Black Death

By Christina Jung
 
 

 
 Why? WHY? WHY?  He dropped himself onto his table and chair.  Emotions whirled; surrounding him with a tornado that would forever persist.  Why did he have to fall in love with Esmeralda?  Why did the Plague have to deliver its blows to his beloved one when he was only twenty-one years old?  Why were there so many questions that he could not answer as a man, a lover, …and as a physician?
 Unable to answer all these troubling issues in his life, he fell asleep.   Slowly, a fog engulfed the young man, and he continued to breathe with the uneasiness of a troubled youth.  The fog brought with it his past thoughts about a time in his room, trying to scientifically track the cause of the Black Death.  Continuously writing with his quill and inkpot, he wrote any ideas that came to his mind.  If the cause of the disease did not lie in the Greek scientist’s, Hypocrites, theory of the four humors in the body, what other areas in the human body would have allowed the Plague to kill mankind?
 Still walking through the fog, Dr. Santiago found himself walking on the street and the smell of freshly cooked rice and beans and newly made tacos, and cheerful cries of "Hola!" between other people on the streets.   He breathed in deeply and soon, he exhaled and his troubles came crashing back to him.  He did not understand what had made his Esmeralda vulnerable to the disease; she was a kind and beautiful woman, who had led him gently through his studies in medicine, and …. Why?  Their marriage had been originally planned to take place in two weeks, but all of those happy discussions broke down as Esmeralda; her skin soon grew little mountains that contained evil fluid and gave her pain, pain that Dr. Santiago could not wash away even with his knowledge of medicine.
  Maintaining his journey in meditation, the healer probed his mind for some knowledge to start uncovering the identity of the antidote of the affliction.  He reminisced the time when he was running down the hill with the exhilaration of an eight-year-old.  His family had lived in a little cottage on the top of a benign little peak, and on that day, his father had brought him along on one of his journey to find herbs in the minute forest near their home.  But the question was concerning what they were searching for…the practitioner remembered that his father was looking for an herb, which removed and soothed inflammations in skin.  But what was its name?  Images flashed through his mind without control…a clock…hands…black…white…the letter u…Unitempora.  Now, he remembered the peculiar-looking plant that he, as a youth, had seen his father pull out of the ground.
 Filled with joy, he quickly made his way to a forest near his home and hunted for the plant.  Coming home with great blissfulness, Santiago made his way home.  He had been planning to prepare it for Esmeralda, but was much too tired to make any effort to do so.  Thus, he dragged himself to his bed, left the herb on the night table, and fell into his rolling dreams as soon as he closed his eyes.
 The next day, he woke up to find the limited supply of the herb on his night-table to have vanished and his level of deep fear and agitation slowly accumulated.  Ironically, it was that same day when Esmeralda came in beaming with a bowl of soup and it was that same day when she had said to him, "My dear husband, I made this soup especially for you with some extremely queer-looking ingredients that I found on our night-table."  She laughed with the river-like sound that was particularly hers.  "But never mind that."