[Some of you have liked the experience I told you last time of a kind and thoughtful doctor. I give here two more of his experiences, no less touching. I’ve cried typing them out.]

The night was dark, that I’m sure of. Nights in New York look like the Last Judgement. The starless sky was an ocean without lighthouses, without caravels, without heroes. A night without horizons, without a thread of light to mark the frontier between what we are and what shall become of us. On my way to the hospital at the depth of night, jumping red lights, crossing lanes, blinded by incoming lights I raced on. The hospital shone at a distance. I was on call that night, I was late, and I speeded up. There was no traffic that night.

George Washington bridge suddenly appeared in total silence. A miracle. It was Christmas night. I alone was crossing it. On the opposite side a broken car, its front crashed, leaned against the divide. No sound of sirens, no flicking of lights. I passed by it at the moment a light went off, a pair of eyes are closed, the pendulum stands still, and a girl died inside. No corpses on the water, no blood on the road. In the New York night the silence was total, the heap of scrap iron laid shattered, and someone was inside it. I went ahead, minding my exits not to miss my way. Minutes later I saw revolving lights in front of the hospital and I heard the wailing of sirens in the midst of the fog. Ambulances arriving. I put on my white coat and went to attend to my patients. Routine work in my section.

It was only hours later that a surgeon friend came close and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Nuno.’ I did not understand the gesture. The surgeon was painfully describing his desperate efforts to save his patient while I had no idea who the patient was. Scalpel, pincers, bold practices to stem the haemorrhage. That life had been cut short that night in the middle of the bridge. When I passed by the side of the wrecked car with the smoke and the sparks I never imagined I would know the person inside it. But the surgeon with his blood stained coat gave out a name, and all of a sudden everything was clear, and a winning Irish smile, a pair of blue eyes with Celt music, the blond hair of another race stood before me. And, above all, the charm of the nurse that used to help me push ahead with that smile of hers that came straight from her island made up of herbs and reefs, of shamrock and ghosts. I had seen her dance on the corridors of the hospital, dancing while she walked, without moving her waist. I had seen her bending over used sheets to make up the beds of men without a history as is each one of them were his own man. I had seen her, while lifting her head from the tiresome task to still have time and cheer for a conspiratorial wink to that doctor who had come from a faraway country and who admired her. [Nuno had come from Portugal.] Her smile and her eyes spoke more than her words when I was still dreaming of the sickness of my voyage and the accents of the seagulls. Who knows whether that night I was crossing through the New York night in the caravels of my race. 

The night was dark, of that I’m sure, as I’m sure that spirals of incense came out of the remains of a wrecked car across a bridge, angel powder. Who knows? Maybe today she is from heaven, as she was on earth, my guardian angel.

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She looked like a badly dressed doll. A white dress with frills and embroidery as for a christening or a first communion. The white dress was delicately arranged as a crown of petals on her intensive-care bed. I don’t remember her name, but she was, simply and popularly, The Girl.

Before her birth her brain had been destroyed. The neck arteries, blocked by a clot of blood, ceased to provide the oxygen that was needed for the life of the cells that would enable her to think, to talk, to love. That would enable her to live, in a word. Yet, when she was born, her heart was beating and the nerve centres necessary for breathing and the other vital functions were intact, allowed for life, at any rate for counting the days of her existence. She was 15 and had a grotesque aspect. She could lay in a cradle, since her immobility through years had atrophied her muscles and her limbs. Her gums, swollen by medicines covered an irregular set of teeth. Her face was featureless, expressionless. But she had eyes. And her eyes, apparently, spoke and entreated in baby language because her family, whose accent, humility and distress revealed at one their humble origin from somewhere in Colombia, was insisting without a shadow of a doubt that ‘she was not herself’. That is, that something was the matter with her, and so they had brought her to the hospital.

But could anything ‘be the matter with her’ so as to say that ‘she was not herself’? How was it possible that that being, which was hardly different from a flower, would show something more than a flower? It was touching to see the love they showed for that almost ‘thing’, their care in dressing her up, their anxious looks, their tenderness. But how to believe them? Her brain was just water and salt in the proportion that goes into a tear, but in order to prevent the brain from growing too much a pipe had connected it to her belly so as to drain, drop by drop, the excess of liquid. A sea that enveloped the brain and protected it. ‘She is not herself’ pleaded her mother with shifting eyes. Two or three words in the little Spanish I know as a Portuguese touched them, and their eyes lit up. The doctor was ‘one of us’, spoke Spanish, understood that a mother’s heart can know more things than a doctor’s brain. But this doctor speaks the language of infinite sweetness, akin to the Latin that even Our Lady will understand. The angels will exchange knowing looks and, with a stroke of their wings they’ve borrowed from the seagulls, will disperse the morning mist that darkened the mild eyes of the worshipped child.

It was not easy to persuade my fellow surgeon to withdraw the pipe. The fact was it wasn’t working, and a new drain gave back to The Girls’s sight something I could not see as I was blind. But they saw it. The love with which that family looked after their daughter, granddaughter, and niece, was truly touching. What they told her, how they nursed her with tenderness I would like for myself, and I envy even today. The gratitude they showed me makes me entertain the hope that, on the day of the Last Judgement, a modest family from somewhere in Colombia will intercede for me.

Months went by. One night I was paged at the deepest hour of the early morning hibernation. ‘My patient’s’ family – said the doctor on call – requested my presence. The Girl was in her agony, an infection had extended throughout her body, and nothing could convince the family that the end was unavoidable. They requested the presence of the neurologist who spoke broken Spanish and who, for once in their life, had understood them. There is no merit in fulfilling a duty that claims us as the force of gravity. At four o’clock in the morning the water in the shower clears up thoughts, washes the soul, cleanses the spirit as a sacramental confession. When I arrived, I just could embrace that village in Colombia, absolutely identical to the villages of my own country [Portugal], to the mothers in my country, to all the women of the land in which I was born. They were emigrants like myself, attached to a child they embellished as though that were the day of her coming of age.

The following days many of my companions offered me their condolences for the death of ‘my’ patient. They all told me they knew how much she meant for me. I don’t think I told them what I had learned: it is possible to love a less-than-perfect being, and as a consequence to entertain some hope for the day of the Last Judgement.

(Nuno Lobo Antunes, Lo Siento Mucho, Aguilar, Madrid 2009, p. 78, 85)