Blonde
The blonde boy hates being called blonde: it seems to him that it is a way – yet another – of putting him down. If the other kids want to talk about his hair, they should say it’s blonde or not say anything. And it will always be better if they don’t say anything, but the problem is that it’s not just the hair: with him everything is like that, like an attack. Everyone always attacks him, as if he were always easy. And so are the slow, deliberate, deliberately slow movements with which his father removes the leather belt from the waist of his brown pants, winds the buckle around his right hand, tests the worn leather against his left three or four times and He tells him to drop his pants – he, the blonde boy, he tells him to drop his shorts – and kneel on the floor with his butt up, his back straight and his head and arms resting on the chair – both arms, he shouts, leaning on the chair – because what he just did deserves a serious beating.
The blonde boy asks him stammeringly, brokenly, what he just did – I don’t know, dad, I didn’t do anything, I swear – but his father tells him not to be stupid, he knows exactly what he did. Then the blonde boy tells him to forgive him, that he doesn’t know but he swears that he won’t do it again and his father tells him not to be a mongolic, because if he doesn’t know what it is, how is he going to swear that he won’t do it? more and that you also don’t have to swear in vain and that if the priests didn’t teach him it, he is going to teach it to him, which is five more so that he learns not to swear foolishly.
There are twenty-five. There were going to be twenty but the five added made them twenty-five. The blonde boy already knows what the whole route is like: the first four or five are the ones that hurt the least, perhaps because the flesh of his ass has not yet been lacerated or because his father’s hand is not yet warm or because he still gives him a little bit of heat. something to hit your child like that or because you like to make him believe that they are going to be easy, so that he gets his hopes up. And then three or four come who begin to be brutal: he already feels them seriously, his father snorts every time he hits him, the whistle of the belt in the air becomes sharper, his blow on his ass more snapping and he, the The blonde boy says no, dad, no dad, but without strength, without hope, knowing that he has no chance of stopping the blows, so he cries, screams, and says enough, dad, it hurts, it hurts a lot, dad, please, stop.
And then, the worst thing is to look at his mother’s face – because his father’s will or his mother’s custom or perhaps his desire demand that every time she spanks him both his mother and his little sister have to look at him. His mother’s face, then: the way she bites her lower lip that someone, at first glance, could mistake for pity or pain but which, in reality, the blonde boy thinks, is pure admiration for the strength of the father, of her husband unleashed on her ass that is already beginning to draw blood.
And the way she clenches her fists as if she was also using force to accompany or increase the force of those blows, and sometimes the noisy breathing that is in rhythm with that of her father, her husband, as if her lungs were beating together. And then ten horrible ones come: her father is already hitting him without stopping, his ass is covered with cuts and bruises that make each blow, in addition, the recurrence of a previous blow. And her mother’s face would be terrifying if it weren’t for the fact that she already learned that at that moment it is much better to close her eyes.
There were times when he wanted to keep them open so he could anticipate the arrival of each lash and harden his ass a little or do something or at least not be taken by surprise, but over time he learned to detect them by the noises, the whistles of the leather, the breaths, so he prefers to close them – with a force that hurts almost as much as his ass – so as not to see his mother’s excited face. (In the background, always a little further away, his little sister cries or whimpers; he hears her, prefers not to look at her because he knows that if he looks at her she will cry more and her father has sometimes punished her for crying. He does not punish her with spankings, but he has his methods: sometimes, for example, he kidnaps his favorite doll for so many days, a Barbie dressed as a nurse, or he forbids his wife – his mother – to go and kiss him when he turns off the light. , things like that.)
At first the blonde boy tried not to cry or scream, but he almost never succeeded. Once, yes, and his father continued hitting him without stopping until he almost fainted – his father almost fainted from the effort and his mother got worried and brought him a glass of gin from the kitchen. Then he understood that as long as he didn’t scream or cry, his father was going to continue hitting him, and he decided to always do it: submit. He wondered if that didn’t make him a coward or, worse, as his father said, a squealing rat; He thought no, it made him more cunning, but he wasn’t sure. Although it wasn’t that complicated either: he screamed and cried because it was convenient for him and because he couldn’t help it.
And sometimes he was very ashamed to think that when his father hit him his ass might be a little dirty, that his father had to hit him on that dirty ass. Only later, much later, did he tell himself that it was what he deserved: for his father to get dirty with his shit. Because he often thinks that his father expects him to do wrong things – which, many times, he really does not recognize – in order to give her the pleasure of hitting him; Others think that it hurts his father to hit him but that he is right to do it, that he sacrifices himself because if not he will never correct himself and be a good man, as Father Alfonso says, a useful person.
And sometimes he doesn’t think anything, he can’t think anything because he can only think about how hard those spanks on his ass hurt and that I hope he at least shoves them all in his ass because if not tomorrow everyone else will be in gym class. Boys are going to see the marks, they are going to see that they whipped him again and they are going to make fun of him, again, as always. And the stupid priests are not going to defend it: they even seem to think it’s good and they’re having fun.
In the end the spankings end: the last ones are rare, softer but better placed, as if his father was carefully looking for the most wounded points to damage them more. The blonde boy doesn’t count them: there were times when he counted them, until he noticed that his father sometimes gave him a few more or, very rarely, one less. And the day he protested because he already had two too many, his father gave him another ten, so he could learn. That’s what he told him: so that you learn, idiot, to act cool. But in the end they finish and, when they finish, his father, his mother and his sister leave the room and leave him locked up, usually without dinner and, above all, without anyone to talk to until his mother goes to put his little sister to bed. . In those long, dark hours, the blonde boy imagines revenge that he will never be able to carry out. Although sometimes you get excited and think that who knows.
***
This shit country
I love it, as I should have loved my wife or my old man, and because I couldn’t love them like I loved my country, I love it more, in the end what is beyond, what else do we have to love? oh really. Argentina, damn it, our ispa, the best in the world with the best people in the world, with its landscapes and its climates and its fields and its skies that are nowhere else, let’s see who can match them.
And furthermore, if I didn’t want it, it would be rubbish, if from a young age I was taught to love it, at school, at every party, in the parades, on TV, in the songs and the heroes and all those who made this country that had to be big. It had to be big, of course it had to be big, it had everything to be very big, it was even very big a hundred years ago, when it was the first power in the world, we broke everyone’s asses and we still have all that.
The trouble is that we squander it, there are times when it seems that we are going to hell, that we don’t know how to take care of what we have and we go to the fucking mother who gave birth to us, the fucking mother. But that happens because unfortunately there are a number of scoundrels who are not true Argentines, who instead of working for the country want to take advantage and toil, who do not realize that good people are going to end up hanging them from an ombu, sons of a thousand whores, or cut their throats off like a pig. All of them, politicians, singers, crooked businessmen, television journalists, Falopa scientists, those who say they are intellectuals, even some soccer players, all shitty people who do not deserve to be called Argentines because they tarnish the name of the country, Algerians should call them, or sons of a thousand whores, thieves who want to destroy our country to keep the remains, to take every last splinter of the shipwreck that suits them so much.
So for that they convinced the poor that they have the right to be given little things, a roof, their food, not for anything, not because they do anything, just because they are poor, and thus there is no country that can endure, they sink it with that invention that you have to give them what they need. In the end they are like the dog in the manger, who neither eats nor lets us eat, and what exasperates me is that so many times it seems that they beat us, they deceive us, they cajole us with their smiles and their stupid lies, and some of the good ones are They despair and believe that there will be no way out but I know that there is, that we good Argentines are going to hang them all one day. It will be nice to see all that blood of anti-patriotic scourges flow, clean our country once and for all and live as we deserve and never again, I swear to you, my Argentina, never again, complain about living in your waist. How nice it’s going to be, my country, when we finally bust all that scoundrel, when you’re pretty and clean and loving like a fourteen-year-old girl.
***
It seems like you didn’t even fuck it
It seems, they told me. Why the hell would they think that she would fuck me or that I wouldn’t fuck that girl that they didn’t even know was my sister? What did they see that she made them seem that way, that she didn’t put her hand in his ass, her tongue in his mouth, that she didn’t put on the shows they put on every time a woman gave them a high five? Is that what they wanted to tell me, that she wasn’t pushy like them, a real macho like them? The idiots jumped to their conclusions without having the slightest idea: without knowing, of course, if we were modest people and did not like to show ourselves in certain situations and, above all, without knowing the most important thing: that that woman was my sister.
In that, unintentionally, they were right: I hadn’t fucked her, she hadn’t fucked me. I had just turned thirty, she must have been twenty-four or twenty-five, we were big people but I don’t think we were big brothers yet. I mean: as brother and sister we were still under the power of our parents, respecting family structures, determined not to break with what was expected of us. And, for reasons that have lost their meaning, what families expect from siblings is that they do not get caught, what societies expect from families is that they prevent it from happening to them.
I still didn’t know why then; I knew it was like that, I didn’t know the reasons. It was a shock a few years later, when I read almost in its entirety a book that I don’t remember the name, about the life of I don’t know what primitive people, which explained that the prohibition of “incest”, of sex between brothers, was because they had discovered that Often the children of two brothers turned out to be stupid: they were a waste, they had to be thrown away. Which might have been reasonable five thousand years ago, when catching and reproduction came very close together, but it is not reasonable now, when we have separated them in 98 percent of the cases.
It was more dangerous, in the time of AIDS, to get infected, and yet the majority continued to take, cover and care. So this is nonsense that comes from other times, from very other customs, which no longer has anything rational; When I discovered it, a light bulb went off in my head and I thought about her and realized that all of that didn’t make sense, that it wasn’t worth maintaining, that we could. I have never been more satisfied with having read a book.
