I

In hac lacrimarum valle

“I’m not in right now, please leave a message after the beep.”

         “Hello, Hello!… Are you there?… Are you there?… You have to be there! You have to be there! Today!… Come on, hey!… Come on!… Pick up!… Listen to me!……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… You’re not there!… You’re never there!… And I really needed you to be there!… Listen!… the spring has snapped… It’s too late now… I can’t stand it any more… Are you there?… Tell me you’re there!… I don’t want to leave like this… without giving you a kiss good-bye… My head is splitting; I can’t go on. There’s no cure now. Nobody is going to stop this torture.”

Woman age twenty. Brought to Emergency as a result of benzodiazepine overdose. Endovenous saline solution administered; flush with nasogastric tube; activated charcoal 50 gr; endotracheal catheter inserted.

         There’s brightness, a hard light like a lever working its way through the cracks in my eyelids. I close my eyes, mumbling no. So exhausted. I feel like they’re dragging me out of a pleasant feeling that’s like an abyss, like a warm desert. Somebody keeps trying to save me. I want to run away, just let myself go, fall a little further, go down and down until they can’t find me; but in spite of me my body keeps coming back to life and swims toward the light. I surface.

         A heavy, soiled light. Distant murmur of voices. Slowly they become clearer. I hear a sob. I’m awake.

         It’s hard to return when you’ve decided never to do that again; it’s painful and grotesque, too. A sense of humiliation and shame. No, I’m not happy at having returned, to have the weight of the world on my back again and now there’s also the suffering I caused. Now I can see the faces of the people in my family, I feel the desperation in their embraces, the weight of the affection I no longer need. Artificial world, artificial love, artificial tears. What I wanted them to be looking at was my dead body; I liked the idea of a sad, intense ending to it all: tears of true love while I was far away, in some silent, still place. Instead, now I’m going to have to put up with compassion. I think for a brief moment about what is waiting for me: suspicion, the concerned looks. I’m like an odd species of animal, the type who failed twice to commit suicide. I’m also thinking about the strength of my determination. Was I really ready? Why did I make that call? Why did I let my sister stop me from dying?

Imprisoned again!

         And the fact is, I really don’t want to live. Or, better yet, I’m certain I won’t be able to live.

         I am afraid of myself.

List of failed attempts:

• Slitting my wrists.

• Drowning myself on the beach.

• Swallowing a lot of pills from the medicine chest.

• Valium 10 mg.

         Attempt number 1

         I always liked the painting The Death of Marat, and The Death of Ophelia, too. With these two images on my mind, I locked myself in the bathroom and filled the tub with hot water. Then I automatically had the idea of grabbing the soap – I remembering smiling when I realized it wasn’t necessary. I set two shiny razor blades on a stool. I thought what it would all look like: my body surrounded by a purplish glow, my dark brown hair glistening against the white porcelain. I thought it was fine: a nice image for that final good-bye, a gentle transition: from the bathtub to the casket.

         I took my clothes off while I said farewell to my body, reflected in the mirror. I thought about how little pleasure I’d gotten from it and about the pleasures I’d never know now. Suddenly I felt happy, because I’d be leaving almost clean, almost pure. I felt a kind of joy beforehand for my cadaver’s sake, something surely beautiful.

         The contact with the water gave me a pleasure I wasn’t looking for, that linked me to the life I wanted to end. But the tears that began to fall from my eyes, the brutal sob that rose up inside me, made me get the razor blades. I had made up my mind.

         I picked up one of the blades, so perfect, so cold, in my hand. It would need to go in straight up into my wrist. I brushed the sharp edge against my blue veins… Blood began to run, a thin trickle, the size of the slight gash I’d made in my skin. I’d have to press harder, push it into my flesh. I tried again, but my body reacted, defending itself: the hand that was the victim hand pulled away and the assassin hand started to tremble.

         I made several clumsy, superficial cuts, like a map of scratches. The afternoon was waning and soon I wouldn’t be alone in the house. I bandaged my wrists and unplugged the tub so the water would drain.

         Attempt number 2

         I always thought water was the best place to die. I imagined it would be like the return of everything to an amorphous state, a soft continuum where it would be possible to just slip away.

         It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun had turned the world to gold. I walked toward the beach; the sand and the sea were golden, too. There was an odd melancholy, so very beautiful, that moved me and forced me to continue, as if I were doing something that had to be done. I left my shoes, shiny leather testimony to my last steps, on a rock.

         I entered the water without taking my clothes off. The sea shuddered. The white foam came in search of me, saying: “Come on in, make yourself at home,” and embraced me with its white tentacles. With my eyes focused on the sunset, I went in, allowing the seaweed, the salty fragrance, the clear air, to engulf me. I walked in the direction of the sun and when my feet couldn’t touch bottom any more I tried to make my body forget it knew how to swim. It rebelled again, my damn body, showing it didn’t intend to follow my wishes. It insisted on floating on top of the water, on breathing. I struggled, and dove down to the sandy bottom in order to stay there like a rotten fish or a forgotten shell. Still, my body protested again, didn’t listen to me, and brought me up to the light again.

         Attempt number 3

         I figured that the only way left was to trick my body into being quiet, but without it noticing. In order to overcome its resistance I had to find a solution that did not have a clear form from the outset, a sneaky solution. I had a hunch that the pills would work. I went to where my grandparents stored their medicine. It was a huge box with lots of bottles, packets and vials. There was poison in it, and I only had to know how much was necessary, what was the most lethal and the least painful dose. So I decided on the heart pills, using an overdose that would make the heart stop instead of curing it.

         I emptied a box onto a porcelain dish. The pills looked like pink candies. I grabbed a handful and swallowed it as if I were famished, then a gulp of water and another handful until there was nothing left on the dish. I waited for a reaction. I didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing. I thought it would be a good idea to wait for the effect to kick in lying in my bed. That would give the impression of orderliness and calm. I huddled under the coverlet and closed my eyes, my eyelids swollen with tears.

         A few hours later I woke up. I felt like puking. I rushed to the toilet. “It’s something you ate,” my mother said. She prepared a chamomile tea for me and helped me lie down. I fell asleep sobbing. It was so hard to end it all!

         Attempt number 4

         I did some research. The method of the pills was still the best one. I just needed to find the right substance. I found it: Valium 10 mg. A whole box: that would shut down the brain.

         We didn’t have that poison in the house. You had to have a prescription for them to give it to you. I convinced the pharmacist to do it. She felt sorry for me, because she saw the dark circles under my eyes. She told me to be careful taking it and informed me of the dangers – which were exactly what I was looking for.

         At the start of the afternoon, when the house was empty, I prepared the stage for my suicide. I put on music, chose a black dress, a long and elegant affair, and opened the curtains; I wanted to have the sunlight shining on me during my final moments. I got the package and stretched out on the living room sofa. One by one, I started swallowing the pills: twenty-five of them. I did it mechanically, without thinking about anything. I wasn’t even crying. Eyes focused, the afternoon sun, the relief of soon being out of here, beyond myself. I waited for the effect to take hold, I felt drowsy, blue and red lights started glowing before my eyes. Suddenly, I realized I’d forgotten something, forgotten I had to say good-bye. I was afraid. I went to the phone and with a lot of effort dialed my sister’s number. Farewell, sis!… I spoke with the answering machine, I spoke to the emptiness. A feeling of bitterness came over me. I went back toward the living room, it was much harder now, and laid down on the couch. It felt like all the filth of my life was falling away from my skin, and I felt as if my body were ascending like a white light, far from all the sadness.

Salve, Regina, mater Misericordiae,

Ad te clamamus

Ad te suspiramus gementes

In hac lacrimarum valle.

II

Shadows and Tall Trees

         February 2

         First psychiatric visit. I’d rather be alone. Too many people are around observing me. I can sense their fear. I can smell it.

         It’s hot, we’re sweltering in the waiting room of this private doctor. There are seventeen plastic plants, eight paintings with floral motifs and five with seascapes at sunset. It’s forbidden to smoke. This decoration tries to create a false calm and it makes me nervous: the strokes of the brush are trembling across the canvases; they’re just spots of temporary color that can’t get comfortable; they’re going to drip; they’re going to fall onto the floor and ruin it completely. I can’t stand it. It makes me ill. I can tell it’s the hand of an amateur painter, the very doctor who’s going to try to cure me. I accept this parody. I have no choice. I am going to go into his office and give polite answers to absurd questions while my family is trying to answer for me. They’re the ones, all of them, who need to be cured. That’s why they’re here with me, why they’re here acting so nervous and attentive. I’m the one who’s helping them, the one who’s making the sacrifice that will finally let them face their ghosts. However, it’s my body that is going to have to swallow that poison. I don’t know what effect it has. Maybe those drops will dissolve inside me like a placebo; a transparent, innocuous liquid that will bring peace to my family, satisfied to be fighting against an evil force that I know is not inside me. The doctor prescribes Haloperidol 10 mg, the only substance known to treat schizophrenia. What’s this doctor good for if he doesn’t have a stethoscope, scalpels, or electric screens? What scientific knowledge does he have, then, if he can’t get inside my body, can’t listen to it, open it, or interpret the condition of my cortex? There’s no image, no analysis, no test. Only short, painful questions that don’t seem to take into account my long, long, long answers. The session is over and he dictates the dosage according to an insultingly simple rule, increasing the dose: 3 mg every 8 hours, daily increments of 0.5 mg, according to how I respond.

         We all leave the office. I still don’t know what illness they’ve diagnosed me as having, and my family doesn’t know, either. I have the impression that none of what we’re doing will do any good. We enter a cafeteria. My family tries to distract me with boring comments; they’re nervous, I can tell. I remain silent, watching them carefully. Now they’re saying hopeful things, calm things, dealing as they are with a situation they truly do not understand, that’s beyond their comprehension, that makes them feel a certain, dark terror. My mother is pulling at the corner of the salmon-colored table cloth of our table with her fingers. These words of compassion hurt me, make me feel odd, sidelined, outside my body – me, the one who hasn’t even started living! There’s a big misunderstanding about all of this, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter that they still can’t see the generosity of my sacrifice. I’ll open the doors of my body to this poison for a little while. I’ll do it to cure them of all that grayness, all that lack of love…

         The only thing I want is to get home; lock myself in my room; protect my body from the harsh stares, learn the exact composition of the potion, how it’s supposed to be used, the exact name of the illness it cures, the illness I do not understand.

Haloperidol 10 mg

For the treatment of schizophrenia; severe psychotic states; psychomotor agitation or states of panic and anxiety. It is a non-selective blocker of dopamine receptors in the brain; may have secondary effects that include blurred vision, dry mouth, weight change, involuntary muscle contractions, irregular menstrual periods, testicular atrophy, shaking. The decline in sexual desire and tardive dyskinesia (uncontrollable movement of the mouth, trunk, or extremities) can become irreversible with prolonged usage.

         A shiver runs along my spine. There are too many risks, too many. I look at the small plastic bottle. Nothing special about it. It doesn’t have any color, even. Transparent drops of poison, crystalline liquid they use to wipe me away. I hear a voice that warns me against this remedy that looks so innocuous:

         “It’s a trick, it’s a trick, you can see through it!”

         My mother comes into the room and forces me to take the prescribed dose. I hear the voice, more adamant now: “You shouldn’t do it, don’t do it!” I see my mother determined, insisting, pour eight transparent drops into the clear glass: drink water, don’t drink anything. “No!” I say. My hands, she grabs my hands, she shouts nervously. I look at her, torn between two voices telling me what to do, one my mother’s and the calmer, more terrible voice that echoes inside me, the voice of my conscience or, perhaps, of a more powerful being that watches over me. I grab the glass and throw it into the air. Now the transparent drops are agleam in the light, showing off all their poisonous power. I listen to the treacherous, treacherous music coming from pieces of broken glass.

         April 28

         Strange things are happening. My body is taking on an incredible, unfamiliar energy. It runs along my spine and goes up to the back of my neck. Sometimes it’s painful. I can’t sleep. Shadows and tall trees. Shadows and tall trees. I am a large container, an antenna with tentacles. The force is gathering within me. It makes me shine. It sets me on fire.

         I know. I see.

         May 2

         Bursts of light, cut fingers. Energy is chasing me. It wants to make me disappear, wrench me away from myself, fill me up until I burst.

         May 3, 10 P.M.

         Don’t go near the light sockets, disconnect all the appliances, don’t switch the light on. Because along the threads there are deep blue beings approaching. They are evil things. They want to enter me that way, with their slender bodies – light attracts light, energy attracts energy. But what is sparking inside these walls is not good. I know that. Who are the ones that are moving along the walls of my house? They’re moving frantically among all the wires, waiting for me. They’re waiting for the chance, for a crack, so they can jump onto me. I have to turn out the light, I have to kill that murmuring, those shrill gears moving inside the walls…

         May 4, 3 A.M.

         Go to the knives, they want me to go to the knives! That’s what they’re saying to me, telling me to go, to grab everything that can do harm, that’s shiny. Violent metal. They want Violence, Torture, Cruelty. And I tell them Stop. Stop Violence. Stop Misery. Stop Hostages. Stop War. Stop Murder. Then I run to grab all the shiny metal things I can find in the house. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want cruelty. They’re making me throw my weapons out the window. It’s raining thorns, and mud that sucks and tears you apart.

NOLI ME VIDERE!!

NOLI ME TANGERE!!

NOLI ME…

I begin to cry blood…

         May 6

         Visible from a distance, this hospital is a moored ship: its chimneys, its gigantic eyes like those of an ox, the big bands of color on its sides like waterlines; but it doesn’t have any horns because it doesn’t need them; here it howls constantly. This is a hospital that dresses up nicely as a ship to sail the green plains, but inside it people aren’t walking around thinking of being cured soon, and there aren’t any liqueur-filled chocolates.

         I go over to the porthole. It’s forbidden, but I don’t care. I don’t know how I got here, I don’t remember, they gave me sedatives. It’s hard for me to think clearly, my tongue won’t do what I want and I’m sleepy, but I don’t want to sleep, my head bobs up and down hard, I bang it against the glass circle, my head against the glass that separates me from the air, from the rest of the people, from the happy people. They don’t want me to think, they want to hurt me! I have to stay awake, keep a close eye on everything, not let anybody take advantage of me. There are a lot of bad people in the world. A lot! Sometimes it’s hard for me to understand how we stay alive, how it is that people don’t end up with knives stuck in their hearts. People are evil. I know what I’m talking about. They talk, they use nice words, but I know, I can see inside their muscles and bones, I can hear their thoughts. They’re coming after me, but I won’t go to sleep, I’m going to stay awake all night, I’ll turn on my walkman: Shadows and tall trees, Shadows and tall trees…

                   is life like a taut rope hanging from my ceiling?

         May 7

         These circular windows don’t open, they’re airtight, they don’t want me to touch the air, the air they breathe. This hospital has the appearance of a ship, but in fact it’s a ship that’s upside down, a ship made for fish, a rotten aquarium. They want us to stay in here, not contaminate them, going around in circles, shedding our scales, our color, the way we shine, going in circles… They won’t let us jump out, be free, go out through the windows that look out onto the ocean we can see. They won’t let us fly through the air, shattering on the ground like water balloons, going free. Fall. Fall. End it. End it.

         A fairy butterfly arrives, a fairy with a mermaid’s tail who sits down beside me. The phosphorescent color of her wings glows: I look straight into her eyes and she is so sad! “Help me!” she says. Her voice is just like Tinker Bell a rattle that makes a noise inside a glass jar, but the rattle is broken. The notes are off-key.

         “Help me!, help me!”

         I try to touch her and she disappears, beating her tail hard in the middle of this dirty aquarium. I tried to catch her and now I’ve got bits of pigment, the aniline from her wings, on my hands. I’ll let her stay like that, stuck to the skin of my hand. Maybe tonight this soft glow will help me. Company during the hours of shadows; shadows and tall trees.

         May 8

         Time passes. I try to remember what day it is, how long I’ve been in this terrible place. The medication those bitches give us – the ones who treat us like garbage when they close the door to the visitors – doesn’t let me keep an accurate count. My head aches. My eyes burn. Cry and sleep, sleep and cry. That’s what I’ve done since I came here… three, four, five days ago? Against my will, they put me in here against my will, as if I were worthless. What do I have in common with this bunch of ill-made dunces? I had to share the space in my room with a damn old woman. I knew she was spying on me while I was drifting off to sleep. Her fists awakened me in the middle of the night: dead branches beating on my face.

         Today they decided to change her to another room. So María arrived. She’s a young girl. A bit younger than I am. Her wrists are bandaged. She doesn’t want to talk. I’m grateful she’s like this. She’s beautiful – her hair’s very short and she wears men’s clothing – she seems fragile. Her eyes hold a slow, sweet sadness. I feel at ease having her here with me. The two of us, stuck in a glass cage. Stretched out on our beds, each one with her walkman. She says “please” and “thank you.” And she cries, like I do. Both of us here, saying nothing, keeping each other company, allowing ourselves to remain stuck on the bottom of this dirty aquarium, in the darkest corner, just like that, not moving, looking for the stagnant water.

         May 10

         I’m beginning to feel better, my head is slowly going back to normal. I no longer feel that heaviness in my eyelids, I’m beginning to recognize the sound of my own voice again. María is starting to wake up, too. Today we decided to talk. I didn’t ask her why she was here, and she didn’t ask me. We talked about songs. I felt less alone. We exchanged tapes. She seems like she’s my sound sister. Two hearts in shy symphony.

         May 11

         Sometimes we detect the roiling sea over our heads. Sometimes we move our bodies unconsciously, rocked by the waves that roll in, gentler now, to this dark, dark corner.

         The mermaid with the voice of a rattle enters, swishing her golden tale. She hangs without moving in the middle of the room, and then, with a very hopeful smile, she unfolds her long, violet-colored wings above us.

         May 13

         María is beautiful, slender, full of promises, like the white lines on the brow of a hill. María is a line, a thread that slips through the fingers. She’s uncomplicated, pure, small, perfect, unadorned. Nothing extra. Nothing more is necessary. Her hair is very short, her shirt white, she’s wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes. Her eyes… Her eyes hold the center of the world.

         For one whole day I wasn’t sure what sex she was. Curled up in her bed, leaning up against the wall, I could hardly see the back of her neck. Nothing that looked like a female, nothing that looked like a male. It was as if an angel had entered my soggy room. And even when she began shifting the direction of her gaze, when she began to use her vocal cords again, I wasn’t sure. She’s strange, wild, there’s nothing like her. A soul stabbed with a knife.

         She has a twin brother, her complete opposite. A smooth surface, efficient, lovely, sane. He’s studying in the Medical School, but she dropped out a while back. She was very angry at the institution with its long history of warnings and disciplinary files. He is the face of light, normalcy, and the acceptance of the rules. They both play a dangerous game, a silent pact they made. María’s way is the more difficult one: she’s there to deny her own identity, to make her brother stronger, more clear-headed. She’s the one with the lewd shadows, the rotting garbage, the howl of rage. It was always like that, according to her. From the moment they were born.

         For the last two years María’s days had been full of mornings spent smoking joints and drinking beer around the table soccer in bars where workers went, leaning up against the cement walls that were damp with ruts of moisture. She takes out a pencil and sketches. She sketches dresses, incredible, sinister dresses, explosions of tulle and post-punk straps. She tries to hide away, disappear inside her plain clothing, pouring out all her fantasy onto the paper, her fantasy of affirming who she is, that dark, painful desire, the one that is burning her inside.

         Sitting on the stairs, accompanied by two empty bottles of the fifths of beer that she always places on each side – three on the right, three on the left, like protective walls – María is drawing nymphs, poisonous snakes, hard mistresses of postmodernity, and she imagines the fabric, the touch, the shading of the colors in the light. She spits a bitter lump of phlegm and picks up the cigarette again with her charcoal-covered fingers. María always smokes really black tobacco cigarettes. She inhales the black air of her nymphs. And sometimes, only sometimes, she notices how the puffs of smoke that come out of her body take on the shape of the dark women she’s bringing to life on the paper. Their faces have the liquid gaze of fish, of an amphibian, something cold, slippery, and repugnant. They’re the ones, the ones that come from her fingers, that – constantly moving the long tails of their long smoky cloaks – fly about her, ready to ambush her, when María isn’t watching, so they can stab her in the back of the neck with the disfigured cadavers of her puny army of beer bottles.

         May 15

         Three capsules of Leponex, three of Plenur, two pills of Risperdal 6 mg, reduce the dose of Akineton Retard. Prognosis pending. Dry mouth. Slight tremor in left leg.

         I still feel like crying. I don’t understand how there can be people outside who dislike me so much that they want me to be in here, locked up. I am not a delinquent. I never did any harm to anybody, not to anybody. So why are they treating me so mean, why are they so hateful? Hate in the eyes of the caregivers who shake us early in the morning so we can go to the medication room. Get up, walk, swallow, suck on this, get it into your system! As if we were leaky bladders that need filling all the time with their poisonous liquids, as if we were elephants on the savannah that they were trying to put to sleep, like poachers: fill us up, put us to sleep, erase us, make our brain stop working. They want it to be hard for me to keep my eyelids open, they want my muscles to sag, be unable to resist. They’re laughing at us. They’re killing us. Slowly but surely.

         May 16, 3:25 P.M.

         Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds before I can get another cigarette from the woman who serves as prison warden. I go over to the window. Back again: two thousand eight hundred fifty; again: one thousand one hundred five. I can only think about the next dose. The seconds drag by. Eight hundred forty six. This is a good poison, the antidote to all the junk we’re swallowing. Our only help in fighting against the substances that are erasing our identities. Thanks to the blessed nicotine we still manage to find a moment of lucidity, we weaken the power of the damned sedatives. That’s why we all smoke here. We’ve all got really black lungs, protected by the gumminess, by the oily tar of the tobacco. That’s our shield against the chemical slavery they insist on imposing on us. They don’t dare forbid it. They know we’d burn the hospital down if they did that. They know full well. That’s why they ration it. They enjoy torturing us. Every hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds. There’s nothing else here to think about. Just counting the minutes that separate us from taking the next drag.

         May 16, 4:30 P.M.

         I’ve just come back from the smoking room.

         They’ve taken my pleasure away!

         This is cruel!

         I was waiting. I’d been waiting exactly seven hundred twenty seconds next to the door to the smokers’ room, that lousy place with no windows and no air circulation. I’ve done it lots of times. I’m there by the door until the time is up, breathing in the smoke that slips out every time somebody leaves. I breathe in that blessed smoke, I notice how all the receptors in my body are activated to take in that scant amount of charity.

         When the time was up and the caregiver had given me my cigarette, I went into the smoking room. I knew immediately that something wasn’t right in there, in that miserable little space they allow us, sitting opposite one another, not saying a word, not looking at anybody, as if we were in a subway car drowning in fog. We have a non-aggression pact. That’s how we do it when they force us to be so close to one another, without a margin of safety. Still, we know how others are thinking. We, who are in the confusing waters of Purgatory, moving upward or heading for a fall, can see that. The noise of the voices that are inside is too much to take sometimes, but we don’t attack one another. We try not to look anybody in the eyes. But today I did. M. was too off kilter, too nervous. I don’t like M., cannon fodder, a brain that’s useless.

         “Don’t look at me!” he said.

         “I’m not looking at you.”

         “Screw you! I told you not to look at me!” (I decide not to pay any attention, to keep smoking and deny it.)

         “I know you well. Get out of here, bitch!”

         “I’m not leaving. You’re the one who has to leave.”

         “I’m going to smack you good!”

         “What did you say, you damned schizophrenic?”

         “I’m going to kick your ass, bitch!”

         “Let’s see, let’s see, asshole! Who’s tougher? You can’t even stand up straight!”

         “Son of a bitch!”

         I look at him. His eyes look glazed, they’re the eyes of a murderer. He raises his fists over my head. He’s pure steel now. The guards come in. His fists are only five centimeters away from my fingers, which I quickly ordered to form a shield that would soften the blow to my poor, poor head.

         They drag him out. He’s howling.

         May 17, 10:45 A.M.

         In isolation. Sleep therapy. So they can do what isn’t written down. I entered, left my keys, my shell necklace, my five silver rings, my belt with the butterfly buckle, the lacquered cigarette case with twenty-eight black diamonds and forty white diamonds, my pink plastic bag, my little Buddha, my journal with the fluorescent cover. They wrote it all down, they treated my things with care, made a list of the items and registered their existence on a sheet of paper that will stay in the files past my time. They separated me from them. The first steps in this whitewashing job. First the objects, then the people. Two weeks without visits. Abandoned. Miserable, abandoned madwoman. They look ashamed. I miss them so much. I’d like to ask them to forgive me for making them suffer so much.

         Good for nothing, that’s me.

         I wish I hadn’t been born.

         But I want so much to be with them! They must have forgotten me, can they forgive me? I need to tell them I love them, hug them really tight, let them know that I’m lost without them, that I want to protect them, that they can trust me to sacrifice myself for them. I’m the only one in my family who can pay the quota of pain that someone hands out. I’ll gather it all in me and give them relief. I’m willing to suffer this punishment so their lives are easier.

         My life has to mean something. Something…

         May 18

         It took me twelve long days. Twelve days of retreat in the corner of the aquarium, among the darkest rocks. I didn’t feel like talking. There are so many strange beings here… My heart aches. So much. It’s so terrible. I know this is a big mistake. This is not my place. It can’t be my place. I decided not to speak during these days. Just a yes or no, a thank you, always in a soft voice, holding onto the sobs that were making my mouth burst. I slept. A lot. Whole days at a time. In my little corner, damp and black, under the power of the white and red pills, watched over by a row of plastic glasses.

         The induced sleepiness is a blessing. It doesn’t leave any marks. It doesn’t allow anything to live. As long as it circulates through my blood, through the fibers of my flesh, there is silence. It disconnects the receptors. There are no more synapses. My neurons continue to flicker weakly, like they are waiting. It’s waking up that I’m afraid of, not sleeping. Because waking up after the poison is slow and tricky. The light comes on and feels harsh: a big neon tube, cold light. Then comes the disoriented feeling, the panic. What day is it? What time is it? Where am I? I get up, feeling anxious, and I don’t recognize my own body. My body, so young, is heavy and painful. I have to fight against gravity, yank it out of bed with a thread of strength, and make it walk. One foot, then the other, trying not to stagger.

         I slip. The walls come to help me break my fall with their open palms.

         I tell them thank you.

         “Thank you, walls, for being white, being smooth, not saying anything, supporting me so I won’t fall!”

         I go toward the door. It takes a long, long time. How long? In the short distance from my bed to the exit my size changes. Alice drinks the syrup that tastes like cherry pie. Then I see myself like this, small, avoiding the big metallic cube that’s the night stand, passing under the ruffles of the coverlet, using the ray of light that falls on the floor tiles, heading towards a door whose lock is so tall I’ll never be able to open it. Suddenly they open the door. Just when I’m getting there, when I’m at the spot where it opens. I can see the enormous door open towards me. Open against me. I’m going to die smashed by the gray door of a hospital room. I close my eyes. I open them again. I feel a heavy pressure in my chest, I’m caught, underneath the crack at the bottom, which is about to crush me in the stomach, to split me in half like a wasp that’s been trapped. Then a gigantic hand comes to my aid. It helps me. I get up. It gives me the cookie that says “Eat me.” I return to my normal size. Finally, I’m back, I’m here again!

         For twelve days this cure of sleeping and waking, exactly the same. Yesterday the red and white pills stopped appearing next to my pillow. “There aren’t any more,” someone said. Now I’ll have to fight again with my own dreams, with those parasites that I am feeding against my wishes.

         May 19

         Good motor coordination. Perception of reality improving. Tremors decreasing.

         Today, after breakfast, I decide to go with my companions to the big room. At ten o’clock we formed a circle around the psychotherapist, dressed in a white uniform while we wear faded blue robes. It’s always so hot in here! The radiators, which have been converted into an excellent instrument of torture, collaborate to keep us in this state of drowsiness, of lethargy, that seems endless. I don’t know why, but this morning I decided to participate in the well-meaning farce, surrounded by stupid, ruined beings. María is here too. Now I’m sitting in a really uncomfortable chair, pulling on the ties of my hospital gown that slither about like snakes. To my right, a very skinny old man is sitting sideways with his legs bent, ready to run away at the slightest sign of danger. On my left, a really fat man lets his arms drop because he can’t find a comfortable place to put them. They’re way too long and pushed out of place by his immense gut, making his hairy, swollen hands drag along the floor that smells like bleach. Across from me a young girl is looking at all of us. At regular intervals, she lets her gaze rest, going from left to right, a minute for each face. Slowly, persistently, we see ourselves reflected in the watery spheres of her big, round, empty eyes. A cow woman who grazes silently on the white meadow, indifferent to words.

         María is seated behind me. I can feel her eyes on the back of my neck. That’s what she wants, she wants to start weaving a net over me, to skulk around me, see how much I weigh. I feel uncomfortable. I think I’m going to leave before the session starts. The priestess is still talking with the employees, reviewing the information on each patient. But I can feel the pressure of María’s threads, the subtle touch of her fabric. I simply stay here like a butterfly softly trapped in a spider web.

         There’s still an empty spot, a chair with nobody in it. There’s still a messed-up being needed to complete this meeting of the lame and the useless. Then he arrives, trying not to exist. Still young – like María, like me – still not ruined by the poison. His gray eyes cut like knives and suddenly turn opaque, refuse to look at the light and turn inward, toward his dreams, silent and confused, like ours.

         The psychotherapist greets us with studied kindness. She passes out the daily newspapers and asks us to focus on one of the news items. It’s an article on a scientific topic: in the future little robots will run along our veins and will be able to detect anything out of the ordinary, then via satellite they’ll quickly alert the nearest medical center or they themselves will release the required medication. It’s called nanotechnology. A few guffaws can be heard. The fat man trembles, waves start to move along his body from head to toe, like a rough sea in which he seems about to drown.

         “That’s a joke, that name’s a joke! Nano, nano… what a stupid name for something so serious! We’re not stupid, doctor. Just because we’re in here it doesn’t mean you can make fun of us like that!”

         The roiling sea stops and fire begins to color his skin. The old man wobbles slightly in his chair and starts to rock his little bird’s head from right to left. The psychotherapist tenses her muscles, paints an expression of confidence on her mature face, and selects a soft voice. She explains that is how they call the new technology that perhaps will revolutionize our lives. I ask permission to speak. I can’t stand inexactness, lack of precision.

         “Nano,” I say, “is a prefix of Greek origin that means a thousand millionth of a fraction. It’s used for units of measure to designate the corresponding submultiple.”

         As I listen to my words echoing, there is a warmth, the warmth of pride, filling me, and I think, at the same time, that all isn’t lost yet, that my head is still working with precision, and the light of intelligence still watches over me. I look at the group now. Surprise has been sketched on their eyebrows, which have become pointy circumflex accents. They’ve surrendered to my wisdom, I’ve risen above their deformed bodies and burnt-out brains. I feel María’s anger behind me, on my neck. The young fellow with eyes like knives closes his lids and the finest trickle of blood starts to run from his tear ducts.

         May 20

         The antipsychotic drugs start to take effect. My dopamine receptors are blocked, the tails of light of my neurons lose the ability to fire. I try to control my body and my brain disobeys me. It doesn’t receive the orders, which get lost in the shining branches, floating loose in the watery mist of my cranium. My body doesn’t belong so much to me now, colonized as it is by a biochemical program someone is using to torture me. I can see my legs rocking, trembling. I’m afraid of this body that shakes me for no reason, with no cause at all. I feel sorry for my body that moves back and forth and grows tense, that knots all up, tortured.

         I’m lying down in my room. Outside, the light is changing: white and vibrant; yellow and empty, ochre and moribund. Sometimes the fog melts the hours away, scattering them. Maybe then the sky will start to cover itself with enigmas I can try to solve…

         While the hours go by, while everything goes by, I cling to these sheets of paper, to my collection of colors, to the box of child’s markers that somebody loaned me. And I draw, I constantly draw these butterfly mermaids, these fairies that accompany me on my dark journey. I take them out of there, out of my uncertain center, I set them free on the white paper, I leave margins, empty, safe frames all around, I make them visible with the thick line of my Carioca marker: strong, black lines on the immaculate nothing. That is how they are born, fearful, blinded by the vast light where I place them. I take pity on their suffering, on their slight moans, and I run to my box to get them something to keep them warm. Immediately I color the structure of their wings. They are real colors, colors that have blood, that create warmth…

         My butterfly mermaids are delicate beings that bear the truth, what is worth the most. They are hope. They are pain. They are sex and pleasure. They sail among the waves of consciousness, through the waters that bury us and drag us along… Queens of hearts. These women transform their breasts into an enormous heart, a huge organ full of love, full of blood. A tattooed heart. The word Love inking itself on the muscle. They’re made to perch on your soul, to push it over the blackness, to give a face to your pain, with their big dark-rimmed eyes from which a single teardrop, painted blue, falls. They’re made to give voice to your desire, with their doll-like shapes and their sex, swollen in the shape of a second heart below their belly.

         The butterfly mermaids keep piling up in my notebooks. They fall out of the door to my night stand if it’s not closed properly, they skitter beneath my metal bed frame. María watches them. She picks them up off the floor and puts them in my hand.

         Without a word.

         May 21

         Even though I still feel like crying, even though they keep forcing me to sleep with Tranxilium, even though I still imagine myself as a tiny fish looking for dark corners, even though I keep swallowing Plenur pills, keep flooding myself with the damned Risperdal water, I sense, I know, that there’s an end to this. I won’t stay here forever. Somebody will end the punishment. Today the psychiatrist spoke to me. For the first time, he said I was making good progress, that soon they were going to reduce the dosage of medications, that I only need to have a little patience and begin to cooperate.

         They took everything away from me, they poisoned me, they refused to let me have things, and I’m the one who has to cooperate, who has to do what they tell me out of my own free will, with enthusiasm, with a nice smile, with gratitude. I suppose it’s just another phase in this perverse game of dominoes, a more subtle level so their victory can be confirmed. There’s nobody to protect me. Nobody to listen to me. I am, we all are, on the edge of a shadow.

THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN WIN. THEY THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN THEY WIN. THEY WIN. WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN THEY WIN. WIN WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN WIN. THEY THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN. THEY WIN WIN THEY THEY THEY WIN THEY WIN THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY THEY

Cooperative strategies:

• Big smile, speak softly to the damned harpies with their pointed nuns’ caps and their stiff clogs. The gaze is important: don’t look down too much or for too long. Practical advice: try not to hear what they’re saying, try not to notice their gestures. Erase them with the strength of your thought.

• Methodical strolls. Wear a watch. Set the alarm. Go out of my room every hour and a half. Walk along the corridor. Don’t walk too fast or too slow. Make yourself talk. Go over to the least dangerous patients. Ana, who has anise-colored eyes, Elías, who knows how to breathe. Antón, who tries to disappear into the white walls. Avoid Xosé, who keeps a knife in his pajama pocket, Manuel, who lashes out over and over, trying to destroy himself and you as well, Lucía, who sneaks into rooms when nobody’s there and steals from the really awful ones, Etelvina with her rotten, stinking mouth…

•  Don’t steal the cigarette butts in the smoking room. Don’t hide so you can smoke them. They always end up finding out.

•  Go to breakfast, lunch, snack time, and supper. Don’t go to the cafeteria too early or too late. Don’t complain. Clean your plate. Don’t leave a scrap.

•  Ask for your cigarettes every hour and a half. Just once. Don’t insist. Just ask for them once. Have a nice smile on your face.

•  Participate in the workshops. Pretend you’re enjoying them. Show gratitude. Concentrate. Give them your all. Work hard to reach a goal.

         May 22

         Today I decided to leave my room and go to the big room, to group purgatory.

         There’s a lot of light, four big windows, sparkling clean glass, trees swaying outside, calming us, protecting our convalescence with their green gauze. Inside there are huge tables, school desks for crafts: painting, woodworking, knitting.

           The noise of the needles is the winner; it’s the biggest group. Many colors of skeins, tangled skeins, disorderly amalgam of colors and textures. Hands grapple with and fight over the yarn. The monitor calms things down. She untangles the snarled mess. She scolds in a friendly manner. And the knitters return, this time with the right ball of yarn, to their work. Their hands fly. Like rodents nibbling on cheese, like beavers building their huts, their movements are quick and efficient. They are a factory. They are machines. It’s clear they enjoy it. They concentrate all their fury, all their clumsiness on that fiber, that thread. They knot it, twist it, pull on it. The material folds, obeying their orders. It doesn’t matter that the scarves they’re weaving are impossibly long, or that the sweaters they’re designing have no openings. They are machines, hangry machines that knit kilometers of cloth, highways for fleeing from bad thoughts, to stop existing, to let themselves go…

           A rough, scratchy rhythm is added to the metallic pounding of the needles. It’s the sound of the little saws that devour the wooden boards. At that table there are only men who grip their tool hard, applying pressure as if they were really working, as if that instrument weren’t just a slender sheet of serrated metal but rather a solid pickaxe, a hammer of violence. They’re constantly breaking, cracking their saws. They put in a new piece of metal and continue their task: a shelf for miniature bottles of perfume, for glass owls, for jade elephants, a name, a letter that’s supposed to go on a keychain or be hung on the door of a child’s room. It surprises me to see all the violence they employ to turn out such small, delicate objects. I think of the saw as a powerful weapon. And I instinctively put space between myself and them, I get as far away as possible from those sheets of metal that tear things apart.

           In the middle of all this ruckus, which is both rhythmic and strident, unsettling, are the ones in my group: the ones who paint. This isn’t the right place for us – we need peace and quiet in order to create. We aren’t artisans. In our work there’s a higher quality, the application of will power and spiritual precision. We give form to our phantoms. For that, silence or music are necessary. I miss my walkman, miss letting it caress me, letting it satisfy me and free me while my hands run across the pale surface of the paper. I look around the table. Tubes of oil paint with their tops covered with pigment; jars of tempera paint that lost their real color because they were handled by nervous, careless hands; broken crayons, snapped and ruined in an attack of violent inspiration; little cups of watercolor with the center used up and the edges dried out… In the middle of this ruined material I find a cardboard box where the markers I use are stored. I go right to them, take off the caps of the brightest colors, and try to draw thick parallel lines. Half of them soon stop along their route. I see them start to fade, to draw their last stream of light color. I pick up the dying tubes and try to give them a final, quick end. I pinch them in my strong hands, flatten them with a sharp blow and manage to remove their guts, the damp, soft innards they hold. Then I apply my hands, full of colorful blood, to the drawing paper they give me. I run my hands over it, run, touch, mix, and I get those spots to come to life, so that for a moment they reveal the shapes of the mermaids that are living inside me. I’ve become an ocean with residents. I’m diving inside myself, hunting for me, trying to catch my spirits in the net, to catch the most benign ones from among the black horde that is gnawing at me.

           Like the Rorschach test they made me take when I entered this jail, the blots begin forming a design that becomes more and more precise, increasing in detail, perspective, shading, and texture. A butterfly struggles to escape, to reach the region of visibility. I capture the image in my mind. I freeze it. Quickly I grab the white paper and the black marker that gives birth to her, painfully, forcefully. The one that is born now is a sad butterfly, I can see that in the grimace on her lips, the vertical expression in her eyes, from which a single tear trickles. Her tail seems faded, with scales the color of gray-green, a putrid shine. And her voice, that voice I hear from far off, buried under the water, is so feeble, a mew, a moan. I pick her up with my pencils, I color her wings, folded back against her sides, with a lavender glow, with blue light. I study the slight movement of her forewings, and sadly I see the prints of the fingers that clutched her for a moment, robbing her of her pigment, the magical dust of her wings.

           On her chest there’s only the slight image of a small, twisted heart. A dried-up muscle. There’s nothing covering her sex, poisoned, erased by the effects of Plenur and Risperdal…

           I hear her voice again, I can make out the words she’s shouting at me in anger, forcing me to write them in the white borders, beneath her ailing tail:

Tortured!

Artificial love, artificial world, artificial tears

Imprisoned again!

           As I finish the drawing, a shiver runs through me. She knows she’s being poisoned, like a layer of mercury. She reflects the real image of my suffering. Suddenly I notice what’s happening around me. A group of people is gathering around my stranded mermaid. “It’s very original,” says an obese woman who spends her days concentrating on painting white petals in a garden of daisies. “It looks strong,” says a little man who repeats, over and over, the same blue lines in a watercolor sea. “Help her, kill her!” says María, the only one who knows how to decipher the message that my delicate being bears.

           The monitor comes over as well. She picks up the mermaid in her hands, holds her up in the air and coldly contemplates her fragility.

           She makes some remarks about technique: it needs more definition for the outline, more perspective, more shading of the color, but it’s got something, there’s something about it. Her compliments surprise me. She belongs to the other group, the enemies, the ones who don’t know. That’s why I think, I reflect for a moment and try to look for the signs that indicate this is a trick. Because this might be just another strategy to wear me down, to beat down the resistance to her control. Nice words, motherly words, sugary clouds.

           They punish us implacably, never losing their smiles, with a false appearance of naturalness, with gentle, dishonest optimism that makes me vomit. But this time, no, I’m not going to let her get away with this, I swear I’m not! I won’t let this damned slut laugh at my sad butterfly.

           The monitor talks about some national painting contest, painting by people in psychiatric wards. Sure! Now I’m convinced she doesn’t care a bit about my delicate mermaid, it’s an excuse, just an excuse to keep going with the damned hoax of the therapy, so she can try to show herself off as a good caregiver to a field day of demented people. I am furious, and so is María, who is on the same wave length as I am, on the same page. I grab the mermaid out of the monitor’s hands with such force that I’m afraid my little creature will fall on the floor, be forever soiled.

           “Don’t be so cynical, so hypocritical, don’t be such a bitch! I know full well that what I do doesn’t interest you at all! AT ALL. But listen, pussy face! This drawing is much better, a hundred times better than what you could ever come up with. You, with your damned workshops for idiots, erasing, deforming what matters with your four shitty academic rules. You, using the time they let you stay in the ironing room, surrounded by stinking, climbing geraniums, repeating over and over what somebody else did. Somebody else, not you, you’re blind, you’re mutilated, you’re not free, not like I am, you don’t have the ovaries you need to imagine strength and fragility. You are coarse, coarse, coarse, coarse, coarse, coarse, coarse like hundreds of people, like hundreds of thousands; who are you other than a real bastard, a damned prison guard?”

           I sense the violence, a burst of flame rising from my heart to my brain, my muscles turning to metal. Inside me I feel an immense strength, a power, a scream that is increasing and I can’t silence, that flows out of me like a liquid force searching for an escape route; I’ve become the river for all those who suffer, overflowing, running free, at last, in a waterfall.

           María is beside me, yelling, in complete synchrony. Dear, dear sister in sound! The monitor runs off, the violence professionals come in, pulling my arms behind my back. María hurls herself at them, throwing punches in the air. One hits the mark. The guard’s eye receives the impact. “Damned, shitty madwoman!” Reinforcements arrive. Open repression, no false smiles, no kind words, brute force… They force María to her knees,, immobilize her and then they push the two of us, like animals, out of the room.

           May 23

           My head aches. Like being stabbed in the middle of my brain. Is it my brain that hurts? I feel my head. I look for signs of having been cut open and sewn up. An attack of anxiety, of panic. I remember the yelling and being shoved; I remember entering the infirmary, I remember a syringe being stuck in my arm. It was bleeding. After that I don’t recall anything. My eyelids drooped. I couldn’t resist their poisonous liquids. I dropped like a beast on the savannah. I felt it. Falling. I don’t know anything more, don’t know how much time went by, where those damn people took me, or what they did with my body during that time. I don’t want to think – but I still think – about the possibility of some horrible act, pounding an awl into my eyeball, about how my bones are splitting, yielding to the iron bar. I imagine – even though I don’t want to imagine – the way that sword moves inside, groping to find the gelatinous cords that connect the lobes, the destruction of the prefrontal cortex, the tiny snowflakes of tissue falling everywhere inside. My dissected brain matter hurts, the wound has not been sutured. Is that what it is? A lobotomy so the flow will stop? So I’ll no longer have a soul? So little by little I’ll become a useless organism, a stupid fat woman who only looks to have the rays of the sun beat on her face while sitting on the bench of some park?

           María wakes up, too. Her brain hurts, too. I run to hug her. The two of us cry softly, making no sound, an anguish that comes from deep inside and takes our breath away. I don’t tell her about my suspicions, I don’t want to increase the pain, plus I’m not certain either, I couldn’t find the wound when I felt for it with my hands… Now I move away from her, I study her and am furious when I discover huge black and blue marks, deep and dark, on her arms and legs. I caress her softly. Her skin – so white, so pure. She takes hold of my hands, brusquely interrupting my affectionate gesture. She looks straight into my eyes.

           “We have to get out of here,” she says, the tone of her voice urgent.

           “Yes, but now it’s going to take us a little longer. This is a step backward.”

           “No, no, I’m not talking about here, about this hospital. We’ll get out of here for sure; they can’t, they don’t want to keep us here. What I’m saying is you have to believe in yourself, we have to believe in ourselves, have faith. We will be able to get away from this illness, we have weapons that the others don’t have.”

           “You think so? What weapons?”

           “Our drawings. The density of the color and the force of our lines.”

           She goes to her night stand and takes out a big art portfolio. She opens it and shows me her creatures. They’re figures in costumes, a parade of nymphs drawn with great detail, the pencil marking slowly every fold of their clothing, every glint in their black skirts.

           Fascinated, I look at the spectacle she shows me, the hardness and strength of her models. I can hear the rustle of the cloth and metal, I see the sinister breeze of their dance.

           “I want to be somebody. I want to leave this shitty city and go to a real city, one where somebody will listen to me, will teach me, make me better and give me the opportunity to show my power.”

           “Do you think they’ll let you? Do you think you can?”

           “No imaginary illness, no castrated psychiatrist is going to stop me. They can take it and shove it! I’m going to throw away all the pills they prescribe for me. As soon as I get out of here I don’t plan to swallow even a gram of poison. I need my head to work at full strength. I need it to make my way out there in the world.”

           “I’d like to have your strength, your decisiveness. I don’t think my drawings are worth half of what yours are worth…”

           “That’s not true. I’ve been looking at them for days now and I swear you’ve got something to say. That’s the important thing: to say something. Something that makes the birds sing, makes the birds laugh. Your drawings express pain – that’s the message.”

           I listen to her words, I let optimism and hope work their way inside me. I love listening to her strumming the cords that fill me with music, cords that nobody plays.

           I’d like to hug her, kiss her, crush her in my strong arms, transform her into the dust of butterfly wings and breathe in that glitter, place it deep inside me.

           May 25

           We make another pact. We decide to fool them. Agree to go to group therapy again, to that solemn farce. A few more days and we’ll be out of here. It won’t be so long now until we are out and we’ll forget we were once here.

           María and I enter the room. A few new people, some missing. The girl with the bovine expression isn’t there. She’s been allowed out so she can graze docilely in the meadows of the city. New acquisitions: an elderly woman, very tall, rigid, and thin. I decide to sit next to Elías, who opens his eyes to look at me, making them glisten in a ray of sunlight for a brief moment.

           The psychotherapist greets us with some apprehension, suspicious of our calm attitude, our desire to collaborate. I make an effort to communicate peace and harmony; I try to hide my cynicism. She distributes the daily newspaper. This time the news article she asks us to go over is about a father accused of abuse who was just allowed to go free. His daughter, two years old, was hospitalized in an alcoholic coma because she drank what was left in the bottles that he’d carelessly left in her reach. The psychiatrist looks for comments. False appearances, social pressure, manipulation of opinions… María is nervous; she wants to speak but doesn’t dare. She’s not very good with words.

           “Do you want to say something, María?” the therapist asks.

           “No, no…”

           “Are you sure?”

           “No… Well, yes, I do want to say something . That’s wrong.”

           “What is it that’s wrong?”

           “The pardon. That father doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. He doesn’t deserve it.”

           “Why not? Don’t you think something like that can happen to a normal person? Something careless, an accident?”

           “That father is not normal.”

           “Why isn’t he?”

           “That father is a damn drunk. He had a whole kitchen full of bottles, plus the living room, the hall, bottles half empty, bottles within reach, so he could drink at all hours, he always had a damn bottle, always had a damn glass. And the little girl, watching it all, poor thing! Probably she was crying a lot, her diapers full of shit, the pee scalding her skin, and he’d let her cry, or grab her up any old way and shut her in a room so he wouldn’t have to hear her.”

           “We don’t know that. There’s nothing about that in the article.”

           “Anybody knows that’s true. Real life is like that. There are fathers who get drunk, who let their children cry, who forget to pick them up when school is out, who beat them for no reason in the middle of the night, who spend all the money that was meant for food or a toy. There are fathers who should rot in jail, or better yet, who should be killed at night, looking them straight in the eyes so they’ll understand, so they can see the real consequences of what they’ve done.”

           I see María getting more and more nervous, wringing her hands while she talks and talks. I think I can see a blade of steel between her hands and I think about Elías’ eyes, I can imagine them held tight between María’s tense phalanges, transformed into a dagger that wants to enter, wants to be plunged into the chest of somebody who wounded her, somebody who used his power to turn her into nothing. There is a father. A guilty person. I know that now. This is the phantom who eats away at her inside. Kill him. That’s what she is thinking. Maybe she has already tried it, maybe one night with blackened air she went to his bedroom with a knife and stood like she was going to stab him in the heart. Her father’s heart.

           The other patients are infected by the nervousness. They all know that since we’re not talking about the article in the paper, we’re talking about something that is very close to us and that we all have in common. The father, the mother, the ones who are guilty of making us like we are, marked, marginalized, contaminated. Parents and their damned genetic legacy, parents and the dark circumstances that made this evil that sentences us to permanent punishment with no hope, made it grow within us.

           The others in the group become a chorus. “Kill him, yes, kill him.” (They laugh a nervous laugh, knowing they’re on the verge of the forbidden.)

           Because we’re not here in this therapy group to talk about what really happens to us, to tell the truth. We’re here to collaborate in the pantomime of being cured, taking care to give the right answer, the accepted one, the one that shows an appropriate sense of reality. But reality isn’t what they say it is, of course not! What they say is what they use to keep us locked up here, to torture us the way they please, a convention, a lie they accept so they can feel safe, to make the world turn in a reasonably efficient manner, but it’s not the truth. Truth, the essential, profound truth, is the one we see, the one we ourselves dare to say:

           “Kill them, do it, kill them!”

           I’m aware that once again we’re going backward, we’re heading away from our goal, from the door to the outside. I’m afraid violence will break out again, afraid the guards are going to come back to tie us up with their ropes, that they’ll write more lies in the folder where our history is filed. That’s why I grab María in my firm arms, I try to get her to hide her head in my breast. I want to stop her from talking, stop the voice that frightens her and this flock of deformed human beings. I want to make her cry, but cry without words: cry!, cry right here!, on me, with me.

Text © Rexina Vega

Translation © Kathleen March