ANOTHER DAY » cool people

Andrea

ianwalk — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:11:36 +0000

The scars weren’t there when she was 21.

That spattering of pinched skin from her left shoulder to her ankle. some like marks from cigarettes, some like bullet wounds, some like exactly what they were; 3rd degree burns. A map of small, sudden violences.

She’d just graduated from university. In Colombia, after receiving your degree, you’re required to spend one year in a town or community in the country, doing volunteer work of one kind or another. A great idea. An even better one if the country weren’t in it’s fifth decade of civil war…a war so long and tired that no one involved, if asked why it’s still on, would be able to come up with any kind of a convincing answer.

She was assigned to a small community a few hours northeast of medellín called el apartado. I’m not sure what it was she was doing there as a volunteer. We didn’t really talk about that. From the look in her eyes as she talked about that time, though, it seemed like the experience was a great one. She was young, beautiful, intelligent, and curious. She was just jotting down the first few words of her adult life.

Some friends from Bogotá came out to visit her, including her boyfriend of 4 years. They went to a local nightclub to dance and celebrate their friendship. A Normal start to a normal night.

I sat for a long time after she’d told me what happened at the night club, thinking about what it must have been like, that night. trying to fill in the spaces, trying to picture the muggy tropical air, the lights and lamps of a small town at night, everyone dressed to the nines. The sound of salsa and reggaetón blasting from cheap speakers, local men leaning against walls with beers in their hands, their clean shirts tucked in, watching a group of laughing Rolos (kids from bogotá) stroll by, their eyes lingering on that one petite girl, the one with all that energy, the one so intensely unaware of her youthful beauty.

They entered the club as a group, bought drinks, danced, talked, peoplewatched, whatever it is you do in that pulsing dark and light, the hypersensory world of sound, skin and movement. “I was having such a great time.” she told me. “I mean, my friends were visiting, we were dancing like crazy. I remember looking at them and smiling just because they were with me.”

I only saw her eyes mist up twice during the whole story. I think I would cry harder with every telling, if it were me. Maybe she used to. Maybe time’s done its work, softened things a bit, carried her a bit further away from the immediacy of it all.

She didn’t see the man. She didn’t see him throw the homemade grenade into the middle of the crowd, just a couple meters from where she was dancing, caught up in the music, and she didn’t hear or feel the explosion. OUT. BLACK. NOTHING.

She woke up. “I was so disoriented. I couldn’t figure out where I was, why I was on the floor, where that floor was, why my left side was wet and slippery. And then men came over and reached for me and I remember yelling and kicking at them, telling them to get away, screaming at them ‘who bled on me! who’s blood is this?!?’”

They carried her out. Hundreds of people stood outside, straining to get a look at her. They put her in an ambulance with seven other bleeding, burned people. It really didn’t register. She still couldn’t figure out what was going on, and why there was so much commotion, sirens, lights, and screaming. They got to the hospital and put her in a wheelchair. A few of her friends were there, asking her how she was. She asked them what had happened “Was it an oven that exploded? ” she wondered. “No” they said, “it was a bomb, andrea. Someone threw a bomb into the nightclub.”

The medics began to cut away her clothing with a pair of scissors. She looked down at herself. “estoy negra, parezco un carboncito” (I’m black, I look like a little lump of coal) she thought to herself before she passed out.

The next few days were pain. That was existence; constant, screaming pain. The small town’s hospital couldn’t deal with nearly all of the 160 injured victims, especially the critically wounded ones. Andrea and a handful of others were flown by US Embassy helicopters to Medellín. They had her heavily sedated because of her many 3rd degree burns, but it didn’t really help, it just suggested the concept of less pain. They opened up her abdomen to remove the shrapnel that had perforated her small intestine. They removed other bits of metal from her left side, they washed the burned skin away, scrubbed out the dirt and grit from the seeping pink flesh, they monitored her imploded eardrums, they took the shrapnel out of her right eye, put in a plastic lens to replace the one that had ruptured from the concussion of the explosion.

she faded in and out of a hazy reality and pain-drug-fantasy. “I only had one dream. Over and over.” she said “I was a tiny doll in this huge doll factory. I would roll down the assembly line and workers would be shoving limbs onto my body and then further down the line they would rip them out again and I would just go around and around like that being put together and ripped apart.”

She would also call out for her best friend Javier nearly every night. “It was strange” she told me “I didn’t ask about anyone else, I just felt that something was wrong, really wrong with Javi” Her family, friends, and the medical staff deflected her questions regarding her friend saying, “he’s too ill to communicate right now, just give it time.” But something kept nagging at her and she persisted until one day she looked at her mom after yet another deflection and said “He’s dead isn’t he?”

“yes”.

Weeping. Silence. Pain of a new kind.

The painkillers intensified her nightmares of the doll factory. The doctors said that the only thing they could do was to try to continue the treatment on her burns without anesthetic. They warned her that the pain would be absolutely excruciating. She told them to bring it on. “I felt like I was offering up my pain to the memory of Javier, that by feeling life so intensely I would honor his death.”

Days folded into weeks which gelled into months. wounds were healing, skin was grafted onto her worst burns. She started rehab “…which was almost worse than having my burns cleaned.” she laughed.

She saw the left side of her body for the first time. “No one will ever want me, now” she mourned, the scars, shiny-new twinklings mocking her in the mirror. She kept asking herself that universal question “why me?” She slid into depression, and even when she got out of the hospital she moved through a fog. Friends ignored. No work. Living at home. Lingering.

Somewhere in that monotony of all that her grandmother took sick. The night she died, Andrea decided enough was enough and made the conscious decision to take control of her life again.

Nine people died in that nightclub, including Andrea’s best friend, javier. One hundred sixty wounded. Her boyfriend nearly lost his leg and has almost no calf now, all the flesh and muscle having been torn away by the explosion. Several more of her friends were wounded as well. And then there was Javier. “Javi died in part because he was directly facing the bomb” Andrea explained. “it picked him up and slammed him against a wall. But I was standing sideways to it, that’s why only my left side really got hit. The concussion threw me too, but not with as much force.”

A miracle of angles and surface area. A miracle of one beat. A miracle of one tiny movement in dance that turned her sideways to the blast. A miracle of just the tiniest fraction of a second that ended one life and saved hers.

She’s taken that to heart in the years since…that harsh lesson about the brevity of it all, the infintesimally fine line between life and death. She shines and bounces and moves and smiles and laughs and listens. “I used to be indecisive and I worried alot. but not now. It’s so simple. None of that matters.” and she smiles again.

DON COCO

ianwalk — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:18:23 +0000

He popped his head out of the gray cement rectangle that held the showers and bathrooms. “I’ll be right with you folks”. Marieke and I sat down on the rickety bench in front of the house. We’d stopped here because we needed water and this was, supposedly, the only store in the area. It didn’t look like much. Most of the building was half-finished; raw cement, empty holes where windows should have been, wires dangling here and there from open sockets and light fixtures. But there it sat, almost as if anticipating something, right there on the steep-sided shore of the Santa River.

The man stepped out of the shower area, which was separated about 30 feet from the house. He wore no shirt, his towel slung over one brown shoulder, baggy pants cinched against his hips. I studied him as he made his way toward us. He was thin. Too thin. Death-is-coming-soon thin. Sunken cheeks, hollow eye sockets, the skin on his torso hanging off his bones like wrinkly tan cloth. His shoulder blades stuck out like proto-wings. I could clearly see the outlines of the radius and ulna bones in his forearms. his stomach was tucked up against his spine it seemed, his ribcage like an overhanging pile of sticks. Something was eating him up, from the inside out. How old was he? 50? 60? 80? It was hard to tell.

He smiled a skull-smile at us. Friendly. Expecting. “Welcome, welcome. Excuse the wait, youngsters, you caught me right at shower time.” He fumbled a key into the door, opened it and motioned us to step in. This was the store. A tiny room. An ancient refrigerator knocked and pinged to the left of the door, a single bed huddled to the right of it. Behind the worn blue counter, a few shelves held a handful of dusty products: toilet paper, pasta, bottles of cane liquor…a one stop shopping center for three essentials in life.

All the while, Don Coco kept up a conversation, “Riding bikes? No? Walking? Well, that’s healthy, isn’t it? You must be tired. Oh, water? Yes. Cold or room temperature? Cold? Just a moment, right over here.” He opened the old fridge. Two or three bottles of water, a lone coca cola, and a fanta lay on separate shelves, as if in some little bottle morturary, awaiting internment.

“You must be tired” He continued. “You’re more than welcome to spend the night here, you can set up your tent right by the house here. You can shower. I’ve had several travelers like yourselves stay here. They’ve always loved it. I’m building a restaurant here, bit by bit. It’s going to be busy around here once they pave the road. I just love to have folks like you stop by. Swiss, Dutch, German, American, they’ve all come here on bikes or in cars. They always love it. Most nights, I invite some of the other folks from the village to watch movies here. That’s right, a brand new DVD player, nice TV. I’m the only one here who has electricity, you see. I bought the wire myself and ran it the three kilometers from the main poles to the house here. Take a look. Right up there.”

We stepped outside to have a look at his electrical handwork. Two feeble wires ran from the house to a crooked tree-turned-power-pole, and from there up a hill and out of sight. The wires looked like they were spliced at least five times, just from the pole to the house…I’m sure any safety inspector from the States would have had a small coronary upon seeing them. But they were working, making this house the only one in the area to be within spitting distance of the 21st century.

Mar and I really hadn’t walked very far that day, and there was still plenty of daylight. But all we had to do was share one look and it was decided, “What the hell. We’ll stay…and there’s a shower!”

I turned to him “Well, sir, if it’s not too much of a bother, I think we’ll take you up on the offer. We’ll stay.” The man beamed, stuck out one of those bony hands to shake ours. “Don Coco, they call me around here, haha. Been called that for so long that I’ve almost forgotten my real name.”

Marieke made a beeline for the showers while I busied myself with setting up the tent. After awhile she came out, a huge it’s-so-nice-to-be-clean-again grin on her face. Don Coco, who was standing near me said softly, maybe to me, “Well, isn’t she beautiful.” Not long after, I was in the shower. The water was sun-warmed, nothing more, but it felt like heaven on my five-days-dirty body. As I was drying off, I glanced up to the darkening evening sky, a pale moon was standing right over me, a glowing period at the end of another day’s sentence.

As Mar and I ate our usual stew-like meal, Don Coco spoke to us of this tiny village and it’s suffering. “Mirador, Overlook, that’s what this place used to be called because all you had to do was turn and look across the river there, and you’re breath would be taken away by the sight of cherry and apple blossoms, avacado and lúcuma trees, strawberry fields, orange trees, banana plants. Oh, the fruit we grew!” he stopped and sighed. “Field after field of fruit orchards from here all the way up to the bend in the river. And people used to come from all over just to see them, just to look out over all of it. Of course, they’d also pack a lot of fresh fruit home, too.” he chuckled. “You see, this road didn’t used to be here. It’s built on top of old train tracks. That was the only way to get up to these parts. It went all the way up to Huallanca and the dam. Every weekend, the train would pull up right here, people crammed into every space, people on the roof, people hanging off the sides and back. We made a killing selling our fruit…best fruit in the whole province.” He sighed again, a bit wistfully. “How I loved riding that train, absolutely beautiful, sitting there, following the river down to Chimbote and the ocean.”

“What happened?” I asked “I mean, where’re the orchards and the trains and the people now?”

“The quake” he said, shaking his head. “The 1970 quake, the one that buried that town up thataway,” (he meant Yungay, a decent-sized town that was buried under 40 feet of mud, ice and rock as a result of the quake) “the one that started a huge flood here, destroyed the train tracks, broke the roots of the trees, carried away topsoil, ruined the irrigation canals.” He walked over to the edge of the steep slope that led to the river. We followed him. “All that empty land there” he said, pointing to the flats on the other side of the river, everything gray now in the failing light. “That was all ours. My mother and father had wonderful orchards, back then. My mother, in particular loved them, called them her ‘garden’, worked in them every day, even Sundays. But the quake, it ended all that. In one day…one day.” His voice carried a tone of utter disbelief, as if he were still unable to grasp how his life could have changed so drastically, so suddenly.

“She died because of it, you know. My mother. After the quake she just went to bed. Two years she spent like that, almost never getting up. And one day, she died… Se murió de pena” he almost whispered it, putting his hands against one cheek in that universal symbol of sleep ”She died of grief. That quake killed her. She couldn’t bear to watch her plants, her garden, wither away.”

This old, too-thin man, standing there now, so kind, gentle and fragile, he looked to me like a wiry 1970 kid, watching a still-swollen river that had once brought him so many dreams, and then swept them away in one furious moment. I watched this oldman-child facing it all, wondering why and why…while behind him, in a modest mud-brick home, his mother slowly removed her blouse and skirt, pulled off her shoes, slipped under the heavy blankets, curled up into a pain-filled little ball in her bed, too sad to live.