27
THE HOSPITAL DE PAULA, IN which I’d been sentenced to serve, was not unknown to me. It was (and surely still is) located on the far southern end of the Paseo de la Alameda, on a small promontory that protruded from the bay, protected by a parapet and sentry post. Many times Maryse and I, leaving the quitrín next to the staircase that led to the Paseo, had walked up to its doors and back, chatting about this and that, allowing our words and the breeze to guide us back toward the fanciful façade of the Teatro Principal. I also knew something about the medical services performed there, as well as the hospital’s administration. It had always been under the directorship of the Bishop’s diocese, which required that the hospital’s directors and chaplains be clerics native to Havana. Romay had taken me on a tour of its wards, which were passably clean, though a bit crowded—in my day, the number of patients vacillated between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty. As in the Salpetrière, the patients were convicts from the House of Corrections, generally thieves and prostitutes, destitute old women and beggars, almost all of whom were afflicted with tuberculosis, tumorous masses, and venereal diseases. Almost all of them were black. Slave women were also treated there, provided their masters paid the corresponding fees. A chapel dedicated to Saint Francis of Paola had been erected alongside the building in which mass was held on Sundays and holy feast days.
The air was good there, and it was possible to entertain oneself watching the ships enter the harbor, drop and weigh anchor. But proximity to the thick and foul-smelling waters of the wharf was a cause of fevers, most particularly yellow fever. Perhaps because I’d breathed the air of so many nations both temperate and frigid, as well as the emanations from swamps and decomposing bodies, this scourge was, for me, an enemy held at bay.
My first disillusion with the place arose the very day of my arrival. In the midst of a dry and long-winded lecture on my duties and extremely limited rights, the administrator insisted that I was to be prohibited from practicing medicine. It did no good for me to show him the paper on which my sentence was recorded, which did not specify what my services to the hospital were to be. His response was: “For all intents and purposes you are no longer a doctor. Both your license and your post as officer of the Protomedicato have been revoked.”
“Very well,” I sighed. “Tell me, then, what are to be my tasks?”
“Cleaning the building. You will sweep, wash, and mop the floors. Except on Sundays, which goes without saying.”
“The entire building?” I said in disbelief.
“You will share the work with two other women. Finally, you should know that, although this isn’t a prison, you are forbidden to go out into the street. Do not forget this. Any attempt on your part to go beyond the front gates will be considered an attempt at escape. The consequence of this is an increase to your sentence, from one to three years, depending upon the circumstances. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s time for lunch. You may go to the dining hall. Turn right as you leave my office.”
When I arrived at the dining hall, I took a seat at the far end of a bench; the two long tables were packed with inmates, servants, and young men in vests who I assumed were medical students. Seeing that no one paid me any mind, I stood and introduced myself. Hearing my name, everyone stopped eating and looked at me, or, better put, they examined me as though I were a griffin or had two heads, a reaction to which I’d already become accustomed. In order to break the spell, I asked who could give me instructions so that I could get started with the cleaning.
And so began my seclusion in the Hospital de Paula. The days passed slowly and monotonously, as though I were trapped in one of those interminable Intendance convoys. My hands soon became calloused from so much sweeping and mopping. Of course, I wasn’t capable of ignoring the fact that I was a doctor, and while I cleaned the wards I took an interest in the patients. With time, it became the doctors’ habit to consult with me about the administration of a drug or a surgical procedure. This made Romay laugh, when he visited me from time to time. “Just look at you, Enriqueta,” he would say. “Your lawyer Vidaurre was right. Once a doctor, always a doctor, and it makes no difference whatsoever if one is dressed as a man or a woman.”
In my meager luggage I’d brought a few books, all of them gifts from Vidaurre before he left Puerto Príncipe. I was allowed to keep them because they were the works of saints and pious sorts: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Friar Louis of Granada. When I read the work by the Mexican nun, whom I hadn’t before known existed, I realized that my impassioned defender’s ideas owed a great deal to hers. Another pastime of mine was watching the ships through my window, the figureheads on their prows bursting into my line of sight like some sort of unexpected illusionist. (What has become of you, Piet Vaalser, with your doves and boxes and handkerchiefs, and your magician’s cape embroidered with half-moons and comets?) Quite often the ships dropped anchor right in the center of my view, on the other side of the bay, just at the foot of the battery of La Cabaña. There they would remain for a few days, surrounded by small launches unloading pieces of machinery, heavy crates, and passengers, only to disappear again beyond my window frame. Before setting sail, they would always take on new passengers, and it was these travelers I observed most closely, the colors of their dresses, their parasols, their white handkerchiefs waving goodbye to relatives and friends invisible to me, bidding them farewell for what might be months, or perhaps forever. I would follow them with my gaze until they entered the hull of the ship; I would count them one by one as they climbed the narrow staircase, watch as its frame was hoisted from the upper works while the sails were unfurled and the anchors weighed, and then the ocean, that vast and perilous waterway that led to Bristol, to Brest, to Boston, to Cádiz, or to Lisbon, and me, anchored in that godforsaken hospital, and thus passed the weeks and months and years.
I was always delighted to catch sight of the Neptune, the steamship that made the tiny crossing between Havana and Matanzas, and also the one that came in from New Orleans, both owned by the company in which the unfortunate Robledo had invested, not knowing that he was carving out his cousin’s fortune rather than his own. The nights also provided entertainment: if there was an opera or a concert at the Teatro Principal, I could hear the music, and even the voices of the sopranos and tenors traveling with some humble Italian company that had sworn to great success at La Scala. My elbows on the windowsill, tracking the lights of the fishing boats and schooners heading out of the harbor, I would enjoy the muted sound of the violins, above which floated, like silver birds, the flute and clarinet. In truth, at least from my window here in New York, it wasn’t so bad there. The war had been so much worse. But after three years of confinement, my nerves began to give way. I would awake in a foul mood, call the doctors useless and the students idiots, complain about the food, or forget to clean one of the privies.
One Sunday as I was ruminating over my bitterness, I saw a beautiful ship-of-the-line flying a French flag maneuver into the bay. It wasn’t just another boat to me: its name, the polished bronze letters of which I was able to make out, was the Languedoc. I spent most of the morning observing the goings-on on board. When one of the dinghies was lowered, I made out the captain’s plumed bicorn amid the oarsmen; when I saw him disappear to my left, I assumed he was headed to the marina’s Command Headquarters in order to deliver some important military dispatch. After lunch I spent the afternoon watching the ship, every so often exchanging waves with the sailors gazing at the city from up in the rigging. The captain returned to his boat at dusk. Given my familiarity with the customs of the port, I knew that this meant the ship would set sail at dawn; when a ship was to remain at anchor for several days, its captain invariably preferred to stay in a hotel or as a guest of the frivolous local nobility which, made rich from sugar, had obtained Marquisates and Earldoms in exchange for sacks of money. This realization was all it took for an unstoppable urge to grip me. No matter how many times I told myself that I only had one year of my sentence left, that it wasn’t worth the risk, my willpower had crumbled irreparably. I felt that I must escape at all costs. Night fell. Barefoot and lightly dressed, I waited for the sentry, a man named Moscote who generally worked the night watch, to fall asleep. He was an insufferable individual. On moonlit nights, when he could make out my shape in the window, he would blow kisses and make indecent hand gestures at me. In any case, I needed only to wait for the glow of his inevitable cigarette to go out to know that he’d be snoring within minutes. His sentry box gone dark, I slid from my window and moved along a cornice that ran between the building’s two stories; I came to a place where a pine tree’s branches touched the wall and from there it was easy to drop into the street. Diving into the water and swimming to the Languedoc was not a problem in and of itself, but I would need to wait for the lights from the fishing boats heading out of the bay to pass by. Sitting on the parapet, ready to jump, I waited and waited, twisted into a terrible knot of anxiety. But that night it seemed as though every fisherman in Havana had decided to try his luck. To kill time, I imagined myself swimming to the ship, making my final stroke before touching the anchor chain, taking hold of it to catch my breath, and then shouting: Vive la France! I’d be hoisted aboard and taken before a surprised duty officer, to whom I’d say: “I am Madame Faber-Cavent, a French traveler. I’ve been kidnapped by bandits and have managed to escape. I’d be grateful, from the bottom of my heart, if you’d take me on board.” Since the ship would be leaving the port early in the morning, the captain wouldn’t have time to make many inquiries. Possibly he’d served under Napoleon, perhaps in the blockade against England, in which case I’d speak to him of the time when, after accompanying my husband to the Russian campaign. . . . But my digressions were to be short-lived. A giant pair of hands grabbed me about the waist, lifted me in the air, and threw me like a sailor’s rucksack over a strapping shoulder.
“From the hospital, eh?” bellowed Moscote. I tried to get free of his arm; begged him not to betray me. It was useless. “If I let you go, they’d punish me.” And then he shouted all over again: “From the hospital, eh? The woman doctor has tried to escape!” Candlelight appeared in the windows. The outer gate opened.
I’d had fourteen months left to serve. They increased my sentence by three more years. It was as though I were arriving at the hospital for the very first time. To make matters worse, as part of my punishment, they shaved my head and forced me to wear a habit that had belonged to a nun who’d taken ill with yellow fever and been brought to the hospital to die.
Nothing mattered to me anymore. I did my work in silence, impersonally. I could scarcely touch food and, more than merely sleeping, I’d throw myself on my cot to sink deliberately into a stupor as warm and merciful as that brought on by opium, my will to live evaporating drop by drop as the weeks wore on. I was certain that I would die before finishing my sentence, and I think it may have been true, had it not been for something on the order of a miracle, a word I always find difficult to employ. Seeing me so downtrodden, Romay had managed to secure Bishop Espada’s intercession. I was to be expelled from Cuba immediately.
I was to board the schooner the Collector under the command of Capitan Plumet, which would set sail for New Orleans with the first breeze of dawn. I had been told nothing until the last minute. I had not a single coin to my name. By way of luggage, I carried a nightshirt, a pair of stockings, and a second nun’s habit. I sat on the cot and waited for them to call me, the bundle of clothes on my knees. At five o’clock, the new administrator, an officious and hunchbacked priest, came for me. Instead of bidding me good morning, he said, almost in outrage: “Do not think that you are free. You are traveling under a convict’s passport. You are to be remanded to the authorities in New Orleans.” He would hand me over personally to the ship’s captain. It was so early that the port was empty of onlookers. This time, at least, there would be no one to humiliate me.
We walked toward the dock in the light of a lantern carried by a slave. I thought of how I was leaving my Woman in Battle Dress behind. Where would it end up? But, above all, I was leaving Maryse behind, this time, forever, and with her, all of her affection, always without buts or conditions. I was broken and alone; no one to write to, no one to go visit. There, in the gloom, was the Collector, its outlines still blurred, nothing more than a gray mass beneath the cawing of invisible seagulls. It would take me to a new time whose calendar began with days of ash. While the priest handed my papers over to the captain, the first rays of sun began to dapple the ship’s rigging, tingeing its flag red and blue. A barefoot sailor helped me up the planks of the gangway and, as I climbed, I determined not to look toward the city, whose towers and façades would be reemerging from the shadows. Like Lot, I was afraid that something would happen if I turned my head, forcing me to remain there forever. To be sure, nothing good awaited me in New Orleans; perhaps jail again or, in the best of cases, seclusion in another hospital, or in a convent. And yet, as I set foot on deck, as I took my first step amid the colors of things, I knew that not all had been lost. I felt tired, very tired now, but on the boat, I’d have time to think.
I’ve just recovered from the attack of melancholy brought on by my last page. I say “my last,” because I know that I lack the strength to go on. True, I managed to compose some manner of ending, an incidental, provisional end, I might add, because I wasn’t even able to speak of those strange nights of voodoo in New Orleans, or of my productive association with Marie Laveau, or of how I met my third husband, or of my clandestine return to Havana, or of my encounter with Christopher in London; lost to silence are the days in Ireland and Egypt, my friendship with Garibaldi, my last nights of love in the haunted house in Venice. How much I would give to be able to tell all of that! Two or three years would be enough, two or three years that I know I do not have. In the end, why go on? Even if it were possible for me to illuminate with my pen all that I have lived, I would be forced to conclude that my story would still end with a tentative, necessarily open-ended finale, and I’d still lament having written an unfinished book. And perhaps my life is nothing more than that; precisely that lack of something that I’ve always sensed, that leak in the roof or chink in the door that neither I nor anyone else has ever been able to fix; that incessant loss that every day leaves me suspended in the middle of things, small and hanging like a comma, but with the determination to carry ever onward. Who knows?