My Other Life (8 page)

As soon as I reached my room I collapsed, my head aching, all my joints cracking. In seconds my skin was on fire and every sound was a howl in my head. It was as though I had been flayed alive, my skin peeled from my flesh to expose the naked white threads of my nerves.

I lay in the hot darkness, with dust in my nose, dying. The fever took hold. I felt I was in the grip of a fatal illness, and I was sure of it when bony fingers squeezed my flesh wickedly, like pincers, in torture. Those skeletal fingers were the fever. I was too sick to be able to tell anyone. I could hear the clatter of plates; they had finished dinner, Simon was gathering the dishes, Father DeVoss snapping the playing cards, Brother Piet humming as he sewed. Father Touchette clutching his breviary. I groaned and could not get up from my bed. I regretted that I had shut and bolted the bedroom door.

The overloud voices in the next room sounded in my dream. They were rough, indifferent men in stained robes, laughing as they played cards. They gambled while I lay dying. Each time I woke, greasy with my sweat, I felt frailer and more fearful.

Help me.

But the moan stayed in my mouth because I was too weak to cry out.

I thought: They could come in here, any of them, and they could help me. They don't care!

I shivered, I sweated. My heart drummed. The laughter—was it Brother Piet?—was sudden and explosive and the racket of it tore into my head.

A shadow rattled against my eyes. It was a bat, flying back and forth in the room, the way I had once seen one flap in a barn. This fever bat was cut by the stripes of light from the cracks in the door frame. I watched the creature seeming to crackle in the broken light. I was not afraid, but I was helpless. The pain in my head and my bones paralyzed me, and my sense of powerlessness frightened me. I felt the thing swoop near my face, beating its skinny wings, and I got a whiff of its stink. The bat bothered me less than the intimation that I was dying, yet it seemed part of the paraphernalia of my death, like a funeral prop, a candle or an owl.

I implored the darkness for one of the priests to look up from his hand of cards and think of me and show concern and break the door down. Then I would have a chance. But I was alone and I was trapped in this room. I was lost. They would not miss me until tomorrow, noon at the earliest, and by then I would be dead.

This terrified me and made me so sad I began to cry again, like a child, not sobbing but whimpering and squeaking as I cowered.

Then I was dreaming of enormous women, Birdie and others, with green skin and stupendous breasts and hot, scorching mouths, laughing at me and biting me, wrestling joyously with each other and casting me aside. Quite near me a leper woman with stumps where her limbs should have been turned away, and I realized that I was even uglier than she. Laughing at me, she twisted her nose off—it was like the damp prune of a dog's nose—and she reached for me.

That woke me, but moments later I was in another dream.

Every dream was a dream of enemies—of my weakness. I was overwhelmed and mocked and intimidated. Occasionally a giantess would throttle me while I tried to summon the strength to plead for my life.

I was washed ashore onto a beach of broken bones, a foreshore crisscrossed by bird prints, spirals of their tracks which were neat and simple, like new letters of the alphabet. It was stony, with broken shells and pockmarked rocks and fragments of white wave-smoothed stones that gave the beach its look of doom, a place of dry bones and skull fragments. There were human footprints but no one was in sight. All I saw was an expanse of white sand. At first I felt the heat on my face, and hurrying across the sand I burned my feet. In the distance the sea was a deep blue, but brown against the shore, under a pale sky. The sun was directly overhead and blazing down upon me. I struggled on scorched feet to the edge of the sea and then tipped myself into the water and was scalded by the heat of a wave. The sea was simmering, and close up it was a foul stew of bubbles and weeds.

I was jerked from this awful dream by the sound of drumming. Like the voices that had jarred me earlier, I had a hallucinatory sense of pain, my eyeballs aching, my ears ringing, not knowing whether I was asleep or awake. The priests were asleep—must have been. But the absence of their voices seemed only to make the drumming louder. It tumbled in a cascade of thumping, and it shivered and stopped before starting again, faster and louder.

And I imagined I could see the dancers—toothy, grinning villagers, lepers and their families, ugly and stubborn, showing aggression, snatching at each other. Other shadows rutted under the dusty trees. The priests stood by saying nothing, their arms folded, while over the drumbeats I tried to call out, "
Save me!
"

There was drumming in my dreams and when I woke the drumming continued outside the window, and I hated them—the dancers, the drummers, the priests especially, because they did nothing to stop it or help me.

So the night went on. Was it one night? But the bat was real, and so was the laughter and the drumming. I was not imagining these things. I could have endured the dream, though. What was real frightened me: the pain in my head and the knowledge that I was small and sweaty and weak and sick, and that I would die before dawn. Knowing that was an agony.

Without making a sound, I wept. Tears streamed down mv cheeks. I was afraid of death but after all those dark hours I wanted to die, to be rid of this pain.

That was before dawn. Then I slept and dreamed in sunlight, which gave my dreams the bright colors of a crackling fire. The cockcrows reassured me, and when I woke at last to knocking on the door, I struggled out of bed and slid the bolt and collapsed. And then Brother Piet was kneeling near my bed and murmur ing, "
Pepani, pepani
" —Sorry, sorry—and fumbling with a thermometer.

My temperature was 103. I thought: I know something I did not know before. But I could not remember what it was.

I lay there too weak to raise my head, yet I was glad that I had been found. It had been a long, painful night, at the edge of death. I had sensed myself slipping away, unable to call out. Now I had a chance.

Father DeVoss visited me, his hands behind his back. He said, "It's lucky you decided to spend your holiday at a hospital."

I had not thought of Moyo as only a hospital. It was everything—a mission, a church, a village, a leper colony. It was for castaways—lepers and syphilitics and snakebite victims—with extravagantly ugly afflictions; and they lay disfigured and hopeless. because they had been cast out of their own villages. Not a hospital, but a refuge for desperate people. They were not sick, they were cursed.

A fever was something else, a ragged pain that droned like a buzz saw in my head and throughout my body. I was not like those other people. There was no cure for me—I knew that much. You lived with it and you suffered and in a week or so you either got better or steadily worse, and even if you got better you were never the same again, because the fever killed something inside you. That was what Africans said of fevers, and now I knew enough of fevers to believe it.

"It could be malaria," Father DeVoss said, lightly speculating. He did not seem concerned, and he stood to one side as Brother Piet set down a tray.

"You drink this while it is hot and then I give you
mankhwala,
" Brother Piet said. The seriousness of the occasion inspired more English words than I had so far heard him use. He offered me a cup of sweet, steaming tea. He dosed me with chloroquine, six tablets now, six more at noon, and paracetemol, to bring my temperature down.

"Or blackwater fever. Even cholera. Or one of the fevers that doesn't have a name," Father DeVoss said. "But we'll treat you for malaria first, because we have the
mankhwala
for that."

Drenched in sweat and gasping, I nodded and tried to smile and thanked them both in a croaky voice, glad that I had survived the night and that I had witnesses now to my fever.

"I think Paul is feeling better already," Father DeVoss said.

It had been an awful night. But now the attention of these kind men had raised my hopes and dulled my pain. I felt looked after, and I was reassured by Brother Piet's fussing. He carefully changed my sheets, and at once in dry sheets I felt calmer.

Father DeVoss still smiled at me but in such a melancholy and benign way I felt he was blessing me. His forgiving eyes seemed to bestow grace. He was looking beyond my fever and my frailty to my soul, while Brother Piet was tending to my body.

All that day Brother Piet and Simon the cook served me tea and made me gulp chloroquine tablets. When I grew feverish again in the early evening, Simon folded wet towels on my head to cool me and bring my temperature down. In the darkness of the night I still burned with fever, but I was less afraid. I prayed that I was on the mend, and when morning came—with the first light—I was more hopeful. I had made it through another night. Then it was hot tea and sour quinine and watery chicken soup that Simon made. As each day waned my temperature went up, my skin burned, my nerves ached, my eyes began to boil in their sockets. And I was afraid again that I might falter in the darkness and die.

The drumming continued, carrying through the trees and up the slope from the leper village. I could smell the sharpness of the dust that was raised by the stamping feet of the dancers. I easily imagined them dancing, bringing their feet down as though they were killing the fat white worms they called
mphutsis.
My fever intensified with the drumbeats and the darkness, giving me a kind of night vision that was also hallucinatory, and I saw them, the dancers—many of them naked, their gleaming bodies lit by flames, their black shadows jumping in my room.

Through burning eyes I saw the young girl Amina flinging herself into the jostling mob of dancers, working her thin arms and legs, thrilled by the drums, her face streaming with sweat, her small breasts reddened by the firelight, her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. And then her cloth wraparound slipped and was trampled. She was entranced and did not notice, only became more sinuous, and brighter, her body like a single flame, while her granny stared with blind eyes, hearing the drums, perhaps wondering where the girl had gone.

In her room in the convent. Birdie also heard the drumming. She too imagined the black sweating bodies, the crackling fire, the yodeling women. The village which slumbered in the dust all day came alive at night. Nothing in daylight mattered. I tried to think about what Birdie felt when she heard it—was she aroused or disgusted? She was excited, of course, but appalled at her excitement, and so she would pretend to disapprove.

My fever helped me see it all clearly, not just the drumming and dancing, but the girl Amina, and Birdie, the nuns, the priests, sweating in their upper rooms, some of them praying. My illness fed me visions and made these people familiar. I knew them all better in my fever.

And then I began to think that it was my lesson. I had to be sick and feverish and lying on my back, unable to form a word with my scummy tongue, to realize that any effort here seemed pointless.

Simon went through the motions of bringing me wet towels and tea and soup and medicine. But neither he nor any of the priests seemed unduly alarmed. They did their duty and they were watchful. But their attitude was as fatalistic as the lepers'. How in this world of lepers could I expect sympathy for my fever? In spite of what they said, they looked upon me as someone who might die.

"There was drumming again last night," I said to Simon, stating the obvious, just to hear my own voice.

"There is drumming every night."

"And dancing?"

"Yes, Father."

I was sure it was as I imagined it, the lepers naked and stamping, Amina twitching before her blind granny.

"Is it some sort of harvest festival?"

"But we have no harvest, Father," he said. "We work in our gardens all the year."

"Then what is the
chamba
about?" I asked, using the word that meant dancing generally.

"It is not
chamba
but
zinyao.
"

I did not know the word, and so I asked him to explain it.

Simon shook his head, as though he could not disclose the secret. "Perhaps you will see it sometime when you get well."

I had begun to sit up, to sleep better, and my head ached less. My fever was intermittent. I still swallowed many bitter-tasting tablets and six or eight aspirin a day. I felt better—not stronger, but less feverish. And then I began to eat more, a slice or two of Simon's crumbly bread with the soup.

Eating more did not make me well or even strong. It simply gave me diarrhea. So instead of using the chamber pot, I had to hobble to the latrine. I had always used the one outside the kitchen. But there was one in an overgrown part of the garden, all mossy bricks and weeds, just outside my room. It was as old as the house itself. It was a nightmare, but it was near.

This shed—mud walls, thatched roof, sagging door, spider webs—was built on to a back entryway near my part of the corridor. Now and then I heard it used, because its door hinges squeaked, sometimes at the oddest hours of the day. It had been part of my feverish hallucination, this squeaking in the dark before morning.

I was surprised to find that there were no door hinges. I stood, dizzy from being upright, and saw that the door was fixed with loops of knotted rope. But I had not imagined the rusty scrape of metal—I heard it again as I stood in the sun, just outside this old latrine. The squeaking was louder inside. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw that bats—three or four rat-sized ones—had attached themselves with dirty claws to the rough edge of the wooden seat hole. I banged the seat with my fist and they took off, dropped into the pit, where they flew in fluttering batty circles. Still they flapped and squeaked under me while I sat wincing, trying to hurry the business.

A week of this: sleep, fever, dysentery; and Brother Piet. "
Pepani.
" Sorry. Most nights, the drumming. My fever subsided, and one day I woke without a headache. My eyes did not hurt. The day was fresh, and the film of moisture on the leaves, darkening the dust under the trees with dew, gave the illusion that it had rained during the night. I marveled at the sky which was an ocean of light, and for the first time I felt hungry and wanted to eat, and I thought, I'm alive.