The Leper Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

stealing her sleep.
    Then came the fatigue, robbing her of energy and strength. She felt as though some force was slowly occupying her body, staking out its land under foreign flag. She kneeled and prayed with all the faith she could muster. She worried.
    Then came the loss of appetite. For months she had to force herself to eat.
    Then a small blemish appeared on her cheek, a pink splotch on her light skin that first could have been mistaken for a pimple or a bug bite of some sort but soon began to take an odd shape, spreading, swelling outward, expanding, an amorphous alien growth that could not be dislodged.
    She finally told Renato.
    He took her to the best infectious disease specialist he knew, and the doctor ran a battery of tests and delivered the diagnosis, which fell out of his mouth like a stone. Leprosy.
    She struggled to understand what it meant, seized by confusion, her future tumbling, crashing. She felt betrayed by her body. The scriptures crawled through her mind, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Kings, the Gospels.
    And if the priest see that, behold, the scab spreadeth in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean (Leviticus 13:8).
    The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever (2 Kings 5:27).
    She pictured the worst, the loss of feeling, the crooking of her fingers and toes, the boils upon her face and arms and back. Renato tried to calm her, to inform her that the stigma was incorrect and her false ideas of biblical leprosy were not factually sound. He told her that it wasn’t as contagious as many other diseases and explained to her the known phases and treatments. He put his arm around her.
    â€œWe will live through this,” he said.
    â€œAt least there are medicines,” she said. “The disease can be cured.”
    â€œTrue,” Renato said. “With the proper rest and medicines.”
    Nonetheless, she would be judged. Too little was known about the disease. In Manila, lepers were feared, were made to ring a bell and carry a sign indicating they were contagious. Those who complied were shunned, dispatched to live outside the city in colonies. There were some eight thousand leprosy victims being treated at that time in the Philippines, with primitive medicines like chaulmoogra oil and its derivatives, but no one knew how many were in hiding or wandering among the general population.
    The doctor informed the young couple that to safeguard Cynthia, who was just five years old, from infection, she and Joey could not live under the same roof.
    Joey died a thousand deaths.
    The pain was excruciating. She called it her Calvary. She knew what she had to do. She couldn’t even kiss her daughter good-bye.
    Cynthia went to live with Rene’s mother, a frugal Spanish woman who loved her granddaughter. Rene moved in with his mother as well, leaving Joey alone in their Florida Street home, with two servant girls. Joey took pains to be careful. She made certain everything she used and sent out of the house had been sterilized.
    Rene found a doctor who would treat Joey in private, in her home, and the treatments seemed to be working. The skin lesions were kept at bay. The fatigue and headaches were bearable. She maintained her beauty, and though she didn’t venture out but to receive Mass, she maintained her status in society.
    Nobody seemed to notice anything amiss. She and Rene and the servant girls and the doctor had a simple secret they’d share with no one.

 6 
BOMBS
    T he newsboys shouted from the corners of Makati and Ermita and Intramuros, their voices rising above the Filipinos in their finest clothes queuing before cathedral doors for the most important Mass of the year.
    â€œHonolulu bombed!” the boys hollered, shaking pages in their inky hands.
    The faithful were going down on their knees as word spread that it wasn’t just Honolulu. High overhead, Mitsubishi G4Ms adorned with blood-red suns let loose