Choque

At first I irrationally thought that the car was on fire as it came screeching by. We were walking home from work along Avenida Brasil, Elisa and I, complaining about the day and chattering in relief of release. The silver sedan began skidding well behind us, the rubber literally burning into the clouds of smoke that distracted me for a moment until I looked ahead to the cross-walk. Caught in the middle of a legal crossing were two people. A man and woman were running, hand in hand, she in front pulling, he behind pushing. The car had slowed only to perhaps 30 miles an hour when it hit her, ripping their hands apart.

She flew sideways up over the hood. We stood frozen on the sidewalk as time stopped and she flew, frame by frame, back away from the car, crashing in a heap onto the pavement of the intersection. The man stood on the other side of the car, his face a glass of red wine shattered on concrete.

At the same moment, a block away, two cars smashed head-on. For a moment, the imagined physics of our society revealed themselves as fallacies.

When the hit woman stood, screaming, staggering, I felt a shock as sure as when she had been hit. I had been sure she had been killed. But she stood, pure adrenaline, and staggered to the curb. Her mouth was open, yelling syllables without sense, and the man ran to her wildly. Three of us stood watching: Elisa and I, and across the street a man in green. I thought of my first aid training and all of the questions that I cannot ask in Spanish. The woman gave into the shock and fell backward onto the sidewalk. I stood with air rushing through my sternum watching the man kneeling over his hyperventilating partner. The man in green suddenly sprung from the shocked still life and sprinted across the street, arms pumping, to their side. Someone appeared swiftly from a side street and pushed a jacket beneath her head.

A man in a blue jacket emerged from the silver car, a middle-aged, flustered, average-looking man whose face, I felt, showed too much self concern and not enough guilt. Elisa pointed and I saw his small daughter, too young to be in a cross-the-shoulder seatbelt, in the passenger seat. Another child sat in the back. Distaste and anger flickered in the air, from me, from Elisa, from the old woman who was drawing near to draw the story out of us, and it drew people who began to circle round. The man who knelt over his woman must have felt it too. He looked up and rose, approaching the car. His face was a desperate kind of breaking rage that I hope I never see again. In this momentary world, slowed by my own surge of chemicals, I saw his heavy armed, thrusting approach intercut with scenes of his flight, pushing his love towards safety before him, and the explosion on his face when the car skidded towards the sidewalk and took her and not him into the metal and into the sky.

The man in blue stood petrified, and the broken man came full of intention, but a van of carabineros arrived as if by magic. Four uniformed, helmeted men jumped out and surrounded the reckless driver, half to keep him there and half to prevent a fight of passions too high to be contained.

The crowd thickened. Rubber-necking as a negative act is not a Chilean concept. Any time that I have seen any sort of accident victim in the street, they have been surrounded by a crowd four or five people deep. I have seen people taking pictures with their cell phones, at times. Elisa and I remained at a distance--witnesses, unsure in this foreign system of whether or not we held any role. The abuela at my side questioned me and Elisa and we explained the story, pointing to the skid marks that stretched for a third of a block, making guesses at his speed, turning our hands into bodies flying through the air. We shared exclamations with her and she lit a cigarette and wandered into the crowd. We heard her explaining to clusters of attentive listeners that the gringuitas had seen everything, gaining glory through her intimate acces to the details of the story.

From nowhere, three fire trucks appeared along the road. Where the two cars had crashed, more vehicles gathered. I could here the struck woman shout out angrily, incoherently, from time to time, but by now she was obscured by a thick knot of observers. A woman came over to us and asked if we had some sort of candy for the children in the car. We had been talking of them, of the shock of seeing a woman against the windshield of your daddy's speeding car. Elisa found the apple she had in her bag and the woman took it...better than nothing, to calm the ninitos.

An ambulance arrived and the EMTs disappeared into the now thick swarm of gawkers, around which the abuela hovered with her cigarette. Soon they emerged with the woman on a stretcher, followed by the stricken man who will never forget the image of his partner rag-dolled in mid-air. A few minutes later it pulled away.

Elisa and I explained what we saw several times to various concerned onlookers. We stood uncertainly at the border, watching the man in blue with the carbineros. The abuela wandered back and she confirmed what I had thought: the woman would be fine. She had been lucky. She wandered off, and after a moment of unsure hesitation, so did we.

I have a friend here who becomes irritated with his girlfriend and myself when we are hesitant to cross in the cross-walk when there is traffic. It is our right-of-way, he says, and so the cars need to stop for us and we are being jumpy. I'd like to take a moment for a shout-out: wrong! I would also like to request that he not urge himself or other friends in front of moving, unreliable traffic.

So Elisa and I moved on along with the rest of our plans. In the grocery store, a man dropped a crate and we both dropped the vegetables we were holding.

I am a transparent person: even my students have remarked on the fact that there is no emotion that passes through my head that doesn't show in my exterior. It could be that this is adaptation. It is the physical shape of distress that draws our empathy. I am thinking of the pictures in the paper on September 12, 2001, of the people who had thrown themselves out of the World Trade Center rather than die of asphyxiation. Their forms, blurry, small, were enough to break us all: arms out at the sides, head forward in a dive, the still-conscious desperation potent like the taste of blood in my mouth. In that file in my mind I add the woman flying backwards in the air in the shape of the letter C; her staggering, bent knees with her screaming mouth; and the face, the broken face of a man whose normal day was broken in half by the destruction and resurrection of the woman he loves.