“Her (Renata) father had resisted our engagement for several years. Finally, after my appointment as director, he agreed to consider the marriage of his daughter to a doctor. Renata was ecstatic when she related her father’s decision to me in the garden of their home.”
Evidently, Renata’s father’s preliminary opposition of their engagement is accredited to social class. Although they are frankly besotted to each other, the father reckons the narrator to be unfitting for Renata. His endorsement which follows the narrator’s appointment as a director upholds that Renata’s father was interested in his daughter's wedding to a man of great social status such as that of a doctor.
“As we passed the Palace of the Inquisition, men and women squatted facing each other and deposited excrement and urine into the canal that ran down the center of the street. As they met their human needs, they conversed with ease and cordiality. Upon finishing , they simply raised their garment and walked away. They had no paper or cloth to practice anal hygiene. It was cleaner to defecate and stand than to employ your hand to wipe away the clinging watery excess.”
The hygienic circumstances of the city are deadly. With such dirtiness, it would be unrealistic to have a decent and disease-free city. Furthermore, the government has nose-dived in safeguarding the city’s hygiene by guaranteeing that there are satisfactory latrines for the residents. The all-pervading germ-infested conditions portrays the underside of the “ New World” sophistication.
“I had never confronted such a plague. What if he asked me to treat the illness? For a moment, a great fear froze my intellectual responses to what I was witnessing. I was ignorant of the cause. I had no remedy. I was afraid my medical training was insufficient to deal scientifically with this plague. Nonetheless, I had been sent by his majesty to deal with precisely these matters of health and I would not let him down.”
Here, the narrator is confronted with an unfamiliar epidemic. His position mirrors the dilemmas which medics face when dealing with new life-threatening maladies. Some malaises are so intricate that they cannot be alleviated by the average medical familiarity. Therefore, uninterrupted medical studies is contributing to dealing with emergent ailments.
