PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2016 Carmen Aguirre
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Aguirre, Carmen, 1967–, author
Mexican hooker #1 : and my other roles since the revolution / Carmen Aguirre.
ISBN 978-0-345-81384-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81386-2
1. Aguirre, Carmen, 1967–. 2. Dramatists, Canadian (English)—21st century—Biography. 3. Rape victims—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
PS8601.G86Z85 2016 C812′.6 C2015-905922-4
Cover images: (wall background) © RoyStudio.eu / Shutterstock.com;
(flowers) © Irina Mishina / iStockphoto.com
v3.1
For my parents
I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing. I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.
—WARSAN SHIRE
excerpt from the poem
“Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgements
Permissions
About the Author
ONE
It all went down in the church basement on Forty-Ninth Avenue, South Vancouver, after the voice teacher instructed me to drop my back ribs. It had been a month since I’d started theatre school and learned the importance of that particular set of bones, and maybe a week since I’d begun trying to grasp the concept of succumbing to the floor. As I lay there, I imagined carrying my ribs in a bag, upturning the contents.
“Let your hip sockets go,” she intoned.
Which made sense, this being a church and all. Fingers placed on my solar plexus, she instructed me to exhale.
Hip sockets. Before Labour Day, I’d never heard the term and envisioned electrical sockets whenever it came up, numerous times a day.
“Drop, let go, drop, let go, drop, let go,” I repeated to myself, reaching for breath over and over again, pushing my back down, willing the electrons coursing through my body to somehow plug or unplug into the alleged sockets.
I knew I was doing it all wrong. You weren’t supposed to push the breath, you were supposed to let it be. The Beatles song popped into my mind.
“Focus, you idiot,” I thought.
I was twenty-two years old, this was voice class 101, I had three years to go, and I planned on acing theatre school, landing on the honour roll, like I had in high school.
My classmates sat cross-legged in a circle around me, the sacrificial lamb splayed belly up. The instructions continued.
“Take a risk.”
Take a risk. I had taken many risks in my life thus far, most notably while being in the Chilean resistance a mere eighteen months earlier, but I was to take another kind of risk, and I had no way to measure, weigh, or determine what it looked like. Deaf, dumb, and blind, I groped my way through the forest, grasping for a new definition of a concept so familiar to me in another hemisphere, south of the equator, a world where the constellations were different and spring had just begun.
“What is the worst thing that can happen if you just let go?” she asked.
I knew the right answer. Nothing. ’Cause the floor is there to catch you. The floor as open arms. Not as dispenser of bruises, breaker of bones. My hip sockets gripped. Instead of releasing. They clung to my pelvic bone, and I started to shake, a leaf at the mercy of an electrical storm. My body leapt up, hit by a bolt of lightning, and landed back down again. I wondered if my hair had gone wild like Medusa’s. Keeping my eyes shut, I surrendered to the surge, battered white flag flapping in the air. Completely pathetic. Out of control. Right. That’s what was required. Loss of control. Right.
“Let it out on sound,” she ordered. “Open your mouth. Out on sound,” she repeated forcefully.
There was only one sound we were to use in voice class 101, and it was the sound we’d uttered when we were expelled from the womb and took our first breath.
“Aaaaahhh.”
The aaaahhh escaped my mouth, tears poured down the sides of my face, and the shaking grew worse.
I had only been back in Canada for six months, after four harrowing years in Argentina, where my sole reason to live was the Cause. I had made many incursions into Pinochet’s Chile during that time, on buses, in cars, and on planes, sometimes flown by my then-husband Alejandro and me. Border runs, they were called. We carried goods for the underground and harboured resistance members in our home in Neuquén, Argentina. I had returned to Vancouver to go to acting school and planned to go back to South America as soon as I graduated to pursue a career in the theatre. Canada, where I’d grown up in exile after the coup in Chile, had not felt like home since I was a child, and there was too much going on in the South for me to miss out on. Although I spoke perfect English and was bicultural to the core, my heart ached for home, and I was not sure how I would survive the next three years away from that Southern Cone, the towering Andes Mountains a seam, the long country of my birth lying stoically in wait for the explosive Pacific to swallow it whole.
“Keep your back on the floor.”
But I couldn’t. The shaking intensified.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“He’s got a gun,” I answered through chattering teeth.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I replied, impressed at her ability to decipher that I was having a childhood flashback.
Fuelled by adrenalin, I ran through the coniferous forest, oblivious to the branches whipping my face, the underbrush drawing beads of blood from my shins. Shafts of light penetrated the tops of the towering rainforest trees as I tore my way through the dense greenery, carrying my sandals in my trembling hand, the soles of my bare feet pounding the pine needle–covered ground. A plane flew overhead, a jogger panted on a trail nearby, the sounds of traffic grew louder.
“What’s happening now?” the teacher asked, my inhalations wind in the sails of my undoing.
“We’re alive!” I yelled back. “We’re alive.”
I could hear my cousin Macarena, twelve years old, covered in bits of moss, twigs in her tangled hair, right behind me. The woods spit us out onto University Boulevard, on Vancouver’s west side, cars racing past. Her face was smeared with dirt, snot, and tears. Tears flowed from my eyes as well, and I was shaking too hard to put my sandals back on.
“Stop!” I yelled at the cars. “Stop!”
But nobody would.
Macarena and I broke into a run again.
The exorcising electrocution
in the church basement went on for the rest of the class. By the time my back ribs were fossilized onto the crust of the earth and I had the flexible hip sockets of a marionette, two hours had passed. My classmates witnessed in silence. Coached up to sitting, I opened my eyes and met the steady gaze of my peers, the circle of them breathing together like a great furry beast. I held eye contact with each and every one of them, as the teacher instructed.
Released from class, I skipped down Forty-Ninth Avenue, woo-hooing at the top of my lungs, arms outstretched, head thrown back, taking in the Indian summer sky. It was September 1990, and Laura Ashley baby doll dresses worn with black tights were all the rage. My beat-up Sally Ann combat boots, however, were most incongruous with my Sound-of-Music behaviour.
Not only did I feel a million pounds lighter, I had mastered the concept of giving in to the floor and would no doubt get an A in voice class 101.
As for the childhood rape that had come to the surface, always present, never dealt with, it was clear as day that it was now cast out from my body, never to come back and bother me again, the way an unruly drunk is unceremoniously thrown onto a sidewalk from a nightclub door. The way an insurrection brings an oppressive system to its knees, expelling the culprit from a country, a continent, an entire hemisphere, or, in this case, a body: mine.
Nine months earlier, in December 1989, my mother and I had joined a crowd of ten thousand people on Buenos Aires’s Avenida de Mayo to hear Tomás Borge, founding member of the Sandinistas, former political prisoner, and minister of the interior for Sandinista Nicaragua, speak to the Argentinian left. Two elections loomed that night: the Nicaraguan, to be held in February 1990, and the Chilean, days away.
In 1970, Chile had become one of the first countries in the world to elect a Marxist president, Salvador Allende. He had gone on to implement socialist change through agrarian reform, literacy campaigns, land takeovers by Indigenous peasants, and nationalization of the world’s biggest copper mine. The last had prompted Nixon and Kissinger to mastermind the coup, along with the Chilean bourgeoisie. On September 11, 1973, the new, Allende-appointed commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Augusto Pinochet, headed the overthrow. The air force bombed the presidential palace, Allende died, and thousands ended up being murdered, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, or were exiled.
Now, after seventeen years, Pinochet was about to step down, but the revolutionary change we had struggled for was not to be. Pinochet’s neo-liberal system would remain intact and Chile would be idolized on the world stage as a “democratic” nation where deregulated capitalism had not only overthrown socialism but done away with every last vestige of it. University education, once superb and publicly funded, had been privatized, social programmes demolished, and the country’s state-owned resources sold to multinationals. As for the resistance, it had pretty much dissolved in the year leading up to the December 1989 election. The revolution had been lost. We had fought through the eighties not only to topple Pinochet’s infamous dictatorship, known around the globe for its gross violations of human rights, but also to pick up where Allende had left off. The difference being that this time socialism would happen through armed struggle, as the coup and its aftermath had proven that the peaceful way to build and defend a socialist society was not yet viable.
As Mami and I awaited Tomás Borge’s appearance at that Buenos Aires rally, I chewed on the fact that the struggle was lost in the macro, as it was in the micro. The indisputable, mortifying evidence of my own monumental failing as a revolutionary was allowing myself to be swallowed whole by the mainstream persona so carefully cultivated as a cover during my years in the underground. When the resistance disintegrated, shortly after my separation from Alejandro, I kept my permed, highlighted hair and my cutting-edge-of-eighties-fashion wardrobe, and threw myself into the lifestyle of a super-privileged, apolitical Argentinian youth. There was no more double life. All was lost. None of it was meant to be. So I laid down my arms and surrendered to the role of mainstream basketball girlfriend to my new boyfriend Estéban, a player in the professional league. I moved from Neuquén, the capital city of a province that bordered Chile, where I’d led my double life of petit bourgeois English teacher and classless underground worker, to Santa Fe, Estéban’s hometown in northeastern Argentina. There, I’d capitulated to the shiny veneer of basketball games, high-end discos, and conversations that centred around the latest celebrity gossip, crash diets, and Hollywood blockbuster films.
Ultimately, though, my succumbing to what I saw as a superficial, meaningless existence was a total bust, because it left me feeling hollow, lonely, and disconnected from my true self. Not only was I a failed revolutionary, I was now also an abysmal basketball girlfriend, weeping incessantly due to my intense grief, causing Estéban great frustration, stress, and anguish. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t just be happy following his dreams, like the rest of the wives and girlfriends were.
After my year of failing to find fulfillment as a basketball girlfriend, to my great relief my mother swooped in and saved me from that life, if only for a short while. Together, we wound up standing on the cobblestone Buenos Aires avenue, surrounded by throngs of activists waving banners that covered the broad spectrum of the left, from the Communist Party to the Teachers’ Union to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their white scarves, dedicated to looking for Argentina’s thirty thousand disappeared.
Sweat poured down my face on that muggy night. I was wearing a Fiorucci white, stretch-denim micro-miniskirt, cork platform heels, door-knocker earrings, full makeup, and huge hair. To say I stood out was an understatement, as many of those present had come from the shantytowns, and the middle-class activists wore hippie attire. Mami stood next to me looking very much like a refined señora, in a prim white skirt with matching shoes and purse. We had carefully chosen our spot, at the very back of the throng, on the outskirts of the masses, and taken note of all the possible getaway points if and when the repression began, including a couple of cafés a few feet away that we could slip into.
It was my first time participating in a rally in the South. The last time my mother had been to one in this hemisphere, it was the marches in support of Allende, before the coup in Chile. It had been two years since we’d seen each other, back when it seemed like revolutionary change was still possible, before I’d met Estéban, when I’d been operating the safe house in Neuquén and doing border runs with Alejandro. Over the last year of self-imposed exile, I’d had minimal contact with her and the rest of my family. When I’d seen her disembark from the plane at Santa Fe airport a week earlier, the turbines whipping her hair, I’d run across the tarmac once she reached the bottom of the airplane stairs and fallen into her outstretched arms, the way I had when I was a preschooler after my first day at daycare. The sweltering, humid Santa Fe summer had her instantly wiping beads of perspiration from her brow, and our damp embrace was long and hard, my nostrils flaring with the familiar scent of Mami. We’d made our way hand in hand to Estéban’s waiting Fiat, where we began catching up on all the family gossip and the political state of the world—Nicaragua was hanging on despite the Contras, the final offensive in El Salvador could triumph, Gorbachev was spearheading necessary, overdue change in the Soviet Union seemingly without compromising socialism, the Palestinians’ intifada was an inspiration to oppressed people all over the world, South Africa’s apartheid state was becoming more and more isolated due to the international boycott—before boarding a bus to Buenos Aires, where we continued our session during the six-hour ride. Best girlfriends, we had always shared our thoughts, questions, dreams, opinions, and given each other advice. Nothing was off limits, except the rape. That was the one thing we didn’t speak of.
I kept my arms crossed and face perfectly still as the crowd chanted its slogans around me. It was a given that members of Argentina’s former underground guerrilla movements, the Montoneros and Revolutionary People’s Army, were at the rally, but they’d be hoping to go unnoticed and wouldn’
t be caught dead waving a flag. Beating on drums, jumping up and down, the crowd hushed when Tomás Borge finally appeared. He arrived on the makeshift stage wearing his green fatigues, the uniform of the Sandinista government. As Nicaraguan minister of the interior, he was commander of the war against the US-backed Contras, which had already claimed thirty thousand lives. During the Somoza dictatorship, he’d been severely tortured and made to witness the rape and murder of his wife, Yelba Mayorga. In his youth he’d gone to law school, and credited John Steinbeck’s writings, among others, for forming his revolutionary consciousness. A friend of Che Guevara, he’d fought in the mountains of Nicaragua and contracted leprosy, like many of the guerrilla fighters. He was a prolific and respected writer, and in one of his most famous poems, “My Personal Revenge,” he told his torturers that instead of jail, he hoped a socialist society with schools for all and streets free of beggars would shake the sorrow from their eyes.
When he opened his mouth that day, his message was so clear that a stunned silence fell over the crowd:
“Unite. The great lesson of the twentieth century for the left is this: Unite. Right now.”
Murmurs and shouts rippled their way through the multitude and a new chant erupted:
“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” (The people united will never be defeated.)
It was a simultaneously heartbreaking and joyous moment, to hear that rallying cry, born during Allende’s Chile, here, in Buenos Aires. We were about to enter the last decade of the twentieth century, the century that had proven neo-colonialism and capitalism could be defeated, as had been the case in Cuba, Nicaragua, and much of Europe, Asia, and Africa—even in Chile for a short while. The chant, a tsunami surging over the crowd now, was both tribute to a dream and eulogy for a loss.
Camera crews were everywhere, recording the event. It was an out-of-body experience, to stand there openly, surrounded by like-minded people—dared I say comrades?—to be a part of what I’d ached for during my years of total isolation in the underground followed by my Santa Fe escape. Even though I was still an outsider—standing on the margins in an outfit beyond ridiculous for the occasion, hair going limp, makeup melting off, not chanting, not holding a banner, not standing in the first row clapping, whistling, and cheering at every word Borge uttered—my jaw trembled with emotion. The chant reached its crescendo. Men with cameras took our picture and we let them. Who knew if there was anything to lose anymore, after so much had already been lost? Who knew if those pictures would come back to haunt Mami and me? Who cared anymore? We didn’t seem to. Argentina was falling, falling hard, into the worst economic crisis in its history, Chile would remain staunchly neo-liberal, Panama was about to be invaded by the USA—which would murder thousands of poor civilians and test chemical weapons they would use a year later on Iraqis during the Gulf War—but Nicaragua was still hanging on. Little did we know on that night that the image of ten thousand leftists chanting “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” would become the symbol of a bygone era. The Sandinistas would lose the elections and within two years the Soviet bloc would fall, the overarching triumph of deregulated capitalism ushering in the 1990s.
Mexican Hooker #1 Page 1
