The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [302]
The idea of rotting torments Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti. He was a student in his last year of medical school at the University of São Paulo when, out of fervor for the republican cause, he enrolled as a volunteer in the army that was leaving to defend the Fatherland up in Canudos; so this, naturally, is not the first time that he has seen people injured, dying, dead. But those anatomy classes, those autopsies in the dissecting room at the School of Medicine, the injured in the hospitals where he was learning to do surgery—how could they be compared to the inferno that this rat trap of A Favela has turned into? What stupefies him is how quickly wounds become infected, how in just a few hours a sudden restless activity can be seen in them, the writhing of worms, and how a fetid suppuration immediately begins.
“It will be of help in your career,” his father said to him at the São Paulo railroad station as he was seeing him off. “You will have intensive practice in administering first aid.” What it has been, however, is intensive practice in carpentry. He has learned one thing at any rate in these three weeks: more men die of gangrene than of the wounds they have received, and those who have the best chance of pulling through are those with a bullet or bayonet wound in an arm or a leg—parts of the body that a man can do without—so long as the limb is amputated and cauterized in time. There was enough chloroform to perform amputations humanely only for the first three days; on those days it was Teotônio who broke the ampoules open, soaked a wad of cotton in the liquid that made him light-headed, and held it against the nostrils of the wounded man as the chief field surgeon, Alfredo Gama, a doctor with the rank of captain, sawed away, panting. When their supply of chloroform ran out, the anesthetic was a glass of cane brandy, and now that the brandy has run out, they operate cold, hoping that the victim will faint dead away immediately, so the surgeon can operate without the distraction of hearing the man scream. It is Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti who is now sawing and lopping off feet, legs, hands, and arms in which gangrene has set in, as two medical aides keep the victim pinned down till he has lost consciousness. And it is he who, after having finished amputating, cauterizes the stumps by sprinkling a little gunpowder on them and setting it afire, or pouring boiling-hot grease on them, the way Captain Alfredo Gama taught him before that stupid accident.
Stupid, yes, that’s the right word. Because Captain Gama knew there are plenty of artillerymen but there aren’t anywhere near enough doctors. Above all, doctors like himself, with a great deal of experience in the sort of medicine practiced in the field, which he learned in the jungles of Paraguay, where he served as a volunteer when he was in medical school, just as young Teotônio has come to serve in Canudos. But in the war against Paraguay, Dr. Alfredo Gama unfortunately caught, as he himself confessed, “the artillery bug.” It was a bug that killed him a week ago, leaving his young assistant saddled with the crushing responsibility of caring for two hundred sick, wounded, and dying who are lying one on top of the other, half naked, stinking, gnawed by worms, on the bare rock—only a few of them have so much as a blanket or a straw mat—in the field hospital. The medical corps of the first column has been divided into five teams, and the one to which Captain Alfredo Gama and Teotônio were assigned is in charge of the north zone of the hospital.
Dr. Alfredo Gama’s “artillery bug” kept him from concentrating exclusively