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| > back So to Speak 4400 University Drive |
Wild Boar Baby by Jan Steckel
Down the streets of the town of Samaná in the Dominican Republic, boys like acolytes chanted “¡Maní, maní!” (peanuts, peanuts) and swung sterno cans glowing holy orange to keep the roasted peanuts warm. In the smaller village of Villa Clara ten miles down the road, where kids squeezed fireflies for light, I lived two years in a zinc-roofed shack as a Peace Corps Volunteer. That afternoon, I lay in a dinghy with Isi, a five-year-old girl with a cleft palate, and her two older brothers. Leonilde and Aridio were purposely rocking the boat to frighten Isi, who clutched the gunwales and honked like a terrified goose. I told them to stop. Though they didn’t feel the shame for which I would have hoped, they stopped, and Isi gradually relaxed. The boys began diving off the bow, their laughter spangling off the water like the sunlight. The cay in the middle of the bay looked as if I could reach out and touch it. As I lay in the now-gently rocking boat between the sky and the transparent water, watching now the boys like otters and next Isi grinning in the stern, I felt that for this moment, I was utterly, completely and perfectly happy. Later that day in a house downhill from mine, a father whipped his five-year-old son, Moreno, with a belt for having hit a girl. The girl in question was feistier than Moreno, and I was fairly sure it wouldn’t have occurred to the peaceable, broad-faced, smiling little boy to raise a hand to her unless she had struck him first. I could hear Moreno’s hoarse cries, and it took all my self-control not to run out of my house and try to stop the beating. I told myself that the father was correcting the little boy as he himself had been corrected as a child. I told myself to be culturally sensitive and to stay put. My nails were digging into my palms. “Juana.” Rosa was standing in the doorway. “There is a baby dying on the other side of the river,” she said. “You must come right away.” I waded with her across the muddy river to the dwelling on stilts where Benita and her husband lived with their ten children. It was no larger than the two-roomed cube I lived in myself. Once, during my training in one of the slums of the island republic’s capital, an epidemic of measles had hit the neighborhood. I was learning to weigh children with a hand-held scale along with the other Health Education Volunteers. At the first doorway, I heard a sound and stumbled into a one-room hovel with a single chair in the center of it. In the chair, like a Pietá, sat a woman holding a barely-conscious child. The child’s diarrhea and vomit had covered the two of them. The woman looked up at me, but not in an appeal for help. Her eyes were without hope, misery making there an emptiness that I feared would swallow me. There was nothing to do. I backed out of the hut and walked away, filled with guilt, wanting anything but to go back in and see the woman and her moribund child again. Now the scene replayed itself, but with a protagonist whom I knew. Benita’s children often came to my house to draw and to play with my hair, which seemed to them miraculously straight and soft. In the front room of her house, several women were keeping a vigil of the saddest kind. I walked into the back room to find a tiny baby on the bed, eyes rolled up white in his head, chest heaving as he struggled for breath, lips puckered and limbs flaccid with severe dehydration. His forehead was burning, but his arms and legs were icy cold. As I put my arm around Benita’s shoulders, she started to cry. “With your permission,” I said, “I would like to take him to the hospital.” “Take him,” she said, the tears spilling down the cliffs of her face. I turned to Rosa, who was some kind of cousin of Benita’s, and asked her if she knew how to ride behind on a motorcycle, not hembra, or sidesaddle, but macho, astride. She nodded. She would put on a full skirt with shorts underneath. I told her to meet me with the baby on the road in five minutes, and I went to get my extra helmet. When we got to the hospital, Rosa thought for a moment that the child was dead, but I took him from her and felt that he was breathing. Holding the child to my chest, I ran into Emergencia and almost straight into Cándido, my friend and the head of Public Health for the town and the surrounding villages. “¡Búscame un médico!” I said abruptly, unintentionally using the familiar command form. Find me a doctor. “Good morning,” he said stiffly, in English. I squeezed his shoulder in apology for my rudeness. “Se muere el niño,” I whispered. The child is dying. A glance at the wizened form in my arms had already told him that. He shot Rosa a look of compassion, and led us to the doctors in the back. We took the baby into Dr. Alvarado’s bedroom and laid him down on the bed. Alvarado was smoking; he kept blowing smoke into the baby’s face as he examined him. “Who let the child get into this condition?” he demanded. The doctors always proudly spoke English to me. Alvarado pinched the skin of the baby’s stomach, which had lost all its elasticity and did not recoil into place right away. Dr. Calderón came in and leaned over the bed. “He is severely dehydrated,” she said. “Go to the pharmacy on the corner and buy us two butterfly needles, maripositas, they are called. Also get an I.V. duct and a syringe.” The hospital had been built with World Health Organization money, but there were no supplies, not even for emergencies. The patients had to buy their own. The doctors were all interns on their obligatory year of national service after university. They were paid so little that they had to live in the hospital call rooms. They pierced him all over, first the backs of his hands, then the feet, then the crown of his head. Finally they got a line into his groin and started running the fluid into him. The tiny, shrivelled body in the bed filled up like a water balloon, expanding into a gurgling baby before my eyes. Everyone around the bed began to cheer, to smile and clap each other on the shoulders, and to pound my back too, laughing in triumph.
Later that night I ate dinner with Quica, the curandera or healer who lived next door to me. She told me I had missed something about Benita’s youngest child. “That child will be an idiot,” said Quica. “Her mother saw a wild boar while she was pregnant, and it gave her a susto, a fright. That’s why the baby came out looking like a pig. He will never become more than a vegetable, a moron, that child.” I stared at the fire. A piece of rotted wood thrown on the fire gave forth a shower of living sparks, winged termite-like insects caught in their own holocaust. One of them crawled, still burning, toward my toe. I shoved it back toward its immolated companions. After dinner, I drove the baby’s mother sidesaddle behind me to the hospital. I took her to the child’s ward, where she kissed and fussed over the infant. Only then did I notice the epicanthal folds of the baby’s eyes. Like a palm reader, I opened the baby’s loose fist, and saw across the palm a single simian crease. Of course. With ten children to feed, they had been letting the youngest child who had Down Syndrome be carried off by diarrhea. Probably the father had insisted, but at the last moment the mother had been unable to go through with it and had sent Rosa to me. Or maybe Rosa had come on her own, and once I was there, the mother had let things take their course. Had let me take my course. I, like a hurricane sweeping through, had thought I was the answer to their prayers, the deus ex machina who would save their child. I drove back to Villa Clara and fell asleep with difficulty. It could only have been a few hours later that I was awakened by an ululation, a keening cry that sent me scurrying into my clothes and out my back door. There was Benita, with bare and muddy feet, crying that she had awakened in the hospital to find the child dead in her arms. She had walked the ten miles back to arrive at the village at dawn. She wanted me to bring her baby’s body back to her. She asked me to take pictures of him so she could remember him. I brought her husband to the hospital on the back of my motorbike, to claim and carry the child. Dr. Calderón at the hospital was very angry. She suspected the mother of smothering the child, although she said that such babies had weak hearts, so there was some chance the mother’s story was true. She didn’t want to sign the death certificate because she wasn’t sure of the cause of death. All the father cared about was getting the hospital to bury the child; he thought that way he could save the cost of the funeral and burial. Calderón got even angrier and said he would have to take the body away.
When I went to photograph the dead child, the ants had already gotten to him. Over and over again, I brushed the ants from his cheek to make the picture turn out well, but they kept coming back. I snapped the photo. Blood turned to garnets, teeth turned to pearls, tears to rain on a zinc roof. Angelito, angelito. You will never swing a sterno can like a censer and cry “Maní, maní.” Your father will never beat you for hitting a girl. You will never leap from the bow of a boat between a perfect sky and sea. You will never catch a susto from a wild boar crossing your path. You will never grow up to be an “idiot.”
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