What I never understood, and to this day I don't understand, is why it took her so much trouble to walk away from that man for good.
Until a few years ago, she once said she still loved him.
It hurt me a lot to hear her say those words.
I start thinking about it, and it still hurts.
How far is a person capable of love?
I remember another night that I must have been very young because, at that time, the house was only one room.
My mother ironed my father's clothes, if I remember correctly, it was his uniform.
My father was going to go out, somewhere, and the shirt he wanted to wear, if it was washed, but it wasn't ironed.
He insisted on wearing that one.
My mother told her to wear another one, as she had several uniforms left to iron.
Chaos ensued.
I remember my father jumping on her and beating her.
I don't know at what point, his hands passed to his neck.
My mother, desperate, yelled at us to talk to the neighbor, which was constant.
We ran outside to look for the neighbor who came to our aid accompanied by two of her children.
One of them a young man, the other a child.
When we got home, my father was gone.
My mother was in bed.
Sore.
The neighbor helped her.
We learned that my mother had burned him with the iron.
That's why he let her go.
My grandmother, because she lived in a similar way, far from helping her, seemed to find comfort in seeing the way we lived, under the false illusion of feeling that we had to be normal.
That we were a normal family.
It was her own subconscious screaming to comfort herself.
I guess this is what I think now.
At the time, I didn't want her.
I still don't want her.
Everything, everything that happened in his house affected us directly.
My aunt, the oldest, where my father used to live when he wasn't home.
He also had 3 children, like us, two women and a boy.
They were religious by inheritance, but they were bad people at that time.
They stole, they broke things, anything they did.
We were always blamed, even though we almost never went to my grandmother's house, on the same grounds.
Before we asked anything, my father would come home and shout at us about the mistake we had committed.
To him, whatever we said, it didn't matter. He took off his belt.
I hated that belt.
If we were lucky, I would wear the belt strap.
If we weren't lucky.
He beat us with the buckle of his belt.
That's when it hurt the most.
Especially when the peg he has was buried in the skin.
When I pulled it out, it broke the skin.
Until he saw us bleed, that's when he stopped.
Their verbal insults or times we didn't hear them because of how stunned we were.
My brother was so young that, I pray he has no memories of this.