I drove back north blasting NoElVezSi, El Vez’s latest album, first drafts of Cojones or Bust and The Trigger in my laptop, bursting with gratitude for how much Los Angeles had fed my soul and my art. Wildfires burned on both sides of the Interstate 5 freeway, and I gunned it through the smoke.
ELEVEN
“You’re still a virgin,” my best friend Amber told me in the girls’ washroom the day after the rape.
“You will be a virgin until you do it with someone you want, because you want to, because you love them.”
Sage words spoken by a grade eight girl labelled white trash by the more privileged sectors of University Hill Secondary School society.
My father had ordered me to stay in bed for a week, and I had responded with:
“I’m not sick.”
Shoulders hunched, Adam’s apple quivering, my shell-shocked Papi had shrugged and gone to his gardening job at UBC’s botanical garden. The rapist hadn’t killed me, he’d made me stronger, so I’d walked to school by myself, books held tight against my chest, humming Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” along the way. The song had been playing on LG73 when my clock radio went off that morning at 7 a.m. I’d placed Air Supply’s “Lost in Love” on the turntable during breakfast, swallowing hard, flanked by posters of Che Guevara (“Until the Final Victory Always”), Fidel Castro (“A Revolution is a Struggle to the Death between the Future and the Past”), Salvador Allende on the day of the coup holding the AK-47 given to him by Fidel, and Miguel Enríquez, the leader of the MIR who had died in combat a year after the coup (“Only Revolution Will Free Us”). If they were brave enough to do what each of them had done, then I was strong enough to go to school. I’d thought of Bob, held prisoner at the National Stadium, of Uncle Boris, arrested in Valparaíso, of all my aunts and uncles in the Chilean community who had survived imprisonment, torture, assassinations and disappearances of loved ones, exile. If they were able to get up every morning and go scrub floors, then I could face this new day without crumbling. I imagined Macarena, also alone, en route to University Hill Elementary School down the way, where she was in grade six.
I filed Amber’s wise words for later contemplation. Hailing from Trail, BC, she was a rocker chick who loved to swear as much as I did. She and her single dad had moved to the courts after her father enrolled at UBC. In charge of housework, Amber kept their place spotless, was a straight-A student, and went to Bible study on Sundays. On Friday and Saturday nights she partied.
Many afternoons were spent swimming at UBC’s aquatic centre, dancing in her living room to Blondie’s “Call Me” and Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls,” and walking around the courts singing. Rough Trade’s “High School Confidential” was our top choice, Santana’s “Winning” and Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” close contenders for second place. Whenever we walked by Cedar, I wondered if the postcards of Lucho’s uncle Alejandro Avalos Davidson and Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, the disappeared actress, still hung from his branch. I hadn’t climbed Cedar since becoming a teenager, and this filled me with loneliness and yearning. He was still my secret tree. I hadn’t told Amber about him, for fear she wouldn’t understand the extent of what his refuge had meant to me. Amber, like most of my school and neighbourhood friends, was in the dark about the details of my parallel life, the one led in the Chilean exile community.
When Kim Carnes came to UBC’s Thunderbird Stadium, Amber and I were in the stands, in heels (mine bought at Zellers with my paper route wages, hers shoplifted from Eaton’s), full makeup and crimped hair, singing along to “Bette Davis Eyes,” another one of our chart toppers. Amber was warm, funny, and smart, and knew how to embrace suffering.
“So if anybody asks, you’ll tell them you’re a virgin,” she said now.
Holding my shoulders against the washroom wall, she nailed me with her fierce green gaze, her determined eyes lit up by the sun pouring through the window directly above my head.
“You hear me? You hear me?” she demanded.
I nodded. Although it had only occurred the previous afternoon, the story was already on the front page of the paper, the school on alert. It was 8:45 in the morning, and five minutes later, when the bell went off for second block, the classrooms would belch hundreds of students into the hallway.
“Besides, it’s nobody’s fuckin’ business, and you’ll keep your head up and walk these brutal halls like the Chilean queen you are, you hear?”
She took my hand in hers and sang the “Winning” lyrics under her breath as we emerged together from the bathroom.
She was preparing me for the aftermath, which I was yet to understand would never end, for I didn’t know one doesn’t get over childhood rape, one simply learns how to integrate it.
She guided my dismantled bag of bones through the treacherous hallways, the pain between my noodle legs so great I had to widen my gait, the front layer of my body disintegrated, innards exposed, organs on display, heart floating in front of me, a Chinese lantern in the night, breath shallow in my chopped-open chest, the axe now lodged in my sternum, the contents of my womb scooped out and discarded like the pulp and seeds of a pumpkin, the knife still inserted in my pubis, my disembodied head, a balloon floating above me, trying to make sense of it all, a knot the size of a peach pit in my throat.
We passed the biology and chemistry teachers, ex–frat boys in their late twenties. They stopped in their tracks and looked at me, forced smiles on their faces.
“Carmen! How are you?” asked the chemistry teacher.
His hands, a magician’s doves, escaped from the pockets of his lab coat, as if to caress my arm, and he plunged them straight back in, nipping his tender impulse in the bud. My lantern heart contracted, the aftermath hitting me like a block of cement dropped from a great height.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I answered.
Amber, a Parthenon pillar, stood next to me.
“We just wanted to say that if you need anything, we are here for you, okay?” stammered the biology teacher, his eyes wide behind his John Lennon specs.
“Okay.”
The conversation came to a crashing halt and they moved on.
The school had been informed by the police first thing in the morning that the Paper Bag Rapist had attacked one of its students in the adjacent woods, and my father had phoned to let the principal know I was the victim referred to in the paper and to ask if the counsellor could please talk to me. She called me into her office when she saw me standing on the front steps, facing the head of Fairview trail, Tommy by my side. Sitting across from me, she’d spoken of experiences that life sends us so that we can learn something. Five years later, when I took the MIR oath in a Lima café while bombs went off around me, the Terror sending me into a shaking fit, my superior, Juan, would take my arm and reassure me with a similar statement:
“Any experience is good, comrade. Any experience is good.”
The counsellor spoke about the death of her husband, how that experience had taught her something, and said that the rape experience would teach me something too. After a long silence, she’d asked:
“How do you feel?”
“It hurts,” was all I was able to come up with.
I had meant it in the literal sense, for sitting down was painful.
As I’d imagined the previous afternoon, Tommy had been practising on his new drum set during the attack. I’d called him late on Sunday night and asked him to meet me at eight the following morning at the school.
“I have a class,” he’d said.
“Skip it. I’m calling from the police station.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t commit a crime. But I have to tell you something.”
“All right.”
Degradations had competed against each other that Sunday night. First off, when the trail had spit Macarena and I out onto University Boulevard, none of the cars we flagged had stopped. This was the beginning of the aftermath. The possibility that no one would come
to our aid had never crossed my mind, the prospect that a crime of this magnitude would be ignored inconceivable to me. As far as I was concerned, when two young girls covered in dirt, tears pouring down their filthy, distorted faces, one of them with bloodstains in the crotch area of her white skirt, waved at you to stop, you stopped. But no one did.
“Let’s run,” I finally said to Macarena.
I’d managed to get my shirt back on, haphazardly doing up the buttons with my shaking fingers. Time being of the essence, I’d grabbed my sandals and run without putting them on. I held them in my trembling hands now. Barefoot, we ran west, panting and wailing, the cars still whizzing by. Neither of us knew where we were running to, only what we were running from: the rapist, wherever he hid. Free from him now, out in the open, those indifferent cars were also our unwitting saviours, for surely he wouldn’t careen out of the woods and pull us back in full sight of the vehicles, apathetic but witnesses all the same.
After the rape, during which I had not counted to thirty, as I’d promised myself, but had instead gone for a precarious spin on the black wing of that eagle, I’d come crashing down into my body with the force of a grand piano dropped from the balcony of a penthouse suite. Lying there, ivory keys dislodged, spring-steel strings cut and flailing, ebony rim split as if by a deranged axe, I’d reached for breath through my blouse-turned-blindfold. No longer pinned down by his weight, I was free to shake now. And so I’d shaken as if my naked body were lying on the tundra permafrost in the dead of winter, not the bed of the temperate rainforest on the first hot day of the year.
“I’m still gonna kill you both. I don’t trust ya. You’re gonna tell everyone, ’cause girls have big mouths. So I’m gonna kill you anyway.”
The shaking had grown in intensity. I wondered if I looked as though I were having an epileptic fit.
After interminable moments, he’d said:
“You’re gonna count to two hundred. Out loud. Both of you.”
We could hear him tearing through the forest as we counted. Dead silence followed when we were done. Lying there for an eternity, we didn’t dare move, for fear he’d jump out from behind a tree again, demanding to know where we were going, gun in one hand, axe in the other. Sounds reached me from afar: the singing of the robin perched on the cedar branch above, the susurrus of the leaves of the birch trees, the number 10 bus’s door flapping open, the jogger panting on the trail nearby (or was it him?), the sound of the bullet that would never be shot ringing in my eardrums.
“Are you there?” Macarena asked in a small voice.
“Yes.”
“What should we do?” she asked in Spanish, the language of rebellion. When we’d spoken it at the beginning of the attack, he’d threatened to kill us because he couldn’t understand what we were saying.
“Run. Run for it.”
I yanked the shirt off my face, my pupils contracting when the sun pouring through the trees reached my eyes at the speed of light, my chest expanding to the rhythm of my first inhalation, oxygen filling every lobe of my lungs. I scrambled to my knees and pulled on my crumpled clothes as Macarena unbraided her fingers from the back of her head, placed her palms on the forest floor, and looked up. Our eyes met for a brief moment, a tidal wave of love crashed onto the shores of my broken heart, flooding all its vacant chambers, and fresh tears poured down both our faces. I placed my hands on her shoulders and said:
“We’re going to run. Towards the sound of the bus. It means we’re closer to University Boulevard. So we’re going to run. As fast as we can.”
I led the way, through spiderwebs and ferns, salmonberry and holly bushes, the sound of the traffic my magnetic north, heart at full gallop, listening for that shot aiming at the backs of our heads, whizzing through the cottonwoods, elders, firs, birches, and cedars.
Now we were running along University Boulevard in the opposite direction of the impervious cars, and through the tears, through the horror and terror, I started to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed while the blood trickled down my inner thighs, and I didn’t care if I peed.
“This is no laughing matter!” yelled Macarena.
To which I answered:
“Macarena, we’re alive! We’re alive! We’re alive!”
To feel the warm cement slapping the bottoms of my bare feet, to see the light of day again, to know that our parents would not have to spend the rest of their lives looking for us while we lay in pieces at the bottom of the forest, to understand that death, though inevitable, had not come for us yet, filled me with elation.
“Excuse me, sir, we’ve just been raped and we need to use your phone,” I told the poor man who watered his plants outside his modest brick house on Presidents Row, now watering his shoes.
I’d left bloodstains on their white couch after he and his wife invited us in. She’d offered us water as he called the police station. Then they’d driven us there. Chris and Mark, the same cops we’d seen when we’d come upon the soccer game, were waiting for us at the door to the station, around the corner from the Lucky Dollar. I was filled with shame that they were seeing me like this.
While one of them pounded out our answers to his questions (“Where did this happen? What did he look like?”) on a typewriter, the other one phoned our parents. Meanwhile, the couple left, pale as ghosts, eyes wide like the moon that would rise in the sky later that night.
I answered the questions (“Fairview trail. We never saw him”) as best I could, though the shaking that had begun during the attack grew even worse now, as though I were being electrocuted. Minutes later, my father, my sister, and Macarena’s mother and brother walked into the station.
“What’s happening?” asked my disoriented father.
“Your daughters—” one of the cops started to answer.
“I was raped,” I took over in Spanish.
Papi, a soft-spoken man, took a good look at my pulverized face and body, pounded his fist onto the counter, and yelled at the top of his lungs,
“Mierda!”
Ale came to me and tried to hug me through my shaking seizure. My cousin Gonzalo stared at the wall with all his might and swallowed, over and over again. Shock immobilized Aunt Tita, a woman known for taking the bull by the horns in any given situation. Macarena cried and cried.
“It’s okay, everyone. It’s okay,” I reassured my family through chattering teeth.
While Macarena stayed behind to answer more questions, I was taken to UBC hospital, where I was laid on a gurney and a nurse took my hand.
“How do you feel?” she asked, the kindness in her eyes so disarming that my solar plexus released and a fountain of fresh tears poured down the sides of my face.
“It hurts down there.” My voice broke for the first time.
“I know,” she responded, eyes fixed on mine, never letting go of my hand, keeping the safe bubble she’d created intact.
We were in the bustling hallway of Emergency, and she just kept gripping my hand, never diverting her pupils—the axis of the world spinning around us—from mine. A few minutes later, after they found out UBC hospital didn’t possess a rape kit, I was put into the back seat of the police car and driven to Vancouver General Hospital. The emergency room was packed when we arrived, and the officer yelled out:
“We’ve got a rape case here!”
Everyone turned to look at me, with my bloodstained skirt. Still carrying my sandals in my trembling hands, I walked with the cop and my father down a white hallway, the floor cold on the bare soles of my feet, the fluorescent lighting dull on our skin, my stunned father next to me, eyes on the ground. I swallowed down my tears and held my head up high for both of us.
I was placed on my back, naked on a hospital bed, feet in stirrups. An older male doctor wearing a suit, no doctor’s coat, placed a clamp in my vagina, to stretch it open, and scooped out the rapist’s semen. My spirit clung by its claws to the ceiling, giving me a bird’s-eye view of the scene. The doctor put the evidence, which included the ra
pist’s pubic hairs he’d found on my labia, in little containers—the “rape kit”—held up by a nurse. Neither one of them ever acknowledged my existence. They compared notes while they looked at my vagina, talked about my broken hymen. They gave me a shot, handed me a small plastic bag of clothes from the Salvation Army—the police would be keeping my own—and left the room.
The bag contained black polyester bell-bottoms with a broken zipper and a black turtleneck. There were no underpants. I took note that they were seventies clothes, out of fashion, “tacky,” as my boyfriend Tommy would say, but not in the ironic way, for I was not a rich white kid playing poor, I was a brown refugee kid who had just been raped, made to wear embarrassingly out-of-style clothing.
I put them on and waited in the room for what felt like an hour. I thought about Mami, in Bolivia. I remembered her smile, her embrace, her benevolent eyes. My abuelita’s soft voice filled my ears, my abuelito’s proud gaze. The shaking stopped and warmth and calmness set in. I remembered the shafts of sun piercing the branches of the trees when I tore off the blindfold. A sigh escaped my mouth.
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