The miracle would have been if those arrogant fools with the fate of the country in their hands had listened in time to the voices of the experts. Now it was too late.
The reality was that all manner of instructions could be given, but people needed to eat and they needed supplies. Some considered feeding the soul as important as feeding the body, so they, too, disregarded the order to not attend Mass. Father Pedro himself had refused to accept that the illness was capable of entering the church, much less spread and grow during the sacred ceremony. But this disease did not respect holy places, rituals, or people, as the pig-headed and dead Father Pedro must now know, wherever he was.
Nor did the disease respect medical personnel. The town’s already limited hospital, founded by the ladies of high society, had closed its doors after the death or desertion of its nurses and the rest of its staff. Now Linares’s doctors and any surviving medical staff who dared do so roamed the town, like Cantú, visiting houses where they were not welcome.
As he crisscrossed the town between one tragic visit and another, for the first time, the doctor dared to ask for a miracle, believing only such a wonder could save Linares.
He was not expecting a reply, let alone an immediate one, when he came across a group of people walking in a hurry. They were going together to see the miracle of a Lazarus, they told him. God’s honest truth, Doctor. He expired, and now he’s back from the grave with messages from the dead for the living, they told him.
Dr. Cantú was used to the extravagances of these simple people. Often—most of the time—they turned something ordinary into something extraordinary, and elaborated on the simplest explanations so much that they ended up confusing rather than clarifying the point they were trying to make.
He had always devoted some of his consultation time to people who could not afford to pay, who proudly traded homemade cheese or a dozen eggs for an appointment and a remedy. Hardworking people who rose at dawn and had not a moment’s rest until nightfall. Anyone would have thought, therefore, that when they spoke they would get straight to the point and be sparing with words, but no: much of the time he spent with them was wasted on trying to understand the convoluted descriptions of symptoms given by the patients themselves or by their mothers, who sometimes required more attention than the patients. In addition to doctor, he had to be translator, linguist, and fortune-teller.
This was the case of a mother of two, a widow since the day before, whom he had just visited:
“Ay, Doc. This flu sure has hit everyone in the house hard—there’s no one fit to mend the others. We’re all sick, Doc! My old man didn’t have time to say a word. One second he was there, and the next he was God knows where. Even I can feel it coming on, and there won’t be no shakin’ it. And now this lad’s got some rashes which’re comin’ out like rashes, but they’re bumps, or who knows what they are? And he’s got little bumps on his weenie as well and on his little nuts and butt cheeks, where they’re worse still. Then he’s got that thing in his mouth, you can’t see it, but you can tell it’s there just by lookin’, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s somethin’. Poor as we are, all I can do is wash it with alcohol, but not even that stops the itchin’.
“And worse: my girl, just look at her. Her chest’s rotten. She ain’t far off chokin’ to death. The snot built up with the cough, and she’s drownin’ in it. And the cough’s gettin’ worse. She’s got what I call a dog’s cough, and around here, above the lungs, you can hear all the muck in there: her little chest goes gurr, gurr, gurr. Sometimes I can see her breathin’ ain’t working . . . It must be the cough, that’s what I say.”
“And has she had a fever?”
“Oh, no. No fever. Just a nasty temperature that heats her up good and hot, till her little heart’s thumpin’. And it never goes down. And then there’s the cryin’ all day, and she don’t sleep well from all the hallucillusions.”
Explaining to the mother that her son had touched poison ivy and then his private parts and mouth was very easy.
“The boy’s healthy, in spite of the rashes. Don’t put any more alcohol on him; it won’t do him any good. And he must stop touching himself, even if you have to tie his hands. Send him to the pharmacy for some ointment to cover the eruption. And sew a bar of lead into his underpants. That will help.”
Giving bad news had become part of his daily routine, but that did not make it any easier—next, he had to explain to this devoted mother that there was no way to save her daughter.
“All we can do is keep her comfortable. Sit her up with pillows to help her breathe more easily. Dab her with cool cloths to bring her temperature down. Keep the windows open, and don’t go near her when she coughs. Wash your hands, Señora. Whenever you touch her, or touch her things, wash your hands. If you’re not careful, you’ll be infected and so will your son.”
“Just give her a vaccine against the chokes, Doc. I’ll get the necessary.”
But it was not a question of the necessary, of money, or of willingness. He wanted to believe that a vaccine would someday be found to make influenza nothing more than a bad memory in humanity’s long history, “But today, Señora, today,” Dr. Cantú said to the distraught woman, “there is no vaccine at any price. I’m sorry.”
How he would have loved to have been able to prescribe the new aspirins that the Germans had invented, but it was a sophisticated, costly medicine, made even more expensive by the Great War. They had been easy to obtain in the United States before the conflict, but now, with the recent theory that the Germans had launched a bacterial attack by means of their Bayer aspirins, they no longer sold them even across the border.
At first, the pharmacy had endeavored to procure willow bark, the source of the main component of aspirin. It was not as effective as the German tablets, but an infusion of the bark helped a little with the pain and fever. Unfortunately, the small amount the pharmacy acquired had been used up in the first days of the Spanish nightmare.
Frustrated that he could not do more, the doctor went away from that house knowing that the girl’s hours were numbered. He would not be surprised if the mother soon followed, for her eyes looked glassy.
It was then, on his way to another tragic visit, that he dared ask for a miracle, and then that he found the group in the street proclaiming it. He joined them so they could take him to the place where the phenomenon had occurred. He did not know what he would find there, but he wanted to believe it would be something different from the constant tragedy of recent weeks. That would be enough.
By the time they arrived, the man they were already calling Lázaro the Resurrected of Linares had gone into his house.
“We touched him, Doctor. We saw him clear as we can see you now. We smelt him and he smelt of pure death, Doctor, rotten-like . . . and you can’t fake that, right? And we knew he wasn’t going to last, because Doña Chela was rushing around giving him traditional remedies and cleansing rituals. Didn’t do any good. Then the poor woman howled to the heavens after she left him there, all wrapped up on the street. The gravedigger took him off to the cemetery, still fresh, all floppy, and he was a goner for three days, he was. Just like the Lazarus in the olden days, the real one. But this one’s our very own: the Lazarus of Linares! And when he got back today, the first thing that happened was his mama died, Doctor. I bet they switched ’em round in heaven, one for the other. She was a saint, Doña Chela: look how she traded her soul for her son’s . . . a true saint. Later, Lázaro told good Don Luis he saw his daughter Lucita in the land of the dead, may God have her in His holy glory, and by anyone’s reckoning he does, because Lázaro saw her happy ’fore he came back here. Now folks are lining up to ask him ’bout their dead, but right now they’re not ready to open the door to give ’em an audience.”