“Should I call her?” I wanted Greg’s advice.
“Leave her alone, woman!” he responded. “Let her be, she’s not a child.”
On Monday, Cori didn’t show up to work, so when I got out, I went to her house. She opens the door and makes me come in, but something’s wrong. I don’t know; she’s acting weird, different. Quiet and evasive, she who was always so cheery. It took some effort to get her to tell me what had happened Friday night; actually at that moment, she did not tell me anything, some time had to pass before she told me that Sleepy Joe had raped her.
“The strange thing is that he didn’t have to,” she told me, “because I’d have let him have sex with me anyway, I was ready. I had made up my mind not to let all that makeup and the tight pants be for nothing. It was me who suggested he come to my place. That was the purpose of the date, no? That’s why I put on heels and drank all that gin. That’s what it was about, no? It was all about getting laid, wasn’t it? And yet, your brother-in-law raped me and abused me, not once but various times, very brutal, you know. I begged him to stop, begged him no more, but it was as if he was possessed. There came a point when I thought he was going to kill me.”
That’s what Corina told me, and I have to tell you, Mr. Rose, I didn’t know how much of it to believe. It’s a fact that she was no sex expert, that she didn’t have much experience in the field, and the little that she had had been precisely the rape back in Chalatenango when she was barely fifteen. That’s why I had my doubts. It did seem as if she had been beaten, that’s true: with bruises here and there, but not wounds or anything. The biggest damage seemed to be psychological, and she seemed so hurt, so depressed that I took her to the doctor, and it was there how I found out how Sleepy Joe had violated her, hurting her in the front and tearing her a bit in the back. He penetrated her in whatever hole he could find and left her with her breasts, mouth, and genitals swollen. “But what can you do, that’s the way passionate sex is,” or so I tried to explain to my friend Corina.
“Look, chica,” I said to her. “Sometimes after a good fuck you feel as if you’ve been crucified, barely able to sit down, walking like a duck, your jaw a bit unhinged from so much sucking dick. And maybe your man is in bad shape too, bruised from top to bottom, holding his balls in his hands, his cock turned to compote, his back all scratched, his tongue scalded, his neck with bite marks. That can happen. But sex doesn’t stop being pleasurable because of that. You get what I’m saying, chica? You understand?”
“This was different,” she said.
“Haven’t I heard you yourself say that some things that are clean for some people are dirty for others? Maybe some things that seem terrible to you might seem normal to someone else.”
“This was something else,” she repeated.
I had read somewhere that a woman who has been raped relives the rape every time she has sex. That’s the picture I had in my head about Cori, and that’s why I was talking to her as if she were a little girl. Me, the know-it-all, the experienced one, and she, innocent, ignorant, and psychologically damaged.
“He used a stick,” Cori told me. “A broken-off broomstick. He shoved a stick in me.”
“A stick? He shoved a stick in you?”
“A broken-off broomstick.”
Mother of God. Then it was possible that she had gone through her own Golgotha. But what kind of monster commits rape with a broken-off broomstick? What pleasure can he get out of that? I didn’t understand. Sleepy Joe, a sexual maniac? An impotent one? It didn’t make sense; I couldn’t see such a masculine guy as someone who was impotent or who had to replace his natural equipment for something artificial. I couldn’t let it go and finally decided to ask him directly, and of course, he denied everything.
“Your friend is a prude,” he told me. “Doesn’t know how to have fun. She’s a tight-ass.”
I didn’t know what to believe. Everything could have been the product of your fears, I repeated to Cori, and she ended up admitting it was possible. Maybe she said it so I’d leave her alone about the issue, because she didn’t like discussing it. Who knows in what cubbyhole of her mind she archived it, because even so she let out a few words about it now and then.
“I think he was praying,” she told me one of those days.
“Praying? Who was praying?”
“Your brother-in-law.”
“You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?”
“During… like in a ceremony.”
“Of course, those Slovaks are worse Holy Rollers than us Latin Americans. For them religion is like a mania, they bless themselves, they kneel, they carry rosaries in their pocket, and the children dream about becoming pope and as adults use their savings for pilgrimages to the Virgin of Medjugorje. They’re fanatics; there’s no other word. Each nationality comes with its defects.”
“No, María Paz, it wasn’t that. What he did with me was an ugly ceremony.”
“An ugly ceremony?”
“What he was doing to me. Ugly, very ugly. I mean the fear more than anything.”
“Oh, I know, you must have been so afraid. Poor girl, it was all my fault, for letting you go with such a brute.”
“That man knows how to make you feel fear. He delights in watching you tremble with fear, María Paz, for hours. He takes you to the limit, little by little, systematically. An expert at it.”
I insisted on comforting and indulging her as if she were a frightened little girl, and after that, Corina did not want to or could not tell me any more, probably disgusted that I was never actually listening, and after that I didn’t see her again because she quit her job and returned to Chalatenango, El Salvador. Just like that, all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, without giving me a chance to beg her to stay, not to leave me, because we were like sisters. Because she was my biggest support, and I’d have wanted to explain to her that an incident could not invalidate such a strong and hardy friendship, because these things pass and are forgotten but the friendship remains. But she didn’t even give me a chance. Corina made the decision out of nowhere and afterward there was no going back. She did offer a word of warning. When she called me to say good-bye from the airport, minutes before she got on her plane.
“Open your eyes, María Paz,” she said. “Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick; I know what I’m talking about.”
Sick, my little brother-in-law? Back then, recently married, I’d have said exactly the opposite; he looked very healthy. True, he was strange, off his rocker, fierce, and a gangster, but what child from a poor neighborhood doesn’t grow up to be somewhat like that? Corina had been my teacher, Mr. Rose, to deny that would be absurd and ungraceful. Just as you showed me how to write, she showed me how to live. At work, in the streets, how to deal with people and behave in America so that you were accepted by the Americans, how to be a friend: she was the teacher and I was the apprentice. But in this particular and delicate case, the episode with Sleepy Joe, I was convinced, or, better yet, I knew that I was the one who was right. She was the novice and I was the veteran.