CERCA TROVA

ENTRY TWO.

To digress.

I grew up on the Southern coast of Spain, alone aside from my early-greying parents and the company of horses we kept. The Andalusian countryside is known for very little, but the horse that bares its name are both the only landmark it carries and the only consistent companions I had for years. That I was born late in the life of my parents was not something that occurred to me for quite some time, and nor would the significance of this appeal to me until even later; I had no siblings to educate me on the standards of the world, and even fewer peers. The only creatures of comparison I had were the stallions and the mares, and they offered no human features to examine in contrast, nor could they give commentary on the appearance of Papa or fading endurance of my mother. 

There were other farmers, of course, and even other ranchers that bred and raised the Andalusians like us. But the land between us was so great, and the collective meetings so sparse, that I never detected the difference between their ages and those of others with children my height. Of course, it helped that there was no one better liked than my father. 

When I was a child, my father had seemed to me the tallest man alive, and although he had been born and raised in the city, he was stout and broad like a man who had worked on a farm his whole life. Even among the grown men he was an anomaly, not particularly for his size (though he was ostensibly the largest or next-largest among them), but for the way he spoke. It feels impossible to describe the way he was then -- - bold and clever, charming and rugged. He spoke loudly and in constant gesture, clapping those around him on the back or holding their shoulder as if to draw them in and make co-conspirators of strangers to his conversation. Though I understand the age difference now, to imagine it then is to picture him as a man ten years the junior of anyone around him, such was his vitality and life. 

I’m sure it also helped that my mother was beautiful. But she was prone to her silences, standing at the sides of rooms and observing with that half-smile that implies an omniscence that should belong to the Mona Lisa or God alone. And I loved her, of course, but I could not understand her. Not in truth, not until I was a woman myself, and even now I feel lacking at the edges of comprehension. Perhaps it’s because she’s never shared her suffering, though I know it to be fierce. But it was my father -- Papa as I called him -- that was my world. 

It was him that first put me in the saddle of a horse, wedged between him and the leather cantle on a deep bay stallion we called Ciro. Ciro was my father’s own horse, a towering thing with an easily changeable temper as dark as his pelt. The men that came to buy our horses always wanted to barter a ride on Ciro, such was his noble look and high height, but they eventually stopped asking when the boys left with bruises on their backs and the indents of teeth on their shoulders. We could rarely even stud him, so unpredictable was his behaviour, and when my mother found out he had taken me for a ride on the beast of a stallion, she was in a fit of anger for days. I, of course, could not understand her rage -- not when my father winked down at me while he stood, martyr-like to me at the time, to receive his verbal lashings before attempting a cajoling with kisses and favoured songs.

It was my father that snuck me lemon candies, flicking them out of his pocket and onto the floor as we walked as if making them shells on a carpet beach. It was him that watched me climb trees and instructed which limb to trust next with booming laughter; him who I played games of meaningless stealth with, taking turns seeing who could pinch objects from each other’s pockets; he who made me my treasure hunts and took me deep into the country on horseback.

And it was my father, that I would find slumped in his great leather chair in the parlour room at least once a month, sleeping or crying softly over an empty bottle.

“Eléna,” he would call me over, waving a large hand at my cautiously inching self. “Little Sun, come here, hug your Papa. He is so sad tonight.” And I would.

Without fail, I would.

I do not believe it was ever a secret that my father drank. Certainly all the farmers and ranchers in the area knew, as they came to our house more often than not for their rowdy gatherings and endless games of poker and monte. He always loved to gamble, but particularly so when he was in the bottle. I don’t remember the first time I recognized that he was the cause of our debts, but I am sure of the memory that I knew we needed money when we began doing weddings at the estate. 

That was how I met him - the man with the puzzlebox who found me on the stoop that day, when I was only a child. The Spanish countryside had grown increasingly in vogue for a wedding, and at the suggestion of one of my mother’s more modern friends, we began taking ceremonies and receptions at our picturesque ranch in the hills. He was one of the guests of such an affair -- a thing I can deduce purely because I know he was not the groom. 

He would take his object back easily that day, but it was not nearly the last any of us would see of him. I do not recall what they were, but he found me later that trip and asked many a question of me before he left. As he was loading into his car, I’m told he spoke to my parents of his interest in me -- that by his measure I was a quiet, intellectual child with great potential, enough of which that with their permission, he would call to see how I progressed.

My parents, likely reluctant that such an influential man was not angry for the petty thievery, consented. And he so he did call. And write. And occasionally visit, when business brought him to the Southern end of Spain. 

It became clear quite early on that his interest in me was substantial, and with that realization came a great deal of excitement in the early days. I was only a rancher’s daughter, previously confined to a life in the green swells and white-stone hearths of a farm, but he had singled me out as something - Someone - worth following. He sent me puzzle-boxes of all manners; more cryptexes, occasionally the Japanese yosegi-zaiku, all foreign and beautiful things that tested my young mind and inspired me.

When I was old enough he sent a car to our farm, a sleek and foreign thing meant for my father or mother to drive me to high school each day. He made a surprise visit when I was 15, promising during that trip should I receive the marks he designated in the papers he bought, he would fund not only my travel and accommodation in Barcelona, but the expense of my tuition at the most prestigious university in the whole of my country -- - the acceptance another thing he promised as if it was a thing he could arrange, not something I earned. But perhaps he did. I have tried over the years not to imagine it.

As I grew from child to young woman in these days, the hero worship I had once held for my father would begin to strain. It was clear to me that he was both a drunk and a gambler, and the root cause of our financial turbulence -- some months we ran rich with funds, others we were forced to sell off prized studs just to make necessary payments. I still excused him then, kept secrets from Mama when he shared the extent of cash lost on the poker table, but it was not quite the same.

By the time I was of age to attend university, my marks and exams all tallied to the point of excellent, the choice fell to me to leave or stay. It was an easy decision. Even as my father had seemingly taken lessons in new sobriety and restraint, the enchantment around the life I had once been submerged in in Andalusia had been broken. I left with the best clothes I owned - a meager amount that fit into a small trunk - and the man that I had met all those years ago as a little girl came to take me away.

ENTRY THREE.

It is hard to say, even here, what it has been like to know and be ruled by him. It’s a feeling that only a woman would understand -- to feel at once thinned out and ready to burst, as if being held permanently between his thumb and hot concrete like an ant.

He has never touched me intimately, but he has never had to. There is ownership in every moment of his gaze, the placement of his hand over the small of my back. He does not hesitate to hold my jaw or take me by the hip when he demands concentration -- taking it without ever raising his voice, keeping me still instead with the weight of the knowledge -- memory of what he’s done for me on one shoulder, and what I have done for him on the other. That is not to say he does not vocalize his threats. He does. There is no limit, no end, to what he will not do. I know this now.

It was university that changed everything. So far from home and all I had ever known, I was a sun-coloured girl with no allies in a big city; despite the years of solitude and hard work that had bred an independence in me, I was weak. All I wanted was to please him, to prove I was worth what he had spent on me, as if I was liable to prove a return. At the time my feelings of unease were not fully formed, or I was young enough to discourage them from creeping up any higher in my consciousness -- because I was young, and he was old, and I was a woman and he was a man and that is how things are. So instead of enjoying youth, I threw myself into academia, pushing myself higher and harder to achieve what could never have been touched, let alone held. 

For a time, it worked. I took to the unusual, at times illicit methods to stay awake and study. I attended after hours with professors, sought out extra credit, but I could not even hold still  even at the very the top of my class. I was a woman obsessed, rocked and soothed by a certain kind of madness, and gave myself no comfort in the everyday pieces of life that would have been so necessary to my sanity. Within a year, two years, I began to crumble. I could no longer sleep, but nor could I stay awake - my marks began to fall. Incrementally, at first, but enough to scatter my mind. There was a class I just couldn’t grasp, though whether that had to do with my insomnia or the anxiety I held in my chest during each moment that prevented me from concentrating, I do not know. But I was breaking, slowly but surely, set to be buried under the weight of tombs and textbooks.

That was the start of it all.

It only took one meeting, one session of me crying on his couch about failure, to shift the course of my future. I have never known for certain whether that day and the admission to my weaknesses was what led the illicit solution to me, but I have my suspicions. Within a week, a classmate I barely knew approached me with concerns about the very same class I was set to fail. We commiserated in our fear.

And it was only a few days later he produced the key to the final exam. I didn’t ask how he got it. I don’t believe I wanted to know, or perhaps some part of my body understood I couldn’t have handled it. But for all you, the nameless readers gorging on these secrets needs to know, I took it. 

You see, it’s been like this ever since.

                                                                     --- 

It feels as though he has seen me naked, or that he could, at any point and time, demand that my clothes come off and I would have no recourse other than to submit. I know, in the way that any woman does, that he is attracted to me, and it only seems to be by the dedication to his capital that he refrains from indulging.

I have this quiet, steady fear that he will kill me, but it is not quite the fear of murder. Perhaps that lingers somewhere in the back of my mind - the same bleak thing that sits up when I am forced to cross dark streets by myself, tells me to notch my key between my knuckles - but it is more this feeling that he will somehow erase me completely. Perhaps by violence, maybe by sex, or simply by forcing my hand into yet another hideous thing I will not be able to pull away from -- - and yet I fear... I am filled with this fear… that one day he will simply find the last thing that keeps me me, and pull that string until I am unravelled in his palm like thread. 

Yet simultaneously I hope, beyond all hopes, to break free like a tent full of birds.