Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,106

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE FALCON ARRANGED WITH THE PRIEST TO FLY ME HOME IN a private plane, accompanied by a Catholic aid worker who was scheduled to come back to the United States around the same time. I don’t remember much about the return journey. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was back at Cassowary for two weeks before I heard another sound.

“They don’t call it hysterical deafness anymore—too stigmatizing, apparently.” The Falcon was sitting beside me, writing on a long yellow pad of paper. “It’s a conversion disorder. The doctors insist it happened as a result of the trauma. I tried to