William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

He looked at the boy's naked body as it lay before him on the dissecting table in the mortuary as he prepared to examine its morbid anatomy. Slightly plump with almost girlish breasts and a small scribble of pubic hair above the clenched genitals. He touched the cool, yielding flesh, pressed down on the rib cage, allowed his hands to shape the contours of the youth's belly. He knew every component of that individual body, everything hidden behind that pliant but tough integument of skin. The inside of a man or woman was as familiar to him as the face of a friend or the layout of his sitting room, but it was a familiarity afforded only after death. The head, the chest, the spine, the heart… He did not dare advance across that threshold while the body lived. Here he was, a highly trained surgeon, the equal, he liked to think, of any in the entire civilised world and yet to all intents and purposes he was trapped, pinioned by fear and the pathetic limits of his knowledge. He was like a man of vast wealth who has purchased a palace of immense and unparalleled splendour. He can wander in the grounds, circle the exterior, peer through the windows, admire the gilded furniture and the lavish textiles, the fabulous works of art and glittering chandeliers. It is all mine, he could think, and yet he was for ever denied entry, on pain of death. On pain of death.

He turned the boy over. Of course, he thought scornfully, one is always allowed access to the bladder or rectum, and those other portals the body provided itself, where catheters and probes, pincers and scalpels, could reach. How many times had he patiently ground down a suffering man's bladderstones, his thin instruments deep inside the bladder, sawing and grinding. He was renowned for the delicacy of his manipulation: of the dozens of operations he had performed in the bladder only three had subsequently died of peritonitis. He knew at once when his touch had let him down. As the lithotrite was withdrawn or the catheter extracted from the penis, there was that small fatal signature of blood. Then the silent prayer: oh Lord, let it only be a scratch on the bladder wall. Even the tiniest of punctures seemed to bring down the heaviest of sentences…

He rolled the boy over again, and reached for his scalpel, about to pull back once more the curtains on the body's baffling fragile treasures. He had read recently of certain American doctors who were recommending the use of rubber gloves during operations – he could practically hear Cruz's incredulous scoffing. Even he, Salvador Carriscant, proud herald of all that was new in medicine, had some doubts about that course of action – what would happen to your 'touch', the magic of the surgeon's gift? That unique combination, as he had heard it expressed, of a lacemaker's fingers and a seaman's grip? What was the point of honing a skill if you then wilfully smothered it in rubber? It was like those Arab princesses hidden behind black veils. Why should a beautiful woman not bestow…

And he thought of the American woman again, of course. Hardly an hour seemed to go by these days without her coming, unbidden, to mind. Something about the quality of her gaze, the geometry of her face, her odd colouring, had acted upon him with fiercesome, uncompromising effectiveness. Never before, never before… Like an inert liquid galvanised into crazy effervescence by a strange catalyst. And here she was, in his city… This was what unmanned him: he felt that curious weakness come upon him again, flowing out from some new gland in the base of his spine and spreading through his body like a tree.

He set down his scalpel with a rattle, and bracing his arms, hung his head over the boy's pale ruined corpse. Jesus Christ, he said in unfamiliar prayer, heaven help me.

' Salvador, what's wrong?' Pantaleon stepped into the room, anxious, concerned to find him this way.

'I'm fine, fine,' he said straightening. 'Just a little tired, I think.' He put the scalpel down. 'This can wait.'

He turned. Pantaleon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

'What is it?' Carriscant said. 'Can I have a discreet word?'

Carriscant had one of the hospital porters drive him down to the docks where the quays on both banks of the Pasig were as clotted as ever with shipping – steamships, square- and lateen-rigged schooners, junks and ferry boats, fat shallow-draught paddle steamers that could negotiate the silty reaches of the river upstream and the great wallowing cascos, barges cum houseboats, homes for the river's transient population, moored four or five deep along the wharves. He was happy to be out of the hospital, quite content to do this favour for Pantaleon, as it gave him an opportunity both to compose himself and also scrutinise every European and American he saw in the passing carriages in the fervid hope of glimpsing that pale freckled face again and feeling the cool gaze of those candid brown eyes…

The carriage pulled up at the foot of a narrow lane, Calle Crespo in Quiapo, where it seemed every second shop was a tinsmith's and the air vibrated dully with the sound of hammers on galvanised iron. As he descended Carriscant saw a new illuminated advertisement across the junction: coney island shooting gallery – clearly the Americans were here to stay. At number 89, Crespo, he found the sign he was looking for: between 'Sam. M. Goodforth, marine surveyor' and 'Pablo Eulegio, hat cleaner' was his destination – 'Udo Leys, tobacco merchant'.

After Annaliese's father, Gerhardt Leys, and her sister had returned to Germany her uncle Udo had stayed on and had stoically watched the family fortunes remorselessly decline. Carriscant climbed the stairs and pushed open the office door. There was no secretary in the vestibule and in the office itself Udo was nowhere to be seen. The walls were lined with empty glass humidors and extravagant posters for Manila cigars. In the 1870s and 1880s the brothers had had the field more or less to themselves. Now there were eight cigar and cigarette factories in Manila alone: no-one needed to buy from Udo Leys any longer and he had been obliged to diversify, operating an opportunistic import-export business, waiting for a need to manifest itself and then racing desperately to supply it, whether it was bicycles or perfume, cattle feed or fancy goods. The last time Carriscant had seen him, Udo had told him in a conspiratorial whisper that he had seventy-five upright pianos in a warehouse in Tondo. 'Think of all those new American schools,' he said, his voice ripe with the allure of profit, 'all those assembly rooms… Who will play the "Stars and Stripes"? They'll be gone within a week.' Carriscant smiled, remembering the old man's impregnable conviction, and wandered to the window. The noise here was infernal: in the courtyard below ten men were making buckets.

He turned at the sound of a door opening and saw Udo emerge from a small cupboard at the rear of the office carrying a chamber pot, the buttons on his flies still undone. He looked unwell, a stout, compressed old man with a florid, noduled face and a small ungroomed bristling moustache that looked as if it were trying to grow in four directions simultaneously.

'Ah, Salvador, my boy, what a pleasant surprise,' he said. 'One second and I'm with you.'

He limped to the window, opened it and flung the contents of the chamber pot over the bucket makers. The hammering never faltered.

Udo shrugged. 'Those shit bastards are meant to stop at lunchtime, but who cares?' He spoke English with a marked German accent. Carriscant shook his extended left hand as the right still clutched the chamber pot: he was fond of the old man but Annaliese liked to keep contact to a minimum. Udo set the pot on the desk and wiped some drops of moisture off his fingers on to the blotter. He opened a drawer and offered Carriscant a cigar, which he declined.