Bio-Strike

TWO

In the center of La Paz, on the main thoroughfare that descended from the heights to the modern business district, one could look up beyond the rows of exhausted little shacks on the canyon wall to where three of Illimani’s five snow-capped peaks took a great bite out of the Andean sky. It was a sight that none who visited the city could forget, and that even indigenous Aymara Indians, with their blood memories of the Incas as encroaching newcomers, viewed with awe and respect.

The National Police Corps vehicle and its motorcycle escort headed southeast on Avenida Villazón to its wide fork less than a mile past the Universidad Mayor San Andrés, then bore left onto Avenida Anicento Arce toward the Zona Sur. Nuzzled deep within the canyon in Calocoto and other suburban neighborhoods, sheltered from the cold sting of high-altitude winds, the city’s affluent lived behind high gates in exaggerated chalets and sprawling, tile-roofed adobe mansions constructed in deliberate imitation of Hollywood cinematic style.

In the police car’s backseat, the lean, ascetic man in first officer’s dress had ridden most of the way with his eyes downturned, a bony hand on the satchel beside him, his lips moving in a nearly constant whisper. He had looked out the window only twice — the first time, by simple chance, when they had passed Calle Sagárnaga, crammed as always with customers of the Witches’ Market. There at the outdoor vendors’ stalls were charms, potions, powders, and fetuses carved from the wombs of llamas for their alleged luck-bringing properties, their dessicated skin pulled tight over unformed bones, forcing them into contortions that resembled, or perhaps preserved, a state of final agony. There, indigent chola mothers, wearing traditional bowler hats and shawls, walked beside women of means in Parisian and Milanese vogue, a rare mixing of classes in this city, fear or reverence for pre-Christian deities being perhaps all they had in common. There, yatiri witch doctors eyed the crowd for potential clients, estimating their worth in bolivianos or U.S. dollars, cannily deciding how much might be charged to read their fortunes or work fraudulent magic on their behalf.

The car’s single passenger had frowned disapprovingly. He spent much of his time among the poorest of society and knew they reached out to the ancient superstitions in ignorance and desperation. But the moneyed, well-educated elite, what was their reason? Did they think to apportion their faith like cash in separate bank accounts, placing small deposits in each, giving their full trust to no god while hoping to prejudice the will of all?

As his escort had left Calle Sagárnaga behind, remaining on the boulevard that traced the subterranean flow of the Choqueyapu River to the city’s outskirts, he’d briefly looked out his window again, his eyes going to the slum housing on the face of the mountain. At first glance it seemed an insult to the divine scheme, heaven and hell inverted, those in the bowl of the earth living without need, those on the heights needing for everything. But that was to ignore the more sublime visual message of Illimani in the background: its sharp white peaks at once reminders of God’s soaring majesty and a warning that He had teeth.

Bowing his head again, the passenger addressed his inner preparations for the next thirty minutes, fingers spread atop the satchel, quietly reciting the prescribed lines of verse from memory.

Now his car swung over to the right side of the road, slowed, and turned gently into a circular drive. Ahead and behind, the flanking carabineers throttled down their motorbikes. At the end of the drive he could see the large gray hospital building rising above a handsome lawn with tiled walks, shaded benches, and a glistening multitiered fountain that drizzled off wavery rainbows of sunlight.

The Hospital de Gracia was the newest and best-equipped medical facility in Bolivia. The physicians recruited for its staff held model credentials. Like the luxurious homes in its surrounding neighborhood, it had been built and financed with money from the illicit cocaine trade and was affordable only to those of high status and privilege.

How ironic, then, that the patient admitted under absolute secrecy ten days ago had vowed before the nation to eradicate the cartels and to apprehend and prosecute the mysterious foreigner called El Tío, who had unified them in his recent ascendancy.

The man in the officiales uniform plunged deeper into his recitation, his lips fitting comfortably around the Latin.

“Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis, et omnes iniquitates meaas dele…”

Turn away thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities…

“Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis… ”

Create a clean heart in me, oh God, and renew a right spirit within my bowels…

“Ne proicias me a facie tua, et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a mei.”

Cast me not away from thy face, and take not thy holy spirit from me.

The motorcade pulled into a wide space that had been left vacant in front of the hospital’s main entrance, the carabineers lowering their kickstands to dismount. One of the lead riders came around back and opened the door for the passenger. Lifting his satchel off the seat by its strap, he let himself be helped from the car. He could almost feel the eyes watching from other vehicles around the parking area, peering at him through tinted windows.

It was to be expected, he thought. There would be a great many secret police.

He climbed the stairs to the hospital entrance with his head still slightly bent and the carabineers on either side of him, sensing their unease as he continued giving whispered utterance to Psalm 50, the Miserere, one of the preliminary invocations for the dying.

“Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus. ”

Deliver me from blood, oh God.

A somber delegation of hospital officials and white-coated doctors met the visitors in the lobby and guided them toward the elevator bank with a minimum of formalities. A pair of soldiers in gray green fatigues were posted at the head of the corridor. They held submachine guns and wore the insignia of the Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico, the military’s elite anti-narcotics task force.

The soldiers hastily checked the small group’s identification papers and motioned them into an elevator. A third FELCN guard stood at the control panel. He pressed a lighted button, and they hurtled up three floors.

Moments later, the elevator doors reopened, and they started toward the intensive care ward.

Humberto Marquéz, the vice-president-elect, was waiting in an anteroom. He stepped toward the man in the officer’s uniform and gave him a firm handshake.

“I thank you for your swift response to our summons,” he said. “And for your tolerance of the rather unusual security measures we’ve had to adopt in bringing you here.”

“Would there had been no cause for any of it.”

“Indeed.” Marquéz ushered him inside. “Our coalition government is bound together by a fragile thread. If news of why you’ve come leaks out before I can meet with old rivals whose differences were just lately reconciled…”

“That thread might well begin to fray even before you are sworn into office. I understand.” The man placed his canvas bag on a low table beside the doorway. Though the committee of doctors and hospital officials had entered the room with him, he noted that his police escort had stayed respectfully out of earshot in the hall. “Please, tell me of his condition.”

Marquéz did not reply immediately. An attorney by background, he possessed an automatic verbal restraint that had served him well since his entry into politics. His manner formally polite, his frame as tapered as his dark gray suit, he nodded his chin at one of the doctors.

“As the one in charge of this case, Dr. Alvarez, it is perhaps best that you address such questions,” he said.

The doctor looked from Marquéz to the uniformed man.

“The presidente is semiconscious and on a ventilator,” he said. “I hope you will forgive any impropriety, but let me be direct in my advice: Omit whatever rites you can, for time is short.”

The visitor kept his eyes on the doctor for two or three seconds. Then he nodded silently. What more was there to say?

He unbuttoned the officer’s blouse he’d been given to conceal his black clerical shirt, shrugged it off, and draped it neatly over the back of a chair. His other vestments were in the satchel with the articles he would require for the sacrament. He opened the bag and began arranging them on the table.

“Un momento, Padre Martín. Por favor.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the doctor.

“Yes?”

“It pains me to interfere. But we have safety practices regarding apparel. Protective clothing must be worn in the ward.”

“Such as?”

“Latex gloves and a gown are standard. As is a filtration mask.”

Martin raised his eyebrows. “Has the presidente’s illness shown itself to be communicable?”

“The presidente’s illness is still undiagnosed.”

“That was not my question.”

Alvarez exchanged a glance with him.

“No additional cases of infection have been reported,” he said. “To my knowledge.”

“Then I will follow the directives of the church. And, God willing, leave here with my good health.”

The doctor’s hand went up in a forestalling gesture. But it was the troubled look in his eyes that gave Martin pause.

“Listen to me, please,” he said. “I have witnessed much suffering in my years of medical practice, but when I go home to my family, it is pushed from my mind. That is how I cope — or always have in the past.” He hesitated. “The affliction that has taken hold of Presidente Colón is a mystery. Ten days ago he was admitted for examination after complaining of symptoms associated with the common flu. Aches and pains in his joints. Some feverishness. Mild gastronomic discomfort. But there is nothing common about his illness. What I have watched it do to his body, its rapid acceleration… I cannot escape the thoughts and images. They will often come upon me suddenly as I put my arms around my wife or look into the faces of my two young sons. And when it does, I am afraid for them. I am afraid.”

Martin looked at the doctor steadily, appreciating his frankness. It had seemed a difficult thing for him to step from behind his wall of clinical detachment. But Martin had not changed his mind.

“Our callings revolve around mysteries of a different nature, my friend,” he said after a few seconds. “You must come to terms with yours, and I with mine. As each of us deems fitting and necessary.”

They were quiet for a while, Alvarez’s eyes shifting to one of the administrators. Martin watched him get an almost imperceptible nod. Then the doctor turned back to him and sighed.

“Very well,” he said resignedly. “I will bring you to the ward.”

The president-elect’s room was segregated from the rest of the intensive care ward and guarded by more FELCN troopers. Alvarez led Father Martin quickly through the security check and then down a long hall to its door.

As they reached it, Martin thought he heard noises from inside. The rasp of something scuffing against fabric, followed by a series of unrhythmical thumps. He waited beside the doctor, listening, and heard the sounds again.

He gave Alvarez a questioning look.

“The spasms can be violent,” Alvarez explained. His voice was muffled by the particulate mask covering the lower half of his face. “We’ve applied restraints to prevent his injury or the interruption of life support.”

He reached for the door handle, but Martin lightly touched his wrist to stop him.

“Wait,” he said. “I need a moment.”

He moved in front of Alvarez, conferred the ritual blessing upon the entryway, and, because there was no one to respond, gave answer in his own quiet voice.

“May peace reign over this place. ”

“It will enter by this route. ”

His prayer completed, Martin pushed open the door himself. His missal and a neatly folded white stole were tucked under the crook of his arm. A burse hung from a cord around his neck, its front embroidered with a large red crucifix. Strapped over his right shoulder was the canvas bag holding his candles, holy water, and a communion cloth, the latter brought in the event Colon proved able to receive the Host.

Martin entered the room. Inside, oxygen hissed through soft rubber tubes snaking from the artificial ventilation unit into the patient’s nostrils, then down behind his tongue into the pharynx. A female nurse stood at the foot of the bed, a clipboard in her gloved hands. A bouffant cap, mask, and isolation gown hid all her features except her eyes, which were visible through a pair of clear goggles. They were large, brown, pretty, and full of the same profound distress Alvarez had confided in the anteroom.

Martin looked at her for a second, then turned to the man he had come to see.

He was either unconscious or asleep, the lesions on his eyelids, cheeks, and lips showing in angry contrast to his waxen pallor. His blankets had been turned down to free his bare right arm for the intravenous drip lines. Patched with a scarlet rash, it was all taut skin and knobby bone, reminding Martin in an awful way of the mummified llama fetuses at the Mercado del Hechicería. Three fingers of each hand were enclosed in open-mesh tubes to the second knuckle, the tubes connected to a strap looped around the bed frame. The blemishes on his wrists were dark and cuff-shaped.

“The finger restraints have been effective in reducing his skin trauma,” said Dr. Alvarez, standing behind Martin. “Any pressure causes blood to well up through the pores. We call it pinpoint bleeding. You can see the bruising that resulted from our use of conventional restraints earlier on.”

Martin’s eyes were still on the bracelets of discolored skin around Colón’s wrists.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see.”

A stand beside the bed had been cleared in advance of his arrival, and he stepped over to it now, donning his stole, taking the candles out of his satchel. Checking that they were secure in their holders, he mounted the candles on the stand and lighted them with a match. From his burse he extracted the pyx containing the wafer and put it on the bed stand in front of the candles. He covered this with the communion cloth and genuflected.

Rising from his knees, Martin reached into the satchel for the holy water, went around to the foot of the bed, and sprinkled the dying man according to the points of the cross — once to the front, once to the left, once to the right. His lips moving in prayer as they had in the police car, he performed further consecrations of the room with his sprinkler, extending it toward the walls and floor around him. At last he turned and shook droplets of holy water over the nurse and Dr. Alvarez.

He was walking back around to the bed stand when Colon went into another convulsion. All at once, his lips peeled back from his gums in a kind of rictus. The muscles of his neck and jaw began to quiver. A gargling sound escaped his mouth, his chest heaving and straining, the hiss of the ventilator growing louder as his demand for oxygen increased. He arched off the mattress, his right knee springing up to mound the blanket, his foot thrashing from side to side like a captured animal.

Martin gripped his missal closer to his chest and turned to Alvarez.

“Is there nothing you can do?”

The doctor shook his head. “The seizures are unpleasant to watch, but they will pass.” He was observing the life support monitors on the wall. “We give him muscle relaxers. Otherwise, it would be much worse.”

Martin wanted to turn away, but in his mind that would have been an act of selfishness and thus an abdication of his responsibility. In this room, charity was reserved for the dying.

He saw Colón’s right hand sweep across the linen sheet, jump stiffly into the air, then pound down on the mattress several times: rasp, thumpthump-thump. When the arm jerked, it pulled his intravenous lines up over the safety rail, but the finger tubes and strap had sufficiently restricted its movement to prevent the lines from tearing loose.

The spasms diminished after less than thirty seconds, his withered arm falling over the rail, dangling there limply for a moment until the nurse came around to readjust it at his side.

Martin stared down at him. His cheeks felt too hot, then too cold in the air-conditioning. He could hear the intake and expulsion of his own breath over the hiss of the ventilator.

He ordered his legs to move him toward the bed. “Señor Colón,” he said in a low voice. “It is Father Martín.”

There was no acknowledgment.

The priest leaned over the deathbed. The sores on Colón’s face were crusted with yellowish discharge. Martin could smell ointment on him and, underneath, the far more unpleasant odor of infection.

“Do you remember our discussions?” he said. “We have had many of them, about many subjects. About faith. And strength.”

He thought he saw Colón’s eyes twitch under their closed lids.

“Now we will ask God’s grace, and find renewed strength in our unity with his spirit,” he said. “You and I, together—”

Alvarez stepped forward. “Father, he is much too weak.”

Martin shot a hand out behind his back and waved him into silence.

“Mi presidente, ” he said. “Can you take Communion?”

A moment passed. Colón’s eyes flickered more rapidly. And then one of them opened and fastened on Martin.

Its white was swimming in blood.

Martin’s cheeks flushed hot and cold again. He realized they were wet with perspiration.

“Are you able to receive Communion?” he repeated, trying to smooth the tremor in his voice.

Colón strained to answer, managed nothing more than a croak.

“Enough,” the doctor protested. “He mustn’t be—”

This time Alvarez fell silent without any urging.

Colon had declared his wish with a weak but unmistakable nod, his red eye never leaving Martin’s face.

Martin turned to the bed stand, knelt before it a second time, and lifted the communion cloth off the pyx. If the heart of Alberto Colon was weighted with sin, he would have to unburden himself before God almighty; it was not humanly possible for him to give confession in his present state.

Moving to the bedside, Martin put the communion cloth under the dying man’s chin and recited the Confiteor, offering penance in his name, pleading for his absolution from worldly sin: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. ”

When he had finished his petition, he took the Host from its receptacle, blessed it, and brought it over to Colon.

“Try to swallow,” he said. “If you have difficulty, a sip of water might help.”

Colon stared at him with his one open eye, the iris uncannily bright, as if all the passion and will that had gained him the presidency — an office he had won in a free election against a powerful league of corrupt influences — was blazing through it.

He produced a groan of effort. Then his cracked lips slowly parted.

The odor of sickness on his breath was even stronger than it had been coming off his pores. Crops of raised, purplish lesions marched across his tongue and palate. His front teeth were smeared with blood where it had leaked from the rim of his gums.

The wafer between his thumb and index fingers, Martin bent to put it in his mouth… and that was when everything inside him stalled.

He stood there, rigid, his hand inches from the dying man’s mouth.

Those ulcers on his tongue. Open. Weeping fluids.

Martin was unable to budge.

Unable to touch him.

What was it Alvarez had said to him in the anteroom?

“I cannot escape the thoughts and images… and I am afraid. ”

The priest felt a cutting shame. His resolute dismissal of the doctor’s admonition came back to him now as self-mockery.

I am afraid.

His forehead beaded with sweat, he averted his eyes from Colon long enough to place the wafer on his tongue. But he could not keep his hand from shaking or drawing quickly back, and as he gave utterance to his prayers of viaticum, they seemed to fall away from him, or he from them. The disconnection was like nothing Martin had experienced before. It was as if he were slipping into a dark hole, some forsaken inner recess where all words of faith dissolved into empty silence.

And though he would spend much time trying to convince himself otherwise, right then, betrayed by his fear, praying in secret anguish, Martin knew for a dreadful certainty that his fall had only begun.