and he was sorry, and he helped me, he washed m y face and he
put me in bed and he covered me up and he let me sleep and it
ju st w asn’t something you could imagine happening again. O r
I didn't do the laundry right. I didn’t separate the clothes right.
I washed his favorite T-shirt in with the colored clothes and
some colors ran in it and he held it up and he berated me for
how stupid I was and how I did this to hurt him on purpose
because it was his favorite T-shirt and I was trying to placate
him so I was trying to smile and be very nice and I said it was
ju st a mistake and I was sorry and he said you always have
some fucking smart answer and he hit me until I was wet stuff
on the floor. Everything just keeps happening. Y ou do the
laundry, you think you are free, you get waked up by
someone on you fucking you or he ties you up and you get a
pain in your side and then you go to the movies and time slows
down so that a day is almost never over, it never exactly ends,
nothing exactly ever stops or starts, I’d sit in the movie
wondering what would happen if I just stood up and started
begging for help, I wanted to, I wanted to just stand up and say
help me; help me; he’s hurting me; he, this one here, he hurt
me so bad just before; help me; take me somewhere; help me;
take me somewhere safe; and I knew they’d laugh, he’d make
them laugh, some jokes about women or how crazy I was and
the stoned assholes would just laugh and he’d keep me there
through the movie and then life would just go on; then or
later, that night or tomorrow, he would hurt me so bad; like
Himmler. There’s normal life going on all around you and
you have your own ordinary days and it is true that they are
ordinary because doing the laundry is ordinary and being
fucked by your husband is ordinary and if you are unhappy
that is ordinary too, as everyone will tell you i f you ask for
help. Old ladies in the neighborhood will pat your hand and
say yes, dear, but someday they get sick and die. Y ou can’t
remember if there was a prior time and you get so nervous and
so worried and you just keep trying to do everything better,
the cleaning, bed, whatever he wants, you concentrate on
doing it good, the w ay he likes it, and you just squeeze your
mind into a certain shape so you can concentrate on not
making mistakes and some days you can’t and you talk back or
are slow or say something sarcastic and you will be hurt. Did
you provoke it, did you want it, or are you just a fucking
human being w h o ’s tired o f the little king? If you tell anyone
or ask for help they blame you for it. Everyon e’s got a reason
it’s your fault. I didn’t clean the refrigerator, I did mess up the
laundry, I wasn’t in the right, I’m supposed to do those things,
I’m the wife after all, whoever heard o f one who didn’t know
how to do those things, he has rights too; I’m supposed to
make him happy. And I let him tie me up so it’s on me what
happened and if I say I didn’t like it people just say it’s a lie, you
can’t face it, you can’t face how you liked it; and I can’t explain
that I’m not like them, I’m not someone virginal in the world
like them, I been facing what I liked since I was bom and being
tied up isn’t what they think, the words they use like
“ sadomasochism” or “ bondage, ” three-dollar words for
getting a trick to come, and they get all excited just to say them
because they read about them in books and they are all
philosophers from the books and I hate them, I hate the
middle-class goons who have so much to say but never spent
one fucking day trying to stay alive. And when you are a
fucking piece o f ground meat, hamburger he left on the floor,
and he fucks you or he fucking leaves you there for dead,
whichever is his pleasure that day, it’s what you wanted, what
you are, what’s inside o f you, like you planned it all along, like
yo u ’re General Westmoreland or something instead o f messed
up, bleeding trash, and i f yo u ’re running aw ay they send you
back for more, and they don’t give you money to help you,
and they tell you that you like it; fucking middle-class
hypocrite farts. I have a list. I remember you ones. Y o u try to
pull the w ool over someone else’s eyes about how smart you
are and what humanitarians you all are on the side o f
w hoever’s hurting. Nelson Mandela provoked it. What do
you think about that, assholes? We all o f us got the consolation
that nobody remembers the worst things. T h ey’re gone; brain
just burns them away. And there’s no words for the worst
things so ain’t no one going to tell you the worst things; they
can’t. Y ou can pick up any book and know for sure the worst
things ain’t in it. It’s almost funny reading Holocaust literature. The person’s trying so hard to be calm and rational, controlled, clear, not to exaggerate, never to exaggerate, to
remember ordinary details so that the story will have a
narrative line that will make sense to you; you— whoever the
fuck you are. The person’s trying so hard to create a twenty-
four-hour day. The person picks words carefully, sculpts
them into paragraphs, selects details, the victim ’s selection,
selects details and tries to make them credible— selects from
what can be remembered, because no one remembers the
worst. They don’t dare scream at you. They are so polite, so
quiet, so civil, to make it a story you can read. I am telling you,
you have never read the worst. It has never been uttered by
anyone ever. Not the Russians, not the Jew s; never, not ever.
Y ou get numb, you forget, you don’t believe it even when it’s
happening to you, your mind caves in, just collapses, for a
minute or a day or a week or a year until the worst is over, the
center caves in, whoever you were leaves, just leaves; if you
try to force your mind to remember it leaves, just fucking
empties out o f you, it might as well be a puddle on the ground.
Anything I can say isn’t the worst; I don’t remember the
worst. It’s the only thing God did right in everything I seen on
earth: made the mind like scorched earth. The mind shows
you mercy. Freud didn’t understand mercy. The mind gets
blank and bare. There’s nothing there. Y ou got what you
remember and what you don’t and the very great thing is that
you can’t remember almost anything compared to what
happened day in and day out. Y ou can count how many days
there were but it is a long stretch o f nothing in your mind;
there is nothing; there are blazing episodes o f horror in a great
stretch o f nothing. Y ou thank God for the nothing. Y ou get
on your fucking knees. We are doing some construction in our
apartment and we had a pile o f wood beams piled up and he
got so mad at me— for what? — something about a locked
door; I didn’t lock the door or he didn’t lock the door and I
asked him w hy not— and he picked up one o
f the w ood beams
and he beat me with it across m y legs like he was a trained
torturer and knew how to do it, between the knees and the
ankle, not busting the knees, not smashing the ankles, he ju st
hammered it down on m y legs, and I don’t remember
anything before or after, I don’t know what month it was or
what year; but I know it was worse, the before and the after
were worse; the weeks I can’t remember were worse; I
remember where it happened, every detail, we had the bed in
the hall near the w ood beams and we were sleeping there
temporarily and it was early on because it w asn’t the brass bed
yet, it was ju st a dum py old bed, an old mattress, and
everything was dull and brown, there was a hall closet, and
there was a toilet at one end o f the hall and a foyer leading to
the entrance to the apartment at the other end o f the hall, and
there wasn’t much room, and it was brow n and small and had
a feeling o f being enclosed and I know I was sitting on the bed
when he began to hit me with the beam, when he hit me with it
the first time, it was so fast or I didn’t expect it because I didn’t
believe it was possible, I didn’t understand what happened, or
how it could; but I remember it and the only thing that means
is that it isn’t the worst. I know how to calibrate torture— how
to measure what’s worse, what’s better, w hat’s more, w hat’s
less. Y o u take the great morbid dark blank days and you have
located the worst. Y ou pray it ain’t buried like Freud says; you
pray God burned it out like I say. Some weeks later he wanted
to have dinner with his sister and brother-in-law. I could limp
with a great deal o f pain. I was wearing dark glasses because
m y eyes had cuts all around them and were discolored from
bruises and swollen out o f shape; I don’t know when m y eyes
got that way; the time o f the wood beam or in the weeks I can’t
remember after; but I had to wear the glasses so no one would
see m y eyes. Them kinds o f bruises don’t heal fast like in the
movies. They all played cards and we had cheese fondue
which I never saw before. I walked with a bad limp, I
concealed the pain as best I could, I wore the dark glasses, I had
a smile pasted on my face from ear-to-ear, an indelible smile,
and brother-in-law brought up the limp and I said smiling
with utter charm that I had tripped over the beams and hurt
myself. D on’t w orry, I whispered urgently to m y husband, I
would never tell. I would never tell. What you did (hoping he
doesn’t hear the accusation in saying he did it, but he does o f
course and he bristles). I’m on your side. I wouldn’t tell.
Brother-in-law, a man o f the world, smiles. He knows that a
lot o f stupid women keep falling down mountains. H e’s a
major in the military; we say a fascist. He knew. He seemed to
like it; he flushed, a warm, sexy flush; he liked it that I lied and
smiled. There’s no what happened next. Nightmares don’t
have a linear logic with narrative development, each detail
expanding the expressive dimensions o f the text. Terror ain’t
esthetic. It don’t work itself out in perfect details picked by an
elegant intelligence and organized so a voyeur can follow it. It
smothers and you don’t get no air. It’s oceanic and you drown,
you are trapped underneath and you ain’t going to surface and
you ain’t going to swim and you ain’t dead yet. It destroys and
you cease to exist while your body endures anyway to be hurt
more and your mind, the ineffable, bleeds inside your head
and still your brain don’t blow. It’s an anguish that implodes
leaving pieces o f you on the wall. It’s remorse for living; it’s
pulling-your-heart-apart grief for every second you spent
alive. It is all them cruel things you can’t remember that went
to make up your days, ordinary days. I was in the bedroom. It
was dark blue, the ceiling too. I’d be doing what he wanted, or
trying to. He fucked me a lot. I’d be crying or waiting. I’d be-
staring. I’d stare. I was like some idiot, staring. After he
fucked me I’d just be there, a breathing cadaver. Y ou just wait,
finally, for him to kill you; you hope it w o n ’t take too long,
you w o n ’t have to grow old. Hope, as they say, never dies.
T im e’s disappearing altogether, it doesn’t seem to exist at all,
you wait, he comes, he hurts you this w ay or that, long or
short, an enormous brutality, physical injury or psychological
torture, he doesn’t let you sleep, he keeps you up, he fucking
tortures you, yo u ’re in a prison camp, yo u ’re tied up or not,
it’s like being in a cell, he tortures you, he hurts you, he fucks
you, he doesn’t let you sleep, it doesn’t stop so it can start
again, there’s no such thing as a tw enty-four-hour day. I don’t
know. I can’t say. I didn’t go out anymore. I couldn’t walk,
really, couldn’t m ove, either because physically I couldn’t or
because I couldn’t. There’s one afternoon he dragged me from
the bed and he kept punching me. He pulled me with one hand
and punched me with the other, open hand, closed fist, closed
fist, to m y face, to m y breasts, closed fists, both fists, I am on
the kitchen floor and he is kneeling down so he can hit me,
kneeling near me, over me, and he takes m y head in his hands
and he keeps banging m y head in his hands and he keeps
banging m y head against the floor. He punches m y breasts. He
burns m y breasts with a lit cigarette. He didn’t need to hold me
down no more. He could do what he wanted. He was
punching me and burning me and I was wondering i f he was
going to fuck me, because then it would be over; did I want it?
He was shouting at me, I never knew what. I was crying and
screaming. I think he was crying too. I felt the burning. I saw
the cigarette and I felt the burning and I got quiet, there was
this incredible calm, it was as i f all sound stopped. Everything
continued— he was punching me and burning me; but there
was this perfect quiet, a single second o f absolute calm; and
then I passed out. Y o u see how kind the mind is. I just stopped
existing. Y ou go blank, it’s dark, it’s a deep, wonderful dark,
blank, it’s close to dying, you could be dead or maybe you are
dead for a while and God lets you rest. Y ou don’t know
anything and you don’t have to feel anything; not the burns;
not the punches; you don’t feel none o f it. I am grateful for
every minute I cannot remember. I thank You, God, for every
second o f forgetfulness Y ou have given me. I thank Y ou for
burning m y brain out to ashes and hell, wiping it out so it is
scorched earth that don’t have no life; I am grateful for an
amnesia so deep it resembles peace. I will not mind being dead.
I am waiting for it. I have breasts that burst into flames, only
it’s blood. Suddenly there’s a hole in my breast, in the flesh, a
deep hole that goes down into my breast, I can be anywhere
,
or just sitting talking somewhere, and blood starts coming out
o f m y breast, a hole opens up as if the Red Sea were splitting
apart but in a second, half a second, it wasn’t there and then
suddenly it is there, and I know because I feel the blood
running down my breast, there’s a deep hole in my breast, no
infection, it never gets infected, no pus, no blood poisoning
ever, no cyst, completely clean, a hole down into the breast,
you see the layers o f skin and fat inside, and blood pours out,
clean blood, just comes out, it hurts when the hole comes, a
clean hurt, a simple, transparent pain, the skin splitting fast
and clean, opening up, and I’m not in any danger at all though
it takes me some years to realize this, it’s completely normal,
completely normal for me, I am sitting there talking and
suddenly the skin on a breast has opened up and there is a deep,
clean hole in m y breast and blood is pouring down m y chest
and I’m fine, just fine, and the hole will stay some days and the
blood will come and go. T h ey’re m y stigmata. I know it but I
can’t tell anyone. They come from where the burns were, the
skin bursts open and the blood washes me clean, it heals me,
the skin closes up new, bathed in the blood: clean. Because I
suffered enough. Even God knows it so He sent the sign. I’ve
seen all the movies about stigmata and it’s just like in the.
movies when someone explains what real stigmata is so we
can tell it from a trick; it’s real stigmata on me; it’s God saying
He went too far. He loves me. It’s Him saying I’m the best
time He ever had. They asked in the camps, they asked where
is God; but they didn’t answer: omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent, H e’s right here, having a good time. When you
get married, it’s you, the man, and God, ju st like is always
said. God was there. The film unrolled. The live sex show
took place. I’m filthy all over. The worst thing was I’d just
crawl into bed and wait for him to fuck me and he’d fuck me. I
couldn’t barely breathe. His long hair’d be all over me in m y
face, in m y eyes, in m y nose, in m y mouth, and it was so hot I
Mercy Page 21