Car Accident, 1976

I was 2 and a half years old, almost 3. My mum had a small dark blue Fiat 600, very common in Argentina in those days. It was a dark winter night (that is, Southern Hemisphere, so around June or July) in Buenos Aires in 1976.

A military junta had taken over the government a few months ago, a time I’ve written about last week. There were armed soldiers at every corner. My mum was driving somewhere in the microcentro. I was sitting, unstrapped (in 1976 seatbelts weren’t mandatory in Argentina yet) on the front passenger seat (I know, I know).

I remember the crash: a colectivo hit the driver side of the car. My mum jumped on top of me to prevent me from flying through the front window shield, but in doing so her left foot got stuck between the clutch and the chassis under pressure from the bus, and the glass of the driver’s door window broke in half. One of those sections cut her foot from her leg almost completely; it was hanging by a thread of flesh.

I have blurry images from that day. The next thing I clearly remember is that I was on a pickup truck, one of those Ford F-100 that were so common in Argentina back in the day. I’m standing next to the driver (once again on the front seat, I know, I know), whom I don’t recognize, looking backwards through the wide rear windshield. I see my mum on the back trunk bleeding, and badly. A couple of men are next to her, shouting to the driver to hurry up, and we’re speeding towards Hospital Rawson (a public hospital that doesn’t exist anymore, it was shut down in 1978).

The important thing to know is that in Argentina it was illegal (at least back in the day) to help a dying person in the street if you weren’t a registered medical doctor and if the police weren’t there. Both conditions had to be met to avoid being thrown in jail, and/or accused of negligent manslaughter in case the victim died. (I kid you not.) These guys saved my mum’s life, and did it illegally, because the Argentine police, well, just like in many other places, could have taken literal hours to show to the party, despite the near ubiquitous presence of armed soldiers everywhere.

Those men stayed with us, apparently for quite some time, until my father showed up a few hours later (my parents had already divorced 2 years earlier). I remember waiting alone in a long corridor with one of those strangers beside me. It was cold and dark. Yet, I felt safe. That’s the feeling I had. It was safe. My dad or my grandmother wouldn’t show up to the hospital until the following morning, but I don’t remember much more about their presence there.

A doctor in the hospital whose name I don’t remember¹ saved my mum’s foot. He completely reattached it back, and she could walk again without problem a few months later. I repeat: this was a public hospital, sanitary conditions weren’t optimal (a euphemism meaning abysmal), yet he performed a remarkable intervention.

The men who saved my mother disappeared right after some member of my family showed up. We’ve never heard from them ever again. I leave this to your own interpretation.

A few hours later, the family of the bus driver came with lawyers to the hospital, screaming and shouting, demanding that my mum (still sedated and on her bed) sign some discharge papers, stating that she was at fault. They were shouting to my half comatose old lady, who didn’t (or couldn’t) sign a thing. They kept sending mail to my mum years after, threatening action (you see what I mean) if she ever went to court to demand reparations.

After my mum was sent back home, my grandmother decided that it was a good moment to leave her daughter alone and took off on a plane to visit some family in Europe. That’s how nice my mother’s family was to each other. I remember my mum taking long baths with salty water at home, trying to regain the movement of her ankle, all by herself (physiotherapy wasn’t a thing, clearly).

For the next 30 years, my mother had a sinusoidal pain in her left ankle, one that came and went depending on weather, mood, and humidity. She was fine during the summer. But those typical freezing and rainy porteño winters were harsher to her.

In 2005, already living in Geneva, she underwent surgery to remove osteoarthritis (arthrosis) from that ankle, which had cumulated through the years. But fate had it, that during said operation she caught one of those pesky hospital bacteria that resist all antibiotics. It developed in her body during the following three years, and in 2008 it caused her a septic shock and a thrombosis (blood clot) that left her in a coma for 2 months. Her health deteriorated quite spectacularly from that point on. She passed away in March 2010.

There’s a direct line between that 1976 car accident and my mum passing away in 2010. Her ankle showed a literal thread connecting the dots.

I hope this isn’t too graphic. It was a key event of my mum’s life. And mine, too.