This weekend I accidentally clicked on a mention of smallpox in Wikipedia. That landed me on Wiki’s smallpox page and I saw the photo there. I was going to link to it, but I find I can’t bring myself to go back and get the url.
Let me stress that what I saw has not inspired me to give money or even to think a humanitarian thought. I hope that somewhere down the road I will send $50 to an organization that helps victims like the girl in that picture. But my point for now is that I have never seen anything so horrible and never expected to.
The closest I can come to describing the picture will sound flippant. The day I saw it I had eaten an almond croissant. The girl’s face looked like a face almondine, with the almonds the size of an adult’s thumbnail — not the rim, the whole nail. The almonds are set one against the other, no space between them, and their narrow end points up. Together they’re like the scales of a pine cone, or giant almonds arranged like the scales of a pine cone. They’re white and glossy, which is why a straight comparison to a pine cone wouldn’t work.
The girl’s eyes are still there, you can see them looking out. But otherwise her face is a cluster, a rigid and severely arranged cluster that presents regular lines and not a sign of flesh as we understand it. I guess I assumed that smallpox would look like a mass of sores hanging off of a face, like exaggerated acne; you would be looking at a face that had been wrecked and spoiled. Instead there is no face, and that is very disturbing.
… this just in: I googled smallpox and found this sentence in the page of links: “The world’s last known case of smallpox was reported in Africa in 1977.” That’s from kidshealth, and I guess they’re right. Of course there are plenty of other diseases that need fighting, and I could give money to one of the relevant groups.
update, I start by saying that “face almondine” is the closest I can come to describing the girl; then I finish by saying she has no face. Damn. I guess I just liked the phrase. One reason: it makes it easier for me to mention the almond croissant I’d eaten, and that brings the reader’s mouth, mentally, into close contact with the girl’s face; the resulting disgust is intimate and ups the description’s emotional effect. Also, “face almondine” is just snappy. I can say apologetically that it sounds flippant, implying that the flippancy was not intended, but I’m still turning a phrase about a horror and a tragedy. Flip a turtle on its back and its legs keep going; overturn me psychologically and my joke reflex keeps twitching. At least if the source of my overturn is a picture; if it’s a horror and tragedy that has hit me personally, I’ll probably skip the jokes for a while.
Some historical fiction paperback I once read, set in the land of the Aztecs at the time of the conquistadors, had one line that stuck with me even if much of the rest of the book has drifted away from memory. Some natives are discussing the smallpox outbreak the white men have brought.
"If these are their small pox," said one, "I would hate to see any of their larger ones."
I'm going to be a real literal-minded dick. Apologies in advance.
If they're Aztecs, how come they're making puns in English?
I didn't say it was a great book.
But, as I recall, they were told what it was by the Europeans who were visiting the local villages. People start getting sick, and the white men say, "oh, that's smallpox".
One could reasonably assume that the concepts of "small" and "pox" were translated from English (or whatever European language the white men were actually speaking) into the native tongue, whereby the comment would arise naturally.
…Unless you're being REALLY literal about it and wondering why the dialogue in the book isn't actually written in Azteca-speak, in which case I'll take the apology and just leave.
No, I'm not that bad. And I understand completely that you're not recommending the book as a quality production. So bear with me as I say this: the conquistadors were Spanish, and the Spanish word for smallpox is viruela — nothing to do with size.
If the name of the book comes back to you, I'd love to hunt the thing down. It sounds like that big-budget Hollywood epic from the 50s where a centurion was wearing a watch.
The book was a thick paperback I borrowed from someone, and was a lurid tale full of sex and revenge and sacrifices and wars and executions and sex and so on.
General plot: An old native man tells his life story to Spanish priests, from his childhood to becoming a warrior to gaining political power and on into his declining years. I THINK the title was actually "Aztec" or some variation on the word, but I can't recall the author.
I understand your point on the Spanish language, but as I think more about this, the more I begin to recall of the book, and I'm not sure the white men in the smallpox incident were actually Spaniards. Not that I know whether whatever brand of Europeans they were (I want to say Dutch, but would have to find a copy of the book and reread it to be sure) would have had a name for smallpox that was made from the equivalents of "small" and "pox", either…
"I'm not sure the white men in the smallpox incident were actually Spaniards."
Ah shit. I really liked the idea that someone had published a book w/ Aztecs joking in English.
I'm betting the writer was Gary Jennings. He did Aztec and Aztec Summer, + a bunch of others just like you describe — big historical potboilers full of sex, kind of a little funkier than James Clavell. Not that I've read him, but you see the books around.
Well, you've got me curious about him. Some of the books looked like they could be fun.