Wild Child and Other Stories

  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 Jerry 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 m
y 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 hedge-hog 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.