Death and the dentist

#57—An unexpected trip into hell.

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What could possibly be so funny about a dead body in the gutter?

It must have been the wars that rekindled the memory because nothing about waking on Saturday morning could justifiably explain it; one of those unexpected turns of the mind that bear no connection to the immediacy of trying to eke out five minutes more sleep amid the rousing ruckus of children stating authoritatively what they want for breakfast. A synapse triggered by a sound, a smell, a feeling, an image, and before I could say corn flakes, those little sparks had gone and exploded into a time some 15 years ago when my husband broke his tooth eating popcorn in El Paso, Texas. I’d never seen him in so much pain, nor have I since.

A dentist? smirked the man at the motel desk. They played golf on Fridays, and while I can’t substantiate that claim, I can confirm not a single dentist was open. We would have to do what the locals did and cross the Mexican border into Juárez where the dentists didn’t play golf. Juárez, the man said, had one of the highest per-capita rates of dentists anywhere in the world, which was quite possible given it was Friday. It was also one of the world’s most dangerous cities—a war zone—a brutal triangular war between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels, and them and the Mexican Army.

The story I’m about to tell has its place in time, specifically 2010. Things have changed since, as is the transitory nature of the world; the heartbreak doesn’t go away, it just shifts. Some parts of Mexico like Juárez are marginally better, others worse.

So it was October 2010. Simon and I had just mountain biked from the Canadian Rockies along the US continental divide to the Mexican border, 5,574 km (3,484 miles) of pedalling the contours of the mountains, living out of a tent and two small panniers, dodging grizzly bears and sleeping with coyotes. The border town of El Paso marked the official end of the US Great Divide—it was a popcorn-worthy moment. Soon we would be in Mexico, but we planned to avoid Juárez with quite an elaborate detour: a train to San Antonio, ride the remaining 1,200km to Pensacola, ditch the bikes and fly to Cancún in the south of the country.

But the tooth. Simon was certain he would not survive a weekend of molar nerve pain, but he might just survive Juárez. After all, that’s what everyone did, right?

The lengths one will go to for an emergency root canal.

The Dentist, by Alia Parker

A small maroon van arrived Saturday morning to transport us across the border. When the door opened, we got in. We got in like it was a normal thing to do, like all wives accompanied their husbands to the dentist. We didn’t say much, our heads too busy creating scenarios that involved anything but actual dentists. The driver said they used to take around 100 people a day across the border for dental treatment, but nowadays it was more like 10. Hang on, everyone does this, right?

Neither of us had been to a war zone, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect Juárez to be one in the conventional sense. I had imagined it to be like other places haunted by undercurrents of civil unrest: armed militia in doorways, air so tense it could be shattered by a breath, a snap of the eyes at anything that moved too fast or moved at all. Juárez was a big city—over 1.3 million people called it home in 2010—and I expected to see them, perhaps going about their business in the way one would if you were to make a wrong turn in Baltimore. I expected to see a few people on the streets.

There were no people on the streets.

Life in Juárez had deteriorated rapidly in the three years prior to our dental emergency and 2010 was a particularly violent year. The infamous Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and his Sinaloa Cartel had invaded the turf of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel and threaded its way through a vulnerably poor population. More than 3,100 people were murdered in this single city in 2010, and that’s not counting the hundreds missing, some since found in mass graves. Prior to our arrival, around 7,500 soldiers had been deployed to Juárez to support the 2,000 federal police and 2,000 municipal police in suppressing the violence. It was the setting for Sicario.

Into this world we came in a little maroon van through streets devoid of people, where the only things that moved were a few anxious cars and the soldiers staked out on street corners behind sandbag walls, watching us in their bulletproof vests and helmets, hands latched to the machine guns ready in their turrets. The driver came to a stop outside a pale blue multistorey building in a side street and ushered us over to a solid door locked behind iron bars. There was no sign to indicate the door belonged to a dentist, the windows were boarded up and behind bars like every other window in the city. He knocked, and we waited in silence. The soldier on the corner shifted position. I watched the street. It was a very long minute before the door creaked open just enough for a single eye to look us up and down, and approving of what it saw, opened the door to the life hiding within: a bustling waiting room of men, women and children busily inspecting specks on walls, the TV, magazines, the water cooler, and chip packets.

The dentist, when it was our turn to see him, was so professional that we felt a little guilty for half fearing Simon would be sedated with tequila (although it probably would have done the trick just fine). He performed the root canal and took a mould of Simon’s mouth, told us he would have to come back the following day for a crown.

Afterwards, we dashed across the road and squeezed behind the soldier and his sandbags to enter a narrow tortería, one side lined with bar stools facing a counter of toasted sandwiches. We ate, two men alongside us, then hurried back, waiting nervously outside the dentist’s door until the driver came out and we got in the van with its superficial safety aura. It would take hours to cross back into the US.

The following day started much the same; the journey into Mexico was seamless—the little maroon van drove straight in, no lines, no customs and in no time, Simon’s tooth had been crowned. (In the years since, dentists have commented what a particularly good job was done.)

A nurse jumped in the back seat of the van to make the trip over the border with us. It was Día de los Muertos—Day of the Dead—and I scanned the streets in search of any hint of celebration, but the souls on the street that day weren’t living. A series of empty soccer fields leached a bloody tear for that city of people who lived behind self-imposed bars. The cartels predominantly targeted each other, but it didn’t take much to get caught in the crossfire.

The van turned onto an arterial road that ran toward the border, a concrete wall masking its western side as it curved around a slow bend. There was nothing around us, no view, no cars, just the road and the concrete wall, so it was easy to spot the dead body in the gutter—a man, lying face down, unnaturally contorted, slumped in the manner you would expect from a lifeless form rolled out of a moving vehicle. How long had he been there? Minutes? Hours?

The driver said something and the nurse laughed. She laughed, then the driver laughed, and it was in this strange reality in which dead bodies in the gutter were trivial that I realised we hadn’t stopped—there was a dead man and we’d driven wide around and kept going, because dead bodies in the gutters of Juárez were a dime a dozen. I looked at the nurse who, though staring at the back of an empty seat was somewhere else entirely, and I watched her sit there with a detached smile across her lips as she listened to the driver. They laughed because they were powerless, because they were angry, because that man wasn’t one of them—he was a criminal—because this was their existence, because of the stupidity of it all, the greed, the desperation, and because what else could they do? It wasn’t funny, it was debilitating, so they laughed to survive.

And I found it interesting that I wasn’t so much shocked by the sight of the murdered man either given the circumstances. I didn’t laugh, but I observed within myself a strange detachment to that body, a sadness that extended beyond him to those forced to live in his shadow. He had the stigma of a criminal, of someone who brought this on himself. Many Mexicans believed the scum deserved to kill each other.

It's a very human reaction to grieve the innocent, but less so the guilty. That’s not to say there is joy in their demise, but rather an eerie distance.

Simon and I were leaving that world. In a few hours we would be back across the border on our way to the south of Mexico where we would spend the next three months. But my grief for those who couldn’t leave, for those who found the only thing to do was to laugh at the absurdity of it all, came back to haunt me unannounced on Saturday morning. As I said, it must have been the wars because down here, beneath the snow-capped mountain ranges and rising sun, the kookaburra was laughing at the beautiful day.

Etymology Monday

This week’s word is simply beautiful and shares a link between eyes and rainbows.

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