Meanwhile, the Devil always comes back for more. We slept together; my father, Jacqie and me in the bottom bunk, while Mikey slept by himself up top. Then one night, I woke up to find his fingers inside of me. I was petrified. Unable to move. I held my breath for as long as I could.
After that, I always made sure to sleep in the middle, so Jacqie wouldn’t be next to him. I kept her to the side, up against the wall, so my father couldn’t touch her. The instinct to protect her was born of some very profound place, though I didn’t quite know why. I still didn’t understand this new game my father was playing, but a little voice deep inside of me was telling me that it would be much more harmful to Jacqie than to me. And I would force myself to stay awake until I heard the slow, constant sound of my father’s breathing. I was dying to fall asleep, to just drift off, but I had to wait for his eyes to shut if I was going to have anything close to a peaceful sleep. Either way, I knew that waking up wasn’t going to be easy. If I couldn’t sleep at night, I’d be nodding off all the next day.
The next morning, his only words were, “Don’t tell anyone or I’ll send you back to my family in Mexico and you’ll never see your mother again.” I was already scared of my other grandmother, his mother. She had never been good with me. I was terrified by the possibility of being separated from my mother and two younger siblings.
“Momma, I don’t want to live at Papi’s house anymore,” I told my mom one day. “I don’t like it there. They’re mean to me. Please!” I begged her with all my soul.
I was so persistent that, after two months, my mother finally relented.
“Fine! If they don’t want you there, then you’re coming with me.”
And that was it. From that point on, my father and his family started calling me a liar and accused me of making up stories about them being mean to me. To this day, that’s all I am to them: the biggest liar in the world.
The agreement was changed. Starting then, we would be with my mom from Monday through Friday, and then spend the weekend with my father. My mom was going a thousand miles an hour when it came to her job, and she needed the weekends to go out and sell houses. It was the perfect scenario for drawing the Devil out of a man who simply wouldn’t give up. My father would take advantage of those weekends, exploiting my silence more and more while simultaneously becoming ever more aggressive. His growing boldness translated into longer, more fearsome and more painful sessions for me. All I remember is closing my eyes, tensing up my arms and thinking: If I don’t put up too much of a fight, then he’ll be done with me sooner.
From eight to twelve years of age, not a single Friday went by where I didn’t wake up with a knot in the pit of my stomach. Oh God! I thought. Today we have to go back to Dad’s house. It was so bad that to this day I still suffer from gastritis.
When we got to his house in the afternoon once school was out, he let us do whatever we wanted: he’d take us to movies, buy us candy and toys and let us stay up late at night. Everything that my mother considered off-limits. During the day he was an angel—a patient and attentive father—but when night fell, he became someone else entirely. That was when it happened: always when the lights were out.
To this day, I’m still terrified of the dark. I always leave a candle burning or a nightlight on so that I can sleep. Whenever I find myself surrounded by darkness, I feel like something terrible is about to happen.
You don’t have a clear conscience, Chiquis. That’s why you’re afraid of the dark, my poor mother would joke every time I’d have to turn the light on before entering a room. Do you think she knows? I’d ask myself in a panic. But no, the truth is that she didn’t know a thing, though she would be the one, some time later, who first put the pieces of the puzzle together. My mom was as clever as she was calculating. She would have made a great CIA agent, given the opportunity.
That’s how I spent my ninth and tenth years: keeping that monstrous, despicable secret from my mother and from the world, deep down in the depths of my very core: Fridays. When I was in fifth grade I finally dared to confess it all to a friend of mine, the first and only friend I had during that time. We were in fifth grade and Valerie was my constant companion.
“You need to tell a grown-up. You have to,” she told me. I remember the urgent look on her face after hearing the ugly details of my story.
“No, please,” I begged her. “Don’t tell your mom. Don’t tell anybody. It’s our secret. Please, amiga, please.”
I pleaded with her so much that she never opened her mouth.
I felt just a bit of relief from knowing that someone else shared my sorrow, but it didn’t help me much. The secret remained a secret. The fear was still fear. Fridays were still Fridays, and the Devil was still the Devil himself.
This was also the year when my suspicions that what my father was doing to me was filthy and wrong were confirmed. I, for all of my innocence, only sensed that it was strange, but then I started to hear the other girls at school laughing and joking about sex, saying that not only was it wrong, but sinful, as well. That’s when I realized that my father was truly doing horrible things to me. It was disgusting! Maybe I did the right thing by not telling anyone, I thought, and with that I buried the thought even deeper into the back of my mind until I turned ten and discovered that I was not the only member of the family who was afraid of the dark, and the dirty, immoral games that came with it.
Tía Rosie was fourteen at the time. But she was more than just an aunt to me; she was like a sister. A big sister who was a bit testy and occasionally moody. And, like any little sister, I imitated her and did whatever I could to get her to like me. She was going through a rebellious, teenage phase, shutting herself up in her room and refusing to play with me. I even worried that she might be jealous of me. Aunt Rosie was my mom’s favorite little darling, her beloved sister, until I was born—though, in truth, my mother never stopped loving and spoiling her. But the fact is that I soon discovered why my aunt always kept me away from her bedroom and her games.
“Yeah, your fucking dad is coming over. I hate that stupid bastard!” Rosie would yell at me. I never understood why she spoke to me with such rage in her voice, until one afternoon when (as my grandma says) the other shoe finally dropped: she was always acting strange around me because she couldn’t stand my dad! She wasn’t jealous of me; it was something that had to do with him.
That afternoon, when I saw her reading on the sofa bed, I took advantage of the opportunity to sit down next to her and start talking about random nonsense. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I said,
“I know why you hate my father so much.”
“Huh? Why? ¿Por qué?” she stammered. It was clear that my statement had thrown her off.
“Because he did the same things to you that he’s doing to me,” I said.
My aunt couldn’t hide her shock, and the blood rushed out of her face. You could see the fear in her eyes. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know, Tía Rosie. I can just feel it.”
We told each other everything, our voices hushed for fear that someone might overhear us. We talked about the when and the where, but never any intimate details. It was incredibly difficult for both of us.
“With me, once I turned eleven, he started leaving me alone. What about you? Is he still doing it to you?” she asked me.
“No. It’s been a few months now.” And that was true. Just before my eleventh birthday, the abuse became less and less frequent, and eventually he stopped coming for me altogether when we were left alone.
“But, Chiquis, if he ever touches you again, you have to let me know so we can go tell your mom,” Rosie demanded, her voice serious, though she was holding my hands with such care and concern that it killed off whatever distance had separated us for all those years.
“Okay, tía. Pinky promise.”
And we hooked our pinky fingers to seal our secret.
From that moment onward, we became much closer friends. Rosie stopped giving me the cold shou
lder all the time, let me into her room whenever I wanted, but we never again brought up the subject. Once was enough. At least, that’s what we thought. But I never told her that just a few weeks after we talked about it, my father woke me up in the middle of the night yet again. And just like that, the fear and the pain came rushing back.
This lasted until I was twelve. Around this time I was just entering puberty, and some of my friends had already had their first periods. This gave me an idea. I asked Dora, my father’s girlfriend, for a feminine napkin. By that point, she had been living with him for about a year, and had always been polite with me and—despite all the drama—she seemed to genuinely care about me.
“Ah, so it’s already time?” she asked, intrigued.
“Sí,” I replied, lying.
Of course, Dora went and told my father and, just as I expected, the midnight episodes stopped once again.
So from then on, every weekend that we’d visit him, I’d take it upon myself to steal a few napkins from Dora or my mother and put them on, just in case the Devil decided to rise again that night. God only knows, but thanks to that little invention of mine, my four-year-long nightmare had truly come to an end. Once and for all. Never again did my father touch so much as a hair on my head. That did not mean the fear was gone.
And the biggest bomb of all had yet to drop. The abuse might have been over, but the wounds were still very raw.
5.
PLAYING HOUSE
What I’m about to say here is something I haven’t told anyone about since it happened twenty years ago. As I write this, I can feel my eyes glaze over and my throat tighten up. This is something I haven’t confessed to any of the seemingly thousands of psychologists whom I saw during my teenage years, nor the doctors who treated me after the scandal with my father, nor the pastor of any church during my deepest spiritual crisis. I haven’t even told my best friend Dayanna, whom I hope will forgive me. Nor have I confided in my best friend Gerald. Not even my current boyfriend, or any member of my family. I didn’t even tell God when I would pray alone in silence! It’s strange, and it’s surprising even to myself that I can’t quite explain why I’ve kept this secret buried so deeply.
The following pages will be the first place where I share this, after having checked first with my publisher and my publicist. Nobody else was involved. Together, we decided that the truth is less painful than keeping secrets. Both of them insisted that if I wasn’t one hundred percent certain about this, I shouldn’t talk about it. But in the end, I decided to do it. Yes, I’m ready to talk about the other instance of sexual abuse that I suffered back when I was still a little girl.
Some might think that I’m doing this for publicity’s sake, or to sell more copies of my book. But the truth is, I’ve decided to reveal this because I need to expose this secret that has been buried far deeper than any other in my entire life. I need to talk about it calmly, with no lights or cameras, and without any experts on the subject. I need to do this alone. I need to do it my way. And this book allows me to do that. These pages are mine alone, and I feel safe in them. You, by reading it, will provide my true therapy. You, in learning about this part of me that I’ve never let anyone see, will be better able to understand the rest of my story, and I will finally have the relief of knowing that this damn secret has finally seen the light of day. Because one thing that life has taught me is that wounds heal not in darkness, but in the sunlight.
My dear mother left this world without ever knowing this about me. She would learn about the abuse I suffered at the hands of my father, but never about this, and that brings on a flood of sadness. She passed away without telling me about the time she was raped by a group of strangers after leaving a bar. I had to read about that in her posthumous memoirs. And for my part, I was never able to tell her about this other case of abuse. Ironically, both our secrets ended up being published, revealed through ink on paper and never confessed in private, the way they should have been. I hope she can forgive me, wherever she may be, for not having told her. She never told me about the bitter spell she endured that night at the hands of those merciless thugs to protect me, and also because I’m sure it left her with a feeling of infinite sadness. I acted in the same way: I told no one in the hopes of avoiding further suffering, and because the sense of shame I felt was enormous.
I’m not sure why, but I felt more embarrassed about this secret than the highly publicized one about what happened to me at the hands of my own father. Perhaps it’s because, in this case, the abuser was a woman.
This woman would come up to me and say, “Let’s play house.” I was nine, and just getting used to the games my father forced upon me.
It was just so confusing to be doubly victimized; I thought that playing house like that, hidden off in a corner, was normal. She would touch me, and she asked me to touch and stimulate her. It’s a woman . . . She won’t hurt me like my dad. That was my naïve and innocent reasoning at the time.
Gradually, these encounters—though they didn’t happen very often—became, in my own little head, the worst form of torture. I didn’t even mention them to Valerie, my friend who already knew about what was going on with my father. I was worried that she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. I guess that’s just how nine-year-old girls think.
The woman knew exactly what she was doing, but that didn’t stop her. I slowly grew to resent her and to hate the time we spent playing house. Until one day she didn’t ask me to play anymore and the afternoons spent in the corners disappeared, along with that abusive woman.
What didn’t go away was the terrible sense of sexual confusion she instilled in me. With what I’d lived through—or rather, what I’d suffered—at the hands of my father, along with the suffering I was subjected to by her, well, it’s needless to say that my sexuality has been a complete disaster for most of my life.
It should come as no surprise that years later I would question myself as to whether I was gay or straight, whether I could have a sexual relationship with a man or with a woman. Would I become so promiscuous that I wouldn’t be able to maintain an exclusive relationship, or would I instead become completely celibate and alone? That’s how terrified I was by even the thought of being touched, regardless of whether it was by a man or a woman.
In time, I was able to be physically intimate and to have stable and lasting relationships. But it wasn’t easy. I have to admit that the road was full of twists and turns and some rough patches, which I’ll be talking about here too.
I want other victims of abuse to read about my mistakes and fears and to see that it’s possible to overcome them, as hollow as that phrase might sound. You can regain trust, if you put your trust in God. And you can learn to love again if you can learn how to forgive. If you can forgive the person who hurt you, the damage they did will start to fade, and it opens up space in your soul for good people to enter. But most of all, it will allow you to start loving yourself again. God and forgiveness, hand in hand, were my lifeline.
And I ask God for help even today. I’m nervous. I don’t know what my family will think as they’re reading this chapter. I hope they don’t start asking me a lot of questions. I urge my fans and loved ones not to inquire further. I don’t want to give out any more details. More about it would achieve nothing, and instead result only in more harm. My story must continue, and my life is about much more than setbacks and abuse.
6.
WHEN THE BOMB GOES OFF
You, come up here. Yes, you!”
I couldn’t believe it. That late summer Sunday, the whole family had gone to church together because an announcement had been made that a well-known prophet would be appearing that day to give out blessings and pray for solutions to our problems. And suddenly, this prophet was calling on Tía Rosie, who was sitting right there in the first pew.
“Step up here. I can see the anguish in your soul. Sexual abuse haunts you. Let us pray.”
You could cut the silence with a knife. Rosie stepped fo
rward and the prophet took her by the arm. He led her up to the pulpit and there—in front of my mother, my grandparents and nearly all my aunts and uncles and their own extended families—he asked us before God to intervene on behalf of her troubled soul.
My aunt didn’t say a word. She was frozen stiff from the shock. Taking advantage of the confusion, I managed to slip away without anyone noticing me and went to hide in the bathroom.
It had been two years since we pinky swore never to tell our secret. My father had stopped molesting me, and I was finally starting to feel like a normal girl again with no need to fear Fridays. Rosie was sixteen by then and had a boyfriend of her own. And now this! Oh my God!
I went into one of the stalls and knelt down to pray: Oh my Lord, por favor, don’t let anyone notice that I’m gone, and don’t let my aunt say a thing, not a single thing, I beg you, dear God. Then I stopped to listen to the voices coming from the sanctuary, trying to hear whether the prophet had finished his prayer. I was absolutely terrified of going out there and looking him in the eye. What if he read my mind? What if he called me out as well? My hands were shaking. All of a sudden, I heard the songs. Uff, it’s over, I thought. Relieved, I snuck back out and worked my way into the crowd of people heading for the exit.
Much to my surprise, the whole Rivera family was out there in the parking lot, acting as if nothing had happened. Nobody was embracing Tía Rosie, nobody was asking for any explanations. My own mother hadn’t even opened her mouth, and she was always the one to take the bull by the horns when it came to all family matters.
Forgiveness Page 3