1993 - The Blue Afternoon (8 page)

“Come on, Mrs Fischer. Leave the bastard.”

We walked quickly towards the car.

“Don’t worry,” Meyersen shouted after me. “We’re going to build another house here. Very similar design, in fact. Different architect, that’s all.”

We drove away down Micheltoreno. Larry was laboriously and vehemently calling Meyersen every obscenity he could summon to mind. His dogged cursing was obscured by a muted roaring in my ears, my boiling blood I supposed, a foaming red surf, heating my arteries, scalding my internal organs with its furious rage. The noise dimmed eventually, or was drowned by the traffic, as we turned west on Sunset and headed thoughtlessly on out, aiming somewhere for the distant sunlit ocean.

C
arriscant turned away from the window. Through its oval I could see the studded silver wing and the engine nacelle and half the blurred disc of the propeller hauling us through this thin high air. We were flying Transcontinental and Western’s Sky Chief service to New York. Somewhere below us was Montana. We had eighteen hours to go.

“It’s quite extraordinary,” Carriscant said, palms patting the armrests of his seat, then gesturing up the aisle at the other passengers and the neat stewardess pouring out cups of coffee. “Here we are sitting in an armchair being served a beverage…To think we can do all this, in such a short time, up in the air like this. Unbelievable. I feel I’ve been given a mighty dunt on the head and woken up in a different world. Rip van Winkle isn’t in it.”

“Dunt? What’s a dunt?”

He chuckled. He was in a fine mood, clearly. “It’s a Scottish word. Means a
blow
, a
hit
. My father used it.”

I sensed one of my rare opportunities approaching: he seemed as if he might be receptive to a few questions.

“Your father was Scottish?”

“Yes. From a place called Dundee. His name was Archibald Carriscant.”

“Is Carriscant a Scottish name, then?”

“It’s the name of a small village in Angus. There’s a River Carriscant too, tributary of the Tweed.”

“So you’re Scottish by origin,” I said, slowly, taking all this in. Angus. Tweed.

He looked at me carefully, not fooled by my ingenuousness, stroking the cleft in his chin with his middle finger, pondering whether to answer me. I wondered for my part whether he might be thinking up some intriguing falsehood, to lead me on a little further.

“I’m half Scottish, actually,” he said. “And a quarter Spanish and a quarter Filipino.”

I hid my intense surprise at this news. “Ah. Hence the Salvador.”

“Exactly. Do you think you could ask the young lady if I could have some coffee?”

From one point of view it had been amongst the easiest decisions of my life—he was my father and he had asked me—from another the most unconsidered and spontaneous. But Eric Meyersen and his wanton, brutal destruction of my house had been a powerful propellant. When George Fugal told me I could do nothing, that Meyersen was completely within his legal rights, I knew that I had to leave the city for a while, escape the shame, leave behind the focus of my anger and bitterness. I needed time, above all.

So, when Salvador Carriscant came calling again with his now alluring proposition of a trip to Europe he found me teary and weak and easily persuaded. He put his arms around me, patted me on the back and muttered consoling words in my ear. There, there, Kay…Don’t worry, all this will pass. I held him close and blurted out my woes, told him about Meyersen’s betrayal and my impotence. Come with me, Kay, he said. Just the two of us, you and me, get away from all this. Take some time off, think things through, then come back and put the world to rights again. For once this was what I wanted to hear and for once I wanted someone else to steer the course of my life for a while. I was tired, weary of standing up for myself…You must know that feeling, how vulnerable you are, when you long for someone else to take responsibility. So my father did just that and asked me to come away with him. And I was glad to go. What else could I have done?

I put all plans for the Lago Vista apartments to one side, told Larry Rugola I was taking a vacation—he understood—and spent some of the profits from the sale of 2265 to embark on this ‘quest’. We were sailing from New York to Lisbon two days hence on the SS Herzog, of the Hamburg-American line, courtesy of Eric Meyersen.

I tried to draw some satisfaction from this but failed. In the days since the house had been destroyed my spirits had never been lower. Carriscant, contrarily, was positively rejuvenated by the news of our journey, almost intolerably jaunty and good-humoured. I had made one sole and unmovable proviso: he had to tell me everything, what all this was about, who this diplomat’s wife was and what mystery was about to be unveiled in Lisbon, should we find her there. I reminded him now of his obligation.

“Oh, I’ll tell you,” he said breezily. “It’s quite a story. By the time we reach Lisbon you’ll know everything I do.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s start with the family tree.”

This is what he told me. Archibald Carriscant was an engineer, one of that worldwide diaspora of Scots professionals and in his early forties when he first arrived in the Philippines—then a colony of Spain—in 1863, sent by his Hong Kong firm of Melhuish & Cobb to supervise the rebuilding of the southern breakwater that formed the entrance to Manila’s docks on the Pasig river. When that task was over he was transferred to the construction of the narrow-gauge steam railway that linked the quaysides with the warehouses and storage sheds behind the customhouse. Melhuish & Cobb won the contract for the construction of the Manila–Dagupan Railway from the English syndicate that was financing it and the rest of Archibald Carriscant’s working life was spent travelling up and down the hundred miles of country that lay between Manila Bay and the Gulf of Lingayen, planning culverts and embankments, cuttings and bridges. A tall, pale, shy man, bald since his early twenties, Archibald Carriscant had resigned himself, with few regrets, to a life of permanent bachelorhood. But during a time when he was positioning the goods sidings at Tarlac he was befriended by a local mestizo landowner, Don Carlos Ocampo. In the month he stayed at Don Carlos’s summer estates near Tarlac he was most surprised to discover that his timid, almost imperceptible wooing of Don Carlos’s eldest daughter, Juliana, proved successful. A year later they married and moved into a large house Don Carlos provided for them in Intramuros, the old walled city in the heart of urban Manila. In 1870 Archibald Carriscant was appointed area manager for Melhuish & Cobb’s operations in Luzon and a son, Salvador, was born to Juliana. Salvador, an only child, intelligent and lively, was educated at the Municipal School for Boys and went on to study medicine at the College of San Tomas. In 1893, at his ailing father’s bequest, he left for Europe to complete his medical studies and take a degree in surgery at the medical school of Glasgow University. Archibald Carriscant died while his son was away in Scotland. Salvador Carriscant returned to set up practice in Manila in 1897.

“And, shortly after, I met your mother,” Carriscant said.

“In Manila?” All these revelations were confusing me.

“Of course. Where did you think?”

“It doesn’t matter.” We were strolling back to our hotel from a chop house on Forty-first Street. “And then the war started,” Carriscant said with a shrug.

“What war?”

“The war between the USA and the Philippines.”

I decided that was enough questions for this evening.

In the morning, after I had visited the Portuguese consulate to have a visa stamped in my passport (Carriscant, being British, did not require one), I visited a bookshop to try to discover more about this American-Filipino conflict but could find nothing. However, in a small volume entitled A Pocket History of the United States of America 1492-1930 I came across the following paragraph and copied it down.

One consequence of the Spanish-American War was that the Philippine Islands were liberated from the yoke of imperial power when Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on I May 1898. Filipino rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, who had been in revolt against their Hispanic masters for several years, saw the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to declare their independence and form a Philippine republic. When they discovered that the United States proposed merely to substitute its rule for Spain’s the insurrectos, as they were known, promptly attacked their former liberators on 4 February 1899 and laid siege to Manila. The subsequent war lasted three years and was only concluded after the capture of the rebel leader, Aguinaldo, in 1901. This war, one of the most prolonged and deadly in the annals of empire, exerted a high toll. Some 230,000 men, women and children perished, of which 4,234 were brave American soldiers, and the cost to the nation’s exchequer was an enormous 600 million dollars.

Archibald and Juliana Carriscant and their son Salvador…Commodore George Dewey and the battle of Manila Bay…The capture of Emilio Aguinaldo…Six hundred million dollars of American taxpayers’ money spent on a forgotten and bloody colonial adventure half a world away…What did all this have to do with me? I wondered how it could possibly explain my journey to Lisbon with a man who claimed to be my father in search of a woman whose face I knew from a torn-out page in a 1927 pictorial magazine.

We had a rare and gratifyingly tranquil voyage on the SS Herzog. The Atlantic swell remained glassy and docile as we cruised eastwards through mild hazy sunshine, the fraying rope of smoke from our two tall stacks trailing persistently behind us as if reluctant to be dispersed on the gentle oceanic breezes.

During our ten-day journey Carriscant was as good as his word—he told me everything, and answered every interrogation I put to him without demur however embarrassing my enquiry or however damaging it might prove to the portrayal of his character and motives. As you will see, his candour was impressive. I kept copious notes of everything he told me and wherever possible attempted to catch him out or corroborate details. In the relaying of his story I have allowed myself some of the licence of a writer of fiction, have embellished it with information I obtained later and with facts gleaned from my own researches. But in the end this is Salvador Carriscant’s story and I have had to trust the teller, as we all must in these circumstances, but what follows is, I believe, as close to the truth as anyone could come.

A
ccording to his best recollection, on the day of the first killing, Dr Salvador Carriscant—the most celebrated surgeon in the Philippines—suffering from a mild headache, left his house and decided as was his occasional habit to walk to work. Nobody of any importance or self-regard, with even the slightest modicum of self-esteem, walked in Manila in those days but Dr Carriscant relished the short stroll from his fine house on Calle de la Victoria to the San Jeronimo hospital, not only for the pleasant sensation of libertarian fellow feeling it provoked in him but also because the interlude allowed him to calm down, to forget the irritations and frustrations of his home life, and clear his mind for the exhilarating but complicated business of the day’s work waiting for him in the surgical wards.

The San Jeronimo hospital in Manila was a comparatively recent building, having been completed in 1878 and renovated again nearly twenty years later when the electric light was installed. It was to some extent modelled, so Carriscant had been informed by an elderly member of the hospital’s board of governors, on the Palazzo Salimberri in Sienna and certainly the streetfront facade bore some resemblance to a crude quattrocento building, made of well-cut adobe brick, with a simple hipped roof of terracotta tiles, much overgrown with ferns, moss and other greenery. There was a very high arched gateway with heavy wooden doors and a row of small square windows set in the walls above, bestowing a solid and uncompromising character, as if the place might have to be defended in times of insurrection or be called on to do duty as a prison. Inside, however, was a wide paved courtyard with arched cloisters on three sides and set behind that was a mature walled garden and arboretum crisscrossed by gravelled paths. Various consulting rooms for physicians, administrative offices and the dispensary led off the cloistered arcades, but the operating theatres, and there were two of them, were contained in two stubby projecting wings, east and west, on either side of the garden, almost as if they had been added as an afterthought. Dr Carriscant’s theatre was in the east wing. The medical director of the San Jeronimo hospital, Dr Isidro Cruz, practised his art in the western projection.

The design of the San Jeronimo was simple and, as long as numbers of patients did not grow too rapidly, as they did when the cholera and smallpox epidemics erupted, was quite effective. Patients first visited the physicians on the ground floor who then, where necessary, referred them to the surgeons. Post–operative care took place in the wards that occupied the floor above. The one disadvantage of the place was that there were no laboratories or dissecting rooms and that the morgue was a little on the small side. Consequently any anatomical or experimental work had to be carried out at the San Lazaro hospital or in private premises. The reputation of the San Jeronimo had been high, almost from its inception, owing to the celebrated dexterity of Dr Cruz (who on one day in 1882 had performed over three dozen amputations) but it had been augmented in recent years as a result of Salvador Carriscant’s return from Scotland in 1897 and his introduction of Listerism and the latest surgical methods and the remarkable success rate these innovations had produced. The hospital board had increased his basic salary four times and had awarded him the honorific title of surgeon-in-chief, a move that Dr Cruz had vehemently and publicly protested and which had set the seal on and, as it were, formalised the doctors’ personal animosity to each other. In public the two men maintained an air of courteous but professional reserve, but everyone knew that Dr Cruz detested Dr Carriscant and everything he stood for medically. The feelings were reciprocal: to Cruz Carriscant was an obsessed faddist and heedless experimenter; to Carriscant Cruz was an antediluvian sawbones cum sinister circus performer, and so on.