Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart

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Was he still there, inside the scarred skin and mended bones?

And if he was, would she be able to find him?

The cry came from behind the hut, not from the direction of the clinic, and the pain in the sound had Caroline reacting automatically. A child lay on the dry, rusty-red ground, gasping for breath, and, unable to understand what the excited children were telling her, she felt first for an obstruction in his mouth.

Juan came running from the clinic, speaking to the children, while a woman Caroline assumed was his grandmother herded the little ones together, taking hold of Ella’s hand as she kept them back from the fallen boy.

‘He just fell down, the children said,’ Juan told her.

Pleased he was there to translate for her, she asked if the boy was an epileptic—did he have a history of seizures? When the answer was no, she asked about allergies—did the children know if the boy had been bitten by something?

The child was breathing, but the harsh rasping sounds of his breath suggested it was an effort. Caroline lifted him in her arms and though Juan protested, she insisted she could carry him to the clinic, hesitating only long enough to turn to the woman who held Ella’s hand and receive a reassuring nod in reply.

‘I’m just going to give this boy some medicine,’ she said to Ella, ‘I’ll be back soon. You stay with—’

‘Mima,’ the woman said, while Ella, who’d obviously been told, echoed the word.

‘Mima,’ Caroline repeated.

Inside the clinic she set her patient down on an already prepared table and began a proper examination. His blood pressure was low, and a redness appearing on his skin suggested an anaphylactic reaction, though to what she didn’t know.

Juan had produced an oxygen mask and was fitting it to the child’s face, before adjusting the flow.

‘Do you know if you have epinephrine in the clinic?’ Caroline asked her helper. ‘The adrenalin solution used for anaphylactic shock.’

‘We have adrenalin solution,’ Juan told her.

He unlocked a tall metal cabinet on one side of the small room and delved around in it, returning to Caroline’s side with a tray on which he’d placed a box of ampoules and a syringe, swabs and antiseptic and a little metal kidney dish, something Caroline hadn’t seen for years. She checked the medication and the dosage on the ampoules before breaking one open and drawing up the solution. Asking Juan to tell the boy what they were doing, she took a swab from the tray Juan had carried and swabbed the boy’s thigh, then slid the needle in, forcing the liquid slowly into the muscle.

‘We’ll give that five minutes and take his blood pressure again. If it hasn’t improved, he might need more.’

Before Juan could reply there was a clamour outside and a woman burst into the treatment room, already near capacity with the patient, treatment table, a chair, the cabinet and two workers.

‘This is his mother,’ Juan explained, before speaking rapidly to the woman.

Caroline acknowledged the woman with a smile, but her attention was all on her patient. Was he breathing more easily now? Had it been so simple? She began a full examination of the boy’s skin, beginning with the parts she could see as she didn’t want to disturb him too much by turning him over.

‘Ah!’ She pointed to a raised red welt just below her patient’s right ankle. ‘It’s a strange place, very low, for a wasp or bee sting, but perhaps you have ants here that cause this reaction.’

Juan seemed to consider this. He spoke to the mother once again.

‘I do not know of ants that can do this and his mother says he has been bitten by ants before. But she says the boys have been playing near the jacaranda trees and sometimes bees crawl into the bells of the fallen flowers.

He may have angered a bee by stepping on a flower and accidentally stepping on the bee as well.’

‘Ah!’

It seemed a logical explanation, and as the little boy was obviously more comfortable now, the drug must have worked.

‘He will need to stay here for some hours,’ she told Juan. ‘Could you explain to the mother we need to watch him in case he gets sick again?’

Caroline had to wonder what Juan had said, for the woman seized both of Caroline’s hands and pressed a kiss on each of them, her ‘Gracias’ and ‘Muchas gracias’ so fervent they would have broken through any language barrier.

‘Is there somewhere we can put the boy where he’d be more comfortable and his mother could perhaps sit by his side?’ Caroline asked.

‘I will fix,’ Juan told her. ‘Are you one of the new doctors who are coming here to work?’

The question made Caroline realise that at no stage had Juan questioned her right to treat the child or her competency to act in the emergency. Obviously Jorge attracted enough foreign helpers for Juan to accept Caroline without question, which was a good thing as far as her campaign to stay was concerned. Knowing Jorge, she guessed that throughout his appointment part of his mind would be fixed on how quickly he could move Caroline out of his life. Now he’d had time to think, he’d have come up with some excuse or strategy, of that she had no doubt, but this was one battle she wasn’t going to lose.

She left Juan to move the little boy, and took a look around. The room they’d been in was apparently the only treatment room, and in front of it was another room, little more than a lobby, where a few patients might be able to wait out of the sun. There were three chairs, a small table and tattered magazines, while all the walls were covered with posters, familiar in context although the messages appeared to be in a language other than Spanish. Probably the Toba language?

The posters adjured people to wash their hands, immunise their children, use sunscreen—or maybe it was insect repellent mothers were wiping on their children’s arms. Another poster showed vegetables and fruit, piles of grains and milk, presumably suggesting good dietary habits—so nothing much changed in this wide world, Caroline decided as she peered into another small room that opened off the lobby.

It must be Jorge’s office, for it had an old table and chair—obviously scrounged from somewhere—with papers piled across the surface of the table and more papers and files on top of the battered-looking filing cabinets that lined the walls. After visiting his house, Caroline wasn’t surprised to see his medical textbooks in tall towers on the floor. In fact, she smiled, for although so much up-to-date information was available to doctors through the internet, she, too, liked to open a textbook when she was checking something.

Beyond the treatment room on one side and office on the other was a wide room that took up the whole of the back section of the building. There were three beds on one side and Juan was settling the little boy into one of these. An old man lay sleeping in the next one, while the third was empty. A stack of mattresses in the far corner on the other side of the room suggested that at times the ‘hospital’ could cater for more than three patients.

Juan must have seen her studying the stack as he came to her side and explained, ‘In the worst of summer sometimes people come from far up north to visit their families who live here now. They come from their homes in the bosque impenetrable—the impenetrable forest—but their families have no room for them so Jorge says they can sleep here. Sometimes they are sick, even with TB, but they are afraid of treatment. Sometimes he can give them treatment, once he gains their. Is trust the English word?’

Caroline nodded, but she was thinking about Juan’s explanation. She had read of the land covered with thorny trees and jungle where many Toba people still lived, a place where she could imagine armadillos still mooching along the ground and jaguars hiding on the branches of the trees, and where exotic birds still made their homes.

They must be tough, the Toba people, to have survived in that environment, and knowing that she understood a little more of why Jorge would wish to help the little community of them who had settled in Rosario but were having trouble making the transition to city life.

Having satisfied the city official that the handover of the clinic was proceeding according to plan, Jorge could hardly avoid driving back to the clinic. The handover might be going according to plan, but his life had been flung so far off track he wondered if he’d ever get it back to somewhere approaching normal.

He drove reluctantly out of the city, through the leafy suburbs towards the close-packed settlement of the Toba.

Where the woman he’d thrust out of his life four years ago awaited him?

He ran his fingers over the scarring on his right cheek, remembering his shock and horror when the bandages had come off, telling himself it didn’t matter, knowing it did because the scars were only the visible signs of the damage to his body—damage that could well have been permanent.

Emailing her.

Now she was back, and he knew her well enough to understand that nothing short of an earthquake would move her, and as the region was relatively stable an earthquake was just as unlikely as the tsunami he’d wished for earlier. Not that he’d welcome either one—he’d not welcome anything that would put anyone in danger.

Perhaps he could pay someone to put a python in her bedroom—maybe even a giant anaconda. He sighed as he dismissed this new idea—knowing Caroline, instead of being frightened away, she’d strangle the creature and cook it for dinner.

Maybe—

Dios mio! Why was he thinking this way? Had the woman’s appearance totally addled his brain? Was finding out he had a daughter turning him crazy?

Caroline was here, and here she’d stay, at least until she’d got what she’d come for.

Which was?

Estupido! The exclamation wasn’t aimed at Caroline but at himself, for as he’d asked himself the question a jolt of desire had rattled his body. Of course she wasn’t here to see him—well, not as the lover he had been, although memories of the love they’d shared, the passion, the heat and the fire set his body alight.

He could see her body now, shadowy as it had always been in the dim light of the small round hut, welcoming, enveloping, becoming one with his—sharing the journey to oblivion with him as they tried to blot out the horrors they had seen during the day.

CHAPTER THREE

FRUSTRATION reawoke his anger. Love-making would be the furthest thing from Caroline’s mind. She had come to shock him into doing what she wanted, come without warning. Come to ensure her daughter had a father.

Could he do that?

Be a father to the child?

At least the questions diverted him from thoughts of Caroline’s motives and the impossibility of love.

He had the greatest example of fatherhood in the world, his father having been behind him all his life, teaching him, encouraging him, backing him in all he wished to do, but most of all loving him with an uncritical and unstinting devotion. His father was the rock he’d clung to when he’d returned from hospital in France, broken both physically and emotionally.

Everyone should have such a father!

But could he emulate the man he loved—be as good a father to Ella as his father had been to him?

Somewhere inside him a determination to do just that was beginning to grow, but weighed against it was the fact that involvement with Ella would mean involvement with Caroline, and if seeing her once had brought such chaos to his mind and body, how would he react to being with her on a regular basis?

No, best he knocked the whole thing on the head right now. Caroline was beautiful. She’d find a man and marry, thus providing a father figure for Ella.

Some other man being a father to his daughter? Guiding her through life, winning her love?

A pain he barely understood shuddered through him.

There had to be an answer, and it was up to him to find it, and soon, before gossip, which, although they were separated by hundreds of miles, inevitably reached his father. Once his father laid eyes on Ella, she would be his princess, the answer to all his dreams, the one gift he’d wanted so badly from his son but had accepted he might never be given.