Essay: Laugh Lines

Men have a tradition of insinuating themselves into places where they don't belong. In keeping with that tradition, this essay on the female lifespan, and certain attendant horrors, begins with a man, Martin Heidegger.

In 1961, decades after he'd resigned as Hitler's spiritual guide, Heidegger gave a lecture whose subject matter does not matter. Afterward, an audience member asked the philosopher this question: How might we live more authentically? After indulging in some meditative silence, Heidegger replied that we ought to spend more time in graveyards.

Let's follow the former Nazi's advice.

Let's follow a pack of hungry cemetery dogs through El Panteón de Mezquitán, to the grave that holds my grandparents' husks. Under dirt, bricks, and mortar, Abuelita's coffin rests upon Abuelito's. That she gets to top my grandfather for eternity makes me smile. Abuelita's final resting place hints that justice can, perhaps, happen on, and in, Earth.

Abuelito deserves to be closer to hell.

He should mulch Hades' orchards.

I learned about Hades when I was a few years younger than Persephone at the "defining moment" of her life. My parents had given me an illustrated book of Greek myths and at bedtime. In the light of my reading lamp, I stared at Persephone's aestheticized abduction. The illustration reminded of a less pretty thing I'd seen in Mexico. The kidnappers at whom I'd gawked through my aunt's car windows had carried machine guns. One of the men wore white jeans. Their denim didn't billow like Hades' white toga did as he plunged his chariot toward darkness, one hand holding the reins, the other hand clutching Persephone.

I don't know what the kidnappers did with the two screaming women they dragged from the car. I'd like to think they didn't kill them. I'd also like to think that nobody offered the women pomegranate seeds. I wanted to learn their fate, so once we arrived at my grandparents' house, I ran to the small TV that Abuelita watched. Researching, I flipped through channels.

Abuelito shuffled through the bedroom doorway. "What are you doing?" he asked.

I turned and answered, "I'm looking for the news!"

He looked at me with bafflement. Why would a nine-year-old girl want to watch the news?

"What's on the news?"

Breathlessly, I explained, "We saw a kidnapping on our way here! It's going to be on the news!"

Abuelito chuckled at my naïveté. He shook his head and explained, "That won't be on the news."

That seemed preposterous and my facial expression must've said so and so Abuelito reiterated, "That sort of thing doesn't go on the news, m'ija."

Still chuckling, he shuffled away. He was dressed in a three-piece suit. That meant he was on his way to see la otra mujer, the mistress about whom I'd heard a myriad of stories but never seen.

The myth of Persephone's abduction gave me my first exposure to aestheticized, allegorical rape. Her story diagrammed the crime. It involved a hole, the deepest hole, a tunnel ending in hell, a path to permanent winter. Rape interrupted. It didn't care that you were a teenage girl picking wildflowers in a field. It ambushed you and stole you into the worst darkness. It stole you away from the world as you knew it and made it so that you couldn't smile. So that you couldn't eat. Rape had little to do with penises or vaginas. It mostly had to do with freedom. Rape did violence to it.

Over the last two decades, I've heard Americans repeat what has become "popular wisdom" that rape is about power. I agree with this assessment but not in the way that most people mean it. Rape isn't about the rapist's power. Instead, it targets the power held by the victim. It does violence to her power. It works to obliterate it. Rape doesn't enhance the rapist's power at all. Violence can't be used to craft power...