fever

I haven't known how to talk about this.

Last week I was in Beira doing work and I got up early Wednesday morning, before the sun had finished yawning and stretching its arms out full over the Indian Ocean, to go along on the regular HIV home care visits that Pastor Fernando makes in the twisted, muddy maze that is Munhava - and that he will continue to make, twice a week, without fail, until the world is free of this disease.

We were nearly done with the morning when I came upon a woman who was more dead than alive. She was the new neighbor of the family we had been intending to visit. She lay quietly on the ground outside her tiny shack, by herself, and she had the furthest advanced - that is to say, the worst - AIDS complications I have seen. She was a mere 60 or 70 pounds, like a living skeleton, too weak to cook, nearly too wretched to speak. She had been brought to Beira by her husband and family, who live in Buzi, a town several hours away, and left in Munhava to die. She had no children. I would have guessed 40, but she said she was 23 years old. Her name was Teresa João.

She often wasn't very nice, once I'd brought her to the hospital and we'd spent several long days together there. Her four roommates were other forgotten women in equally dire straits, also there waiting to die, mankind's leftovers; they also endured the relentless ants and flies, the lack of food in the ward; they also stared at dirty gray walls for hours, lay in their urine or, if offered assistance, risked the flooded toilets scurrying with cockroaches; they also silently absorbed the insults flung at them by tired hospital staff. One woman brought to join us later was not right mentally, though quiet and kind, and had been tied up  by her ankles and wrists with bedsheets. She kept asking me to free her.

I brought fried chicken and french fries for them to eat; once, another hollowed out woman - who later become my favorite, a truly elegant creature, Fernanda - stumbled across the hallway, plate in hand, begging a ration. I reached over and took her cheap tin bowl, no one spoke, but each woman consented, giving a share, their eyes quiet and knowing. I am not accustomed to recognizing divinity, but I think what these women retained was inner light, soft like dusk, the aroma of having known love. But as I neared Teresa's bed, she called out frantically, her voice flat and cracked with TB, again and again, refusing to share: Chega! Chega! Chega! It means Enough! No more!

What do we require from each other?

When I found Teresa on the ground that Wednesday, she told me all the trouble had started when her family cursed her and the espiritos maus, evil spirits, whose lifeline was now tied up with hers, parasitic-like, would kill her completely if she set her inflamed, bare, tiny feet on the hospital grounds. She only needed a blanket, she croaked, because thieves had broken in the previous week and taken the only one she'd had. We convinced her to come with us anyways.

I wrote to a friend, Gerhard, late one evening:

Am tired, spent much of day at hospital and its just so damn depressing. i've made friends with the whole room of women there with the lady i brought in, all but one of them without any family helping them. its grotesque, the way they must lie there in a pit of a hospital, alone, sitting in their own fluids, without food or water, just waiting to die. its such a humiliating way for them to leave this good earth. i look at them and try to imagine them as young women, instead of skeletons, women that men loved once, healthy, strong, full head of hair - alive, basically. and now... this.

It drained me, sitting with these women in their final days; overwhelmed me emotionally, but there is very little in my life that I have enjoyed more. It was wonderful knowing them, sharing in what they had left, which was still so much.

I said I didn't know how to write about this experience, and I still don't.

The very last thing Teresa, burning up with fever, asked me to do for her was pour water over her naked chest and neck. I drenched them, spilling liquid from my little plastic bottle, until her bed was swimming in the tepid tap water that had once been pulled up from Mozambique's deep, ancient aquifers.

She whimpered and cried, eyes screwed shut, her hot breath leaking from her like priceless oil.

Back in Chimoio on Sunday, I received a text message from Pastor Fernando at about 6 PM:

Senhora Teresa Joao faleceu 5 horas hoje.

Her bed had been by the window, a large one without glass or screen, and when she finally passed away at 5 AM on Sunday morning, she had been alone.

In the shadows of tall buildings
Of fallen angels on the ceilings
Oily feathers in bronze and concrete
Faded colors, pieces left incomplete
The line moves slowly past the electric fence

Across the borders between continents

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is...

(Jump Little Children, "Cathedrals")

Fernanda, age 27