Chemé

Of all the children who came to play at my house, twelve-year-old Chemé was the best artist. She almost never spoke, and she rarely smiled. When she started throwing up uncontrollably, her mother took her to the doctor in town. Chemé wouldn't or couldn't speak, but her brother Moreno said she had eaten a strange fruit from the forest, so the doctor gave her a shot of antihistamine and sent her home. Moreno came across the river in the late afternoon to take me back to his house, where I found Chemé sitting slumped and immobile, drooling out of one side of her mouth that drooped downward. Her father had stayed home from the rice swamp that day to sit and watch her. I couldn't get her to respond to me, but she often didn't answer questions even when she was well, so I couldn't tell exactly how out of it she was. When her mother Nuri came home from selling fish to tourists, however, she only had to take one look at Chemé to start freaking out. She grabbed the girl by the shoulders and lifted her up to a standing position, shaking her like a rag doll and shouting "Ay! Ay! Chemé's dying! I'm going to die, too!" Then she dropped the child back into the chair and threw herself on the wooden floor, pounding the planks with her fists and howling. The house was on stilts a couple feet off the ground, and the corrugated tin roof seemed to amplify sound, so the effect was thunderous, especially since Nuri must have weighed over 200 pounds. It was like being trapped inside a giant drum with an enormous insane infant. While she rocked the place thrashing and screaming that if God took her daughter she would surely die, I cringed in a corner wondering, "Is this cultural?"

I sent Chemé and Nuri in the back of a pick-up truck first to the hospital in town, then to the big provincial hospital in San Francisco de Macorís. For three days Nuri sent back word daily that no doctors had come to see Chemé since her admission and that they were doing nothing for her. On the fourth day Moreno came before dawn to tell me his father Rufo was going on the seven o'clock guagua to Macorís to take Chemé out of the hospital and bring her home to see the curandero, the local healer. I went and asked Rufo to let me talk to the hospital doctors before he brought his daughter home, just to find out if there was any medicine I should continue giving her while she was under the care of the curandero. We agreed that I would start the ride to Macorís on my motorcycle right away and arrive before him, so we could talk to the doctors together.

I should have made better time on the Honda than Rufo could on the loaded-down pick-up truck, but the bike started to wobble. Halfway there I had to stop and realign the back wheel, so I didn't reach the hospital in Macorís until sunset. The first thing I saw inside was a black rat the size of a rabbit running alongside one wall of the main hallway. Somehow in trying to find Chemé's ward I ended up in the maternity unit, where the preemies were lying in bedpans instead of bassinets. I recalled a story that a Catholic Relief Services nurse in the capital had told me about a rat getting into a premature infant's incubator and chewing the baby's hands off. Suddenly it seemed possible that the CRS nurse had been telling the truth, and that maybe Rufo was right about getting Chemé out of that place. I finally found Chemé lying on a plastic mattress without sheets, drooling and moaning without words, but watching her parents who sat beside her looking stolidly hopeless. Nuri told me that Chemé couldn't move the right side of her body or the left side of her face, and that she was unable to eat or speak. The mother was sure, however, that the girl understood the speech of those around her.

I went and talked with the hospital director, who told me that Chemé had probably had a stroke, but there was no way to tell without a CT scan. If a CT scan confirmed a stroke, she could be taken care of for free in the big public Children's Hospital in the capital. Since the only CT machine was privately operated and in the capital, and Chemé's parents didn't have the 500 pesos a scan would cost, the hospital was, as Nuri had correctly perceived, doing nothing while waiting for Chemé either to die or go home. I offered to pay for a scan, and the director promised to send Chemé to the capital in an ambulance that was going to Santo Domingo for supplies at six o'clock the next morning. I went back and told Rufo what the doctor had said, and that I'd give Nuri 400 pesos for the CT scan plus bus fare to the capital if he'd give her the 100 pesos I figured he was saving for the curandero. He gave in immediately, not knowing what the best thing to do was, only wanting desperately for someone to do something for his daughter.

After much searching through the town I found someone willing to change a check for cash at an outrageous surcharge, gave Nuri the money and went to a fellow Peace Corps volunteer's house to collapse on the floor asleep. When I awoke the morning was already getting bright and hot outside; it was after seven. I took my time getting cleaned up; it would have been nice to see Chemé off, but since she had already left for the capital in the six o'clock ambulance, why not take advantage of the luxury of running water? It was almost eight when I went to the hospital to thank the director and found Chemé and her parents where I had left them; the ambulance had gone without her.

I sent Chemé bouncing on the bumpy road to the capital in the back seat of a cab instead of in an ambulance, and wondered what additional damage she might have suffered because of it. The CT indeed showed a stroke, and she stayed in Children's Hospital there for three months getting anticoagulants and physical therapy. She came home to Villa Clara dragging one leg, with a useless arm, thick of speech and with a strange inappropriate laugh, a kind of disinhibition that made people think she was a little loony. Her father refused to put her back in school; though I argued with him then, I imagine he was right. I gave her a set of felt-tipped pens and a sketch pad, but when she tried to scrawl with her non-dominant left hand, her face crumpled and she threw the pens back at me. The following week I invited all the children to my house and gave them all crayons and paper. Chemé sat motionless in a corner, scowling with one side of her face. She could only stand it for about five minutes before she grabbed a crayon away from a younger cousin and started drawing. I tacked all her pictures up on my walls.

One day I was boiling drinking water with nobody but el Mello in the place. El Mello was four years old, supposedly, but he was the size of a two year old. He was so weird and precocious that if he hadn't had a twin sister who looked exactly like him and acted like a normal kid I'd have thought he was actually an adolescent dwarf posing as a small child. He was lying in the doorway of my house so that every time I went from the front porch to the stove he'd get to look up my dress. Each time he caught a peek he'd explode into a lewd chuckle that sounded like Louis Armstrong laughing after a few drags of helium. Barbina's grandsons were knocking down a palm tree that had become too tall so that it wouldn't fall on the houses when the next hurricane came. Barbina, who was about 90 years old, was standing in the courtyard between the houses squinting through her cataracts and telling them they were doing it all wrong, but they laughed and told her to stick to women's business.

At a certain moment it dawned on me that perhaps I ought to get off the porch, so I grabbed el Mello and ran into the courtyard. Within several seconds the palm tree tipped the wrong way, toward the houses, and started to fall. Everyone who had been idling around watching operations ran like hell, totally panicked, grown men pushing children out of their way as the tree crashed down and flattened the front half of my house. The palm also knocked down an orange tree, so the courtyard was awash in frantic chickens, rolling coconuts, green oranges, and children running after all the fruit. Only Barbina remained motionless exactly where she had stood while haranguing the men about their technique, about ten feet out of range of the fallen tree, wearing an ancient-goddess-I-told-you-so look. El Mello, still in my arms, had stopped with the Louis-Armstrong-on-helium laugh and was now staring at the pile of rubble and dust where the porch used to be murmuring "'Coño!" I was wondering where my dog was when I became aware of Chemé laughing her head off from the rocking chair on Barbina's porch across the way. It didn't sound inappropriate to me now; it sounded like exactly the right thing to be doing, and soon I was laughing like crazy, too.