his bed overnight. While we waited for the car to collect us, I fetched a bowl of warm water and shaved him, holding his head steady with my left hand, and with the other trying to work the razor into the deep recesses of his cheeks. He subdued his impatience for a few moments and was pleased enough with my attempts, but his whole attention was directed toward the strenuous effort of the day ahead.

  The ceremonies were already under way when we entered the c
hurch. The air was heavy with incense and singing; and behind and around the priests as they processed waved the palms—fan palms, wine palms, date palms and any other palms that could be procured for the occasion, stripped from gardens and purloined from railway sidings, decorated with roses and festooned with red and purple ribbons, palms sanctified now to the celebration of impending death. After the antiseptic whiteness of the hospital, the spectacle caught him up with peculiar force. As I wheeled him down the aisle beneath the arches of palms to a place at the front, he burst into tears, and hardly appeared to notice that there was a photographer present, and a reporter, as we learned later, from the Times on Sunday.

  The Mass began. From the steps of the sanctuary they solemnly narrated the gospel of the Passion from red books with gold crosses on the covers, and when they came to the end a small boy in the pew behind us said to his mother, ‘What is wrong with that man?’ ‘He’s very sick,’ she replied, which apparently sufficed as an explanation.

  Then they were praying: for the church, for the world, for the sick. The sick were surprisingly numerous. However, by virtue of their infirmity they were understandably absent, so that the roll call of their names proceeded without interruption. But Juan Céspedes was there, and when his name was read, he responded quite audibly with a prayer of his own. ‘Take away this pain,’ he said; and if anyone glanced across at his wheelchair they would have seen that his head was bowed, as if in prayer, but equally because his neck could no longer hold it upright.

  When the people had received communion and the priests were performing their concluding rites, there was a tap on my shoulder from the boy’s mother. I turned around, and the boy passed across the pew a drawing of a man on a donkey and palm trees with blue fronds under an orange sun. ‘It’s for the sick man,’ he said.

  And the last hymn, with its confident, world-conquering Victorian piety, was that also for the sick man?

  Ride on, ride on in majesty

  In lowly pomp ride on to die.

  I looked down at Juan. His feet had slipped off the footrest of the wheelchair and were splayed uncomfortably on the floor, but he was singing.

  Bow thy meek head in mortal pain…

  So, with his palm cross tucked into the breast pocket of his white Italian dressing gown, he entered the holy week preceding the death of God.

  Outside the church we were introduced to the reporter. He had been commissioned by his paper, which must already have been in a state of terminal decline, to write a feature article on ‘What People Are Doing at Easter’. He needed to do some interviews, and our friend Judith, who could improvise a party out of thin air and a flagon of red wine, announced that he should do these over a lunch at her gallery. The photographer should come too. In fact, there was a more or less general invitation.

  ‘You will come too, won’t you, Juan?’ And he said, ‘Of course.’

  It was in the gallery, in the midst of chatter about Easter and employment conditions at the Times on Sunday and the futility (or otherwise) of the peace march they would join in the afternoon and the necessity (or otherwise) of unilateral disarmament, it was here that Juan finally took his leave of Hiram. He had not been in touch with him for more than a year, and the remembrance of him now was prompted by the sight of a dish of pickled herrings.

  ‘Jewish food,’ he commented. ‘Hiram eats these.’

  And so, although he had always despised sour pickles, he asked for a piece of herring and nibbled it in a final communion with La Negra. But Jewish food no more agreed with his stomach than did Christian, and we had to stop the dog from licking up the pile of regurgitated fish on the floor.

  The reporter made notes, which duly appeared in the paper at Easter, along with accounts from the Lakemba mosque and other centres of devotion across the country. At North Melbourne, the article said, they were high church without being high camp or highbrow. Father Brady, ‘easy-going, slightly eccentric and politically left-wing’, led an eccentric flock. This included the perennial Liberal candidate for the safe Labor seat of Melbourne, and Judith who ran the gallery, and a woman called Linda who would be camping in the bush with her family at Easter, ‘making altars out of stumps and things like that’. And then there was Juan. ‘Last Sunday, the friends of another member of the congregation, Juan Céspedes, were far less sure what he would be doing at Easter. They were not sure he would be alive. AIDS has ravaged his emaciated body and he can only attend church in a wheelchair.’ It was accurate as far as it went, though I could never fathom why people were so impressed with the wheelchair. I wished they had written he was sick as a dog, but still elegant in his high-fashion bathrobe.

  Early in the afternoon, when the luncheon party marched off with their peace palms, Juan and I came home. The cats poked their heads round the living room door, a bit sniffily, I thought, for such a momentous occasion. I had put a vase of red gladdies on the table because he had told me once that these were his mother’s favourite flower.

  ‘My mother’s favourite flower,’ he said, acknowledging my gesture. Otherwise he was pleased to see that nothing in the apartment had changed in the nine weeks that he had been away. That was sufficient. He had seen enough and he was suddenly tired, anxious to return to the hospital. As we were leaving, and Ann and Jim came into the garden to farewell him, it occurred to me that we had forgotten the bag of pills that was still sitting unopened on the living room table. Should I fetch them? ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken enough pills. Throw them out.’

  Monday

  He was still asleep when I arrived on Monday morning with the bowl of strawberries that he wanted for his breakfast. The room looked different. Before I had left him the night before, he had asked me to take down the poster of Nureyev. When Val had brought it in as a present he had been delighted by her thoughtfulness. Now though, after weeks of gazing at that peerless athleticism, he found the image unbearable.

  ‘Take him down,’ he said. ‘He’s odious.’

  The removal of Nureyev seemed to have been the signal for a wholesale reorganisation of the room. Some time during the night they had moved the bed, swinging it around by an angle of ninety degrees so that it faced towards the window and the western sun. Over the head of the bed, where it partly obscured the BLOOD PRECAUTIONS sign, one of the nurses had tied the palm cross which was bound with a bunch of French lavender he had been given at the gallery. It was as though they had set the stage for the final act.

  Something about his sleeping disturbed me. He was definitely asleep: yet his eyes were half open, but glazed, not seeing, and then he seemed to be speaking, or trying to speak, in a thick voice as though his mouth were nothing but tongue. And then, quite distinctly, I caught the word ‘Mamá!’

  Mamá! Was he back in Guantánamo, on the poor street where the long row of white houses closed their shutters against the summer heat? Or was he responding to those firece, embracing letters from his mother that he half feared to open, and that scorched and seared him with self-reproach and guilt? ‘I hardly remember your face,’ she had written, ‘but I hope to embrace you before I die.’ ‘Write to me but do not tell me lies. I want to know the truth of your life.’ ‘Do you still love me now that Rafael is big?’

  Rafi! That was the second name he called out, brightly, eagerly. Since he had heard that Rafi was in Germany, he had hoped it might be possible to meet him there, in Berlin, where he would cross through the Wall with a brand-new American passport, thumbing his nose at the Communist guards. And on the other side there would be Rafi, with his muscles and his darker skin, so that you might have wondered whether they shared the same father. Or was it just that Rafi looked more like his grandmother who was very black, and who had long since gone to her rest and was buried in the cemetery on the edge of the town where the locas used to make out with their men, and where there were white marble angels that had been erected before the Revolution.

  Then he muttered a third name. ‘María!’ I was sure he called María: but who was she? I ran throu
gh the list of nurses in my mind. There was no María, but there was Arlene, thank God, who now appeared with her usual cheerful bustle to assure me that, if he had not come round yet, it was because he’d taken an extra sleeping pill.

  It must have been an hour or so before there was any further sign of life. Suddenly, very suddenly, his eyes shot open with the startled-rabbit look that always made me want to laugh.

  ‘Am I dead?’ he asked. It was not an unreasonable question. After all, how should one know that one is dead unless the death is certified? At the sound of my voice, he was fully awake.

  ‘Johnny!’ he exclaimed, as though I was the last person he might have expected to be at his bedside. ‘Did you bring the strawberries?’

  Tuesday

  Five days to Easter. What if he died at Easter, I wondered, on the longest of long weekends when even the corner milkbars were closed and certainly, I presumed, the undertakers? What then happened to the dead? Were they lined up in a grisly holiday traffic jam, waiting their turn in an endless queue to enter their six feet of earth? The thought appalled me, and I determined that the funeral arrangements should not be left to chance.

  At the edge of North Melbourne, where the distinct lines of the city merge into the amorphous expanse of the western suburbs, there was a firm of undertakers. They were, as I later discovered, the most expensive practitioners of their trade, and I reflected that Juan might well have disapproved my impulsive engagement of their services. He would have shopped around, found a bargain price, done a deal. But once I was through the smoked-glass doors and marching through the vestibule up to the reception desk, it seemed somehow indecent to calculate the cost.