Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart

He emphasised the last word in the invitation to convince himself there was no shame attached to inviting guests into his rough adobe hut, but picturing it in his mind as he’d left that morning—an unwashed breakfast bowl and spoon on the sink; piles of books like mini-skyscrapers all over the floor; his bed unmade should anyone peer through the curtain that served as a bedroom door.

The child—Ella—surely would, though an unmade bed should mean little to her.

‘We’ll have mate, a kind of tea. Have you had time to try it?’

Now he sounded like a tourist guide, and though she was walking behind him, little Ella at her side, he knew Caroline had heard the falseness in his voice and was smiling as she replied, ‘We’ve come straight from the airport so we’ve not had time, although I’ve heard of it.’

She’d answered like a polite tourist, although when she added, ‘Of course, you used to tell me about it, Jorge, and long for a taste of it,’ her voice was soft and he could almost believe.

Believe what?

That after four years she still felt something for him?

Imbécil! Was he so stupid that he was thinking this way?

They’d reached his hut. His hut? He’d thought of it that way since the project had begun but it was never destined to be his for ever, or even for much longer. Soon it would house volunteer doctors.

Volunteer doctors! The board set up to run the clinic had agreed they would still accept volunteer help when it was offered, as well as paying a permanent doctor. Caroline must have made the arrangement through the board and somehow dates had become mixed up, which would explain why he hadn’t received notification.

He shook his head at the bureaucratic bungling that had thrust him into this situation and continued towards the hut.

At least now it had a front door, though not much of one, cut from a bigger, thick timber door one of his helpers had found in a second-hand yard. Cutting the door, like the other tasks he’d undertaken in building his hut, had reminded him how little he knew about manual labour—how easy and privileged his growing up had been.

‘Great door!’

Caroline was smiling at him, running her fingers along the rough edges where the plane had bitten too deep into the wood.

‘All your own work? ‘

He fought the urge to smile back—and the even stronger urge to put his fingers over hers. To smile at her would be to lose, to touch her would be to surrender, and although he wasn’t sure of the battle taking place, its rules or even the battleground, he wasn’t going to lose.

‘I built the hut with some of the unemployed young men in the area, so we could all learn the traditional way of building. We try to reuse wood where we can. We cannot stop deforestation taking place, not only here but in so many rainforest areas throughout the world, but at least we should be aware that we need not add to it.’

Her smile grew softer, gleaming in her eyes where anger had been earlier, and his heart bumped once again in his chest.

Danger—that was what the bump meant. It was as good as a flashing sign saying, Beware! He straightened up, feeling the skin on his body tighten and momentary pain. Pain was good as it reminded him that he couldn’t let a smile breach his defences.

‘Did the building project help the young men get work?’ she asked.

She was worming her way into his confidence but he couldn’t let a smile divert him, any more than he could let Caroline’s apparent interest in his building project distract him from the fact that she was here to disrupt his life.

Yet politeness meant he had to answer.

‘For some of them, it led to work.’ He kept his voice carefully neutral, and looked at a spot over her shoulder as he spoke so he didn’t have to see the so-familiar curve of her cheek, the blue of her eyes, the silver of her hair, but he’d lost her attention anyway, the child coming dangerously close to the piles of books.

‘Don’t knock them over!’

Caroline’s cry diverted his attention from battles, danger, smiling eyes and building projects, but it had come too late to stop Ella spilling one of his piles of books.

‘Not reached the bookshelves-page of your how-to-build book?’ Caroline teased, kneeling to help Ella rebuild the pile.

And this time, perhaps because she was kneeling and might not see it, he did smile.

‘Furniture is a different world, far too complex for an amateur like me to tackle,’ he said, amazed he was able to have this ordinary conversation when his insides were churning and his mind battling to reject that this was happening. ‘We were gifted some furniture, not a lot, but enough.’

Caroline finished tidying the spilt pile of books and stood up, leaving Ella wandering around the stacks in much the same way as a child might play in a maze. Although every sinew in her body was tight, the tension in the room palpable, she had to keep pretending—to keep up her end of what was really a bizarre conversation, given the circumstances. She and Jorge together after four years and they were discussing building projects!

Better than arguing, she told herself, but at the same time her heart ached for the time when she and Jorge would have laughed together over this strained and formally polite behaviour.

Laughed, hugged, kissed, made love?

But it was her turn to talk, not think!

‘Is there a big unemployment problem in the area?’

She left Ella with a warning not to touch things and crossed the room to the little kitchen nook, where he waited by the single gas ring for the kettle to boil. Picking up the gourd in which he had put the chopped-up leaves—were they called yerba? She tried to remember—for the tea, she turned it in her hands, cupping it and appreciating how snugly it fitted her hand, stirring the chopped dry leaves with the metal straw.

Eventually he answered, taking his turn in this painful pretence.

‘It’s a problem among the young people—the ones who choose not to go on to higher education,’ Jorge replied, though his inner reaction to her closeness and his fascination with the movement of her hands had delayed his reply too long. ‘In the beginning, working with the boys to make the mud bricks for the walls, I found it was a more satisfying form of physical therapy than working out in a gymnasium. Gradually it became a challenge to all of us, to build something with our own hands—something we could feel pride in. Yes, the hut is rough, the door is rough, but it is our hut and our door, and I, for one, cannot open it without a sense of perhaps not pride but satisfaction that I could, with only a little help, make myself a shelter.’

‘You started by making the bricks?’

Disbelief and admiration warred in her voice but the shrill whistle of the kettle stopped the conversation. He took the gourd from her, turning it upside down a couple of times to move the finer leaves to the top, then tipping it from side to side. That done, he poured in cold water to saturate the leaves and let it sit a minute on the table. The mechanical movement of his hands as he made the mate gave him time to think—time to tell himself her admiration wasn’t personal. She would be equally admiring of any man she knew had built his own dwelling.

Any man she knew?

He glanced at her left hand, certain he’d see a wedding ring.

No jewellery at all, but, then, she’d always shunned what she called fripperies. And if she’d married, Ella would have a father figure in her life, and there’d have been no reason for her to come.

He tipped the gourd once more so the leaves settled on one side of it, and carefully added the boiling water.

And while it steeped he shrugged off her admiration, making light of what had been a mammoth task.

‘It’s how people used to do it, and I cannot spend all my spare hours reading.’

‘Spare hours,’ Caroline replied. ‘I remember them, though the memory is hazy.’ She looked towards her daughter, then added, ‘Not that I’d swap Ella for even one spare hour.’

The remarks bothered Jorge, for all he was trying to do was keep the conversation determinedly neutral—coolly polite, nothing more. She’d sounded wistful, as if genuine regret lurked somewhere behind the words.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked, dropping a silver straw into the mate then pausing for an unseen guest to try it before handing the gourd to Caroline.

She lifted the gourd, and sipped through the straw, grimacing slightly at the taste, or perhaps the heat of the drink.

‘I pass it back to you, is that right?’ she said, and, knowing she’d remembered something as simple as the mate ceremony of sharing made his heart go bump again, but though the barriers he’d erected around his heart were as rough as the walls of his hut, he knew he had to keep them intact, heart-bumps or no heart-bumps!

His mind tracked back to the previous conversation—the question Caroline hadn’t answered.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked again.

It was all too weird, Caroline decided, standing in a little hut not unlike the one they’d shared in Africa—although that one had been round and roofed with palm fronds, not corrugated iron—with Jorge beside her, asking polite questions—exactly as it had been when they’d first met.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE shook off the memory and steeled herself against the attraction that still tingled along her nerves when she looked at him or heard his voice. Best to consider his question—to answer him.

Best to forget the past and all its joy and pain …

‘I work, I come home, and I try to be a good mother. Like all working mothers I feel guilt that someone else spends more time with my daughter than I do, so I probably overcompensate. Then, when Ella goes to bed, there are always business things to take care of, or articles to read or write—you know how it is, keeping up with the latest developments, hoping you’ll find something to help a patient you’ve seen recently.’

He turned to face her so the scar on his cheek was fully visible and it was only with an enormous effort she resisted the urge to lay her palm against his damaged skin, as Ella had done earlier.

‘You said your father left you money. You must have no need to work.’

She smiled at him and waved her hands around the hut, pleased to have such a bland, harmless topic of conversation to occupy her mind and distract it from the suggestions of her body—suggestions like moving closer, touching him.

‘And I’m sure you’re not so impoverished you needed to build your own hut, so you, at least, should understand. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort to train me for the job I do. I wouldn’t feel right to just stop doing it, especially when there are areas where doctors are still desperately needed. I’ve been working in an inner-city practice where patients are a mix of trendy twenties, urban aboriginals, homeless youths, prostitutes, Asian migrants and long-term street people. Probably not unlike this area you work in, although, from the article I read, most of your patients are the indigenous Toba people, so you don’t get the same mix.’

Pleased with herself for answering as if the tension in the air between them wasn’t twisting her intestines into knots, she kept going. Talking was better than thinking. Unfortunately for this plan, Ella chose that moment to knock over a second pile of books.

‘Oh, blast,’ Caroline said as she hurried towards the mess, but Jorge was there before her. ‘I really should control my daughter better.’

The words were no sooner out than she realised how stupid they had been.

‘Our daughter,’ she amended, but knew it was too late. She was kneeling now, directly in front of him, looking into Jorge’s deep brown eyes, eyes she’d once fallen right into and drowned in, losing her heart, soul and body to the man who owned them.

And because she was looking, she saw the pain, read it as clearly as words written in white chalk on a black background.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, though for what she wasn’t certain.

For the lost years?

For him not knowing he had a daughter?

For hurting him by not showing enough love that he could have depended on it four years ago, depended on it enough not to have written that email?

Though surely pride had written that email—his pride, not her lack of love.

She didn’t know.

He stood up without a word, walking back to the kitchen where the mate sat on the small kitchen table. Leaving Ella to restack the books, Caroline followed him, picking up the gourd and taking another sip, trying to get back to polite conversation because anything else was too painful.

‘It must be an acquired taste,’ she said, handing the gourd over to him and hoping he’d think she’d been considering mate, not love and the pain it caused as she’d sipped. ‘And obviously very popular! We saw people drinking it everywhere—walking along the street in the city, even waiting at bus stops.’

‘It is a custom not only in Argentina but all over South America.’

Caroline smiled but she knew it was a sad effort, memories of the past hammering in her head as they both tried gamely to keep the stupid conversation going.

‘Strange, isn’t it,’ she said quietly, ‘that we who talked about everything under the sun should be reduced to tourist-talk? But now that Ella has found her land legs after the journey, perhaps it is time for you to meet her properly.’

She turned, calling to her daughter, who’d selected a book with a red cover, settled herself into a tattered armchair and was reading herself a story from it. As it was almost certainly in Spanish and quite possibly a lurid medical text, Caroline wondered what Ella would choose to make of it. At the moment she was hooked on The Three Robbers, which also had a red cover, so possibly that was the story she was telling herself.

‘Ella!’

The little girl looked up from the book as Caroline said her name.

‘Come over here and meet Jorge properly.’

Caroline pronounced his name as best she could, although she’d never fully mastered the deep-throated ‘h’ sound that was more like an x than the English pronunciation of g.

Ella came to stand beside her, her lips moving so Caroline knew she was trying out the name.

‘Hor-hay?’ she queried, and to Caroline’s surprise Jorge knelt in front of her and politely shook her hand.

‘It is a hard name for you to say,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps before long we can find something else for you to call me, something easier.’

‘My name is easy,’ Ella, ever confident, ever up for a chat, told him. ‘It was my grandma’s name—the grandma I didn’t know. I knew my other grandma but I don’t really remember her very much because she went to be a star in heaven when I was only two.’

The child’s innocent remark made Jorge glance up at Caroline and saw pain whiten her cheeks, the wound of her mother’s death still raw, but the child—Ella—was talking again and he turned back to her, fascinated by the resemblance to his younger self, captivated by a small person who was now telling him about the big plane that had flown up in the sky.

‘Not high enough to see my two grandmas who are stars,’ she explained seriously, ‘but too high to see down to the ground except when we went over some mountains before the plane came down again. Mummy says you used to go walking in those mountains and maybe when I’m a bit bigger I could go too.’

Not all the words were crystal clear but her story still came through, each syllable tightening a band around his chest, the innocent chatter of the child all but suffocating him.

‘Mummy talked about me?’ he asked, though he knew it was wrong to question a child this way.

‘She told me lots of stories about her friend Hor-hay who worked with her in—’

She broke off to look up at Caroline.

‘Where was it, Mummy?’

‘Africa,’ Caroline supplied, and the restraint in her voice suggested she’d have preferred to put her hand over her daughter’s mouth to stop the revelations rather than helping out with the conversation.

‘Afica!’ Ella declared triumphantly, then she pointed at the gourd, still in Jorge’s hand. ‘Can I have some of that?’ He passed the gourd to her, letting her hold it but keeping his hand on it as well. He was vaguely aware of Caroline’s anxious ‘Is it cool enough now?’ but mostly he was swamped by unnameable—even unfathomable—emotions as, for the first time, he shared mate with his daughter.

‘Yuk!’

So she didn’t take to it, but that mattered little. She would, in time, grow accustomed to the taste.

In time?

Was he seriously considering getting involved in this child’s life?

How could he, living as he did, virtually a hermit?

But even as the objection surfaced he remembered that his bare existence in this place where he felt most at peace was coming to an end—and soon. Nine days from now the local government was taking over the clinic, and he was returning to Buenos Aires to be with his father, to live with the man who had first taught him the strength of love.

Ella was telling him an involved tale about a doll Caroline had made her leave at home, but the words barely penetrated, his brain swamped by the revelation that peace might be achievable in other places if the right elements were in place—elements like a wife and a child…

Not without love, common sense reminded him. In his search for peace after the accident he’d tried relationships without love, and peace was the last thing they had brought him.

Impossible, too, that Caroline could love him. Not after the way he’d treated her. Uncertain of his future, thinking he might be an invalid for life and not wanting to tie the woman he loved to him, he’d deliberately worded that email to kill whatever love she’d felt for him, driving a spear of harsh, hurtful words into her heart.

Caroline’s heart ached as she watched father and daughter together. With her usual sunny disposition, once Ella had felt comfortable in the hut she was chatting away to Jorge as if she’d known him for ever. If only she had! If only Jorge had been there to share the early joys and triumphs, though he’d have been there for the bad times too, in that case, the endless sleepless nights, the time they’d battled croup, her mother’s death.

Don’t think about that now—think positive, think forward. There are obviously two bedrooms in this hut, so I will work with him. One month isn’t long but surely it will give me time to learn if what he said was true, or if it was his stupid pride that split us up.

‘Caroline?’

His voice suggested he’d spoken while she’d been lost in her own determined thoughts, but she’d missed whatever question it might have been.

‘Jorge?’ she responded, feeling almost light-headed with the sheer delight of being close to him and saying his name again. Not that she could let such pathetic reactions show. She, too, had pride, and she wasn’t going to fling herself at this man and be rebuffed again. No, time would tell her if any of the fire that had flared between them still existed, and until she’d seen some hint of his, she would have to keep hers well tamped down.

‘I was saying you can’t stay here, but there is a hotel not far away. It is clean, the food is excellent, and there is a big plaza—a park—with a children’s playground just across the road. If you insist on this foolish notion of working in the clinic, there is a bus you can catch each day, a small commute.’

She found a smile, knowing it would hide the hurt caused by him pushing her away, although it was only what she’d expected.

‘No, I’ll stay here,’ she said, picking Ella up to cover her hesitation before replying. ‘The information on the internet said there was simple accommodation for visiting doctors and simple is okay with me. We’ve got a sleeping mat and sleeping bags. We’ll be fine. Also, staying here, eating meals with you, Ella will get used to you and when you have time off, she’ll be happy to be with you.’

Ella joined the conversation at this stage, putting her hand on Caroline’s cheek to turn her face.

‘Are we really staying here, Mummy, in this little house? With the kids outside to play with?’

Jorge heard the words and knew he’d lost the first battle of this war he didn’t fully understand. But looking at the child clinging to her mother, he wondered just how hard it was for Caroline to be parted from the little charmer who was her daughter, to go to work and leave Ella in someone else’s care.

And was he thinking this to stop himself thinking about the pair of them living here, sharing his house, his meals, always there, tormenting him with their closeness? It would be bad enough being near Caroline while they worked, but to have her in his home as well?

A totally inappropriate excitement sizzled to life within him but he ignored it, using the image that confronted him in the mirror each morning to douse it. Most normal women would react with revulsion and although he doubted Caroline, who had seen the worst things people could do to each other, would be revolted, what he feared most from her was pity.

As if to remove himself from his thoughts, he reminded himself it was only for a couple of weeks—nine days to the handover and a few more days after that to settle the new doctor into the clinic. He crossed to the front door.

‘I suppose if you insist on staying I can hardly throw you out. I’ll get your bags.’

But once outside he simply looked at the bags, not wanting to lift them, not wanting to carry them into his home, fighting the anger rising once again at Caroline’s intrusion into his life, for all it was probably justified.

Was his apparent co-operation prompted by a genuine desire to get to know his daughter, Caroline wondered, or was there some deeper ploy behind him giving in?

Whatever! At least he was gone for a while and she could breathe normally again. She gave Ella a hug and set her down, telling her she could go outside and play with the children, but not to wander off. She’d already checked she could see the children from the window, so she could keep watch unobtrusively.

A shadow darkened the doorway and she glanced across to see not Jorge but a younger man, carrying the two backpacks into the hut.

‘Jorge remembered an appointment in the city, he was already late,’ the young man explained. ‘I am Juan, his assistant, a kind of nurse now but studying medicine at the university.’

Politeness insisted Caroline cross the room to shake his hand, but she couldn’t help casting an anxious glance out the door at the same time.

‘Do not worry about the little girl,’ Juan told her. ‘My grandmother is there, she watches the children all day. Some of them, their mothers work, but others just come to play. My grandmother says it keeps her young to be with the children.’

‘I’m sure it does,’ Caroline agreed, ‘but it is a great kindness she does as well, for it’s hard for mothers to leave their children to go to work. I know it!’

Juan smiled shyly and was about to back out the door when Caroline realised that with Jorge gone and Ella happily playing, she was at a loose end.

‘Would it be all right if I visited the clinic?’

Before Juan could answer, Jorge appeared.

‘Did Juan tell you I have to go? I’m sorry, but the appointment is with a government official and I’m already late.’

‘Juan explained, and I was asking if I could visit the clinic.’

She saw the reluctance in his face but as the purpose of the article on the internet had been to attract volunteer doctors to the clinic, he could hardly refuse to let her work there.

‘Your vaccinations are up-to-date?’ he queried, impatience edging the words.

‘Hep A, Hep B, typhoid and yellow fever. We’ve both had them, as Ella was able to handle them now she’s over two, although I’m reasonably sure they were only precautionary.’