Writing, being able to communicate with the outside world from my ditch, has kept me out of harm's way countless times. To create —in my case with the word, in others with a brush, a score, a violin, what do I know...— is often, for those children who receive the torture from whom we expected help, invoking someone save us, believe us.
The adult writes, but it is the child who asks to be heard.
If the writing is on the port side of my raft, on the starboard side I have my sisters, now two grieving women who mourn the death of my mother like me, trying to fit her into what we are without her. The largest and the median. They were there from the beginning and, now that our mother lives in mourning for each one, they accompany me on this raft of old logs. Since I made my childhood hell public, I have understood - and it is no coincidence that many of the victims who come to me end up confiding in me that, emotionally, that has been the hardest thing - that if I had not had the family that I have had, and excluding the figure of my father, I would not be here now, writing this. A large part of the problem of reporting abuse is the lack of a family that supports the victim in her story, that reinforces not only her truth, but also the brother, daughter, man or woman who decides to expose to the world a wound that many , the vast majority, do not want to see.
We victims are witnesses to the ugly, that unresolved historical memory that has a voice and that no one, not even legislation designed to silence us, can ignore. They do not want us close because, although it seems unreal, even today the sexual nature of the crime of which we have been victims shames and provokes rejection in those who are on the other side of the barrier. It is a horrible crime, one of the most appalling, and hearing about it and knowing about it is not pleasant. We do not like, the victims are not welcome. It is uncomfortable and violent to hear us talk about the horrors that, at five, ten or fifteen years old, we had to live in the hands of men and women like those who are now listening to us.
The day I decided to speak, I warned my sisters. "Do you think you're ready?" they asked. I answered yes and they stood firm by my side: “If you are, go ahead. We with you”. Now I know that this, this support, is not usual. The victim —and if you are a victim and have been through it, you will be nodding when you read me— faces this alone, many times knowing that their relatives do not want to know or hear, ashamed to be exposed to the not always friendly gaze of their respective communities. . “Why remove this now, after so long?”, “What do you gain by telling those things if that man is as he is and can no longer hurt anyone?”, “He's your uncle, daughter. He is your family. Is it really worth it to you?"
The family.
The afternoon that I spent with my sisters in front of the fireplace, talking and remembering things that we had never put together before, was a balm and also a trial by fire. I had told them that I had one more truth, that they still needed something to hear, and they waited for me to speak sitting on the sofa. Then I remembered my mother, of the times that, in recent years, the two of us had spent alone, when in the summer we would lie on the stone benches in the church garden at the last minute, while the breeze cooled the afternoons, and we would talk of us. “How are you feeling?” I would begin. I know it may sound silly, but I also know that such a simple question is one that hardly anyone asks their mother. We didn't ask them that, just like that, out of the blue, just to open up the conversation. Perhaps it is that it is not easy, that we are educated so that a mother is only asked about her life, not about how she lives it or how it affects her. But mine was easy to relate to like that. The question was the beginning of what the afternoon brought and her answer was always the same: “Well now”. The two of us were lying down, watching the banks of clouds pass over the cypresses, we talked like I haven't been able to do with anyone else. And we laughed. We laughed so much... I made her laugh and her laugh relieved me. We liked each other, that's the truth. And, above all, and despite the fact that we had our things, we did well because together we felt free.
However, despite the trust and complicity that we shared, never, not once in the forty-four years that passed from the afternoon that I dared to confess the abuses I was suffering until his death, did he mention to the brother L. or to school. If ever a news item appeared on the news regarding a complaint or arrest related to child abuse, he would automatically start talking about whatever it was, relevant or not, or change the channel, or suddenly it was time to eat, or have a snack. , whatever it was not to be there, hearing what he did not want or could not relive. Not even at the end, when his memory began to fail and sometimes he confused the living with the dead and the past treacherously devoured the present, was the abuse episode mentioned again. I always believed that Mom hadn't gotten over her feeling of guilt for not having done more for me when she played and that the issue was an unhealed wound that shouldn't be touched. However, now that she is gone, I understand that I was wrong: if Mom didn't talk about her, it wasn't because of her, but because of me. She avoided the subject because she avoided my pain and continued to protect me. For her, facing this news with me was like going back to the afternoon in the kitchen at home, just the two of us, listening to what no mother should ever have to listen to.
There is not a single mother in the world prepared for what she had to experience during those hours with me. I remember the moment she finally got me to trust her and tell her what the Brother had been doing to me, he came over to me and hugged me. It was then that I noticed that she was trembling. I was so tense that I felt his fingers typing on my sides as if they were vibrating, and I got scared, first because I was afraid that all that tension was against me, that with what I had just confessed I would have made my worst nightmare come true, that is, that My mother stopped loving me. Mom's body vibrated against mine and I cried, but not out of relief, but because she believed that she was going to punish me. However, as soon as she pulled back and looked at me, I understood: she was trembling for me, not only with grief, but also with anguish. I saw myself in her eyes, I saw how she looked at me and I recognized her so wounded that, if she had been able to go back in time, she would have withdrawn everything she said, everything she confessed in that kitchen as a child so as not to continue seeing the horror that my confession had broken in his gaze. I never saw that color in my mother's eyes again. Though I couldn't know it at the time, much later, on the day she died, my eyes changed color—from green to liquid gray—for twenty-four hours. They had done it a couple of years before, when she had had to put my dog down, but at the time I thought it was an illusion, a perception that I must have imagined. I was wrong. The morning my mother died, while we were waiting for the doctor to come to certify her death, I suddenly remembered that scene we had experienced together in the kitchen the afternoon of my confession and also of her eyes, and I understood that a part of she had been stranded there, between the door and the hallway of the house, hugging me, broken from the inside seeing me like this, also broken the child that I had ceased to be.
I was wrong about her and I was wrong about me. Mom silenced the abuse episode to protect me from the memory. She didn't do it for her but for me, and now that I know, I regret not talking about her sooner. If she had done it, she would have understood that she could also be involved in that and that I didn't blame her, that all she wanted was to protect her. The day I appeared in the media with my public confession I would have given my arm to have her by my side and finally see her free from all the years of that ugly silence with which we had clumsily protected each other, the son imagining the pain of the mother, the mother still suffering for the son. I would also give it now to be able to spend half an hour together and tell her live, lie down again in the church pews and tell her that it's over, that her hug saved my life because at that moment, that afternoon, I thought I would lose her in as much as I spoke and she taught me that I would always have someone to lose myself with, no matter what I said.
