Author’s note

In 2014, a friend I call a sister was raped while running to Vista Chinesa. A long police investigation to find the perpetrator ensued. I wasn’t in Brazil at the time, and was only able to stay abreast of this painful process by telephone, which was the closest form of contact available to me.

At an exhibition a few months later, in early 2015, I saw the series The Innocents by American photographer Taryn Simon, which documents a number of cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, raising the question of photography’s function as credible evidence. The portraits of people who had been wrongfully convicted based on identification by victims reminded me of my friend’s rape and the search for the perpetrator. Her difficulty in establishing whether a suspect was or wasn’t the culprit, her reticence to incriminate an innocent man, the police’s determination to arrest someone — I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was when I began taking notes to write a novel.

I set the notes aside until the beginning of 2018, when I discovered I was pregnant with a girl, and I thought the time had come to turn them into a book. In order to do so I needed to interview my friend, but I wasn’t sure if she would be willing to re-open such deep wounds. The feminist movement had since given her opportunities to talk about the subject, but she had preferred to keep her story among a close circle of people.

As soon as we began a series of interviews, I was surprised by the urgency with which she narrated the experience. The wounds weren’t just deep — they were at the surface, on her skin, still very much open and raw. She became so involved in the process that it would have been impossible to interrupt it in the middle. For a time, we established the following routine: she would tell me the story and I would take notes; then I would write, and she would read what I’d written; she would comment on it, and I would revise it. When I felt I had what I needed, I would move on.

I made it clear that I was going to write a novel, and she never interfered with my choice. She never asked me to tell it this way or that way. At a certain point in the process, she asked me only to say that it was a novel based on true events.

When the book was ready, she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t enough to merely set forth the facts. She felt it was important to reveal to whom those facts belonged. Would you like me to name you? I asked. Yes, she replied. For months, I played the Devil’s advocate, trying to ascertain that it was what she really wanted, until the day she told me: I’m not ashamed of what happened. I want you to write that this really happened — and that it happened to me, Joana Jabace.