The Blessing Next to the Wound
A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation
Hector Aristizábal and Diane Lefer
Lantern Books | New York
A Division of Booklight Inc.
2010
Lantern Books
128 Second Place
Brooklyn, NY 11231
Copyright © 2010 Hector Aristizábal and Diane Lefer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Lantern Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aristizabal, Hector.
The blessing next to the wound : a story of art, activism, and transformation / Hector Aristizabal and Diane Lefer.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59056-171-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59056-171-6
1. Violence--Colombia--History--20th century. 2. Colombia--Social conditions--20th century. I. Lefer, Diane. II. Title.
HN307.A37 2010
303.6'2092--dc22
[B]
2010004078
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To the memory of Hernán Darío and Juan Fernando and to the future of Camilla and Gabo
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Hidden in Plain Sight
Chapter 4: Life from Barren Rock
Chapter 6: Torn Up by the Roots
Chapter 7: In the Mouth of the Wolf
Chapter 8: The Latin American Dream
Chapter 9: The Terrorist Within
Chapter 10: May 2006: The Wind Comes and Takes Away
Chapter 11: Crossing Psychic Frontiers
Chapter 12: The Wounded Healer
Four am. A low-income housing project on the outskirts of Medellín, Colombia. The whole neighborhood shook as military trucks rumbled into the barrio on the hunt for subversives. It was 1982; I was twenty-two years old. We were living under the Estatuto de Seguridad, a repressive law that looked on almost any opposition to the government as Communist-inspired. It was dangerous to talk politics. Sometimes even more dangerous to create art. Friends of mine from the university had been seized and disappeared only to reappear as cadavers found in a ditch, bodies covered with cuts and burns, toes and fingers broken, tongues missing, eyes gouged out.
It could happen to me. With my theater company, I performed plays that encouraged dissent by poking merciless fun at the military and the rich, at presidents and priests. I’d participated in protests and human rights demonstrations and had organized cultural events where we sang the protest songs of Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa and showed our revolutionary sympathies by watching Cuban films.
It could happen to my younger brother. It might have already happened. Juan Fernando had left the house two days before to go camping with three other kids. Then my family got word he’d been arrested. My father and I went searching for him and were told he’d been turned over to the army, but we hadn’t been able to learn his whereabouts or anything about his case. I’d spent a restless night, my sleep troubled by fear for my brother.
Now I was instantly alert. I pulled on a T-shirt and warm-up pants and ran to look out through the blinds. One of the trucks stopped in front of our house directly beneath my window. Should I try to escape? A cold mist made everything indistinct but by the light of the streetlamp, I could see Juan Fernando surrounded by soldiers in the open back of the truck. So, at least he was alive. But there was no running for it now. I couldn’t try to save myself if the army had my brother.
“Open the door! This is a raid!” A platoon of ten soldiers and a sergeant burst in, pointing their weapons at my terrified parents. My father grabbed our little dog, his beloved Chihuahua, trying to keep her still. “All of you! Sit there!” There was my teenage sister Estela, scared and embarrassed to be seen in the old nightclothes she slept in. There were my brothers—Hernán Darío who was fighting demons of his own that had nothing to do with politics, and Ignacio, the steady, reliable one who worked as a delivery boy to help support the family.
“You!” One of the soldiers pointed his rifle at me. “What’s up there?”
“It’s where the boys sleep. Me and my brothers.”
I led them up the stairs. They overturned furniture, threw clothes and papers everywhere, tossed my mattress as they ransacked my room. I started to calm down as I watched them search. This meant they weren’t after me for anything I’d done. They expected to find something and I knew they wouldn’t. I always cleaned the house when a government crackdown was expected. Pamphlets that criticized the president, leaflets demanding social justice, anything that mentioned trade unions or socialism—including books assigned at school—I’d gotten rid of everything. That’s what I thought, and I was wrong.
When I was fourteen years old, I’d written a letter to Radio Havana Cuba asking for books and magazines about the Revolution. I was so proud of that letter, I’d kept a copy for myself. I’d forgotten all about it. Now it was in the hands of the soldiers. And worse. Among my school papers, they found a booklet from the ELN, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the second largest guerrilla group in the country. This little pamphlet could mean a death sentence. It had to be Juan Fernando’s. No one else in the family had any interest in the ELN. Was he hiding it? Or had he left it for me to find, a follow-up to our recent disagreement? Then they picked up the photos. As a psychology student, I’d been documenting the degrading treatment of mental patients at the charity hospital. According to the sergeant, these wretched looking human beings were hostages held by the guerrillas.
My mother cried and begged the soldiers to let me go, but I was handcuffed and pushed out to the street where a cold gray dawn was breaking. All the world’s colors seemed washed out, gone. And it was quiet, abnormally quiet. No shouts, no street vendors, no radios. But hundreds of neighbors had come out of their houses to see what was happening. They watched in silence and I remember thinking, Witnesses, hoping that would make a difference, that the army would not be able to just disappear us when so many people had seen us detained.
I was put in the back of the truck with my brother.
“Mono!” I called him by his nickname. Soldiers kicked us and struck us with their rifle butts and told us to shut up, but I had to talk to him. If we couldn’t explain away that ELN booklet, one or both of us might die. “I’m going to say you’ve been in the mental hospital, okay?” We could admit yeah, he might have picked up some guerrilla propaganda, but he wasn’t capable of understanding what it meant. My brother said nothing, but his eyes were full of pain.
We were driven to Batallón Bomboná, an army post in another part of town. We entered the compound followed by three more trucks, each carrying one of the boys who’d gone camping with Mono. Soldiers ordered us out and stood us facing a wall. It was cold as hell out there in the yard. I shivered until the sun came up at last, throwing shadows against the whitewashed adobe. I can still remember the brief touches of warmth, now on my shoulders, now my back.
Comunistas! Subversivos! Soldiers ran by in formation, hollering insults: Hijueputas! The firing squad stopped and aimed their rifles. Someone shouted: The one with the red shirt! Bang! The one with the long hair! My heart exploded in my throat. Long hair meant me. Bullets slammed into the wall again and again just above our head, but didn’t hit us.
What were they going to do to us? We stood under guard for hours at that wall. The morning went on and on and I waited.
“Don’t look!” But I looked, and saw a short fat man lead my brother’s friends away, one by one. They were so young, just kids. What would happen to them? At last the soldiers brought them back. “Don’t look!” But I saw the boys were soaking wet and trembling. “Shut up! Don’t talk!” But there were whispers. We were tortured. They were tortured. They were tortured.
The man took Juan Fernando. Minutes went by. Hours. He didn’t bring my brother back. Images roared through my mind: mutilated bodies, my brother’s face. Torture. When the man came back, he was alone.
The man came for me.
He led me up a hill to a cell at the end of a long, one-story building. He blindfolded me. He demanded information. “Where are you keeping the hostages?” He beat me. He kicked me. He forced my head underwater again and again, bringing me to the verge of drowning.
“Your brother has told us everything,” he said. “So have his little friends. We know you’re an urban guerrilla commander. You’re the one who’s training those kids.”
The son-of-a-bitch had to be lying. Juan Fernando would never have said such a thing.
“He’s crazy,” I said. “My brother has been hospitalized.” The worst pain was imagining what they might do to him. “Please don’t hurt him.”
I thought of Mono’s growing sympathy for the guerrilla movement. It was what we argued about. Maybe he was more involved than I’d realized or had wanted to know. So what? He was my brother and I would do what I could to protect him.
“He’s not responsible. He has mental problems.”
Soldiers attached electrodes to my testicles and sent jolts of electricity tearing through every nerve. They twisted my arms up behind my back and left me hanging until the pain and helplessness became so great, I was blown right out of my body and mind. Soldiers drove me around in a small jeep. One forced the barrel of his rifle into my mouth. “You’re going to die now,” he said. “Just like your brother.”
Instead, they forced me into an underground passage where I found Mono, alive, and his friends, all of us hidden from view—as we later learned—while a human rights delegation searched for us somewhere above our heads. The ceiling of our dungeon was so low we had to crawl. The air was hot, thick, and the stench unbearable from human waste and from the festering wounds of a black man from Chocó we found chained and shackled there, bleeding to death in the dark. He told us he had no idea why he’d been arrested and tortured. “Worse than a street animal,” he said. Nothing we could do could help him or ease his pain till it turned out another prisoner had bribed a guard for marijuana. “Here, brother.” The dying man filled his lungs and began to laugh and the smoke filled the dark and filthy crawlspace. We all filled our lungs and laughed and I believe I’ll hear our laughter echoing in that cave and in my nightmares for the rest of my life.
* * *
It must have been the witnesses and the human rights delegation that saved us. We could have been executed in secret. Instead we were brought before a judge. Our mental hospital story worked. The ELN booklet was deemed harmless, but my brother and the other boys went to prison for carrying a subversive weapon—a machete. He went in an idealistic young man. He came out a committed revolutionary, convinced no alternative existed to the armed struggle.
As for me, ten days after my arrest, the army let me go, but the ordeal marked me. It marks me still.
I’m marked as well by my self-inflicted wounds. Years later, in California, my life was a shambles. My marriage had collapsed and the identity I’d so painstakingly constructed in exile had shattered. I was overwhelmed by my history of loss: I’d lost my country and my language and so many people I loved to violent death. Then the photographs from Abu Ghraib seared themselves into the nation’s consciousness and I was galvanized back into action. I was asked to participate in an anti-torture event. When I improvised a few scenes about my experience, I saw immediately that I’d brought home to the audience the human reality of torture in a way no newspaper account or news broadcast could do. The pain I’d suffered was now a source of power—the blessing next to the wound. To carry the message further I asked my friends Diane Lefer, BJ Dodge, and Enzo Fina—a writer, a director, and a musician—to collaborate with me. We created the play Nightwind, which I’ve now performed all over the United States and around the world.
This work helped me heal from torture, but offstage I was still a mess. Some days, I felt myself disintegrating, plunging into the void, but I always knew for the sake of my two young children I had to regain my footing.
When I worked as a therapist, I often asked clients to tell me the story of their lives. I would then offer them narratives in which they could recognize not just themselves, but their strengths. I would invite them to discover what they’d learned and could make use of from the most difficult experiences. And so I began to tell Diane my story—all of it—and I asked her to write it.
I came of age in Medellín, Colombia, at the time considered the most dangerous city in the world. In the barrio where we lived, few jobs and little opportunity for education existed and so it was prime recruiting ground for Colombia’s four armies: the government military, the rightwing death squads, the revolutionary guerrilla groups, and the cocaine mafia. I buried most of the kids I played soccer with and I assumed that my life, too, would be short, and my death a violent one.
My generation was not the first to be plagued by violence and early death.
My father’s family were peasants, driven out of the mountains by the civil war that raged between the country’s Liberal and Conservative parties. In those days, the late 1940s, just as today, ideology wasn’t the only, or even primary motive for the killings. Armed factions sowed terror in order to take possession of fertile lands and wherever resources (gold, coal, oil) could be found to be exploited. And so the Aristizábals arrived in the city. My father, Pedro, a teenager without formal education, found work at Fabricato, the huge textile mill in the town of Bello, which made him one of those fortunate enough to be employed.
My parents met when my mother, Nidia, was taking a stroll (un paseo) with her married sisters. In Latin America, the paseo was a highly respectable form of cruising, a way for single people to meet. My parents liked each other right away, but their courtship lasted three years, as my father couldn’t afford to marry. He was supporting his entire family and was committed to putting his younger brother through school. My Uncle Marcos had his arm blown off as a child when he picked up a stick of dynamite that had been left near a gold mine. His stump limited his capacity for manual labor, but also opened up an opportunity. Thanks to my father’s hard work, he had the chance to become a teacher. I looked up to him as the one educated member of the family while I failed, as a child, to appreciate my father’s generous sacrifice. My father has always shown his deepest feelings through his actions rather than his words. When we kids were growing up, he never raised a hand or an angry voice to us, but it’s taken me many years to recognize his tenderness and the non-verbal language he uses to express love.
My mother’s family was more solidly working class: slightly, though significantly more prosperous. My mother was twenty-seven when she married, considered way past a woman’s prime for that time and place, and she was entirely ignorant of the facts of life. As far as she knew, babies came when a woman secluded herself in a room with her knitting and waited for the Virgin Mary to bring the newborn. Nidia was only nine when her mother bled to death behind such a closed door, miscarrying what would have been her twelfth child. Her father remarried, and her stepmother also died soon in childbirth, but these events remained mysterious and unexplained to Nidia. As she prepared for her wedding, no one—not even the married sisters who’d chaperoned her first meetings with Pedro—told her anything of the intimacies of married life. When my father tried to consummate the marriage, she was horrified. How could her respectful, gentle suitor even consider such a thing?!
For all her strict religious belief and clinging to respectability, my mother never seemed to accept the notion of sin. She retained an innocence that made her see everyone as God’s children, and she only saw the good in people. When a neighborhood man and reputed murderer, nicknamed Peligro, which means Danger, tried to befriend my youngest brother, my mother was moved by his kindly friendliness. My mother always blamed herself for what she learned years later about their relationship. As a teenager, I was cruel to my mother, dismissing her values in ways that tore at her heart. I demanded that she see life as it really was, or as I, at that time, believed it to be.
When Pedro and Nidia did marry at last, they had help from my mother’s father, who let them live at nominal rent in the big house he owned behind his workshop. So that’s where I was born, in 1960, in that big old house in Bello, and spent my early years fascinated by Grandpa Carlos and his skill at repairing cars and doing all sorts of things with hammers, drills, torches, and soldering irons.
On the other side of the garden wall, the neighbor’s mango tree held the sweetest fruit in the world, a constant temptation to my brothers and me. We would climb to the top of our own tree and then step onto the crumbling wall that divided our yards and brave the three vicious dogs that guarded the mangoes as though they were golden apples of the gods. An abandoned chicken coop became our submarine, our space ship, even the lamp from which a genie appeared to grant our every wish. We had never seen an actual computer, but we knew the power of computers from Star Trek, and when our games reached crisis point, we often asked our imaginary computer what to do.
I was the oldest: the instigator and clown. My mother says even in the cradle I made muecas (funny faces) to get her attention. Next came Ignacio, lover of almanacs. When we submerged, à la Jules Verne, to the bottom of the sea, he told us that Lake Titicaca lies 3,810 meters above sea level, covers 8,300 square kilometers, and reaches its greatest recorded depth at 280 meters. Juan Fernando, nicknamed Mono (Colombian slang for blond), came next. He was the biggest and tallest, and most likely strongest of us all, but he never used his strength to intimidate. Mono never spoke much. He rarely invented our games, but quietly took every heroic action. I admired his self-containment, which I saw even as a child as nobility of soul.
We didn’t always want to play with our youngest brother, Hernán Darío. He cried easily. He was afraid of falling, of getting hit when the games got rough, of getting hurt. When we needed someone, though, to play the poor widow woman who needed rescue, we chose Hernán Darío. We teased him and called him names: “pío pío,” the cheep cheep of a baby chick; “Nidio,” a play on my mother’s name as a way to call him “mama’s boy,” and other words—ugly words like “maricón,” or “faggot,” syllables that today taste like poison on my lips. The real girl in the family, Estela, was a baby, too young to join us. She was born sickly and spent her early months in an incubator and even required a full transfusion of blood. Estela was different from the rest of us, with a hot temper, quick to anger, something we attributed to the transfusion, saying, “Who knows whose blood she inherited?”
In those early days, I wanted to grow up to be a fireman or else a scientist. I had no idea what a scientist was or what one did, but I’d heard people speak with admiration about Albert Einstein and, since he was a scientist, I figured I would be one, too. I was even more excited when I heard he had invented a “theory”—whatever that was—even though he hadn’t done well in school.
One day my Uncle Marcos told me my name meant “entertainer” and my middle name, Augusto, meant “intelligent.” In Spanish, we don’t pronounce the “h” so “Hector” does sound very much like “actor.” But if you look me up in a dictionary of names, you’ll find that Hector means no such thing, but is the Latin version of the Greek for steadfast—very different from my own impulsive self. My uncle’s translation of Augusto wasn’t accurate either, but I liked being called intelligent, and took his words very much to heart. I excelled in school and grew up to be an actor.
* * *
When I was ten, Grandpa Carlos sold his property and my father was confronted with the challenge of paying real rent. In Medellín, the government was trying something new, building a whole neighborhood intended for low-income workers. For a lower mortgage than you could find anywhere else, a family could move into an unfinished adobe structure and then, with savings, bit by bit turn it into a completed house. During the nineteen years we lived there, we never had a spare penny for improvements and the building remained forever in a state of incompleteness and disrepair. When you showered, you had to be careful not to step in the hole in the bathroom floor. I used to say we lived in a house with leprosy, because the adobe was crumbling, chunks constantly falling from the walls. And it’s where our family itself began falling to pieces.
Life in the barrio was noisy, crowded, overflowing—the street vendors calling out their wares: plátanos, bananos, verduras, or offering to repair irons or sharpen knives. Voices carried from the houses nearby—arguments, sometimes violent ones. Early each morning, my mother would wake my brothers and me. The four of us slept on the second floor in what we called our rooms though they lacked doors. Music would erupt joyfully from the homes of the Afro-Colombians who’d fled the violence in Chocó. Cars honked on the narrow streets and on the nearby highway, and the trains whistled as they pulled into the station and then picked up speed along the dangerous tracks where we were forbidden to play and always did. Lalo was killed trying to jump onto a moving train. Beto lost both legs. The danger didn’t stop me. The chance to see the world, or at least ride to the next town, was irresistible, and good practice for the life-and-death challenge of going to high school. Though buses passed on the highway nearby, they were always full by the time they got to the barrio at rush hour. The only way to ride was to grab onto the outside of a window and try to hang on while the driver turned the bus into a bucking bronco.
Our house had electricity, but no hot water. To this day, I shower in cold water, not understanding how a person can feel clean after immersion in something the temperature of piss. We argued in the morning over who would get to shower first and use our shared towel while it was still dry. I was often the one sent off to the bakery to buy sweet rolls for breakfast, the fresh bread we dunked in hot chocolate. Going to the bakery wasn’t bad (the baker usually gave me an extra treat), but sometimes I would find something terribly important to do, something that absolutely couldn’t wait, and fight with my brothers until one of them agreed (or was compelled) to go.
The baker was a neighbor who put an extra large oven in his kitchen. Everybody had a sideline. Even with fulltime wages, it was impossible to make ends meet. The unfinished houses all remained just that way until some kids started dealing drugs or working as mafia hitmen and suddenly, their houses got done. Three doors down from us, Claudia’s mother sold socks and underwear out of the living room. I was at the age where I fell in love with almost every girl I saw, but Claudia, two years older than I, was special. I loved her from afar and imagined her initiating me into the mysteries of sex. In a way, that’s what would happen, but not how anyone would have wished.
Our family had sidelines, too. My father sold cheap perfumes on the street. At night, after his day job, he managed a bar. For a while, we tried selling ice cream. This meant investing in a freezer and traveling by bus to the distributor of Helados Alpina to bring the product home. But the vanilla covered in chocolate topping was so delicious, we kids ate up all the profits, and after a couple of years, my parents took the Alpina sign out of our window.
I missed the ice cream business. Too many meals consisted of salted water with a bit of potato floating in it, creating in me an eternal aversion to soup. We drank agua panela (water with brown sugar) the energy drink common to the army, the guerrillas, and the poor. Sometimes we took the bus back to Bello, to the cooperative store where we could buy staples like rice, beans, and soap in bulk, at discount prices. The problem was, at the co-op, you had to pay in cash, which is something my father rarely had. So like everyone else in the barrio, we bought on credit from the local store and paid when we could. The store was the sideline of a retired policeman and he routinely cheated his customers, adding all sorts of charges for things we didn’t buy. It enraged me that my father knew he was being cheated, but never challenged the man, as if to say beggars can’t be choosers.
For years I looked down on Pedro, my father, and considered him a peasant. I hated the sight of him at the dinner table sucking the marrow from a bone as a substitute for meat, little dreaming that one day I would be a prisoner, and grateful to the soldier who gave me a bone from his own meager rations.
* * *
In the barrio, I became street smart. Some streets were paved, some weren’t. Most of the streetlights were out; breaking them with rocks was a favorite pastime. We were all obsessed with soccer, playing for hours with balls made of crumpled newspaper tied up with twine. Some of us had shoes, some didn’t. Mafia guys scouted our games. Who was most aggressive? Who bullied the other kids? Who looked the most hungry? By the age of twelve, some of my friends had already been recruited into crime, but I’d discovered books. I preferred to sit up on the second-floor balcony, looking out over the games and arguments going on below, the air heavy with fumes from the chemical plant nearby. I’d read while holding my little transistor radio to my ear, the sound so faint it could hardly be heard over the noisy life happening around me. In those days, my greatest dream was to have a giant sound system with which I could flood the world with the magnificent music of Mozart and Pink Floyd.
Like most Colombian children, I was initiated early into the beliefs and rites of the Catholic Church. Though I have rejected much of what I was taught, I carry the imprint of mythic scenes of sacrifice and resurrection or rebirth. More problematic for me was what seemed the absolute split between good and evil, and the split between body and soul. There seemed no way to reconcile my carnal desires with the strictures of the Church, and the local priest bored me with his monotonous drone. Yes, the Latin American bishops met in Medellín in 1968 to affirm their commitment to Liberation Theology and to the poor, but I saw no evidence of this commitment around me. I harangued my devout relatives with speeches about the evils of the Inquisition, the extermination of the pre-Columbian peoples, and the wealth of the Vatican compared to the poverty of the faithful.
At the same time, I wanted to sacrifice myself to something larger, become larger through the expansion of the soul, and so I began a spiritual search. Mormon missionaries came to the barrio and I was briefly intrigued by rumors of multiple wives. I rejected the Hari Krishnas. Long hair was my sign of rebellion, and I wasn’t about to shave my head for any god.
At that time, I didn’t think to explore traditional cultures. I’d grown up with folklore: Madre Monte, the huge woman who represented Nature; La Llorona who roamed through the dark, wailing and seeking children to abduct and who we thought of when we heard cats yowling in the night; El Patatarro, the soldier with a tin leg; and El Sincabeza, the decapitated peasant who rode his horse through the countryside looking for people to behead.
Instead I turned to other ancient traditions and immersed myself in mysticism: Gnosis and Rosicrucianism, cabalistic knowledge, Egyptian and Greek mysteries about the Inner Order and the Outer Order. I devoured all the books on esoteric knowledge that I could find—Alpha & Omega, The Golden Dawn, Eastern philosophies, the seven chakras—finding magical theories that explained all the mysteries of life and death. I dreamed that some day I would be able to read and understand the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, or find access to the cabalistic Tree of Life and transform myself into a wizard of white magic. My task in life was to raise myself up to the highest possible state of consciousness, above plants, animals, and my less evolved fellow humans.
Some of our neighbors turned their rooms at night into centers for Gnostic meetings. It took me a while to see that my fellow believers were poor, uneducated people who had known nothing but misery. They fantasized about magical powers since they saw no other way to gain power in this world over their own lives. One day, an old lady suggested to me that I could become the “kalki avatara” of the Aquarius era, just as Jesus had been the “kalki avatara” of the Pisces era. Even given my moments of grandiosity, I don’t think I believed her, but instead of setting her straight, I swore her to secrecy.
In spite of my spiritual search, my blossoming sexual desires never stopped sabotaging my metaphysical efforts. I remember trying to transmute my sexual energy into fuel for my astral trips so I could travel in my dreams to any place in the world. En route to the ancient pyramids, my astral itinerary took detours in the hopes I’d get to see people having sex or, at the very least, watch the most attractive female neighbors I knew taking off their clothes. I tried esoteric breathing to gain longevity like Samael Aun Weor, the Gnostic writer, who was supposedly 230 years old. I used to meditate upside down like a bat until I hyperventilated. Then, my body shaking, I would come downstairs, convinced my family could see me levitating. My biggest spiritual struggles took place in the bathroom, the only place I could be totally alone to do my higher practice. As illustrated in the Gnostic books, I used my right hand to hold my nose while chanting a mantra and imagining my semen traveling like a snake from my sexual chakra, up my spinal cord, and into my third eye. In the meantime, however, I could not stop my left hand from playing with my penis. About ninety-nine percent of the time it was my left hand that won the battle, and my supreme energy ended up against the bathroom walls.
From my perch above the street, I read—no, devoured—books, sometimes two a day: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, García Márquez, Shakespeare, and any other author I could get my hands on. In the printed word, I sought social and spiritual truth, seeking the life models that were not to be seen in the physical world around me.
I read Marx and Engels and the booklets I received about the Cuban Revolution from Radio Havana. Now I could really be a pain-in-the-ass militant around my relatives, not only criticizing their beloved Church, but asserting the supreme scientific truth of dialectical materialism. Utopia was possible here and now if I could only convince them to participate in the insurrection needed to overthrow the government. All that happened was that my grandfather called me the Anti-Christ and threw me out of his house.
My grandfather surely thought my book-knowledge had ruined me. In truth, it may have made me obnoxious, but it also stimulated my mind and saved me, kept me from joining street gangs or guerrilla armies. I went into battle with words and ideas, with passionate beliefs, many of which I would repudiate as I grew.
When I discovered Wilhelm Reich, his work became my main inspiration. I was attracted to him as an eternal rebel. He’d been expelled from both the German Communist Party and from the Psychoanalytical International and his fate confirmed my worst suspicions about the United States, as he died incarcerated in this country. Reich explained that sexual repression of the people, especially the youth, was what allowed those in power to oppress the masses. What could be better? Through Reich we could have our revolution and orgasm, too.
At first, this was nothing but theory.
Chapter 2: The Womb As Tomb
A guttural wail tore through the air. I was fifteen, just dressed and ready to leave for school and this awful sound was coming from Claudia’s house, three doors down. She was the girl I loved and dreamed about, and so I ran as fast as I could to be by her side. I found her father trying to calm his wife who shrieked, distraught, while Claudia’s brother punched the wall, grunting like a wounded animal.
The door to her bedroom was open, the bedroom I’d entered so many times in my adolescent fantasies. Now, no one stopped me. Claudia lay in bed, her pretty brown face drained pale, her body floating in a pool of blood, her eyes fixed somewhere in eternity. She had bled to death after aborting a fetus that later that morning was found clogging the toilet.
She was seventeen years old.
* * *
When I was seventeen, I met Rocío. It was, in what would prove to be my usual way, love at first sight. Sometimes I think Rocío saved me, focusing all my urgency and violent energy into tenderness and passion. Certainly, she gave me what I now look back on as some of the happiest, most ecstatic days of my life. Rocío was generous and patient and while she didn’t always understand me, she understood how to be with me. I was different from the boys she was used to.
If a film moved me, I didn’t want to talk about it. Words would break the spell, when all I wanted was to stay inside its magic. We’d leave the theater in silence. I’d close my eyes to block out the real world around us and Rocío would take my arm and lead me safely home. I used to compare her to a flower growing in the middle of a train track, fresh and unspoiled no matter how much social garbage passed over her. Together, we explored and experienced all the joys of young, new sexuality.
Of course, we had no place to go. Even when it was possible for me to obtain condoms, somehow I never had them just at the rare moments when we had a chance to be alone. So we stole what intimacy we could, passionate and desperate for each other and usually unprepared. We took risks. There was too much bliss in giving ourselves to one another with everything we had. Being together, joining our bodies—that, not the possible consequences, was a matter of life and death.
When Rocío became pregnant, we were terrified. We were alone with our secret in a country where abortion is illegal, even when medically necessary to save a woman’s life. Somehow, I managed to find a doctor and, though we had no money, I convinced him to help us. That’s how we dealt with it. The first time.
I had more reason than ever to escape into a world of passion with Rocío as life wasn’t happy at home. My childish idea had been that my family would always be together. Since high school, I’d been writing and acting, and I’d had the chance to visit other towns and cities to perform. Theater was starting to open up the wider world to me and I wanted my brothers to have the same chances. I believed Hernán Darío had more talent than I did, so I decided we would start a theater company together. Or maybe we would found an important publishing house. Whatever we did, it would be creative and wonderful and we’d all live together in a huge house with wives and girlfriends and lots of children. I led my younger brothers to see films at the Goethe Institute, where people stared to see children in attendance, children obviously from the barrio. I wanted the boys to be stunned, as I was, by Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I’d gone to a public college-prep high school, probably the best secondary education in Medellín, and I wanted them to do the same. But first Ignacio and then Juan Fernando—Mono—dropped out of school.
My dream wasn’t working out, though my mother said the boys followed in my footsteps all the same. “You brought all the plagues to this house!” she accused me. “Drugs! Sex! Communism! Atheism!”
Mono spent most of his time hanging out in the street. Ignacio, always the serious one, went to work, came home, and kept his head down and his thoughts to himself. I used to think he was the most intelligent of us all, but now he retreated from the turmoil at home and in the barrio into an unreflective life of survival. And almost from the time we’d left Bello, there had been problems in my parents’ marriage. Estela, la niña, now shared a bed with our mother and drowned every night in Nidia’s helplessness and tears while struggling with problems of her own that remained unspoken.
My father worked all day at the textile mill, mostly as a gomador, spending long shifts in a room filled with heavy steam as he operated the machinery that sprayed huge bobbins of filling yarn with the conditioner that set it and got out the kinks. He also worked weekends and nights to make ends meet or maybe to get away from an old-fashioned wife and five rowdy kids. Besides the venture of our short-lived ice cream business, he sold wicker chairs. He managed a series of bars, including Las Brisas, where he became involved with the waitress.
Hernán Darío took our mother’s side. Once, blocking the door, he told my father to go away and stay away. This was the only time I ever saw Juan Fernando get violent, as he grabbed our youngest brother, slammed him against the wall, and told him he needed to respect our father, no matter what. Estela, sadly, as she too often did, just blocked out everything happening around her and remained silent.
As far as I was concerned, if my father wanted to live with someone else, that was his choice and I said as much, a naïve know-it-all. After all, thanks to a purely ideological understanding of life, I’d rejected any notion of monogamy and marriage. I adored Rocío, and we would remain together for years, but once I entered the university, my world expanded and she didn’t grow along with me. I met lots of women who excited me and I seduced as many as I could. Rocío was always generous with me and I was deeply grateful, but I failed to see that sincere gratitude in the heart is no substitute for reciprocity.
I was essentially clueless about how complicated relationships, especially marriage, can be and Reich and Marx were not much help. I lost patience when Dad kept telling me what a wonderful woman my mother was: “the best.” I didn’t need to hear that while I watched “the best” become a river of sorrow. My mother made me her confidante. Instead of comforting her, I confronted her with her sexual hang-ups, and flaunted my own liberated sexuality.
Sex was delicious. Sex was great. The evidence all around me, however, was sex was also danger.
Rocío was pregnant again. She tried douching with detergent. She swallowed down all sorts of concoctions made of traditional herbs, but she was still pregnant and I was too ashamed and indebted to approach the doctor again. Instead, I found a nurse.
The nurse wanted to help, but she didn’t want to risk prison. So she agreed to let us use her apartment. She’d leave the instruments there, waiting for us, and she agreed to tell me what to do. “But I won’t be there. I have nothing to do with this if anything goes wrong.”
I knew very well what could go wrong. I’d seen how Claudia paid with her life, but I shut off those memories. I was terrified enough as Rocío and I entered the nurse’s unfamiliar room.
“Rocío, are you all right?”
Yes, she was ready to go through with it. I still ask myself why she was: because she trusted me, because she was desperate, because we were young and unable to recognize consequences? And me? I knew her body, I’d seen and loved every inch of it; but the way I was seeing it now was different.
The nurse had kept her word. There was the metal tool, the speculum. That’s what I had to put into her vagina so I could see inside. Then, at hand, the nurse had left me the tweezers and the sonda, the probe, just as she had promised.
“Rocío, are you all right?”
She was so scared, her voice hardly came out, but she said she was.
Use the tweezers to insert the probe in the cervix. It looks just like the behind of a chicken.
“Are you all right, Rocío?”
“It’s okay.” She was crying in pain, but she said, “Keep going.”
I slowly pushed the probe up to the cervix and then stopped. I couldn’t do this. I stood there frozen until Rocío said again, “Keep going.” Holding my breath, I pushed the probe through the cervix and into her uterus. Gone.
“Now what?”
Now we had to wait for her uterus to expel the foreign object, along with the fetus.
This is the hardest story for me to tell.
The next day we were with a group of friends when Rocío began to have painful contractions. She jumped up from her chair and rushed away. I followed. We found a bathroom and I stood with her as blood and mucus came pouring out. “Are you all right?” I kept asking, but she was in too much pain to answer. Then I saw the probe pushing its way out of her body. I reached for it and pulled it and as I did, a fetus came pumping out from the lips of her vagina and into my hands. “Don’t look!”
Neither one of us had known what to expect, and I wasn’t prepared for this. I found a plastic bag in the trash and placed the fetus inside. I made Rocío sit down and held her a moment, asking again if she was all right. I was desperate to know she was okay but also desperate to take the bag and be gone before she could see what it held.
“Don’t look!” But I looked and saw the small chest inflate in what was probably its last breath in this world. That’s when I understood what we had done. “Are you all right?” I asked once more and when Rocío said yes, I left her just long enough to carry the bag outside in the dark and hide it in the bushes. I imagined eyes watching me, condemning me, and I imagined wild animals feeding off the small mass of flesh that could have become our own baby.
We were lucky. My probing didn’t puncture Rocío’s womb. And the nurse had left pills for her to take to prevent infection.
I wish it had not happened. I believe I will never get over it. But if I had my life to live over again, I would make the same choice. It seemed like the only choice we had.
* * *
There was another nurse in Medellín. Her name was Carmen and she was estranged from her respectable family because they knew of her secret life. Carmen was not just an advocate for change; she risked prison every day by performing safe but illegal abortions. I became the go-between, putting desperate students from the university in touch with her.
For me, attending Antioquia University was like winning the lottery, as 3,500 students applied and only 250 could find places. Though it was a public institution and the fees were low, they were impossibly high for my family and so I took out loans and worked a variety of part-time jobs, which taught me as much as school did.
There were several entrances to campus where guards checked student IDs before letting you pass the wrought-iron gates. I always came onto the grounds from Avenida Barranquilla, which put the science, mathematics, and engineering buildings to the right, humanities and social sciences quite appropriately on the left. The intellectual discourse of the 1970s and 80s melded Marxism with psychoanalysis and so you couldn’t study psychology or literature or theater in those days without being exposed to leftist ideology.
France was the country we all dreamed of as we read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. We studied culture through the lens of structuralism and post-structuralism, building on the theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. For all the radical activity on campus, no graffiti was painted on the buildings; we had too much love and respect for the places where we attended class. But slogans covered every other bare surface of concrete wall: ¡Venceremos! ¡Muerte al Imperialismo Yanqui! ¡Patria o Muerte! and the initials of the whole alphabet of leftist groups: FARC, ELN, EPL, PCMLN, MOIR, M-19. I spent a lot of my time in the theater department but my official course of study was psychology. The subject matter fascinated me, and I was also driven to seek help for my increasingly troubled family, especially for Hernán Darío, whose drug use had clearly progressed beyond experimentation to addiction.
The campus had shade trees and flowers (Hernán Darío would have known all their names). The buildings, dating back to 1803, had cantilevered red-tile roofs and, built of beautifully weathered brick rather than adobe, already seemed to promise initiation to a world far beyond the barrio. There was an athletic center with a swimming pool and running track and, perhaps of more interest, “the airport,” the adjoining secluded grove where students went to smoke marijuana and to make love, accounting for much of Carmen’s business.
The phone would ring at home. Another girl asking for me. My mother knew I had other girlfriends besides Rocío, but so many?
“I have a problem and I heard that you could help.”
“Who told you that?”
“Antonia.” Good. I’d helped Antonia a month earlier. It was less risky for Carmen when the referral came from someone who had herself violated the law.
“Okay. Can we meet? Tomorrow in the cafeteria at 10:00? I’m a skinny guy with long curly hair,” I told her. “I’ll be carrying a copy of [Lacan’s] Las formaciones del inconsciente.” In fact, I recognized her. I had experience at this game now, and pregnant girls were often easy to spot. It was the glazed look in Tita’s eyes and the stiff way she walked. Like so many others, from the moment she learned she was pregnant, she must have girdled her stomach tightly, terrified that anything would show.
In the cafeteria, I got her a cup of coffee. In those days, I was always broke and living on Coca-Cola (so much for my anti-imperialist rhetoric!) and guava-cheese pastry, but the girls were always scared and I felt it was my responsibility to treat them to at least some little thing. We found a small table in a corner.
I usually heard explanations like this:
“If my father finds out, he’ll kill me.”
“If I don’t end the pregnancy, my boyfriend will leave me.”
“My parents will blame the university. They always said higher education isn’t for girls.”
But what Tita said made me identify with her right away. She was desperate to finish school, receive a degree, and start to earn money. Her family, like mine, was counting on her to lift them out of poverty.
I explained the procedure and asked if she had a place. It was too risky for Carmen to let any patient know her name or address, and she didn’t dare do the work in her home.
“I live with my parents,” Tita said.
Of course: How would she have the money for a place of her own?
There was a place I sometimes had access to, and that’s where we went.
If Tita’s boyfriend was still in the picture, he had decided not to be involved, and so while Carmen worked, I was the one who held Tita’s hand.
While Carmen cleaned up, I tried to talk to Tita about what we’d just done, but she kept her eyes closed, and as soon as she felt well enough to leave, she was gone.
Every time I made an introduction, a fetus was aspirated away, but I told myself I was saving someone from Claudia’s fate. I kept reliving my own experience without ever facing it, at least not directly or consciously. But there I was, again and again, because I had something to learn even though I told myself I was there with something to teach. I imagined I could use my developing skills as a therapist and counselor to listen to the girls, talk with them about the experience. A wound won’t heal when it’s hidden, and no matter how necessary an abortion may be, no matter how right the decision, the mind and soul may need help coming to terms with the womb that is also a tomb.
Though I was incapable of recognizing these truths in my own life, I looked at these young women and knew that as long as they denied and ignored the consequences of their actions, they would remain caught up in behavior that would return them again and again to their wound. But most of the young women I brought to Carmen didn’t want to talk. The fear and shame were too great. As soon as the procedure was over, they wanted to be invisible, anonymous, gone. They resumed their daily lives with the pretense that nothing at all had happened.
I could not presume to know what went on in the hearts of the young women I brought to Carmen, but I knew the conflict inside of me. If Rocío and I were to have a baby, the only word I could think of for the situation was disaster. Abortion? Of course. But at the same time, I longed to be a father. I’d always wanted to bring life into the world, to raise children. Having a baby was out of the question. It was also what I wanted from very deep places in my soul. But we never talked about this. We remained trapped in our cycle of bliss and terror. So did the young couples on campus.
And so the phone would ring.
“Hi, it’s Tita. I need your help.”
“You have a friend?”
“No. It’s for me.”
Again.
* * *
Years later in the U.S., I faced young pregnant girls again and again. With my Masters degree in psychology earned in Medellín along with a Masters in marriage and family therapy earned in California, I offered my services as a therapist and counselor for pregnant teens and with kids coping with the powerful drives of sexuality. I wasn’t there to tell them what to do but rather, I hoped, to help them make sense of their lives. Most likely, I was trying to make sense of my own.
In California, I’ve met incarcerated girls who’ve given birth as many as three times without ever experiencing motherhood. The way the system works here, if a girl gives birth in a Youth Authority facility, she’s allowed only two days with the baby. If no relative is willing to take the child, it goes up for adoption right away.
This shocks me. When I led workshops in a women’s prison in Pune, India, children were everywhere, allowed to live with their mothers until age five. After that time, they could return to visit, but the moment of separation was of course a very difficult and traumatic one. Together, we designed a letting-go ritual for the mothers and children to acknowledge that rupture in their lives.
Two weeks after I returned to California from India, I met Jackie. She wasn’t a criminal, just a kid who became affiliated with a gang at age thirteen. Her parents weren’t looking out for her, gang activity was the norm in her neighborhood, and no one on earth seemed cooler than the gang member she fell in love with. He briefly made her feel cherished, like someone who mattered. Next thing she knew, she was pregnant, and locked up. Jackie never even saw the life she gave birth to. There was no time for attachment, or mourning, or even consciousness. She ended up feeling she’d never even had a baby.
Jackie got out on parole and almost immediately got pregnant again. Once again, she served just as a body. The baby came out and then the baby was gone.
For three years, I worked with students at the Los Angeles opportunity school that pregnant girls as young as twelve can choose to attend. These are kids who’ve been “abandoned” by parents who work all the time to keep a roof over their heads. They’ve grown up in the streets, educated by the influence of the media and then pressured into sexuality at a very early age. They end up getting pregnant in the first or second experience of having a penis inside of them. I was amazed to learn most of these girls did not know what a clitoris was. They’d never heard that females could experience orgasm. Even those who did have information about condoms and other ways of avoiding pregnancy didn’t think it could happen at age twelve or thirteen. They were children who had bodies capable of reproducing life, though their minds and souls didn’t yet know much about what life really is.
We live in a culture where kids are constantly sexualized: by rap music, television commercials, porn sites on the Internet, mainstream fashion and more. Yet the honest discussion is silenced. It seems nothing is as taboo in our society as sex.
When I facilitate groups, there’s a theater game I play in which I invite people to create a machine. One person begins making a mechanical, repetitive motion. Someone joins in onstage adding another action; someone joins and adds a third movement until an entire machine is working away before our eyes. I say “The machine is sad,” and everyone continues moving, but dejectedly now, and with sighs. “The machine is happy,” and the rhythm turns bouncy and fast. I turn the machine into a serial killer and people go along with it, vicious and menacing. But almost every time, especially if I’m working with adults, when I say, “the machine is horny,” everyone stops, embarrassed.