“What if we got matching ones? A mother-daughter set!” she’d exclaimed enthusiastically.
She’d been a devoted mother. I wondered if in that moment she’d had any premonitions about how our lives would turn out: my brother’s attack, our moves around the world, my adolescence marked by all manner of violence. She’d done her best, I thought, which was a lot given my father’s negligence, his laissez-faire attitude. I missed her deeply. I wished for nothing more than to put my head in her lap and weep, to feel her warm breath on my cheek as she stroked my hair. She’d sensed I was in danger even when I’d fled home, living as if in a fugue state far from her gaze; her gaze had seemed so oppressive then, but in truth, it stemmed from a kind of punitive vigilance for which, I considered, she could hardly be blamed. She was punishing herself, and me by extension, for not having been able to protect my brother.
I felt my anxiety give way to a deep, aching sadness. The bus came to an abrupt stop. I immediately recognized the port, its restaurants and bars and nightclubs, the roundabout that led to the walkway along the docks where people moored their yachts. I made my way off the bus with the rest of the passengers in single file, our heads lowered, all of us watching our step with what seemed to me a funereal air. I saw Omar in my mind’s eye lazily leaning against his silver motorcycle at the curb, his head tilted back, his mouth open to reveal his teeth, the light shining off his peppered hair. I was so sure he would be there, but when I got off the bus and breathed in the fresh maritime air, all I saw were two teenage girls taking selfies, pressing their faces together, pursing their lips as if they were blowing kisses at the camera. Their cheeks were full of color and their eyes shone with an attitude of joy. I smiled at them and wished Ellie had come along with me.
I stood there on the curb and watched the girls shift their postures before the camera. They leaned back-to-back and crossed their arms. They looked at the camera with a hardened gaze. When they were done, they giggled and admired themselves in the shiny screen of their phones.
As I made my way toward the port, across the road and past the roundabout, I realized that there were no images of me from the summer I’d spent here. No photographs. No evidence. I had no way to prove what had happened. I was a ghost in my own past. I had only the memories I’d stored away, but they increasingly came to me like old paper left too long in an orphaned desk, yellowed at the edges, ink smudged. It had been twenty years since that summer; twenty years had passed before I’d been able to confront what had been done to me, before I could sink into my own guilt and shame, my sense of complicity. Who would believe me now? I’d researched the law. There was nothing I could do. The statute of limitations had passed, and the law in Spain, a law largely developed in the dark shadows of Catholicism, was not on the side of any victim of sexual abuse. I looked at all of the teenage girls as I walked toward the port, their cut shorts and cropped tops and white sneakers. The tides of fashion had turned backward, and these girls looked just like I had two decades before. I wondered if they had parents or guardians who spoke to them frankly, plainly, calmly about their rights.
At least they had each other. What had I been doing walking around this place all alone at such a tender age? I felt as though I’d been punched in the gut. I began to recoil from the vast gulf that separated me from who I’d been as a teenager. I looked around, and in my mind’s eye I saw myself walking down the port in my Dr. Martens and my jean shorts, my sunglasses on, a T-shirt pulled over my two-piece purple Speedo, my thin, tanned body. And there was Omar, tall, elegant, extraordinarily fit, towering over me as we weaved in and out of the bars. I wondered what had happened to my boots. I wished for a moment that Ellie had found them in the dusty cabinets of the apartment. I would have had them resoled. I would have walked in them again. I wanted so desperately to bridge the gap between who I had been then and who I had become. I wanted to seal the chasm. I wanted to take the girl I had been away from this place for good. But the process of doing so was terrible, so deeply terrifying, that it required an all-consuming bravery. I was exhausted most of the time, and yet I knew that I had to fan the flames of my courage if I was going to cross that twenty-year ravine.
I walked to the edge of the jetty and stared at the oily waves lapping gently against the hulls of the moored yachts. The water was opaque, and yet I could see through its teal surface to the murky shapes of the carp swimming about, gurgling the water in their whiskered mouths. There were Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked on the jetty. I could hear techno music booming in the distance, coming up through the ground. There was money spilling down from the sky. Everywhere I turned there was flesh on display. It was a place that promoted addiction and all of the promises of relief that come with it.
I wondered for a moment what it would be like to disappear again into this world. How easy it would be for me to walk on board one of these yachts and blend in, to have my glass filled by a suitor, to lean my head against another woman’s breasts for the pleasure of others. I could spend the afternoon popping olives into my mouth and getting stroked by the rich hands of strangers. I wanted a coffee, a glass of water, but I hesitated to walk into one of the bars; I didn’t want to speak to anyone or have to excuse myself, weave my way through the velvet patio furniture draped with lovers. There were people moving down the jetty in droves, stopping here and there to take pictures. I thought again about how I didn’t have any photographs of my time with Omar. About how I didn’t have any tangible evidence that our lives had ever collided. I heard the loud giggle of a group of adolescent girls and searched for them in the crowd. They were sitting on the jetty with their legs dangling over the water, their blond hair slick with sunlight, their faces hidden behind oversize glasses. They looked happy.
The closer I came to the edge of the jetty, the closer I felt to the adolescent I had been. I felt as though my Lorca books, my Dr. Martens, my cut jeans, my trinkets were with me still. I felt as though they were floating around me, as if they’d dissolved into the air of Marbella, their essence absorbed in the particles I was breathing that were blowing down from the mountains toward the sea. Here I was, I thought, in this strange environment, trying to recover a time in my life without any concrete leads, unaware if Omar was dead or alive.
I sat down on one of the rocks. I could see Morocco and the Strait of Gibraltar in the distance. How remote those lands seemed! I could feel some understanding sliding into place, a memory rising in me, a freeze-frame that had, for years, remained static. I saw myself standing with Omar under a blistering, unforgiving sun amid an endless sea of dunes. I had no idea where we were. Even as I looked back at the image, with all the perspective of time and age, I couldn’t see beyond the frame that my mind had cast around the event. I saw dune after dune after dune and the hot sun setting the golden granules of sand aflame. Omar was standing near his Ducati. His helmet was at his feet. He was restless, agitated, ill at ease. I remembered wondering for one single moment, a moment that had severed me from myself, if he was planning on murdering me. There wasn’t another person in sight.
“What are we doing here?” I’d asked him, my voice weak and trembling.
He’d just looked at me, and said, “Relax,” with a twisted smirk on his face.
After a while, I heard the low roar of a second motorcycle and saw a man approaching on his bike in the cleft between two steep dunes. The man parked his bike next to Omar’s and got off. He, too, seemed simultaneously nervous and elated. He walked around me and examined me from all sides. I wasn’t sure what was happening. When he was done, the two of them walked together and talked in a low whisper. After that, Omar returned and told me to put my helmet on and we drove away.
We went back to the city and he dropped me off at the apartment. I had no idea what had happened. I’d spent years not understanding what had occurred that day, revisiting the scene on the rare occasions I could access the memory only to remain dumbfounded, uncomfortable, astonished; and yet, I ended up repeating to myself: Nothing happened!
Nothing happened! It was an innocent meeting between friends! But something was stirring wide awake inside of me, an understanding that I knew would take me the rest of my life to digest. Omar, I realized, had been showing me to another man, discussing the possibility that I could be this other man’s youthful lover, too. It had been, quite simply, a meeting of like-minded men. In that scenario, Omar was the one procuring the girls and I, I suddenly realized, was one among many being groomed and packaged to be moved down the assembly line of pussy-hungry men. If to them I was a nymph, then to me they were murderous apes.
I felt a fire light up in my belly. There was so much heat spreading through my limbs. The walls of my stomach were lit and burning. It was as if I had swallowed gasoline; the fire was roaring, choking me from the inside with its smoke and heat. I could barely stand the pain. I doubled over and tried to take in deep breaths. What would have happened to me if I hadn’t left Marbella? I tried to center myself. I was trembling, overheated. I thought again of the bloodied and bloated face of that other future version of me. I winced at the thought of her. At the thought that she represented a life I’d nearly lived, a life so racked with pain and guilt and isolation that I could hardly sustain the thought of her. How on earth would I have borne the weight of being her?
I walked back to the bus station. I passed the Virgin Mary weeping in her enclosure, and for a moment, I had the impression that time was standing still. The Virgin Mary weeping. What a tired image, what a worn-out image. The image of the dark night of the soul! I wondered, Was Omar conscious of his power? A power that had near fantastical proportions? Had he spent years, as I had, contemplating the residual aftereffects of his crime? His delinquent nature? The sinister conspiracy he’d subjected me to? Or did he lack the capacity for self-appraisal? Even now, I thought, hidden under the hardened filth, the bitter repulsion, was a mild happiness. A burgeoning will to hold the hand of the girl I’d been, to make room for her in the woman I’d become. I walked under the gunmetal sky and let myself be cleansed by a warm, sweet gale.
It dawned on me that by returning to Marbella, this eternal landscape of sunshine and guile, I had plunged my body back into the past—the tortured chapters of my adolescence—and that doing so had delivered a terrible shock; but I needed that shock to carry on. I could sense an incredible burst of energy ahead of me, a limpid energy born of hope. I thought about the fragility of all living beings, of the planet itself. Our resilience, I thought, is born in our vulnerability. That much was clear to me. It’s not easy to honor our fragility, to care for it, to acknowledge it in the first place. It’s not for the faint of heart. But it would be worth it, because tenderness and fragility, like kindness and love, are expansive, elastic, impossible to exhaust. I felt my chest widen, my heart expand; my body was making space for the girl I had been. My body, which was her eternal home. It wouldn’t be long now. We would escape together soon. Our heads held high. Fire in our eyes. Discerning, vigilant, open, free.
12
ON THE WAY BACK, I got off the bus a few stops early. The leaves on the trees lining the road looked greener to me now. The sky, which had been thick with fog, appeared lighter, more forgiving. A mild sunlight was breaking through the heavy mist. It streamed down through the gaps in the leaves and brightened the grass and the asphalt. I caught sight of the sea every time there was a break in the row of southern buildings. The ocean looked varnished in that shy mustard light. As I made my way toward the apartment, it seemed to me that the earth was calling life back to itself, that the sun, having been absent all morning, had come forth to spend the last hours of the afternoon warming the roads and hills and stones of the city, heating up the waters that lapped along its shores.
I was excited to return home to Ellie. I couldn’t wait to burst through the door and tell her that I’d survived my trip to Puerto Banús, that I’d gone to Puerto Banús and returned unharmed even if I’d felt shredded by terror, my guts minced. I stopped at a flower shop to admire its potted succulents, its young potted cacti nursing in the sidewalk sun, and thought about how, as all-encompassing as Omar’s presence was, I hadn’t seen him. No. We hadn’t run into each other. I walked through the florist’s door. There, in the dimly lit interior, in a corner, resting on a carved wooden stool, I spotted a crystal vase full of irises. They were beautiful. I walked over and stroked their fresh petals.
I heard a woman’s voice at my back. “I can make you a gorgeous bouquet,” she said. I turned around. “I just got some angel’s breath in this morning.”
She was a middle-aged woman with dark skin, bright black eyes shaped like almonds, and coarse hair she’d braided to one side. She took in a deep breath.
“Don’t you just love the aroma of the flowers?” she asked tenderly. Her smile was full of patience and warmth.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with the flowers,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow for Granada.”
“That’s where I’m from,” she said. “There’s no place in the world like it.”
I turned back around to glance at the irises. They’d been my favorite flower through my twenties. I remembered that my boyfriend, the chef, had gifted them to me early on in our relationship when we still spoke to each other at length and pined for each other during our long work shifts. He’d given me the irises for my birthday along with a box of handmade chocolates he’d flavored especially for me: dark cherry truffles decorated with gold leaves; eucalyptus-infused white chocolates dusted with Himalayan salt; red peppercorn and whiskey bonbons. They were delicious. My mouth watered at the memory of them.
A moment later, the shopkeeper came up from behind me and plucked three irises out of the vase. “I’m going to wrap these for you as a gift. Take the bouquet with you to Granada. Consider it my offering to the city of my youth!”
She wrapped the flowers in brown paper and tied them with a ribbon she quickly twisted into a bow. As she put the finishing touches on the bouquet, spraying the flowers with fresh water, she told me that as a child she’d lived in the caves in the mountains overlooking the river, that every night she’d walked to the edge of the road to admire the Alhambra.
“It sits on a hill like a crown jewel.” She sighed. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss that view.”
I told her I believed her. That I’d seen the palace once long ago and had never been able to forget it. That every time I thought of it I felt chills run down my spine, chills of disbelief, because it seemed impossibly beautiful to me, so extraordinary that I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d dreamt it.
“Exactly,” she said, and handed the bouquet to me. “For you!”
I thanked her and left, dipping my nose in the flowers. I loved their subtle, herby smell. The day was taking a wide, unexpected turn toward grace. I felt an electric energy course through my veins. I smiled to myself, oblivious to the passersby, as I considered the fact that I was going to seal the door to the apartment for the last time. I was going to abandon it to the elements. Sure, I thought, the apartment will live in my mind forever. I was sure, too, that what had transpired inside its walls would transform over the years; it would change as I, too, would.
I walked up the road and made my way to the apartment. Our bus would leave early in the morning. We had a few hours of daylight left to pack our suitcases. I couldn’t wait to leave. We’d spend one last night in the apartment’s unlit interior, navigating our way by candlelight. I was feeling light, positive, spacious. I was nearly there, on the cusp of freedom, finally about to exit my relationship with Omar that had been sinking me like a stone as long as I’d been denying its existence. I’d touched bottom. The only place left to go from there was up. It occurred to me, as I saw my future on the horizon, that Marbella had been my open-air prison. That I’d felt restricted, monitored, controlled by Omar’s moods. I made my way to the building, through its heavy glass doors, up the stairs with firm footfalls. As soon as I walked in, I met Ellie’s gaze.
“I’m so happy to see you,”
I said.
It was incredible to open the door and be greeted by her face, her adoring smile, her humor. She was sitting on her suitcase in the foyer, using her weight to seal it.
“It won’t close!” she said with a giggle.
“You probably just arranged things differently,” I said.
I could see her throwing her clothes and books and shoes into her suitcase impatiently. She, too, I considered, couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment, to be as far away from its darkness as possible.
“You bought flowers?” she asked, looking up as she turned to kneel on the suitcase. She was on all fours, and she still couldn’t close it.
I went into the kitchen and placed the flowers on the counter. I told her about the florist and how she’d punctuated my day with color.
“That’s so sweet,” she yelled breathlessly in my direction.
By the time I returned from the kitchen, she’d given up; she’d opened her suitcase and was busy pulling out her shoes and clothes. I still had to pack myself, and despite my eagerness to leave, I suddenly felt a pinch in my chest, an unexpected tightening of my heart. I paused in the threshold and observed Ellie. I told her that I thought she’d have an easier time if she rolled her shirts rather than folding and stacking them.
“You think?” she asked, and got to it, picking up a dress and rolling it against her thighs.
I got down on the floor to help her. I picked up her shoes and lined the edges of the suitcase with them, leaving a rectangle in the middle where she could deposit her clothes, which, once rolled, looked like rods and pipes. It was a very efficient affair, a method I’d learned and perfected over the course of my itinerant life. Packing, leaving, departures . . . they’d always been easy for me. But as we packed Ellie’s belongings, I noticed that the pressure in my chest was worsening. The buoyant feelings hadn’t lasted long. I feared the apartment would take me hostage; that we would leave, yes, and I would be free, yes, but I wouldn’t know how to lay claim to my freed self. That challenge lay squarely ahead of me. It was a challenge that didn’t offer prizes, that resisted mastery. But beneath that fear ran a deeper, darker one: that by leaving, I’d be discarding my past self—that lost adolescent girl—to the bowels of this behemoth to be devoured out of sight. I tried to breathe through the panic.
Savage Tongues Page 20