‘FIRST YOU MUST wash your hands and arms.’
Sister Maddalena snorted and glared at the Jewish doctor. ‘We know the rules of hygiene very well here.’
The doctor looked around the room with its spotless floor and bed linen. He inclined his head. ‘I appreciate that and I compliment you on it. Nevertheless I insist that you wash once more. I may have brought infection in from outside. Therefore you must roll back your sleeves to the elbow and wash all exposed skin.’
My aunt hesitated. It wasn’t right for a man, and worse, a non-Christian man, to see the exposed flesh of a professed nun.
‘Oh, do it!’ I said crossly. Lorena’s howls were agitating me beyond reason. I pushed up my sleeves as far as they would go and washed my hands and arms thoroughly. My aunt and Sister Maddalena followed my example.
‘Now I must examine the patient.’ The Jewish doctor approached the bed and spoke gently to Lorena, asking her to tell him her name and assuring her that he would do everything in his power to help her. His quiet authority seemed to calm her. If she realized he was a Jew, she gave no sign.
My aunt put her hands beneath the bedcover and raised up Lorena’s nightgown. Then she folded down the top sheet to expose only her stomach. The doctor prodded with his fingers and Lorena grimaced. The doctor’s face showed no indication of what he felt. When he’d finished, he stood back. ‘There is an irregularity,’ he said. ‘I must make a further examination.’
There was silence in the room.
Lorena chewed on her lip. Even my liberal-minded aunt flinched.
‘The birth canal,’ the doctor said distinctly, so that there could be no mistaking his intention. ‘I must probe the passage itself to determine if there is a blockage preventing the baby from being expelled.’
‘That would be improper,’ my aunt whispered.
‘Let him do it!’ Lorena shouted. ‘It is I, not you, enduring the pain!’
She kicked her legs up, tossing the sheet aside so that her buttocks and her private parts were exposed. ‘Let him look at whatever he wants!’ She shrieked in hysterical laughter. ‘More than one man has done so before him! It’s why I am in this condition now!’
What could she mean? Everyone in the room avoided each other’s eyes.
My aunt glanced towards the door. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said, trying to hush Lorena’s ranting.
Sister Maddalena took away the blood-soaked towels from under Lorena’s hips and replaced them with fresh ones.
‘You must hold her legs bent up and back,’ the doctor instructed the two nuns.
Sister Maddalena and my aunt exchanged looks. It was Maddalena who stepped forward first to obey his instructions.
The doctor watched Lorena’s face as he probed her with his fingers. Then he addressed himself to her. ‘Your baby is lying crosswise to the opening of your womb. In that position the child cannot be born. It may be possible to turn it, but this is not without risk. You are bleeding from some unknown internal place and I doubt that I’m capable of halting the haemorrhage.’
Lorena’s face had taken on a pink flush and her eyes glittered as if she were in a fever. As she did not reply to the doctor, my aunt asked, ‘What is the alternative?’
‘We may cut open her belly and try to rescue the child. She will almost certainly die and possibly the child too.’
‘And if we do nothing?’
‘Her suffering increases so much that she might go mad. Eventually she dies in agony and then the child too dies.’
‘Go ahead!’ Lorena spoke in a rush, as if she’d been listening but only just come to a decision. ‘Do it. Turn the child and let me be rid of it from my body.’
The Jewish doctor faced me. ‘In this state the woman cannot give her permission. If any fatal consequence comes of this action then it would be deemed that I had assaulted her in the most vile manner. That I had taken advantage of a woman while her mind was unsound. I need someone who has wardship of her, or who is her kin, to confirm that I am allowed to do this.’
‘I am her – her . . .’ My tongue stumbled on the words. ‘I am her stepdaughter. I give you the permission you need.’
Sister Maddalena hurried to write out a document for me to sign while the doctor again washed his hands and returned to the bed. He pummelled at Lorena’s belly. This time he was not gentle and took no notice of her shrieks as he struggled to turn the child so it would lie head down in the birth canal. Without ceasing his efforts he kept manipulating the baby towards the course he desired. Sweat ran down his face, glistening on his eyebrows and beard.
Lorena was roaring. Her contractions now followed each other without respite. I wiped her brow as she thrashed in the bed and my aunt and Sister Maddalena coaxed the child from her womb. Lorena gave an almighty scream as the head crowned, and then another cry was heard in the room.
The heart-stopping, insistent, desperate cry of the newborn.
‘A boy,’ my aunt announced, holding up a blood-red, raw, squirming baby.
My heart and head spun with relief and joy.
The doctor took him and pronounced him healthy. He then looked again at the intimate parts of Lorena’s body. He drew me and my aunt aside. ‘She will not live long,’ he told us. ‘It’s as I thought. There is a bleeding that I cannot stop.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘You might want to summon one of your priests to guide her soul into the afterlife that has been prepared by your God for his followers.’
As the Jewish doctor packed away his instruments in a worn leather bag, it struck me how weary he looked. I thought of how it must reduce a doctor to know that someone he has treated will, despite his best efforts, die.
‘My belly aches,’ Lorena said in a weary voice. ‘I can feel blood seeping between my legs. Is there nothing that can be done to stop it?’
I glanced at the doctor.
‘Is there?’ Lorena persisted.
‘No,’ he told her plainly.
‘Then I am doomed.’ Tears coursed down her cheeks.
‘Let her see the child,’ the doctor advised us. ‘It will give her fortitude and hope. If not for herself personally, then she’ll draw strength for her ordeal to come, knowing that she leaves part of herself in this world.’
But Lorena turned her face away when the child was brought to her. ‘No,’ she said bitterly. ‘I’ll not look upon him. I’ll not let him see me. He will know another as his mother, not I.’
Beatriz put the baby in the crib Maddalena had prepared. I went to sit by Lorena’s bed.
She looked at me. ‘They say that when you are dying you speak the truth. I am near death, so I will confess to you the wrongs I have done. It may be my one chance to enter into Heaven. For if it is left to the virtue of the life I have lived, of my mind and my body’ – she laughed, and a sudden flash of the old Lorena, of her rash gaiety, shone through the pallor on her face – ‘then I am both doomed and damned.’
‘We will summon a priest,’ I said.
‘Oh, no!’ Lorena pursed her lips. ‘No. For I would give the priest you brought such nightmares and put such wild thoughts into his head that he wouldn’t be able to cope. Then he would have to confess to another, and he in turn to yet a third, and so it would go on, and think what a fuss and consternation there would be.’
At one time that kind of commotion would have suited Lorena very well, I thought to myself; she who loved so much to have men gazing after her and thinking all sorts about her.
My aunt addressed herself to Sister Maddalena. ‘Please escort the good doctor to our front door and then fetch a priest to hear this woman’s confession.’
Sister Maddalena nodded and went out with the doctor while my aunt Beatriz gave Lorena the potion he’d left. He’d told us that it might cause confusion in her mind but would give her a painless passage from this world to the next.
Lorena opened her eyes wide to stare at me. ‘Why did you help me?’ she demanded. ‘Why, when I treated you so badly, Zarita, did you care enough to try to save my life and that of my child?’
I could not truly express why I’d done so. Living the life of a nun meant translating the love of God into charitable action rather than merely reciting words. But it was more than that. ‘You were my father’s wife,’ I said. ‘And the baby is kin to me.’
‘The baby isn’t any kin of yours.’
‘Of course he is,’ I said. ‘Try to rest.’
‘I say again, Zarita, that none of your family’s blood runs within that child.’
I assumed that the opiate was starting to take effect. As the doctor had forewarned us, Lorena was losing her mental faculties. I made to place a cloth on her brow but she pushed my hand away.
‘Listen to me, Zarita! Your father was anxious for a son and we didn’t seem able to make one together. I tried every folk remedy and potion, but none worked. Then I began to think that he was tiring of me and my attractions, so I decided to lie with another younger man whose seed might bear fruit in my womb.’
My aunt looked at Lorena in alarm. ‘You are wandering in your thoughts, Lorena. Better to be quiet now.’
‘I’m not so confused that I don’t know the true father of my own son!’ Lorena exclaimed. ‘His name is Ramón Salazar.’