Alejandro Palomas: "When an adult rapes you at the age of eight, you don't want to be a child anymore"

Alejandro Palomas believes that he has been late for many things.

However, he would prefer that he had not been forced to jump ahead on a crucial one: "When an adult rapes you at the age of eight, you don't want to be a child anymore."

This is how he has left it written, moreover, as one of the many phrases that produce chills in

(Destiny), the memory where he recounts the abuses he suffered as a child at La Salle de Premià de Mar school, in Barcelona.

If we had to summarize his ordeal in a long paragraph, we would do it like this: Alejandro grew up without hugs in a family with a very strict father from Barcelona and an adorable albino Chilean mother.

As a child he was classified in a psychological test as gifted without being told.

He found out when he gathered the papers of his mother, when she divorced at age 65, in a transfer.

That he thinks partly explains why he was seen as the class repellant and caused him bullying problems at school.

If we add to this the fact that his effeminate ways provoked the systematic rejection of his father, it is not surprising his permanent tendency to isolation.

His brilliance in his essays caught the interest of brother L. He does not want to give his name.

He doesn't hold a grudge against her either.

At the age of eight, he began to systematically abuse him.

When he ejaculated, the priest used to exclaim:

"See what you make me do?"

And often Alexander asked her forgiveness.

The kid told it at home.

His parents protested and brother L. did not assault him again.

For many years, Alejandro wanted to get rid of everything, but his life has been like a succession of personal and sentimental setbacks.

He made a living as a translator and became a successful writer with recognitions such as the Nadal Prize in 2018 for his novel

He has suffered symptoms of severe stress, was misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue, his bruxism causes him to wear a novel tooth-grinding sleeve.

He hasn't been in a relationship for 20 years.

She has not stopped treating herself in therapy and it becomes clear that he will be the one who decides to end her life whenever she wants.

On January 26, he decided to tell about it on the radio, with Aimar Bretos, in Hora 25, on Cadena SER.

A week later, on February 4, the President of the Government received him in La Moncloa.

It is up to you who want to continue reading… From here we will go into details.

Alejandro Palomas is 1.91 meters tall, but he tends to shrink.

For a long time he has wanted to disappear.

He tried to make his body flexible until it became a reptile, and today he leans on it and tries to slip on the table to hide his presence, somewhat light and whitish, despite the proportionate volume of his body.

His body, yes.

A problem for him.

So much so that since he was a child he often dreamed of making it disappear and being left alone with the soul that inhabits it, somehow converting it into present and visible matter.

But for that he required a great leap of faith while still resorting to self-destructiveness.

And he didn't dare go that far.

Palomas seems at peace with himself on the afternoon of our appointment in Madrid.

But the armistice that he has signed before him, he assures him, is recent.

“In the end, I was lucky.

Good luck,” he says.

Difficult to imagine it with the curriculum that we have just summarized.

Simple if we understand that only an intelligence and sensitivity reserved for a chosen few can turn certain misfortunes around and turn them into fortune.

Wisdom is also needed.

And years, which are falling in his case until the capicúa maturity of his 55. But he emphasizes it: “Despite everything, I consider myself privileged, every day.

I had the means, an intelligence that has played against me many times, but it has helped me.

What happened is something I can tell myself despite not having done so for decades.

I have words

mechanisms and curiosity for life.

I feel very alive and very dead, on the other hand”.

Very alive but very dead?

Let's stop at that sentence.

In

, Palomas assures that he has told almost everything.

He has not wanted to go into matters that could harm others or address taboos —more taboos should be specified— such as suicide.

He believes that we are not yet fully prepared for it and that when he has tried they have not let him.

From a very young age he prayed for God to kill him.

That he confesses in the book and, even so, it is not entirely hopeless.

We didn't avoid the subject in the conversation: “He could be dead, I've thought about it, I've thought about it.

I have had periods.

One of hyperstress.

He lost faculties, he didn't understand what they were saying to me, I got scared.

He did not distinguish the red from the green of the traffic lights, he suffered from photophobia, he asked people if he saw me as normal, if it was me and not someone else… ”.

He began to suspect if he was going crazy.

He didn't want to stay alive and began to obsess about how he was going to kill himself... "After consulting several specialists who couldn't find a solution, I accompanied my sister to the family doctor for a consultation and before we left, out of curiosity, I asked her" .

It was he who gave him the key, the correct diagnosis.

Just by telling him a list of symptoms.

“I had them written down in my notebook.

Even for my madness I was tremendously organized”.

Alejandro Palomas, photographed in Madrid. Jordi Adrià

The doctor gave her two options: “Either my sister would take care of me for a few weeks, until the medication took effect, or she would admit me to a center.

She couldn't stay alone, she found me on that limit that, if crossed, ended up on the other side”.

She was walking on the twisted threshold where the chances of suicide multiply.

“That's where I understood mental illness.

I lived it, that horror of wanting to die all the time”.

That period he suffered as an acute crisis.

But the idea of ​​dying of his own free will does not leave him.

"I'm very tired.

I ask myself many times: do I want to continue?

At some point in the day, as soon as I get distracted, it comes up, and many times the answer is no.

Until my mother lived, I made her a promise.

She couldn't leave me while she was here.

Now that dam has already jumped.

I have an expiration date.

I will decide when, if life does not take me before.

And that relieves me.

I do not speak from depression, but from lucidity.

I want to go lucid, but I also refuse to die without having lived.

And it's now that I'm really starting to live.

I feel something different that arouses a lot of curiosity in me, and that's why you win me over, because of the curiosity”.

Does that mean that he is in permanent anguish?

"Either.

I enjoy my life.

Although not happy.

I feel fulfilled if I am in the forest, for example.

Throw myself on top of the moss, some ferns, go through that freshness.

So I think: I would stay here, that fullness leads me to want to die.

For me death is not a drama.

I am very curious about what comes next.

I believe in something beyond, although it doesn't matter what faith I maintain, at least I tell you what I want.

I would like to close my eyes and meet my mother and Rulfo, my dog, to get up and continue walking through the forest with them.

Nothing more".

This is how I would close the wound, the wounds, although, in part, I have also known how to do it here.

It is hard to believe that Alejandro Palomas does not hold a drop of grudge against anyone.

To begin with, against Brother L. “It's not kindness, it's survival.

I feel no rancor.

Hate, yes, at times, but it has not transmuted into the resentment that this form of permanent hatred entails.

It doesn't come out either.

I hate what he did, true, but I don't know how it came to that, who he was, where he came from… ”.

Nor does he have accounts to settle with his father after that unconnected abyss that was their relationship.

"I understand you.

He was a very sensitive man, very afraid of certain things, he was not educated to love or create a family, I can't hate him for that: because I understand him ".

Despite the fact that that eternal look of contempt still sticks in his eyes, that lack of acceptance that extends in the memory of him in the shadow of him like a swamp.

"The family.

Family is just family, friends are no substitute.

It is what touches you, what is not chosen, and from there you build”.

How can you… “He hated me…”, writes Palomas openly in his book.

A forceful verb that will be repeated a lot later.

His father.

He hated it.

But it is not a phrase that he has placed there, like crazy, the product of a mere vent.

But as a consequence of collated evidence.

That sensation that in him could be subjective was rigorously objectified by his sisters.

“They saw it.

And they told me as is.

Someone who treats his son like that hates him.”

Someone who looks at him with a mixture of disgust, hatred and disappointment, like a terrible mirror that you don't want to hang on the walls of your house.

“I felt like this: detested by my father.

And I remember that look, I still feel it.

Also, we were identical, and every time he saw how he grew to resemble him as he got older he hated me more.

My father was a great jealous,

That made my mother distance herself from me at some times in her life.

When I flew, she was grateful that she was not there, peace reigned;

my presence broke the harmony of the marriage”.

However, it was a tandem that knew how to act to the best of its ability when Alejandro told what was happening to him at home.

As soon as he confessed it to his mother, the two showed up at school to protest.

Y…?

It's over.

The fact.

The rape.

But the consequences began.

The slimy nightmare.

Until today.

Palomas does not want to shy away from harsh words.

“I was a raped, abused child, let it be clear, let's not hide it with euphemisms.

I can't conceive of using language to hide: rape is rape.

No more whitewashing, in my life I fight now to make it clear.

Still, it was hard for him to start telling himself.

There are traumas, sensations, experiences that are ahead of language.

They lack a name because it is difficult to accept the words that define it.

“I don't know when I started to address this.

I never talked about it, not even in my therapies until recently;

I never wanted to delve into it because I thought it was not that important.

Today I'm in a state of shock, I've been peeling the layers.

I feel, therefore, that I have begun to live now, from this now”.

In that aspect, he followed the current that hardly anyone dared to break in Spain, even when the cases jumped in several countries.

Silence… Here, silence.

“Regarding the abuses as a case, an echo came from other places.

I saw

the movie, and I didn't associate it.

You defend yourself in such a way that you think that it happens far away.

That brings you back to a key issue: why drop it now?

“I count to know why, to get to know myself.

Maybe.

But… I don't know, I don't know.”

When his parents reported the case to the school, Brother L. turned away from him.

The groping ceased, the penetrations without notice, the privileges as a reward to satisfy their desires through manipulation and psychological torture.

That of a book psychopath, who escaped from the due punishment, that he has not paid the crime and the crime of forever upsetting someone in his care.

"He went to the opposite side, that of contempt or reprimand through new forms of humiliation."

On the other hand, other harassment did not stop.

They singled him out for his lucid abilities.

This was confusing him.

More confusion.

Once, a classmate exclaimed: “Yuck…”.

Another expression for torture.

“I was convinced that they knew, although he was referring to something else, when pronouncing that, I had no doubt.

Perhaps because of that hammer at the wrong time, that displaced feeling, Palomas feels, he says, an orphan of the present.

Since before the abuse, even.

“I have no memories of Alejandro, a happy child, very precocious.

Being gifted brings another taboo, another hell.

Upon discovering that in the folders after my parents' separation, I understood.

He was a repellent kid, he needed the teachers not to make mistakes, he could write two things at the same time, I still can.

Although it is wrong to say it, I am capable of working on two novels at the same time.

But nothing else, I can't have a healthy relationship, what do you want?

On top of that I feel bad because writing fast is writing badly”.

Alejandro Palomas, photographed in Madrid. Jordi Adrià

And when it comes to relationships, two is not a good sum for Palomas.

"I feel good being odd," he admits.

Again, the body.

“I have always had a very bad relationship with my appearance, I began to accept myself when I was 40 years old, when I no longer had partners or the need to please anyone.

I'm late for everything, but you also think... When is it late?

You see… My problem is that my head always generates one question after another, like that all the time”.

Sometimes, too, forceful conclusions: “I think it is impossible, in general, to live sex fully after such an experience.

I haven't met anyone who has done it."

The curse of that damn phrase has not left him: see what you make me do...?

"Even now, when I hear it from a mother, by chance, reprimanding a child, she paralyzes me."

She represents the perfect excuse,

it meant turning over to an innocent person the responsibility of what for the criminal was, moreover, a sin.

“A nanosecond still persists in me when I think: what have I done wrong.

I have repeated that model when it comes to asking for forgiveness with my partners.

It is vicious abuse.

You don't understand, you need acceptance from him, and the other person next to your obsession manipulates everything and turns against you."

It is also possible that so far he has had bad luck.

Still, he says, “I've repeated patterns that come directly from that experience, I've realized that those behaviors count.

If the sexual relationship is marked by that, you fall into it, until I verified that that was a field with tentacles that I could not understand or control and I said: enough.

Today I have been without a relationship for 20 years.

Of course, she says that it does not matter, that it is fine.

It is not necessary either.

“Why do you have to be happy with someone?

Why?

Who says it?

Who sets those guidelines?

It has cost me a lot because I have felt guilty when deciding, although I am not closed…”.

As it does not close either, once the past has been opened up, to try to lend a helping hand with solutions.

In fact, she would like to meet Pedro Sánchez again: “I have studied the subject in depth and today I have much more to contribute with a broader vision.

I have felt many prejudices regarding politicians, but when talking to him I think we understood each other.

I think I accessed some kind of personal connection.

We were clear.

He invited me to frankness.

In something we are two survivors.

Nine months have passed since then, now I have more information to sit down with him again in that white seat in La Moncloa and specify”.

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