The Island of the Colorblind

Felipe spoke movingly of his life and the past. He enjoyed fadang occasionally (‘we all did’), but he was not, like many other Chamorros, forced to subsist on it during the war. On the contrary, he spent the war as a sailor with the U.S. Navy, stationed part of the time in Portsmouth, Virginia (hence his excellent English), and he was part of the Navy force which retook Guam. He himself had to take part in the bombardment of Agana, a heartbreaking business, for it was the destruction of his native town. He spoke movingly of friends and family with lytico-bodig. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I have it too.’ He said this quietly, simply, without a hint of self-pity or drama. He is sixty-nine.

His memory, intact for the past, has become severely eroded for recent events. We had in fact passed his house and stopped to say hello the previous day – but he had no memory of this, showed no recognition now we had come to visit again. When John told him the Chamorran version of his name (John Steele translates as ‘Juan Lulac’), he would laugh, repeat it, and forget it within a minute.

Though Felipe had an inability to register current events, to transfer them from short-term to permanent memory, he had no other cognitive deficits – his use of language, his perceptual powers, his powers of judgment, were all fine. His memory problem had worsened, very slowly, for about ten years. Then he had developed some muscular wasting – the thinning of his once thick and powerful farmer’s hands was striking when we examined him. Finally, a couple of years ago, he had developed parkinsonism. It was this, in the end, which had so slowed him down, taken him out of active life, made him a retiree in his garden. When John had examined him last, a few months before, the parkinsonism was entirely confined to one side, but it had progressed apace, and now affected both sides. There was very little tremor, just an overall immobility, a lack of motor initiative. And now, John showed me, there were the beginnings of a gaze palsy too, an indication of yet a fourth form of lytico-bodig. Felipe’s civility, his character, was perfectly preserved despite his disease, along with a sense of rueful insight and humor. When I turned to wave goodbye, Felipe had a cockerel perched on each arm. ‘Come again soon,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I won’t remember you, so I’ll have the pleasure of meeting you all over again.’

We returned to Umatac, this time stopping at the old graveyard on the hillside above the village. One of John’s neighbors, Benny, who tends the graveyard – he cuts the grass, acts as a sexton in the little church, and as grave digger when needed – showed us around. Benny’s family, John told me, is one of the most afflicted in Umatac and one of the three families which especially caught Kurland’s attention when he came here forty years ago. It was one of his forebears, in fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, who was cursed after stealing some mangoes from the local priest, and told that his family would contract fatal paralyses generation after generation, until the end of time. This, at least, is the story, the myth, in Umatac.

We walked slowly with Benny among the limestone grave markers, the older ones crooked and sunken with time, the newer ones in the shape of simple white crosses, often embellished by plastic statues of the Virgin Mary or photographs of the deceased, some with fresh flowers on them. As Benny led the way, he pointed out individual stones: ‘Here’s Herman, he passed away from it…and my cousin, that one here…another cousin is the one down here. And one of the couple here, the wife, passed away from that…yeah, they all passed away from the lytico-bodig. And up here – my sister’s father-in-law passed from the same disease…my cousin and her dad and mom, the same thing…the mayor’s sister, same problem…got a cousin here passed away too. Yes, here’s another cousin, Juanita, and her dad, they both had it. My uncle Simon, right here – he was the oldest in the family who passed away from the lytico-bodig…and another cousin, he just passed away a couple of months ago. Another uncle, same problem – and the wife, same disease; I forget his first name. I didn’t really know him, he just passed away before I got to know him.’

Benny went on, leading us from one grave to another, continuing his endless, tragic litany – here’s my uncle, here’s my cousin, and his wife; here’s my sister, and here’s my brother…and here (one seemed to hear, intimated in his voice, necessitated by the tragic logic of it all), here too I will lie, among all my family, my community of Umatac, dead of the lytico-bodig, in this graveyard by the sea. Seeing the same names again and again, I felt that the entire graveyard was devoted to lytico-bodig, and that everyone here belonged to a single family, or perhaps two or three interrelated families, which all shared the same curse.