Brushing Feathers: Queen Of The Night
What makes us human?
In my last chapter I ended with this question that troubles me so much, because we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. I repeat: we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Sometimes it is necessary to repeat in order to become aware. Sometimes it is necessary to repeat in order to become aware. As life (which is a journey of Kaos and Beauty, that we do a little blindly) my column will be the same. As everything is connected (or so it seems) it is normal to sometimes make a mess. But it is also beautiful to be able to play with what is repeated and from there create something worth sharing.
Today I want to tell how life offered me one of its repetitions. This time in the form of friendship and on the West Coast of the United States, Oregon. And how from there sprouted a Queen of the Night flower, that although the flower is not seen, its aroma makes the night walk, a sweeter path.
I came to Southern Oregon seven years ago, to stay only for the three months of the trimming season (what the visa lasts), and then return home (Spain) or to travel a bit. I did so until three and a half years ago, when I decided to stay - or what is the same: not to cross the U.S. border again.
I came to escape the precariousness of the Spanish hospitality industry. My first working years were spent working in my father's beach bar during the summer. I started when I was fourteen years old, without a contract. Then I came of age and had a “family” contract, from which you could not add years of contributions. Or maybe it was just adding half of your years. I don't know. Nobody explained it to me. And I never struggled to understand the bureaucracy. To this day, despite having worked since then, I do not have the minimum amount of contributions to collect unemployment, or to have a pension. I am thirty years old.
My father's bar is a family business. My mother, my mother's sisters, my cousins (older and younger), my brothers -one year younger than me, and the other one, eight years younger. The youngest one, since he started, hasn't stopped going and even has his own paddle surf board business. He never cared about any career. He prefers to stay in town, with his friends, with our father - to help him in business - and with our mother, who laughs and loves each other forever. El Luisito, who although he is not blood family, he has accompanied us for so many years and with so much joy, that he is and always will be one more of the family. Rest in peace, my sweetheart. Rest, you deserve it more than anyone else.
The one who has been there forever, however, is my aunt Delfina, my father's older sister. She is a very important woman in my life. But not in the way you might imagine. As a little girl I always heard my mother say that Delfina was a witch. And ever since then, the image of a witch was a fat, almost bald, tanned-skinned woman, sulking most of the time, but who snores when she laughs loudly. She speaks her mind, even if it's racist or sexist. She criticizes a lot and likes to make dirty comments and get silly with some customers. In summer she wears patterned gowns, which reach her knees and which she rolls up her sleeves to her thighs when they get sweaty -that way she gets air and avoids the irritation caused by rubbing- exposing her varicose veins in bluish and lilac colors. Like her hair! She has been dyeing her hair every color possible for years, but her favorite ones are electric blue and red. When she comes home from the hairdresser's she shows off her four colorful hairs and gets flirtatious when she gets a compliment. She has a habit of repeating twice, the last phrase or word people say. For example:
-we went to eat a paella at bar Juan.
-Aaah, Juan's bar, Juan's bar...
She pronounces the R's (erre) as the French do, “egue”.
My grandmother Desamparados and my grandfather François emigrated to France in the spanish postwar period, with my aunt. My father was born there. They learned French at school, but they learned Valencian at home, orally. My grandfather is illiterate and together with my grandmother they worked in the grape harvest. My aunt and my father, thirteen and ten years old, too. Each one in a row, they would race to see who could get to the end first. Today I can't help thinking that maybe I have chosen the countryside because there is something that ties me to it. Something to resolve. Is there such a thing as destiny? Is destiny the past?
A few years ago I went to France to work the grape harvest. At the end of the season I went to visit my grandfather in Pomerols. I recorded the conversations with a tape recorder given to me that summer. His girlfriend Michelle had just died of cancer (la maladie). And I found it tender the way someone who can't read nor write expresses his emotions. There are no codes of conduct. It is genuine, simple, real. My grandfather is a Gemini and therefore he talks a lot. I was surprised by all the information he shared with me. He told me that my grandmother, one day stopped making love to him, and that's why he started going to whores. I recently learned that François was an abuser of his wife and children.
My grandmother separated from him and went back to the village of Castellón, alone with her two teenage children, who - at thirteen and sixteen years old - had a hard time adapting to the new school. The Don Miguel, Don Antonio, Don Manuel, humiliated and whipped with the ruler if you made a mistake in a word or in an “egue”. Those were fascist and puritan times, where the only language that was allowed to be spoken was the one that my father and aunt had never spoken: Spanish. My father was nicknamed “Paco el Francés”. My aunt, I don't know. But it must not have been easy being poor teenagers in the diaspora, going to school in the mornings and cleaning apartments in the afternoons; the same apartments where my grandfather now lives, having returned to the village after Michelle died. When Michelle died, he told me “life is a wheel that never stops rolling”. It seems that being a man allows you infinite comfort, no matter how much pain you have caused. You can't even read these lines.
At El Xiringuito (that's the name of my father's bar) I worked for several seasons. I hated it. I didn't like being a waitress and putting my body on display for Belgian, German or any other tourists. I preferred to work at the bar, pouring pitchers of beer, making coffees or preparing cocktails in the evening. But I'm a woman and the customers like it better if I'm outside. Especially men. I also couldn't stand my father telling me that I wasn't nice enough. That I needed to smile more. And when the other co-workers heard that, they didn't hesitate to remind me of it almost daily. It disgusted me how some clients who knew me since I was a child, grabbed me by the waist and told me “how grown up you are”; nor how at nap time, with my bikini on, some men would walk near my hammock to examine me closely. I thought, if I'm here selling my body to earn a few extra tips (which unlike my brothers, I never saw), at least let me be an edge. But that wasn't all. My aunt Delfina (who hates herself) made my life miserable. She was so kind to my baron brothers. And yet, she would leave me alone with twenty-five tables, on days when, suddenly, a wave of unexpected customers would arrive; she would yell at me in front of everyone, that I had forgotten to clean a table (which she could perfectly well have cleaned herself, seeing the situation); one day she told me that I was working there, only because I was the boss's daughter (she was projecting); she wouldn't listen to me when I asked her for the table bills, so that the customers would get annoyed with me; every time she made a mistake (and there were many), it was always my fault. Until one day I exploded and made her cry. And my father repeated that phrase that hurt me so much: “you are just like your aunt Delfina”. And I started crying, just like my aunt Delfina. The one who started to use the phrase, however, was my mother, who sometimes used it as a crutch because she knew it unnerved me. I don't blame her. I was a complicated teenager. I have an anger inside that sometimes I wonder where it comes from. Why am I like my aunt Delfina?
The image I had of her was that of the wicked witch, who made life impossible for my grandmother (my little angel, may she rest in peace). But my grandmother and her mother Filomena also ended in a bad way. And my aunt and her two daughters are always arguing and criticizing each other behind each other's backs. My aunt has suicidal impulses. My aunt “is a witch and she is crazy”.
It wasn't until I went to Barcelona - where I started reading anarchist and feminist books - that I could begin to see these women from a more compassionate perspective. What they all had in common was that they had married whoremongers, abusers, men who didn't love them. And I was on the same path. Recently I was able to name for the first time and with the exact word, that an ex of mine raped me at the lighthouse in town. Now I was dating a narcissistic anarchist and alcoholic, with a split personality he called “the wolf”. “Life is a wheel that never stops rolling.”
But I have been luckier than them. My father did well in business and married my mother, who came from a gentrified family, and that I adore. I don't know what poverty is. I have never lacked for anything. I am a middle class woman.
When I came to Oregon to stay - after first experiencing the consequences of dating a narcissist - when I was doing well (I was doing great) I fell madly in love again with another narcissist. He too (as well as my other ex) had an alcoholic father. Was François' father an alcoholic?
We were platonically in love for months, until I left my then partner (the second good man I've dated) and I began a turbulent relationship with the one I thought was going to be the love of my life. It didn't even last four months. He humiliated me so much that it awakened in me the strongest feeling of revenge I have ever felt. I couldn't contain myself and one night, with a friend, we went to Walmart, bought lilac-colored sprays (like my aunt's varicose veins) and drove an hour to my recent ex's house. We drove around the street (mistake, as there were cameras everywhere) and I told her to park in the driveway and wait for me. She said she wanted to be with me, so we got out of the car together, her without a hood. Cover up, I told her. There was the car and her new van. It must have been 11pm. Not too late. I graffitied his car. I wrote: parasite and coward. And on the windshield I wrote the definition of “parasite”, in case it was not clear enough. Then, with my knife, I slashed all four tires. We went back to the car, when I remembered that his new van was there too. I told my friend to wait for me. There was no point in wrecking his old car that he no longer was going to use. So I did the same with the van, this time, in more of a hurry. We left and celebrated with a tequila. But the revenge of a narcissist is always the last one. The next day, he made the whole thing a public issue. And I became the crazy one, the bad one, the witch. I was judged by an entire community and for the first time, I became aware of how it feels. Admit it! Guilty! Apologize! Surrender! I thought, you are just like the women in your family.
I lost two friends (males): one recommended me to write a public letter asking for forgiveness (which luckily I did not do); and the other (Francesco) touched me in my sleep, on my birthday, after having given me a moralistic sermon. I said nothing, waiting for his apology. It was the second time he did it to me. Nothing. A week of silence until I told my best friend and another friend.I didn't want people to have another topic of mine to talk about. But Francesco gave himself away and told my friend Luna. Evidently with a different perspective. I was a liar and we were just spooning.
Luna is a person that since I met her I admired the mischievousness, the mental speed, the art of speaking and moving, the diva grace, the street wisdom and the intuition of a wild woman that characterizes her. As Podas would say, she is an Almodovar girl. Don't imagine her as Penépole Cruz. She would be more like a Rossy de Palma, raised in the streets of Asturias and Mallorca, with the junkies, the whores, the gypsies, the top manta and the drugs. We met talking about therapy. For her, therapy is useless. For her the best therapy is her friends. She reminded me of my aunt Delfina, in the way she talks about sex, in the way she laughs loudly, in the way she dresses, in the way she gets angry, in her social class. The big difference is that Luna is always the joy of the room, the artist, the muse. Not only that, but despite being one of the people who suffers the most in silence (like my aunt), she is able to take care of the people around her. She became a teacher from the day I met her. She is like the Queen of the Night. I thought I would never be enough for her, as I am middle class and boring (or so I think), but we clicked right away.
After all that fuss, she and I went to a party in California. It was the first time I was exposed to the public and I was scared. I had some zines about narcissism with me, which I made as therapy. I was going to hand them out. I was scared. But in the end it didn't go so bad. And then we were invited to stay at the house of some acquaintances. There, all drugged, I started a conversation with Jade, in front of Luna, Laura, Alex and Max, in which I had a more theoretical/intellectual point of view and Jade, a spiritual one. Not too long ago, I had a religious experience that overturned all my beliefs. I still didn't quite understand how to adapt that realization to my feminist, anarchist and decolonial ideologies. But we were able to weave all the dots together. I was loving it. It was one of those conversations that flow because there is a willingness to listen and to understand. But everything turned upside down when we got to the subject of feminism. For her there was no difference between men and women. For her we are all equal, we are all human. I was the French existentialist and she was the healer (no irony). Max said something very wise: “it seems that the subject of feminism is touching a deep wound in you all”. At the time I thought “what a way to discredit people”. But he was right. I didn't understand it then but that wound is the one that almost separated me and Luna, forever. My arguments had irritated her. Don't read so much, she told me. And then she started telling the story that once, her partner almost killed her. That she hid in the closet and saw the devil. I felt humiliated. I didn't understand why she had gotten so upset. It was as if she was telling me that I was a crybaby and that I had no fucking idea what fear was. That my pain was not valid. That I should shut my mouth.
Jade, I remember, started talking about how that time, looking at herself in the mirror, she was able to forgive herself. Luna understood her perfectly and I kept quiet. I still hadn't been able to forgive myself. What was I going to forgive me for? Was it my fault that I had been treated worse than an animal?
Our drive back to Oregon, at night and in the middle of a snowstorm in Shasta, was tense and uncomfortable. Our friendship cooled from then on.
It took me a short time to realize that Luna was avoiding me, so I gave her her time. One night, at the bar, both of us alcoholized, we let out a couple of snide remarks that got us heated. We started arguing until I told her that maybe it wasn't the time or the place. But like two good drunks, we ended up yelling at each other in the middle of the bar. I got up and walked away. She went behind me, with the gaze of the people behind us, and said to me, ”Now I understand Francesco”.
To which I replied, “What about Francesco?”
She revealed, “I wonder if you are going to be the one who mistreats men”.
Exhausted, I opened the car door, and in a dry manner, I reproached her, “You are not getting it”.
Luna, hesitating whether or not to touch my door, and with the voice of ultimatum, warned me, “You're this close to losing me”.
I started the car without saying anything else and left with the anguish of losing a friend. In addition to the anger and frustration I felt at having heard her words, I also felt sorrow. Sorrow that I had not been able to connect with her. Sorrow that I had pushed her away from me because I thought like an existentialist feminist. Sorrow that I was unable to express my feelings without mentioning a fucking theoretical book. Sorrow that the social class we were born with, had beaten us. Sorrow for not being able to heal that branch of my family tree, nor to do poetic justice to the women in my family. I failed them. I failed myself.
A Queen of the Night flower wilted on the drive back home.
When I arrived I brushed my teeth, while sobbing like a little girl. Intruder in my own home and with the judgmental gaze of my cats. I collapsed on the bed and lit a cigarette. I took my phone out of my purse and saw that Luna was sending me non-stop audios. I listened to the first one. She was telling me again that I was an abuser of men. I decided to put the phone away. Could I be a man abuser?
After a while, I was filled with courage and started listening to the audios. She immediately realized and apologized. She told me, in tears, that it was not true that she thought I was an abuser and that she loved me very much. When we got back from California, all that feminist theory I talked about brought back frightening memories. She found it kind of insulting that I talked about all that without taking into account what she had suffered, that I was selfish not to let her talk or not to take seriously what she said. And that is why she came to think that my lack of heart confirmed that I was the abuser.
She was telling me, you have been loved more. Your father loved you more. You don't know how lucky you are.
I apologized and explained to her that she shouldn't think I didn't take what she said seriously, but that at that moment I felt humiliated and that my pain didn't matter. But that I understood now. I felt sorry for having been selfish and unable to see something so obvious. I told her that she was teaching me things that I would never forget. That I admire her so much. I admire her grace, the most. That she is an example. A teacher. A master of life.
And so, like two drunken girlfriends, we were saying beautiful things to each other, that both she and I, so urgently needed to hear, for having, those beings, hated us so much.
The twig of the tree blossomed and its Queen of the Night flower scent has been with me ever since.
To this day, my friends are my therapists and Luna signed up for therapy.
I believe that what makes us human is true friendship, which transcends class, race and gender. In that sense, Jade was right. But true friendship implies, in this case, class and gender consciousness. It is no coincidence that Luna was brutally hurt and I was “only” raped in the town's lighthouse, on a moonless night.
What Luna doesn't know is that she also helped me understand my father when he once told me:
“Nina, the only thing wrong with you is that you don't value what you have.”
And now I understand you, dad.
I'm sorry.
To my aunt Delfina,
To my iaia,
To my father,
To Luisito,
To you, Luna.
Os quiero.
Vos Vull.
Je vous aime.
