“So Mami’s friends are actors?” I asked my father that afternoon.
“Yes.”
“And Mami is an actor?”
“No, but she’ll sing and play the guitar. Did you know she studied twelve years of piano and guitar at the musical conservatory when she was growing up? And she acted once in a play at the Pedagogical University, directed by her professor Enrique. She was nine months pregnant with you, and she was Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. The play was set during a street protest, so she held placards and banners for the whole thing,” he explained.
He pulled a picture out of a shoebox of my mother at the age of nineteen, wearing cat’s eyeglasses, her hair in a beehive, heavily pregnant, holding up a protest sign.
I put it all together then: the mesmerizing circus woman standing on the galloping white horse I had seen when I was three, the van full of people who radiated a light as strong as the sun, and now this picture of Mami onstage while pregnant with me. It all gave me butterflies of excitement and a little bit of fear. Performing, acting, theatre. Yes, this was it. This was my calling! I was going to be an actor, and nobody and nothing would ever stop me.
“And look, here’s Mami’s uncle and aunt,” Papi said.
The sepia photograph featured two young acrobats in impossible positions, with the caption The Rubber Couple at the top.
“They spent years travelling the northern mining towns with a small circus.”
My stomach flipped, my heart skipped a beat. I dashed to my room, put on my favourite necklace made with the buttons from my abuelita Carmen’s sewing kit, and ran outside, skipping rope in tow. Jumping in front of my house, I beamed and beamed, full of the pictures, full of the actors from the van, full of the woman and the white horse, and a spontaneous internal voice boomed in every chamber of my skull:
“Welcome to the theatre. It will never let you go.”
I surrendered, whooping as I jumped and jumped with my skip rope in the lane of Huacho Copihue, willing my friends to come out and ask what was up so that I could answer with pride, shining button necklace a crest on my chest:
“I will be an actor.”
One of the things that always jarred me about theatre school was its apolitical nature. We were taught everything one needed to know to be a Shakespearean actor and worked like mules until we got it (or didn’t), but nothing was ever said in regards to the purpose of being an actor. Having just come from Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, where art-making was a political act and being an artist came with a huge responsibility to the community, I had crumpled with dismay upon realizing that no one at school—not the teachers, not the students—connected art and politics. Not only that, it was looked down upon to mix the two, which was mind-boggling to me. In contrast to the theatre I had experienced in South America, most notably the Lima curfew players in 1986, in Canada acting seemed to be entirely about fulfilling an individual dream, as opposed to a skill developed in order to serve others. The closest thing to a political statement that I ever heard at theatre school, from peers and the powers that be alike, was the inalienable right to freedom of expression, the right to one’s individuality. This right ignited passionate opinions, although it was always the furthest thing from my mind, as it had never been, and never would be, my bottom line.
I left my political being at the door when I entered theatre school, compartmentalizing my life for the millionth time, and in so doing inadvertently shut off access to the wealth of emotional material I could have drawn from. It was no wonder I couldn’t stay connected onstage: the compartmentalization was so airtight that my very identity was absent from my acting classes. On closing night of my play In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, in 1995, some of the actors admitted to me that they had not believed me when I had talked to them about torture in Chile. They’d been certain that torture only existed in Shakespeare’s plays and that the Nazis were the last to have held people in concentration camps. As part of their research, the director had had me do a presentation and I had produced books, movies, and testimonials. They had considered me a liar—until they read about it in Amnesty International files.
The irony was that the Guatemalan janitor family who cleaned the very floor they rehearsed on were survivors of torture. Mainstream Canadian theatre presented overwhelmingly white, middle-class stories—which almost always dealt with the personal crises of the protagonists, more often than not with no social, political, or historical context—without examining its own privilege. The story my play told, although common to thousands of immigrant Canadians, was so absent from Canadian stages that it was met with incredulity from the very artists presenting it, who could not integrate it until they knew it was backed up by a middle-class, white, liberal organization such as Amnesty International. I decided that one of the reasons I was acquiring theatre skills was to tell the stories of my silenced, isolated, and disbelieved community, the Latino community in exile.
Discovering Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed was such a relief, I likened it to what a desert traveller must feel when coming upon an oasis. I toured the province with the Victoria troupe, even going to Rio de Janeiro, where I performed in a two-hander about family violence with my beloved friend Lucho at Boal’s International Festival of Theatre of the Oppressed. In 1994, six months after graduating from theatre school, I started facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed workshops around Greater Vancouver with a local company, Headlines Theatre. With their support and backing I formed the Latino Theatre Group, made up of anyone from the Latino community who wanted to join, as Theatre of the Oppressed was not for actors but for non-actor community members. The group, meant to be a two-month workshop, endured for eight years. We created and presented twenty-five short plays on issues of concern to the participants, who were almost all political refugees, some of them survivors of torture, others whose parents had disappeared, some who were members of infamous street gangs, and still others who had arrived in Canada on foot from Central America. Our plays were presented on the street, at community centres, at festivals, on the radio, on local TV, at solidarity fundraisers, even in my home to private audiences. Two full-length plays were created. They received runs at the Firehall Arts Centre, a Downtown Eastside theatre, part of whose mission statement is to produce work that reflects the cultural pluralism of Canada.
Although I was learning a great deal about directing non-actors, coaching, and writing through the Latino Theatre Group and the other workshops I facilitated, I still wanted to act in the professional theatre world, no matter the discouraging comments from my mentors. So, in 1995, a few months after the In a Land Called I Don’t Remember production, I wrote a one-woman show entitled Chile Con Carne. It was dramaturged and directed by Governor General’s Award–winning Argentinian-Canadian theatre artist Guillermo Verdecchia, whom I latched on to like a lobster once we met. He was, along with Lucho, the only other professional Latino theatre artist in town.
Chile Con Carne was a dark comedy about the trials and tribulations of an eight-year-old Chilean refugee in Canada in the seventies. The seed for the play had been planted in my first term at theatre school, when I had told the story of the coup on the Performance Lab stage and learned that it had been too personal. I now understood why: the telling of it had been about catharsis. I had been working through trauma onstage. Now I knew that simply recounting a story as part of a healing process was not art, but therapy. Transforming a personal story into universal experience involved a long, gruelling process where one looked for themes, ideas, and form. Once those were found, one chose the content to support them, so that one was not in dialogue with one’s own private pain onstage, but rather presenting a piece of art. That kind of distance from the story could only happen after healing.
Chile Con Carne was a hit and has been produced many times in cities across Canada, as well as Venezuela and Chile in translation, over the years. I was able to bring all the acting skills learned in school and take a risk. I was grounded, embodied, and who
le onstage, while holding the audience’s attention for eighty non-stop minutes. My next acting challenge would be to do the same thing while interpreting someone else’s text, hopefully in a non-stereotypical role. In Vancouver, casts were typically all white, and the roles open to actors of colour were often racist.
All my years of training—including my acting classes since the age of eight—had finally paid off. I was learning to trust myself and my art, and it had brought so much joy to the audience that I was rendered speechless every night. After the show, immigrant Canadians from every corner of the globe waited to tell me in broken voices how much they identified with the character and her story. It was one of the rare times that a refugee story had been told on a professional Vancouver stage in the English language. It was an honour to be a pioneer of sorts. And it was shameful that in a city housing thousands of refugees, its theatre artists had not figured out a way to tell the story more often.
“You have two choices,” he said. “Either you make love to me or I kill you.”
“First of all, it’s not making love, it’s rape. Second of all, if you’re asking me to choose between rape and death, I choose death,” I answered.
“It’s not rape. You were hooking. I fell into your trap. Only a hooker would wear a skirt like that and be sneaking a cigarette in the woods.”
I was silent. Macarena lay face down, hands behind her head, dirt in her mouth and nostrils. He had pulled me away from her, after getting each of us to whisper our name, last name, phone number, and address in his ear (“If either of you changes a detail, I’ll kill you”). He would always know where to find us now, where to look for our family. They’d be murdered at his hand if we ever told anyone about this afternoon, he warned. Now he was brokering the deal with me, away from her ears.
“You’re sure you want to die?”
“I’m positive.”
“Okay. Here’s the thing. I only have one bullet left. So here’s what’s gonna happen. I’ll chop up your cousin into pieces, starting at her feet, moving my way up. I have an axe to do that. Then I’ll put the pieces in a plastic garbage bag and bury her in the forest. This will happen in front of you. Then I’ll shoot you. Actually, maybe I’ll chop you up too. Save the bullet for someone in your family. Maybe your mother. I have your address now, so I can find her.”
“My mother’s in Bolivia.”
“Well, your father then. It’s all the same to me.”
I thought of Papi, locked in his bedroom right now, working on his doctoral thesis in a language he’d only learned a few years ago.
The gun was held to my temple during the negotiations, while I lay face down, fingers interlocked at the base of my skull, his breath hot and sour against my cheek.
“So. What’s your answer?”
“Just kill us. Really. Just kill us.”
He grabbed me by the shirt, dragged me back to Macarena, and dropped me face-down next to her. A sigh of relief broke her silence. I was back.
In the early spring of 1985, when I was seventeen, I got a phone call. After four years, Macarena and I were being contacted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, requesting our presence at a Burnaby police station. Macarena, the shortest sixteen-year-old girl I knew, barely made it on that Sunday at noon, stumbling out of her friend’s car after a night of carousing. No one else in the world knew exactly what we’d been through, only she and I, and so we took care of each other. I went to parties with her and made sure she made it out unscathed, and she never judged my unwavering commitment to being a teetotaller, honour roll student, and imminent MIR militant, preparing for my return to South America so that I could join the underground there. Unable to reach her the night before, I had prayed she’d got the message about the police station.
She arrived with her two best friends, blue-collar white girls from Canadian Communist Party families, regular fixtures at pro-choice and anti-nuke rallies who loved revelry as much as she did. Mami, my four-year-old brother Lalito (the son my mother had with Bob), and my husband-to-be Alejandro accompanied me. He had come to Canada to wait out my final high school year so we could go back south and join the MIR together. I’d met him when I was sixteen and living in Bariloche, Argentina. The MIR had transferred my mother and Bob there from Bolivia to run a safe house and do border runs into Chile through Patagonia. After five years of underground work, the whole family had come back to Canada in 1984, and my mother and Bob had separated shortly thereafter. We’d come close to falling into the hands of the enemy, but that was not deterring me from going back and joining the movement myself.
“You okay?” I whispered in Macarena’s ear after everyone had greeted each other in the parking lot.
She nodded, black eyeliner smudged around her bloodshot eyes. We walked through the police station doors, not knowing what to expect. Inside were about fifty women and girls, sitting and standing in the waiting area, some with parents, others with husbands and babes in arms. I noticed they were all white. A police officer informed us that we were to wait our turn to look at a lineup.
“A lineup?” I asked.
“Yes, you will be asked to identify the Paper Bag Rapist.”
Macarena and I stared at each other.
“You mean you caught him?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
It had been four years since the rape, and although I had never seen him, he lived in me. His voice, his smell, the taste of his saliva, the texture of his skin were imprinted in me, the way one’s first love might be, only that in this case they caused a repulsion so visceral that nausea came up when I conjured his memory with my senses. And yet there was no denying that there was an intimacy to rape, that to be attacked with someone else’s naked body, their sex a weapon, was intimate. To have the opening at your centre split open, to lie in a pool of your vaginal blood, to sweat, to shed tears, to beg the stranger who holds your life in his hands to spare you, to spare your family, to spare your cousin lying next to you, weeping almost inaudibly, while he shoots his semen into your core, was unquestionably intimate.
There was also a beauty in transcending the horror by inhabiting every moment of what I thought was my last afternoon on earth. It was as if I heard birds chirping for the first time on that warm, sunny spring day. The moss against my cheek, the pine needles beneath my calves, the rays of sunshine penetrating through the cedar trees and landing on my skin were wondrous discoveries. There had been enough time to say goodbye to life, to all my loved ones, to the beloved planet Earth, because the attack lasted three hours. I had no idea that having machine guns pointed at me at the age of five would in some ways pale in comparison with the up-close-and-personal, full-frontal assault of a rape, with having the coldest human I’d ever come across put a pistol to my temple with a steady hand and whisper, “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot,” in a mechanical voice. Passion had driven the machine gun–wielding, following-orders soldiers, political purpose behind their actions. Being in the hands of an emotionless man who attacked for no apparent reason was somehow far more chilling. Political violence was a concept that I got; senseless violence left me with nothing to excuse him with.
When he’d entered me with the force of a knife plunging into warm flesh, my spirit had shot like a laser out of my body through the crown of my head, landing near the top of a cedar tree. Caught in the branches, it had looked down at the white back of a grown man moving rhythmically over a brown girl, her face covered with her white cotton blouse, another brown girl lying amongst the ferns, face buried in the earth, hair covered in moss and twigs, fingers locked behind her head, body shaking like the tremors in Chile. A robin had perched next to my spirit hanging from those branches, a sheet blowing in the breeze. Its song sent my spirit soaring into the blue sky, where a bald eagle coasted on the wind. My spirit, white shroud, had landed on the back of that eagle, and had gone for the ride of its life, the white houses of the courts below, the brick-coloured diagonal roofs of the dwellings a Lego set, the Pacific Ocean lick
ing the land, the snow-capped mountains, the Lions Gate Bridge a hologram of the Golden Gate, the canopy of the trees protecting the rapist and his victims, imperceptible now from this great height, the domain of absolute silence. I’d wanted to stay there forever, but I knew I had to go back. I had to return for Macarena, for my family who would die of grief and guilt if I didn’t enter my body again.
The eagle flew higher and higher in a large circle and I hung on to its neck with all my might. Far away, I could hear moaning. It wasn’t sexual, it was the kind of moaning one hears when someone is in agony. A dull, low scream through clenched teeth. In the infinite distance I could feel a pain so brutal, it was impossible to stay present for it. Did he have a knife? Was that what he was using? It hurt like a blade reaching up between my legs, tearing through my axis, hacking at my insides, splitting me in two. It was so far away now, that torment, but I could still feel it, across the realms that I had crossed to escape it, I could still hear the moaning, in spite of the silent kingdom that I was now queen of, flying with that eagle, my arms spread out over his wings now, trying to ignore the murmur in my ear that kept telling me to moan sexily, that it was embarrassing to mewl like a calf being slaughtered. What would he think, this man with the gun? I tried to blot out that voice by yelling, “Woo-hoo!” into the imperturbable sky, the eagle diving now while I tried to hang on to its feathers, but losing my grip, slipping from its back and clinging to the tip of one of its wings, the knife a pestle now, my pelvic basin the mortar where my womb was being ground up, shredded, no mysterious corner or virtuous crevice left untouched.
The eagle changed directions as it dove, and I hung on with my teeth now, my jaw clamping down with all its might, the wind filling my spirit, a sail on the open ocean. “You wanna go for another spin?” the eagle asked me. And I tried to answer yes, yes, let’s go for a spin again, but I couldn’t because my teeth and jaw needed to clamp on to the tip of its wing. It spread its wings farther, and I fell.
Mexican Hooker #1 Page 14
