Red Press is Kickstarting The Anatomy of Silence, an anthology of non-fiction and creative narratives about the silence that surrounds…
*Content warning - rape, sexual assault*
‘“La violó! La violó!”
Her voice came through like bullets as I stood holding the phone, which was tethered to the nightstand by a too-short chord. I couldn’t move — couldn’t even bring myself to sit down on the bed. He raped her. No — he just violated her. Nope — that word means rape. My mind spun as I tried to accurately translate her words — so clear, yet so inexact when outside my native tongue.
At first I thought it was important to understand exactly what she was saying , to understand the precise degree to which he had taken advantage of her, but I soon realized it was not important at all. The woman shouting on the phone was communicating something horrific to me. Quibbling in my mind over translations was not helpful.
Here’s what mattered.
He had done something awful.
He was my son’s father.
I had just turned 22 and was living with him in a small one bedroom in Santiago, Chile — his hometown.
Diego was barely six months old. The tension in our home was growing by the day as the monster of his addiction spewed despair, violence, and rage upon anything and everything it met. The pain of our suffering as a family was enough. And now I was living with a rapist?’
