Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Thinking that, I understood “my rape” a little better, although there’s no point in deceiving ourselves, understanding doesn’t mean overcoming — because the other thing I couldn’t get out of my head was that the rapist was none other than Stef, my God, a young man who had been in Paris, looking at museums and going to concerts, a young man I’d cooked pasta in tomato sauce for, all that kind of thing — I said to myself, men have sex when the prey reveals her fragility, and that was what I had done. I must never appear fragile again. I didn’t feel guilty, as sometimes happens to women who are raped, which makes them go to psychiatrists, or sometimes kill themselves, or turn into avengers, these last being the most interesting, because in general, before they end up in some provincial prison, they manage to mutilate a few male members, even pulling them out by their roots, savagely interrupting the trunk-foreskin continuum or the even more complex trunk-testicles continuum, which usually results in a geyser of blood.

I am aware of the injustice that some innocent foreskins may be presumed guilty and cut to shreds, but what we can do if the tribe is cruel, cruel in a different way for each tribesman. The rules of a mob devouring itself, penises still throbbing with life on the floor for having forced themselves into vaginas or anuses that didn’t want them, oh, what are we going to do, the world is crazy, we are all crazy: this was what I was thinking as I sat there smoking, wrapped in a blanket, by the window of Kay’s apartment, which I haven’t mentioned was on Rue Oberkampf, near République, in the eleventh arrondissement, and that was why when I dared to go a bit farther than the corner, where the Monoprix supermarket was, I walked as far as the Canal Saint-Martin and kept myself amused watching the brown waters flowing past, laden with garbage, shit, and plankton. The river that was flowing inside me was the same, a stream of black waters, filled with rats, excrement, and semen, because that night in Oslo they didn’t only rape me from the front but also from behind, which was something Kay and I had had a taste of without going all the way, preferring to wait for the right moment, and now that heavily guarded treasure had ended up in the ravine, lost and abused. Take note, girls.

After many days at the window, having already abandoned hope, I saw him coming. His tall, stooped figure, in a blue coat and scarf, stood out among the passers-by on Rue Oberkampf; on one side he was carrying his camera case and on the other a small bag, and I said to myself, there he is, the bitch got rid of him, she must have gotten tired of his snoring and his farting and his sour breath in the mornings. I felt a gigantic flower growing in my throat, because I loved him madly. Of course I made him pay. He had to do things, things that would never have occurred to him, before I would give him the first embrace or have sex with him, which was what he had been longing for from the first second. And so our relationship started up again, rebuilt like a house after a fire, never the same as before, with traces of soot on the ceilings, but still standing. There only remained the matter of my rape by his brother, but I preferred not to talk about it, we could see about that later.

I was young and I felt that my strength was infinite, that I was still able to bear a lot of things, so he went back to his work in Paris and of course continued with the drugs. His months with the Norwegian whore had strengthened his addiction and he increased his daily dose to keep a steady pulse, so he had to work very hard. Heroin is expensive and I was a spoiled little girl who liked exclusive things, fashionable clothes, scents.

And so things went on for nearly six months until one day Kay suggested taking a few nude photographs of me. He said that kind of thing paid very well and we’d be able to take a vacation in New York, so I agreed, I went to his studio, and we did them. The poses were fairly artistic, though with a touch of spice. In fact, some were a bit too suggestive for my taste, although there were no close-ups of genitals. Kay took them with him the next day and in the evening came back with a lot of money. We packed our bags and went off to New York to live it up for a while, with a room booked at the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle and friends who took us to MoMA and to see the view from Brooklyn Bridge, but of course, there’s also plenty of heroin there, it’s cheaper and very different, so one night I had to take Kay to the hospital after an overdose, which was pretty unpleasant. When he came out, we had to go back to Paris, as all our money was gone.

Back on Rue Oberkampf, I started to ask myself questions like, what is life? is it worth living? what sacrifices are justified in life and why? questions connected with what I saw in front of my eyes every day, and one afternoon I don’t know why the idea came into my mind, but I decided to call my mother in Mexico City. When she heard my voice, instead of being genuinely pleased she sounded anxious, maybe she was worried I was going to announce my return, since by this time it was obvious that my presence bothered her. I quickly told her that everything was fine in Paris, that I was living with a Norwegian fashion photographer but that I wasn’t very sure what to do with my future. In other words: I was calling to ask her advice. She liked that and said, listen to me, Sab, I’ve always believed that what makes people noble and useful is studying, so you ought to study, darling, and in fact something just occurred to me: if you study, you won’t be able to work, so I’d like to help you, send you money to cover your expenses, how about it? I thanked her and thought it over for a few days, until I decided I’d study acting and phoned her to tell her.

On the phone, she sounded really moved, Oh, how proud you’ve made me, she said, a Gina Lollobrigida in the family, a Grace Kelly, a Julia Roberts, hey, Fito, come and hear this, and she immediately sent me a decent amount of money to start my course, and I enrolled in drama school at the Sorbonne, doing a little audition at which, in all modesty, I left the judges in raptures, and not only because I finished my monologue by taking my pants off and walking around the stage with a lilac-colored G-string stuck between my buttocks, but because my talent expressed itself openly, in a direct, transparent form.

A new period of my life began. I felt really active. An inner fire consumed me. Very soon I got together a group of friends from among my classmates from the school and we started going out, day and night, to see plays or hold rehearsals, and it was around that time that Petra first put in an appearance. Petra was a Romanian, and taught Expression through Movement. He was one of those Francophile Romanians like Ionesco, Mircea Eliade and E. M. Cioran, and well, it all happened very rapidly.

One afternoon, Petra asked us to interpret with our bodies something that made us feel afraid, and I evoked my childhood, which for me was the grimmest thing in the world. The one thing I could come up with was to sit down in a corner of the stage with my face covered, get down on my knees, pull my pants down and raise my backside; it was my way of expressing the fragility of childhood, transposing it to the sexual fragility of woman, my rape. Naturally, my male classmates, and some of the women, got a bit distracted, so Petra came up on stage and said, mademoiselle, can you explain your position?

I told him about my childhood and the horror of the rape and how all that formed a whole that generated all the greatest fears in my life. Petra asked the others to go and get changed. We were alone on the stage, and he said, can you get back in that position? I’d like to try and understand it in the light of what you’ve just said.