Back home in bed, bathed in sunlight, I turn the initial police report over in my hands. The names of the accused are written on the initial report. ‘Tomas da Silva’ and ‘Salvator’.
Later, we eat the dreary pasta dinner and I sip my glass of wine too quickly. I pour another. A melodramatic, drunken thought crosses my mind: I’m not safe. I’ve never been safe.
—Which is probably, technically, true.
8 February 2017 (Are you afraid?)
What does a man become in the eleven years since he threw a girl’s sense of being into chaos? This is the question I ask when I type ‘Tomas da Silva’ into Google. According to my yield, Tomas da Silva is a football hooligan. Tomas da Silva is also a yogi. He is a newlywed. He might be a mathematics professor in a woollen vest. Or a handsome Californian. A Miles Davis fan. An MBA graduate looking for work. A stocky young dad pleased with his brood. A professional soccer player who played for Benfica 1939–42. A helicopter pilot. A sappy boyfriend. A self-promoting guru. A surfer. A guy in aviators you’d avoid at a bar. A priest. A singer in a straw hat, laughing. A supply-chain manager. A teenage boy aware, and proud, of his burly new chest. A hotel manager with a sweet, plump fiancée. An acquisitions manager who has the look of a murderer. A seventeenth-century author of books that I determine are about Portuguese court life.
—Eleven years is a long time.
There is also the leader of ‘People’s Youth’, a right-wing Christian lobby group whose purpose seems only to suppress same-sex marriage and abortion. This Tomas looks so familiar that I swear it is him, until I swear it is not, until I look at his features more closely and remember that dark brown hair, pale skin with spots, a nose on the larger, rounder side, and about this tall, is not enough to go on. And while it might have been droll, or something grimly related to it, in this case I am unable to name a Christian lobbyist a sex offender.
—So you know their names, now, like you never forgot. Or maybe you’re confusing them?
—But Tomas is not the one she is afraid of.
You know when life is literary?
—Dreams organised neatly into themes. Memories of childhood retold to fit with object-relation theory.
—Stretch it. And it fits.
Well, the way I remember it,
—Or, you don’t,
Tomas is pale and Salvator is tanned. Tomas is round-nosed, Salvator is pointed. Tomas is soft-willed, Salvator, calculated.
Tomas is a garden-variety coward. Salvator is a literary psychopath.
—Neat.
—A dichotomy assists comprehension.
—For children and their moral equals.
—A dichotomy is usually false.
In court, in 2006, before I left Portugal, the boys’ lawyers were each allowed to ask me a question. Tomas’s lawyer asked me if I thought that his client was sorry for what he’d done. ‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that this was true. He was, I believed, horrified by what he had done.
Salvator’s lawyer asked me if it was true that I’d said, before his client took me to an apartment, locked me in a room and pinned me down with the intention to rape me, ‘Take me home and I’ll fuck you’?
I leapt up in my chair like a cat. ‘No! No, that’s not true. No, I’ve never said that to anyone.’ Which was true. I had never even thought of that constellation of words as my own.
While it was Tomas’s cowardice that got me into that room that morning, it was his cowardice that got me out, too. As I literally, literarily, kicked and screamed under the boys’ weight, heaving-crying and thinking that I would die, I desperately repeated, I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.
—I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.
Tomas lost his cool. He burst into tears and rolled off the bed. And it was suddenly clear to Salvator that he couldn’t handle the rape on his own. And Salvator said, ‘Two blow jobs then! You can leave when you give us two blow jobs!’ And I repeated the mantra I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me. And Tomas continued to cry and shouted at Salvator in Portuguese. And Salvator shouted, ‘You’re not leaving.’ And I found my shirt and my skirt and my shoes and I bundled them up in my arms. And Salvator and Tomas screamed at one another. And I pulled some of my clothes on. And Tomas said to me, ‘Come on.’ And I moved towards the door. And Tomas made as if to open it. And we, one of us, opened it. And Salvator slammed his arm between it and me, and he said, ‘Are you afraid?’ And that’s how I know he is a psychopath.
9 February 2017
On 7 June 2006, my older brother emailed me.
Hey a letter from the portuguese sexual crimes bureau came in today, so I’m emailing to make sure you’re ok?
I responded:
Yes, I’m fine, I had a scare one night and took it very VERY seriously, and thus put two potential sex criminals in gaol. Well, not in gaol, but they’re going to trial in the next few months. Don’t tell Mum and Dad, they don’t need to worry about anything.
It was a pretty stressful situation, involving multiple trips to the police station and ID line-ups…But it’s all over and despite the fact that it has come down to my word against theirs (and they have lawyers and will actually be present at the trial whereas only my statement will be present), I feel that in some small way, the fact that I followed it through and found them, and their families and friends now know, that a small amount of justice has been served.
Apart from all that, I’m fine and dandy. I’m in Granada now which is very very beautiful. You’d love it.
I mean. Who speaks like that?
—Eighteen-year-old you, is who.
Eighteen-year-old me, who will not let this ruin her trip! Who has exhausted her legal duties and will demand no concern,
—A small amount of justice has been served.
who can absolutely handle trivial things like ID line-ups and slut-shaming lawyers, by herself, in a foreign land,
—Fine and dandy.
whose parents need not be informed lest they ruin her new life, her new life that is, for the first time, her own.
—But it’s all over…
If you wanted to phone home in 2006, you first had to go to a tobacco stand or a deli and purchase a calling card, ten euros, and scratch the silver film off the back of it with a coin, and find a public phone, and dial the calling card company’s phone number followed by a long PIN, followed by the country code and then the number you actually wanted to dial. Occasionally the call lasted as long as it was supposed to, but usually the line would drop out and you’d dial again, all those numbers, only to hear a pre-recorded Portuguese woman inform you that you’d run out of credit.
I was always (and am still) in trouble for not calling, or emailing, or visiting home often enough.
—Selfish.
Like many children—and who is not a child—I always felt a fierce need to protect my inner life and even my public decisions from my parents. I fear their intrusions and their judgements. When I see them, I brace myself for the impending commentary on the architecture of my life. I even brace myself for their love and praise, because who knows what ghosts parental love might awaken. As a daughter, I don’t ask for help, and I know better than to ask for validation. I don’t reveal my darkest worries. What I feel for them is love and duty. I help out when I can. And in return for being low-needs, I ask for freedom.
—As if a parent could ever give that to their child.
In the middle of the ‘fine and dandy it’s just a minor sex crime’ period, I called Mum and wept into the phone. I said, ‘I love you’, which was more demonstrative of me than usual. She said she loved me too, and begged me to tell her what was wrong. I said nothing specific, homesickness, maybe. Because I was fine, in a way. I was having the most thrilling most brightly lit time I had ever had. Everything, other than the minor-major sex crime, was fine, fine and dandy.
After I returned home to Melbourne, laden with debt, my father told me in a reproachful way that Mum had cried every nigh
t I had been gone—eight months or nine.
—A horrible thing for a child to be told.
—As if it were possible for a daughter to give her mother freedom from maternal love.
10 February 2017
Every time I garner the courage to call the prosecutor’s number, the office that has access to my file, something intervenes. My Skype app automatically updates itself. The internet drops out. The receptionist can’t understand me and hangs up. I try the other number, the number that Cristina gave me in case I needed to reach her, and no one picks up. Then finally I get through, explain myself to an English-speaking receptionist, who puts me on hold while I am transferred to another officer who doesn’t speak English. Each time I must explain ‘the situation’ I feel like I am being punched in the face. Like a boxer, I prepare myself for each blow. Yet when it comes, I’m shocked.
I finally reach Cristina. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘you want a copy of the investigation?’
‘Please,’ I say, ‘yes.’
‘Call back on Monday,’ she says. ‘I have a lot of work today.’
So that’s that. I cross my fingers and set an alarm for Monday, as if I’ll forget. My heart begins to settle down, the tension in my gut relaxes and I feel wetness between my legs; the gentle slipperiness of hot blood.
I have told the story of me in Lisbon at eighteen being attacked by two young men hundreds of times. The more I simplified the story, the more comfortable with it I became. I integrated the facts of it into my identity. I had been terrified, but I wasn’t harmed, not beyond repair. While afterwards I trusted people a little less, I didn’t fear sex, or men, or even travelling alone. And I didn’t think about the word trauma until years later, when I noticed that my nerves could not hold still, not in even a minor crisis.
On the way to a brother’s twenty-first birthday, my family, all packed into the butter-beige ’80s Volvo, ran into a cyclist. The cyclist was at fault, and no one had been going fast enough for the accident to have caused injury. But the guy hit the bonnet of the car, and automatically I screamed ‘Oh-my-god-oh-my-god-oh-my-god’, tears bursting out of me. Mum shouted at me to calm down while she pulled out her crisis-management package (How do you feel, don’t get up, an ambulance is on its way) and Dad screamed at him, ‘Jesus wept! Whaddayou think you’re doing?’ and the cyclist said, ‘Don’t call an ambulance, please, I don’t have insurance.’ And he was absolutely fine, although perhaps a bit of a bonehead, but it was too late for me, my night had been ruined, the fantasy that things are somehow safe, which you need to have if you are to do anything at all, had been pulled right out from under me.
There were other times: a little white dog we all thought had been killed at the traffic lights, but which popped out from under the bonnet a second later, unharmed. A kinky nothing said to me by a lover in bed, the same words that Salvator had said to me as he pinned down my wrists, urging his friend to violate me. A kitchen fire at a dinner party, where the thud of terror said don’t try to fight it—RUN, to my embarrassment, while the friends I’d been dining with successfully smothered the fire with tea towels.
‘This happened,’ I used to say to friends, and therapists, ‘and now here I am, exactly as you see me.’
11 February 2017
When I was a little girl, my favourite aunt said of me: she’s been here before. She might have said this in response to the fact that at five I ‘preferred soymilk’, or that I opened packages with undue precision, or simply that I reminded her of herself—we share qualities, among them a love of beautiful objects that transcend context and time. But it’s true, too, that I was a little girl who longed to be old, old, old—twenty, thirty-five, fifty, sixty-eight—because oldness was wisdom, age was elegance, grace was strength and power was freedom.
I didn’t know that spring carries with it its own knowledge.
—You knew.
—She knew, but only in the inviolable way a person knows but does not understand.
12 February 2017
Yesterday, Dom and I walked through the yellow city. Dodging the street dealers who work the tiled plane of the Praça do Comércio, we crossed paths with a group of young people, clearly backpackers. An odd assortment of eighteen-year-olds—fat and thin, pimpled and pimped out—presumably having come together hastily at the hostel’s breakfast bar that morning. Legally and morally, and maybe financially, they are adults, but the softness of their features betrays them.
—‘To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child.’ (Claudia Rankine)
Cloaked in a sheepskin coat down to his knees, his tight curls shaved to a fade, their leader puffed on a cigarette while he walked. No smoker in their right mind smokes while they are walking. But a young smoker smokes not because they can’t but smoke, but for the gravitas they believe smoking lends them.
—You remember someone telling your nineteen-year-old self, I’m surprised! I thought you were thirty.
Thirty.
Jesus.
—You puffed your cigarette at them and beamed.
—Now and then, the uncrossable threshold.
—A form of desperation, nostalgia. Speaking to the dead.
—The dead are everywhere, like God.
The group passed us by, not noticing us. ‘Watch out,’ my ancient spirit urged them. ‘Watch out for yourselves.’
13 February 2017
It’s Monday.
So.
I dial the number.
Again.
A surge of adrenaline.
Detective Cristina Serinia: ‘Okay I need a little more time. Please will you call back tomorrow?’
I hang up, exhausted. A bright acid curls inside my belly.
14 February 2017 (Valentine’s Day)
Is aging the slow expenditure of a finite source of energy?
Some of the other resident artists are going out for a drink, and might we like to join them? There is no way we are going out. Dom and I heat up some dinner and crawl into bed.
We open the laptop to watch a dumb movie on Netflix. Because I’m writing about sex crimes and reading sad books by Svetlana Alexievich, Claudia Rankine and Peter Handke, I want a film to wash over me, to leave me feeling numb and easy.
—You don’t even like movies.
—Books have more interiority. They are about insides as well as surfaces, not only surfaces.
But I do enjoy the passivity of watching films. So rarely do I feel so passive that I trust myself to be carried, without objection. I. I’ve seen them all.
—All she asked for was a dumb movie to put her to sleep.
Well, we try.
Dead Calm (1989) opens with Sam Neill returning from his naval duty to find that his infant son has been killed in a car accident with his wife, Nicole Kidman, at the wheel. In the wake of the tragedy, the couple take an open sea yacht trip to reconnect. A dinghy containing Billy Zane, whose own ship is foundering, approaches the yacht; they let him on board. All of Billy Zane’s boatmates have apparently died of botulism, which seems unlikely, so the couple lock him in the bedroom and Sam Neill leaves Nicole Kidman on the yacht to go investigate. In Billy Zane’s sinking ship, Sam Neill discovers a bunch of dismembered, bare-breasted corpses. Sam Neill realises his rookie mistake and tries to paddle his way back to the yacht but, oh, too late. The ship has been commandeered by Billy Zane. Subtext: Nicole Kidman’s imminent rape. Sub-subtext: the real victim of rape is the rape victim’s husband.
We turn it off.
The premise of Cape Fear (1991) is that Robert De Niro, an ex-con, freshly out of prison for rape and battery, goes after Nick Nolte, his former lawyer, for defending him improperly. The key ingredient is that Nick Nolte found evidence that the victim had been ‘promiscuous’, which is apparently a defence in a rape trial, but due to the severity of Robert De Niro’s violence, Nick Nolte decided to withhold that ‘evidence’. Nick Nolte is now compelled to protect his hot wife, Jessica Lange, and his prize, the sexy teenage daught
er, Juliette Lewis, from imminent rape, while also suppressing his secret, which is that in his spare time, he plays very physical squash with his attractive younger colleague. To recap: a lawyer didn’t appropriately slut-shame a rape victim, for which he feels real regret, and now the rapist, recently out of jail, is coming after the lawyer’s women.
Nope, I say. No no no.
Indecent Proposal (1993) stars Robert Redford as a billionaire who would definitely touch the waitress’s arse while she poured his wine. Demi Moore stars as a hot young out-of-work real-estate agent who is ‘satisfied’ because her husband, Woody Harrelson, is nice to her, and Woody Harrelson plays an aspiring architect who is also out of work but needs to finish building his dream house so that the world will recognise his extremely special talent. The couple go to Vegas to throw away their last five grand, which they do. Robert Redford, meanwhile, notices that he wants to shtup Demi Moore, and knows that, based on their difference in financial status, money will be an effective means of achieving this goal. Robert Redford coerces Demi Moore into gambling one million of his dollars at a very public dice table, a tell-tale sign of sociopathy, and then he thanks Woody Harrelson for lending out his wife so generously. In real life, everyone knows that pretty much anyone would sleep with anyone else for one million dollars, no questions asked. So the real question underpinning the tension is: what does Demi Moore value more highly—her husband’s sexual ego, or her husband’s creative aspirations?
‘OFF!’ I scream.
I open my Svetlana Alexievich book, Zinky Boys. One of her subjects, a private from the Grenadier Battalion, speaks of the first time he witnessed someone being shot:
It’s like a nightmare you watch from behind a sheet of glass. You wake up scared, and don’t know why. The fact is, in order to experience the horror you have to remember it and get used to it.
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