Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A YOUNG GUY, BETO CRUZ, OLDER THAN ME—IN HIS THIRTIES, I guessed—met me at the airport in San Salvador. He had dark hair and eyes and was emanating intensity from across the scuffed miles of linoleum that separated us, holding up a makeshift sign with CALY FLANAGUN written in black Magic Marker.
His English was fluid, and he spoke with almost no accent—turned out he had lived most of his life in Canada with his mother.  He’d been home for only a few years.
“You’ll be staying in a hotel tonight here in San Salvador, and then tomorrow we’ll drive to the Pacific coast. I’ve got something I want to show you,” he said as we drove, me riding shotgun in an old VW van, his arm stretched across the top of the seat, fingers almost touching my shoulders.
“Oh, I thought we were going to . . . Where’s the convent? In the north?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s on the way. I’m taking the scenic route,” he said, smiling, lighting up a cigarette, the tips of his fingers stained with nicotine, looking away from the road and over at me. “Well . . .” He laughed nervously. “We’re going to go north, but first we’re going south—just a few hours out of the way. I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I figured you might be interested in my work concerning child labor. The nuns are into it big-time, and Sister Mary Ellen thought it would be good for you to see what’s going on here. And who knows? Maybe you get a little interested yourself. Maybe you want to help. We could use all the help we can get.”
“Sure,” I said, chewing my bottom lip, trying to be upbeat, though I was feeling less certain than I sounded.
The car pulled up in front of the hotel, and even though it was nighttime there were hundreds of people on the street, crisscrossing our path. I was looking for a gap in the steady flow and stepping away from the curb, luggage in my hand, when I was stopped in my tracks.
A stranger approached me, came out of nowhere, walked right into me, bumped my chest with his chest, then took two quick steps back so we were facing each other. He raised his hand to my forehead, his hand took the shape of a gun, his forefinger touched the spot directly between my eyes, and he made a muffled sound, a popping noise, what kids do when they pretend to shoot someone. Lowering his arm to his side, he disappeared into the steamy surge of human traffic.
“What was that all about?” Beto said, catching up to me. “Hey, let’s go. You can make friends later.”
“Yeah, okay, that guy surprised me, that’s all.” My heart was pounding, gut churning—I felt all these miniexplosions going off inside me.
“Good thing it wasn’t real,” Beto said as we stood inside the elevator on the way to the top floor.
I nodded, marveling that in a country where guns were as common as fingers, I had encountered the only pretend pistol. The adrenaline rush finally subsided, but for the first time in my life, I was conscious that a silent bang and an imaginary gun, made of human thumb and forefinger, can be almost as terrifying as the real thing.
Trundling along in our beat-up van early the next morning, I was looking around, trying to acclimatize myself to all the brilliant colors—the trees, the houses, the sky overhead. We’d traveled about thirty miles when Beto pointed to a rocky field, a body dump where the government routinely abandoned the corpses of murdered citizens. By midmorning, deeper into the mountainous countryside, I was shocked to see dead bodies along the side of the road, rotting under the sun, hands tied behind their backs, the stench filling the car. There was a young man wearing blue jeans. He was bare-chested, and his arms were extended out from his sides. His head was missing. I wasn’t able to figure out whether he was lying on his back or his stomach. I couldn’t help but look and look and look. I was repulsed, but at the same time I wanted to see as much of death as I could. The only other bodies I had ever seen were Ma and Bingo, and their deaths hadn’t looked like these.
Pulling my shirt collar over my nose, I signaled Beto to pull over. He stopped the car, and I leaned out the open door and retched onto the side of the road.
Beto waited patiently and then restarted the engine. “Anyone caught burying the dead risks getting killed himself.”
“Is this a good idea?” I asked, sitting on my hands to conceal their shaking. “Should we be traveling around like this?”
“Sure. Why not?” he answered me, his eyes on the road ahead as an oncoming car, swerving dangerously, deliberately veered to hit a duck in the middle of the road. It was chaos on the roads, and every once in a while we’d encounter a group of people walking and Beto would dutifully roll to a stop and offer them a ride, all of them piling into the back of the van, some reaching over into the front seat, offering their firm handshakes in greeting.
Wet and hot, it was early afternoon, I was sweating, hair pasted to my forehead, the fabric of my shirt catching on the car’s torn vinyl upholstery as we bumped along rugged dirt roads, passing coffee farms and sugarcane fields, stopping occasionally to let the overheated van cool, a Baltimore oriole, reassuringly familiar, singing in the trees overhead, a nice change from the clucking of chickens. I was hearing roosters crow in my sleep.
“Where are we going?” I finally summoned the nerve to ask.
“Don’t worry. Everything’s okay.” He sipped water from a thermos as I eyed him with suspicion. He grinned back at me and slapped me on the upper back. “Hey, man, where’s your sense of adventure?”
We both looked in the direction of the mountains, distracted by the muffled exchange of  automatic gunfire not so far away.
“I don’t have a sense of adventure,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, I hope you can swim! Hold on.”
I was sitting alongside Beto, both of us soaking, huddled together on a wooden bench in an aging fiberglass outboard. I nodded and wrapped my arms around my chest, my knees jumping as I tried to stop my teeth from chattering.
“Yeah, I can swim,” I said, taking a look around—surrounded on all sides by the Pacific Ocean.
It was a little past dawn. After spending three sleepless nights in the van in a tiny fishing village, the locals scrupulously avoiding eye contact, we were heading out to a fishing platform where kids from the area villages were forced to net fish eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Starved, bullied, threatened, and even sexually abused, they were at the mercy of thieves, storms, and natural predators. For respite, there was the war.
By using my money to bribe foremen over the last few days we were able to do some limited filming aboard the leaky platforms, as they wavered back and forth on shaky stilts battered by the wind and the waves.
But now we were on a different mission. Beto and I and a handful of foreign Catholic aid workers were making the journey by boat to film the rescue of some of these underage child workers.
“Don’t worry, Collie,” Beto said in a reassuring manner I’d come to distrust. “It’s all arranged. It will be smooth as silk.”
The shore birds circled noisily overhead, blurry and overexposed, banking in the strong west wind. Waves were washing over the boat, and I was on my knees, clinging to the sides. I leaned over the side of the rickety boat and threw up into the water.
“Are you sure you’re not pregnant? Pull yourself together, Collie, or what the hell good are you?” Beto said as another ten-foot wave washed over us. He looked like a pillar of salt, his hair white and stiff and standing on end.
I was in over my head, the executive part of my brain relinquishing power to a terrified intern. The water smelled briny, the boat reeked of fish and gasoline, my clothes stank—I was experiencing El Salvador as if it were an olfactory hallucination, minus the hallucination. The aid workers’ boats had already pulled up alongside the platform, and they were shouting out their intention to come aboard. Beto was filming, and I was handing him equipment as the fishermen waved their arms and screamed threats and swore.
Some of the younger kids were crying. One of the platform workers grabbed a small boy by the hair and dragged him to the edge of the wooden deck; the boy was maybe eleven or twelve years old, skinny, his arms and legs covered in bruises and sores.
The man picked up the boy, arm around his waist, bent him almost in half, and lifted him two or three feet off the ground. The boy was crying loudly, and the man was threatening to throw him overboard if we didn’t leave.
We moved our boat closer—I maneuvered until we were positioned right next to the man and the boy, just beneath the corner of the platform. All around was shouting, screaming, crying, when the platform worker made a sudden violent move and threw the boy in the water, and two of the aid workers jumped in after him, all three of them disappearing below the water’s surface.
I heard a low laugh, almost a growl, and looking up caught sight of a platform worker appearing like a toothless grin just above me. He made a wind-up motion with his right arm, hurtled something my way, and I felt a heavy wet thud in my lap.
“Holy shit!” I leapt to my feet, jumping backward, colliding with Beto, who kept right on filming. A sea snake slid from my lap onto the floor of the boat, recoiled, and struck out at the air, curled back in on himself, and shot forward, biting the camera’s strobe arm. I was so scared that I couldn’t even close my eyes.
“For chrissakes, Collie, dump that thing overboard!” Beto yelled as the adult workers on the platform pointed and laughed.
I intuitively reached for one of the oars and used it to poke and prod the snake until he wrapped himself around the end of the paddle. He kept biting into the wood, his mouth open wide enough to swallow a soup bowl, and I tossed the snake and the oar over the side and into the water. A warm, thin trickle of piss ran down my inner leg.
“Let’s get out of here!” the cry went up among the aid workers in the other boats, the little boy safely aboard.
A mournful wail ensued as a handful of older boys—sixteen, maybe seventeen years old—clapped and waved over at me, calling for help. It was clear they wanted to come away with us. I sank to my knees in the bottom of the boat.
Shaking so much I felt as if I were coming apart, I forced myself to take one last look behind as our boat churned away.
“Well, we got one of them out of there, anyway. Too bad about the others,” Beto was saying as he fiddled around with different camera lenses. “The sea snake was a nice touch, don’t you think? . . . Hey, are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. You’ve got to toughen up, Collie, or you’ll be no use to anyone.”
I shook my head and pawed at my ears. His words were muffled—it was as if I were listening to him from beneath a waterfall.
“When are we going to the convent?” I asked.
He appraised me for a moment and sighed. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll leave in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was nodding gratefully, thinking that if I could only get to the convent, everything would be okay.
“Quit apologizing,” Beto said, registering a mix of contempt and pity. “Where the hell do you think you are, anyway, at a f*cking dance recital?”
Ma once accused me of treating life as if it were a dance recital.
Six nuns, four of them Americans including Sister Mary Ellen and two Canadians, came out to greet us when we arrived in the tiny village of Adora a couple of days later.
“Hello, hello!” They were very happy and hugged and kissed us—I remembered something that Pop once said: “Nothing like squalor and suffering to cheer up a nun.”
The sisters, along with a couple of secular aid workers, lived in a pink-and-tan house made of adobe and mud. Tin sheets and cardboard covered the roof. Everything was makeshift. Most of the people in Adora lived in shacks constructed of wood and plastic.
“So has Beto been a good travel guide? Showing you all the sights?” Sister Mary Ellen asked me, as if we’d arrived for a long weekend in Palm Beach, linking her arm in mine as she led us inside the house. There were three rooms, including a bedroom and a rudimentary kitchen, along with one big living area that had a worn sofa with springs poking through polyester fabric and a couple of metal chairs. Dishes and books were stacked on a long table with a bright green shiny top.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.
“Outside,” Sister Mary Ellen said. “I’m sorry it’s not what you’re used to, Collie.”
“It’s what I’m getting used to,” I said, not meaning a word of it.
“If you want to get cleaned up, then you should head down the road to the spring where there’s a plunge pool. But be careful not to swallow any of the water. You might want to plug your nose, too, as an added precaution. Lots of little thingies that could cause you problems,” she said, laughing.
“Here’s where you’ll sleep—” A young nun pointed to a hammock in the main living area.
“Thanks,” I said as Beto put his stuff in the corner and caught my backpack as I tossed it to him. I could hear tropical birds calling to one another outside the open windows.
“It seems pretty quiet around here,” I said.
“What did I tell you?” Sister Mary Ellen said, offering me a glass of lemonade.
“Where are the other students?” I asked her. “You said there was going to be a group of volunteers.”
“Oh, they’re in different places. Most of them are with the priests in the south and a couple of them are with us, but they’re a couple of miles out, living with a farmer and his family, helping to dig a new well.”
The next morning, Beto and I met some of the villagers— everyone was friendly, and all the little kids followed us as we walked among their homes, tiny one- or two-room shacks without plumbing or electricity or appliances. Whole families slept on plastic sheets laid out on the floor.
One girl, maybe nine or ten years old, with black hair and black eyes, followed me around most of the morning. I gave her a twenty-dollar bill. Her eyes widened, and tears ran down her cheeks. She hugged me and ran, crying out for her parents. I made up an excuse and went back to the little house where the nuns lived, knowing it was empty. It took me a while to pull myself together. I never want anyone to look at me that way again.
After lunch, Beto and I drove Sister Mary Ellen and one of the aid workers, a girl named Sandy from Philadelphia, out to the farmer’s house. We joined the other volunteers, two engineering students from Northwestern who were helping dig the well. They handed us a hammer and nails along with some flimsy wood and a roll of chicken wire. I caught them exchanging a look—their skepticism about my abilities was obvious.
“Nice manicure,” one of them said as Beto laughed.
I spent the next few days helping to design and build a chicken coop and did such a good job that I won them over. I got lucky those first few days getting the chicken coop assignment. When I was a kid, I helped Uncle Tom build an elaborate loft for the pigeons—this was a snap by comparison.
When it was finished, the farmer and his wife and kids gave me an egg laid by one of the hens. I held the brown egg in the palm of my hand, and its warmth spread throughout my entire body. So this was what it was like to be good, to feel goodness in every part of you—for those few days, I thought I had found what I was looking for in the rough shape of an El Salvadorean egg.
Five days later, the village and the mission were attacked by government militia wanting to teach the nuns a lesson. Sister Mary Ellen and the two Canadians had flown to Bolivia for a conference. They were due back the day of the attack. I was getting ready to go to the airport to pick them up when we got hit with the shrapnel from a mortar shell that exploded near the car.
Beto jumped into the jeep alongside me, and we sped away, abandoning the car when it ran out of gas.
We walked for two days, when I again heard the sounds of helicopters overhead strafing the fields and villages, and we were back up and running. Some guy I didn’t know had a hold of one of my arms. Beto grasped my shirtsleeve. Sandwiched between them and along with hundreds of villagers, I fell to the ground and started to climb the steep mountainside on my hands and knees.
Volcanic rock crumbled and gave way; my fingers were stained the same caramel color of the rock, blood beneath my nails. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue and cloudless. There was a warm breeze, lime and orange trees waving on the surrounding green hills, bodies like tumulus beneath them.
“Keep moving. Keep moving. Don’t stop,” Beto said as guns from the helicopter raked the ground in front of us, behind us, to either side of us. A chicken appeared from nowhere and landed on the stranger’s shoulder, pecked the top of his head. He was trying to swat it away, but he couldn’t budge it; the two of us and Beto were laughing like crazy, tears streaming down our cheeks.
Seems like all I did was laugh, I was aching from laughter, couldn’t breathe, it hurt to laugh.
“Stop, you’re killing me,” I said.
The chicken abruptly lifted off, clucking, wings flapping, and the stranger was on his stomach, not moving, he was perfectly still. He looked like laundry, like clothes left out in the sun to dry.
“Don’t stop, Collie,” Beto said.
“Laughing?” I said as I kept moving up the mountain.
A few days later, on Christmas Eve, we were able to connect with another group of Catholic aid workers, when five government militia types wearing identical mirrored sunglasses stopped us at a checkpoint outside of a small village in Chalatenango, which was mostly under guerrilla control.
They pulled me off the back of the open truck, wanting to do a visa check. The others were ordered on their way—Beto put up polite but vigorous argument, but nobody wanted to listen. I was struggling to understand what was being said. After some discussion, they emptied my pockets, took the money from my wallet, and when I objected they shoved me, pushed me around a bit, and tossed me in the backseat of an old Chevy, locked the doors, and sped off. I looked behind me and saw Beto standing in the middle of the road, watching. I never saw him again.
“What are you doing with me?” I tried to speak with more confidence than I felt.
“We’re taking you to the airport. You’re going home today,” the guy who appeared to be in charge answered me in heavily accented English.
“Why?”
“Visa’s expired.”
“No, it hasn’t—” I stopped myself. I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t sure they were telling me the truth about going to the airport.
“Expired visa or you expired. Makes no difference to me. You choose.”
Pleased with his wit, he turned and translated for the others, who laughed. I laughed, too—inappropriate laughter had become my stock-in-trade, though I wasn’t feeling very funny. It wasn’t good to disappear in El Salvador.
Twenty minutes later, we spotted a burning bus on its side stretched across the narrow dirt road. Our driver scratched his head and asked what he should do.
“Well, what else can you do? Stop,” said the wit. He ordered me to stay put as the car came to a slow halt and he and the others, weapons drawn, got out to assess the situation.
I heard a series of loud bangs, and the militia guys went down like bowling pins, some wounded and the others dead. I felt a fiery pain in my left thigh—glass from the window of the car. Guerrillas, too many to count, emerged in waves from the surrounding jungle and converged on the car. Shooting the sky, they jumped on the hood, kicked the doors, and some enormous guy picked up a huge rock and tossed it into the center of the windshield. Glass shattered as the rock landed next to me in the backseat.
I was dragged from the car, knocked to the ground, and struck in the head with the butt of a semiautomatic weapon. For a minute I saw stars, then my vision gradually cleared. A young guy about my age stood on top of me, grinning.
He nudged me in the hip with the muddied tip of his boot. “So what are you doing here? Saving the world?”
“You’re an American,” I said.
“No, but I grew up in Los Angeles, lived there with my grandparents. I got sent home when they died. What are you doing with these guys?”
“I got picked up at the last checkpoint. They were taking me to the airport, sending me back home. . . .”
“Why?”
“They said my visa had expired.”
“Sounds like a bullshit story to me.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You an American?”
I nodded, squeezed shut my eyes, and held my breath.
“What are you doing in El Salvador? You with the CIA?’
“No. I’m a volunteer at the Catholic mission. I’m supposed to go home in a few days.”
“The mission that got attacked?”
There was a crowd of angry faces staring down at me. It was quiet but for the moaning of the wounded and a long, low hiss, the sound of steam escaping the bus’s ruptured radiator. One of the insurgents put his rifle against my heart, cocked the trigger, and, shrugging, looked at the young guy who was asking me all the questions. My interrogator—his name was Aura—chewed on his thumb for a moment and then, seeming indifferent, gestured to the others to bring me along.
“Merci,” I said, whispering, recruiting the power of the French language.
“Don’t you mean gracias?” Aura asked in a civil fashion, as if we were in some bizarro-world language lab.
Force-marched along with two wounded policemen through miles of swamp and dense jungle for the next three days—right away I lost my hiking boots in the deep, sticky mud—and continuing on barefoot, I developed these god-awful oozing sores from dozens of burrowing foot worms.
My leg, already in rough shape, caused me a lot of grief and stopped working altogether on the second day. I sank to my knees. I think I may have passed out. One of the guerrillas dragged me up onto my feet, handed me a big stick, and gave me a push just to get me started. Enormous leafy canopies of twelve-foot-high prayer plants and knifelike thorny vegetation blocked every step as a haze of encircling sweat bugs and mosquitoes covered me like a second skin.
We finally got to an area of some relief where the rain forest was intersected by a wide, flattened swath, a rudimentary road made by local wildlife. We came to a semiabandoned village, where we were greeted by a handful of hooting and jeering men and a few villagers who had set up camp among the burned-out huts.
After a brief conference, one of the men ran to get shovels. When he returned he handed them out among a small group, who took us to a remote end of the village, where they began digging in the ground. Somebody pushed a handmade shovel into my chest and ordered me to start digging. Shovels were in short supply, so the two wounded soldiers were pushed down onto all fours and made to scoop out the dirt with their hands.
Standing barefoot in the moist, loose dirt and hacking away at the buried roots of resistant palms, I dug until the edge of the hole was so high that it touched my waist. Behind me, without warning, I heard loud voices, a sudden great commotion, and truncated shrill pleas for mercy.
Two gunshots were fired one right after the other. Gripping the shovel’s handle, my arms trembling from the effort, I shut my eyes tightly, anticipating a third.
Instead, coarse hands reached down and yanked me up by the shirt collar, lifting me from where I stood inside the hole. My legs buckled, and I fell on my knees and watched as the lifeless bodies of the executed policemen were tossed into the freshly dug grave, one on top of the other. Aura looked over and laughed at me, the sharp edges of his pleasure slicing through me like a knife.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You might come in handy.”
Some guy came up from behind me, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me on my stomach for several yards, paused, and threw me into a deep trench dug into the earth sometime earlier. A thick cover of branches and palm leaves concealed it.
I fell asleep. I was afraid to wake up.
It was raining, the pit filling several inches with water along the bottom where I was lying on the ground, soaked to the skin. I was pulling glass and maggots from the random pattern of holes in my thigh. I heard a rustling overhead; the air was filled with the feral odor of wet pelt and, looking up, my head spinning, vision blurred, I was amazed to see several monkeys peering down at me through the twigs and the leaves.
Curious and unafraid, they watched me for a long while, chattering to one another, and then one of the monkeys picked up a loose rock and lobbed it at me, hitting me in the leg. It stung. A few of the others picked up scattered sticks and threw them at me, striking me to no great effect, but I stayed still, and soon they got bored and left. For some reason, the monkeys’ attack had the strange effect of cheering me up.
The sticky musk of flowers clung to the air like night sweat. Staring up into the black sky, sedated by the meditative drone of insects, I saw the ghostly shapes of blackbirds circling overhead. Their wings softly fluttering, they called out to one another.
“Ma says she’s proud of you, Coll.” It was Bingo, even if it was only in my head.
“Now I know you’re not real,” I said to him. “Even if she were proud of me, she’d never admit it. She’d die first.”
“She did, don’t you remember?”
The next day, the village was attacked by militia, who were going systematically from village to village in the area. Some local guy, after nearly falling into the hole with me, took strange pity and pulled me from the pit as he ran for his life. We were hiding in the forest, in flight from men who were thrashing through the deep tropical undergrowth, hunting for human prey, slashing away at stubborn, spiny plant fronds.
I was shaking uncontrollably, my teeth chattering violently, and my noisy terror threatened to give us away. My savior pushed me down and clamped his hand around my mouth, nearly suffocating me, pinning my face in the mud until I passed out.
“You speak English?” I asked him finally when I came to.
He looked at me and shrugged.
“Are you a Catholic?” I asked him, thinking it was a safe question even if he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. “I’m a Catholic, too,” I said. I was having trouble standing.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” I said, feeling practically delirious as we walked along together, his arm around my waist, my arm thrown over his shoulder, my left foot dragging along the ground, him not saying a word. And then I told him the whole story, about lying to Pop and Uncle Tom about the holidays, about how the Falcon had tried to keep me from making the trip, about how I’d built the chicken coop for the farmer and his family.
“I’m here helping,” I said as he looked at me as if I were out of my mind. My knees buckled—there was a lot of that going around.
My leg was chewed up and pulsing. It was infected, and I kept passing in and out of consciousness. The man from the village talked someone into driving us to a makeshift clinic—a converted chicken coop—full of young kids being treated for injuries they’d suffered as soldiers after being kidnapped and conscripted by rebel forces. The man who dragged me out of the hole was scanning the beds, obviously looking for someone. He left disappointed without saying good-bye. I never knew his name.
There was only one doctor, assisted by a handful of nurses. He was French. The nurses were Belgian. One of them, named Madeleine, seemed to be in charge. She had a nice way of being bossy as hell. They were going crazy trying to treat all the kids, and they just kept pouring in—it was like using your thumb to try to stem the flow from a breached levee—and it was the middle of the night and there was nowhere to put them, no one to take care of them.
They treated me and my leg, and after a few days I started to come around. Madeleine offered me the use of a primitive cane and asked me to help her take care of the kids. I had my shirt collar pulled up over my face—the smell—I was slipping and sliding among the dross of a charnel-house floor. One little boy, he seemed dead to me, needed a transfusion—there were no blood supplies, no electricity. The French doctor pointed at me and called me over and told me he was going to take 500 cc of blood from me for this boy.
“But what if I’m not a match?” I asked, thinking it was a reasonable question.
He wound up and hit me in the face, knocking me into the wall. And then again, he hit me again when I straightened up. I put up my hands, the cane went clattering to the floor, and I was saying, “It’s okay, just do it, take my blood if it will help.”
He calmed down a bit, not much, but by now I was feeling pretty upset. He hit me one more time, open-handed, a slap upside the head, for good measure. Then, his hands shaking, he and Madeleine set up to do the transfusion.
Lightning illuminated the black sky. The night was a cold and shining lake. A flame from a single white candle fluttered, creating the illusion of quietness where there was none.
The French doctor was like an unvisited place, his solitariness so thorough that it was as though I were seeing him from a distance. The dead and dying were all around him, hanging overhead, unsightly as flypaper, part of the architecture of his calling. He finished with me, and then he just got up from where he was sitting, didn’t say a word to me, pushed me aside, bumped me with the edge of his shoulder, and went on to the next kid and then the next one after that. I tried to stand up, but I started to black out. I fell back onto the cot and closed my eyes.
After it was over, Madeleine sank down beside the little boy on the floor to comfort him, easing into all that percolating effluvium as if it were a Hot Springs. Her hands were stained with blood.
The next batch of kids came in and the next after that, and I was nothing more than a turnstile, people pushing past me, going forward and back, in and out, and I wasn’t exactly in the way but just someone from whom nothing much was expected.
The next day, the little boy seemed better, brighter; the general consensus was that he was going to make it. I couldn’t stop staring at him. He used to be dead.
One of the hospital workers, his name was Santo, bravely offered to help me get back to San Salvador, to the airport and home. He asked me if I could walk. I was okay with the help of the cane, which was little more than a T-shaped stick. I felt like hell, but all I could think about was getting back home. We set out while it was still light, hoping to avoid the insurgents and the militia that prowled in the night—the area was crawling with both. We had been traveling for hours when we heard screams and shouting and saw the lick of flames shooting above the tree line.
Glowering billows of smoke obliterated the sky, choking the field, as, curled up and facedown, swallowing petrol fumes, I pressed my hands against my ears.
Rain was falling gently on giant lobelias, making a pat-pat sound against the leaves of young trees that were bending back and forth in the humid night breeze. My heart was beating, bumping erratically against my rib cage.
It was the last thing I heard. I turned and tried to speak to Santo, but I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice. He dragged me around in the dark, his hand wrapped around my wrist, pulling me along, stumbling and fumbling, the night a world without boundaries. With every step, I felt as if I were walking off the edge of the earth.
Santo somehow got word to Sister Mary Ellen. She arranged for me to stay with an American priest, who got in touch with the Falcon, who organized a flight back home.
Santo left me with the priest. I hugged him in gratitude for what he had done for me. He hugged me in return, and then he turned and left. He was going back up north, back to the hospital. I don’t know if he made it or not.
I was in El Salvador for one month. During that time, I saw brave people do things that defied logic and circumstance to save my life, a stranger to them—Beto, who spoke up for me with the militia; the villager who could have kept running but instead pulled me from the pit and took me to the hospital; Santo, who brought me to the priest.
I thought about the French doctor, who could have been home in Paris, drinking champagne.
I told myself I did the right thing when I didn’t jump in after Bing. Sensible people everywhere would say I did the right thing. But that logic didn’t square with what was done for me in El Salvador, where every minute of every day people confronted with the same kind of decision I faced chose to make the leap of faith—Santo had faith he would make it to the airport and back alive.
They all jumped and would jump again and again. I wanted to believe that only an extraordinary person, knowing the dangers, would have jumped in after Bing that day in the cave. But ordinary people did brave things every day in El Salvador in 1983.
I was an ordinary person. Why didn’t I jump in?
I went to El Salvador to excavate a little personal courage.
Courage exists—even if it doesn’t exist in me.