Wild Child and Other Stories

SIN DOLOR

He came into the world like all the rest of them — like us, that is — brown as an iguana and flecked with the detritus of after-birth, no more remarkable than the date stamped on the morning’s newspaper, but when I cleared his throat and slapped his infant buttocks, he didn’t make a sound. Quite the contrary. His eyes snapped open with that searching myopia of the newborn and he began to breathe, calmly and quietly, with none of the squalling or fuss of the others. My nurse, Elvira Fuentes, who had spent fifteen years working on the cancer ward at the hospital in Guadalajara before coming home to devote herself to me, both as lover and helpmeet, frowned as I handed the infant to his mother. She was thinking exactly the same thing I was: there must have been some constriction or deformation of the child’s vocal apparatus. Or perhaps he’d been born without it. We’ve seen stranger things, all manner of defects and mutations, especially among the offspring of the migrant workers, what with the devil’s brew of herbicides, pesticides and genetically engineered foodstuffs to which they’ve been routinely exposed. There was one man I won’t name here who came back from the cotton fields of Arizona looking like one of Elvira’s oncological ghosts, and whose wife gave birth nine months later to a monster without a face — no eyes, ears, mouth or nose, just a web of translucent skin stretched tight over a head the size of an avocado. Officially, we labeled it a stillbirth. The corpse — if you could call it that — was disposed of with the rest of the medical waste.

But that’s neither here nor there. What I mean to say is that we were wrong. Happily, at least as it appeared. The child — he was born to Francisco and Mercedes Funes, street vendors whose tacos de chivo are absolutely poisonous to the digestive tract, and I advise all who read this to avoid their stall at the corner of Independencia and Constitución if you value your equilibrium — was soon groping at his mother’s breast and making the usual gurgling and sucking noises.

Mercedes Funes, twenty-seven years old at the time, with six children already to her credit, a pair of bow legs, the shoulders of a fullback and one continuous eyebrow that made you think of Frida Kahlo (stripped of artistry and elegance, that is), was back at her stall that evening, searing goat over a charcoal grill for the entertainment of the unwary, and, as far as Elvira and I were concerned, that was that. One more soul had entered the world. I don’t remember what we did that night, but I suppose it was nothing special. Usually, after we closed the clinic, we would sit in the courtyard, exhausted, and watch the doves settle on the wires while the serving girl put together a green salad and a caldereta de verduras or a platter of fried artichoke hearts, Elvira’s favorite.

Four years slipped by before I next saw the child or gave more than a glancing thought to the Funes clan except when I was treating cases of vomiting and diarrhea, and as a matter of course questioning my patients as to what and where they’d eaten. “It was the oysters, Doctor,” they’d tell me, looking penitent. “Onions, definitely the onions — they’ve never agreed with me.” “Mayonnaise, I’ll never eat mayonnaise again.” And, my favorite: “The meat hardly smelled at all.” They’d blame the Chinese restaurant, the Mennonites and their dairy, their own wives and uncles and dogs, but more often than not I was able to trace the source of the problem to the Funes stall. My patients would look at me with astonishment. “But that can’t be, Doctor — the Funes make the best tacos in town.”

At any rate, Mercedes Funes appeared at the clinic one sun-racked morning with her son in tow. She came through the door tugging him awkwardly by the wrist (they’d named the boy Dámaso, after her husband’s twin brother, who sent small packets of chocolate and the occasional twenty-dollar bill from Los Angeles when the mood took him), and settled into a chair in the waiting room while Elvira’s parrot gnawed at the wicker bars of its cage and the little air conditioner I keep in the front window churned out its hyperborean drafts. I was feeling especially good that morning, at the top of my game, certain real estate investments having turned out rather well for me, and Elvira keeping her eye on a modest little cottage at the seashore, which we hoped to purchase as a getaway and perhaps, in the future, as a place of retirement. After all, I was no longer as young as I once was and the Hippocratic frisson of healing the lame and curing the incurable had been replaced by a sort of repetitious drudgery, nothing a surprise anymore and every patient who walked through the door diagnosed before they even pulled up a chair. I’d seen it all. I was bored. Impatient. Fed up. But, as I say, on this particular day, my mood was buoyant, my whole being filled with an inchoate joy over the prospect of that little frame cottage at the seashore. I believe I may even have been whistling as I entered the examining room.

“And what seems to be the problem?” I asked.

Mercedes Funes was wrapped in a shawl despite the heat. She’d done up her hair and was wearing the shoes she reserved for mass on Sundays. In her lap was the child, gazing up at me out of his father’s eyes, eyes that were perfectly round, as if they’d been created on an assembly line, and which never seemed to blink. “It’s his hands, Doctor,” Mercedes said in a whisper. “He’s burned them.”

Microsoft Word — Wild Child.docx

Before I could say “Let’s have a look” in my paternal and reassuring tones, the boy held out his hands, palms up, and I saw the wounds there. The burns were third degree, right in the center of each palm, and involved several fingers as well. Leathery scabs

— eschars — had replaced the destroyed tissue and were seeping a deep wine-colored fluid around the margins. I’d seen such burns before, of course, on innumerable occasions, the result of a house fire, smoking in bed, a child blundering against a stove, but these seemed odd, as if they’d been deliberately inflicted. I glanced up sharply at the mother and asked what had happened.

“I was busy with a customer,” she said, dropping her eyes as if to summon the image, “a big order, a family of seven, and I wasn’t watching him — and Francisco wasn’t there; he’s out selling bicycle tires now, you know, just so we can make ends meet. Dámaso must have reached into the brazier when my back was turned. He took out two hot coals, Doctor, one in each hand. I only discovered what he’d done when I smelled the flesh burning.” She gave me a glance from beneath the continuous eyebrow that made her look as if she were perpetually scowling. “It smelled just like goat. Only different.”

“But how—?” I exclaimed, unable to finish the question. I didn’t credit her for a minute. No one, not even the fakirs of India (and they are fakers), could hold on to a burning coal long enough to suffer third-degree burns.

“He’s not normal, Doctor. He doesn’t feel pain the way others do. “Look here”—and she lifted the child’s right leg as if it weren’t even attached to him, rolling up his miniature trousers to show me a dark raised scar the size of an adult’s spread hand—“do you see this?

This is where that filthy pit bull Isabel Briceño keeps came through the fence and bit him, and we’ve gone to the lawyer over it too, believe me, but he never cried out or said a word. The dog had him down in the dirt, chewing on him like he was a bone, and if my husband hadn’t gone out into the yard to throw his shaving water on the rosebushes I think he would have been torn to pieces.”

She looked out the window a moment, as if to collect herself.

The boy stared at me out of his unblinking eyes. Very slowly, as if he were in some perverse way proud of what had befallen him or of how stoically he’d endured, he began to smile, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d make a first-rate soldier in whatever war we were prosecuting when he grew up.

“And do you see this?” she went on, tracing her index finger over the boy’s lips. “These scars here?” I saw a tracery of pale jagged lines radiating out from his mouth. “This is where he’s bitten himself — bitten himself without knowing it.”

“Señora Funes,” I said in my most caustic tone, the tone I reserve for inebriates with swollen livers and smokers who cough up blood while lighting yet another cigarette, and right there in my office, no less, “I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth here. This boy has been abused. I’ve never seen a more egregious case. You should be ashamed of yourself. Worse: you should be reported to the authorities.”

She rolled her eyes. The boy sat like a mannequin in her lap, as if he were made of wood. “You don’t understand: he doesn’t feel pain.

Nothing.

Go ahead. Prick him with your needle — you can push it right through his arm and he wouldn’t know the difference.”

Angry now — what sort of dupe did she take me for? — I went straight to the cabinet, removed a disposable syringe, prepared an injection (a half-dose of the B]21 keep on hand for the elderly and anemic) and dabbed a spot on his stick of an arm with alcohol. They both watched indifferently as the needle slid in. The boy never flinched. Never gave any indication that anything was happening at all. But that proved nothing. One child out of a hundred would steel himself when I presented the needle (though the other ninety-nine would shriek as if their fingernails were being pulled out, one by one).

“Do you see?” she said.

“I see nothing,” I replied. “He didn’t flinch, that’s all. Many children — some, anyway — are real little soldiers about their injections.” I hovered over him, looking into his face. “You’re a real little solider, aren’t you, Dámaso?” I said.

From the mother, in a weary voice: “We call him Sin Dolor, Doctor. That’s his nickname. That’s what his father calls him when he misbehaves, because no amount of spanking or pinching or twisting his arm will even begin to touch him. Sin Dolor, Doctor.

The Painless One.”

The next time I saw him he must have been seven or eight, I don’t really recall exactly, but he’d grown into a reedy, solemn boy with great, devouring eyes and his father’s Indian hair, still as thin as a puppet and still looking anemic. This time the father brought him in, carrying the boy in his arms. My first thought was worms, and I made a mental note to dose him before he left, but then it occurred to me that it must only have been his mother’s cooking and I dismissed the idea. A stool sample would do. But of course we’d need to draw blood to assess hemoglobin levels — if the parents were willing, that is. Both of them were notoriously tightfisted and I rarely saw any of the Funes clan in my offices unless something were seriously amiss.

“What seems to be the problem?” I asked, rising to take Francisco Funes’ hand in my own.

With a grunt, he bent down to set the boy on his feet. “Go ahead, Dámaso,” he said, “walk for the doctor.”

I noticed that the boy stood unevenly, favoring his right leg. He glanced first at his father, then at me, dipped his shoulder in resignation and walked to the door and back, limping as if he’d dislocated his knee. He looked up with a smile. “I think something’s wrong with my leg,” he said in a voice as reduced and apologetic as a confessor’s.

I cupped him beneath his arms and swung him up onto the examining table, giving the father a look — if this wasn’t child abuse, then what was? — and asked, “Did you have an accident?”

His father answered for him. “He’s broken his leg, can’t you see that? Jumping from the roof of the shed when he should know better—” Francisco Funes was a big man, powerfully built, with a low but penetrating voice, and he leveled a look of wrath on his son, as if to say that the truth of the matter was evident and the boy would have a whipping when he got home, broken leg or no.

I ignored him. “Can you stretch out here for me on your back?”

I said to the boy, patting the examining table. The boy complied, lifting both his legs to the table without apparent effort, and the first thing I noticed were the scars there, a constellation of burns and slashes uncountable running from his ankles to his thighs, and I felt the outrage come up in me all over again. Abuse! The indictment flared in my head. I was about to call for Elvira to come in and evict the father from my offices so that I could treat the son — and quiz him too — when I ran my hand over the boy’s left shin and discovered the swelling there. He did indeed have a broken leg — a fractured tibia, from the feel of it. “Does this hurt?” I asked, putting pressure on the spot.

The boy shook his head.

“Nothing hurts him,” the father put in. He was hovering over me, looking impatient, expecting to be cheated and wanting only to extract the pesos from his wallet as if his son’s injury were a sort of tax and then get on with the rest of his life.

“We’ll need X-rays,” I said.

“No X-rays,” he growled. “I knew I should have taken him to the curandero, I knew it. Just set the damn bone and get it over with.”

I felt the boy’s gaze on me. He was absolutely calm, his eyes like the motionless pools of the rill that brought the water down out of the mountains and into the cistern behind our new cottage at the seashore. For the first time it occurred to me that something extraordinary was going on here, a kind of medical miracle: the boy had fractured his tibia and should have been writhing on the table and crying out with the pain of it, but he looked as if there were nothing at all the matter, as if he’d come into the friendly avuncular doctor’s office just to have a look around at the skeleton on its stand and the framed diplomas on the whitewashed walls and to bask in the metallic glow of the equipment Elvira polished every morning before the patients started lining up outside the door.

It hit me like a thunderclap: he’d walked on a broken leg. Walked on it and didn’t know the difference but for the fact that he was somehow mysteriously limping. I couldn’t help myself. I gripped his leg to feel the alignment of the bone at the site of the fracture. “Does this hurt?” I asked. I felt the bone slip into place. The light outside the window faded and then came up again as an unseen cloud passed overhead. “This?” I asked. “This?”

After that day, after I’d set and splinted the bone, put the boy in a cast and lent him a couple of old mismatched crutches before going out to the anteroom and telling Francisco Funes to forget the bill—“Free of charge,” I said — I felt my life expand. I realized that I was staring a miracle in the face, and who could blame me for wanting to change the course of my life, to make my mark as one of the giants of the profession to be studied and revered down through the ages instead of fading away into the terminal ennui of a small-town practice, of the doves on the wire, the caldereta in the pot and the cottage at the seaside? The fact was that Dámaso Funes must have harbored a mutation in his genes, a positive mutation, superior, progressive, nothing at all like the ones that had given us the faceless infant and all the other horrors that paraded through the door of the clinic day in and day out. If that mutation could be isolated — if the genetic sequence could be discovered — then the boon for our poor suffering species would be immeasurable.

Imagine a pain-free old age. Painless childbirth, surgery, dentistry.

Imagine Elvira’s patients in the oncology ward, racing round in their wheelchairs, grinning and joking to the last. What freedom! What joy! What an insuperable coup over the afflictions that twist and maim us and haunt us to the grave!

I began to frequent the Funes stall in the hour before siesta, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy, to befriend him, take him into my confidence, perhaps even have him move into the house and take the place of the child Elvira and I had never had because of the grinding sadness of the world. I tried to be casual. “Buenas tardes,” I would say in my heartiest voice as Mercedes Funes raised her careworn face from the grill. “How are you? And how are those mouthwatering tacos? Yes, yes, I’ll take two. Make it three.” I even counterfeited eating them, though it was only a nibble and only of the tortilla itself, while whole legions of my patients past and present lined up for their foil-wrapped offerings. Two months must have gone by in this way before I caught sight of Dámaso. I ordered, stepped aside, and there he was, standing isolated behind the grill, even as his younger siblings — there were three new additions to the clan — scrabbled over their toys in the dirt.

His eyes brightened when he saw me and I suppose I said something obvious like “I see that leg has healed up well. Still no pain, eh?”

He was polite, well-bred. He came out from behind the stall and took my hand in a formal way. “I’m fine,” he said, and paused. “But for this.” He lifted his dirty T-shirt (imprinted with the logo of some North American pop band, three sneering faces and a corona of ragged hair) and showed me an open wound the size of a fried egg.

Another burn.

“Ooh,” I exclaimed, wincing. “Would you like to come back to the office and I’ll treat that for you?” He just looked at me. The moment hovered. The smoke rose from the grill. “Gratis?”

He shrugged. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other — he must have felt himself immortal, as all children do until they become sufficiently acquainted with death and all the miseries that precede and attend it, but of course he was subject to infection, loss of digits, limbs, the sloughing of the flesh and corruption of the internal organs, just like anyone else. Though he couldn’t feel any of it. Mercifully. He shrugged again. Looked to his mother, who was shifting chunks of goat around the cheap screen over the brazier as the customers called out their orders. “I need to help my mother,” he said. I was losing him.

It was then that I hit on a stratagem, the sort of thing that comes on a synaptical flutter like the beating of internal wings: “Do you want to see my scorpions?”

I watched his face change, the image of a foreshortened arachnid with its claws and pendent stinger rising miasmic before him. He gave a quick glance to where his mother was making change for Señora Padilla, an enormous woman of well over three hundred pounds whom I’ve treated for hypertension, adult-onset diabetes and a virulent genital rash no standard medication seemed able to eradicate, and then he ducked behind the brazier, only to emerge a moment later just up the street from where I was standing. He signaled impatiently with his right hand and I gave up the ruse of lunching on his mother’s wares, turned my back on the stall and fell into step with him.

“I keep one in a jar,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking of scorpions. “A brown one.”

“Probably Vaejovis spinigeris, very common in these parts. Does it show dark stripes on its tail?”

He nodded in a vague way, which led me to believe he hadn’t looked all that closely. It was a scorpion — that was enough for him.

“How many do you have?” he asked, striding along without the slightest suggestion of a limp.

I should say, incidentally, that I’m an amateur entomologist — or, more specifically, arachnologist — and that scorpions are my specialty. I collect them in the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies, though my specimens are very much alive. In those days, I kept them in terraria in the back room of the clinic, where they clung contentedly to the undersides of the rocks and pottery shards I’d arranged there for their benefit.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. We were just then passing a group of urchins goggling at us from an alleyway, and they all, as one, called out his name — and not in mockery or play, but reverentially, in homage. He was, I was soon to discover, a kind of hero amongst them.

“Ten?” he guessed. He was wearing sandals. His feet shone in the glare of the sunlight, kicking out ahead of him on the paving stones. It was very hot.

“Oh, a hundred or more, I’d say. Of some twenty-six species.”

And then, slyly: “If you have the time, I’ll show you them all.”

Of course, I insisted on first treating the burn as a kind of quid pro quo. It wouldn’t do to have him dying of a bacterial infection, or of anything else for that matter — for humanitarian reasons certainly, but also with respect to the treasure he was carrying for all of mankind. His excitement was palpable as I led him into the moist, dim back room, with its concrete floor and its smell of turned earth and vinegar. The first specimen I showed him — Hadrurus arizonensis pallidus, the giant desert scorpion, some five inches long and nearly indistinguishable in color from the sand it rested on — was clutching a cricket in its pedipalps as I lifted the screen at the top of the terrarium. “This is the largest scorpion in North America,” I told him, “though its venom is rather weak compared to what Centruroides exilicauda delivers. The bark scorpion, that is.

They live around here too and they can be very dangerous.”

All he said was, “I want to see the poison one.”

I had several specimens in a terrarium set against the back wall and I shut down the lights, pulled the shades and used a black light to show him how they glowed with their own natural phosphorescence. As soon as I flicked on the black light and he’d had a moment to distinguish the creatures’ forms as they crawled round their home, he let out a whoop of delight and insisted on shining it in each of the terraria in succession until he finally led me back to Centruroides. “Would they sting me?” he asked. “If I reached in, I mean?”

I shrugged. “They might. But they’re shy creatures and like most animals want to avoid any sort of confrontation — and they don’t want to waste their venom. You know, it takes a great deal of caloric resources to make the toxin — they need it for their prey. So they can eat.”

He turned his face to me in the dark, the glow of the black light erasing his features and lending a strange blue cast to his eyes.

“Would I die?” he asked.

I didn’t like where this was leading — and I’m sure you’ve already guessed what was to come, the boy who feels no pain and the creatures who come so well equipped to inflict it — and so I played up the danger. “If one were to sting you, you might become ill, might vomit, might even froth at the mouth. You know what that is, frothing?”

He shook his head.

“Well, no matter. The fact is, a sting of this species might kill someone very susceptible, an infant maybe, a very old person, but probably not a boy of your age, though it would make you very, very sick—”

“Would it kill my grandfather?”

I pictured the grandfather. I’d seen him dozing behind the stall on occasion, an aggregation of bones and skin lesions who must have been in his nineties. “Yes,” I said, “it’s possible — if he was unlucky enough to step on one on his way to the bathroom one night…”

It was then that the bell sounded in the clinic, though we were closed, except for emergencies, during the afternoon. I called for Elvira, but she must have been taking her lunch in the garden or dozing in the apartment upstairs. “Come with me,” I said to the boy and I led him out of the back room, through the examining room and into the office, where I found one of the men of the neighborhood, Dagoberto Domínguez, standing at the counter, his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag and a small slick gobbet of meat, which proved to be the tip of his left index finger, clutched in the other. I forgot all about Dámaso.

When I’d finished bandaging Senor Dominguez’s wound and sent him off in a taxi to the hospital with the tip of his finger packed in ice, I noticed that the door to the back room stood open. There, in the dark, with the black light glowing in its lunar way, stood little Dámaso, his shirt fluorescing with the forms of my scorpions — half a dozen at least — as they climbed across his back and up and down the avenues of his arms. I didn’t say a word. Didn’t move. Just watched as he casually raised a hand to his neck where my Hadrurus — the giant — had just emerged from the collar of his shirt, and I watched as it stung him, repeatedly, while he held it between two fingers and then tenderly eased it back into its cage.

Was I irresponsible? Had I somehow, in the back of my mind, hoped for just such an outcome — as a kind of perverse experiment?

Perhaps so. Perhaps there was that part of me that couldn’t help collapsing the boundary between detachment and sadism, but then did the term even apply? How could one be sadistic if the victim felt nothing? At any rate, from that day on, even as I wrote up my observations and sent them off to Boise State University, where Jerry Lemongello, one of the world’s premier geneticists and an old friend from my days at medical school in Guadalajara, had his state-of-the-art research lab, Dámaso became my constant companion. He seemed to revel in the attention Elvira and I gave him, coming as he did from a large and poor family, and over the course of time he began to dine with us frequently, and even, on occasion, to spend the night on a cot in the guest bedroom. I taught him everything I knew about scorpions and their tarantula cousins too and began to instruct him in the natural sciences in general and medicine in particular, a subject for which he seemed to have a special affinity. In return he did odd jobs about the place, sweeping and mopping the floors of the clinic, seeing that the scorpions had sufficient crickets to dine on and the parrot its seed and water and bits of fruit.

In the meantime, Jerry Lemongello pressed for a DNA sample and I took some scrapings from inside the boy’s mouth (which had been burned many times over — while he could distinguish hot and cold, he had no way of registering what was too hot or too cold) and continued my own dilatory experiments, simple things like reflex tests, pinpricks to various parts of the anatomy, even tickling (to which he proved susceptible). One afternoon — and I regret this still — I casually remarked to him that the paper wasps that had chosen to build a massive nest just under the eaves of the clinic had become a real nuisance. They were strafing my patients as they ducked through the screen door and had twice stung poor Señora Padilla in a very tender spot when she came in for her medication. I sighed and wished aloud that someone would do something about it.

When I glanced out the window fifteen minutes later, there he was, perched on a ladder and shredding the nest with his bare hands while the wasps swarmed him in a roiling black cloud. I should have interfered. Should have stopped him. But I didn’t. I simply watched as he methodically crushed the combs full of pupae underfoot and slapped the adults dead as they futilely stung him. I treated the stings, of course — each of them an angry swollen red welt — and cautioned him against ever doing anything so foolish again, lecturing him on the nervous system and the efficacy of pain as a warning signal that something is amiss in the body. I told him of the lepers whose fingers and toes abrade away to nothing because of the loss of feeling in the extremities, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was driving at. “You mean pain is good?” he asked.

“Well, no,” I said. “Pain is bad, of course, and what we do in my profession is try to combat it so people can go on with their lives and be productive and so on …”

“My mother has pain,” he said, running a finger over the bumps on his forearm as if they were nothing more than a novelty. “In her back. From bending over the grill all day, she says.”

“Yes,” I said — she suffered from a herniated disk—“I know.”

He was quiet a moment. “Will she die?”

I told him that everyone would die. But not today and not from back pain.

A slow smile bloomed on his lips. “Then may I stay for dinner?”

It was shortly after this that the father came in again and this time he came alone, and whether his visit had anything to do with the wasp adventure or not, I can’t say. But he was adamant in his demands, almost rude. “I don’t know what you’re doing with my boy — or what you think you’re doing — but I want him back.”

I was sitting at my desk. It was eleven in the morning and beyond the window the hummingbirds were suspended over the roseate flowers of the trumpet vine as if sculpted out of air. Clouds bunched on the horizon. The sun was like butter. Elvira was across the room, at her own desk, typing into the new computer while the radio played so softly I could distinguish it only as a current in the background. The man refused to take a seat.

“Your son has a great gift,” I said after a moment. And though I’m an agnostic with regard to the question of God and a supernatural Jesus, I employed a religious image to reinforce the statement, thinking it might move a man like Francisco Funes, imbued as he was with the impoverished piety of his class: “He can redeem mankind — redeem us from all the pain of the ages. I only want to help.”

“Bullshit,” he snarled, and Elvira looked up from her typing, dipping her head to see over her glasses, which slipped down the incline of her nose.

“It’s the truth,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he repeated, and I reflected on how unoriginal he was, how limited and ignorant and borne down under the weight of the superstition and greed that afflicts all the suffering hordes like him. “He’s my son,” he said, his voice touching bottom, “not yours.

And if I ever catch him here again, I’ll give him such a whipping—”

He caught himself even as I flashed my bitterest smile. “You don’t know, but I have my ways. And if I can’t beat him, I can beat you, Doctor, with all respect. And you’ll feel it like any other man.”

“Are you threatening me? Elvira”—I turned to her—“take note.”

“You bet your ass I am,” he said.

And then, quite simply, the boy disappeared. He didn’t come into the clinic the following morning or the morning after that. I asked Elvira about it and she shrugged as if to say, “It’s just as well.” But it wasn’t. I found that I missed having him around, and not simply for selfish reasons (Jerry Lemongello had written to say that the DNA sample was unusable and to implore me to take another), but because I’d developed a genuine affection for him. I enjoyed explaining things to him, lifting him up out of the stew of misinformation and illiteracy into which he’d been born, and if I saw him as following in my footsteps as a naturalist or even a physician, I really didn’t think I was deluding myself. He was bright, quick-witted, with a ready apprehension of the things around him and an ability to observe closely, so that, for instance, when I placed a crab, a scorpion and a spider on a tray before him he was able instantly to discern the relationship between them and apply the correct family, genus and species names I’d taught him. And all this at nine years of age.

On the third morning, when there was still no sign of him, I went to the Funes stall in the marketplace, hoping to find him there.

It was early yet and Mercedes Funes was just laying the kindling on the brazier while half a dozen slabs of freshly (or at least recently) slaughtered goat hung from a rack behind her (coated, I might add, in flies). I called out a greeting and began, in a circuitous way, to ask about her health, the weather and the quality of her goat, when at some point she winced with pain and put her hand to her back, slowly straightening up to shoot me what I can only call a hostile look. “He’s gone off to live with his grandmother,” she said. “In Guadalajara.”

And that was that. No matter how hard I pressed, Mercedes Funes would say no more, nor would her donkey of a husband, and when they had the odd medical emergency they went all the way to the other side of the village to the clinic of my rival, Dr. Octavio Díaz, whom I detest heartily, though that’s another story. Suffice to say that some years went by before I saw Dámaso again, though I heard the rumors — we all did — that his father was forcing him to travel from town to town like a freak in a sideshow, shamelessly exploiting his gift for the benefit of every gaping rube with a few pesos in his pocket. It was a pity. It was criminal. But there was nothing that I or ferry Lemongello or all the regents of Boise State University could do about it. He was gone and we remained.

Another generation of doves came to sit on the wires, Elvira put on weight around the middle and in the hollow beneath her chin, and as I shaved each morning I watched the inevitable progress of the white hairs as they crept up along the slope of my jowls and into my sideburns and finally colonized the crown of my head. I got up from bed, ran the water in the sink and saw a stranger staring back at me in the mirror, an old man with a blunted look in his reconstituted eyes. I diagnosed measles and mumps and gonorrhea, kneaded the flesh of the infirm, plied otoscope, syringe and tongue depressor as if the whole business were some rarefied form of punishment in a Sophoclean drama. And then one afternoon, coming back from the pet shop with a plastic sack of crickets for my brood, I turned a corner and there he was.

A crowd of perhaps forty or fifty people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the Gómez bakery, shifting from foot to foot in the aspiring heat. They seemed entranced — none of them so much as glanced at me as I worked my way to the front, wondering what it was all about. When I spotted Francisco Funes, the blood rushed to my face. He was standing to one side of a makeshift stage — half a dozen stacked wooden pallets — gazing out on the crowd with a calculating look, as if he were already counting up his gains, and on the stage itself, Dámaso, shirtless, shoeless, dressed only in a pair of clinging shorts that did little to hide any part of his anatomy, was heating the blade of a pearl-handled knife over a charcoal brazier till it glowed red. He was stuck all over like a kind of hedgehog with perhaps twenty of those stainless steel skewers people use for making shish kebab, including one that projected through both his cheeks, and I watched in morbid fascination as he lifted the knife from the brazier and laid the blade flat against the back of his hand so that you could hear the sizzling of the flesh. A gasp went up from the crowd. A woman beside me fainted into the arms of her husband. I did nothing. I only watched as Dámaso, his body a patchwork of scars, found a pinch of skin over his breastbone and thrust the knife through it.

I wanted to cry out the shame of it, but I held myself in check.

At the climactic moment I turned and faded away into the crowd, waiting my chance. The boy — he was an adolescent now, thirteen or fourteen, I calculated — performed other feats of senseless torture I won’t name here, and then the hat went round, the pesos were collected, and father and son headed off in the direction of their house. I followed at a discreet distance, the crickets rasping against the sides of the bag. I watched the father enter the house — it was grander now, with several new rooms already framed and awaiting the roofer’s tar paper and tiles — as the boy went to a yellow plastic cooler propped up against the front steps, extracted a bottle of Coca-Cola and lowered himself into the battered armchair on the porch as if he were a hundred and fifty years old.

I waited a moment, till he’d finished his poor reward and set the bottle down between his feet, and then I strolled casually past the house as if I just happened to be in the neighborhood. When I drew even with him — when I was sure he’d seen me — I stopped in my tracks and gave him an elaborate look of surprise, a double take, as it were. “Dámaso?” I exclaimed. “Can it really be you?”

I saw something light up in his eyes, but only the eyes — he seemed incapable of forming a smile with his lips. In the next moment he was out of the chair and striding across the yard to me, holding out his hand in greeting. “Doctor,” he said, and I saw the discoloration of the lips, the twin pinpoints of dried blood on either cheek amidst a battlefield of annealed scars, and I couldn’t have felt more shock and pity if he were indeed my own son.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

My mind was racing. All I could think of was how to get him out of there before Francisco Funes stepped through the door.

“Would you like to come over to the clinic with me — for dinner? For old times’ sake? Elvira’s making an eggplant lasagna tonight, with a nice crisp salad and fried artichokes, and look”—I held up the bag of crickets and gave it a shake—“we can feed the scorpions. Did you know that I’ve got one nearly twice as big as Hadrurus — an African variety? Oh, it’s a beauty, a real beauty—”

And there it was, the glance over the shoulder, the very same gesture he’d produced that day at the stall when he was just a child, and in the next moment we were off, side by side, and the house was behind us. He seemed to walk more deliberately than he had in the past, as if the years had weighed on him in some unfathomable way (or fathomable, absolutely fathomable, right down to the corrosive depths of his father’s heart), and I slowed my pace to accommodate him, worrying over the thought that he’d done some irreparable damage to muscle, ligament, cartilage, even to the nervous system itself. We passed the slaughterhouse where his mother’s first cousin, Refugio, sacrificed goats for the good of the family business, continued through the desiccated, lizard-haunted remains of what the city fathers had once intended as a park, and on up the long sloping hill that separates our village by class, income and, not least, education.

The holy aroma of Elvira’s lasagna bathed the entire block as we turned the corner to the clinic. We’d been talking of inconsequential things, my practice, the parrot — yes, she was well, thank you — the gossip of the village, the weather, but nothing of his life, his travels, his feelings. It wasn’t till I’d got him in the back room under the black light, with a glass of iced and sweetened tea in his hand and a plate of dulces in his lap, that he began to open up to me. “Dámaso,”

I said at one point, the scorpions glowing like apparitions in the vestibules of their cages, “you don’t seem to be in very high spirits

— tell me, what’s the matter? Is it — your travels?”

In the dark, with the vinegary odor of the arachnids in our nostrils and the promise of Elvira’s cuisine wafting in the wings, he carefully set down his glass and brushed the crumbs from his lap before looking up at me. “Yes,” he said softly. And then with more emphasis, “Yes.”

I was silent a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my Hadrurus probing the boundaries of its cage. I waited for him to go on.

“I have no friends, Doctor, not a single one. Even my brothers and sisters look at me like I’m a stranger. And the boys all over the district, in the smallest towns, they try to imitate me.” His voice was strained, the tones of the adult, of his father, at war with the cracked breathy piping of a child. “They do what I do. And it hurts them.”

“You don’t have to do this anymore, Dámaso.” I felt the heat of my own emotions. “It’s wrong, deeply wrong, can’t you see that?”

He shrugged. “I have no choice. I owe it to my family. To my mother.”

“No,” I said, “you owe them nothing. Or not that. Not your own self, your own body, your heart—”

“She brought me into the world.”

Absurdly, I said, “So did I.”

There was a silence. After a moment, I went on, “You’ve been given a great gift, Dámaso, and I can help you with it — you can live here, with us, with Elvira and me, and never have to go out on the street and, and damage yourself again, because what your father is doing is evil, Dámaso, evil, and there’s no other word for it.”

He raised a wounded hand and let it fall again. “My family comes first,” he said. “They’ll always come first. I know my duty. But what they’ll never understand, what you don’t understand, is that I do hurt, I do feel it, I do.” And he lifted that same hand and tapped his breastbone, right over the place where his heart constricted and dilated and shot the blood through his veins. “Here,” he said. “Here’s where I hurt.”

He was dead a week later.

I didn’t even hear of it till he was already in the ground and Jerry Lemongello buckled in for the long flight down from Boise with the hope of collecting the DNA sample himself, too late now, Mercedes Funes inhaling smoke and tears and pinning one hopeless hand to her lower back as she bent over the grill while her husband wandered the streets in a dirty guayabera, as drunk as any derelict.

They say the boy was showing off for the urchins who followed him around as if he were some sort of divinity, the kind of boys who thrive on pain, who live to inflict and extract it as if it could be measured and held, as if it were precious, the kind of boys who carve hieroglyphs into their skin with razor blades and call it fashion. It was a three-story building. “Jump!” they shouted. “Sin Dolor! Sin Dolor!” He jumped, and he never felt a thing.

But what I wonder — and God, if He exists, have mercy on Francisco Funes and the mother too — is if he really knew what he was doing, if it was a matter not so much of bravado but of grief. We will never know. And we will never see another like him, though Jerry Lemongello tells me he’s heard of a boy in Pakistan with the same mutation, another boy who stands in the town square and mutilates himself to hear the gasps and the applause and gather up the money at his feet.

Within a year, Dámaso was forgotten. His family’s house had burned to ashes around the remains of a kerosene heater, the goats died and the brazier flared without him, and I closed up the clinic and moved permanently, with Elvira and her parrot, to our cottage by the sea. I pass my days now in the sunshine, tending our modest garden, walking the sugar-white beach to see what the tide has brought in. I no longer practice medicine, but of course I’m known here as El Estimado Doctor, and on occasion, in an emergency, a patient will show up on my doorstep. Just the other day a little girl of three or four came in, swaddled in her mother’s arms. She’d been playing in the tide pools down by the lava cliffs that rise up out of the sand like dense distant loaves and had stepped on a sea urchin.

One of the long black spikes the animal uses for defense had broken off under the child’s weight and embedded itself in the sole of her foot.

I soothed her as best I could, speaking softly to distract her, speaking nonsense really — all that matters in such circumstances is the intonation. I murmured. The sea murmured along the shore. As delicately as I could, I held her miniature heel in my hand, took hold of the slick black fragment with the grip of my forceps and pulled it cleanly from the flesh, and I have to tell you, that little girl shrieked till the very glass in the windows rattled, shrieked as if there were no other pain in the world.