The Incest Diary Read online

  He asked me to stay, but I said thank you, no. I wanted to go back to school.

  Before I left, I went to Octavia’s two-story house with a red-tile roof and rang the bell. Her housekeeper answered and let me in. Octavia didn’t ask me why I was there, but offered me coffee. As we sipped our sugary coffee, I told her that I wanted to apologize for having had an affair with her husband while they were still together. She took a sip of her coffee, then got up and asked me to follow her. We went down the hall to a bathroom. She pulled up her white skirt and sat on the toilet. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She peed. While she pulled off a strip of toilet paper and then wiped herself, she said, “Don’t worry, flaca, there’s no need to apologize.”

  I returned to Chile another time. I was much older. Salvador’s children were grown; his girls were women and Federico was a young man in university. Octavia had moved back to Milan. The family had fractured, scattered. The cousins and nieces and nephews had moved away to Santiago, Madrid, London, Los Angeles, New York. He had lost everything in a few unlucky business deals. He had sold his land; his endless lawn was now a neighborhood. He still had his house, but with nothing in it. Just a table, but not the enormous grand dining table from before. A modest oak table with six yellow wooden chairs. Two armchairs were covered in blankets since the upholstery underneath was worn with holes. The life-size antique horse was gone. The pigeons were taking over outside and the mice inside. Camila had almost nothing to clean, and no children to clean up after, but she had a war to wage on the pests. He wanted her to use poison for the mice, but she refused, she used traps and spent hours stuffing cloth into all the holes she suspected they were using to enter the house. She climbed a ladder and put spikes under the eaves of the house. She made a fake owl and put it on a stake in the yard. Salvador and I drank coffee and looked at his empire in decay.

  Gerónima had died, but Honório still lived in the adjacent house. He could still walk and talk and look me up and down and wink just like always. He watched the news and ate his quince jam on bread with a glass of wine before bed. His maid was stealing from him, la gorda, but they all steal from him, Camila told me, and now there’s almost nothing left to steal. And la gorda is sweet to him. She doesn’t lose her patience with his constant worry and obsessive complaints.

  * * *

  As a little girl I liked my mother to know that I was someone to worry about. That I could take my father away from her.

  And I wanted my father to worry that the man in Chile could take me away from him.

  * * *

  My father was so angry with me after I returned from my first trip to Chile. He accused me of hating men. One night in a French restaurant, he yelled at me. I don’t remember what about. He threw his napkin at my face. The waiter asked him to please calm down. But he didn’t. Then the manager came over and asked us to leave.

  One night, my father asked my brother and me to watch the movie Death and the Maiden. It’s the story of a woman who years before had been kidnapped and tortured by a South American regime. Her husband unknowingly brings home his wife’s torturer as a guest. The wife holds the guest at gunpoint and does her own trial regarding his crimes against her.

  Our father was in the other room while my brother and I watched on the small television. When the movie was over, my father came in. He was in a rage. Did you like it? Did you like it? Did you? Did you? Furious voice, furious eyes, clenched jaw, furious body leaning over us where we sat. Did you like it? His fury grew. I bet you liked it, he yelled. You did, you did you did. Did you believe her? I bet you believed her.

  * * *

  My father choked me when I was little, but I don’t remember him doing it when I was a teenager. The last time my father choked me I was twenty. It happened in the house near the pond. I was half an hour late to his house for Christmas Eve. He and my brother were there waiting for me in the living room. My father was very angry at me for being late, even though I wasn’t even late to anything—we were spending the afternoon together and then friends of his were coming over for dinner. It made me very anxious when my brother left to go pick up the goose my father had ordered for Christmas Day and left me alone with him. My father was furious. He had a particular rage for Christmas. He picked up the large Christmas tree and threw it against the wall. Glass ornaments smashed. He threw the coffee table, which had a crèche that had belonged to his mother on it, and everything broke. The table, the wooden angels. I stood there silently watching him break everything that was Christmas in the house. My father came at me and grabbed my neck with both hands. He began to squeeze. He said he wanted to finally do it, he said he was going to kill me. I kicked him. I was wearing heels and I drove one into his sternum and he pulled his hands off to move my leg and when he did, I rolled and then moved as quickly as I could to the door and ran out and ran and ran down the street, until I saw a family walking their dog in the cold. “Merry Christmas!” they said. I asked if I could use their phone. “What’s the matter?” they asked me. “I had a fight with my father.”

  “Go apologize to him,” the father said. They let me go to their house and use their kitchen phone. I called my mother and told her what happened and asked her to come pick me up. She said she didn’t want to drive that far. I went back to my father’s house. He was standing, rocking back and forth, back and forth, on the front lawn. His eyes were other. They were possessed. He was clenching his jaw. “Merry Christmas,” he said angrily, and we went inside. He poured me a glass of wine. My brother had returned with the goose and was playing Chinese checkers by himself.

  I knew a girl in college who was extraordinarily clever. She and I had too much to drink one night and she told me her story and I told her mine. Her older brother had sex with her and had her jack him off in the shower from the time she was around eight or nine and throughout her teenage years. One day their mother walked in and saw them having sex. Lucy was about eleven. The mother walked out of the son’s room and never did or said anything about it. These secrets are the most protected things.

  The girl had promise. I thought she was going to do so much with her cleverness, wit, and beauty. The other day I heard from a friend that Lucy committed suicide.

  * * *

  In college, Lucy had a boyfriend who was a musician. He wrote a song for her on one of the bridges near our school. He named the song “Lucy’s Bridge to Heaven.” Lucy and I weren’t good friends, but we were competitive classmates. We were the top students in philosophy. I was interested in the idea that language preexists us. I was interested in the idea that morality is only a construct. If there is no intrinsic right and wrong, then what happened to me is something that I can think my way out of.

  Lucy and I tried to outdo each other by knowing more obscure writings by Lacan than the other. Lucy liked Derrida more than I did, and I liked Deleuze more than she did. Could Anti-Oedipus help me? I wanted desperately to find help inside it. I bought two copies in case that would help me more. I was standing on a bridge over the river when someone told me that Deleuze had just died. It wasn’t Lucy’s Bridge to Heaven, it was one farther upriver.

  * * *

  I returned home from college for the summer. I lay in my mother’s bed for days. I had horrific nightmares. Images of little girls being impaled and dying, then being devoured by ants and maggots. I lay there in the same bed that my father had bought for my mother and himself decades before. The same mattress. My brother was conceived in that bed. I was raped on that mattress. My mother joined me at night. Carefully, frightened by me, she would slip under the covers on the other side, read for a while, then set her alarm, take off her glasses and place them on the bedside table, tell me Sweet dreams, and then shut out the light. In the morning she would rise early and attend to the dogs and cats. I cried until my eyes were red and almost swollen shut. I lay in my mother’s bed until finally she came in one day and asked me why. I reminded her what my father did to me. I reminded her that he raped me when I was a little girl. Rememb
er the blood I showed you? Remember when I cut my legs with a kitchen knife? I was only four years old, cutting my legs. She sat on the edge of the bed. She touched my arm under the covers. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything then, or that night, or the next day when I got out of that bed. She didn’t say anything ever to me about what I told her and what she already knew.

  * * *

  When my father cut my pussy with the knife, he didn’t take me to the doctor. He did it just badly enough, but not so badly that I couldn’t heal myself.

  Another time, I remember the steak knife being held at my throat and then at his own. I told him not to do it. I told him not to hurt himself.

  * * *

  When I was twenty-one years old, I was date-raped. I worked a summer job in a museum and one of the donors asked that I go to his apartment in order to collect a check. He had a loft in the living room. He invited me to go up the ladder to the loft to look at a sculpture, which I did. He followed me, and when he got up, he knocked the ladder off and it crashed to the floor below. He held me down on my back and raped me. Afterward I tried to leave, but he grabbed me and said that I couldn’t. I tricked him by telling him I heard something out the window, and while he was distracted by that for a moment, I jumped off the loft and fell onto the floor. I ran out the front door and into the street and got a cab.

  In the emergency room, the staff was all very kind. I didn’t even need their kindness, but it was nice. They did an examination and a social worker was there. Then I went home and I went to work the next day. My boss asked me how it went, and I told her not very well. She pressed me, since he was an important donor, and so I told her. She was aghast and told me to take the week off. She said the museum would pay for therapy. I said I was fine. I didn’t need time off and I didn’t need therapy. The truth was that what happened that night didn’t really get to me. I also felt partly responsible for it. We can smell these things. I have a weakness that he sensed. He might not have done that to another woman, but he did it to me. Perhaps I smelled the violence in him and acted differently around him, unconsciously, like I did with Carl. And I knew how to leave my body behind and let things happen to it.

  * * *

  I went through two promiscuous phases. One was just before I got married, and one was twelve years later, after my marriage ended. I did it sometimes with the anticipation of pleasure, but it rarely worked out that way. Sometimes it was only about conquest. Sometimes I didn’t have any desire or intention to see these men again, to get to know them, to be their girlfriend. I was not looking for love, nor was I offering it. The first phase began with a man while I was in college. I have no idea what his name was. I only have two images of him—one is of him vigorously shaking a martini for himself and the other is of him deeply tongue-kissing my friend Addison. She was one of my closest friends from school. We spent long afternoons reading in cafés, and sometimes long evenings together when her live-in girlfriend was busy with work. One day she asked me about sex with men. She had never had sex with a man, and she wanted to know what it was like and what were all the things that I had done. She wasn’t even sure what a penis looked like. I drew her a diagram of a man’s genitalia in my notebook. That night we went out to dinner with some other students and ran into one of my favorite professors. Addison, the professor, and I sat at the end of a long table and drank wine. He went to use the restroom and she drunkenly told me she wanted to watch me have sex with the professor. I said I would love to, but I didn’t want to because I liked him so much and knew that I would be very weird afterward—perhaps even completely cold—to him if it happened. He came back from the bathroom and we all laughed and drank more, and it would have been seamless for the three of us to leave together. But I stopped it. I liked him too much. But I was drunk and she wanted to watch me have sex with a man. We went to another restaurant, where we kind of knew the owner. Not long after that Addison and I were in his apartment. I watched him deeply kiss her and take off her shirt and her jeans. She wouldn’t let him take off her underpants. I remember them—big white underpants. He wanted us to kiss and we did. I looked into Addison’s eyes while I got fucked from behind by this unknown man. I watched her eyes get big. Then she and I left and took the subway home and I stood even though the seats were empty. She told me that it was different than she’d expected. I asked her, different how? She couldn’t put her finger on it, she said it was just more than she had imagined.

  Then there was the Republican who didn’t kiss me, but slowly smelled my entire body for an hour before he fucked me. There was the banker who couldn’t stop talking about Winston Churchill, and my friend’s older brother. The civil rights lawyer who only used colored condoms and who, after I lent him my car, returned it to me with discarded sandwich wrappers on the floor in the backseat. But for the twelve years I was married, I was faithful to my husband.

  * * *

  I loved Isaac. We got married on a boat in our bathing suits. With his father’s help, we bought a rambling apartment with three fireplaces near the park. Isaac didn’t want children and I did, so we got big dogs. Isaac went to work early in the morning, and before he left, he brought me coffee in bed. He worked a lot. He suggested that I decorate the apartment. I spent my days finding things in antique stores. I spent weeks deciding which stove to get. Which bathtub, which fabric for the guest room curtains. After months of looking, I finally found the cutting sink I wanted for the pantry. I learned to squeeze the juice of a lemon on a wooden cutting board to get out the smell of garlic. And to use baby powder to quiet squeaky wood floors. From Martha Stewart I learned that when you are removing a lipstick stain, first scrape off the excess lipstick from the fabric with a butter knife. I liked being a housewife. And I didn’t like being a housewife. I collected china plates, vintage aprons. Old Baedekers, books of maps, books of myths. I put the books on a shelf in the room with the dark red walls and the pale green chairs.

  We had a lot of friends and I was lonely. We had dinner parties where either Isaac cooked or I did. He drank and I didn’t. We traveled. We had a lot of insurance. He wanted to take care of me, and he did. Sometimes in the afternoons while he was at work, I looked at pornography. I would look at bondage, at submissive women being beaten, at fathers and daughters. It made my cunt hurt to look and I couldn’t help doing it.

  Isaac told me that the most magical place he’d ever been was the Isle of Raasay. He told me about the limestone cliffs, the lochs and bogs, the eagles. He took me there and I unpacked my clothes and wanted to stay forever. We spent three days in a hotel in an eighteenth-century stone building, wandering the moors and the beaches. But we barely spoke. The sexual desire wasn’t deep and it wasn’t wide. In all the years we were together, I never had a dream about him. I never wept on his chest, telling him how terrified I was. I never pulled his chest hair with my teeth and then kissed him, the way I later would with Carl, pulling on his hairs with my hands like an animal, pulling on him, calling to him, saying his name in a soft voice, a baby voice, calling him to do it to me again.

  I wanted a safe and calm home. I wanted a sexless home, but I didn’t know that then. I wanted him to raise me. And sometimes he did. He taught me about wine and contemporary art. He taught me how to behave at a cocktail party, which I also didn’t know, and I never did well. I cut my hair short like he wanted. I stopped wearing lipstick because he didn’t like it. And then I wanted him to stop raising me. I wanted my hair long, I wanted to do things besides decorate our apartment and roast lamb for his friends whom he also called mine. I wanted to wear lipstick. After we separated, I felt my back and my arms for the first time in years. I started drinking. I wore earrings.

  Sex is the center of things. If you’re having it, it’s the center. If you’re not, it’s the center.

  * * *

  Isaac was kind and supportive of me when I told him that my father had molested me. I didn’t tell him any more than that. No details, no stories, not for how long or how often. Nothin
g about my desire and excitement when I thought about what had happened to me. I never said the word rape to him. I couldn’t say it until very recently. I wouldn’t buy grape-seed oil because it had the word rape in it. I kept the word out of our home.

  Isaac treated me delicately. He said that whenever he thought about what had happened to me, he didn’t want to touch me or upset me. It was as if he were afraid of me. I think he had affairs. He must have. There were years when we almost never had sex. Once, when we were walking in the park, he told me that if I ever were to sleep with someone else, he asked that it not be one of his friends, that I use protection, and that I never tell him about it, ever. This made me think that he was doing that. But I didn’t have sex with anyone else. For years I shut off all sexual desire. This was about halfway through my marriage, after the time of my rare afternoons with pornography and my years of obsessive masturbation. I didn’t have sex and I didn’t think about it. I convinced myself that I was better off without it. That I could only be pure and good without it. Sex was too much pain, too much darkness.

  * * *

  My mother was so distraught by the separation and divorce between Isaac and me that she threatened suicide. I don’t know why it got to her like it did. Maybe she, too, needed the safe, calm home that she thought I had with him. I don’t know.