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Blueberries

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by Ellena Savage


  15 February 2017

  They say that eyewitnesses are unreliable. Stories are told of rape survivors who made sure to rigorously study their attacker’s face during the assault for later identification. On this compelling evidence, innocent men are said to languish in jail until they are freed on the back of new DNA test results. Often this story is the story of a white victim and a black perpetrator, and it speaks to cross-racial blindness, or it speaks to structural racism and white women’s complicity in it. Other times this story is about the memorisation act, about how every memory, once recalled, becomes a re-remembrance, a new memory made, mildly altered from an earlier version.

  ‘Were they black?’ The (white) police officer had asked me.

  ‘No. White,’ I said. White and rich.

  I gave the detectives the scrap on which Tomas and Salvator had inscribed their email addresses.

  ‘What were you wearing?’

  Do they ask that question to victims of theft?

  These were early social media days—hi5, something like that—and it wasn’t as simple as jotting a name into a search engine. But, with the email addresses, Salvator’s profile soon emerged, and with it, pictures of him surrounded by his friends. One picture, shot from below, showed a group of teens huddled in a circle.

  —That’s him. With the big white mouth, celebrity teeth.

  I sat in the back of a police car as we backtracked. ‘Where did this happen?’ an officer asked as we drove along the banks of the Tagus to its mouth, then along the beach. Then, a right. ‘Around here?’

  —Feels right.

  —Felt. Awful.

  And then a family of high-rise apartments with anonymous faces. ‘Take your time,’ the woman detective said to me. I took my time. But still, it was impossible to say with authority which apartment had been the apartment.

  The detectives returned to the site with photos printed from Salvator’s profile. Showed them round the neighbourhood. ‘Do you know these men?’ they asked. And then, a day or two later, I was called in to identify them.

  I braced myself for the first of the two line-ups. Salvator was easy. Unusually handsome and unusually unperturbed by the situation. The sight of him filled me with rage. And fear.

  —Yes, you were afraid.

  Then, the Tomas line-up: I knew who it was I was supposed to be identifying, the only one in the line of young men who vaguely resembled my memory of Tomas. But somehow, my memory of him, only a few days old, was totally altered. Amorphous in my imagination, he had become a composite of faces I already knew, erasing all of Tomas. But I saw in his face the look of fear, and identified it. Tomas was the dark-haired boy who looked like he had been crying.

  —Even you had been holding it together.

  —What entitled him to his tears?

  I walked quickly from the dark ID closet into an open room that resembled a classroom—which I now remember, as if in a dream, as an actual classroom—dropped my head and sobbed. The male detective who had accompanied me throughout this allowed my tears for a moment, and then he said, ‘You know, I’ve done this for a long time, and I’ve talked to those boys, and they’re just dumb kids. They’re not the monsters we usually deal with here.’

  To this day, I have never met a monster.

  —You haven’t?

  —Is she lucky for that?

  16 February 2017

  While waiting for the Skype call to go through to Cristina’s office, I absent-mindedly write in my notebook:

  THIS IS MY STORY. YET I CANNOT FIND THE DOCUMENTS.

  THEY ARE MINE.

  I’m navigating yet another obstacle separating me from attaining a simple slice of hot photocopied paper. That paper contains the information I need to move on. Move on: no. That’s not right.

  —Move on. Move along, please. Is what police officers say when the public is being public. Too emotional too curious too badly behaved.

  I mean. I am not an idiot. I understand that just because something happened to me doesn’t mean that the suppressions of time and the failures of memory and the most human of all errors, bureaucratic filing systems, should somehow suspend themselves and consort to deliver me exactly what I’m looking for.

  It does not escape me, either, that what I’m looking for doesn’t exist. I want a copy of the investigation, which has been archived for ten years and is seemingly impossible to dredge up; I want to find out how Salvator and Tomas described the events in their words, if only to scoff at their lies; I want to know what judgement concluded the trial, if only to suffer through a not-guilty verdict. But none of this really matters. None of this pushes the factory reset button, or assists my interior life, except to make me remember things my body has buried.

  —What happened to you, really?

  A moment of consciousness is just a fraction of time.

  —It is all, a moment, you have.

  But its material is made of every fraction that came before it, and its presence will predict the substance of all future fractions.

  When I was a uni student, years ago, I edited the student newspaper. That kind of job unsurprisingly attracts meetings with all kinds of fringe types. Once, a middle-aged woman wearing loose denim came in, sat on the couch across from me, and said, coyly: ‘I have a story. It’s big.’

  ‘Oh? What is it?’

  ‘The government,’ she said, ‘NASA, the AFL, Iraq. It’s all connected. And I have the evidence to prove it.’

  It was difficult, I remember, to get her out of the office without causing offence. With each gentle dismissal, she heard an encouragement. When finally the woman left, she promised to send us her evidence, which she said was kept in a storage unit somewhere secret. Evidence that it’s all connected. She went away and we never heard from her again.

  —It is all connected, though. Truly.

  When we say that a narrative is, or is not, someone’s ‘story to tell’, what we unwittingly suggest is that when the story is yours, as in, it happened within time as you directly experience it, you are given some power over it. Is this the biggest betrayal of pop psychology via talk therapy? That in language a person can find sufficient tools to erect a life undisturbed by demons? Or the thought, even, that a person can comprehend what it is they have lived through.

  —Survivors of all things, always trying to reconstruct the moment they survived through.

  —Strange, though, that even as you narrate it, you get to the horror point, and you think, this time, it’ll go differently. But the film reel keeps playing through, all the way, and, whoosh: powerless.

  Tomorrow, I am taking a train out to the suburban court where my file is archived. I think. It’s hard to say, really. I’ll either get the copies I need, or I won’t.

  17 February 2017

  Dom and I go on a trip out to the court where my ‘process’ file has been archived. The regional train races past the docklands beneath the red bridge, out towards the beach. To the left, the Atlantic Ocean opens up before me, slick and chilly. To the right, blonde apartments emerge in rows from the dense green hills strewn with wild yellow flowers. It was in there, in one of those apartments, that it happened. Inside them, I can tell you, there are marble counters and gold-coloured curtain rails.

  When we find it, the courthouse is stark, fascist, latin-white. Paint curling off it. Inside, the wood panelling radiates under the sunlight. I give the young receptionist, who is wearing a small silver engagement ring, my notebook, where I have written my list of demands in Google-translate Portuguese.

  —By now, you expect little.

  She calls over an older woman with plump cheeks who can speak English. ‘You must apply to see the process file,’ she says. ‘It has already been archived.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘What is your reason?’ she says. ‘Why do you want to see it?’

  —You must have a reason.

  —She doesn’t say: to write an essay.

  —They’ll
think journalist. They’ll say no.

  —(Truths like that can keep you from the truth.)

  ‘I had to leave Portugal,’ I say. ‘I never found out what happened.’

  —Is that why you’re here, really?

  The woman looks at the computer screen and types. Finally she says, ‘I can’t tell you the sentence, but I can say the man, the accused, his sentence was annulled.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘You will need to fill out a form to find the sentença, the precise judgement,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘The court will telephone once the judge has decided whether you can see the file.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll be in Lisbon another ten days or so.’

  I take my vending-machine Diet Coke outside and smoke a cigarette in slow motion on the edge of a fence. Dom touches me sweetly and says comforting things that I can’t hear.

  There is a reason a person might not seek such a verdict for eleven years.

  —‘…willing suspension of disbelief for the moment…’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

  ‘I guess it would have been unusual if they had been convicted,’ I say to Dom.

  —Breathe in, the dusky smoke hits your lungs.

  ‘I mean. Evidence-wise—

  —Injustice.

  ‘There was nothing to prove whatever they did they did without my consent. So…

  —You’re rambling…

  ‘They lied and they won. Liars win, violence wins. That’s what is always being proven.’

  —Stop.

  —The two of them are not far from the beach. Twelve million people, plus however many untold millions more, were stolen and smuggled, across that water. So many drowned. Just a blink of an eye ago, and with the full permission of the law. Horror. The law is horror.

  —Those sparkling beaches tell you all you need to know.

  21 February 2017

  Thing is, there had been evidence. But I guess it went missing.

  After Tomas let me out of the room and out the door of the apartment into the hallway, I looked along the rows of identical doors and was struck with dysphoria. ‘Where the hell am I?’ I screamed.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ he said.

  He led me into the elevator, where we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shaking with adrenaline. Then out of the lobby and towards his little car. ‘Get in,’ he said. So I did. A few hundred metres down the road, he pulled over, hit his hands hard against the wheel. ‘Shit,’ he yelled. ‘I’m out of petrol.’

  —You looked ahead. There was a petrol station within the field of vision.

  I thought: he’s going to lock me in and rape me here.

  —Nice plan!

  —When recollecting this scene later, she noticed there was no one around. Not a soul. It was Sunday morning. The petrol station clearly wasn’t open.

  I swung the car door open and bolted down the hill. Tomas cried out after me but I didn’t look back, not for minutes. Round corners and through bushy enclaves. I didn’t slow down till I was down by the beach.

  All I have to do is walk along here for like, ten kays, and I’ll be home, I thought. I had about five euros on me and no bank cards. A car pulled up beside me.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the driver, an adult man.

  I looked at him sideways, and thought: I am exactly the final girl in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  —Hell or high water, you will survive this.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m going into Lisbon. I’ll drive you.’

  No way, I thought. But also: just try raping me—I’ll happily roll out of a moving vehicle! So I got in, scanned the door-handle-seat-belt situation for my impending escape. No central locking. Good.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he asked me. I told him. And burst, again, into tears. As I choked on my saliva, the man began kneading my thigh. First the knee, then higher, and higher.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I hissed. And he looked at me as though I was nuts. As in: calm down, baby. I’m just kneading your thigh. Relax, relax. Relax.

  He scoffed and gave me his hankie. We did not speak for the rest of the trip. When he pulled up by my hostel, the man pulled down the sun visor and it read: Polícia.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ the man said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There’s a station just up the road. Go to sleep for a few hours, then go there and tell them what you told me.’

  When I gave the tourist police my statement a few hours later, chipper and responsible as could be, I included the part about the police officer who drove me home. Not the part about him kneading my thigh. Just that he got me home, that I had told him what had happened, that he had pointed out the police station to me. I waited as they put out a call to all the officers who’d been on duty that morning.

  None of them, apparently, had picked up a girl.

  ‘But he did.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  —He did.

  When other people lie they make you look like a liar.

  22 February 2017

  There’s this video going round where a beautiful female author and a man who raped her, many years ago, stand together on stage and talk to the audience about big ideas like accountability and trauma and forgiveness.

  ‘A few years ago,’ the woman—the rape survivor—says, ‘it became apparent that in order to move on in life, I’d need to forgive this guy.’

  ‘And when she made that decision,’ the guy says, ‘she passed responsibility for the crime over to me, the perpetrator.’

  Everybody is sharing this video.

  —It was already on you, though. All over you.

  The thing people like about this video is: here is another way to conceptualise rape.

  —Okay. You get it.

  The other thing about this video is: the institution that gives primacy to forgiveness—a primitive sort of Christianity—is the same institution that shames women into submission. Like: the meek do not inherit the earth. Anything that sells the meek short in this way is really just a tool of enslavement.

  —We have forgiven enough.

  —‘If you take away my life, I’ll give you blood to drink.’ (The last words of Sarah Good, who was murdered in the Salem witch trials.)

  In my early twenties it seemed as if all my female friends were in therapy, talking to an empty chair, addressing their mothers. Letters were written. Redemption was sought. The rationale was that it would be possible for these young women to ‘move on’ or develop ‘healthy’ relationships or ‘love themselves’ only when they forgave their mothers, who hated them.

  —Forgiveness is the wrong aim. Acceptance, even, too humble.

  —Find, in those betrayals, the strength to exist.

  Around that time, I was grey area’d by an older writer. That grey area, somewhere between boldness and shame, knowledge and horror.

  —The field of sexual exploitation we feminists are not entirely supposed to admit exists, but which every woman on earth knows exists.

  —Find, in those betrayals, rage.

  A few weeks after this troubling (for me) encounter, the writer gave a public talk. I didn’t want to speak with them ever again, nor was I curious about the subject of the lecture. But I needed them to see me, just once more. Before they began their speech, they looked up and we locked eyes. I was slouched over a chair in the centre of the auditorium. My face betrayed no warmth, no familiarity, not a thing. They shifted their focus to their notes and did not look at me again.

  —Look at me again and I’ll kill you.

  —I’ll give you blood to drink.

  23 February 2017

  The courthouse has become my body’s focal point of tension, I notice; I can feel my bones, every organ in my trunk, as we sit the train ride out. I can’t focus on the pages of my book, so I look out the window. Brilliant light. The yellow of the flowers is violent.

  This i
s the last time. The last trip I am taking out to the court. I received the email yesterday afternoon:

  Venho informar que poderá proceder ao levantamento das cópias solicitadas.

  [I hereby inform you that you may collect the requested copies.]

  —Exactly what she wanted. This whole time.

  The walk between station and courthouse is quick. Dom tries holding my hand; I don’t know how to say please don’t touch me without saying ‘Don’t touch me!’, so I hold my arms close to me and hope he reads the gesture.

  The court’s archivist, João, is a gentle man. He smooths his hand across the open pages of the two thick binders, talking me through everything that happened after I left.

  Salvator corroborated my testimony. He was not charged. Tomas was prosecuted. He was given a suspended sentence of twelve months, and was required to pay five hundred euros to a victim support organisation. Tomas then appealed the sentence, and his sentence was annulled.

  As João methodically copies the documents, I swing to Dom. ‘But Salvator was the evil one,’ I say. ‘Salvator. Not Tomas.’

  And of course I know in an instant that my memory was all wrong. I must have, at some point over the years, switched the names of the faces. And if I had been so certain about something so wrong, what else? What else had I changed?

  —Another day, another anxious train ride home. But this time the anxiety had an object.

  We stop for Chinese on the way home.

  The horror, horror, horror.

  Fried rice.

  I have their full names now.

  Two Tsingtaos.

  I am going to google the shit out of them.

 

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