The neighbors, whose dinner stinks drove me up the wall offered their help. They said they stood ready to drive me to the hospital at the town of M. forty kilometers away. The road was scenic but jammed, as I was well aware, with decayed farm vehicles and _guaguas__ (buses).
The doctor was mild, "understated,' as we say, not inclined to make melodramatic diagnoses. I decided therefore to accept my dengue without fuss and drink the quinine mixture he prescribed. Rosamund and I read _Antony and Cleopatra__ together, recalling Ravelstein's dictum that without great politics the passions could not be represented. Rosamund wept when Antony said, "I am dying Egypt, dying," and when Cleopatra put the asp to her breast. After this we got into bed and slept, but not for long.
On the cool tile of the bathroom I fainted. It was dark and I had been groping myself out of the room when I fell. Rosamund couldn't lift or roll me onto the bed. She ran down to wake the land lady, who immediately telephoned for an ambulance. When I was told that the ambulance was on its way, I said I'd never agree to go to the hospital. I had seen enough of such places. Colonial medicine, especially in the tropics, was very chancy.
Rosamund said, "You _must__." But when she saw how obstinate I was she went down again to call the doctor on the landlady's telephone. He was five minutes down the road. Very decent about be ing wakened, he shone his flashlight down my throat and into my eyes. Two burly orderlies now filled up the doorway with a furled stretcher. These black men in coveralls had already begun opening the stretcher on the floor when I stopped them saying, "I ain't going nowhere."
Rosamund asked the doctor for an opinion and he said, "Well, it isn't absolutely _nйcessaire__ if he is so opposed." He sent the ambulance away. It didn't make a great difference to the orderlies, who left in silence. It was the engine of the ambulance that did the snarling.
We somehow got rid of the rest of the night, and in daylight, without a mention of breakfast, I sat outside looking toward the black reefs-atmosphere and water doing what they always do. One of the attractions of the season were the clouds of pale moths, a soft yellow variety. They were not big nor were they beautifully marked, hovering out to sea and back, again to the vegetation.
Rosamund was below, using the landlady's telephone, which had never before been available to us. The landlady would take no messages for us. Guests were not allowed to make calls. But I was sick now, and she didn't want me to croak on the premises. I thought this must be apparent to Rosamund as well and oddly enough I had almost no feeling one way or another. The sun hadn't risen yet and there was just light enough to distinguish fluid from solid-a sea-a kind of flatness, and a corresponding inner emptiness. Only Rosamund, normally flexible, ladylike, deferential, and genteel now revealed (no question about it) an underlying hardness and the will that showed how well prepared she was to deal with the bad character of the landlady and the bureaucratic hard-heartedness of the airline's telephone staff. And when she climbed upstairs she said, smiling slightly, "We go back early tomorrow. There are plenty of seats out of San Juan because it's Thanksgiving Day. The flights to San Juan were the problem. But I said it was a medical emergency. They say they'll have a wheelchair waiting."
A wheelchair! I would never have guessed I was as sick as all that. It turned out that inexperienced Rosamund saw the facts more clearly than anyone. I never anticipated crises or emergencies.
Could we count on a taxi so early in the morning? Yes. For one thing, because the all-business, middle-aged, handsome, severe Afro-Caribbean landlady had taken note last night of the ambulance and the doctor. Probably she had had a word with the conscientious, not entirely truthful young Frenchman. But she didn't need his warning; one look at my wrinkled, bad-luck, pre-dawn face on the outdoor staircase would have been enough.
Rosamund, frightened by now, was only too glad to leave. Her pale-dark face was now reset for Boston, with its thousands of doctors. She seemed to have gotten the message: It was certain death to stay on the island. She asked me, "Which books and papers do we dump?" This was easy enough. "Let's get rid of all the heavy volumes. And especially Browning's _Collected Poems__." I had turned against Browning. I classed him now with the cuisine and the French neighbors.
What I wouldn't discard was my friend Durkin's magazine-the cannibal number. I was hung up on the roasting human flesh, on the cannibals and the severed heads looking upward from the blood-sprinkled grass at the orchid-covered cliffs. The human flesh being eaten crowded into my-I admit it-contaminated consciousness. It was my sickness that made me peculiarly susceptible. I wouldn't have left these pages behind for anything. I could plead sickness as my cover. But they disappeared during the flight.
The relief registered by our sternly handsome landlady said it all. How pleased, how proud she was of getting rid of me. Let him go and die elsewhere-in a taxi or a plane. She got up before dawn to see us off. The French neighbors also turned out. They must have been awakened by the ambulance the night before with its sirens and flashing lights. With kind hearts and sorrow they wished us well and waved goodbye. Decent people, after all. The landlady's goodbye signified "Get lost." In her place I might have agreed. In the five-o'clock light she waved goodbye-well out of that!
Rosamund, speaking of our foiled holiday, said, "What a night mare." In the rattling speeding taxi, she said goodbye to the island with a kind of wild relief. She was at least going to be rid of the masked motorcyclist who once or twice a week took over the main street. He was all gotten up in leather and a Buck Rogers helmet.
His big teeth were bared and set. The police disappeared when he made his sweep. People scattered when he came flying. He roared back and forth in storms of dust, and he'd surely kill the pedestrians. "The town crazy man," Rosamund called him. "I won't have him to worry about, coming and going to the pharmacy," she said.
At the vast green metal shed of the airport covering thousands of square feet, Rosamund helped me, the sick man, into the waiting wheelchair. I sat in it, feeling imbecilized, and signed traveler's checks in my lap, to pay the exit fees. I felt I didn't actually need a wheelchair. I was still able to walk, I said to Rosamund, and gave her a demonstration by climbing the many stairs into the aircraft. Then down again in San Juan, where I fell gratefully into the second waiting wheelchair. Most of the luggage was piled around my feet and on my knees. But then there was the passport inspection, for which I had to stand up. Worst of all was the customs examination. Rosamund had to get the large suitcases and garment bags from the carousel to the inspection tables-open them, answer questions, then lock them again and haul them down to be reloaded for the U. S. flight. She didn't have the male grip, the necessary muscle. And here I discovered that once and for all I was no longer the able-bodied passenger I once had been. Rosamund said to the inspectors that I was unwell, but they didn't particularly heed her.
It was Thanksgiving Day and the plane was more than half empty. The attendant said I might want to stretch out and led us to the rear, where she pushed back the arms of a row of seats. I asked for water and then more water. I had never been so thirsty. The chief steward, who had dengue in the South Pacific during the war, had many savvy things to say. He offered to give me oxygen. Rosamund urged me to take it but I asked only for more water.
She, meanwhile, was trying to reach my Boston doctors on the telephone. There were two of these-the "primary" one and the cardiologist. The cardiologist, on the golf course, couldn't be reached; the "primary' doctor had gone to New Hampshire for a family dinner.