Saving the World by Julia Álvarez Read Free Book Online Page A

fear of discovery. But sighs were audible.
    â€œI come today in my capacity as director of that expedition, Doña Isabel. It is an extraordinary mission, decreed by our good king Carlos IV.” He bowed his head slightly at the mention of His Royal Highness.
Our? Good? King?
I could hear Doña Teresa plucking each word like an untuned lute string. She would beg to differ with this description, I thought, recalling Doña Teresa’s rants. Perhaps our visitor’s association with “our good king” was why she had not accompanied him.
    â€œThis expedition will bring salvation to millions who would otherwise perish from the smallpox …”
    Smallpox
—the word itself was an infection! I felt my skin prickle. My old scars pulsed as if they were opening again, mouths repeating the word:
Viruela, viruela.
My head swirled. I caught myself just in time, both hands on the table. Briefly, it crossed my mind that I had not worn my gloves. The marks on the backs of my hands would be visible.
    â€œIt is a warm evening,” the stranger noted. Perhaps he had observed my dizziness, was suggesting I lift my veil. But I had seen his eyes taking in my figure, for the smallpox had not made a total ruin of me. He was imagining, no doubt, a lovelier face. I was not yet ready to disillusion him.
    â€œI am sorry for your loss.” He had made the common mistake of thinking my black mantilla and attire were mourning clothes. Indeed, there had been a loss, many losses, but they had occurred so long ago, I could not lay claim to fresh condolences. “The heart is not on the head’s timetable,” Doña Teresa sometimes counseled me. She had been mourning as long as I had, indeed longer, for her son had been stricken by the same wave of the smallpox that my family and I had been, and by then Don Manuel had already been dead a year. “It is difficult to lose those dear to us,” our visitor added quietly as if he had endured such losses himself.
    Again, I did not correct him. I wanted him to think of me as a widow, a woman who had once been wanted. He was an older man, some years my senior, very elegant in his royal uniform, his dark hair lightly touched withgray—or was that powder on his hair? What business had such a one with our foundling house? Perhaps Don Francisco’s business was with me as a survivor of an epidemic. How could I serve him?
    â€œYou might have heard of the new vaccine?”
    With a hospital next door, there were always rumors. Some years back, I remembered hearing talk of a doctor, a crazed Englishman (“They are all crazed,” Doña Teresa liked to say about the English) who had been purposely infecting boys with what he claimed was a harmless pox that would protect them from the actual smallpox. The claim had sounded as ridiculous as the tales of pilgrims who touched the bones of the apostle at Santiago de Compostela and were instantly healed of their limps, their harelips, their excesses of humors.
    â€œThis vaccine is nothing more than a benign form of the pox that afflicts cows,” our visitor went on. “Cows, Doña Isabel!” he repeated as if delighted that the physical salvation of man should also issue from a stable. “You have heard it said, no doubt, that English milkmaids have lovely complexions?” He touched his cheek with the back of his hand. I shivered as if he had touched my own face.
    â€œA certain Dr. Jenner in England asked himself, Why? Why should milkmaids be spared the smallpox while princes and peasants everywhere were being cut down?” Our visitor stopped as if to let me ponder this riddle as well.
    â€œGod works in mysterious ways,” Father Ignacio, my confessor, would have replied, as he did to my own misgivings and doubts. It was an answer that I was finding increasingly unsatisfying. Perhaps this Dr. Jenner had felt the same.
    â€œWhat Dr. Jenner discovered was that in milking cows