Carmen Aguirre - Mexican Hooker #1: Art, Love and Forgiveness After Trauma

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2016 Carmen Aguirre

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Aguirre, Carmen, 1967, author

Mexican hooker #1 : and my other roles since the revolution / Carmen Aguirre.

ISBN 978-0-345-81384-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81386-2

1. Aguirre, Carmen, 1967. 2. Dramatists, Canadian (English)21st centuryBiography. 3. Rape victimsCanadaBiography. I. Title.

PS 8601. G 86 Z 85 2016 C 812.6 C 2015-905922-4

Cover images: (wall background) RoyStudio.eu / Shutterstock.com;
(flowers) Irina Mishina / iStockphoto.com

v3.1

For my parents

I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing. I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.

WARSAN SHIRE

excerpt from the poem

Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)

It all went down in the church basement on Forty-Ninth Avenue, South Vancouver, after the voice teacher instructed me to drop my back ribs. It had been a month since Id started theatre school and learned the importance of that particular set of bones, and maybe a week since Id begun trying to grasp the concept of succumbing to the floor. As I lay there, I imagined carrying my ribs in a bag, upturning the contents.

Let your hip sockets go, she intoned.

Which made sense, this being a church and all. Fingers placed on my solar plexus, she instructed me to exhale.

Hip sockets. Before Labour Day, Id never heard the term and envisioned electrical sockets whenever it came up, numerous times a day.

Drop, let go, drop, let go, drop, let go, I repeated to myself, reaching for breath over and over again, pushing my back down, willing the electrons coursing through my body to somehow plug or unplug into the alleged sockets.

I knew I was doing it all wrong. You werent supposed to push the breath, you were supposed to let it be. The Beatles song popped into my mind.

Focus, you idiot, I thought.

I was twenty-two years old, this was voice class 101, I had three years to go, and I planned on acing theatre school, landing on the honour roll, like I had in high school.

My classmates sat cross-legged in a circle around me, the sacrificial lamb splayed belly up. The instructions continued.

Take a risk.

Take a risk. I had taken many risks in my life thus far, most notably while being in the Chilean resistance a mere eighteen months earlier, but I was to take another kind of risk, and I had no way to measure, weigh, or determine what it looked like. Deaf, dumb, and blind, I groped my way through the forest, grasping for a new definition of a concept so familiar to me in another hemisphere, south of the equator, a world where the constellations were different and spring had just begun.

What is the worst thing that can happen if you just let go? she asked.

I knew the right answer. Nothing. Cause the floor is there to catch you. The floor as open arms. Not as dispenser of bruises, breaker of bones. My hip sockets gripped. Instead of releasing. They clung to my pelvic bone, and I started to shake, a leaf at the mercy of an electrical storm. My body leapt up, hit by a bolt of lightning, and landed back down again. I wondered if my hair had gone wild like Medusas. Keeping my eyes shut, I surrendered to the surge, battered white flag flapping in the air. Completely pathetic. Out of control. Right. Thats what was required. Loss of control. Right.

Let it out on sound, she ordered. Open your mouth. Out on sound, she repeated forcefully.

There was only one sound we were to use in voice class 101, and it was the sound wed uttered when we were expelled from the womb and took our first breath.

Aaaaahhh.

The aaaahhh escaped my mouth, tears poured down the sides of my face, and the shaking grew worse.

I had only been back in Canada for six months, after four harrowing years in Argentina, where my sole reason to live was the Cause. I had made many incursions into Pinochets Chile during that time, on buses, in cars, and on planes, sometimes flown by my then-husband Alejandro and me. Border runs, they were called. We carried goods for the underground and harboured resistance members in our home in Neuqun, Argentina. I had returned to Vancouver to go to acting school and planned to go back to South America as soon as I graduated to pursue a career in the theatre. Canada, where Id grown up in exile after the coup in Chile, had not felt like home since I was a child, and there was too much going on in the South for me to miss out on. Although I spoke perfect English and was bicultural to the core, my heart ached for home, and I was not sure how I would survive the next three years away from that Southern Cone, the towering Andes Mountains a seam, the long country of my birth lying stoically in wait for the explosive Pacific to swallow it whole.

Keep your back on the floor.

But I couldnt. The shaking intensified.

Whats going on? she demanded.

Hes got a gun, I answered through chattering teeth.

How old are you?

Thirteen, I replied, impressed at her ability to decipher that I was having a childhood flashback.

Fuelled by adrenalin, I ran through the coniferous forest, oblivious to the branches whipping my face, the underbrush drawing beads of blood from my shins. Shafts of light penetrated the tops of the towering rainforest trees as I tore my way through the dense greenery, carrying my sandals in my trembling hand, the soles of my bare feet pounding the pine needlecovered ground. A plane flew overhead, a jogger panted on a trail nearby, the sounds of traffic grew louder.

Whats happening now? the teacher asked, my inhalations wind in the sails of my undoing.

Were alive! I yelled back. Were alive.

I could hear my cousin Macarena, twelve years old, covered in bits of moss, twigs in her tangled hair, right behind me. The woods spit us out onto University Boulevard, on Vancouvers west side, cars racing past. Her face was smeared with dirt, snot, and tears. Tears flowed from my eyes as well, and I was shaking too hard to put my sandals back on.

Stop! I yelled at the cars. Stop!

But nobody would.

Macarena and I broke into a run again.

The exorcising electrocution in the church basement went on for the rest of the class. By the time my back ribs were fossilized onto the crust of the earth and I had the flexible hip sockets of a marionette, two hours had passed. My classmates witnessed in silence. Coached up to sitting, I opened my eyes and met the steady gaze of my peers, the circle of them breathing together like a great furry beast. I held eye contact with each and every one of them, as the teacher instructed.