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May 11, 2023
When I was ten years old, I broke my nose...
Well, technically someone else broke it for me.
My family was living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at the time and I would regularly spend time at the park at the end of our street.
The park is named after former UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, and it was a great place to blow up ant colonies with firecrackers or partake in other, less destructive activities.
One day, my friend and I were doing the ant colony/firecracker thing when we heard a girl arguing with a boy.
The boy was older and bigger than me, but the girl was very cute - so I decided that I would be the shining knight to come to this fair maiden's rescue.
So, in my best beginner-level Portuguese I asked him to stop bothering the girl.
Well, maybe I accidentally used a wrong word, or he just did not care because the next thing I remember is his fist smashing into the right side of my face.
Instantly, blood started gushing from my nose and kid who hit me was so shocked that he started screaming that he had killed me and ran away.
I chased him for a while, but he had a head start and escaped into one of the neighborhood houses surrounded by a high wall.
I applied pressure to my nose with my bloody shirt and headed home to our house which was located just down the street.
When I got there our live-in housekeeper Maria was shocked at the sight of so much blood and asked me what had happened.
I told her about the fight but asked her to wash the bloodied shirt - and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE say nothing to my parents.
She "agreed" and I thought I was in the clear.
There was no way that my parents would find out what had happened.
That night at the dinner table my Dad took a long look at my swollen face and asked me how my day had been.
I told him "Fine, it was fine. We played in the park."
He said, "Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
I said, "Nope."
He said, "Well then, can you explain to me why your nose is now located on the left side of your face?".
Damn - he was on to me - so I really had to come up with something good.
Then, from my pea-brain powered mouth came the following gem - "I slipped and hit my nose on a rock as I was rolling down the hill"
Brilliant right?
Not so much.
Eventually, he coaxed the real story out of me and then after admonishing me about the perils of fighting he decided to find a doctor who could put my nose back in the middle of my face.
The folks at the Embassy had some suggestions but it was one of our neighbors who mentioned that they had a connection with the doctor who at the time was known as the "Plastic Surgeon of the Stars".
Never mind that he had a distinct accent and entered the country under mysterious circumstances 24 years earlier - he was the go to guy if you needed your nose fixed.
So, that's how I ended driving though steel gates and into a compound with walls topped with barbed wire which surrounded a converted mansion where the doctor did his work.
He fixed my nose, but I had to wear a silly plaster cast for a few weeks which made me look like Jack Nicholson's character in Chinatown.
Eventually, my nose healed, and I was able to resume normal activities - like breathing.
Looking back all these years later - I am happy to report that the fight in which I got a broken nose was the only fight I ever got into.
