The Leper Spy (19 page)

The stronger patients who do not require much attention lead practically a normal life. Some of them cultivate gardens from which they harvest vegetables to supplement their meager food rations. Others engage in pursuits quite in keeping with their ability.

The government finally sent investigators to the leprosarium, and they inspected the dormitories and medical facilities and eventually confirmed the press's findings. The
Times
story on January 29, 1947, was headlined A
NOMALIES IN
L
EPER
C
AMP
C
ONFIRMED
: “The probers found that a patient, Mrs. Guerrero, really spends money out of her own funds for the washing of the children's clothes. She also provided lumber for the coffins of inmates who died in the station.” The previous year, there had been thirty-six deaths, and the primary cause was beriberi.

Baby Quezon's clout and connections to those who succeeded her father in power at Malacañang Palace and to A. H. Lacson, who would go on to become mayor of Manila, had been key. But perhaps her lack of fear was most important. At a time when leprosy victims still carried a harsh stigma of being unclean, when it was still widely believed that the disease was spread through touch or simply inhaling the same air someone suffering exhaled, she maintained her friendship with her childhood classmate. Her own family would long remember Baby's stories about her work at Tala and her friend Joey. “She used to tell us stories about this friend who had leprosy,” her sister, Zeneida “Nini” Quezon Avancena, would say much later. “Typical of my sister, she had no fear of being contaminated. She was more concerned about Joey thinking that she would be afraid of picking up the dread disease. So she had no hesitation in putting her arms around her and sharing food from her plate.”

And once the cleansing spotlight of newspaper journalism shone upon a wretched corner of Philippine society, even the pencil pushers in the cold bureaucracy of the world's newest and poorest nation had empathy.

A
nn Page's letter excited Joey. Resigned to death, the idea of life filled Joey's soul. The idea that the answer to five more years or ten more years or even a full recovery might be found in a forgotten little town on the banks of the Mississippi River kept her awake at night. She was also enthused to receive a visit from Dr. Leo Eloesser of San Francisco, a renowned thoracic surgeon and personal doctor and lifelong friend of the famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Leo had worked among the neediest in rural postwar China under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and taught for the World Health Organization, and he was planning to return to teach lay volunteers about sanitation and communicable diseases, first aid and treatment of injuries, and midwifery. During Leo's stopover at Tala Leprosarium, he struck up what would become a lifelong friendship with Joey.

The two bonded over their love of music—Leo played viola with members of the San Francisco Symphony in an ensemble that met in his apartment each Wednesday—and their devotion to art and literature, but they also spoke of Carville and the medical breakthroughs there. After his visit, Joey wrote Leo to update him on the work of their mutual friend Frank Gaines, former mayor of Berkeley, California, who had helped set up the UNRRA offices in the Philippines after the war, and to ask if he'd given any more
thought to trying to cure leprosy. She was again careful not to ask for too much, but was hoping for a miracle.

September 30, 1947

Dear Doctor Eloesser,

I have thought often of you, strange as that may seem, although you would not think that from my apparent indifference. Yet, I really have. Why, I don't know except perhaps the fact that you bothered to come and visit us, to eat and talk with me, a leper, and because your mind fascinated me. Being stupid, brilliant minds hold a magic fascination for me, although, it upsets me for it makes me realize how little I know, and how completely ignorant of many things which I am supposed to know. I know I enjoyed your visits and wished you could have stayed longer and visited with us longer. I would have wanted to get you interested in Hansen's disease with as much avidity as you have for tuberculosis—perhaps, you, in your great interest for the sufferings of others, might find the solution to the cure. Sometimes, I have asked, why not you? Mr. Gaines, being practical and in accord with your mind, tells me, that your love is for tuberculosis, and let someone else do the trick with Hansen's. Unfortunately, I am only a patient, or I would say, “But they tell me, it is practically the same in many ways—so why not Dr. Eloesser?” Well, when you have leisure time (or do you ever have it?), quien sabe? I dare say you want to know how things are with us?

Far better than when you were here. We have a permanent chaplain now, a Father Anthony L. Hofstee, O.P., who was formerly chaplain of the 13th Air Forces at McKinley. He has done wonders with things in general. We now have more social activities, as well as having started cooperative farming and poultry. The wards are
cleaner and brighter, and the cottages are more orderly than they ever were. We needed such a one like him here, full of spirit and cheer, raring to go and do things. I have been very unwell, actually it is the reason for my failure to write to you sooner. I have had bouts and bouts of fever, my skin opening everywhere. It has left me pretty spent and very tired. For the past three weeks, I have had no fevers, my appetite is back to normal and I have only four wounds unhealed. I think I am safely out of the woods now. There is so much to do, so many things to accomplish and time is short. I wish I could get well.

I think you know of plans about Carville. However, that seems a long way off. We are waiting for General Parran's approval or papers which will be the sesame to open Carville's doors for me, the key lies in his hands. Leprosy being a mandatory quarantinable disease, they will not issue my passport and clearance here without a recommendation from the Surgeon-General. I am anxious to go to Carville—I feel that I might be able to achieve a cure there. God willing, if I can achieve a cure, it will mean so much for my fellow patients everywhere, for I can become a sort of symbol, a symbol for hope and greater courage. I believe in miracles and God will see that I am cured, if that is for my good, it will come.

It was a pleasure to have met you and made your acquaintance, and I hope that distance and time will not make you think of less of us here. I know I shall remember you always. You have my sincerest wishes for greater success.

Sincerely always,
Joey Guerrero

When Leo arrived in Tien Tsin, China, a few weeks later, he couldn't help but see what he could do for Joey. In December, he
wrote to Dr. Herman Hilleboe, the state commissioner of health for New York, explaining Joey's story in detail, telling how her maps of the city helped US bombers “hit the Jap targets right tic tac toe,” how she had sacrificed so much to help win the war.

“It seems that special permission of Surg. Gen. Parran is needed for her to pass the US mandatory quarantine and to gain admission,” he wrote. “If governmental gratitude or recognition can cut governmental red tape then Guerrero deserves its being done, and I am writing to you to see whether I might enlist your efforts in her behalf.”

In January 1948, Henderson forwarded Eloesser's letter to his friend Ralph Williams, assistant surgeon general at the US Bureau of Medical Services in Washington, DC. “If there is anything you can do for this friend, I am sure that it will be worthwhile,” he wrote. “Doctor Eloesser is a wonderful man and I know that he would not ask for help if it was not needed.”

But Williams had reservations. The United States had never before granted a visa to a foreigner with leprosy. Doing it now, for Joey, would be unprecedented.

“There are two points which I feel should be very carefully considered,” he wrote. “The first is the possibility of difficulty in securing transportation by steamship or airplane for a person with leprosy. The second is that facilities exist in the Philippine Islands for the treatment of leprous persons with sulfones according to methods developed at Carville.”

He suggested placing Joey in the care of a doctor in Manila, José Rodriguez, who had spent time at Carville and knew how to administer sulfones. “To bring Mrs. Guerrero from her friends and relatives in the Philippines to Carville, where the mode of life and entire surroundings would be completely different from that to which she has been accustomed all her life would probably not be satisfactory, as undoubtedly she would soon become homesick and lonely,” Williams wrote. “It is, therefore, my well-considered suggestion that she secure sulfone treatment in the Philippines. If, for any
reason, it is not practicable for her to be placed under the treatment of Dr. Rodriguez, I believe that the American Mission to Lepers or the Leonard Wood Memorial would take a special interest in this case to assure that a competent physician in the Philippines is furnished with the necessary sulfone drugs so that Mrs. Guerrero may be given proper treatment.”

It was true that Dr. Rodriguez was a distinguished authority on Hansen's disease in the Philippines. He had visited the United States in 1946 on a fellowship from the Leonard Wood Memorial and on special detail from the Philippine Bureau of Health and was greeted by the Hornbostels when he arrived in Carville to study for a month. They thanked him for the part the Filipinos played in helping American prisoners of war. Rodriguez started his work with Hansen's disease twenty-five years before in Cebu but was transferred to Manila just before the outbreak of war. He opened an emergency hospital in Pampanga that gave aid to many sick Filipino and American soldiers during the death march, then helped secure food for starving patients on Culion. But even Rodriguez knew how hard it still was to get medicine in the islands. He'd been treating eight thousand patients before the war with the old chaulmoogra oil until food was cut off. Many of his patients starved to death. After the war, only twenty-five hundred were accounted for in the colonies, and no one knew how many remained in hiding. The previous March, Rodriguez himself reported that conditions in the Philippines' various leprosariums were “very difficult.” Even though the government was still spending a third of its health budget on Hansen's disease, he said, the cost of everything had grown so high that the funds could barely be stretched beyond subsistence.

The best doctor with no access to medicine is not the best doctor. If they wanted to get Joey to Carville, if they wanted to get her healed, they'd need to appeal to a higher power.

M
aj. Gen. George Moore stood once again on Corregidor on October 12, 1947, the noon sun blazing above the parade grounds on Topside. The strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” rolled out over the once doughty fortress at the mouth of Manila Bay as a few soldiers slowly lowered the American flag for the last time.

Moore looked on as a color guard of the US Army's Philippine scouts folded the flag with dignified snaps and presented it to Capt. Vincente Athambra of the Philippine Army. A Philippine color guard then hoisted the garrison flag of the Philippine Republic while the band played the Philippine anthem. Behind Moore, among the four hundred guests there for the ceremony, stood thirty survivors of the five-month siege and fall of Corregidor. They'd lost eight hundred fellow soldiers here and many more in the prisoner-of-war camps after surrender. Their discarded dog tags were buried in the island's dust.

When the Spanish claimed the island in 1793, it was used as an entry station for ships headed into Manila Bay, a place for the Spanish regulators to check and adjust shipping records. They called it Isla de Corregidor,
corregidor
literally meaning “corrector.” This ceremony was something of a correction, an end to American imperialism. It also marked the acknowledgment of a new kind of
warfare and the sudden obsolescence of an island once thought to be one of the most strategically important spots in the Pacific theater. More than $50 million went into building up Corregidor's tunnels and defenses, but, as eleven thousand American and Filipino survivors found out, advances in air power had made the Rock seem outmoded. The Philippines republic would use Malinta Tunnel for storage of small arms and ammunition. The rest of the grounds would house memorials to the soldiers of three nations who died defending this spit of land.

President Manuel Roxas addressed the crowd.

“We are deeply resolved that never again shall we be forced to let a harsh invader transgress upon our sacred land and home,” he said. “We must keep our forces ready for all eventualities and for preservation of peace in the Pacific. This is an unshakable obligation for the republic as a signatory of the United Nations charter and as a completely sovereign democracy.”

In accepting the transfer, Roxas said, “The American flag was lowered this time in victory, a victor of democracy, of justice, of love of freedom, and undying devotion to the cause of peace all over the world.”

He recalled what General MacArthur had said long ago about the island: “Corregidor needs no comment from me. It has sounded its own story at the mouths of its guns.”

Those guns were silent now, replaced by the surf lapping at the shoreline and grown men choking back tears.

Moore was emotional. He had spent much of his career right here.

“It was on this very spot that I suffered the most bitter experience of my life,” he said. “Certainly I can say that my best years as a soldier have been spent on Corregidor. It would be difficult for me to portray my feelings or those of my troops on May 6, 1942, when I was directed by the overall commander to have my command lay down its arms at noon. We had fought a good fight and it was through no fault of our own that we were laying down our arms.”