I was not particularly convinced by his words.
“Señor,” I said, “I’ve heard that thousands of people have died of this disease in Italy and France, whole cities are deserted. .”
“Here isn’t like in Italy and France,” the doctor cut me off. “Don’t forget that everyone in Sevilla smokes. More or less every single person. And nothing disinfects the air like tobacco. You still don’t fully believe in tobacco, do you, eh, Guimarães?”
“Well, of course I believe in it, señor, but I don’t know, I just don’t know. .”
“Tobacco decontaminates everything,” the doctor assured me. “As long as the epidemic continues, you’ll simply have to smoke more. It will last six or seven months, not more. And it won’t be anything like in Italy and France. They don’t smoke there. Here the air is disinfected.”
Of course, the doctor took certain other measures. First of all, he moved Jesús, along with his whole noisy family, from the slum to his house near Puerta de Jerez, which he rented out. The merchants who had been staying there didn’t want to leave, since they had paid through the end of the month. The doctor offered to give them their money back, but they still refused. I was forced to go call Rincon and Cortado. With Rincon and Cortado, the whole business was cleared up in less than twenty minutes.
Thus, we safeguarded ourselves as far as Jesús was concerned. Besides that, the doctor turned down all calls from outside the city, as well as some in Sevilla itself. What a thing experience is! Nothing can replace experience! What I mean is that the doctor in principle took calls from the Santa Cruz Quarter, but not from all streets. From La Macarena, he only took calls from certain streets. Of course, he didn’t set foot in the slums on the other side of the river. Yet in the wealthy Arenal neighborhood, which was directly across from the slum, but on this side of the Guadalquivir, he went everywhere without concern. What I’m trying to say is that only experience can tell you whether to go to certain streets in one and the same neighborhood, but not to others. If it were me, I would either go to Santa Cruz or not. But the doctor had learned to make finer distinctions.
Soon the municipality took measures as well. This, of course, stemmed not from the municipality itself — if you wait for the city council to take measures, it would surely make some decision five years after the illness had passed — not from the municipality itself, I say, but from the royal governor of Sevilla, Count Villar. And he was sufficiently sensible not to turn to the municipality, but to call a meeting of the city physicians, at which they would discuss the situation and decide what to do. Afterwards Count Villar would present their plan to the municipality and the latter would accept it. The municipality is like a woman — if you state clearly what needs to be done, she will more than likely do it, but if you wait for her to decide on her own, she’ll take to hesitating, dawdling, ruminating in vain, and so on. It was well known that the count deeply despised the municipal government, while they in turn hated him and were constantly cooking up intrigues against him, claiming that he was a dictator and Lord knows what, such that he had decided that if the municipality dawdled and took to ruminating, he would run the physicians’ decision through the Council of Castile, which would then simply issue it as an order to the municipality. The Council of Castile was made up of the king’s people, like Count Villar, so they wouldn’t even read what was presented to them — they would simply vote for it. As far as we knew, the count had even called a meeting of the Council of Castile for the following week, and the people from the municipality knew this, too, so they had to accept the decision of their own free will, since otherwise it would be forced on them from above as an order that had to be followed down to the letter.
The municipality should be shut down, in my opinion. I can’t imagine anything more useless than it. At least as it is now.
When Capitan Armando, the count’s aide-de-camp, informed Dr. Monardes of the scheduled meeting, the doctor fell into feverish activity. Few people on earth can do as many things in as little time with such resolute vigor as Dr. Monardes. I haven’t seen any others, at any rate. The secret of this is that he appears inexhaustible at such moments and always knows what his next step will be. He finishes one thing and immediately moves on to the next. Without a moment’s delay, nor a moment’s hesitation, nor a moment’s thought. He thinks in motion. After all, he has had experience in this as well, the situation was familiar to him. The previous royal governor had acted in the same way during the previous plague of ’68. So the doctor was prepared.
From what he told me, huge stakes were up for grabs at the moment. Something like a bonus pay day, but on a much larger scale. Dr. Monardes, as well as the other doctors, had decided to present the situation as catastrophic, as if the gravest danger were looming over the city. Judging from myself, I could say that everyone in Sevilla would easily believe this, with the exception, of course, of the doctors themselves. None of them looked particularly worried, which contrasted sharply with the gloomy prognoses they laid out. First of all, the municipal government had to pay the doctors for caring for infected citizens in certain hospitals specially designated for this purpose. It was voted that Dr. Monardes should receive fifty thousand maravedis. Dr. Bartholo wanted to transfer the sick to his San Juan de Dios Hospital; however, Dr. Monardes supported Drs. Gómez and León and their Five Wounds of Christ Hospital. In the end, a compromise was reached. Furthermore, a decision was made to clean all the streets, to close the city to people and goods from infected regions (later the municipality voted to make an exception for the merchant Señor Espinosa, who solemnly promised to limit his trade with those regions on his own and to that end presented a detailed plan, 138 pages long, of cautionary measures), and, most importantly for Dr. Monardes, to regularly burn tobacco in the various areas of the city so as to disinfect the air. Dr. Monardes assured those present that thanks to the trading company he owned with Rodrigo de Brizuela, he would be able to supply the necessary quantities of tobacco for this purpose. He even had a ship full of tobacco in the port at the moment. Some objected that his company was not large enough, since vast quantities would clearly be needed, thus perhaps it would be better to turn to Señor Espinosa, who could certainly supply them, but Drs. Gómez and León vigorously supported Dr. Monardes, also bringing forth the argument that only one type of tobacco, Nicotiana tabaccum, had disinfectant properties, while the other fifty-nine types did not have such properties, and that no one could possibly know better than Dr. Monardes how to distinguish Nicotiana tabaccum from the other types of tobacco. It is true that Señor Espinosa also traded solely in that type of tobacco, since it is the only type suitable for smoking, but a merchant cannot be expected to have a physician’s knowledge, so in the case of Señor Espinosa, the possibility for error at least potentially existed. “We cannot allow ourselves to take even the slightest risk with the health and lives of our citizens, especially not at such a dangerous moment,” Dr. Gomez said amidst approving applause from most of the doctors present. In his tirelessness, Dr. Monardes had met with almost all of them over the past two days. And so the doctors’ meeting decided to entrust Dr. Monardes with the task of supplying tobacco. Later, the municipal government voted to make an exception for Señor Espinosa as well, but despite this, the doctor kept at least half the city. At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I should say that he indeed could not supply — despite all his efforts — the enormous quantities of tobacco required and had to transfer some of this responsibility to the merchant Espinosa, but he still kept nearly one-third of the city. The municipality also had to finance the publication of treatises on the plague written in a generally accessible style, in which the emphasis would fall on how to protect ourselves from it. This was nothing new. The Drs. Andrés de Alfaro and Francisco Franco had written such treatises during the previous plague of ’68. They now wanted to write them once again. However, Drs. Gómez and León objected that their treatises were already well-known to the public, which had purchased them during the previous plague and most likely still had them, and that now treatises needed to be written by other people, who would present a new point of view on the illness. Dr. Monardes vigorously supported them. He suggested that Drs. Gómez and León write those treatises themselves. A heated argument arose. In the end, it was decided that Drs. Gómez and León would write new treatises, while the old ones by Dr. Alfaro and Dr. Franco would be reprinted, also at the municipality’s expense. Several other details were also settled — citizens were advised to follow a nourishing diet, they were also advised to wear amulets full of aromatic substances, best of all tobacco, and to protect themselves with its vapors as well, by using it more frequently. With that, the physicians’ meeting ended. I was surprised to see that all of them ended up satisfied — some more, others less, but overall, everyone was satisfied. One hundred and twenty people, and all of them satisfied! Now that’s something you don’t see too often. I suppose that plague, war, or natural disaster is necessary in order to see 120 people satisfied down to the last man in one and the same place at one and the same time. Guilds are quite something! If you have a drop of brains in your head, you’ll join one.