Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

A large, tinted oval photograph of old Doña Caridad, Dr. Olivera’s mother, glared at him from the wall. Her lips writhed. She scowled. Carlos got up hastily. Doña Caridad’s unexpected and totally unprovoked hostility was more than he could stand. He had his hand out to open the outer door when the inner door opened and the physician himself stood there — momentarily surprised, immediately afterwards urbane as always. Bowing him in. Doña Caridad was as immovable and expressionless as before.

There was a formal exchange of courtesies. Then silence. Dr. Olivera gestured toward a publication on his desk. “I have just been reading,” he said, “in the medical journal. About eggs. Modern science has discovered so much about eggs.” Carlos nodded. Dr. Olivera placed his fingertips together. He sighed. Then he got up and, with a sympathetic expression, gestured for Carlos to drop his trousers.

“Ah, no, Sir Medico,” the officer said hastily. “No, no, it isn’t anything like that.” Dr. Olivera’s mouth sagged. He seemed to hesitate between annoyance and confusion. Carlos breathed in, noisily, then said, all in a rush, “My head is bursting, I have dizziness and pains, my eyes swell, my chest burns, my heart also, and — and—” He paused. He couldn’t tell about the way people’s faces changed. Or about, just now, for example, Doña Caridad. Dr. Olivera might not be trusted to keep confidence. Carlos choked and tried to swallow.

The physician’s expression had grown increasingly reassured and confident. He pursed his lips and nodded. “Does the stomach work?” he inquired. “Frequently? Sufficiently frequently?”

Carlos wanted to tell him that it did, but his throat still was not in order, and all that came out was an uncertain croak. By the time he succeeded in swallowing, the señor medico was speaking again.

“Ninety percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he said, making serious, impressive sounds with his nose, “are due to the stomach’s functioning with insufficient frequency. Thus the corpus and its system become poisoned. Sir Police Officer — poisoned! We inquire as to the results — We find—” he shook his head rapidly from side to side and he threw up his hands “—that pains are encountered. They are encountered not only in the stomach, but in,” he enumerated on his fingers, “the head. The chest. The eyes. The liver and kidneys. The urological system. The upper back. The lower back. The legs. The entire corpus, sir, becomes debilitated.” He lowered his voice, leaned forward, half-whispered, half-hissed, “One lacks capacity …” He closed his eyes, compressed his lips, and leaned back, fluttering his nostrils and giving short little up-and-down nods of his head. His eyes flew open, and he raised his brows. “Eh?”

Carlos said, “Doctor, I am thirty years old, I have always until now been in perfect health, able, for example, to lift a railroad tie. My wife is very content. Whenever I ask her, she says, ¿Como no? And afterwards she says, ¡Ay, bueno! I do not lack—” A baby cried in the public waiting room. Dr. Olivera got up and took out his pen.

“I will give you a prescription for an excellent medication,” he said, making a fine flourish and heading the paper with a large, ornate, Sr. C. Rodriguez N . He wrote several lines, signed it, blotted it, handed it over. “One before each alimentation for four days, or until the stomach begins to function frequently… Do you wish the medicine from me, or from the farmacia? ”

Discouraged, but still polite, Carlos said, “From you, Doctor. And… Your honorarium?”

Dr. Olivera said, deprecatingly, “With the medication…ten pesos. For you, as a civil servant. Thank you…ah! And also: avoid eggs. Eggs are difficult to digest — they have very, very large molecules.”

Carlos left via the private waiting room. Doña Caridad looked away, contemptuously. Outside, those coarse fellows, woodcutters, the cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, nudged one another, sneered. Carlos looked away.

He crossed the plaza, vaguely aware of its smells of grilling, crisp pork carnitas, ripe fruit, wood smoke. His head and eyes and throat were misbehaving again. He remembered that the Forestal authorities had forbidden woodcutting for a month as a conservation measure and that he had meant to look out for possible violations. A toothless old Indian woman with bare, gray feet, padded by, mumbling a piece of fried fish. Her face twisted, became huge, hideous. He shut his eyes, stumbled. After a moment he felt better and went on up the steps of the covered market and into the excusado . As always he received mild pleasure from not having to pay the twenty centavos charge. He closed the door of the booth, dropped the pills in the bowl, flushed it. So. Saved twenty centavos, spent — wasted — ten pesos. On the wall was a new crop of graffiti. A harlot is the mother of Carlos Rodriguez N. read one. Ordinarily he would have read it without malice, even admiring the neat moderation of the insult — by crediting him with two family names, albeit reducing one to the formal initial, the writer had avoided accusing him of illegitimacy. Or he might have remarked to himself the effects of enforcing the lowered compulsory school entrance age: the obscenities were increasingly being written lower and lower on the walls.

But now — now—

Incoherent with rage, he rushed, shouting, outside. And almost ran into his superior, Don Juan Antonio, the chief of police. Who looked at him with the peculiar look so familiar nowadays, asked, “Why are you shouting?” And sniffed his breath.

Accepting this additional insult, Carlos muttered something about boys begging in the market. Don Juan Antonio brushed this aside, gestured toward the other end of the plaza. “Twenty auto-buses of students from the high schools and colleges of the State Capital are stopping over here before they continue on to the National Youth Convention. Must I direct traffic myself while you are chasing beggar boys?”

“Ah, no, señor jefe! ” Carlos walked hastily to where the yellow buses were slowly filing into the plaza and began directing them to the somewhat restricted place available for parking — the rest of the space being already occupied by vendors of black pottery marked with crude fish, brown pottery painted with the most popular women’s names, parrot chicks, Tabasco bananas, brightly colored cane-bottom chairs, pineapples sliced open to reveal the sweet contents, shoes, rubber-tire-soled sandals, holy pictures and candles, rebozos, mantillas, pear-shaped lumps of farm butter, grilled strips of beef, a hundred varieties of beans, a thousand varieties of chili peppers, work shirts, bright skirts, plastic tablecloths, patriotic pictures, knitted caps, sombreros: the infinite variety of the Latin American marketplace — he called out to the bus driver, banging his hand on the bus to indicate that the vehicle should come back a little bit more…a little bit more…a little bit—

Crash!

He had backed the bus right into the new automobile belonging to Don Pacifico, the presidente municipal! The driver jumped out and cursed; the mayor jumped out and shouted; the students descended; the population assembled; the police chief came running and bellowing; Señorita Filomena — the mayor’s aged and virginal aunt — screamed and pressed her withered hands to her withered chest; her numerous great-nephews and great-nieces began to cry — Carlos mumbled, made awkward gestures, and that ox, the stationmaster, a man who notoriously lacked education, and was given to loud public criticism of the police: he laughed.

The crowd became a mob, a hostile mob, the people of which continuously split in two in order to frighten and confuse the miserable police officer with their double shapes and now dreadful faces. It was horrible.