When I was a bit older I began to suffer from
asthma. It would leave me gasping for breath, my chest wheezing. Those nights
when I was suffering were terrible. Sometimes I would lie in bed for three long
days. Afterwards I had to rest, unable to go out into the yard, or sit on the
porch because of the close weather, the humidity, the showers of rain. I could
not eat fruit, I couldn’t touch a coconut. They roasted cane for me to suck,
like you would give a pregnant woman.
The smaller boys were sent to my room to play
with me, but they did not like playing with a sick boy, and they abandoned me,
leaving me alone. All I had left to do was daydream.
My cousins had come back from college and their
behaviour had changed, if only for the first few days.
“Boys are only straightened out at college,”
people used to say, as if college were some miracle cure.
Before long though they were back to being
their usual diabolical selves.
At the mill, they were grinding the sugar. From
my room I could hear the sound of the sugar being crushed, the shouts of the
mill workers, the sound of singing from the carts as they came from every part
of the plantation. The sweet smell of syrup wafted through the windows. The
plantation was busy and happy.
Meanwhile the devil of this asthma was taking
away my breath, leaving me without air, and with a bitter taste in my mouth. I
would look at the rays of light that reflected off the roofs and around my
room. Bit by bit they would disappear, rising up the walls, hiding in the
corners, and then, when there was no more sun, gone altogether. Sometimes a
shaft of light would dart in like an arrow planting itself in a corner. I had
seen this shaft of light on the pictures in the chapel. They said it was the
Holy Ghost entering Our Lady. Baby Jesus had come out of this shaft of light
come from the sky. Jesus had come from heaven, but other children weren’t like
him. It was men who made children, just like the animals.
My grandfather would come to my room to see me;
he would check that I didn’t have fever and then he would go away. For him, the
fever was the worst of all illnesses, and the only remedy was a purge. The
plantation had its own list of defined illnesses and each one had its cure;
measles, chicken pox, mumps……..and then there was malarial fever.
Old José Paulino could treat them all, remedies
flavoured with mustard, hot baths, ricin oil, jacatarÃa fruit for the worms. He
cured us all, the Negroes, the grandsons, the workers.
And he lanced boils.
Once, an ox-cart ran over the foot of one of
the carters, crushing a toe. My grandfather amputated the limp flesh, put
ironwood resin on the wound and bound it up with pieces of an old shirt.
For my asthma he prescribed purging by
provoking vomiting with onion stock. My Aunt Maria would stay by my side when I
heaved up uncontrollably.
The asthma though, only passed with time. It
came and it went as it pleased.
When I was ill the nights were interminable. I
would lie awake, miserable, my eyes shut because of my fear of the dark. When I
saw the grey light just before the dawn through the slits of the shutters, and
I would hear the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps on the flagstones outside,
on his way to take his cold bath, as he always did at four o’clock every
morning. The noise of the animals, the whistle from the mill calling people to
work, the birds singing their dawn chorus from the tree tops, was all a novelty
to me.
All that wheezing made my childhood seem more
like old age. At night, my eyes, tired of the darkness, waited eagerly for the
new day. When the sun rose, rays of light brightened up my room. One ray would
come in right on top of my bed, a nice round ray, right next to my pillow. I
would stretch out my hand to feel the warmth, and cast shadows upon it like the
clouds.
Gradually the rays would leave my sick bed once
again. It was just a brief visit to the invalid, and soon they were half way
down the bed, and then on to the floor, where they would remain for the rest of
the day.
In my illness I entertained myself with this
cinema, in which the sun and the clouds were the actors.
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