Is the plague tired yet?
(for Raphael Andre)
IN THE YEAR 430 B.C., a plague emerged from Ethiopia, spilled over the adjacent Persian empire, and soon marched toward the almighty city-state of Athens, a city at the height of its global cultural dominance.
The plague first seized the ports surrounding Athens and then moved northward, contaminating the city’s drinking waters. Those who fell ill reported feeling a wicked thirst and a boiling in their foreheads, wishing to be either strip naked or flung into a fountain. One by one, the plague stalked its prey, striking the fear of God into anyone who saw inflamed veins in their eyes, blisters on their skin, or noticed a foul-smelling breath. Those were the first signs of what was often a death sentence within ten days, at which point its victims would meet a vile end, depleted by diarrhea and dehydration.
Mothers and medicine men alike lamented the absence of a cure; for the plague rejected all antidotes except that of sheer luck, feasting equally on those from the highest fitness to the lowliest infirmity. So vile was the illness, corpses were left lonely, as even vultures and vagabond dogs shunned their bodies. The despair grew so great some Athenians chose to succumb by their own hand rather than risk its wrath.
Even those that survived did not completely escape the plague’s grip, as many survivors were either left blind by their illness or aggrieved by a foggy forgetfulness, left wandering one of civilization’s greatest cities, where 25 percent of its citizens had suddenly disappeared.
***
IN THE YEAR 1665 A.D., a great plague swept through London killing at least 15 percent of its population, causing many of the rich to flee the city, leaving shop windows shuttered and the poor to limp along the barren streets with empty begging bowls. Far away from the metropolis, on the opposite side of the country, lay the small northern village of Eyam. The villagers likely felt sheltered from the horror, for they lived in a valley shielded by a chain of mountains, and were at least a six or seven-day trek from the rat-ridden capital.
But within a year over 80 percent of the village would perish.
It all started with a box of clothing a village tailor had ordered from London. The wool clothes and fabric patterns arrived damp and he so hung them over the fire to dry, unaware that what he was touching had been infected by London rat fleas. The next day, glands in his neck and groin became swollen, and he felt himself agitated. By the third day he spotted the dreaded mark of death—a black spot of decomposing flesh on his chest. The next day the tailor was dead.
The pestilence quickly jumped from house to house, and unlike in London where neighbours were strangers, here the dead were your family and friends. As the plague spread, the villagers made a remarkably selfless decision inspired by a local pastor by the name of William Mompesson: to save the neighbouring counties from suffering the same fate.
They drew a circle of a thousand steps around their homes, which they pledged to never pass, no matter what they suffered. Neighbouring villages would gratefully leave food at her borders, but that was all. As the disease spread, no one worked. Stray cows wandered the nearby hills. The main street became overgrown with grass and flowers. At the first sight of buboes on their skins, they began to dig their own graves, often in their own backyards.
Reverend Mompesson would visit every stricken household to deliver last prayers and blessings, yet strangely never himself became sick.
***
IN THE YEAR 2021 A.D., on the night of January 16th, there as a 51-year-old man, just east of Mount Royal, falling asleep in a porta-potty. By morning he would be frozen to death.
The winter winds in Montreal are brutal. They accelerate over the slopes of Mount Royal, raking through the downtown core like razor blades as they race toward the waters of the St. Lawrence, greedy for the currents that will take them to the freedom of the Atlantic. Such were the winds I assume this man was trying to escape. But the real winds that carried his final fate go back a long, long way.
His name was Raphael Andre. He was an Indigenous man who frequented a homeless shelter for the aboriginal community located on Parc Avenue. The shelter is equipped with 65 beds, including Plexiglass barriers, but on that cold Montreal night, every single one of those beds was empty.
Health authorities had shut the night shelter down due to a Covid-19 outbreak. And with a Quebec curfew in place for nightfall, there was not even the prospect of finding the warmth of a subway vent.
Raphael Andre did not die from the virus, but he did die because of the virus, and so joined a long list of those who have been trampled beneath the trajectory of history’s plagues, which gallop periodically and without mercy over the bewildered eyes of this planet, causing some to be trodden under its hooves, and others to be stampeded by the panic.
Whatever the age names its enemy—bubonic or pneumonic, influenza, measles, smallpox, typhus, Ebola or coronavirus—it never really tires. It comes back on an endless loop, giving humanity periods of relief. That is why I was so struck by the story of Raphael Andre, who never himself became infected, and yet grew so weary from it all, he tilted his head against the wall of a chemical toilet, perhaps dreaming of Greek temples or lost valleys, and closed his eyes forever.
Sources:
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (431–404 BC)
The History and Antiquities of Eyam by William Wood (1842)
CTV Montreal News (January 18, 2021)