A Good Map of All Things Page 2

  Even though science was his morning, afternoon, and evening, he did not discount the things he did not understand, all the stories his parents had left untold or unexplained. Indeed, he understood perfectly well how having an open, scientific mind meant looking at exactly that—what the world did not yet know and what was waiting to be discovered. Or, he would remind himself, thinking of his parents, remembered.

  For these reasons he kept a civil relationship with Sra. Castañeda and marveled when she finally showed him her chest of drawers full of roots and dried herbs, a large brown elephant of a chest that she kept in the back bedroom of her house. It was not unlike the chests his father had made to hold the special materials and buttons and clasps and sequins and all manner of sartorial confetti for the family’s tailoring business.

  Dr. Bartolomeo at first tried to cure everyone who came to see him, at least that full first year, but later he began to send a few people for a talk with Sra. Castañeda, just to see if she had any thoughts on the person’s particular condition, or anything surrounding it that she might know to look for and point out. He never spoke with her directly about such things, but understood that she had at her disposal some remedies that he did not. She had the past, while he held the future.

  He thought of these things she took care of as diseases of the past, not simply or only as beliefs people had. The mal de ojo, for example, whether it was true or not, he had seen it cause many problems, which in turn led to sickness. In itself it might be nothing much, but believing in it led to restlessness and anxiety, to depression, to a lack of appetite, to fear, and then very easily to sickness of one kind or another. He could see the connection and understand the power that it held—if one believed in it, of course. He could see that if a person thought he had the mal de ojo and then got sick, that one thing caused the other. Dr. Bartolomeo could see that connection, though he saw it in all its intermediate steps, not as one thing moving directly to the other. Even if he could explain it, however, and break it down into its component parts as a process or like a stepladder, that didn’t mean much. A person was still sick regardless. It was that simple.

  Even so, while Dr. Bartolomeo believed in his more forward direction and thought of it as his province, he never forgot the feelings he had while growing up about everything that had brought his parents to this place, even if he had to remind himself. All that knowledge counted for something, if just something to stand on as one looked forward. That seemed sensible enough to him. The past had its place.

  And besides, he had a great deal of respect for Sra. Castañeda’s son, Perfecto, as well, and for Perfecto’s wife, Berta. Both of them sometimes came to meetings of the science society, and even when they didn’t were nevertheless always supportive of Dr. Bartolomeo’s endeavors, which he appreciated.

  Dr. Bartolomeo did, however, along with Sra. Castañeda, keep not as medicines but as necessary treatments such things as watermelon in his fancy office refrigerator. Even he understood about watermelon and the dying. A person longs for so many things, to taste them once more, most especially those things not in season. One wishes for what is not possible, after all, in that moment. Having watermelon when none was otherwise available always gave a person hope—hope and a taste of childhood, of happiness. It was the taste of another time.

  * * *

  His very first case was famous here. As a doctor he came back to town shiny and new. In his clean suit and with just as clean a smile and washed hands, he sparkled and had every confidence in himself. He carried a clear sense that the people in this town would do what he told them to, for their own good, of course. And he had tried to think of everything, including making an arrangement with Ubaldo Dos Santos’s mother, Sra. Dos Santos, who had a small hotel. He entreated her to reserve, as much as possible, one room with two beds, but into which might be fitted four should the need for a hospital arise. It was an uneasy arrangement because no one was quite sure what that meant, the need for a hospital, but Dr. Bartolomeo offered to pay her a small monthly sum for this assurance, and that seemed like a good idea to the town generally, especially the part about him assuming responsibility for the payment personally.

  Dr. Bartolomeo came to do good, his motives were pure, his attentions were thorough, and everybody already knew him.

  And if they did not, his first patient would change everything. The case came to him in a cacophony of shouts and a car honking and a small crowd of people. Dr. Bartolomeo had opened his office one Monday morning after having put an advertisement in the newspaper, so everybody knew where it was.

  When Dr. Bartolomeo looked down at the patchy work towel that someone had lent to the occasion of draping the patient, and with several of the people saying, “Go on, it’s all right, go ahead, he needs you,” he took charge, took a deep breath, and lifted the towel. He saw what was there, then looked around at the crowd surrounding him.

  It was the dog Bernardo.

  Bernardo had been hit by a car. It was an accident, and everyone stopped to see what could be done for the dog, but nobody knew what to do. There was no blood, but Bernardo lay on his side, unresponsive. He wasn’t dead—that was clear enough. His tongue had slipped out of his mouth and was moving when he breathed, though it was a labored breathing.

  When these things happened, it was generally more convenient all around for people if the impact was a little harder or the outcome a little more certain. That there might be something to do, that’s when people panic. People prefer to say if only something could have been done to doing something. This was something Narciso later thought about, and in retrospect he understood that something very good had happened. And that he had been slow to see it himself.

  “But I’m a doctor,” said Narciso Bartolomeo, with all the authority of his office.

  “We know,” said someone.

  “But it’s a dog,” said Dr. Bartolomeo, incredulously. “A dog!”

  “Yes. And he’s been hurt,” said someone else.

  “But he’s a dog.”

  Everyone looked at the doctor, and for a moment the air seemed to stop moving and the noise quieted. Somewhere in the back of his head Narciso understood this to be a moment when the movement of things was being blocked, and as he took stock of the situation, he realized that he himself was blocking it. He himself, of all things, was the problem.

  He threw his hands up. “Bring him in. I will take a look and do what I can. Is there an owner?”

  “It’s Miguel Torres’s dog. He never lets him out of his sight.”

  “Well, somebody check on that, and send Sr. Torres over here if you find him.”

  With that, Dr. Bartolomeo, after giving the dog a quick check, lifted him up and brought him in his arms into his office.

  * * *

  When he fixed Bernardo up, giving him all the necessary stitches where he had found it necessary to open and repair his stomach and understanding fully that this was, indeed, his first patient and that everyone would be looking to see what he could do, he said that Bernardo had to relax for a few days and not exert himself, or else the stitches would come out. And he could not lick those stitches, either, the doctor added, remembering as an afterthought how the behaviors of dogs were so different from humans’ behaviors.

  Licking stitches. It seemed ridiculous, and anyone would understand that. But would a dog? With that thought came a nagging secondary thought: What if the dog were right? No person he knew ever thought to lick stitches. Certainly nobody was instructed to do that in school. But what if stitch licking turned out to be science in the next decade? It was a possibility. He understood about keeping a wound dry, but he also understood about keeping a wound clean. Which was the stronger commandment? Dogs seemed to do very well on their own. He would have to consider this later and do some tests.

  Understanding that Bernardo, like any dog, would prioritize which irritation to deal with first, and not wanting him to go for the stitches, Dr. Bartolomeo fashioned a collar by taking strips of paper from t
he large roll he used to cover the examining table for each new patient. Hygiene and cleanliness were the first things he planned to stress to the townspeople.

  Dr. Bartolomeo cut the paper strips into various sizes and then looped them around the dog’s neck and sutured this fluttering mess together, since he already had his suturing needles out. He used a very thick, curved needle and a very thick thread, the thickest of each—items he had been certain he would never be called upon to use. That, by itself, made him smile, this combination of surprise and inspiration. And science.

  * * *

  This collar delighted his next patients, who were scheduled to be his first. The schoolchildren had not had a proper check-up in several years, ever since Dr. Cano had retired. Since these children were not old enough to remember what visits to him were like, they were cheerful as they lined up in a row.

  When Dr. Bartolomeo and Bernardo came out of the examining room, there were all the kids, in a line starting in the waiting room and extending outside onto the sidewalk. But it was a neat and orderly line, even with all the fussing, all the ways children find to move even when standing still. Looking at them all in a row, one could guess all their nicknames, thought Dr. Bartolomeo, Chapo, Flaco, Gordito, Huila, Güerita, Zarco, Guapo.

  Guapo. The good-looking boy. Dr. Bartolomeo noticed that this handsome boy also had on clothes different from the rest. Narciso noticed this because his parents were tailors, and he remembered this equation even as a child: Handsome people wear different clothing, no matter how poor they are. And they invariably wear it better. But perhaps they wear it better because someone put the time and energy into making sure that it fit. A little bit of extra color here, a better seam there—people did things for beauty.

  But then they turned around and complained at how the beautiful ones seem to get everything, without understanding their own complicity. The idea of beauty was bigger than all of them, perhaps. Beauty was simply a force beyond their control, for good or for bad. But it was there. This handsome boy, el guapo, had handsome clothes. They fit, and they had a brightness of color that suggested how carefully they had been laundered. It was not fair, of course, but just one more item of note in the great ocean of things.

  Well, all of this aside, as Dr. Bartolomeo stood there looking for how to proceed, the children saw Bernardo in his collar and laughed. Dr. Bartolomeo at first did not notice, but then acknowledged what they were interested in and raised the dog a little so that they could see him better.

  “Who will help me with Bernardo?” he asked. The neat line quickly became a small, unruly crowd, everyone volunteering by shouts and the raising of hands.

  Dr. Bartolomeo pointed to six children, all about the same height and build, four boys and two girls. They came immediately forward as the others voiced their dismay. But the procedure was far from over, and their attention was immediately drawn again.

  “Hand me that,” he said to one of the boys, pointing to a large, square piece of construction wood, one of the plywood panels that were still lying around the new office. It had been used, perhaps, to bring in the windows, or perhaps it had been the side of a big box holding some of the medical equipment. What its function had been was lost, but what it would be was everything.

  Dr. Bartolomeo put Bernardo down on the waiting room couch, motioning the children to stay back. He got some more of the hygienic paper and wrapped it around the wood, taping it all neatly down with white tape. He then asked to be handed a cardboard box, instructing another of the children to look out back. He took that box and cut it into something of a triangle and stuffed the inside with a clean white blanket from one of his cabinets. The hodge-podge of things added up, and the box became something luxurious, so many odds and ends sticking up and down that it looked like comfort itself, exhibiting the elegance of excess. It looked like nothing else anyone had ever seen. With that, he set Bernardo on his back, halfway sitting up, into the box, and put the box onto the plywood square.

  Then he arranged the six children three on a side.

  “You’ll be careful?” he asked, and they all said yes and nodded seriously.

  “Do you know where Don Miguel Torres lives?” he asked.

  They all nodded their heads again.

  “Then, very carefully, I want you to lift the dog, everybody taking care, and then carry him over to Sr. Torres’s place. Can you do that?”

  They all nodded of course.

  “All right, then. Let’s go.” With that, he had them lift the dog and carry it outside on this fine bed. Dr. Bartolomeo knew that he had to keep Bernardo quiet and safe, away from the stitches, and he did not want him to throw up from the anesthesia. This seemed like a good plan. And with all these children here, it was a little bit of theater as well. He needed to count them all as being on his side, as he would be seeing them all for the next—who knew?—fifty years perhaps.

  As they started off, Narciso thought of Bernardo—this medium-sized, light-colored, shaggy-haired apparition—as a fine, ancient, well-fed potentate on a sedan chair carried by servants and fanned with palm fronds, but he kept the thought to himself as an amusement of his own, something not always easily explained to others. Still, it made him wish he had a camera.

  But he needn’t have worried. Everyone laughed and wanted to follow along. The teacher, Sra. Maldonado, said no, but with only half a heart. She was friends with Dr. Bartolomeo, and they looked at each other with laughter as well.

  “All right,” said Sra. Maldonado, “some of you can go. But those who need to leave school early today, you stay here and get checked first.”

  It was a compromise, and good enough, even with some complaints.

  Sitting up instead of lying on his back, and groggy from the medication Dr. Bartolomeo had administered, his paws waving this way and that, Bernardo and his entourage started their voyage, stepping away from the doctor’s office and into the street.

  Just as the children set out carrying the dog, carefully up above their heads, a car passed by, very slowly, on the other side of the street, a car with a flat roof, the driver looking with some bemusement at the dog and parade.

  * * *

  Sra. Guillermina Belmares, who knew everything regarding this town, and everybody, and who was normally hard at work selling dairy products from her stall in the mercado, and was familiar with animals because her family had a dairy and raised cattle and farm animals as well, happened to have stepped away from her work and was on her way to do an errand. As she walked along the street at that very same moment, she saw what she would later describe as the most startling thing she had ever seen. And she fainted straightaway.

  The details were these: As the car passed slowly in front of her, the driver looking at the dog, Sra. Belmares’s view of the children was obscured. All that was left to her to see was the dog, mouth muscles relaxed from the medication and drooping open a little, giving his face the appearance of a smile, and wearing what suddenly looked to her like a royal collar, and reclining on what looked just as suddenly like a flying carpet, flying easy as anything down the street with the cars.

  It was an illusion easily enough explained later, but at that moment the false impression spoke for itself with the parts that she saw. Behold, the Great Bernardo! one could have said, and to her it would have made a perfect kind of sense, a part of the moment that fit.

  “But I saw it!” said Sra. Belmares.

  What she saw was, for a half-second, difficult to decipher. It was not the evil eye, because the look the dog gave her was the only look that dogs have, finally, all love. But the dog did look at her. And smiled.

  It was not susto, because she was not afraid; nor was the dog trying to scare her.

  It was disbelief—that is what it was most and for which there are so few words, perhaps only the despairing and imploring Dios mío, Dios mío, which covers everything and were precisely the words she used. To that extent, she was fully in control of her senses, enough to know what to say. This was nothing S
ra. Castañeda could have fixed.

  And so the woman fainted. Straightaway, not two seconds after what she had seen and then thought, falling in a perfect corkscrew motion to the ground. It was a great stroke of luck that Dr. Bartolomeo was still standing there minding that the children were careful with their charge. He was not fast enough to help her on the way down, but he was there to help her up, to fan her face and make sure she was all right, or as all right as she could be.

  “But I saw it!” said Sra. Belmares, again.

  It was not fear, finally, that she tried to communicate when she came out of her faint. It was amazement—But I saw it!—yet the harder she tried to explain, the harder everyone laughed, including the doctor. Sra. Belmares took that laughter in good stead, assuming it to be a kind of amazement, too, and a good way to feel about the state of the world wherein such a thing might be possible. But whether this was the future, as the doctor so often discussed, or the past, which came to her from her schoolbooks, she could not say, not in the moment. It was simply a flying dog, one more marvel one was lucky to have seen in one’s own lifetime.

  * * *

  When Miguel Torres showed up to thank Dr. Bartolomeo, all the fuss had died down, but a new part of the day’s history began. Dr. Bartolomeo asked Don Miguel if he would mind very much bringing Bernardo back, or letting the children bring him back. He would explain later. As Dr. Bartolomeo had taken such good care of Bernardo, and since it was the doctor who was asking, Don Miguel agreed readily.

  For the sake of Sra. Belmares, who did not understand why everyone was laughing, the doctor decided to reconstruct what had happened, taking into account everyone’s stories, even to having the children repeat the performance.

  When he explained it to the children, telling them what Sra. Belmares had seen, they laughed as hard as they could and were eager for the reconstruction, telling everyone they knew to come and watch.