Lucas Iberico Lozada

EL DOC

Like all government clinics, the Sanidad de la Policía Nacional in Moyobamba only operated until lunchtime. On the day I met Coca-Cola, the fat colonel nominally in charge of the clinic had left even earlier than that, as he often did, and was likely enjoying a warm chilcano at the tiny bar across Avenida Belaúnde Terry, one of the few paved roads in the province.

Wilmer, a male nurse with dubious credentials and an impossibly friendly disposition, had assigned himself the role of factotum to my new life in the high jungle. We were sitting on plastic chairs on the concrete patio outside the policlínica when Coca-Cola appeared.

“Culqui,” he said, bowing toward Wilmer. “And you,” he said, proffering his childlike hand in a jerky motion, “must be the bright young doctor I’ve heard so much about!” He stood directly in the sun’s glare, just beyond the shadow cast by the patio’s green awning, as though he didn’t want to get too close. I was taken aback by his unlikely figure—I hadn’t seen him approach. I half-stood and reached out for his hand and shook it, muttering my name as I did so. He was wearing a shabby blue suit with a yellow woolen sweater. I had to squint as I looked into his face, which was dominated by a bulbous nose and richly plump purple lips. His hand, however, was cool and smooth, not unlike the marble steps that led to my grandfather’s home in San Isidro.

“Care to join us, Doc?” Wilmer asked, remaining seated.

“I couldn’t possibly, gentlemen—I’ve a few patients to attend to. Is the colonel in, by any chance? I was hoping to speak with him about an important matter.”

Wilmer raised a hand to his neck and began to scratch behind his ear. “Nah, he’s at Tonio’s. You might go find him there…”

“Alas,” said the man, interrupting Wilmer. “Some other time, then, some other time.” He swiveled around and began walking off. After he had taken a few steps, he threw up a hand, waved it in the air, and, without turning, cried out: “Pleasure meeting you, young man!” He was shouting, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of a diesel truck carrying rough-hewn logs toward Tarapoto.

Wilmer shook his head. “The old doc is crazy. Loco. Ponce named him Coca-Cola. Get it?” He grinned at me, but I wasn’t sure I got the joke.

“He’s a doctor?”

“That’s what his sign says, anyway,” Wilmer replied, shrugging. “Claims to have studied at San Marcos—just like you, eh? I can’t imagine that he gets much business. Maybe the odd coffee farmer or two, people who don’t know any better.”

I winced at Wilmer’s crude equation of medicine with commerce. Still, what could I expect? Wilmer made a healthy living by running an illegal after-hours clinic outside of the policlínica, relying on the labor of those of us who chose to spend our year of obligatory government service in Moyobamba. It seemed harmless enough, I reasoned, after he had explained the scheme to me. Besides, I was grateful for the added hours of practice.

I looked out into the shimmering street, but Coca-Cola had disappeared. “Well, Doc,” Wilmer said, gesturing at a white Toyota 4x4 rumbling toward us from the opposite direction. “Time to open up.”

*

I rented a bedroom on the second floor of an unfinished house owned by one of Wilmer’s many cousins. Walking home that evening, I was struck by the ease with which life was meant to be lived in Moyobamba. In Lima, my “free” time was filled with a never-ending array of dinners, lunches, teas, and parties with this auntie or that, Mister Vice Minister, Señorita Ambassador’s Daughter, Don Mining Executive—and nearly always at Verónica’s side. I found myself longing for the days of my childhood, which had been so carefree—and so solitary—in comparison. I had grown up in Arequipa, far from the filmy gray enormity of Lima. But my family was wealthy and well connected, and with my mother’s family already in Lima, we ended up moving to the capital just before I began high school. My new school friends admitted me into their confidence on the condition that I subordinated my desires, interests, and dreams to theirs. By the time my elaborate initiation into their friend group was complete, it was time to begin escorting young women during quinceañera season.

I met Verónica at her cousin’s quinceañera, a baroque affair that took place at the Franciscan church in central Lima. You can imagine the kind of party it was: Verónica’s uncle had married the daughter of an important man, a man who had served as finance minister for both a dictator and the dictator’s democratically elected successor. Álvaro, a friend from school, had arranged the date. “You’ll like Vero,” he commanded. “She’s smart. Not like some of these bimbos out here.” (Despite his reputation for charm—everyone adored him—in private Álvaro liked to speak about women with the weary loathing of a man who had been betrayed over the course of a lifetime.)

Still, I was taken aback by Vero’s intelligence, the way it rang out immediately, visible simply in the way she carried herself. I had arrived late to the party, meeting her and the rest of the court only moments before the grand entrance. Without turning to acknowledge me or my apologetic greeting, she lifted her hand into the air—a gesture whose utter elegance left me dumbstruck. After our dance under the tent that had been erected in the church’s courtyard, after the applause and before the band started up again, Verónica turned to me and told me to take a seat, that she had no interest in continuing to dance with someone as clumsy as me, that she wanted to ask me a few questions about what it was I expected from life. Nobody had ever asked me something like that before—certainly not a woman, and certainly not a girl of sixteen. I felt the ground open up beneath my feet. I suddenly became aware that everything would be different from then on.

It’s no secret that Vero was the one who encouraged me to study medicine. I was surprised to discover that I had an intuitive feel for the human body and its ailments, a talent noted and encouraged by my professors. They were older men who had left Peru and then returned, laden with the insight and air of snobbery that access to first-world medical facilities and journals had given them, yet graced with the rooted awareness—itself another form of snobbery, available in abundance to the true South American creole—of the limitations of the gringos’ scientific instruments.

I did well enough on my graduation exams from medical school to take my pick of the second-tier postings for my year of government service—nothing cushy in Lima, or in the beach towns near Máncora on the northern coast, but nothing way up in the sierra or out in the deep jungle, either. I had never been to San Martín, but a professor told me that a former student, Renato Ponce, had enjoyed his year in Moyobamba so much that he had founded a small mission-clinic of his own outside of town, buying a few acres of good land and even finding himself a wife in the process. Plus, Moyobamba was only a half-hour van ride from Tarapoto—itself only forty-five minutes by plane from Lima. When we spoke on the phone, Ponce explained that the fat colonel who ran the post would demand loyalty, but that in return I could expect a free ride to Lima roughly once a month, alongside whatever poor soul was being flown out for a treatment not available in the province’s meager medical facilities.

Some part of me, I suppose, thought that I picked the posting for that convenience, the ease with which I would be able to come home and see Verónica and my family, but looking back on it now I see that it was clear she would have been happier had I been somewhere truly remote. My decision to remain close but not close enough was, like nearly all of the decisions I made back then, an awkward attempt to split the difference, to arrive at some grand compromise rather than be pinned down definitively. And besides, it’s not like she would have visited me. She never came out and said it, but it was always clear to both of us that there was nothing of interest for her in Moyobamba. No museum, no cinema, no café—not even a McDonald’s. Instead, I thought as I clambered into bed, we had a McPollo.

*

I began to see Coca-Cola nearly everywhere I went in Moyobamba. He always seemed to be in a rush, scurrying off somewhere or another, dashing out a quick greeting and lamenting that he couldn’t stick around to chat for longer. Every time, he would implore me to visit with him in his “study,” where we could, he always said, “exchange ideas about our shared Hippocratic passion.” After some time, I grew weary of his chirped greeting: “Young man!” With those two words, his was the only discordant note in the chorus of voices that were buttressing my role as trusted town doctor.

My renown, Wilmer insisted whenever I would beg off for a few hours of studying, was spreading: he was fielding calls from as far away as Yurimaguas, where the road ends and the true jungle begins. I won’t deny having derived a fair amount of pride—and even pleasure—from my work. Whether it was sanctioned or not felt rather beside the point. It quickly began to feel essential that I be the one to palp my patients’ bellies, peer into their nostrils, prepare their injections.

A few weeks after our first encounter, I ran into Coca-Cola as I crossed the plaza on my short walk home in the early evening. He seemed to be in a particularly acute state of distress. He had a thin yellow smock pulled over his suit, his name stitched over a breast pocket in frayed blue letters, and was walking quickly, his head bowed down, muttering to himself. “Young man,” he exclaimed, stopping short just before me, raising his gaze to meet mine.

I stretched out my hand in greeting, but the old man left his hands laced behind his back. He popped his trembling bottom lip into his mouth, looked away, and looked back at me again.

“A quick consultation, young man?”

“Of course,” I replied, my frustration swiftly dissolving into amusement.

He waved away my suggestion that we take a seat on the benches outside the cathedral. “Recently I have been considering the feast day of San Juan. Surely the young man is aware of its great importance for those of us who live thanks to the bounty of the forest?”

I shrugged, frowning. “I’ve heard it’s a big party.”

“It’s so much more than that, young man!” Coca-Cola looked pained, as though what I said had wounded him. “It’s a day of remembrance and also forgetting, a day of joy and despair…”

He said this with such solemnity that I couldn’t help but smile.

He looked at me dolefully. “Does the young man doubt me?”

“No, of course not,” I said quickly, looking down.

“And surely the young man must know of the poison being inflicted on those under our care?” His reedy voice had taken on an edge. He took a step forward. He placed a hand—cool iron—onto my jaw, where I was allowing the beginnings of a humble beard to sprout. I was too startled to react.

“Some of our patients don’t know any better, but we mustn’t indulge them with falsities and heresies.” He was whispering.

I laughed and inched backward, sliding out of his grasp. “Of course, Señor Doctor, of course…”

He stared at me, looking hurt. “One must never doubt Saint John the Baptist’s example! One must be willing to part with one’s head!”

The smile began to feel pasted to my face. I waited for him to say something—anything—else, but he closed his eyes and began to sway.

“Well, if that’s all, Doctor,” I said, after a painful few moments. “I’ll be on my way now.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, still rocking in place. His face turned, his eyes meeting mine. “I have some patients to attend to now. Would you like to come by tomorrow so we can chat?”

No, I thought. I nodded. Dr. Coca-Cola slipped his hand into mine, smiled, then walked off.

I resumed my path through the plaza, my mind blank as I watched a group of nuns spread colored seeds onto the ground in wide, psychedelic arrays. I ordered a watermelon juice and watched as the vendor tossed the glistening fleshy chunks into a blender.

*

I quickly grew to love Moyobamba. The genial placidity of my patients and colleagues—with the exception of the fat colonel, whose drinking and gold-capped teeth made me think of some sort of bilious shark—was matched by extraordinary weather day in and out. Aside from the rainy season, one had the feeling that Moyobamba was the closest Peru would ever get to paradise. Hot but not too hot, humid but not uncomfortably so, rivers and streams everywhere, shady nooks and dells providing respite from the sun at nearly every corner. The lack of things to do made perfect sense after spending a few weeks there: in a place where avocados, mangos, papayas fell fully ripe from your neighbor’s tree—why do anything at all?

Under different circumstances, perhaps, the distance between Verónica and myself would have been perfectly manageable, but instead I chose to react in ways that only served to widen the gap. I found it impossible to focus on what she would tell me over interminable phone calls; once or twice, I even fell asleep while she was talking. Soon, she was nearly impossible to get on the phone, and, once she finally did answer, would speak with such flat affect that I wondered whether she had begun to hate me. Then, just as I would give up all hope, she would begin to wheedle and whine, demanding my attention at the most inopportune moments. After a few weeks in a row like this, I snapped. Didn’t she understand how well things were going for me? How easy life could have been, if only we chose to make it so? One night, I filled the silence of our call with terrible insults, using the worst words I could think of. Even Álvaro seemed shocked, felt that I had taken it too far when I called him, panting, afterward. “Careful, man. Don’t forget you’re coming home after all this.” After hanging up, I felt consumed by loathing, the anger gnawing a pit into my stomach, leaving me feeling frayed, exposed. Then—over a limp serving of fried chicken from the McPollo—I was overcome by remorse.

Verónica forgave my outburst, and soon she and I settled into a new normal. We only ever spoke when I called and she deigned to pick up, and even then, the conversation was stilted. She seemed to be saving herself—and her juiciest conversational morsels—for my monthly visits to the capital. In January—halfway through my time in Moyobamba—I asked the colonel for a flight back to Lima, where I asked her parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage.

*

The remaining months slipped past without incident. I had finally gotten into a decent study routine for my upcoming exams, complementing my mental exercises with a daily early-morning run with the police recruits down along a winding path next to the river.

On Thursdays, I had a standing invite with Edgardo Sánchez Sánchez. The highest ranking police official in Moyobamba after the colonel, Sergeant Sánchez Sánchez showed me how to grill paiche properly—wrapped in banana leaf over a dug-out wood fire—behind the little shack his girlfriend Lucía owned a few miles outside town. While he prepared the fire, she would prepare coconut rice, sweet yams, and peas in an enormous pot and ask me about life in Lima, if it was true what they said about the traffic, the dust, the stone beaches, whether I had left behind a lover, how Limeñas compared to selváticas like her. Sánchez Sánchez would laugh and fill my glass with lukewarm beer and say that if Limeñas were anything like Chiclayanas—his wife, who lived in town, was from Chiclayo—then they stood no chance against Moyobambinas.

Once, in the last weeks of May, we all got very drunk and I was surprised to feel my phone buzzing against my leg. It had been so long since I had received a call at night—perhaps, I thought, there had been an emergency. I excused myself and walked out onto the path in front of the house to take the call: it was Álvaro. His father was dying, he told me, all his life fucked over by my mother and my step-mother and now this, killed by his own fucking prostate, can you believe it, you better go learn from the gringos and figure out a way to fix these things, it’s a disgrace for men in the prime of their life to die like this, and on and on.

“I’m sorry, Alvito,” I said, my tongue thickened by the cañazo Sánchez Sánchez had been feeding me, “but it’s after hours.” I was, I think, trying to make a joke. As I stood and listened to the busy silence from the receiver, it seemed as though the sounds of the forest began to increase in volume, and I wondered whether I could ever reconcile what happened outside of me with what was going on inside. Then, all at once, the sound emanating from the phone changed abruptly—Álvaro had ended the call.

I shoved the phone into my pocket and turned to head back inside, but was stopped by the image of an unusual green shape hanging from the shack’s front door. The shape didn’t move, but a strange sound came from inside the house, so I crept forward for another few steps, and then it suddenly seemed as though the cries coming from inside the house and Sánchez Sánchez’s green uniform shirt, hanging from the door handle like a totem—or a warning—were merging and ringing out in celestial, ecstatic harmony.

*

A few weeks before I was to return to Lima and take my entrance exams, Wilmer and I were having lunch in the clinic’s back patio when the colonel surprised us.

“Sir,” I said, standing. “It’s good to see you. Would you like some—”

“There’s a woman here to see you, Doctor. She’s jabbering on about a girl. There’s been some sort of accident.”

His eyes were glassy, barely focused. It seemed as though he was holding his breath.

After hesitating for a moment, I stood and walked past the colonel into the clinic’s small waiting room, where I found a chaotic scene. A heavyset woman in jeans and a T-shirt was pacing around the small waiting room, tears streaming from her face, while a small Indian man in a stained white short-sleeved button-down was staring silently at Néstor, a technician whose sole responsibility, so far as I could tell, was to sterilize the medical equipment. When Néstor saw me, relief flooded his face. He pointed a shaky finger: “There’s the doctor.”

Before I could say a word, the woman was upon me. “Please, sir, a little girl, a child, she’s trapped, come help us…”

By the time we arrived on the scene, the girl was dead. The other passengers had lifted the car off the crumpled body, but it was no use. The driver, who ferried villagers between Chachapoyas and Yurimaguas in an overloaded Toyota station wagon, had swerved to avoid a mototaxi, then overcorrected, flipping over in the process. No one could say, exactly, at what point the girl had been thrown from the car. Five of the passengers sat dazed on the side of the road—concussed, probably—while the rest were sifting through the baggage and sacks of grain and coffee that had spilled everywhere.

Wilmer and I carefully loaded the tiny corpse onto a stretcher and into the back of the ambulance we’d driven over from the clinic. I told the girl’s parents—who by this point had stopped wailing and were standing dumb, trembling—that they would need to calm down before getting in, that it was a long drive to Tarapoto and that it wouldn’t do to disturb their daughter on her difficult journey. After hesitating for a moment, I told Wilmer to go on without me. The couple climbed in, and the woman burst out again into long, jagged sobs that were muffled when Wilmer pushed the doors shut and climbed into the driver’s seat. They set off, lights flashing uselessly on the empty road.

I began walking toward the other injured passengers, but Sánchez Sánchez called out to me from his 4x4. The driver’s arm was badly gashed, and he looked pale from the shock. I cleaned and bandaged him up as best as I could. The man slumped forward once I had finished.

“It’s not broken, but he needs treatment. Stitches. Antibiotics.”

Sánchez laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell them that at the comisaría. The bastard is drunk.”

*

On my walk home that evening, I decided to stop by the small shack where Coca-Cola met with his patients. On my way, I passed through the plaza, filled with people eager to learn more about the accident, ask who had been involved, see if it was anyone they knew. A few of the townspeople were convinced that they knew the dead girl, but it was impossible to know with any certainty—I had forgotten to record their names. It occurred to me that maybe Coca-Cola knew the family, or that at any rate he’d be interested to hear in the day’s events—he could add it to the collection of stories he must have collected over the years.

When I arrived, I was surprised to find the corrugated tin door—directly beneath a hand-painted sign that read M SOCAS. MÉDICO.—closed. Tentatively at first, I knocked, though the door’s rough surface made it hard to make myself heard, so I ended up banging on it with my fist instead.

“Doctór?” I called out.

Puzzled, I assumed he must have been out on a rare house-call, so I stepped back and turned to leave.

“Young man?” He called out in a hoarse whisper from behind the door, surprising me.

“Doctór,” I said, surprised. “Are you feeling ill?” I remembered that I hadn’t seen the old man in weeks.

“No, young man…” He paused. “Here, come inside.” He pushed the door open a crack.

I wedged myself into the corridor. The house was coated in shadow, drapes pulled tight against the windows. Coca-Cola gestured toward the tiger-print blanket that covered a couch in his waiting room. “Have a seat.” He eyed me warily.

I remained standing. “Did you hear about the accident?”

He didn’t say anything, so I went on.

“A girl, she was thrown from a colectivo—”

“They came to find me,” he said.

I looked up at him. His head, bowed down, looked comically large on his small frame.

“A woman came screaming down the road, calling out and wailing. I closed my door. She knocked and knocked but I never answered. She must have seen my sign.”

At this, he raised his head to meet my gaze.

“I know that they’re looking for me. I know what they’ll do to me. The people of this town… you have no idea. They know, young man. They know.”

I wasn’t sure what to tell the old man. As far as I could tell, his cowardice had likely gone unnoticed; I hadn’t heard anyone mention it. Besides, there was nothing he could have done—the little girl had been killed instantly.

But he hadn’t known that. I felt a strange feeling welling up inside of me as I began to think—he had failed in his most basic duty as a medical professional. The look on his face was one of sheer terror. I had only ever seen that face once before. I put effort into a half-smile.

“Well, Doctor,” I said. “Next time I’m sure you’ll—”

The old man hugged himself tightly, then burst into tears and began crying softly, babbling around the snot and tears about the afterlife, about the river, about the unending presence of death. My mind drained of all feeling as I rose to my feet, put my hands to his shoulders, and guided him onto the couch. I rooted around his dusty cabinets for a sedative, or even a kettle, but found nothing. I squeezed his shoulders and left him there as I walked to the door and pulled it open, allowing the late-afternoon light and wind to come rushing in.

 
*

Verónica and I married a month before I left for Little Rock. The plan was for me to return at Christmas, by which time she would have finished her studies, and for us to being our new life together after the New Year. As the date of my return to Peru drew nearer, I began to recall my year in Moyobamba.

Through sheer coincidence, my last day in Moyobamba coincided with the feast day of San Juan. By late afternoon, half of the town seemed to be crammed into the verdant glade that housed a small tribute to the saint, a few miles down the road to Tarapoto. Wilmer had encouraged me to invite Verónica, Álvaro, my family—anyone from Lima would do—but at the last minute, I had decided not to, preferring instead to preserve my time there as something uniquely my own.

I hadn’t been back to see Coca-Cola since the evening of the accident. I knew I was being childish in my harshness toward him—it’s not like anyone thought of him as anything but a quack, really—but at the time, it felt important to me to establish a clear set of values and stick to them as best as I could. As the evening wore on, though—as the children began to nod off and their teenaged siblings began to creep around the forest’s edge—I found myself wishing he would have been there, telling one of his incomprehensible stories, delighting in his generative, combustive paranoia. The last time I’d seen him before the accident, he spent nearly fifteen fervid minutes telling me about the time that he had shaken hands with Salvador Allende outside the Dos de Mayo hospital—where he claimed to have done his rounds as a medical student, just like me—in Lima in June, 1973.

It was an outrageous claim. I looked it up later—there’s no record of Allende having traveled outside of Chile in the weeks leading up to the Tanquetazo, the first, failed attempt to remove him from power. But Coca-Cola had told the tale with such pride, such feeling, that I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was a tiny chance, some sort of left-wing solidarity conference organized, the smallest excuse necessary for him to slip away from Santiago and find time to visit Lima’s biggest public hospital in between plenary sessions.

Maybe, just maybe, I thought, as I recalled the grime beneath the doctor’s fingernails marking the outer edge of the hand which hung limp, suspended by the wrist of his other hand. Arms laced firmly behind himself, he walked and talked and walked. That hand, it looked dead, I remembered having thought, as though at any moment it were liable to fall off. As the light in the wooded glade in Moyobamba began to shade into a magnificent orange, I felt flooded with the knowledge that if that wrinkled, dead hand had fallen off his wrist, I would have walked over, picked it up, and, with nothing but tenderness in my heart, sewn it back on for the old man.

LUCAS IBERICO LOZADA lives in Philadelphia, where he is at work on a novel. His essays, reviews, and dispatches have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, Popula, and Vanity Fair. “El Doc” is his first published short story.