It started with someone shouting, I don`t remember what, but it was something repetitive and low pitched. Like the horns of a ship nearing a harbour. Then the bus stopped and someone said "it`s a human being" and everyone looked scared, eyes wide open, probably mouths too, but that`s impossible to know, as everyone was focusing on each other's eyes. People crawled under the bus. I tried, my hands shaking, my guts turning at the sight of the blood. Cowardly, I decided to leave it too someone more competent or perhaps braver.
The aforementioned human being. Foetus like under the front of the bus, his trousers for some reason on his knees, his legs twisted in strange, inexplicable positions. Someone said he was dead. I agreed, he had to be dead. I ran to the other side of the road to find someone among the
converging audience with a cellphone. No one seemed to understand what I was on about. I saw the car that had hit him, a white Mercedes, its windshield broken, the front of the car crushed.
He had to be dead. Or perhaps he was still alive, but he would soon die, and that was even worse; to see someone bleed to death.
I ran towards the gas station we had just passed, to make them phone the ambulance, the police, or whoever they normally call in this country when things like these happen. The woman looked relaxed and content, and did not seem aggrevated at all by the man bleeding to death 100 yards away. It was like such events were part of her daily routine. She didn`t have a phone. She didn`t know where someone would have a phone. I ran back, thinking someone with a cellphone surely had to have phoned the ambulance by now. It turned out there were no ambulances.
The man had a pulse and was breathing, I thought about how much a human body can take, survive, at least for a few moments, and thought about the heads rolling, eyes still blinking, in France, the guillotine, the revolution. Could he possibly survive, no, there was no chance, but we had to do our best, some of the braver people had to do something, just so we had done what we could, for moral reasons, out of respect. I was caught up in thoughts like these, but they did something, stopped the blood from flowing from his legs, now no longer a part of him, but something to be avoided, separated from the rest of him, still living. Those legs were not living.
Suddenly he was in a car, in the car with the broken windshield, the white Mercedes, and then they were off. The air still dense with tension but at the same time everything strangely empty and still.
