“Murderer, we don't want you in the town”
A quick sequence of events. One day in 1998, a mother sends her 13-year-old daughter to buy bread; the girl is raped by a 62-year-old man who threatens to cut her throat if she says anything; the rapist, Antonio Cosme, "Pincelito", is arrested; the girl returns to school, and there a classmate tells her: "You're a whore, you made it all up." And others chant at her: "You're the rapee, he raped you." The girl moves to another school outside the town, where three students recognize her and make her life impossible in class and on the street. One day, one of the rapist's sons asks her: "Did you like my dad?"
A group of neighbors organizes a demonstration in defense of the rapist. None show support for the victim and her family; they make derogatory comments out loud when they cross paths with them: they want money, it's physically impossible for a 62-year-old man to rape a 13-year-old girl. The rapist is convicted with overwhelming evidence, and during his second prison permit he goes to the girl's mother and approaches her: "Good afternoon, ma'am, how is your daughter?" The woman, undergoing psychological treatment, heavily sedated with sleeping pills, weighing barely 40 kilos after several moves and having taken her daughter out of the town to avoid harassment and insults, remembers the rapist's phrase to the girl ("if you tell your mother, I'll cut your throat with a billhook"), goes to a gas station, fills a liter and a half of gasoline, goes to where the man is and sets him on fire after asking him: "Do you remember me?"
During her first prison permit, the woman is greeted by 400 neighbors: "Murderer, we don't want you in the town." "She's a demon," says one. "Her release from prison causes social alarm and fear," says the rapist's lawyer. It happened in Benijófar (Alicante) and was covered since 2005 by a journalist who worked for El Mundo, Gema Peñalosa, who has published Fuego (Libros del K.O.), the detailed chronicle, with a very well-documented historical context, of the woman (María del Carmen García) who sought justice in a bottle of gasoline.
It is a highly unsettling book overshadowed by an obsessive question, "what would you do", for which there is no possible answer: there are reactions that we are unaware of until we are faced with the action. Peñalosa delves into issues that are still current, for example, the confession of the perfect victim: the work a raped girl must do ahead of her to appear as one, her presentation to society as a rape victim, measuring her discourse as a rape victim, adapting her state of mind as a rape victim to what is expected of her, wearing clothes of a freshly raped woman, stoically enduring the clamorous trial that awaits a woman who has reported a rape even if she is not older than 13.
Deep down and on the surface, sexual violence against women and the brutal step of reporting it, especially in small communities. And, beyond that, the helplessness that this report provokes when justice acts against the rapist without protecting the victim. The rape does not end when the rapist is imprisoned; the rape continues in the victim's perception of the world, in her relationships with men (the first, a rapist; the second? and society), in her traumatized mother dealing with a man in her flight from the town, in a question that many end up asking themselves: "Was it worth reporting?" The nausea, in short.
