Evan Hunter: The Moment She Was Gone

It was the next few questions that started the fracas.

“Why do you have a ring in your tongue?”

“Doesn’t it get in the way when you lick your friend’s pussy?”

Oops.

Annie grabbed the bottle of red by its neck.

Like the good second baseman and power hitter she once used to be when she and I were young and happy together in summers gone by, she swung the bottle at the head of the lout who’d made the remark, hitting him over the left eye. The bottle broke, spilling red wine all over his white shirt, and opening a gash some four inches long in his bushy eyebrow. Soaking wet and gushing blood, he began cursing in the dialect, seemingly more concerned about his wine-stained shirt than the wound over his eye. His pal went pale. So did Lise the Brave, who immediately raced off into the night. Annie got up, knocking over her chair, and swinging the jagged edge of the bottle in a wide circle as she backed off the terrace and down the steps and out of the place.

That isn’t the end of the story.

As the tale unfolds...

She throws the broken bottle into the scraggly bushes lining the dusty road, and thinks at first she should go back to her tiny room over the butcher shop, but wouldn’t those roughs in the bar know where she lives? Or wouldn’t they ask the proprietor of the bar where she lives, everyone knows she lives right over the butcher shop! So she heads up the mountain instead. It is close to midnight on a Friday night on a lonely Sicilian road. My sister has no specific plan in mind except not to go back to the dubious safety of her room over the butcher shop. At first, she’s not sure she’s actually seeing figures in the road ahead of her. She stops, peers into the darkness.

There are four men in the road ahead. Four men blocking the road that leads up the mountain and to safety, if we are to understand her reasoning. The leader of the four — the one she assumes is the leader — says something to her in Italian, in the Sicilian dialect, no less, which of course she can’t understand. Instead of picking up her skirts — she is wearing a peasant blouse and a wide peasant skirt and sandals she bought in a shop in Palermo before beginning her inland trek — instead of picking up her skirts and running down the mountain and away from the imminent threat posed by these four hulking men blocking the road ahead of her, their manner and their unintelligible speech promising pillage and rape on a grand scale, banditos for sure, instead of running down the hill away from them... she smiles.

I happen to believe this.

I know my sister.

She would have smiled.

Besides, from time immemorial, women have smiled in the face of imminent rape. Smiling at a would-be rapist is the equivalent of smiling around a pistol someone has thrust in your mouth. Especially if you have a ring piercing your tongue. But smile she does, and then explains to them, in English, of course, that she is an American, and she wishes they would let her proceed up the mountain in peace. The only word they understand is “American.” So, naturally, they pounce upon her, and pummel her, and throw her to the ground, and rape her, all four of them, one at a time, or so her story goes.

I have heard this tale and its many variations several times now.

It is the tale she initially told the police in Mistretta, and later the magistrate there, and finally Dr. Lorenzo Bertuzzi, the psychiatrist at Ospedale Santa Chiara. Maybe it’s true. I still want to believe it really happened.

As the tale unfolds...

Her rapists leave her battered and bruised on the dusty road in the dark, laughing as they go off into the endless night. Her panties are torn, her blouse ripped open over her breasts. Her lip is bleeding. She is bruised all over, she hurts all over. She stumbles to her feet and starts down the mountain at last, back toward the village where perhaps the two roughs are still looking for her, but where at least there are policemen to whom she can report this outrage, at least there are telephones, at least there are civilized human beings!

But on the way down the mountain...

On her way back to civilization...

On her way back to safety...

She sees a light coming from a wooden shack just off the road. It is a quarter to one in the morning. The crystal on her watch is broken from when she was on her back struggling and her attackers spread her arms wide and held her hands and her wrists to the dusty road, pinning her there...

The broken watch crystal is real. I happen to know that for a fact. I saw the watch when I went to the hospital to pick her up. It was a cheap little watch with a plastic band. The crystal was indeed broken, but the watch was still ticking. Now whether or not the crystal got broken during a rape is another story. The doctors who initially examined Annie at the hospital found no lacerations about the labia or tears of the vaginal wall, no signs of forced entry, no traces of sperm in the vaginal vault. In their opinion my sister was not raped that Friday night.

There is a light burning in the small shack.

She approaches the front door.

She knocks.

“Chi è?”

A man’s voice.

She understands the Italian. He is asking who is here at his front door at a quarter to one in the morning.

“Sono io,” she says. And then, because she learned the word to use in case of an emergency just like this one, “Aiuto!”

“It’s me! Help!”

The door opens.

A massive man is standing in the doorframe, lighted from behind He is bald, totally bald, and naked to the waist, and barefooted. He is wearing only trousers fastened at the waist with a black belt.

He looks at her.

Without a word, he reaches out for her, seizes her by the arms, both arms, grabs her just above the biceps, and..

(“It’s called a head butt,” Annie tells us. “Men in Europe are skilled at it. They know how to bang their heads against yours with unbelievable force and yet sustain no injury to themselves. It’s a skill they have.”)

He pulls her toward him, his head moving forward at the same time. Their heads collide. She stumbles away from him, dizzied by the blow, staggers across the road, loses her footing, falls to her knees, rolls over — and suddenly she is falling down the mountain! Tumbling and rolling and bouncing and jostling, she finally comes to a stop on yet another dusty road below, and lies motionless and breathless on her back under the stars. She does not move for ten minutes, fifteen, perhaps longer. Then she stumbles to her feet and begins walking again, not back to the village where all of this started, but instead to the nearest real town, Mistretta, where there is a proper constabulary that will take note and make record of the various indignities she has suffered this night.

She tells the police she’ was accosted by two roughs in the bar in town, and then assaulted and raped by four banditos on the road up the mountain, and then head-butted by a brute of a man who lives in a shack on the side of the mountain, after which dizzying blow, she fell down the mountain. She shows them her bruises, her cuts, her bumps and lumps. She tells them she wants them to go up the mountain to arrest the brute who butted her with his knobby bald head, and then find the banditos who assaulted and raped her, and then go over to the village to arrest the roughs in the bar who started all this. She tells them her father is a famous painter. She tells them he is Terrence Gulliver. She does not tell them that she hasn’t seen him since she was five years old. Standing disheveled and wild-eyed in a police station at two in the morning, she tells the police she wants them to arrest half the male populace of Sicily. The police cluck their tongues and shake their heads in sympathy, Ah, questi American! But they are not about to go out into the night in search of men they already suspect are phantoms. Finally, in desperation, my sister tells them she will kill herself if they don’t protect her somehow.