ARTICLES

- A Short, Unhappy Life
- Citys Fotograf Räddade Studenterna
- Katrina Blues

A Short, Unhappy Life

By ANDREW J. TONN
Documentary Director

SANTA ROSA de COPAN – On Saturday night, when all hell breaks loose like it does around the world, no doctors or registered nurses are on duty at Hospital Regional de Occidente. I cajoled Emergency Room nurse Kristina Hall into going with me to see.

I followed her tall, lanky Arkansas frame up the streets to the hospital’s back staircase. I was nervous on the night sidewalks. A week before I’d had a 9mm chrome Beretta in my face for being out too late. At the time I’d only wondered at the fact I knew what model of gun was likely to put a bullet in my brain. Ever since I’d had the shakes.

We climbed to the dark halls where I’d never been after nightfall. It is different, cooler and seems cleaner. The dirt and dark stains are hidden. Breeze moves the trees in the courtyard, rustling leaves and casting moonlit shadows that shift on tile floors. You stop. It is pleasant for a moment, like some rustic inn or decrepit old hacienda. Then in the dark you hear moans, muted crying and the gentle wind carries with it the stink of death and rot.

The E.R. was quiet but the night still early. The staff acted hopeful, saying that maybe it would be a quiet night. They didn’t seem convinced. We checked the infant and children’s wards and they were quiet as well. Mothers and fathers slept with heads fallen forward onto children’s beds. Their posture appeared one of mourning. Others slept in the halls, on floors, on benches, their bodies wrapped in thin blankets and towels, muffled against the chill of a week suddenly turned cold. All their money was spent bringing relatives here. There is nowhere else to go except the street.

We headed down to the men’s surgical ward and I shuddered, not from the chill but remembering my visit to that room last year, remembering that every man I’d interviewed was there because of violence: machete cuts and gunshots all around, the smell of decaying flesh in the air.

I followed Kristina through swinging wood doors into brilliant light and frantic activity. An orderly was doing CPR on a young man. The other patients watched their dying ward-mate with a mixture of resigned boredom and morbid fascination. Some joked and pointed. Others stared.

The man, a boy really, of about 19 years, mumbled and convulsed. A small, swollen-edged bullet hole gave him a second red-blue navel two inches directly over his natural one. His chest and face were covered in gang tattoos. The orderlies told me he had killed three people in the last week. Someone else told me the orderlies had stolen the dying man’s pistol and were playing with it in the next room when we entered the ward. Kristina got gloves on, found his pulse, found he was breathing on his own but shallow and ragged. The nasel canula, meant for someone with minor breathing problems wasn’t close to enough. She called for an oxygen mask and got a blood IV started. The shot man briefly rallied and began to fight so the orderlies tied his kicking feet and flailing arms to the bed with torn strips of surgical scrubs.

His lips got blue and his face pale. Black ink tears fell from fading eyes. They wouldn’t take him to surgery until his vital signs stabilized. Without surgery they never would and the truth was they weren’t going to spend much time or money on this guy. He looked directly into the lens of my camera. I lowered it and looked back. He hated me with his eyes and I hated him back, wondering if he was the hooded man who had put the chrome 9mm to my forehead a week before. If he could have gotten off the bed and killed me he would have tried but we both knew he was never getting. I felt sorry for him then, dying in this ugly way and ugly place with a guy taking pictures of him he would never see developed. They told me he was a gang kid, the son of illegal immigrants, deported from Los Angeles to a place more foreign to him than it was to myself. When I was robbed the week before I prayed the hooded man wouldn’t count the money because it was only $1.50 in a wad of one Lempira bills. I reached down and held his naked foot for a while, feeling the rough callous on it and the warmth that would soon be gone. My eyes went to the ornate “13” tattooed on his cheek. Bad man. Bad luck.

And the fight left him, bleeding away in his insides. He became flatter on the bed, suddenly, two-dimensional. The feet stopped their pull on the restraints.

Outside the night was still quiet. Music played on radios from different directions. Kristina and I walked back to the hotel down empty streets shining with fresh fallen rain. The edges of things seemed unnaturally sharp and bright and I could taste the air, the rain and diesel and food scents it contained.

We were alive and he wasn’t.

We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.