MEN IN HIGH PLACES
June, 2007
Liliana: The trial
In the midst of this trial, where the world seems to be collapsing around me, I am trying to make sense of it all. But it is too much. The sordid testimonies, the vicious prosecutors, and worse than all, I feel the public eye, searing into our backs. The vultures roam near the ground and enjoy our fall from grace a little too much. They lustfully lick their lips with anticipation of the endless potential of this scandal. Bastards.
How could this have happened? How could someone so powerless take everything from us? We had handed her the string that she pulled on until it unraveled us completely. It is hard for me to understand.
So I've decided to start at the beginning, from the first memories I have of her.
I guess the first thing that I recall is that she never seemed improper, not even as a child. Her hair was always neatly tucked into a bun or effortlessly falling to her shoulders. For that, I envied her. For the rest, of course, I didn't. Her shabby shoes, the way she looked down at the floor sometimes when people were speaking straight at her...it was hard not to feel a glimmer of pity. She would wrap her books in a transparent wrap at the beginning of the year because she would rent them instead of buying them. In the swarm of ponytails and matching blue skirts, she would get lost, practically disappear from notice, as if blending into the environment came easily to her - as if she had always been there. She hadn't, of course, but this was something I constantly need to remind myself of.
Almost a cultural institution, our school had survived all the upheavals of a young Latin American democracy. Nearly 100 years old - almost as old as the capital city - it had lived through wars, revolutions, dictatorships, democracies, and dictatorships again. It had started in the early 1910s as a finishing school for young girls from rich families - ones that expected their daughters to be interesting companions to rich men. Sending girls to school seemed like a luxury that promised modernity - the kind of thing that Americans or Europeans would do. And so, these modern men sent their daughters to school, and those women sent their daughters to the same school, and so on. Over the years, not even the leftists' revolutionary governments ever messed with the school (don't their members also need interesting wives?).
Most of us in school had played together as babies. Our mothers ate lunch at the Country Club while we dabbled around as toddlers. We took kindergarten photos in front of the large school building. She appeared somehow in second grade, once the groups and allegiances were formed between little girls. She meshed with the few other middle-class girls - being neither light enough nor dark enough to be set in a particular group.
Back then, I didn't know - or care enough- where she came from. Some city in one of the provinces, possibly in the mountains, probably a mining camp - like all the white children coming from that part of the country. I never once saw her parents - not in a PTA meeting nor in a school event. Then again, maybe I did, and they just blended into the background, like her. I remember an older woman, dark-skinned and braided hair like our nannies and maids. She picked her up from school and told the teacher she was her grandmother. We all stared in silence before breaking up in giggles. The next day we chanted that her grandmother was a maid. Yes, we were awful, but in all fairness, we used words no different than the ones our mothers did. I remember being with her in a carpool once, and an old lady with braids and woolen skirts who was asking money in a street light stop almost ran into our car. "Fucking India," the mother yelled at her. We giggled at hearing a mother curse. The class clown, leaned close to her and said: "India, like your grandmother." She just looked out the window and did not say a word nor move an inch.
The truth is, none of us knew much about her until the turn of the century, the year 2000 when all the ugliness went down. She was involved in a sordid little affair that constituted her 15 minutes of notoriety. After that, she disappeared from our sights and seemingly from the face of the earth. Quite honestly, after all that, I doubted we would see more of her. And we wouldn't have if it weren't for Rafael.
Rafa, my little brother, was always a little fuck. I think it's because Mother never breastfed him. She never breastfed me either, but I didn't have these latent Eudipous tendencies he did. I saw Mother for what she was, a nervous frivolous woman filled with anxieties that boredom created. A small stomach roll peeping out in a picture from over her jeans could send her into severe angst and weeks of diet. The maid getting a new radio would make her spiral into counting the loose change in every room in the household, as she was suddenly sure she was stealing. I sensed this, smelled it when I was little, and kept her at a safe distance. I didn't want to drink her milk (not that she offered, she knew she didn't want saggy boobs since her first pregnancy) or anything else from her, for that matter. I sensed that it would be toxic, that something in her was dangerous, frail, and contagious.
But serious little Rafael saw Mother as a beautiful unachievable creature, waving bye to him in a frock and constantly too tired to bother with him in the mornings. He wanted nothing more than to climb in her bed and stroke her pretty yellow hair. She sometimes entertained his longings, but it didn't last. She would get bored and call the maid. He would get angry and kick the maid in the shins. Mama would just shake her face and move on.
Rafael had always wanted to be a politician; we knew it since he was a little and made himself grandiose. He was - and is - an idiot, yet he spoke so confidently that he impressed his teachers, who always gave him glowing course reviews. They looked past how slimy and seething he could be and perhaps pitted him for being scrawny and getting bullied at times by the larger, fatter kids, and overlooked how he turned to bully the kids that were even smaller than him. He got even worse after he went to camp with the Opus Dei, who scouted what they called 'the young leaders of tomorrow.' Only rich little white boys, of course. They were accurate in that sense. They took them to spiritual retreats where god knows what nonsense they fed into them, but Rafa returned each time with a cross hanging around his neck and a bigger attitude of being god's gift to this earth, sent here to save this country Cholos and Indios.
But Rafa could never fool Father, who saw through his weakness. Father brought him back to earth in a second. "Did you enjoy your Christian cabro camp?" Yes, Father was convinced the Opus Dei wanted to turn all little boys into fags, and more than once, he threatened to send Rafa to a military school where the Cholos would beat him bloody.
I think that Father always knew Rafa's weakness would not only be annoying but also dangerous. I think he sensed that he was a weak link in the chain that held us all together and in place. And now, in retrospect, I know he was right.
Used with permission from the author, copyright (c) P.B. Nieto 2021
