Eric McCormack - The Dutch Wife

THE DUTCH WIFE

THE DUTCH WIFE

ERIC MCCORMACK

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Eric McCormack, 2002

Interior image Barnaby Hall/Photonica. Re-use.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed and bound in Canada on acid free paper

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

McCormack, Eric

The Dutch wife / Eric McCormack.

ISBN 0-14-301342-4

I. Title.

PS8575.C665D87 2002 C813.54 C2002-901941-9

PR9199.3.M42378D87 2002

Visit Penguin Books website at www.penguin.ca

For Nancy and Jody

INTRODUCTION

Look at the world, with its thousands

upon thousands of years of wars,

plagues, famines, murders, public

and private brutalities, injustices,

parricides, genocides. One would have

to be a supreme cynic not to believe

there must be some great pattern,

some great plan behind it all.

PABLO RENOWSKI

GENTLE READER: Id like to tell you about an incident that happened ten years ago. I was visiting an old friend who was the Director of a U.N. medical agency in Central Americain a little town along the equatorial southwest coast of San Lorenzo. One morning early we went down to the market. At the busiest fruit stall, the stallkeeper was a big man, naked to the waist. He had a twig, a few inches long, somehow stuck to the surface of his belly. While he was talking to my friend about the freshness of the cantaloupes and the oranges, his fingers would occasionally go to the twig. Hed give it a little slow twirl, the way you wind a wristwatch.

We chose our bag of ripe fruit for breakfast. On the way home, I asked about the twig on the mans belly.

Ah, so you noticed that? my friend said. He was reeling in his worm.

His what? I said.

Its a parasite he has inside of him, said my friend. A worma Guinea Worm. The only place they used to be found was on the Guinea Coast of Africa, so theyre called Guinea Worms. Theyre all through the tropics now, in unpurified drinking water. They grow inside the victim till theyre about four feet long. Sometimes they burst through the skin and stick their necks out. If you can wrap a little twig round them, they cant pull themselves back in again. But you have to be patient. Every time the tension slackens, you wind a little more, then a little more. Its the same principle as reeling in a fish with a line thats not very strong. If you tug too hard, the worm snaps and all your works for nothing. It just slides back inside and keeps on growing. To get one of them out can take weeks or years. Sometimes, just when one worms almost out, another one pops its head up. Some people live their whole lives pulling the things out of themselves.

My friend told me all this in the matter-of-fact way doctors talk about such horrors.

Is there no cure? I said.

Not while the drinking waters contaminated, he said.

What an awful thing! I said.

Its hard for outsiders to understand how these people put up with it, he said. But some families down here have had the worms for generationstheyre almost like an inheritance. Those who are infected get married and seem to get on with their lives just the same as anyone else. Take a look over there.

We were passing a ramshackle house with a tin roof. A man and three women were sitting in the doorway, chatting and laughing in the shade of a poinciana with huge, blazing flowers. Some children were playing in the red dirt. I tried not to stare, but I could see clearly that one of the women had a twig attached to her bare belly and was fiddling with it while she talked. Two of the children, a boy and a girl, each had a little twig attached to their bellies. They smiled shyly and waved to us as we walked by with our bag of fruit.

THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME Id ever heard of the Guinea Worm. Then, by one of those weird coincidences, just a few weeks after I came home someone mentioned it to me again. He was an elderly man and he spoke about it in the course of telling me about the life of his mother. Equally interesting was that several times he called her a Dutch Wifewhich turned out to mean much more than I would ever have suspected. The story he told made such an impression on me that its the substance of this book.

ONE DAY WHILE I WAS WRITING it, I happened to be driving downtown when a black car with darkened windows swerved in front of me and cut me off. There was hardly any other other traffic around so it seemed deliberate. At the next set of lights, I got alongside the black car and peered in. But with those windows, it wasnt possible to see who was in there, only the reflection of my own face staring back. When the lights changed, the black car made a left turn and that was the last I saw of it.

But that incident got me to speculating how thats the way it is with certain stories. They seem to be more than just stories: they must mean something, and ought to mean something, or are maybe on the brink of meaning somethingmaybe about yourself, rather than anything else. Theyre like a key to a door, then to a door beyond that, then to a door beyond that, and so on.

Anyway, thats precisely the way the story that follows is for me. I havent been able to figure out all of the whys of it. Maybe you can.

BY THE WAY: that elderly man who told me the story was a great book lover. He once said he missed seeing the phrase, Gentle Reader, in books. So Im using it here in his honour. And Im begging youGENTLE READERnot to blame him for this books many deficiences. Theyre mine, all mine.

SO, ID JUST COME BACK to Camberloo after a few months abroad, ending with that side trip to San Lorenzo, and now I was looking for a place to rent. My wife wasnt with meshe was on loan for a while to the West Coast branch of her law firmand I was staying at the Walnut Hotel on my own while I found a new place for us.

I was being helped in the search by Victoria Gough. She was a real estate agent whod found apartments for us over the years when we returned from extended trips. I suggested that this time it might be a nice change to rent an entire house. After three days of looking, she phoned to say shed come up with something.