I will not wait any longer. My father passed away long ago. He will never tell me what I want to hear, he will not make an apology. That is why I have to imagine it, because it is in the imagination where we can dream of crossing horizons, giving depth to the story and designing alternative results.
This letter is an invocation, a call. I have tried to let my father speak to me as he would have done in life, and despite having written the words he needed me to say, I have had to leave some space for him to manifest through me.
There are so many things about him and his past that he never told me that, in large part, I also had to conjure them up.
This letter is an attempt to confer on my father the will and the words that lead him to cross the border and speak the language of apology so that I can finally feel free.
Dear Evie:
How strange it is for me to write to you. Am I writing to you from the grave, from the past, from the future? Do I write as if I were you, or as you would like me to be, or as who I really am from my own limited understanding? Does it matter? Am I writing in a language that I never spoke or understood, that you have created inside our minds to bridge distances and remedy our lack of connection? Perhaps I am writing as I really am, now that you have freed me with your presence. Or I may not be writing anything and you may simply be using me as a means of meeting your own needs and your side of the story.
I don't remember ever writing to you. He rarely wrote letters. Writing letters, going to someone, would have been a sign of weakness; it was the others who wrote to me
I don't remember ever writing to you. He rarely wrote letters. Writing letters, going to someone, would have been a sign of weakness; it was the others who wrote to me. I would never have allowed anyone to think I cared enough to write him a letter. Doing so would have lowered me, would have put me in an inferior position. Even telling you this is strange to me. It is not something that I would ordinarily know or say unless you had entered my mind. But I will not discuss it, because it seems accurate.
You always wrote me letters. It seemed peculiar and strangely moving to me. We lived in the same house and you still wrote to me, with your calligraphy as a little girl, trying to form straight lines, but straying all over the page. It was as if you were trying to make contact with some aspect of me, with a part that you did not find in the most intense moments of our conflict, as if through poetry you were trying to appeal to a secret self that I once let you see. Normally, you wrote letters of apology. How appropriate that now you want a letter of apology from me. You were always apologizing, begging for forgiveness. It had reduced you to a degrading daily "sorry" mantra.
One day I sent you to your room without dinner and forced you to stay there until you understood and recognized your bad behavior. At first you were stubborn, quiet for 24 hours. Your mother was concerned. But then you might be hungry or bored, because you wrote me a letter on a piece of cardboard that my shirts brought from the dry cleaner. You ran it under my bedroom door. It was a dramatic appeal, a list. You always liked the lists a lot. Now I see that you needed to catalog things, make sense of them with a kind of literary arithmetic.
It was a list of everything you had learned and everything you would never do again. I remember that the first thing was to lie; you would not lie again. And I knew, despite chasing you daily and making you believe that you were a vile liar, that you were the most sincere child I had ever met, although I did not know many. She hated children. They made noise and messed everything up and misbehaved. I was too old to have children, I only had them to leave my legacy. But I am rambling. That cardboard letter with your hasty calligraphy in a purple marker and the crooked flowers that you had drawn in the margins took you out of the room, and now I wonder if that's why you kept writing, as if it were a kind of passport to freedom.
Ever since I left the world of the living I have been trapped in a most debilitating place. It is very similar to what people usually say about limbo: nothingness, oblivion. Limbo is not an external place, not exactly. On the contrary, I have been basically nowhere. Floating, without moorings, circling. Here there is nothing, nothing to see, there are no trees, there is no ocean, there are no sounds or smells, there is no light. There are no places as we conceive them, there are no roots, nothing to hold on to. No, there is nothing except the reflection of what dwells within me.
"What is hell? It's yourself."
That's from Eliot. Maybe you don't know he was my favorite poet. His words come to me often in this limbo. I have spent almost 31 years of your time hanging around in this place, but it is strange, because here there is no time, there is only a dying void, an infinite space that engulfs me and that is terrifyingly vast and extremely claustrophobic at the same time.
I left the world of the living charged with resentment and rancor. Even on my deathbed, the virulence of my anger was more powerful than the cancer that consumed my body. My rage was so pernicious that I was able to fight morphine and delirium, and give myself energy to design and execute my latest punishments. And your poor mother, what could I do? I had scared her for so many years, stoking her with my screams, my condescension and my threats, that by then she had become a timid and faithful accomplice. She tried to play along with me, telling me that it might not be the best time to make decisions as extreme as those. He did everything except tell me he had lost his mind.
My last thoughts and breaths were tinged with the desire to do harm, the desire to create suffering that would last over time. You may not know it, but at that final moment I insisted that you be removed from my will. You wouldn't inherit anything, "nothing!" I said very strongly. Even in my most fragile state, that act of revenge gave me life. It was the last chance I had to abolish you, to eradicate you, to punish you.
I made your mother make a commitment to distrust and doubt you forever. I forced her to exterminate you just as I had. I forced her to choose her husband over her daughter
And when your mother asked me to rethink it, I insisted that you had earned it. Why would she leave anything to a daughter who had been so stubborn and disloyal? Your mother's questioning fueled my fury even more and I became more vengeful, even trying to eliminate your character. I forced her to promise me that, whatever you said after my death, I would never believe you, since many years ago it had been fully demonstrated that you were a shameless liar. Liar. I forced your mother to commit, in essence, to distrust and doubt you forever. In that sense, I forced her to exterminate you just as I had. I forced her to choose her husband over her daughter, but that was nothing new, your mother had a lot of practice in making that sacrifice. He had demanded it of her for most of your life. And I knew perfectly well how much he despised himself for consenting to it. I saw how, over the years, I had undermined the respect that was held as a mother, eliminated her security and her voice, and how it had weakened her to the point of not liking or even recognizing herself, and even so, I kept insisting.
The first stage of my time in this realm of death, which felt as if it had lasted for years, I spent immersed in an infinite loop composed of all the betrayals and disappointments experienced, of all the ways in which my companions, children and supposed friends had revealed his stupidity or weakness, reliving all justifiable aversion and executing imagined revenges. Naturally, you were at the top of the list.
I left the world so furious with you, that to punish you I refused even to warn you that I was dying. I didn't call you to say goodbye. I wanted the splinters of my rage to cut you and make you bleed to force you to take me with you, so that you dragged a hemorrhage of guilt and despair and wondered for the rest of your life why you never lived up to, why you never were the daughter I expected you to be.
Determined to leave you without closure or end, I did not plan or even allow a ceremony or funeral to take place. They seemed to me vulgar and pathetic demonstrations of absurd and useless emotions. And besides, if you cried at me, it was very likely that you would end up getting rid of me. Retaining you was the only power I had left by now, the only way to grab your being, the only way to call and hold your attention.
A few days after I died, before entering this shot, I saw you sitting on the floor of my closet in Florida with your face buried in my old yellow cashmere sweater. At first I didn't understand what you were doing, but then, as I watched you, I understood that you were smelling what was left of me, inhaling my cologne and my essence, trying to find a place to deposit your pain. And, to my regret, that moved me. She returned me to a time that had been docile between the two, a time harbored by an almost unbearable affection. Seeing you on the floor in front of my closet, trying to find me, to find that tenderness, caused a wave of sadness and loss in me; and then I disappeared. I left your world behind, I left beauty behind, I left behind the possibility of salvation. And I was thrown into a rampant repetition of offenses and grievances.
They say that just as you live, you will die. And it's true that over time my fury turned deadly. "Anger is a poison that you prepare for your friend, but that you drink yourself", my mother used to warn me
They say that just as you live, you will die. And it's true that over time my fury turned deadly. "Anger is a poison you prepare for your friend, but you drink yourself," my mother used to warn me, as she was always inexplicably furious. And then my anger changed direction and my body rotted, flooding it with insufferable terror. It was as if the anger had withdrawn into itself, devouring and suffocating my anguished psyche in a lane of laments, of unbearable anxiety, of heartbreaking doubts and of a torturing self-recrimination. Couldn't move forward. I couldn't go back. There was no way out. Paralyzed in this place of limbo, I lacked the language and the will, and the understanding to free myself.
I know that I was a cynic who rejected with contempt all the nonsense related to the afterlife. But what did I know about anything? And I wouldn't even call this afterlife. It is not "beyond" anything, but below. In this sense, death is atrocious and infinite. Or perhaps it is only this specific death that has touched me. I imagine there will be others whose good purpose takes them on their wings to more resplendent places.
If I have learned something here –and it has not been easy to learn much, since my brain is clouded by anguish–, what I have discovered is that it is of utmost importance to resolve conflicts while you live, since all the pending issues haunt you at next shot and determine the state of your being. Every grievance that you have caused in life, every harm that you have not assumed guilt, becomes a kind of spiritual mud, a slimy substance that builds your confinement. It is a cage, but it is inside you, and that is even more insufferable and disturbing. You are trapped in yourself, absorbed by the mud of eternal obsession. You would scream, but the mud is so thick that it keeps your voice out. There is no possible relief.
So I thank you, Eve, for invoking me, for giving me this opportunity to be held accountable for my appalling actions. I know there is no guarantee that he will be freed from this distressing limbo, but your offer to receive this apology has already altered this landscape of despair.
I am aware that your purpose is clear. The depth and sincerity and necessity of your mission are evident and powerful. I know you are asking me to apologize, and I must say that this terrain is unknown and unnatural to me. I don't remember ever apologizing for anything. In fact, it was instilled in me that by asking forgiveness one shows weakness, one becomes vulnerable.
Translation by Ana Pedreo Verge.
Excuse me . Eve Ensler. Paidós, 2020. 152 pages. 15.95 euros. It is published on June 16.