I turned to go back. The fog had reached the top dune line and blurred the beach house. Its lit windows burned cheerful holes in the mist. All at once I could not wait to get off the empty beach and into the house. I started across to the steps to the wooden walkway, whistling to Gladys. She came larruping happily behind me. Both our feet slipped in the dry, shifting sand.
I looked up to see Camilla on the top of the dune line, a little way from the house. She wore her old raincoat, and it blew about her. I wondered what she was doing out in the fog. She always said that it made her bones hurt.
“Hey!” I called. “What are you doing up there?”
She did not answer, and I cupped my hands to throw my voice farther.
“Camilla?”
Again, there was no answer. I turned to make sure Gladys was with me, and when I turned back, Camilla had gone inside. Gladys and I bounded up the steps and into the house as if pursued.
They were all sitting around the unnecessary but beautiful fire, drinking wine. I loved them suddenly. Loved them all with a weight that hurt my heart.
“You’ve got wet hair,” Lewis said.
“There’s a big fog bank out there, in case you haven’t noticed,” I said. “Camilla, what were you doing out there on the dunes? I yelled, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”
She looked at me.
“I haven’t been outside,” she said. “Not this whole afternoon.”
“I was sure it was you. It looked like that old raincoat of yours, the one with the hood.”
“I gave that to the Salvation Army last spring,” she said.
There was a silence.
“You saw the Gray Man,” Simms said, leering. “Gonna be a storm sure as gun’s iron.”
“Oh, I did not,” I said peevishly. “It was probably somebody up there looking for a dog or something.”
“Nope. The Gray Man,” Charlie jumped in. “Come all the way down from Pawley’s just to see you. We better batten down.”
On the way home, the fog thick and white by now, I said to Lewis, “I did see somebody on the dunes. Somebody real. Why does everybody have to carry on about the damned Gray Man?”
“Teasing you,” he said briefly. He did not say any more.
“Lewis, you can’t possibly think…”
“I guess not,” he said.
We did not speak again until we got home.
“Want cocoa?” he said.
“I think I’d just like to go to bed. I’ve got to get up early if I’m going to arrange to take two weeks off.”
“Well, I think I’ll read awhile,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead. “Be up later.”
I lay awake for a long time, even after he came up, even after I heard his breathing deepen into sleep. I had wanted amused denial, fond ridicule, and, I realized, reassurance. Their absence felt like hunger.
Ciudad Real means “royal city,” and it is difficult to imagine that any one of its 355 inhabitants gives much thought to the irony of that. It lies in the north-central state of Chihuahua, huddled in a gap in the Sierra Madre Occidental range, approximately halfway between the small city of Madera and the sea. Until very recently, it was connected by road only to the slightly larger village of Oteros, whose own road led to the spectacular Barranco del Cobre, or Copper Canyon, and stopped. There were footpaths over the mountain to small towns on the Sonoran coast, but it was not possible to get goods and crops for trading and selling over them, and the great Copper Canyon Railway that connects the arid mountainous interior of northern Mexico to the Pacific was beyond the means of most of the villagers. Few of them harvested crops or fabricated goods anyway. It was a desperately poor little hamlet set among stunted oaks and stubby cacti. A cloud of dust hung over it perpetually. There was a small, crumbling adobe church, a cantina with rooms above it for the thin teenage prostitutes and their guests, a sort of store/gas station affair that sold fly-specked canned goods and American snacks and sodas and the occasional gallon of elderly gas. There was a telephone in the cantina and store, but none of the horrendously dirty and dilapidated houses seemed to have one, and the only TV aerial I saw was on the roof of the cantina. In its sun-smitten little central square, the fountain was dry and the market stalls all but empty. A few merchants sold thin, dispirited chickens and a skinny, cold-eyed goat or two, and bits of lumpish pottery, and baskets of wilting vegetables and fruit that grew in the gardens behind the homes. English, we found, was spoken only by the unkempt priest, the doctor who had summoned us, and the bar mistress of the cantina, who was also its madam. To get there from Charleston, you flew to Atlanta and from there to Mexico City and from there to Chihuahua, took a battered bus from Chihuahua to Madera, and depended for the remainder of the journey to Ciudad Real on the kindness of strangers.
We came into Madera at three in the afternoon on September the eighth, dirtier and more tired than I, at least, had ever been in my life, and were met by the aforementioned Dr. Lorenzo Mendoza, in a Land Rover that made Lewis’s Range Rover look like a Rolls-Royce limousine. He was a short, stocky, swarthy man with the darting energy of a Tasmanian devil and a gold-starred smile as wide as his entire face.
“My Americans are here!” he shouted, and hugged us all in turn. He hesitated when he came to me, said, “You are a nurse, perhaps? Wonderful!” and continued his hugging without listening for an answer. He smelled powerfully of stale sweat, but so did we. I so badly wanted a bath and a nap that I would have gotten into the Land Rover with the world’s gamiest Sasquatch. Wedged in between Henry and a gastroenterologist from Houston, I found myself trembling with insane, suppressed laughter. I felt Henry’s shoulder shaking and knew he was desperately trying to contain laughter, too. I did not look at him; that would have been death for both of us. In the seat ahead of me, Lewis slept. He could sleep anywhere. I hated him momentarily. The gastroenterologist stared straight ahead. Two general surgeons from Fort Worth cowered in the front seat with Dr. Mendoza, being bombarded with shotgunned information.
The new road, the good doctor said, connected Ciudad Real to Madera, from there to Chihuahua, and then on to Highway 40, which wound its way across the waistline of the country and entered Texas at McAllen.
“Now we are in reach of many health care facilities, and we can receive supplies,” he cried gaily. “I put up my little hospital and some temporary housing for the staff even before the bulldozers rolled out. It is small, but it will grow, and it is not uncomfortable, I don’t think. With my new friends to teach new techniques to me and one or two new associates coming in, and even a nurse to instruct my nursing staff, we will soon be a distinguished regional facility.”
And he laughed, a trifle hysterically. The two surgeons grinned desperately. Lewis snored. Henry snorted.
“Don’t you
dare
,” I hissed furiously at him. The gastroenterologist did not move his eyes from the road ahead.
We caromed through deserted little Ciudad Real, scattering dust and chickens and a few skinny black dogs. A fat woman with impossibly lush, lacquered black hair waved from a window over the cantina—the madam, I learned later, Señora Diaz. In the entire two weeks we were there, I never saw hair nor hide of Señor Diaz. He was very much alive, Dr. Mendoza assured us, though he was seldom seen.
“It is just that he is shy,” he said.
We careened around a curve overhung by a huge boulder, and there was the hospital of Dr. Mendoza. The distinguished regional medical facility. It consisted of three brand-new double-wide trailers placed side by side in a meager grove of scrub oaks and connected by a wooden walkway. A low wooden barracks affair sat a little behind the trailers, with a few folding plastic chairs set about it in the dirt and an outside shower affixed to one end. I wondered, crazily, how he had gotten the trailers and the material for the barracks over the new road.
In front of me, Lewis woke up.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Yes!” Dr. Mendoza shouted in ecstatic agreement. “It is truly holy shit, is it not?”
It was a shell-shocked and surreal sort of evening. The American doctors would be housed in the barracks—“brand new, still smelling of sweet new wood!”—but no one had told him I would be coming. The nurses had lodging with a couple of villagers, but he did not think there was any more available. We would go and have our dinner at the cantina, and give thought to the matter of where I was to sleep.
“A clean bed and three squares, huh?” I glared at Henry. “Maybe there’s a goat shed around somewhere I could share.”
“I’m sorry, Anny,” he mumbled. “I’ve never been on one of these things that didn’t have some kind of hotel or motel or something.”
“You damned well ought to be sorry, Henry, my man,” Lewis said ominously. But I could see his lips twitching. It was clear to all three of us, even before the arrangements were made, that I would be sleeping upstairs over the cantina with the three adolescent prostitutes.
“But by far the best room,” Dr. Mendoza assured me earnestly. “It is for the ones who stay three or four hours. There is a television set and flowered sheets.”
“You could come out of this a wealthy woman,” Lewis said. And we all burst into laughter. It was clear that the surgeons and the gastroenterologist did not get the joke.
Looking back, I can picture those two weeks in Ciudad Real as if I were watching them on a screen. They have the surreal vividness of a fever dream: details stand out as if limned in light. I can remember the sights, sounds, smells, tastes so clearly that I become lost in them. Almost anything can call them back: the brassy wail of cantina music, the taste of dust, the smell of new wood in the barracks and old sweat and perfume in my seraglio bedroom, the taste of warm beef and tacos. I do not wish to summon that time; in many ways it was ghastly in the extreme, and pales utterly beside some of the beautiful places Lewis took me in the years after that. Nevertheless, there it is, lodged in my subconscious like a bone in a dog’s throat. I think it’s because those weeks were so absolutely self-contained, so totally without context. Nothing—not time, not the world—seemed to intrude upon them. That hyperreality is still a source of both pleasure and pain to me.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, went as we had supposed it would. The first morning we went into the hospital’s minimal little waiting room and found it boiling with the miserable humanity of Ciudad Real. Patient old men and women; wailing children; vastly pregnant women; stoic, sullen men with racking coughs or bloody rags wrapped around an arm or a leg; even a black dog, tail thumping under the receptionist’s desk. If there had been a receptionist. The two promised doctors did not appear.
“I have had word that they have been detained in Guatemala,” Dr. Mendoza said. “Some foolishness at the border, no doubt.”
“Those docs can kiss their asses good-bye,” Lewis muttered to Henry.
The three nurses, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were short and squat, with Indio blood apparent in their opaque black eyes and slightly flattened noses. They wore proper nurses’ uniforms, none too clean, and did not speak a syllable of English. The interpreter had missed his plane to Chihuahua and was considering renting a car.
“We can kiss his ass good-bye, too,” Henry growled.
“I didn’t realize there would be a clinic,” Lewis said as amiably as I have ever heard him. It was an ominous sound. “It’s going to be hard to share techniques and suggestions if we’re busy all day treating walk-in patients. I was prepared to show you some new orthopedic surgery, and I know that Dr. McKenzie has some new wrinkles in cardiology. Most of these folks look like a nurse or a family physician could handle them.”
“Oh, but you will treat and I will watch, and then I will show the two doctors when they come,” Dr. Mendoza said happily. “And as you see, we have nurses.” He gestured at the three young women. They gazed back with blank, obsidian stares.
“But they have no English,” one of the general surgeons said, in a tight, constipated voice. “And unless I’m mistaken, none of us has adequate Spanish. Who is going to interpret?”
Dr. Mendoza looked hopefully at me.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not good at all with Spanish. I’m really here to help you set up a program of resources available to your patients.”
Dr. Mendoza puzzled for a moment, and then spat out something in rapid-fire Spanish to a young girl who looked relatively mobile. She left the trailer and trudged back toward the town.
“I have just the answer,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Diaz speaks wonderful English. She will help us out.”
And so it was that the first day in the hospital of Dr. Mendoza, the madam of the local house of joy served as interpreter and sometime disciplinarian, and did it very well indeed.
“What will happen when you have to go back to your daytime work?” I said to her as we sat, wiping sweat from our faces, in the folding plastic chairs outside the barracks. I had been drafted to serve as receptionist and appointments secretary, and that is what I did until the day we left. Almost immediately I liked this big, vital woman with luxuriant dyed hair and enough lipstick to frost a cake. She was intelligent, industrious, matter-of-fact, and virtually unflappable. I thought she was sorely wasted as a small-town madam, though I did not say it.
Carmella Diaz grinned. She had a fine gold tooth.
“My no-account
esposo
can get his sorry ass out of bed and keep the cantina,” she said tranquilly. “Work really doesn’t start until nighttime, and it don’t take much to keep those hyenas in line. By the time they want one of my girls, they’re too drunk to cause trouble, anyway.”
I felt my cheeks burn, and then laughed. Why not? It was the way of things in Ciudad Real.
We triaged and treated as best we could until past eight that evening. Fevers, diarrhea, broken bones, cuts from God knows what, endless coughs and colds, one or two real medical problems that, without facilities and assured nursing care, the doctors could not handle.
“You need to evaluate every case and get the ones in real trouble over to the nearest big town,” Lewis said at the end of that interminable day. “I can’t operate here without surgical nurses and equipment and no antibiotic except penicillin. There are many good new ones; I’ll make you a list. And anesthetics, too. You can’t use the same one for everybody. You’ll need an internal medicine man immediately; he can tell you what supplies you’re apt to need. And you’ll need a highly trained head nurse. Nursing care is going to make the difference out here.”