2004-03-11 - 7:38 p.m.
He came in with a smile. slightly slicked back hair a little gray and a clean look. 39 yrs old. I read his history from the intake. Hanging from a ceiling in a cell in El Salvador. blindfolded. burned with a metal rod he could not see. shocked with wire from the darkness and the nowhere. the nowhere of pain that came quick and settled in to scar his skin as he hung.
but his speech was crisp. he said he was a poet and a writer. a poor man from El Salvador that defended the word as necessary. the feeling that the word saved his life. that poetry and writing and creating saved his life. No doubt.
i got excited. i am a med student who is expected to see only one patient and do everything for him. i met protocol. i only saw him that night. we talked and talked for two and 1/2 hours. i moved the history to settle on medical problems but let him tell the story of each scar.
and the pain in his neck from the live lynching. he would get excited or sad or angry and his spanish rumbled on faster than a train and faster than i could hope to understand. i had to tell him to slow down. he said they hung him face down and plummeted him to the ground fast blindfolded so he would speak. he didnt speak. scared as all hell but he couldnt allow his anyway about to happen either way death to bring horror to another living.
he was on the side of guerillas but didnt believe in war.
only something resembling dignity in for everyday poor in the land of his birth and becoming.
finally i got to the depression questions. the suicide slit wrist no hope no sleep questions.
he said ya, when he was in mexico fleeing from the government. he missed his family. when a family member died the whole family came together one afternoon. the govt was waiting for him to come back for his family member's funeral. he found out they were gonna kill him there.
now he rarely gets depressed, he says. he does pushups and never drinks and writes. and writes
he came to the US. an exile.
it took me an hour to draw his scars. i suck at drawing. they had healed, mostly since the 1980's. but there were many.
he was going up for asylum the next week and if he proved his story matched his scars and a doc agreed that would be good.
once you get rejected from asylum the head doc said appeals are almost hopeless.
why aren't we recruiting this guy to stay in our country? my friend, chetan, during pediatric rounds every morning tells me what was on Prime Time the night before. Where was prime time to interview this phenomenal human being? with so much guts.
i told him to bring his poems next time and i would bring mine and we would workshop after clinic.
ss
from something i read this morning...
She arrived in a very bad mood. She didn't speak. In the elevator her face puckered up. Then she let her milk get cold in the cup. She looked at the floor. I sat her on my knees and asked her to tell me about it. She shook her head. I caressed her. Kissed her on the brow. A tear escaped. i dried her face with my handkerchief and she blew her nose. Then I asked her again.
She told me her best friend had told her that she didnt like her.
We cried together, I dont know for how long, there in the chair.
I felt the hurt that Florencia was going to suffer through the years and I would have liked God to exist and not be deaf so I could beg him to give me all the pain he had reserved for her.
-from Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano.
