1 February 2017
A worn-out black turtleneck, skin-tight black jeans. The same clothes I wore when I travelled here alone, eleven years ago. I notice this only while sitting in the back seat of the taxi into Lisbon with Dom. Now, however, I am one-and-a-half dress sizes larger. Now, my jeans are tailored and my sweater has a designer label. Now, I don’t wear whimsical fur-collared coats or charming hats from the 1920s to suggest the possibility that I am interesting.
The last time I came to Lisbon, eleven years ago, I could talk to any person in the world. I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year; with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus. I saw no problem in taking time from others, or accepting their hospitality, because I was paying it forward. I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealised potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered.
—In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, you, you don’t have much left to give.
—But it’s true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didn’t get any better.
2 February 2017
This is where it began. Lisbon, May 2006. Outside the club at the Santo Amaro docks, I dangled my legs over the edge of the wide river, my feet swinging like a purse at the end of a long strap. Above me, Lisbon’s big bridge, red and hung, just like the Golden Gate. I puffed smoke into the air excessively, the way I always do on long boozy nights, though I hadn’t had a drink for a couple of hours.
—She’s lying.
I drank water from a flimsy plastic bottle!
—Or vodka lime soda? Though you might still have been on your caipirinha bent, after Coimbra.
The girl I had gone to the club with, the woman, was kissing her new man inside while I waited. They had brought me here, in his car, from the bar with pink fairy lights that he owned in the Bairro Alto.
The woman with whom I had come was a stray I had ‘saved’ several hours earlier. She was walking, alone, with a brawny shadow behind her. Locking eyes with me, she called out, ‘It’s so good to see you!’
‘It’s good to see you, too,’ I replied. Like that, I rescued her from a man who might have hurt her. We struck up a conversation. We kept it going. Later, she said, ‘I’m going to meet a friend; would you like to come?’
—She might have helped the woman find a cab.
—It was just a twenty-minute walk. And the glorious amber of Lisbon at night.
It’s true—others were with us. To celebrate the woman’s escape, we stepped into a bar that smelled of yeast and bought a round of frothy beers. Her hair was long and wavy and she laughed at all my jokes. She was smaller than me and more beautiful. I wanted to follow her.
—A night opens up. Who are you to say no to it?
—Don’t go.
—Too late.
The man she was kissing inside the club was in possession of a figure that didn’t support his gut. Tall and fine-boned, he would have been slim but for the soft pouch of his belly, his hangdog chin. I couldn’t imagine what my new friend saw in him.
—Why had she not chosen you?
But then, I was fresh out of high school. What did I know about sex? Sitting by the river I talked loud-mouthedly to two young men, nineteen-year-olds with faces they’d one day grow into. Lit with vexation,
—The woman with wavy hair had dropped her.
I endeavoured to make my own way through the night. Conversation unfurled between the two young guys and me as we shared a diminishing supply of cigarettes.
I was on a break from school, working in bars and maxing out my credit cards for the privilege of seeing a world that wasn’t mine. I was enrolled in a law degree, which I was to start the following year (which I never did). Law, of all things.
—No more second-hand bedsheets.
—You thought you could evade me.
—Her feeling of entitlement, of significance, not yet knowing that it doesn’t come.
The boys with callow faces, were they business students? They longed to visit Australia. We swapped email addresses, just as I had swapped them, dropped them, in every city I stepped through. Did anyone ever email? Yes. But only the boys who thought I’d come with them to Corsica.
—The Corsicans were the worst.
It was light, now. I looked across the Tagus at the harsh stare of Jesus, Christ the King, the grand monument, arms outstretched from the mountaintop across the river. Christ the King, installed there by the fascist government, was in no position, I thought, to judge me. The boys promised me breakfast, the best pastel de Belém in Belém. I accepted. I went to say goodbye to my new friend. She told me not to go with them.
—She was right to sense danger.
—Did she think that instead you’d go back with her, to his place? Watch them screw?
Just one chance. One more in a series of chances that had led me to her, to this.
I’ll go with them, I said. It’s fine. I’m a big girl. The woman with long wavy hair wrote her number on a piece of card that I slipped into a fold in my wallet.
—You didn’t have a phone.
3 February 2017
When I am asked what the first news story I remember is—and because I cannot organise my memories in such a way—I say Princess Di. Other people my age say this, and so it has become my first news memory, too. Though it may have to do with the film Amélie, which romanticises the princess-death. The Thredbo disaster was a month earlier, however, and I remember that perfectly. I was nine.
She, the blonde princess, didn’t mean all that much to me, and so in her death I didn’t lose anything personal except perhaps a belief in the myth that blonde princesses live happily ever after. What I gained instead was a sensation of hot metal folding into my body, of boiling black oil spilling over my arms and face. Unlike the funerals of elderly family members, their peaceful grey bodies packaged smartly in timber boxes, Princess Diana, Lady Die, gave me the flesh knowledge of violent death. A useful memory to hold within your skin, as any one of us might take our last breath in a state of absolute terror.
Today I will call the police. I mean, I will call the ‘tourist police’, who take down tourists’ statements on official stationery and stamp them, so that tourists may claim the value of their stolen purses with their travel insurance companies. When I last came into contact with Lisbon’s tourist police, eleven years ago, I had to wait for an hour against a wall lined with orange plastic chairs—or maybe they were blue?—as an endless parade of dusty-haired English and French couples reported acts of petty theft against them. I was there to report an almost-rape.
—A sexual assault?
An encounter during which my flesh remembered the possibility of a violent death. When my body understood for a second that corpses are dismembered to cover up crimes. By kicking and screaming and running, I had got away from the death, so what was there to report?
—An attempt.
—A terror.
—A scare.
Waiting for the tourist police then, eleven years ago, my organs felt heavy from the no-sleep, from the trauma, from the traces of alcohol still left in my blood. But I was chipper and businesslike. I buried my shame deep alongside my fear, and I gave my statement, describing how two young men had conspired to rape me and almost succeeded, but I weaselled my way out by agreeing to other acts of violence, and then by my hysteria, and then by my physical desperation to flee. I was so chipper that, once I’d finished and signed my statement, the tourist policeman wrote his number on a piece of paper and said, ‘I finish at ten—let me take you out and show you the real Lisbon.’
4 February 2017
I didn’t call the tourist police yesterday; today, Saturday, the office is closed. This might have been unconscious, an avoidance.
—Or, lazy?
—Un-pleasure avoidance through pleasure? She wouldn’t go that far.
I’m not in the habit of living by Freud, but I admit that he has given me useful words to sort through my actions. I knew, for example, that I would come to Lisbon to find a copy of the police investigation; I knew that for many months. I knew, too, that I’d be searching for the documents that detail, in some kind of truth of their time, what happened to me, eleven years ago. But now that I’m here, I can’t even pick up the phone. I don’t want to know.
—But you do.
—She doesn’t want to know the words she gave that tourist police officer, so revealing will they be of what essence she’s made.
—Were made ofthen, whichmakes you now, no threshold between you.
I know what the pleasure principle is: it is not calling up the tourist police when I intend to. It is preserving the self that I am used to living with and going to great lengths to protect it from disruptions. Freud’s exact words won’t assist me here unless I’ve already been living by them.
Instead, I’ve been living with the detritus of pop psychology, like:
+ Strength can be willed.
+ Fear can be conquered.
+ It’s not difficult to be truthful.
The idea that ‘confronting demons’ is, firstly, possible, and, secondly, a good idea.
5 February 2017
—One can only conceptualise memory through metaphor. A sieve a warehouse an attic a skeleton a cupboard a filing system a database a basement an encyclopaedia a landscape a dustbin a grab bag. A tape recorder. RAM. A cathedral.
—Memory is the scribe of the soul. (Aristotle)
—That’s romantic—ergo, bullshit.
—Memory is a reconstructive process. (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)
—Or in the living arena of speech, memory is idiomatic. ________ like an elephant tripping down ________ lane jogging your ________ commit it to ________ a living ________ know it by ________ allow me to refresh your ________.
—If memory is not a tape recorder starting at zero, then how can a self exist, truly?
—To attach to memory some order, an architecture, helps assuage the sense that one has slipped into a warm pond, only to turn around and find oneself in treacherous waters, far from land.
—Anchor memories to signposts that suggest linear time. How old was I then. What was my mother doing. I was a size eight. Tony Moretti loved me.
—‘My first memory.’
—Is buttressed by recalling it.
—‘My first memory.’ A fiction fixed to the linear self.
—If only to survive the terror of selflessness.
—But I remember mine. My first memory, Paula, an artist at the residency, said. I was three, and I remember thinking, ‘I’m not so young anymore. I’m three.’
—‘Her first memory.’ It was pink pink pink. And red, peach light, close-up mottled black. Eyelids stuck pressed shut pressed against the breast. Vitreous fluid moves against. Breast. The muted sound of booming voices, dense. Everything thick all wet velvet dusky stuck together.
—Time precedes you. A framework for the private self, totally. Alone.
—‘And yet the image we have of ourselves is mediated through the other. Indeed, it is only the other who can see us, as it were, “objectively”.’ (Hans Ruin)
—‘It takes two to witness the unconscious.’ (Freud, via Shoshana Felman)
—Does trauma need a witness? If it does, you’ll need to have this published. Or else you will be your only witness.
6 February 2017 (Absolutely no meaning whatsoever)
Polícia de Segurança Pública.
Olá. Hi. Do you speak English?
Yes.
I have a strange request. In 2006, I was the victim of a crime in Lisbon, and it went to court, but I had to leave Portugal before I was able to find out what happened, so I’d like to see if I can track down the documents from this time.
Okay, so it was eleven years ago. So the problem is, eleven years later our paper has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
What…does that mean.
It means the situation was a long time ago and the situation is in the archives; it has been archived for ten years.
Is it possible to access the file from the archives? I don’t intend to pursue the matter at all, I just want to read it.
I can print it for you, but it has absolutely no meaning. If you want, you can send an email to the police. The situation is that we don’t give the police report in email.
Can I come in person? I’m here in Lisbon.
Okay, you can come here. Bring your ID.
7 February 2017 (A bad day)
Sometimes I think it’s possible to live with anything. That we’re wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think it’s not possible to live at all. Not at all.
—Is that how you preface a flurry of complaints?
—A knuckle clenched in her gut.
After phoning the tourist police, we—Dom and I—walk to a police station near our building. But Dom has the address wrong in his phone and, with no internet, we wander round like puppies, following indecipherable directions given to us by fruiterers. Each time we turn a corner, one of his work boots crunches down on my much smaller foot, by accident.
—Found it.
I explain ‘the situation’ to a group of eight male officers in severe boots, military haircuts. None of them speak English.
—They sent you home!
—To another station, downtown.
—The sun was miraculous in the sky.
—Tomorrow. Her breasts are heavy today, back aching.
We stop to rest in our room before heading to the other station. Once back at the studio, lethargy takes over. In bed, I listen to an audiobook history of the Salem witch trials. Unbelievable! I think, and then, somewhat believable—the madness of myth and misogyny and violence. I laugh, then, at the absurdity. These girls, swaying and chanting with the viral madness that possessed them. The men’s horror at the collapse of their neutral, natural power.
—The blanket beneath her legs is hot and dry in the sun. Her insides throb, but the blood does not arrive.
The artist residency we are staying at is highly disorganised. We don’t have a stovetop in the studio, we don’t have a key to the communal kitchen downstairs. In the cupboard, there is one butter knife, two bowls, two forks. A chopping board. A microwave on the bench. For these first few days, I cooked pasta in the microwave, which I then used to boil canned tomatoes with a clove of garlic (not recommended).
The air in our room is damp and it smells like the sea.
—You don’t want to read the police report.
—But she is itchy all over. In the legs. Itchy in the shoulder blades.
After building up some guts again, we embark on the second journey downtown. Once there, I explain myself again. The man at the desk prints off the information he finds, the initial report I made in 2006. He sends me to another location, the Polícia Judiciária, an enormous, modern building bustling with detectives who are investigating serious crimes such as attempted rape.
At the Polícia Judiciária I explain to six, seven, eight more people ‘the situation’. Finally, someone seems to know what I am after. The report. The file. The verdict of the trial that I never found out. I am told to wait.
Dom reaches for my hand and holds it lovingly, devotedly, as every cell in my body buzzes.
‘Don’t,’ I say to Dom, shrugging off his love, trying to settle my hands down. ‘Sorry. Just…frustrated.’
Hundreds of thickset detectives with charcoal overcoats and leather shoes cut out of the building for their lunch break. The lobby, wide and open as a gallery, is left empty.
Eventually, a middle-aged female detective, Cristina, comes out to explain that I will need to call yet another department. And that there will be a different reference number for my case after all—my name was incorrectly spelled in the initial report.
Back home in bed, bathed in sunlight, I turn the initial police report over in my hands. The names of the accused are written on the initial report. ‘Tomas da Silva’ and ‘Salvator’.
Later, we eat the dreary pasta dinner and I sip my glass of wine too quickly. I pour another. A melodramatic, drunken thought crosses my mind: I’m not safe. I’ve never been safe.
—Which is probably, technically, true.
8 February 2017 (Are you afraid?)
What does a man become in the eleven years since he threw a girl’s sense of being into chaos? This is the question I ask when I type ‘Tomas da Silva’ into Google. According to my yield, Tomas da Silva is a football hooligan. Tomas da Silva is also a yogi. He is a newlywed. He might be a mathematics professor in a woollen vest. Or a handsome Californian. A Miles Davis fan. An MBA graduate looking for work. A stocky young dad pleased with his brood. A professional soccer player who played for Benfica 1939–42. A helicopter pilot. A sappy boyfriend. A self-promoting guru. A surfer. A guy in aviators you’d avoid at a bar. A priest. A singer in a straw hat, laughing. A supply-chain manager. A teenage boy aware, and proud, of his burly new chest. A hotel manager with a sweet, plump fiancée. An acquisitions manager who has the look of a murderer. A seventeenth-century author of books that I determine are about Portuguese court life.
—Eleven years is a long time.
There is also the leader of ‘People’s Youth’, a right-wing Christian lobby group whose purpose seems only to suppress same-sex marriage and abortion. This Tomas looks so familiar that I swear it is him, until I swear it is not, until I look at his features more closely and remember that dark brown hair, pale skin with spots, a nose on the larger, rounder side, and about this tall, is not enough to go on. And while it might have been droll, or something grimly related to it, in this case I am unable to name a Christian lobbyist a sex offender.
—So you know their names, now, like you never forgot. Or maybe you’re confusing them?
You know when life is literary?
—Dreams organised neatly into themes. Memories of childhood retold to fit with object-relation theory.
—Stretch it. And it fits.
Well, the way I remember it,
—Or, you don’t,
Tomas is pale and Salvator is tanned. Tomas is round-nosed, Salvator is pointed. Tomas is soft-willed, Salvator, calculated.
Tomas is a garden-variety coward. Salvator is a literary psychopath.
—Neat.
—A dichotomy assists comprehension.
—For children and their moral equals.
—A dichotomy is usually false.
In court, in 2006, before I left Portugal, the boys’ lawyers were each allowed to ask me a question. Tomas’s lawyer asked me if I thought that his client was sorry for what he’d done. ‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that this was true. He was, I believed, horrified by what he had done.
Salvator’s lawyer asked me if it was true that I’d said, before his client took me to an apartment, locked me in a room and pinned me down with the intention to rape me, ‘Take me home and I’ll fuck you’?
I leapt up in my chair like a cat. ‘No! No, that’s not true. No, I’ve never said that to anyone.’ Which was true. I had never even thought of that constellation of words as my own.
While it was Tomas’s cowardice that got me into that room that morning, it was his cowardice that got me out, too. As I literally, literarily, kicked and screamed under the boys’ weight, heaving-crying and thinking that I would die, I desperately repeated, I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.
—I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.
Tomas lost his cool. He burst into tears and rolled off the bed. And it was suddenly clear to Salvator that he couldn’t handle the rape on his own. And Salvator said, ‘Two blow jobs then! You can leave when you give us two blow jobs!’ And I repeated the mantra I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me. And Tomas continued to cry and shouted at Salvator in Portuguese. And Salvator shouted, ‘You’re not leaving.’ And I found my shirt and my skirt and my shoes and I bundled them up in my arms. And Salvator and Tomas screamed at one another. And I pulled some of my clothes on. And Tomas said to me, ‘Come on.’ And I moved towards the door. And Tomas made as if to open it. And we, one of us, opened it. And Salvator slammed his arm between it and me, and he said, ‘Are you afraid?’ And that’s how I know he is a psychopath.
9 February 2017
On 7 June 2006, my older brother emailed me.
Hey a letter from the portuguese sexual crimes bureau came in today, so I’m emailing to make sure you’re ok?
Yes, I’m fine, I had a scare one night and took it very VERY seriously, and thus put two potential sex criminals in gaol. Well, not in gaol, but they’re going to trial in the next few months. Don’t tell Mum and Dad, they don’t need to worry about anything.
It was a pretty stressful situation, involving multiple trips to the police station and ID line-ups…But it’s all over and despite the fact that it has come down to my word against theirs (and they have lawyers and will actually be present at the trial whereas only my statement will be present), I feel that in some small way, the fact that I followed it through and found them, and their families and friends now know, that a small amount of justice has been served.
Apart from all that, I’m fine and dandy. I’m in Granada now which is very very beautiful. You’d love it.
I mean. Who speaks like that?
—Eighteen-year-old you, is who.
Eighteen-year-old me, who will not let this ruin her trip! Who has exhausted her legal duties and will demand no concern,
—A small amount of justice has been served.
who can absolutely handle trivial things like ID line-ups and slut-shaming lawyers, by herself, in a foreign land,
whose parents need not be informed lest they ruin her new life, her new life that is, for the first time, her own.
—But it’s all over…
If you wanted to phone home in 2006, you first had to go to a tobacco stand or a deli and purchase a calling card, ten euros, and scratch the silver film off the back of it with a coin, and find a public phone, and dial the calling card company’s phone number followed by a long PIN, followed by the country code and then the number you actually wanted to dial. Occasionally the call lasted as long as it was supposed to, but usually the line would drop out and you’d dial again, all those numbers, only to hear a pre-recorded Portuguese woman inform you that you’d run out of credit.
I was always (and am still) in trouble for not calling, or emailing, or visiting home often enough.
—Selfish.
Like many children—and who is not a child—I always felt a fierce need to protect my inner life and even my public decisions from my parents. I fear their intrusions and their judgements. When I see them, I brace myself for the impending commentary on the architecture of my life. I even brace myself for their love and praise, because who knows what ghosts parental love might awaken. As a daughter, I don’t ask for help, and I know better than to ask for validation. I don’t reveal my darkest worries. What I feel for them is love and duty. I help out when I can. And in return for being low-needs, I ask for freedom.
In the middle of the ‘fine and dandy it’s just a minor sex crime’ period, I called Mum and wept into the phone. I said, ‘I love you’, which was more demonstrative of me than usual. She said she loved me too, and begged me to tell her what was wrong. I said nothing specific, homesickness, maybe. Because I was fine, in a way. I was having the most thrilling most brightly lit time I had ever had. Everything, other than the minor-major sex crime, was fine, fine and dandy.
After I returned home to Melbourne, laden with debt, my father told me in a reproachful way that Mum had cried every night I had been gone—eight months or nine.
—A horrible thing for a child to be told.
—As if it were possible for a daughter to give her mother freedom from maternal love.
10 February 2017
Every time I garner the courage to call the prosecutor’s number, the office that has access to my file, something intervenes. My Skype app automatically updates itself. The internet drops out. The receptionist can’t understand me and hangs up. I try the other number, the number that Cristina gave me in case I needed to reach her, and no one picks up. Then finally I get through, explain myself to an English-speaking receptionist, who puts me on hold while I am transferred to another officer who doesn’t speak English. Each time I must explain ‘the situation’ I feel like I am being punched in the face. Like a boxer, I prepare myself for each blow. Yet when it comes, I’m shocked.
I finally reach Cristina. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘you want a copy of the investigation?’
‘Please,’ I say, ‘yes.’
‘Call back on Monday,’ she says. ‘I have a lot of work today.’
So that’s that. I cross my fingers and set an alarm for Monday, as if I’ll forget. My heart begins to settle down, the tension in my gut relaxes and I feel wetness between my legs; the gentle slipperiness of hot blood.
I have told the story of me in Lisbon at eighteen being attacked by two young men hundreds of times. The more I simplified the story, the more comfortable with it I became. I integrated the facts of it into my identity. I had been terrified, but I wasn’t harmed, not beyond repair. While afterwards I trusted people a little less, I didn’t fear sex, or men, or even travelling alone. And I didn’t think about the word trauma until years later, when I noticed that my nerves could not hold still, not in even a minor crisis.
On the way to a brother’s twenty-first birthday, my family, all packed into the butter-beige ’80s Volvo, ran into a cyclist. The cyclist was at fault, and no one had been going fast enough for the accident to have caused injury. But the guy hit the bonnet of the car, and automatically I screamed ‘Oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god’, tears bursting out of me. Mum shouted at me to calm down while she pulled out her crisis-management package (How do you feel, don’t get up, an ambulance is on its way) and Dad screamed at him, ‘Jesus wept! Whaddayou think you’re doing?’ and the cyclist said, ‘Don’t call an ambulance, please, I don’t have insurance.’ And he was absolutely fine, although perhaps a bit of a bonehead, but it was too late for me, my night had been ruined, the fantasy that things are somehow safe, which you need to have if you are to do anything at all, had been pulled right out from under me.
There were other times: a little white dog we all thought had been killed at the traffic lights, but which popped out from under the bonnet a second later, unharmed. A kinky nothing said to me by a lover in bed, the same words that Salvator had said to me as he pinned down my wrists, urging his friend to violate me. A kitchen fire at a dinner party, where the thud of terror said don’t try to fight it—RUN, to my embarrassment, while the friends I’d been dining with successfully smothered the fire with tea towels.
‘This happened,’ I used to say to friends, and therapists, ‘and now here I am, exactly as you see me.’
11 February 2017
When I was a little girl, my favourite aunt said of me: she’s been here before. She might have said this in response to the fact that at five I ‘preferred soymilk’, or that I opened packages with undue precision, or simply that I reminded her of herself—we share qualities, among them a love of beautiful objects that transcend context and time. But it’s true, too, that I was a little girl who longed to be old, old, old—twenty, thirty-five, fifty, sixty-eight—because oldness was wisdom, age was elegance, grace was strength and power was freedom.
I didn’t know that spring carries with it its own knowledge.
12 February 2017
Yesterday, Dom and I walked through the yellow city. Dodging the street dealers who work the tiled plane of the Praça do Comércio, we crossed paths with a group of young people, clearly backpackers. An odd assortment of eighteen-year-olds—fat and thin, pimpled and pimped out—presumably having come together hastily at the hostel’s breakfast bar that morning. Legally and morally, and maybe financially, they are adults, but the softness of their features betrays them.
—‘To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child.’ (Claudia Rankine)
Cloaked in a sheepskin coat down to his knees, his tight curls shaved to a fade, their leader puffed on a cigarette while he walked. No smoker in their right mind smokes while they are walking. But a young smoker smokes not because they can’t but smoke, but for the gravitas they believe smoking lends them.
—You remember someone telling your nineteen-year-old self, I’m surprised! I thought you were thirty.
Thirty.
Jesus.
—You puffed your cigarette at them and beamed.
—Now and then, the uncrossable threshold.
—A form of desperation, nostalgia. Speaking to the dead.
—The dead are everywhere, like God.
The group passed us by, not noticing us. ‘Watch out,’ my ancient spirit urged them. ‘Watch out for yourselves.’
13 February 2017
It’s Monday.
So.
I dial the number.
Again.
A surge of adrenaline.
Detective Cristina Serinia: ‘Okay I need a little more time. Please will you call back tomorrow?’
I hang up, exhausted. A bright acid curls inside my belly.
14 February 2017 (Valentine’s Day)
Is aging the slow expenditure of a finite source of energy?
Some of the other resident artists are going out for a drink, and might we like to join them? There is no way we are going out. Dom and I heat up some dinner and crawl into bed.
We open the laptop to watch a dumb movie on Netflix. Because I’m writing about sex crimes and reading sad books by Svetlana Alexievich, Claudia Rankine and Peter Handke, I want a film to wash over me, to leave me feeling numb and easy.
—Books have more interiority. They are about insides as well as surfaces, not only surfaces.
But I do enjoy the passivity of watching films. So rarely do I feel so passive that I trust myself to be carried, without objection. I. I’ve seen them all.
—All she asked for was a dumb movie to put her to sleep.
Well, we try.
Dead Calm (1989) opens with Sam Neill returning from his naval duty to find that his infant son has been killed in a car accident with his wife, Nicole Kidman, at the wheel. In the wake of the tragedy, the couple take an open sea yacht trip to reconnect. A dinghy containing Billy Zane, whose own ship is foundering, approaches the yacht; they let him on board. All of Billy Zane’s boatmates have apparently died of botulism, which seems unlikely, so the couple lock him in the bedroom and Sam Neill leaves Nicole Kidman on the yacht to go investigate. In Billy Zane’s sinking ship, Sam Neill discovers a bunch of dismembered, bare-breasted corpses. Sam Neill realises his rookie mistake and tries to paddle his way back to the yacht but, oh, too late. The ship has been commandeered by Billy Zane. Subtext: Nicole Kidman’s imminent rape. Sub-subtext: the real victim of rape is the rape victim’s husband.
We turn it off.
The premise of Cape Fear (1991) is that Robert De Niro, an ex-con, freshly out of prison for rape and battery, goes after Nick Nolte, his former lawyer, for defending him improperly. The key ingredient is that Nick Nolte found evidence that the victim had been ‘promiscuous’, which is apparently a defence in a rape trial, but due to the severity of Robert De Niro’s violence, Nick Nolte decided to withhold that ‘evidence’. Nick Nolte is now compelled to protect his hot wife, Jessica Lange, and his prize, the sexy teenage daughter, Juliette Lewis, from imminent rape, while also suppressing his secret, which is that in his spare time, he plays very physical squash with his attractive younger colleague. To recap: a lawyer didn’t appropriately slut-shame a rape victim, for which he feels real regret, and now the rapist, recently out of jail, is coming after the lawyer’s women.
Nope, I say. No no no.
Indecent Proposal (1993) stars Robert Redford as a billionaire who would definitely touch the waitress’s arse while she poured his wine. Demi Moore stars as a hot young out-of-work real-estate agent who is ‘satisfied’ because her husband, Woody Harrelson, is nice to her, and Woody Harrelson plays an aspiring architect who is also out of work but needs to finish building his dream house so that the world will recognise his extremely special talent. The couple go to Vegas to throw away their last five grand, which they do. Robert Redford, meanwhile, notices that he wants to shtup Demi Moore, and knows that, based on their difference in financial status, money will be an effective means of achieving this goal. Robert Redford coerces Demi Moore into gambling one million of his dollars at a very public dice table, a tell-tale sign of sociopathy, and then he thanks Woody Harrelson for lending out his wife so generously. In real life, everyone knows that pretty much anyone would sleep with anyone else for one million dollars, no questions asked. So the real question underpinning the tension is: what does Demi Moore value more highly—her husband’s sexual ego, or her husband’s creative aspirations?
‘OFF!’ I scream.
I open my Svetlana Alexievich book, Zinky Boys. One of her subjects, a private from the Grenadier Battalion, speaks of the first time he witnessed someone being shot:
It’s like a nightmare you watch from behind a sheet of glass. You wake up scared, and don’t know why. The fact is, in order to experience the horror you have to remember it and get used to it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 is 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.
Garlic stir-fried greens.
Back home again, I search online.
—A lot of people with names just like theirs. Even with their middle names, nothing.
Tomas must have changed his name. For sure.
—Coward.
I think about hiring a private detective.
I find one Tomas da Silva on Facebook, private account, and I message him.
Do you know me.