In Bed with the Village Whore

Who knows what set it off? I attributed it at the time to fatigue brought upon by the stress of reading about Robert Louis Stevenson, but then the joint pain came back, the lethargy returned, and finally the sweating and the chills, often within thirty seconds of each other. At its height, I was putting on and pulling off the bedclothes at such a pace that Mr. Fernández, entering the room, inquired, “putting out a fire, somewhere?” To this I snarled, “yes,” and pointed to my body, which the virus had just cast into the cauldron of boiling oil. The next moment, I was crawling across arctic expanses, naked to the elements. (Well, element—since the only thing there was cold….)  And so I spent most of yesterday in bed, thinking that in general I was perfectly fine, and why was I malingering? Aren’t I made of sterner stuff than that?

Consider the life of Stevenson, born in Scotland, educated in London, married in the United States, and died in Samoa. Here’s what the extensive biography in Wikipedia has to say about him:

Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp, chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851.[10] The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six years old, but the tendency to extreme sickness in winter remained with him until he was eleven. Illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin.[11] Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis[12] or even sarcoidosis.[13] 

Now then, I could fulfill my bloggerly duties and report in to you guys about bronchiectasis or even sarcoidosis—but that misses the point. And that is? That Stevenson followed the typical Victorian tradition of being born sickly, exerting himself, suffering horrendous relapses, taking to bed, getting the entire house—if not the block—to revolve around him, staring once again into the grim eyes of death, and recovering—during which, somehow, he had produced another book, another travelogue, another collection of poems. You need proof?  Well, Wikipedia lists fourteen novels that he wrote, six collections of short stories, seven books on travel, five books of poetry, and the usual essays and articles. And did I mention that his dates are 1850 to 1894, which—assuming that the fever hasn’t burned away my slight ability at arithmetic—means that he did all this in just 44 years? I imagine him scribbling away in uterus, and being born with several manuscripts already clutched in hand….

Was it the incipient fever that was exacerbating my tendency to digression? Because soon I was considering dear Miss Nightingale—well, if that’s how Her Supreme Majesty called her, am I to do any less?—and her triumphant invalidism. Did she come back, as I remember Lytton Strachey telling me, from the Crimean War, take to her bed, declare herself afflicted, afflicted, beyond any hope of recovering, and then settle down to invent modern nursing, endow schools of nursing, write a zillion books, and—oh, sorry, was about to forget this—set out singlehandedly (why not single womanly?) to reform the War Office? And guess what? She succeeded at all but one of those tasks….

Nor was that all, because in addition to all that, she was busy with the spirit as well; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

She wrote a work of theology: Suggestions for Thought, her own theodicy, which develops her heterodox ideas. Nightingale questioned the goodness of a God who would condemn souls to hell, and was a believer in universal reconciliation – the concept that even those who die without being saved will eventually make it to Heaven.

Hey—guys out there? How many of you have written a theodicy? And isn’t it good of Miss Nightingale to straighten out God—hope he listened more than the War Office—and get those unsaved souls into heaven? And does that include the souls like me, who have been repeatedly played the tune, and have refused to dance to it?

So then I was back with Stevenson, who on his decades-long deathbed had decided to reform the British foreign service. Here’s Wikipedia again:

He was convinced the European officials appointed to rule the Samoans were incompetent, and after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, he published A Footnote to History. This was such a stinging protest against existing conditions that it resulted in the recall of two officials, and Stevenson feared for a time it would result in his own deportation. When things had finally blown over he wrote to Colvin, who came from a family of distinguished colonial administrators, "I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside the politician!"[63]

 And all that effort at least must have made him popular with the Samoans, who, when Stevenson died, appointed the traditional night watch, and then bore him on their shoulders to his grave Mt. Vaea, where he was buried. There, his tombstone bears the poem that everyone knows by Stevenson:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Well, of course, everyone but me, since Stevenson—a literary hurricane in his time—had been degraded to a very weak tropical depression in the 60’s and 70’s. In fact, two major anthologies of poetry during those decades had tossed him out the door: he was bounced for being Victorian and, well…sentimental.

It probably didn’t help that he wrote all that children’s poetry, as well as Kidnapped and Treasure Island. And true, some of the poetry is of that sort that gets embroidered onto the antimacassar—not sure they did that, but you know what I mean. But guess what? There is a place for the sentimental, for the verse that pulls at just the right heartstring, that strikes just the right chord. “Here he lies where he longed to be….” Who hasn’t felt that?

And where was I lying? Where did I long to be? Well, I was 180 degrees most of the weekend, not 90 degrees. And all because of this stupid African disease, borne by a mosquito. This African disease with the name that I’m too tired to get right. Oh, and did I mention that our health department, completely overwhelmed by samples, has announced that there are only there are over 200 cases of it on the island?

“Isn’t it curious that we happen to know the other 198 cases,” I ask Mr. Fernández, who has been suffering from the damn thing as well. If you didn’t go through the
AIDS crisis of the early ‘80’s—well, you know what it’s like now. “Did you hear that Sonia has it now,” said Mr. Fernández two days ago, and I know—just as I did then—what the “it” was….

“I’m just calling this thing the Village Whore,” I tell Lady at the café. She stops to ask me why….

“Shouldn’t it be obvious? We’ve all had her!”