When I was finally fetched by a nurse, I was taken to another room, where Papi stood with the plain-clothed doctor and two men in blazers.
“There has definitely been a rape,” the doctor was explaining to my father.
My word didn’t count. Only this doctor’s did. I had been guilty of lying until the rape kit proved the truth. I didn’t understand anything, except that I was at the mercy of whatever system I now found myself in. My father nodded at everything these men said, for what else was he to do? They spoke of an investigation, of trying to catch the rapist, of the injection they’d given me to prevent pregnancy. They told my father I’d be nauseous due to the vaccine, as I stood there, invisible to them, underwear-less, pubes poking out of the broken zipper, a non-person. Was it because I was a girl? A child? A brown immigrant? I had no idea.
“Do you have any questions?” they asked Papi.
“Yes,” he responded in his thick Chilean accent. “Do you think we should leave this country?”
Having no clue what to respond to this nonsensical question (to them, certainly not to me, probably not to any refugee or immigrant), they simply stated:
“No. We need you here so we can conduct the investigation.”
My father was taken home in one car, I was ushered into another and driven back to the scene of the crime. It was cordoned off, surrounded by police cars with their strobe lights on, University Boulevard shut down to traffic. We pulled up, and as soon as I got out of the cruiser, a big German shepherd jumped on me, paws on my chest, almost throwing me to the ground.
“He can smell the rapist on you,” one of the detectives explained.
That’s right, I thought. I haven’t showered. He’s still all over me. Everyone can smell him on me.
Macarena had already been taken to the scene of the crime and was back at the police station now, dictating her detailed report of what had happened, they told me. As for me, I was led to the location, found by the dogs, lit up with spotlights now, and asked if this was it. I nodded, though I had no idea if it was. There were all kinds of experts there, all white men, in blazers, suit jackets, trench coats, a few uniformed cops. As I was being taken back to the idling car, one of the two detectives from the hospital approached from the trail.
“Look at this,” he said to his partner.
He held the cigarette butt that Macarena and I had been smoking.
“He might have been smoking.”
“No. That was us,” I said.
Now they knew. They knew it was my fault. For being a bad girl sneaking a cigarette in the woods.
Back at the police station, I told the cop everything I could remember about the rape as he pounded away on his typewriter and tried not to yawn. He asked me if the rapist had hurt me in any way, if I was sure it was rape, if I had been wearing provocative clothing. He asked why I had taken Macarena into the woods. I answered his questions and heard my mother’s furious feminist voice booming in my head. I nodded at it, knowing everything that was wrong here, and also understanding that this man was ignorant, that he was doing his job, for he was required to ask these questions by a system that considered a young girl raped at gunpoint guilty until proven innocent. I wondered what the questions would be if I were a boy. I wondered if I’d be laughed at if I were a boy. I wondered if a boy would even tell. To think the aftermath had only just begun.
After buying me a Coke from the vending machine, the officer took me home in the cop car. He offered to turn on the strobe lights and I agreed, for it would be fun. It was well past midnight when we pulled up to my house. A bone-crushing exhaustion unlike any tiredness I’d ever experienced hit me. It was a cement flattener. I walked up to the door alone, legs far apart due to the throbbing pain between my thighs, waved goodbye to the cop, and entered my house.
My entire family was there. Aunt Tita had made me vegetarian pastel de choclo, my favourite dish, and it sat waiting for me at the head of the table. When I made my way down the hall, Uncle Boris took a drag of his Benson & Hedges Light and yelled out,
“Well, thank God she’s not in a wheelchair!” and let out a long exhalation.
Everyone laughed. A smile spread across my face and I knew all would be fine, for humour was the way Chileans dealt with the worst of tragedies. So, after taking my first bite of food, everyone’s eyes fixed on me, I cracked a joke myself.
“Oh, fuck. I just realized I haven’t showered or brushed my teeth, and now I’m eating, so I probably swallowed some of the rapist’s pubes.”
But I was the only one who laughed.
I took my family in, one by one, nodded to myself, and silently thanked the Virgin Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia, the one who keeps the roads clear, for bringing me back to them safe and sound.
Now it was 8 a.m. the following day and I stood on the front steps of the school with Tommy.
“I was raped in there yesterday afternoon,” I said, indicating the woods with my chin.
“What?”
“I was raped.”
He searched my face.
“They told me last night that it’s the Paper Bag Rapist. Because of his MO. After I told them everything he did to me and my cousin. So they made a big deal about it. They cut off University Boulevard and everything. Anyways, I’m fine. But I wanted to tell you.”
He took my hand and asked to hug me and my heart overflowed with love for the umpteenth time since the rape. I was alive. I was alive. As he rocked me from side to side, I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed in the scent of his neck, like the time we’d slow-danced in his rec room to John Lennon’s “Woman” from the Double Fantasy album I’d given him for Valentine’s Day. I smiled at the memory of his Halloween costume. He’d worn a white and red leotard, tied a Canadian flag around his neck, and called himself Captain Canada. I beamed at the image of him pulling up to school every morning on his red ten-speed, wearing his blue windbreaker, dirty-blond hair framing his freckled face, at our arguments over the Cold War, over El Salvador, over capitalism and imperialism. When I opened my eyes, the culpable forest rose up in front of me in all its green, inviting glory, and I thanked my lucky stars for having met a rapist, not a murderer.
TWELVE
Oughton’s corrections officer was a three-hundred-pounds-of-muscle, soft-spoken white guy with a shaved head, gladiator tattoo on one bulging biceps, dragon tattoo snaking around the other, a silver braided Celtic wedding band on his ring finger. There was a large bump on his forehead, as if he’d just finished restraining an out-of-hand prisoner.
“I deal with Oughton,” he told Laura and me, stance wide, arms crossed over his chest, as we waited in a small room for our tenth parole hearing to begin.
An Edmonton Oilers dream catcher hung in the window behind his head. St. Patrick’s Day stickers of leprechauns, four-leaf clovers, top hats, and pots of gold at the end of rainbows decorated its panes, despite it being October.
The year was 2013, and we were at Bowden Institution, a jail an hour’s drive north of Calgary, where Oughton had been transferred from BC’s Mountain Institution. We’d attended every hearing over the last two decades, through marriages, divorces, children, heartbreak, depression, disease, bankruptcy, career highs and lows, and, now that we were in our mid-forties, menopause. In short, through our adulthood. Over a dozen victims, on top of the eight who had gone to the original hearing we’d attended in 1995, had come and gone, sadly never a male one. Laura (the other lone woman at the first one, now one of my closest friends) and I were the constants in a whirl of women who came to catch a glimpse of him. So many stories had been swapped, so many details shared, so much recognition of each other, Laura and I always there to offer guidance to the new ones, and now the last ones standing. Rick, head of the investigative team that had caught him after the assault on Barb, loyal friend and unwavering supporter, was there every time.
Eighteen years had passed, and controlling, attention-seeking behaviour on Oughton’s part had been intrinsic to every hearing si
nce he’d first yelled and run out of our first one, from refusing to show up at the last minute while we all waited in the next room, to an outburst in which he had been wrestled to the ground by two guards and Rick, to his insistence at the ones he’d attended long enough to speak at that “They wanted it. I am their victim,” while his mother shot us dirty looks from her seat. When she stopped coming, we learned she had died in a car accident on the Trans-Canada Highway on Mother’s Day. She’d been on her way to see him in the stretch limo she had hired.
For years, a few of us had regular dinners and brunches, the bond between us so strong despite our very different lives (from a globe-trotting high-fashion model to a personal trainer to a criminal justice worker to a midwife to a hotel receptionist) that there was nothing to explain when we talked about our issues around sex and relationships (some of us were in difficult marriages, others divorced, others dating, others too jaded to go anywhere near any kind of intimacy). During one of our dinners, held on the back balcony of a Commercial Drive Italian restaurant, we’d dialed 911 when we heard a young girl scream out “Rape!” from the dark alleyway. Laura had kicked off her heels and chased the rapist for ten blocks while I’d run the other way after the victim, a terrified teenaged addict from skid row. Too afraid to talk to law enforcement due to her hard-drug use and the petty crime that came with it, she’d continued on her way after she calmed down, and the rest of us waited for the police to arrive. Laura had managed to keep the would-be rapist in view during her sprint, and arrived with him in the back of a cruiser. When we gave our statements, the young cops, a man and a woman, thought we were pulling their leg when we told them we were all victims of the Paper Bag Rapist. Some people believed he had been a myth that parents used when barring their daughters from leaving the house.
Over the years, we’d got to know each other’s parents, relatives, spouses, and friends who came to the hearings to offer support. Afterwards, we’d have lunch at Earl’s Restaurant, just off the highway in Chilliwack, and discuss Oughton’s latest courtroom antics, and then catch up on each other’s lives. I was always alone, for the rape could never be discussed with my father, who left the room whenever I mentioned it. He wasn’t even aware that I had continued going to the hearings after the first one. Right after the attack, when we’d been speeding to the general hospital along University Boulevard, he’d said quietly,
“I don’t think we can ever speak of this,” his voice breaking clean in two.
I’d looked out the back window of the cop car as we passed the entrance to the trail Macarena and I had emerged from just an hour earlier. I nodded, still holding my sandals in my shaky hands, my bare feet covered in the dirt and grime of the forest floor, boulevard cement, police station tiles, and UBC hospital hallways. And I understood that the pain caused by the rape of his child was bigger than the grief of his best friend being shot in the firing squad. Bigger, even, than losing an entire country to exile.
For the next few weeks, he spent all his free time with me, taking me on walks through UBC’s botanical and rose gardens, and along Spanish Banks, Locarno, and Jericho beaches, during which he urged me not to tell too many people about what had happened, because the world is a cruel place and I would be blamed and called terrible names, and he philosophized about life. About how one must always stay positive and not focus on the negative. One night, he took me to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz at the Ridge Theatre. He loved the movie (as did I) and behaved like a teenager through it, bopping his head up and down to the music, clapping, whistling, and cheering, modelling his “focus on the positive” philosophy. For the first time, I saw a new side of Papi in relation to me. Although we could never talk about the rape and its effects on us, he was letting me know he could also be a friend and a peer, not just a father figure.
As for my mother, I’d been forbidden to tell her until the next time I saw her, which was later that year, when I moved back to Bolivia, the logic being that there was nothing she would be able to do from her distant post other than worry sick about my emotional well-being. Strange as it was to keep such a key piece of information from her, especially taking into account that we corresponded on a regular basis, it also made sense. My northern life was compartmentalized from my southern one; the two had never met. The rape was part of my northern narrative and identity, and being barred from telling Mami in the long letters I wrote her kept it that way. So I’d dealt with the immediate impact with the help of my friends, who were always willing to lend an ear when I’d tell them about it, ignoring my father’s advice to keep it to myself, the act of repeating the sequence of events in a factual, detached way helping me to process the horror of it.
Word of the rape had spread like wildfire. It was on the cover of the Vancouver Sun that I delivered on my paper route the afternoon after it happened, and everyone at school and in the neighbourhood knew that Macarena and I were the victims, much to Papi’s dismay. There was no need for her and me to speak of it; we both knew what we’d been through, and that was enough. We were each other’s silent witness, and we were bonded for life in the certainty of what we were capable of doing for each other. In this way, I was not alone in my suffering. I had my friends and I had her. I had her knowing look across the dinner table, her gentle elbow in my ribs when breaking news of the Paper Bag Rapist’s latest attack appeared on TV and in the headlines of the newspapers I delivered, I had the way she held her breath every time we passed the guilty forest.
She was now a working mother of three children and had no interest in the hearings or in meeting the others. She believed she was not a real victim because she hadn’t been raped. She was hard on herself, not only in her certainty that she hadn’t been victimized, but also in her core belief that the rape had been her doing, for she had mouthed the words “Do it for me” as a twelve-year-old with a gun to her head. The position he had put her in was his biggest crime, as far as I was concerned, for no matter how the adult Macarena tried to convince the child Macarena that she had been set up to feel responsible, the belief was still there, unshakable. When Laura and I spoke to our fellow survivors, we recognized a pattern in how the witnesses had dealt with the attack: drugs, alcohol, other addictions. In half the cases, the duo was estranged.
I was always alone at the hearings, and would have wanted only Macarena there, for I didn’t want to take care of a third party’s feelings, a role I fell into seamlessly and that I was most comfortable in. Knowing that I always chose to go unaccompanied, others’ support people went out of their way to be there for me, so much so that I felt a blood connection to those parents, there to do for me what Mami and Papi had never been able to. Their pain had been insurmountable, their guilt unbearable. Neither of them could accept that there was nothing they could have done to prevent the rape, that there are things that cannot be controlled. Both knew how to fight for humanity’s basic human rights: food, water, shelter, medical care. Figuring out how to provide emotional support for their raped daughter did not propel them into action the way the revolution did. On the contrary, it immobilized them, silenced them, left their lungs devoid of breath. “Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t breathe” had not only been my survival psalm during the rape itself, it became theirs in the aftermath.
My mother had collapsed onto the couch when I’d told her and Bob in Bolivia later that year, a grunt as though she’d been kneed in the gut escaping her mouth. I knew I couldn’t go into detail as I watched her double over, arms on her stomach, something I’d never seen her do before. Of all the things we’d been through in my thirteen years of life—persecution, exile, the MIR’s Return Plan that had us leading double lives in Bolivia—this was the event that succeeded in pulling the rug out from under her feet.
We hadn’t spoken of it after that. Referenced it, but never spoken about the actual attack or its ongoing effect on me. Bob, on the other hand, had asked questions from that day on that were hard to ask. He was brave, confronted the dark head-on, always had. When I was nine
and he’d first become my stepfather, I’d requested he climb Cedar with me, the only adult ever to receive that invitation. Not only had he accepted, he’d understood what Cedar meant to me and we’d shaken on the secret once we reached the top. Since then, Bob had been a twin soul. I had lacked his courage, though, for I’d never had the guts to ask him what had been done to him when he’d been held prisoner at the stadium in Santiago, what he’d witnessed, how he’d felt, the way he’d asked me. His ability to dig, to inquire over the years, helped to demystify the rape, and took away its power over us.
In 1997, sixteen years after the rape, on my thirtieth birthday and on the cusp of my Saturn Return Nervous Breakdown, Mami and I sat in the Caprice Theatre on Granville Street, waiting to watch the matinee showing of Autumn Sun, an Argentinian film featuring two of my all-time favourite actors, Norma Aleandro and Federico Luppi. As the lights went down, she said:
“I went to see a psychic healer the other day. Because I feel pain and I’ve gone to doctors and they haven’t found anything wrong with me. She told me she could see me being attacked and raped when I was thirteen. I told her there was no way. That that wasn’t me. She said yes, she could see it, that it was horrible, absolutely horrible. She insisted. I finally realized it was you she was seeing. It was you.”
Mami’s voice grew thick with emotion.
“So I told her. I said, ‘What you’re seeing is my daughter.’ And she told me what she saw. The man, on top of you, the gun, Macarena with her face in the dirt next to you, the terror he put you through. And I kept saying, ‘That’s my little girl. That’s my daughter. That’s my daughter. That happened to my little girl.’ And she said, ‘That is your pain. That is the pain that lives in your body.’ ”
The theatre went to black, and we took each other’s hands and let the tears cascade down our faces in the dark. We didn’t let go, fingers braided together.
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