Do Tampons Take Your Virginity?: A Catholic Girl's Memoir (6 page)

We went to the shrine twice every day. Mother loved it. She was the most devout person in the family and she really felt at home.

We bought candles and rosaries, some of which were beautiful. Mother bought a silver rosary at the shrine. It was beautiful: handmade with silver beads shaped like rosebuds. Mother fingered the rosary breathlessly—it was the loveliest rosary she had ever seen. My father scowled, because he didn’t want to pay for it, but even he was too ashamed to refuse the purchase in such a holy place. Mother’s eyes glistened. Then she kissed the rosary and tucked it lovingly into a light blue box with a gold seal. I still have it.

We stayed in Fátima for a week.

While we were there, I noticed an old beggar woman sitting outside the hotel. She was at least eighty. Her spine was twisted, and she had a hump the size of a football on her back. Mother begged Father to give the old woman some money.

There are a lot of beggars in Fátima, but this little old lady was our favorite. She never spoke, but she smiled toothlessly at me when we gave her money. It wasn’t much—maybe a few dollars each morning.

On our last day, my mother asked my father for $20 to give to the beggar woman. This was an enormous sum, not because we were broke, but because my father was monstrously cheap and the thought of giving $20 to a stranger and getting nothing in return was unfathomable. My mother never had any of her own money—it was just another way that my father controlled her. Mother asked again and again for money to give the old woman.

Father finally relented and gave Mother the money. The last time we went to visit the shrine, Mother personally handed this princely sum to the old woman. Then Mother tried to embrace her. As my mother rose up from the embrace, she frowned. We visited the shrine for the last time and returned to the hotel.

Once we got to our room, I could tell my mother was upset.

“Why are you mad, Mother?” I asked.

“The old lady didn’t have a real hump on her back. When I touched her, I felt the hump and it was made of paper. It was fake,” she said.

“Does it matter? She was so old,” I said.

“Yes, it matters. Twenty dollars is a lot of money.”

And there it was. Mother never mentioned it again, but it was obvious that she felt betrayed by this old beggar woman. It was because my mother initially felt kinship with this wretched creature, but discovering the “paper” hump shattered the illusion.

After that, we left the mainland for the Azores islands. We never returned to mainland Portugal. It was the first and last time my mother saw Fátima.

1987,
AGE
14

After leaving the mainland, we took a tiny propeller plane to Horta, Faial. The weather was terrible and the plane was bobbing up and down. All the people on the plane were vomiting into little white barf bags. Father promised God that he would kiss the ground if we landed safely.

We landed in a shitty little airport and walked off the tarmac. Father didn’t kiss the ground. He was too embarrassed.

“I thought you said you were going to kiss the ground.”

“Maybe later,” he said.

I reflected on the possibility that God might strike him dead for breaking a promise like that.

No such luck, though.

Father had reservations at Hotel Pousada, a beautiful fivestar hotel overlooking the ocean. But he was such an asshole to the hotel desk clerk that they refused to admit him to the hotel. He screamed for the manager, who came over and told him, “We don’t have any rooms.”

Father started the argument over money. We were blackballed from that hotel forever. We ended up staying in a shitty hostel for the remainder of the trip.

Four years later, Father returned to Faial and tried to get a room at the Hotel Pousada. The desk clerk remembered him and told him, “We don’t have any rooms.”

Classic.

Anyway, while we were staying in our shitty hostel, Mother and I had opportunities to talk. Father left with my brother and explored the countryside and I stayed behind with Mother.

We talked for a long time. I told her that I was afraid all the time. I complained about the beatings. She was sympathetic, but I knew she was powerless. We continued to talk, but the conversation deteriorated from there. I loved my mother, but I couldn’t forgive her weaknesses.

After a while, Mother hung her head and whispered, “I really want to die, Marie. I just want to die.”

I put my face in my hands and cried.

Catholics have a love-hate relationship with sex. In most European and Latin American countries, it goes like this: the women are discouraged from having sex until marriage. The men, however, are encouraged to get laid as much as possible. This creates a real conundrum because, if all the women are waiting for marriage, how are the men going to get laid?

The answer is simple! You find a mentally disabled girl, get her drunk, and then gang rape her. Repeat. Problem solved.

My grandmother was the youngest of thirteen children. In those days, thirteen children was considered an average-sized family. It was common for women to die in childbirth and at least one of my grandmother’s siblings died before the age of two. Amalia was actually the second baby in her family named “Amalia.” The first Amalia died as a toddler, overcome by intestinal parasites. Serious illness was commonplace and medicine was scarce and expensive.

My Grandmother Amalia had an older sister, Lumelia, who contracted scarlet fever as a child. The fever was so bad that Lumelia suffered permanent brain damage as a result. Lumelia was a pretty girl, but she was simple-minded.

Unfortunately, Lumelia became a sexual target for all of the men in the village. They would shower her with compliments and then ply her with alcohol. By the time she was in her late teens, she had been sexually assaulted by many men. Sometimes it was consensual, if you can call it consensual sex when the victim doesn’t understand what’s happening.

Later, the assaults progressed into all-out gang rape. A man would try to find Lumelia where she was washing clothes, or simply walking though the village. He would isolate her and force her to drink wine until she passed out. Then he would go get his friends and they would take turns sexually assaulting her in private.

Europe is dotted with little wine cellars and cottages. The Portuguese call these
adegas
. They are private, one-room structures about the size of a large garden shed. Families use them to store their wine barrels. Most of them are secluded and, therefore, make the perfect setting for a sexual assault.

The rumors started to circulate and word of the rapes trickled down to my great-grandparents. The family was crushed by this horrible gossip; it was a smear upon the entire family. Everyone knew what was going on and the rumors and the attacks escalated. My great-grandfather caught a few of the men and there were some physical altercations.

Lumelia was beaten for her behavior, but she was slow and didn’t really comprehend the gravity of the situation. Lumelia was an irresistible target and men continued to victimize her. She began having illegitimate children. In the end, she gave birth to eight children, all with different fathers. Each subsequent birth drove her into a deeper depression.

Lumelia understood enough to know that she had become a pariah. She had destroyed the reputation of her entire family.

At the age of thirty-six, Lumelia walked barefoot into a farmhouse and hung herself. Lumelia’s twelve-year-old daughter Sofia found her swinging gently from the rafters. Her youngest child was only two years old when Lumelia committed suicide.

Sofia, devastated by the discovery, was forced to become a mother to her much younger brothers and sisters. My cousin, Sofa, is now sixty-one years old—the age my mother would have been had she lived. Her face shows years of heartbreak and backbreaking labor.

I telephone her often and I send her some money sometimes to help pay for some little necessities. She cleans houses for a living and makes 198 Euros per month, which is roughly 400 American dollars.

I called Sofia a few months ago to ask about the suicide. “Cousin Sofia, do you remember your mother’s suicide?” I asked.

“Yes...I do. Of course. How could I forget? I was twelve. I discovered her...hanging there. I am the one who found her. It was hard for me, after she did
that thing
. There were three [siblings] below me, so I had to learn how to be a grownup woman very fast.”

“You took over the household?”

“Yes, I washed clothes; I cooked and cleaned and took care of the little ones. I had many, many bad years. In those days, there were no washing machines. I had to wash the laundry in a stone tub.”

Sofia talked to me about her childhood for a long time. Her voice was sad, filled with longing. Something had been stolen from her. She never said the word “suicide.” She just kept referring to
that thing
.

It makes me wonder about all the women in my family and women in general—women demoralized by their own lives and choices. It was like our family was a party to a slow death. No one talked about it because each discussion pointed a spotlight on one more shameful memory.

In the end, the family was refused funeral rites and Lumelia was buried quietly outside the church cemetery on without the benefit of clergy.

CHAPTER 3

1986,
AGE
13

When I was thirteen, Mother took me aside to discuss menstruation. It was a milestone for her—this little talk. She confided in me one day when my father and brother had left the house. Mother loved me and believed that her motherly duties included this requisite chat about menstruation.

“Marie,” she whispered, “you must know about
‘menstruations’
so you won’t be scared when it finally happens to you. I was thirteen when I began my menstruation and I was very afraid.”

I could tell it was an extremely difficult subject for her to discuss.

When she was growing up, Mother’s entire family of seven lived in a tiny two-bedroom cottage in the Azores with no running water and an outhouse. There was little privacy.

Mother was the eldest child. My grandmother, Amalia, never discussed sexual matters with Mother, mainly because Grandmother was even more uncomfortable with menstruation than my mother was.

Soon after her thirteenth birthday, Mother started bleeding vaginally. It happened in the middle of the day. In her terror, Mother refused to tell Grandmother about it, thinking that she would get beaten within an inch of her life.

Mother was afraid that people would think that a man had “done something” down there. Paralyzed by fear, she stuffed a clean rag in her underwear and went home. She didn’t say anything during dinner, even though her menstrual cramps were excruciatingly painful. She simply went to bed, still wearing the rag in between her legs.

My mother shared a bed with her younger sister, my aunt Angélica.

In the morning, they both woke up caked with blood. There was blood everywhere—it looked as if someone had been bludgeoned to death in the bed. Mother started sobbing uncontrollably because she knew that she couldn’t hide it. She crawled into a corner of the bed and pulled the bloodied sheets over her head and cried. She was waiting for my grandmother to come into the bedroom and beat her senseless.

Angélica was younger than my mother and she ran into the kitchen, covered in blood.

“Please come quick! There’s blood everywhere!”

My grandmother looked at Angélica and went into the girls’ bedroom, closing the door. When Grandmother saw my mother, she nodded quietly. Grandmother went back out to the kitchen and told my grandfather to leave the house with all the children except Angélica. Grandfather didn’t say anything—he just nodded and left.

Grandmother went back into the bedroom and pulled the bloody covers down. My mother was shaking, her bloody hands covering her face.

Grandmother said firmly, “Stop crying. Women have this problem. It’s normal, so you must get used to it. I’m not angry at you.”

That was it. No other explanation was given. Grandmother never discussed what menstruation was. It was possible that she barely understood it herself. My mother was so thankful she wasn’t beaten that she didn’t ask any more questions.

Mother stayed home all day. Grandmother bathed both sisters, removing all the bloody crusts from their hair and faces.

Grandmother spent the afternoon teaching my mother how to sew sanitary napkins, made from remnants of old flannel. The homemade pads were thick, like those yellow bars of laundry soap. Mother washed the bloody napkins in secret and hung the stained pads on a “special tree” secluded behind the house. Everything was done with a healthy dose of shame.

When my mother finally arrived in the United States at the age of twenty-one, she was overjoyed by the discovery of Kotex. Yes, Kotex, those giant, thick, diaper-like pads designed to be worn with an old fashioned sanitary belt. These pads were a godsend to my poor mother, who had been washing her homemade flannel pads for a decade. Now she could just wear them and throw them out. Eureka!