Thrown into Nature

8. Against Bad Breath

The doctor was called to a lass who was to be married in two days’ time, but who suffered from bad breath in the mouth. What a bad luck! Indeed, such things do happen. I personally feel great sympathy towards the victims in such cases. It is as if Nature is mocking them. They not only suffer from the illnesses or indispositions themselves, but they are also ashamed to admit it. These illnesses and indispositions, however, are quite real, and even though they may appear at times trifling and insignificant, one mustn’t forget that sometimes a pebble can overturn the cart.

The doctor for his part is rather dismissive of such cases. I would even say extremely dismissive. He listens with half an ear and treats them somehow mechanically, distractedly, as if his mind were elsewhere. And his mind really is elsewhere, this is not only an outward impression.

In this case, he even refused to make the call. Not that he refused the commission — he almost never did that, as long as you paid the fee — rather, he sent me instead. The treatment of bad breath is easy and the doctor trusted me to handle it on my own.

The lass lived on Imagen Street, so I went on foot. She was a pretty girl, black-haired, dark-eyed, by the name of Maria, around twenty years old, a thin little thing. But with bad breath. When I spoke to her from a distance of two or three feet, I immediately caught a whiff of the foul odor coming from her mouth. I could not help myself and jerked my head back. I almost stepped back. How she could get married in such a condition, I can’t imagine. The groom would have to be some Byzantine prisoner with a hacked-off nose. But I would set things aright.

First, I smeared the girl’s belly with gas. Then I requested they bring me a brazier and I charred two tobacco leaves in it. I smeared their ashes on her belly, too, on top of the gas. It isn’t a pretty sight, but it’ll do the trick. The girl had to go to the privy. Then again. Then yet again. Etc., as the doctor says. This puzzled me a bit, although I didn’t let on. Her family began getting nervous and questioning me.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “That’s how the organism cleanses itself, it’s casting all the poisons out of the body. Afterwards her bad breath will be gone, too.”

As far as I could recall, however, the treatment was not supposed to go quite like this. I decided to repeat the procedure. This time I hardly managed to smear her belly with gas before she again rushed out to the privy. I wondered whether we couldn’t move the whole operation out there, somewhere closer, but the privy, of course, was located in the yard, there were no conveniences at hand, and it would be somehow inappropriate. . In short, it was impossible. When the girl returned, I smeared her belly with the ashes from the tobacco as well. She dashed outside again. There was no longer any doubt but that the girl had diarrhea, and a rather serious case at that. I also wouldn’t say that her bad breath had disappeared, although now it was more difficult to perceive, given the combination of various odors. As if this wasn’t enough, the girl also began to weep. Her father started flying at me, the family barely managed to hold him back. But for how long? He was completely red in the face, foaming at me with rage — typical Spanish madness. I could almost see myself from the outside, standing there with one open palm raised and with a tobacco leaf in the other hand, saying: “Calm down, calm down.” While in front of me the beet-red Spaniard was foaming at the mouth, the girl was weeping or rushing outside again, and two women were holding back the Spaniard, but shooting daggers at me. “At least the groom isn’t here, too,” I thought to myself. The other thing I was thinking was that we needed to call Dr. Monardes. And that’s exactly what we did; we sent one of the servants to call him over.

When the doctor arrived, he calmly entered the room and began questioning the girl — whose diarrhea had meanwhile begun to subside. The two of them managed to conduct a relatively lengthy conversation, after which he nodded at me calmly to go outside to discuss what had happened. The presence of the doctor and his confident manner suddenly inspired calm in all of us, but especially in me. I somehow felt certain that he would solve the problem. The doctor radiated such assurance, such confidence about his person — that was one of the great secrets of his success in the medical profession. This confidence, of course, was due in large part to his enormous wealth of knowledge, but not entirely. It was also a mysterious gift, which some people possessed, others not.

When we went outside we ran into the girl, who was going back inside. The doctor smiled, while she hung her head and ran into the house. She had stopped crying.

“What happened, Guimarães?” Dr. Monardes asked, staring at his shoes as he lightly tapped around them with his cane. This was a very, very bad sign.

“The young lady got the shits, señor,” I replied, throwing up my hands.

“And no wonder, eh? No wonder!” the doctor said, this time bringing his cane down close to my shoes. He knew they were watching him from inside, and this made him restrain himself somewhat. “Listen, you idiot,” he went on in a hushed, but very clear voice. I heard him very well, in any case. “You have to put tobacco ashes on the stomach AND on the shoulders. And on the shoulders! So that the tobacco pulls the hot humors upward. Otherwise it gathers all the hot humors in the belly, turning it into a veritable volcano. And on top of everything this is a young girl, Nature has made her stomach boil and churn with hot humors as it is, who knows what horrors are brewing there without your meddling. Then you come along and put tobacco on her stomach to pull in even more hot humors.” The doctor smacked himself on the forehead. “Now her stomach is like molten lava, Guimarães. Are you crazy or what? I wouldn’t be very surprised if she burns the boards of the outhouse and if instead of bad breath, steam and the stench of sulfur start coming out of her mouth.”

“Well. . I’m still learning, señor,” I replied.

“Yes! And I am the one to blame for that!” the doctor said, having turned his back on me to return to the house.

As soon as we entered to the girl’s room, he turned to those present and said: “My student has acted rightly and with a little more patience the girl’s illness would have been cured in that way, too. However, there is an easier and quicker method of healing, which I will now employ.”

When I again began to burn the tobacco leaf in the brazier, the girl and her parents looked horrified, but the doctor assured them that he would not smear her belly and gently asked Maria to pull down the sleeves of her undershirt, and he proceeded to smear her shoulders with gas and then began to rub the tobacco ash into them, giving me a discrete sign to leave the room. I went out into the yard and lit a cigarella. Soon the girl once again passed by me, first in one, then in the other direction. On her way back, I smiled kindly and nodded politely. She, however, fixed her gaze on her feet and quickly ran into the house. “Hello, señorita” was on the tip of my tongue, but I restrained myself. Afterwards I gazed up at a bird in the sky. Its movements struck me as somehow strange. It swooped about on the air currents with its wings spread wide for some time, then it dove, plunging suddenly downward like a stone, its wings gathered to its body, after which it flapped them again and began climbing, once again floating upon the air, turning with wings outstretched, diving down, again flapping and rising upwards, circling above one part of the city. One doesn’t usually stop to think that flying is not only pleasant, but surely difficult as well. You have to constantly keep track of the air currents, which are always changing, and to go from one to another, then at some point you hit a hole and suddenly plunge downward, so you’ve got to flap your wings and rise with another current, and if it’s not going the direction you want, you’ve got to switch again. You have to be always on the alert, concentrated on your movements. Like a swimmer. Except, of course, that swimming in air is surely easier. But if I were a bird, for example, my entire attention would be fixed on my movements, I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. Certainly with the passing of time birds get used to it and begin to do it almost unconsciously, yet despite this, walking over land could easily turn out to be the simplest way to move. You can stop somewhere, lean against some wall, light a cigarella, and stare up at the sky at great length, for example. Birds can’t do that. If they stop, they’ll immediately plunge downward or the air current will simply carry them off somewhere. There’s no wall to lean against. Of course, there aren’t any cigarellas, either. They’re constantly on guard, constantly vibrating as one with the air. This is surely the reason people seem more intelligent than birds, they’ve thought up so many things — they’ve built cities, written books, tended vineyards and gardens — because their minds are much freer to think about other things, rather than being focused on their movements. Besides, nothing grows in the air and a city couldn’t just hang there. Birds could never do any such things, Nature herself has preordained this. And yet, I would prefer to be in their place. To dart from one place to another, to ramble about in the air, soaring on its currents. It must be a wonderful feeling. Oh, how fine it is to be a bird! And how stupid it is to be a human, how pathetic it is to be a human, to struggle your whole life for bread, to plow and sow to get by, to survive with trickery and force amidst the other beasts of the earth. What a slavish fate! Nature herself has made men slaves, she has created them as pathetic servants, to lead a pathetic existence upon the harsh face of the earth. All men are slaves by birth, slaves of Nature, slaves of scarcity. Even if you are Don Felipe II, emperor of Spain and the Indies, you are still a slave by birth. Pathetic creatures, pathetic captives. But like all pathetic creatures, they don’t realize it either. And what to say about those madmen who hope to be resurrected in their bodies, or else hope to be reborn in new ones — so as to continue their pathetic existence, if possible, forever? What madmen, indeed! But what can you expect from servants, from the obedient brainless creations of Nature? She has simply made them so. To earn their daily bread through labor and the sweat of their brow, as it says in that book, and even to thirst for more of the same. How much better it would be to rise high above it, above that slavish earth, to soar through the air like the birds, who neither plow nor sow, in the air, where nothing grows, since they have no need of it. What happy creatures! They are Nature’s privileged children, not man, I daresay. She has made them with love, while him she has made with cold reason, insofar as she possesses the latter at all. What unhappy, self-absorbed animals, creeping painfully across the earth, constantly threatened by hunger and disease and by their own kind, even a bit of bad breath in the mouth can ruin their lives, but despite everything they fancy themselves the pinnacle of Nature, her highest creation, even “the image and likeness of God.” Good God! I am imagining how laughable this must look from the outside. And from above. If birds had more time to think, and if their minds weren’t as consumed with movement as I suspect they are, they would surely think the same about people. But it seems that Nature has to a great extent deprived them of the ability to think. And who knows if thinking is even a blessing at all. Thinking might be the greatest foolishness, a pure waste of time, milling the wind and chasing words. Look, just now the cigarella burned my fingers and I threw it on the ground without thinking at all. And I acted rightly. If you can simply act rightly, what’s the point of thinking? There is no point. No, none at all. A man does the most thinking precisely when he doesn’t know how to act rightly. As long as he’s not some gaper — one of those whose “thoughts wander”, as they say — he becomes thoughtful for that purpose alone.

Incidentally, the bird, which continues to circle above the La Macarena Quarter in my opinion — but who knows, it could be much farther away, this is not obvious in the sky — is not a pigeon. It’s bigger than a pigeon, but it could hardly be a bird of prey — first, because there aren’t such birds here anymore, and second, because it looks smaller than they are.

After an hour or so, as the doctor and I were leaving, I told him what I had seen.

“That was a falcon,” the doctor replied. “They’re left over from the Arabs. Way back then, the Arabs bred them, and when our people chased out the Arabs, the falcons left the cities, too. Now they are multiplying in the Sierra Morena.”

“Gee! I didn’t know that,” I said.

“You don’t know anything, Guimarães,” the doctor replied.

Ah, that Dr. Monardes! He always cuts you down like that. But then again, he was the one who cured the girl. “Her breath smells like violets,” was what he said. He had forbidden her from eating meat and had left a cigarella just in case — if her bad breath came back before the wedding, she needed only to take a few puffs and it would disappear.

“You owe me a ducat,” the doctor said. That was the fee. “I couldn’t take anything after your bungling.”

Yes, back down to earth. Here I am, striding firmly down Imagen Street as the doctor’s carriage drives off. I don’t mind. The weather is fine, dusk is falling, and I’m heading towards San Francisco Square, straight for Don Pedro’s pub. Well, we killed off this day, too.

I found Rincon and Cortado inside, in particularly high spirits. I suspect that has something to do with the plunder of carts carrying the royal taxes on ships from the Indies — these carts had recently been robbed on the road to Madrid, in the Sierra Morena. They found the guards a full two days later, tied to trees, half dead from hunger and thirst, reeking of piss and shit, since when you’re tied up, you do such things in your pants, like it or not. I don’t exclude the possibility that they were found precisely thanks to the stench. And yes, I very strongly suspect that Rincon and Cortado had something to do with it. But in any case, I’m not the royal treasury, so I’m absolutely safe in their company. They even offered to buy me a round, since I started patting my pockets nervously, assumed a surprised expression, and said that I’d forgotten my money. Then my tongue loosened up and somehow or other I told them my thoughts about birds, what an easy life they lead.

“Come on, now,” Rincon objected, “what’s so easy about it? Would you like having to fly all the way from the Hansa down to Egypt and back every year?”

“That could never happen to me,” I shook my head. “I would never set foot in the Hansa. It’s cold, there’s the Baltic Sea, the people are rather strange. . it’s out of the question.”

“Fine,” Rincon nodded, “I just said the Hansa as an example. It doesn’t have to be the Hansa. It could be from somewhere else in Germany or Holland, or from England or France. There are lots of birds in France, too.”

“The prettiest ones are there,” I agreed.

“And every year they fly south. Some stay here in Andalusia, but others keep going all the way down to Egypt.”

“I’ve been there,” Cortado cut in. “Alexandria is a really nice city. But you’ve got to be careful and keep your eyes peeled.”

“And then from there they go back to France. Twice a year,” Rincon said, lifting two fingers in front of my face. “Would you like that?”

I thought of the night that I walked back to Sevilla, but despite this I said: “What’s the big deal? They just fly through the air. It’s not like walking over land. I can’t imagine it’s particularly tiring.”

“That’s what you think,” Rincon objected. “But if you were in their place, you’d be singing a different tune. The ones that get tired and lag behind the flock fall into the sea and die.”

“That’s right,” Cortado nodded. “I’ve seen them in the sea near the Greek islands. They land on the mast, take a rest and fly off again. But if there’s no mast, then where do you land? I’ve even seen how they fall into the sea. They fall in and drown.”

“Drowning is a really painful way to die,” Rincon said. “It’s not like getting stabbed and that’s that. I’ve seen a drowning man. That’s painful business.”

I was about to ask him whether he hadn’t been holding the man’s head under at the same time, but luckily the wine had not scrambled my wits to such an extent, so I was able to stop myself in time. Such jokes can suddenly make your life miserable. Instead, I told them about the girl with the bad breath who was going to get married. It turns out (Cortado knew this) that she was supposed to marry one of the soldiers from the royal guard whom they had found tied up in the Sierra Morena.

“Well, no harm done. She’ll stink of garlic, he of shit, a perfect match,” I said. Just look at how fate brings like things together, or else Nature makes more alike those which have come together, I thought to myself and the vivid picture of the girl running back and forth across the courtyard sprang into my mind. “Well, what do you know! It’s a small world!”

“It is a small world,” Cortado nodded, laughing.

“Come on, now,” Rincon shook his head. “The world is enormous. Sevilla is small.”

“Exactly. That’s what I meant to say,” Cortado agreed.

When I thought about it, that, in fact, was what I meant to say, too. We made a toast to Sevilla. Say what you will and despite everything, Sevilla is a beautiful city.

How nice, I thought to myself, that I came to Sevilla. And that I’ll become a doctor. I’ll heal people, I’ll make money.

My whole life was before me. Well, almost my whole life.

Rincon lifted his hand and signaled to Don Pedro to bring us more wine and tapas.