Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [31]
Patricia then moved on to her incredible survival.
“How did you get found?” she asked.
In the morning, on the precipice by the side of the road, she saw many cars speeding by. She stopped to raise her bloody arms to catch their attention. Some drivers, stopped and gawked and then got back into their cars and kept going. By then she was covered with the pikan, the thorns that are common in the area. One potential good Samaritan even said, “She’s not dead,” but kept going. Finally an army pickup truck came by and—proving that not all soldiers are the same—one of the two soldiers in the truck said, “We can’t leave that woman here.” They picked her up and put her in the back of the truck.
Tearful, Alèrte stopped talking and her husband picked up the narrative from there. During the entire interview, he referred to her in Creole as dam la, the lady, a rather formal but not impersonal designation.
After escaping to his aunt’s house in another part of town, Alèrte’s husband returned home the next morning. The children told him that their mother had been taken away by the men who’d come the night before. That same morning, a soldier came to the house and asked who he was. He hesitantly told the soldier his name. The soldier said, “You should come quick to the hospital. Your wife is sick. She may even die before you get there.”
When he got to the hospital, he did not recognize her. “That’s not my wife,” he told the doctors.
Alèrte had the presence of mind to nod her head to indicate to him that she was indeed Alèrte.
“She had long hair before,” he said, pointing to her buzz haircut. “But when I saw her, she was like the chopped meat they sell at the market.”
Later a human rights group would publish a brochure filled with pictures of Alèrte taken in the hospital after her attack. I had never seen anything like it: picture after picture of hollowed pockets of severed and swollen tissue all over her face, arms, and legs.
The doctors had to hide her when several attachés came looking for her in the hospital. There were many instances of attachés coming back to kill torture survivors in hospitals. A young man who had been left for dead in Titanyen was later taken to the hospital, and then was murdered in the hospital by paramilitary men as his grandfather watched helplessly. That precedent forced the doctors to hide her.
She was lucky to have had the doctors she had, she chimed in. Doctors like that are hard to come by for poor women in overcrowded hospitals in Haiti. The doctors hid her and, when the killers came by, they would say that she had died.
Slowly, she said, reaching up to touch the scars on the side of her face, she began to heal. But she did not want to give the impression that it was quick and easy, as in a movie. She remembered the infections over her entire body, when most of her wounds were filled with puss. She had to be on oxygen a lot of the time because her nasal cavities were too inflamed to take in enough air.
As she talked, her daughters played nearby. They had heard all this before, it seemed, and they could ignore it now, or they were simply protecting themselves by giggling together on the floor and disturbing the shoot. Their childish giggles reminded Alèrte to say that after all this, after she went from being a plump, voluptuous, long-haired woman to a skinny, buzz-cut amputee, her daughters also did not recognize her. Because of her new appearance, they did not know who she was. The younger of the two would pull a picture from the side of the bed, a framed picture of Alèrte looking fleshy and healthy and smiling. The child would carry the picture to her and say, “You are not my mother. This is my mother.”
It took the children a while to get used to her new body and the new, deeper voice she had as a result of her tongue having been cut in half and sewn back together again. The tongue had been hanging by a thread of flesh, but the doctors sewed it back on and, miraculously, it healed.
“It healed,” she said, “so I can tell