Mexican Hooker #1

by Carmen Aguirre

  As for the rape, it was like a satellite orbiting my life, part of my northern narrative, far enough away that we didn’t share the same air, but visible on a clear day or night. Gravity didn’t threaten to pull it through the atmosphere and crash it into me, hence it was not on my radar as a trauma to look at, but merely as a phenomenon to observe from afar.

  Months passed and my self-loathing intensified. I had made the unequivocally un-revolutionary and un-feminist decision to be a woman whose identity could be summed up as “basketball girlfriend,” and I started lashing out at Estéban. When not conducting a full-frontal attack, I could be found engaging in passive-aggressive behaviour, such as lying next to him in bed pompously reading Marta Harnecker’s The Social Revolution while he flipped through Clarín newspaper. It was the only book I had saved from my underground days, and it had always lived in a hiding place back in Neuquén. Now that I could read it openly, I did so, just to clarify that, although I was no longer involved in a leftist organization, I still believed in revolutionary change. Estéban was a whip-smart news junkie with centre politics who held a degree in journalism. Debating was one of our favourite pastimes, and it never took long for an argument to start.

  Our relationship could be summed up with two F-words: fucking and fighting. We fought not only about politics but about everything. He wanted me to do all the housework because he was the main breadwinner (I tutored English and taught at a private institute), while I wanted to share it; he wanted to hire a maid and pay her the going rate to resolve the issue, I would refuse to exploit a shantytown woman; he wanted to get married, I didn’t believe in marriage and reminded him that I had only married Alejandro at the MIR’s request; he wanted to have children, I spouted imperial feminist dribble passed down from my mother about how the maternal instinct was a patriarchal construct that didn’t exist. Our fighting, also triggered when, in my blind jealousy, I would accuse him of fucking groupies despite there being no evidence of this, would usually end up with me pounding on him to no effect. He was two hundred pounds of muscle, a six-foot-three professional athlete, and I was close to a foot shorter than him and weighed almost half what he did. He’d grab my forearms and stare into my face as my mouth, now a submachine gun, spit out the filthiest swear words in the Spanish language. Finally, after I’d exhausted every possible configuration of the Southern Cone’s most popular insult, “Go back to your mother’s cunt,” I’d stare back at him in silence, out of breath, covered in sweat, nostrils flaring. Within moments we’d be fucking each other’s brains out. And thus the vicious cycle would continue.

  It was the polar opposite of my marriage to Alejandro, a model of diplomacy, respect, tenderness, and like-mindedness. Our fights over the four and a half years of our relationship could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  The fiery connection with Estéban provoked great fury in me, but it also sparked a great furor, for he reminded me what it was to be fully alive, engine firing on all cylinders. He was funny, intelligent, and so sexy my knees still buckled every time I looked at him. And he put up with me. He loved me, and I was mad about him.

  There were times I would disappear from his life after a particularly brutal fight, slipping out of the house when he was asleep and taking the bus to Paraná, where I would hole up at Luisa’s for a few days. Once, I recruited her to take me to Buenos Aires. Penniless, we snuck onto an all-night train and spent the entire ride avoiding the conductor. We divined that the train was crawling with thieves, our antennas up in the dark, and, it being the dead of winter, we almost froze to death because the windowpanes were broken. When we reached Buenos Aires at the crack of dawn, we knocked on Luisa’s cousin’s door, shaking from the frigid train ride. He was an economics student and shared his studio apartment with a classmate. We all slept on the floor after debating for hours about neo-liberalism. They were pro, we were against. The argument, unresolved, continued in the dark as we lay on the floor.

  “Oh! I’m coming! I’m masturbating to Fidel Castro and I’m coming, ’cause I’m a Communist!” yelled the cousin’s friend.

  “Che Guevara’s the hot one, you fucking imbecile,” was Luisa’s response. And then we both faked loud orgasms while yelling out, “Oh, Che!”

  After a few days of aimless roaming around Buenos Aires, we snuck on a train back to Santa Fe, where I knew Estéban would be worried sick. I had fled without a plan, but while on the run Luisa and I had attended a showing of Romeo and Juliet at the Buenos Aires University Theatre Department. All their plays were free to the public, and every show was sold out. This particular version of Shakespeare’s classic reimagined Romeo and Juliet as an old, sour, bitter couple who did nothing but bicker. The students had spent a semester developing it, devising an alternative ending to the original wherein the star-crossed lovers instead fled their families and grew old together. It was brilliant, and those students pumped my blood full of life with their joie de vivre.

  On the voyage back to Santa Fe, eyes still shining from the performance, for the first time since I was a child I started to wonder about a possible future as an actor. I’d put on plays at social gatherings throughout my childhood, been part of theatre troupes in my teenage years, and had a starring role in my high school play the year I graduated. The theatre had seduced me at a tender age, and had been my one true love ever since. I had sacrificed that love for an even bigger one: revolutionary love. But now that was lost. And perhaps the future, which as far as I had always been concerned was going to consist of a socialist Chile where I would do whatever job was required of me, could now involve a life onstage. Who knew where, how, or when? For it was still difficult to fathom anything other than the dream I had fought so hard for, the crushed dream of so many.

  The year came to an end and things got progressively worse between Estéban and me. Mami came to fetch me from Santa Fe and we ushered in 1990 in Valparaíso. During our time together, I told her about the Buenos Aires play and my long-lost dream of being an actor, and she urged me to follow that path no matter what, insisted that staying in Santa Fe would kill me and that the theatre would save my life. Mami came from a line of women who had never had the opportunity to follow a calling. Her maternal grandmother had raised thirteen children while being beaten regularly by her husband. Due to malnutrition and disease, only five of her offspring had made it to adulthood. Her paternal grandmother, a seamstress who had also raised a brood of thirteen, only three of whom made it past adolescence (one of them, my abuelito Armando, had become a teacher and subsequently a high school principal), had succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. Her mother, my abuelita Carmen, had fled her violent family home at age sixteen, pregnant with my abuelito’s child, my uncle Carlos. My mother was the first to go to university, because it was free of charge. I could be the first to follow a calling.

  Shortly after my return from Chile, I bit Estéban’s chest during a bad fight, drawing blood and leaving a scar. Much to my amazement, no matter how much I aimed my anger at him, he stayed put, never kicking me out or giving me an ultimatum. Admittedly, many would have seen Estéban as the culprit in this particular fight. He had returned from an out-of-town basketball game with a crab-infested pubic area (no matter that I too had just nearly cheated on him with the Cousin). I had known the second I saw him that he’d slept with someone else. If anything, being in the resistance had sharpened my instincts to such a point that one glance was all it took to read a person like a book. Pulling down his pants and seeing the crabs crawling on his belly and inner thighs had provided tangible evidence of the infidelity I’d always suspected him of. He denied it, of course, blaming dirty sheets in the hotel room he’d stayed in.

  After the crab-induced chest-biting incident, my year of nervous breakdown reached its peak. I cried for a few days straight. Night and day. He did the best he could, although, being a young, super-privileged guy who’d never seen overt trauma up close, he had no skills to deal with me. All I wanted was to be held and reassured; all
he could do was throw his hands up in the air in exasperation and walk away, shaking his head. Sure, the VD situation had sent me over the edge, proving to me that I was indeed alone in the universe, but the roots of my suffering went much deeper than being deceived by Estéban. I couldn’t let him know what was wrong, no matter how much he asked, because I had no words to express what it felt like to be in a state of post-exile, post-revolutionary inertia. As for the rape, it was the furthest thing from my mind, as I was convinced that the basis of our relationship—sex—had proven that the rape was not an issue in my life.

  “I’m going to theatre school in Canada,” I announced a few weeks later.

  The way out of inertia was to apply a force to it, I had learned from my father, a physics professor, so I decided that following my calling surrounded by the exiled part of my clan in the land that had taken us in might dry my endless stream of tears.

  I’d been chewing over Mami’s inspiring words, no longer taking stock only of all that was lost but also of all that could be. Even though Pinochet was about to step down, I was afraid that going to theatre school in Santiago would be too painful to bear in the immediate aftermath of our defeat, so it made sense to end my Santa Fe banishment by following my childhood dream back to Vancouver. I could study theatre and upon graduation return to Argentina or Chile and be an actor.

  As a professional athlete, Estéban understood the power of a calling, so he supported me in my plans. I would go to Vancouver for the audition, and he would follow three months later, abandoning the basketball season midway. Within three years my schooling would be done, and we’d return to the South, probably to Buenos Aires and its thriving, world-renowned theatre scene and basketball teams he could try out for. During my summer breaks from theatre school, we would visit Argentina.

  On a warm Buenos Aires day in March 1990, I waved goodbye to Estéban from the escalator taking me to my Canada-bound flight at Ezeiza International Airport. I wore the same Calvin Klein, floor-length, gigantic-shoulder-padded denim coat M had bought me many lifetimes before, when I was a twenty-year-old, on-fire divorcee. Although that had been only two years earlier, a revolution had been lost since then and my adventuresome little group had scattered. M had returned to Brooklyn and I’d lost all touch with him, Luisa now lived in her hometown of Paraná, and Estéban had been traded to Santa Fe. Neuquén, where I had spent my first years of adulthood, seemed like a faraway dream, with its underground life and many secret excursions into Chile, that imagined country with its promise of imminent socialist triumph. Looking down from the escalator at that loyal, if not entirely faithful, man, I put on a brave face and bid farewell to the Southern Cone, the place where I’d given my life to a cause so much bigger than myself. Rudderless since that colossal loss, no one was more surprised than me when my compass pointed north.

  I’d known acting was my calling since the age of three, when my parents had taken me to the circus in Valdivia and I’d watched a bikini-clad lady stand on one leg on a galloping white horse. I also knew that acting had little to do with talent and much to do with skill—I’d taken acting classes since the age of eight—hence my decision, to my parents’ delight, to try out for one of the top classical theatre conservatories in Canada, located in the basement of a South Vancouver college. An Emmy-nominated American TV actor prepared me for the audition. He’d coach me late at night, after he returned from twelve-hour stints on set, where he played a detective on a Vancouver-shot Hollywood cop show. I met him when he hired me to be his Spanish wife’s English tutor, and the three of us became fast friends. They lived in a penthouse suite on Beach Avenue, overlooking the Burrard Inlet, and he was kind enough to help me work through a comedic monologue about a harried waitress and a dramatic monologue about a girl who’d lost her mother to cancer. A white girl. A middle-class girl with a name like Sandy.

  His patience and persistence paid off: I was accepted into the acting programme at the conservatory, along with fifteen other people. Hundreds from across the country had auditioned for sixteen slots, eight for men and eight for women. Of those original sixteen, only five would graduate. The rest would bow out of their own accord or be asked to leave within the first year—par for the course at this theatre school.

  I think it was my rendition of “Happy Birthday” in Spanish that tipped the scales in my favour. The audition, two hours long, had ended with a request for a song. My jaw dropped. The mailed instructions had only required two contrasting monologues; no mention of singing had been made. But then again, movement exercises, icebreakers, ensemble builders, improv, cold readings, and group games with names like Let’s Do It! hadn’t been alluded to either. So I sang “Happy Birthday” to the director, giving it my all, a Broadway belter beaming at the centre of a spotlight. Thankfully, my friend Lucho, a fellow Chilean exile about to graduate from the school, had advised me to wear tights, a loose T-shirt, hair in a bun, and zero makeup. It was clear that the others had not had the privilege of inside information. Some of the women were in pointy shoes and denim miniskirts, blond perms on full display, Bordeaux lips contrasting with their powdered faces. None of those made it in.

  Now that I was in theatre school, I was beginning to realize that I had been wrong in my assumption that acting was about acquiring the skills to pretend convincingly—in effect, to be a bald-faced, superlative liar. It was mid-October 1990, I was halfway through my first term, and so far I had learned that I was an absolute disaster as an actor, that indeed it was foolhardy ever to have thought I could grace the stage. Coming to this conclusion wasn’t difficult. First of all, there was the question of vulnerability, the fact that in order to be an actor one must be willing to open one’s heart and expose oneself to an audience of strangers who had paid money to see you do that. I had no idea what vulnerability in the professional realm was—what it felt like, how it manifested itself. Although I had just spent an entire year in the fetal position sobbing inconsolably on a daily basis, I was clueless as to how one went about accessing one’s emotional life on demand.

  “The answer lies in the text,” my teacher affirmed. “Now get onto your voice and speak on the breath.”

  Voice class was helpful. We had lessons on how to get out of one’s head, drop into one’s guts, and strengthen and trust one’s back so that one could let the front of one’s body relax and open. Still, no matter how hard I cried in voice class, once I got to acting class, where I was required to relinquish control and lay myself bare while interpreting a script, I shut off, any access to my emotional well sealed like an adamant clam at the bottom of the sea.

  When I grasped that acting was about honesty as opposed to masterful posturing, my awe and respect grew exponentially for the actors and plays that had changed my life. The most searing of these had been in 1986, in civil war–ridden Lima, Peru, the day after I’d taken the MIR oath at the age of eighteen (Lima was the MIR’s South American headquarters-in-exile). I was walking around downtown, weeping under my mirrored sunglasses, gripped by the Terror, when Alejandro pointed out a scribbled sign on a telephone pole advertising a play that was to start after curfew. The scrawled note taunted: Come if you dare.

  Being young and stupid, Alejandro and I broke all the rules of the oath we’d taken twenty-four hours earlier, which included never being seen at any alternative, much less illegal, events, and we dared to go to the play.

  We arrived just before curfew at the mentioned location, a rundown school. There were a couple of dozen people there, of all ages and mixed social classes. We all nodded at each other and then stared at the ground as Lima prepared for curfew, last stragglers running home, packed buses speeding down the street, the first military helicopters hovering in the sky. I cried quietly, the Terror not giving an inch. Finally, an Indigenous man in bare feet and white pants came out and gestured to us to enter the building.

  We were taken to a classroom. The chairs had been arranged in a circle. After we took our seats, the man disappeared. Time passed, the score of curfe
w becoming more prominent: silence, except for the intermittent hum of helicopters and military vehicles, an order being barked out, a bomb exploding here and there, and the odd shot ringing through the night. These sounds became our walk-in music. I wondered if there were secret-police members in the audience. More tears sprouted at the thought. Un-revolutionarily.

  All of a sudden a guitar played and a man came in, a troubadour, also in bare feet and white pants. He sang a song with no lyrics, just haunting vocals. He was followed by a woman and two other men, all in bare feet and white attire. The last was the man who’d let us in. For the next two hours they told us the history of Peru from the Spanish Conquest until that very moment in time: May 1986, the civil war. They told the story with their bodies. No text was spoken. They created image upon image, and a soundscape with their voices and breath, periodically punctuated by the hums, shouts, shots, and explosions of curfew. The images were of genocide, rape, slavery, starvation, and, ultimately, resistance. A celebration of life. The history of that country from the point of view of the oppressed, now freedom fighters. They finished their play by dancing cumbia as they sang the only text: