When I arrived at the musical instrument workshop the following morning, I was so weary that my whole body ached. I hadn’t had more than a couple of hours of proper sleep before the light of dawn woke me.
It took Signor Fidardo no time at all to see what was the matter.
“Your yawns are disturbing me,” he said, “and, to be honest, they are rather unpleasant. What if one of my elderly customers were to come through the door at the very moment you are showing your canine teeth? No good could come of it! Old people have been known to suffer a stroke from less than that! Is it your evening job that’s spoiling your sleep? Come on, let’s go to the Café Nova Goa and have morning coffee. You look as if you need it!”
78The day turned out to be very different to what I had expected. When we got back from the Nova Goa there was a taxi parked on the pavement and a woman walking anxiously up and down and peering in through the windows of our workshop.
I recognized her immediately, as did Signor Fidardo.
“Isn’t that our dear Doctor Domingues waiting for us?” he said, sounding surprised.
Rosa Domingues is a doctor in the infectious disease clinic at São José Hospital. She works harder than anyone else I know, but I had never seen her looking as utterly exhausted as she was now. Her face was pale as marble and the blue rings around her bloodshot eyes told of a lack of sleep.
“Ah, there you are at last!” she exclaimed with relief in her voice when she caught sight of me and Signor Fidardo. “Thank Heavens for that!”
Rosa asked the taxi driver to wait while she accompanied us into the workshop.
“I have a problem,” she said to me, “and I think you are the only one who can help.”
The problem was an Italian vessel that was quarantined in the port—the one that Sylvie Dubois had read about in the paper. Rosa gave us a brief account of the situation.
“Some of the passengers are poor emigrants,” she said. “They are on their way to England to seek their fortune. Someone 79must already have been ill when they came on board in Salerno and now the bacteria have spread through the passengers and the crew. The sick need emergency hospital care, otherwise many of them will die. And it’s the children who are most at risk.”
Rosa gave a deep sigh.
“The ship is anchored on the other side of the river and it wasn’t until yesterday evening that the Ministry of Health gave me permission to bring the sick ashore. To a restricted military site close to the harbour, where my clinic is setting up a temporary field hospital at the moment. But there is still a problem—a big one…”
Rosa was wringing her hands anxiously. “We don’t know how we’re going to bring the patients ashore. We have been given the use of a transport boat but no one will volunteer to drive it. The Navy refuses. The coastguards, too. And the harbour pilots are also refusing. They don’t want to risk their seamen being infected. And I do understand—diphtheria is a dreadful disease.”
Rosa looked me in the eye and added, “But it’s an infection that only passes between people…”
80Signor Fidardo said I should take as much time off from the workshop as Rosa needed me to. He also said he’d send a message to the funfair to inform them they shouldn’t expect me there for the next few days.
Then Rosa and I hurried to the waiting taxi and in less than an hour we were turning into the gates of the Belém naval base. A sailor in uniform showed us the way through the barrack blocks down to the quayside where the grey-painted naval vessels were moored.
The transport was a thirty-foot, open steam launch with room for twenty or so passengers. The boiler was already fired up so I cast off straightaway and steered due south. Rosa explained to me how she thought we should carry out the evacuation. We’d take the most severely ill ashore first and then we’d fetch those with less serious symptoms. We would leave healthy passengers on board for the moment.
The SS Campania was anchored a good distance offshore. A black-and-yellow quarantine flag was hanging from one of the mainmast crosstrees. As I drew alongside the Campania, Rosa was already putting on her protective mask and gloves. A rope ladder was dropped and I climbed up to the ship.
I had been expecting that the sight of me climbing in over the rail would cause a stir aboard the Campania. But the mood on deck was so overwrought and threatening that no one paid 81any attention to me at all. A hundred or so passengers were pushing and shoving to leave the ship and be the first down into the transport.
A few members of the crew were attempting to hold the excited crowd back. A man who appeared to be the ship’s captain was waving a gun. The air was filled with screams and oaths and the situation was on the point of going out of control.
And then, suddenly, a woman emerged from the tumult. She was tall, straight-backed and dressed like a simple peasant woman in colourfully patterned skirts and with her hair covered with a black headscarf. Without a moment’s hesitation she snatched the gun from the captain, aimed it into the air and pulled the trigger.