The boy looked at me and nodded. “What a fool!” I thought to myself. I am not particularly fond of children. Still less I like the spoiled little monsters from royal courts. And still less if they have worms. And especially if I must insert a glass tube into their backsides and blow tobacco smoke into it, so as to cleanse their bowels from the inside, as was required for the procedure I was faced with. The persistent thought that some worm might crawl through the tube and into my mouth kept running through my head. Yet loyal to my duties, I lit a cigarella and began exhaling tobacco fumes into the tube, blowing as hard as I could so they would not come back out. At the same time, the doctor gave young Felipe a bit more of the infusion, so as to attack the worms from both ends. This raised my misgivings to the level of acute alarm, as I imagined what would happen if he were to get the runs while I was blowing tobacco fumes into the tube. In Sevilla there is a man everyone calls Shit Mouth, thanks to his habit of constantly making gloomy prophecies (which incidentally never come true, except with respect to Shit Mouth himself), but, of course, this expression could also have a literal meaning. I imagined what Francisco Rodrigues would say in the pubs, if such a thing were to occur. He would say: “Hey, there’s our friend Guimarães, who ate royal shit.”
“But what if he. .” I said, unable to fully suppress my misgivings.
Dr. Monardes shrugged, as if reading my thoughts. “This is medicine! It is a difficult profession, Señor da Silva,” he added, standing by my side and looking down at me.
Difficult, yes, but sometimes you get lucky. The whole procedure went smoothly, we gave him the enema and the doctor left the boy, who looked completely dazed at that point, to sleep. We would wake him after two hours to give him some food and a mild laxative and with that, the doctor reckoned, his treatment would be successfully completed.
As we paced back and forth in the hallway, a priest appeared, sent to help us in case the need arose. I forgot to mention that this outwardly freakish building is also freakish in content, combining as it does a royal palace and a monastery. The priests here are either hypocrites or fanatics, so you cannot hope to have a worldly conversation with them, and indeed, this one soon began prattling on about the soul. Dr. Monardes is in principle a calm man in his fifties, of average height with a well-trimmed, grayish beard, which he strokes with his hand when he portrays pensiveness. He is calm, as I said, yet the word “soul” is something that can infuriate him. I noticed how, as the priest kept talking and talking, Dr. Monardes stroked his beard tensely, trying to restrain himself. But the priest wouldn’t shut up. “Why not?” I asked myself. “Is he simply a windbag who, now that he has found an audience, cannot shut up? Or is he a fanatic who has taken it upon himself to preach to us? Or is he a hypocrite who is counting on us to praise his righteousness and zealous faith to high-ranking personages?” Who knows? In any case, at a certain point the doctor could not stand listening to any more of his slimy, somehow sing-song voice and said: “The soul, father? What exactly are you calling the soul? There is no such concept in medicine, señor. In medicine, the soul is a functio of your corporality. Your body has four fluids, four humors, warm and cold and two others; it also has organs, between which these fluids move. Your body is eight-tenths water. Water, padre. And while these things interact according to the laws of nature, something else appears, which you call the soul. But it is merely a kind of functio of the humors and organs.”
“That is not so, señor,” the priest objected. “The soul is immortal. How could that which you describe be immortal? The body decays, yet the soul remains.”
Fortunately, the doctor got a hold of himself and let the argument drop. The last thing I needed was for some ecclesiastical idiots to clamp my feet in an iron boot. Because their faith and love for their fellow man does not hinder them from torturing him like beasts in God’s name. Thus the cruel madness that nature has instilled in all her creation comes out in them. Fortunately, many things are forgiven to the members of the medical profession. For a long time now we haven’t heard of a medical man being persecuted by the Inquisition. This is so because our very profession is thought to make us quite absorbed by the body, hence some of our convictions are benevolently ignored as a type of occupational illness or mental injury. Otherwise they would have to burn up more or less all the medical men, yet even priests fall ill now and then and need a doctor, since pain is difficult to cure with prayer, no matter what they might say. Despite this, however, a doctor still may not say everything he thinks without risking a wealth of troubles, and big ones, at that. Dr. Monardes knew that far better than me and prudently fell silent. “To risk making yourself dependent on other people’s benevolence is a serious form of madness or idiocy, which every intelligent person should avoid,” Dr. Monardes says. Of course, he says that in a different context, referring to medicine itself, having in mind how important it is to lead a healthy life, lest you have to resort to the benevolence and intellect of doctors, who could easily be both malevolent and stupid — such examples abound. However, that statement is admittedly true in a much wider sense as well.
The time finally came to wake up young Felipe. As soon as we entered the room, something in his look unambiguously suggested to me that the boy was not well at all. He had not fallen asleep, but had passed out, as the doctor soon found.
“Complications have arisen,” Dr. Monardes said. “Quick, Guimarães, get the citronella.”
Citronella is a substance discovered by Dr. Monardes, which is made up of citrus fruits, glycerin, and rose dust, and in the form of a tincture it is used for coming to after a faint. Most of our medications, however, were in a bundle we had left — due to its great weight — in an area near the entrance to the palace. We had taken only the cigarellas, tobacco infusions, and one or two other items. Now here’s an opportunity, I thought to myself, for this monk to make himself useful.
“How is our regal lad, señor?” He asked me when I came out.
“Very well,” I replied. “He’s recovering.”
And then I sent him to bring the bundle of medicines.
“You should have gone yourself,” Dr. Monardes reproached me, as I came back into young Felipe’s chambers.
“I don’t know the way, I would get lost in the hallways,” I replied, which (in and of itself) was true.
“Listen here, Guimarães,” the doctor said, handing me a cigarella. “If something happens to this little fool, I have money stashed in Sierra Morena and more left in trust in Cadiz. We’ll go there, get it, and flee to France.”
“But how will we get out of here?” I asked. “We don’t know the way.”
“I remember it,” Dr. Monardes assured me. “That’s the first thing I notice when I go anywhere.”
“But how will we flee to France? They will be looking for us everywhere!”
“Don’t worry about that,” the doctor replied. “No one who has money and knows how to use it is ever found, as long as he knows they are looking for him. All the Italians know that. And my father was Italian. . Remember our friend Frampton? We’ll sneak out the same way.”
Frampton was that Englishman engaged in wholesale trade in Spain who was locked up in Cadiz by the Inquisition, but he escaped and later translated Dr. Monardes’ book in England. Of course I remembered him, how could I not! I must admit, as strange as it may seem, at that moment I felt a joyful excitement. The thought of fleeing to France with Dr. Monardes’ gold aroused in me an unexpected surge of strength. Not that I meant him any harm, God forbid! but fate works in mysterious ways: What would happen if, when we went to France, some calamity befell Dr. Monardes? I would be left with all the money. How much was it? Certainly quite a lot — the doctor was a celebrated personage with a huge practice, famous throughout the entirety of Spain, under one name or another. And how nice it is to live without working! I would even say that is the meaning of life. No work, no responsibilities, just your heap of gold and the pleasurable life! Not such a great meaning, I agree. But, then again, it’s all you really have in the world of Nature, and you should be real, shouldn’t you? You are either real or a fool.