Take Me Back to the Start
Tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Yesterday, my mother shared something deeply sad with me.
Many years ago, during an argument, she had grabbed my father’s shirt with her hands.
Realizing her mistake, she immediately let go. She knew it was wrong to do that.
How could a woman dare to confront a man like that? A well-behaved woman cannot be angry, protest, or even get upset!
And she immediately learned that lesson.
My father shoved her so hard that she slid across the floor and hit the wall.
More than the physical pain, there was the humiliation, the vulnerability, the fear of it happening again — the monster that sleeps beside us, ready to awaken at any moment.
All horrible.
When I was a child and teenager, I witnessed several absurd outbursts from my father. A wild anger coming from strange places, always fueled by too much alcohol.
Out of nowhere, the silence of an abandoned house in the village was interrupted by shouting that could be heard in every corner.
There was always my father’s loud voice shaking the walls, and his big, thick hands, always too close, as if his shadow could touch us even before he did.
And of course, above all, the constant presence of alcohol that for many years became a daily routine. After a long and exhausting workday, the obligatory stop was always the bar.
Often, we were in the car waiting for his daily dose of that poison to end before we could go home. My father didn’t care if we were hungry, cold, or tired; we had to wait for him until the moon came out.
I never witnessed physical violence, at least not as far back as I can remember. It was never necessary to hurt us.
Psychological violence was enough.
It wasn’t the first time I heard those accounts of physical violence from my mother’s mouth. She confessed to me on other occasions how impatient he had been with her while she was pregnant with me.
While I was in her womb, my mother endured many more blows that I may never know about. I don’t know if I will ever be able to forgive my father for that — for having ruined my mother’s life and for also giving me stress even before my birth.
I blame him for the nerves I still have today. It might be a guilt without guilt, but even though I want to admit it’s not the only cause, there is an overwhelming coincidence in all of it.
It seems that all the anguish my mother swallowed passed directly to her belly and grew inside me.
All that rot from that time settled into my flesh, my blood, my entire being. I blame that immense stress for my illnesses.
For my malformed uterus, for my epilepsy, my imbalance, my anxiety, and for a rage that flows in waves inside me, with every beat of my blood, coming and going, coming and going in a crescendo that refuses to calm down.
Today, while reading another book by Annie Ernaux, The Frozen Woman, I paused at a particular sentence.
I thought about how much it wouldn’t please men — my father, my husband, and even my brother. However, I also thought about how many women would understand the origin of this sentiment.
She wrote:
“Inexplicably, I also feel that almost all women’s unhappiness comes from men.”
I thought about my father.
About the night everything changed.
That night, when my eyes changed irrevocably about how I saw him until then. That suffocating thought that other fathers wouldn’t be as crazy as mine.
The feeling that, after all, my beloved father was not a good person, but a maniac taken by daily madness.
That night, that ended the vision of a tender and caring father.
The father who looked at me as a little girl stopped looking at all of us in the family as loved ones and started seeing us as a burden in his life.
My epilepsy attacks go hand in hand with the violence that hovered in that house during the same period.
Strangely, it was only those moments that united us all.
That made him run out of bed in alarm, worried about my twisted face, my rolled tongue, my stiff body as if I were a stone, and the salvo of screams that woke me from a deep and grotesque sleep.
If death is like that, please let it not come soon!
All my youthful unhappiness came from there.
I didn’t even have the luxury of girl problems — heartbreaks, first kisses, learning to take care of my body, talking about menstruation. There was never a safe space to understand anything.
No period, no sex, nothing.
I only knew what “solitary pleasure” was in my twenties, and even then, without fully understanding what they meant by it.
When the first blood came out inside me, I knew more or less what it was, but I didn’t understand why or what I should even do. That stain there, like a bubble bursting inside me, as if my body had suddenly gotten sick.
That afternoon, when I came home from school and told my mother what had happened, I only remember the phrase: “When you’re like this, you shouldn’t take a bath, you’ll get lots of headaches.”
Fortunately, I never followed that strange advice.
Some things were taboo and want to continue to be — the shame, the blood we didn’t ask for, the fear of being mocked at school. Everything might have been different if I had known more about it, and much earlier.
Adolescence — as I said here — never really came for dreamers. I’m still hanging there for it.
I knew little about youth problems. There were no romantic songs, youth soap operas I could understand, nor conversations among classmates I could feel were mine.
I remember innocently when someone mentioned she wasn’t a virgin. I said I wasn’t either. I recall the surprised expression on one of my classmates' faces.
I then told her I wasn’t born in September, and that’s why I was a Leo. I became the laughingstock of a potential group of female friends. I was about twelve years old.
At that age, my problems were my parents’, especially my father’s.
His lack of emotional management, the financial problems he caused, his camaraderie with despicable people, and what I thought was his hatred for us, even though he told us he loved us above all else.
Of course, he won his redemption; there was no other way.
To save himself and not take us all into an abyss, he had to leave the country. He earned a different salary, fixed his catastrophic situation, and the finances gradually improved.
I believe that what seemed like a misfortune back then — leaving the country — was what made him better.
It was his salvation.
It did him good to see other realities and to be far from us. It was a relief that I will never be able to tell him it was as such.
But as long as there was youth in that body, violence appeared from time to time, with different nuances, but it was always present.
The fear of him coming home, drunk or not, didn’t matter; only the fear of him crossing the door—the shame of everyone hearing his screams, my crying, my incomprehension in front of everything.
The fear he might kill the dog I had just adopted, tear him apart, throw a sharp object at him, or simply take him away and make him disappear. It was confirmed. Farrusco, my dog, disappeared one day after he arrived.
My dog, who had appeared at my door, starving, and whom I cared for and fed. Once upon a time, there was a dog, my only friend. My only company during those days of tremendous teenage loneliness.
My dog disappeared. Just like that. From the supposed “nothing.”
He never apologized to us; he just went on with his life, returning to Spain and leaving me immersed in a tremendous mourning for an animal that helped me fight teenage depression.
(Last week, there was a hungry cat at their door.
When I gave it food, my father hurriedly got up from the dinner table, no longer to reprimand me, but to chase away the poor animal with a voice that is still, from time to time, violent enough to frighten the poor little cat.)
During adolescence, I was haunted by thoughts that should never cross a young girl’s mind. They are even too horrible to put into words, fearing that if I write them, what I wished for then might happen now. I wish nothing horrible upon my father anymore, quite the opposite.
The father I have now is very different from the one I had in my little self period. I have grown up, too.
My father is now a person I envy in how he treats his granddaughter.
He is gentle, patient, and affectionate.
He was never with me.
But he tries to forgive himself. He calls me “Joaninha.” — little Joana in a sweet way.
He tries to hug me whenever he can. He doesn’t really know how, though. He never learned. It’s very awkward, but I try to let it happen. I have to forgive him somehow.
I confess, however, that it is still difficult for me.
As a young adult, already out of the house, he proudly talked about how hardworking I was, telling my life as if I were an adventurer—a courageous young woman, traveling from country to country.
However, he never told me that directly, even then.
I never knew he was proud of me having won a merit scholarship to study in Brazil. I didn’t know he was proud that I went to France and Italy, to the unknown, to find a job.
He told others, and others told me. I never told him that I was aware of it. It seems like a secret code between us.
It’s all in the past now; it only comes back to the present from time to time.
I wish it wouldn’t.
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*hugs*