Soledad

Soledad is 18 years old, funny, beautiful, bright and paraplegic. She’s been bed-bound for more than three months, since the car she was travelling in was involved in a head-on collision at a black spot outside Buenos Aires shortly before Christmas. I mentioned it at the time. Her elder sister, Florencia, perished in the accident. Soledad’s twin, Guadaloupe, sustained some spinal injuries but has made a marvellous recovery. Their mother, Mercedes, is on the mend, and their father, Fernando, is still using a wheelchair, but his badly fractured femur is expected to heal well, and he will walk again in due course. What is not known is the likelihood of Soledad ever making use of her legs again. It is, as her devout mother says, in God’s hands. Little short of divine intervention is likely to get her walking.

Sole and Guada were private students of mine. In fact, the last pre-accident image I have of them in my mind is of the two of them walking away from my house after our last class together. They were about to finish high school and had chosen courses at universities in Buenos Aires to begin after the long Christmas break. Soledad had been voted Best Classmate, a high accolade and an accurate reflection of the person she is. All in all, as she and her sister strolled happily away from my house, the future looked wide open and full of possibilities.

I can’t stop thinking about her walking off that evening. It’s painful to contemplate her present reality when only three months ago she was so full of beans. It gets worse, too. The operation performed on her in Chivilcoy, the site of the accident, was of the emergency, life-saving kind. It didn’t quite do all it was supposed to, not that the surgeons can be blamed, given the circumstances. Sole is still with us after all, but a small fissure in her spine means she’s losing cerebrospinal fluid which accumulates near her kidneys leading to problematic infections. She has to be operated on again, a five-hour procedure to remove all the metalwork which was inserted in Chivilcoy, insert a bone graft to stop the fluid loss, and then put all the nuts, bolts, screws and plates back on again. It is an operation which is not without its risks.

I’ve seen Soledad twice since the accident: first when she was in a glossy, high-tech centre of rehabilitation on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She was starting to get used to sitting up, had begun gym and was optimistic, if a little prone to throwing up. The second time I saw her was not so bright – she’d been transferred to a clinic because of the infections she had been getting and was confined to quarters, deprived of her internet connection and fed with at the lack of gym. She’s in the same place now, trying to stay infection free and building up her strength for the operation, which is due to take place at the end of this month. I have another visit planned to BsAs before that date.

The effect of the accident on me has been huge. It’s changed my life and my outlook on life. I’ve assumed more work responsibilities, calmed myself down, become more contemplative and less creative. I appear, outwardly at least, to be more religious. I’m not, it’s just that I go to mass every Sunday at the church where my devoted Catholic friend Mercedes was a chorister. I plan to keep going until the day she walks back through the church door, at which point she will no doubt conjure up an elaborate ruse to persuade me to stay.

I also don’t like the idea of anyone driving on the highway these days. I have a leaflet beside me on the desk which lists the bend in Chivilcoy as number four out of 16 of the most dangerous spots on Argentina’s roads. Florencia was one of the last of more than 8100 fatalities in 2007, a 7pc increase on 2006 and a figure which represents a little over 22 deaths per day. Argentina regularly eclipses other developed nations in terms of motoring mortality: in 2001, for example, there were 1058 deaths per million vehicles here compared with 181 in Holland and 196 in the USA. That’s not just down to bad driving, though motorists here are capable of some pretty shocking manoeuvres; a lot of cars are not as robust as they are in, for example, the States, and many are old and poorly maintained. There’s next to no control over who gets behind the wheel, so you could come face to face on a blind corner with a 70-year-old, partially-sighted farm labourer who never had a driving lesson and never sat a test. If you come out of the accident alive, frequently the other motorist is uninsured, so any medical and repair bills could well be yours to foot. On holiday weekends, the crumbling, single-carriage highways explode with activity, with 4x4s going head to head with long-distance buses and HGVs, turning the roads into racetracks where, inevitably and tragically, lives are lost or immeasurably altered in abundance.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. The tragedies of Florencia and Soledad are mirrored by the fate of those in the other car – three children orphaned, the eldest only five years old, when their parents died in the crash. Those children will grow up parentless because one driver decided to overtake on a bend and then mistakenly threw his car onto the gravel shoulder to avoid collision when he saw the oncoming vehicle. But it was, according to the law, up to the other driver to take evasive action. He did, and the consequences were terrible.

There but for the grace of God go I.