Free Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page A

don’t think we’ve met before,” Dr. Camarillo said.
    “I’m not from around here,” she said, placing her purse on her lap and leaning forward. “I’ve come to see my cousin. She’s sick, and I thought you might take a look at her. She has tuberculosis.”
    “Tuberculosis? In El Triunfo?” the doctor asked, sounding quite astonished. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”
    “Not in El Triunfo proper. At High Place.”
    “The Doyle house,” he said haltingly. “You are related to them?”
    “No. Well, yes. By marriage. Virgil Doyle is married to my cousin Catalina. I was hoping you’d go check on her.”
    The young doctor looked confused. “But wouldn’t Dr. Cummins be taking care of her? He’s their doctor.”
    “I’d like a second opinion, I suppose,” she said and explained how strange Catalina seemed and her suspicions that she might require psychiatric attention.
    Dr. Camarillo listened patiently to her. When she was done, he twirled a pencil between his fingers.
    “The thing is, I’m not sure I’d be welcome at High Place if I showed up there. The Doyles have always had their own physician. They don’t mingle with the townsfolk,” he said. “When the mine was operational and they hired Mexican workers, they had them living at a camp up the mountain. Arthur Cummins senior also tended to them. There were several epidemics back when the mine was open, you know. Lots of miners died, and Cummins had his hands full, but he never requested local help. I don’t believe they think much of local physicians.”
    “What sort of epidemic was it?”
    He tapped his pencil’s eraser against his desk three times. “It wasn’t clear. A high fever, very tricky. People would say the oddest things, they’d rant and rave, they’d have convulsions, they’d attack each other. People would get sick, they’d die, then all would be well, and a few years later again the mystery illness would strike.”
    “I’ve seen the English Cemetery,” Noemí said. “There are many graves.”
    “That’s only the English people. You should see the local cemetery. They said that in the last epidemic, around the time the Revolution started, the Doyles didn’t even bother sending down the corpses for a proper burial. They tossed them in a pit.”
    “That can’t be, can it?”
    “Who knows.”
    The phrase carried with it an implicit distaste. The doctor didn’t say, “Well, I believe it,” but it seemed there might be no reason why he shouldn’t.
    “You must be from El Triunfo, then, to know all of this.”
    “From near enough,” he said. “My family sold supplies to people at the Doyle mine, and when they shuttered it, they moved to Pachuca. I went to study in Mexico City, but now I’m back. I wanted to help the people here.”
    “You should start by helping my cousin, then,” she said. “Will you come up to the house?”
    Dr. Camarillo smiled but he shook his head, apologetic. “I told you, you’ll get me in trouble with Cummins and the Doyles.”
    “What can they do to you? Aren’t you the town’s physician?”
    “The health clinic is public, and the government pays for bandages, rubbing alcohol, and gauze. But El Triunfo is small, it’s needy. Most people are goat farmers. Back when the Spaniards controlled the mine, they could support themselves making tallow for the miners. Not now. There’s a church and a very nice priest here, and he collects alms for the poor.”
    “And I bet the Doyles place money in his contribution box and the priest is your friend,” Noemí said.
    “Cummins places the contributions in the box. The Doyles don’t bother with that. But it’s their money, all the same, everyone knows it.”
    She didn’t think the Doyles had much money left; the mine had been closed for more than three decades. But their bank account must have a modest balance, and a little bit of cash might go a long way in an isolated town like El Triunfo.
    What to do now? She thought it over,