The octopus fisherman

[Trigger Warning: Childhood sexual abuse]

I woke up earlier than usual. Little sunbeams filtered through tiny cracks in the blinds, announcing a beautiful summer day. I slid down from my top bunk and, not wanting to wake up my brothers, dressed up quietly. Just my swimsuit, a T-shirt and beach slippers.

I was thirteen.

The sun was still low over the pine trees. The bay was calm, an incipient breeze changing its color from silver to deep blue. It was going to be a hot day. Nobody was up yet, so I decided to go for a stroll.

I wandered through fields of cabbage and corn till I came to the rocks on the shore. Not far on the water, in his wooden boat brightly painted white, brown and blue, was the octopus fisherman.
Octopus is a delicacy in Galicia, sort of a national dish. It is served boiled on thick wooden plates, seasoned with olive oil, coarse salt and spicy paprika. I loved to eat it but was also fascinated by the animal itself. I had learned to catch it. With my mask, snorkel and fins, I would swim over the sandy bottom looking for odd objects: an old rubber boot, a pot, a tire. Then I would dive down and check inside for octopus. More often than not I would find one, which then I would wrestle to the shore, kill and proudly present it to my mother to cook for lunch.

The old fisherman used completely different methods to catch octopus. He would never get in the water; like most Galician fishermen, he probably didn’t even know how to swim. He carried long poles with a hook at the end. When he spotted an octopus in the bottom he would quickly get one on his poles, hook the octopus and haul it into his boat. Sometimes the octopus would get into a crack in the rocks and stubbornly held to it with all the considerable strength of its tentacles and suction cups. Then a fight would ensue, the fisherman pulling with his pole this way and that and the octopus holding on for dear life.

* * *

One day I witnessed one of these struggles while lying lazily on a towel on the beach. The fisherman fought for over half an hour and still couldn’t get the octopus. I grabbed my mask, snorkel and fin and got in the water, wanting to take a closer look at the struggle. There was a large rock on the bottom and the hook of the fisherman’s pole keep going under it. There must be an octopus under there. I asked him if he needed help, but he just muttered something incomprehensible in Galician. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I took a deep breath and dove toward the rock. Bracing with my knees on the bottom it was a simple matter for me to turn over the rock. The octopus came out and took off swimming at full speed, opening and closing its tentacles, looking like a little ghost. I went back to the surface for air. “Now I’ve done it!” I thought, “I have lost this poor fisherman his catch.” Desperately, I swam on the surface following the octopus, which was heading for deep water. I dove again. If the octopus were as smart as some people think it is, it would have just keep on swimming and I would have not been able to catch it. Instead, it opened its tentacles on the bottom and waited for me. I grabbed it and head back to the surface. It was a big one. It wrapped its tentacles around my arm all the way to my neck, pulling hard to slide between my fingers. I knew it just wanted to get away, but I started to get scared. Then I looked up and saw the fisherman in his boat. He grabbed the octopus and peeled it off me.

“I’m glad I could get that octopus for you,” I told him after I climbed into his boat.

“That’s your octopus, not mine,” he said. “Take it home and ask your mom to cook it.”

* * *

I used to ride with the octopus fisherman in his boat, watching him peer into the water to see an octopus where I could see just rocks. Another way he had to catch his prey was to drag a line to which he had attached a small rock with a crab and hooks tied on top. The octopus would try to get the crab and get hooked. He taught me the names of all the beaches in the bay and a lot of things about the sea. At the end of the morning, he would pull his boat to the beach and the beachgoers would gather around and bid for his catch.

So when that morning he called me and rowed his boat backward to the rocks to let me in, I didn’t think twice. I went and sat of the prow as he rowed back out on the bay.

I was starting to ask something about octopus when something really weird happened. The fisherman pulled the oars in and came to where I was. Then he started touching me over my skimpy swimsuit. I couldn’t believe what was happening.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Whoa, you have a big one!” he said.

That was completely ridiculous. I haven’t reached puberty yet, I had the penis of a child. It didn’t even care if it was big or small.

“Do you want to touch mine?”

I couldn’t imagine anything more repulsive than to touch that old man’s cock.

“No! Stop! Leave me alone!”

“Do you want to go to shore?” He said in Galician. But he wouldn’t stop touching me.
Go to shore and do what? Go to a hiding place so he could continue touching me? Anybody looking out from the beach could have seen us. But there was nobody.

“Stop! Stop, or I’ll jump in the water!”

He took a step back, considering what I had said. Then he started again.

I quickly took off my T-shirt and my slippers and dove head first in the sea. The water was cold. I come to the surface and looked at him. He could row his boat much faster than I could swim. Would he fish me out of the water like I was an octopus? But he just stood there, looking at me with apparent indifference. I swam in a perfect crawl straight to the beach.

I wanted to slip quietly back into my room and change, but my mother saw me walking in, barefoot and wet.

“You have been swimming already?”

“Yeah, the water is nice,” I muttered and went upstairs.

* * *

What was that old man thinking? How could he dare? He was just a poor man, my father was a local authority. If I told, I could get him into a lot of trouble. He would probably wind up in jail. But I couldn’t stand the thought of that free spirit in jail. For me, he symbolized the freedom and wildness of the sea. Even what he had done to me represented that wild freedom. Those were still the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. I didn’t know anything about sex, nobody had told me. Obscure desires had started to awaken inside me, like the strange excitement I felt when I watched my classmates getting a spanking. I didn’t understand any of that. It scared me. The priests told us something about it, but it was always unclear. It was shrouded in secrecy and sin. Perhaps the old fisherman could explain it to me, the same way that he explained the way of the octopus. But not if he was going to touch me like that again.

It slowly dawned on me that I could never ride in the old fisherman’s boat again.

* * *

Later on that day I saw the fisherman pulling his boat on the beach. He had a system to pull his boat out over the tide line. He lay the oars over the sand, then put a round log across them. Then he rolled the boat over the oars using the round log as a wheel. He repeated the process until the boat was on the white dry sand. Some beachgoers always helped him, although he was perfectly capable to do it on his own.

While the bid over the catch started, I quietly grabbed my slippers and T-shirt from the boat and walked away.

* * *

He must have done other boys. One day, I was walking on a beach that could only be reached by hiking through thorny gorse and blackberry bushes, or from the sea. Then I saw him, walking out of a shack with a teenage boy. I pretended that I didn’t see them.

The locals never talked much about him. He had no wife, no children, no family that I knew of. He seemed content and self-sufficient. He looked as old as the world, with his short white hair and his wrinkly face, but there was no way to know how old he really was. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. I saw him once dancing at a local fiesta, alone. He jumped and pranced with a vitality and abandon that I almost envied.

* * *

I may have been already in college when I heard that the octopus fisherman was dying. Stomach cancer, they said. I made discreet inquiries and found the way to his place. It was an old stone house surrounded by an unkempt garden, but there were peach trees and fig trees and plum trees, the fruit still green in the early summer days. I knocked on the door, called, then walked in.

The inside of the house was just a large single room, with a high ceiling, a wooden floor and walls of naked granite. There was a large bed in the middle. The old fisherman was laying on it, his belly swollen.

I sat by him and asked him how he was. He knew he was dying. I asked him if he was afraid of death. He said he was afraid of the pain. We must have said other things, but that’s all I remember. I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention the incident in the boat.

A few days later my father told that the octopus fisherman had died. He asked me if I wanted to go to his funeral. I said no. I had already said my goodbyes to the old man.

The Wall of Words

Words are meant to be used to communicate and communication is essential in any relationship. However, quite often words are used as weapons to attack a partner in a relationship, as clubs to bludgeon he or she into submission. One thing I have encountered quite often in my life is what I call the “Wall of Words”, which consists in one person (whom I will call a “waller”) talking in an aggressive way for long periods of time so that the other person is forced into silence and does not have time to form an effective defense.

Here is how it works. The person will start talking and carry on for a long period of time, often giving lots of unnecessary details and repeating himself. If the other person interrupts her, he will complain vigorously about the interruption and then proceed with the speech. However, there is a double standard regarding interruptions, because when the other person finally gets a chance to talk, she will be soon interrupted by another long tirade of the “waller”, who suddenly feels the urgent need to correct something the other person has just said. In the most blatant cases of the Wall of Words that I have experienced, there was an occasional silence but when I opened my mouth to speak the “waller” immediately started talking over me, blocking anything I was trying to say. In fact, the Wall of Words may leads to two persons talking simultaneously, even screaming at each other, one trying desperately to get heard and the other blocking the speech.

The Wall of Words is harder to implement in group situations, although I have seen one person take control over an entire meeting and preventing people with dissenting opinions to speak by using her authority as the Chair to allocate most of the speaking time to herself.

The “waller”, consciously or unconsciously, is trying to block the other person from communicating. She clearly does not want to listen, she just wants to lecture the other person. The goal is to create a power imbalance in which the “waller” adopts the role of a superior lecturing a subordinate, like an adult reprimanding a child or a boss chastising an employee. Indeed, the content of the speech in the Wall of Words is quite often full of accusations and shaming. Other times the “waller” presents herself as a victim and the Wall of Words in put up with the excuse of defending herself against the supposed abuse of the other person. Of course, abuse does happen, but the way to stop it should not be preventing the abuser from communicating. In fact, the Wall of Words is in itself a form of psychological abuse in which the power imbalance created by the fact that one person gets to talk and the other doesn’t may end up undermining the self-esteem of the person silenced. Often, the “waller” will elaborate a long list of accusations and the person silenced feels powerless to even start addressing it. In the worst cases, threats are also included, adding fear to the negative emotions of guilt and shame.

What can be done when faced with a Wall of Words? Solutions are not easy because the Wall of Words itself prevents any solutions based on good communication. Here are some ideas:

1. Ask a third person to mediate. Ideally, the mediator should be made aware of the problem so that she can arbitrate equal time to talk. However, be aware that the “waller” may try to involve the mediator in the dynamic with protest of unfairness, ultimately also blocking the mediator from communicating. 
2. Walk away. Quite often a person will put up a Wall of Words only when he is upset or forced into a defensive position. In those cases, simply rescheduling the conversation for a time when everybody is more calm solves the problem. In other cases it may simply not be worthwhile to talk to a person who uses the Wall of Words. On the other hand, trying to continue a conversation when a Wall of Words is being used is not just a waste of time, but an affront at the dignity of the person being subjected to it and may even cause her psychological damage.
3. Ask yourself if you are part of the problem. Granted, a Wall of Words is abusive, but perhaps the person using it does so as a mechanism of defense against something that you are doing. She obviously doesn’t want to listen to you, but is it out of fear that what you may say will hurt her? Even if you don’t use a Wall of Words, you may also be saying things that are threatening, blaming or shaming. 
4. Use a safeword to signal to a person prone to use a Wall of Words that she is carrying on for too long and is time for her to listen. Of course, this is predicated on that person recognizing that there is a problem.
5. Name the problem: “you are using a Wall of Words”. I think that coming up with a shorthand name like the “Wall of Words” can help a lot by raising awareness about a previously unrecognized problem. Other words like “sexist”, “homophobic”, “emotional blackmail” and “slut shaming” have work very effectively as a signposts for other abusive behaviors. 

I just came up with these possible solutions by thinking about this problem, but if you know of any others please feel free to suggest them.

Is it sinful to be spanked?

This is a scene from the first chapter of my novel “Games of love and pain”, which I published in Spanish and have started translating into English. The story starts in January 1976 in the southern French city of Perpignan. Cecilia and Julio had to share a hotel room in their way back to Spain during a skiing trip to the Alps. Cecilia is quite religious and prudish, but in the course of an intimate conversation with Julio they both discover that they share some peculiar sexual tastes…

The idea that started to form in her head was terrifying… in a sort of tempting, irresistible way.

“But it I like it, it doesn’t have to be so horrible.”

Her heart was beating fast. She kept gazing at the ceiling, not daring to look at Julio.

“Hey… What do you mean with all this?” said Julio, pulling at her arm to make her look at him. “Do you mean that you want me to spank you? That’s really amazing coming from you, Cecilia!”

She felt herself blush. She rolled sideways, turning her back to him so he wouldn’t see her face.

“That was stupid of me… I shouldn’t have told you anything.”

Julio grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her slightly.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to be ashamed of telling me what your brother did to you. I’m so happy that you trusted me enough to tell me! I just don’t understand what you want… Before you came here with me you made me promise that I wasn’t going to touch you… And now you want me to spank you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to do it?”

“Of course I would like to do it! But I didn’t think that was a possibility. I never imagine that I would find a woman who would agree to that.”

“Well, you have found me.”

“Are you sure, Cecilia? Don’t you think it would be a sin?”

“If it hurts, if I don’t feel pleasure, how could it be a sin?”

“Look here, Cecilia, I know what you are doing. You are just going around inside your pretty head looking for excuses. I’m dying to do it, I assure you. But I promised you that tonight I wouldn’t try anything with you, so I’m not going to mislead you. Whatever you decide, you’ll have to decide by yourself, don’t tell me afterwards that I tricked you.”

It was true. Her own arguments failed to convince her. Guilt and desire fought each other inside her.

“The thing is… if we don’t do it now, it will never happen” she whined. “When we go back to Madrid I will never see you again.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t we continue being friends? Maybe you should think about all this more calmly.”

But she knew that if she let the opportunity slip away it would never come back, for either of them. She would probably never find that husband that knew how to discipline her in a loving way. And Julio would never find another masochistic woman that would let him spank her. That made up her mind. She wanted to give him that present. She wanted to leave him with a memory as unforgettable as that evening with Laura under the poster of the Sagrada Familia.

“Just a few spanks, on my pajamas, OK?”

Julio looked at her with a mixture of excitement and fear.

“OK. If you want me to stop, you only have to tell me, got it?”

“I got it.”

She couldn’t believe what was about to happen.

Julio sat up in the middle of the bed with his back straight, leaning on a pillow and the headboard. He left his legs under the covers, pulling them up to cover his lap.

“Lay down on top of my legs” he told her.

Cecilia kneeled on the bed to his right. She hesitated, and for a moment their eyes met. Julio’s face showed desire and a certain anxiety. She wasn’t  going to chicken out now. She let herself fall across his lap. Julio’s crossed legs made her butt stick out in a rather obscene way. She felt the warmth of his body. His smell intoxicated her. Waves of excitement cruised her entire body.

Julio slapped her bottom. The thick fabric of the pajamas took all the force of the hit, so that she felt only a blunt impact, not at all painful.

“How was that?” asked Julio.

“It didn’t hurt at all. Hit me harder.”

“Let’s see…”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Julio raise his hand, which landed with force on her. But, once more, the spank had no effect at all. Julio hit her a few more times with the same result. It was utterly frustrating.

It came as a sudden, unconscious decision. She put her hands inside the waist of her pajama pants and pulled down to lower them. By the contact of the cool air with her skin she knew that her panties had bundled up, leaving most of her buttocks bare.

She heard Julio draw a deep breath.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, fearful that he would want to stop.

“Nothing… Is just… that you have such a beautiful butt… May I touch it?”

Without waiting for her answer, Julio caressed her buttocks were they were left exposed by the panties. It gave her goosebumps. The touch of Julio’s hand was soft, incredibly sensual. Too sensual.

“No, no!” she protested. “Just spank me.”

Julio’s hand went away, only to immediately fall back on her with full force. This time it cracked on her skin with a sting. Right away, Julio spanked her other cheek, where it also elicited a lively burn. At the third stroke she couldn’t avoid moving her butt to try to avoid it.

“So, not it does hurt, doesn’t it?”

“You bet!” her voice came out faltering. “Go on.”

“So you think this is rather funny, don’t you?” said Julio in a commanding and slightly mocking voice. “Look, Cecilia, you had this coming a long way. Most of the time you are a pretty good girl, but from time to time your wires get crossed and you throw some silly temper tantrums… Like the one you had today in the bus, don’t you think?”

That lecture had to be fake, to spice things up, but Julio’s voice sounded so stern that it did scare her a little. It also turned her on.

“Yes, I deserve a good punishment. Spank me hard!”

“Well, then prepare yourself. I’m going to give you something you won’t easily forget!”

To emphasize what he said, Julio grabbed her hip with one hand while with the other he gave her a series of quick slaps, alternating between her buttocks. The blows were sufficiently severe to keep her from thinking about anything else. Still, the spark of pain elicited by each slap had an undeniable pleasure quality. It merged with the perverse joy that came from the humiliating position in which Julio held her and the idea that she was being punished like a little girl. Very soon she started wiggling her bottom from side to side, up and down, as her body hopelessly tried to escape the slaps. It became an obscene dance that she performed following the rhythm that Julio marked with his spanks, like the monotone rhythm of a metronome, warning her of precisely when the next slap was going to hit her so that the stings of pain acquired the inevitability of destiny. None of them said anything; each one was completely absorbed in their task: to punish and to be punished. Cecilia only produced sighs and occasional moans… whether from pain or from pleasure, she didn’t know. The spanks did produce a loud noise that exploded on the skin of her bottom and reverberated on the walls of the room, small explosions as alarming as the blows themselves. Julio’s arm held her hip against a vertical, cylindrical bump in his belly of which she was only vaguely conscious, absorbed as she was in the conflicting emotions evoked by the spanking.

Julio stopped suddenly. He pushed her away from his lap and jumped off the bed. He ran into the bathroom, a fist tightly closed on the front of his pajama pants.

Cecilia was left laying on her belly, not even caring to pull up her pants. Her heart was beating loudly in her ears. She was shaking. The contrast between the intensity of her connection with Julio and her suddenly loneliness filled her with confusion. She felt abandoned, rejected in the middle of that intimate act to which she had abandoned herself so completely. Without knowing exactly why, she started to cry.

Coming out of the bathroom, Julio looked at her with surprise.

“You are crying! What’s wrong?”

He sauntered to the bed. He laid at her side and hugged her from behind.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you so much” he muttered.

“It’s not that…” she said with a slobbery voice from crying. “Why did you leave so suddenly?”

“Oh, that! Well… you see, it was that I… I couldn’t hold it anymore… I went into the bathroom so you wouldn’t see me.”

 Cecilia sat up, turning to look at him.

“Do you mean that you have… ejaculated?”

“Only a little bit…”

Cecilia laughed, tears still pouring out of her eyes.

“That means that you got really excited.”

“I think it was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“More exciting than making love to Laura?”

“Yes, even more than that.”

That made her feel proud. But immediately a crushing wave of guilt invaded her.

“Ay, Julio! What have we done!”

Hurt

Today is Erin's birthday. She would have been 50 years old today if she hadn't decided to kill herself last November. She was kind of scared of being 50... She often thought of herself as an old maid. In fact, she was beautiful and sexy. There was always something of a teenager in her.

She had this ritual of calling her best friends on their birthdays and play "Happy Birthday" by Altered Images. Just the song, no comments, then she would hang up. Last year she did it to me on my birthday, then I did the same to her on her birthday. March first, like today.

I won't play Happy Birthday by Altered Images today. It's not a Happy Birthday. Maybe it's not a birthday at all. Instead, I'm posting this video of the song Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, which I think is what she would have liked me to post. Erin was big on getting me to like the music that she liked. She made me a CD of her favorite songs and was kind of disappointed when I didn't play it often enough when we were together. She didn't understand, I didn't explain well enough, that I'm slow to take to music. I was taking my time. I thought that we had time. She didn't explain that we did not, in fact, had that much time. She didn't say that she planned to leave so soon.

Anyway, I like Hurt now. It explains perfectly well how she felt, how she hurt, why she had to go. With it, she warned me that she would let me down, in the end. That she'd made me hurt. I hear her talking in every single word of those lyrics. What have you become, my sweetest friend? You left me your empire of dust... all of it. What am I do to with it?

This is Erin speaking. This is her Hurt. She sent me this e-mail on April 30 last year.

Oh.....Jesus, Mary and Joseph!  - forgive me!  - but I am so sick and tired of spending two and a half hours on the phone talking with some guy who is SO into his wife or some other chick - and helping him to feel better about his relationship!  OH DOG!  FUCK ME RAW AND KILL ME BEFORE I EVER FEEL THE NEED TO DO THIS AGAIN!   It used to, but no longer instills "hope" in me!  I am just wanting so bad for this life shit to be over with asap!  i am SO done with all of this bullshit!  I just wanna sleep - to trip the light fantastic - for good!  - and, again, I am not suicidal, trust me, I am not!  I am just so very done with all of this crap!   There is nothing that is good or wonderful about my life!  I want to expedite the process of my death to the best of my ability.  Perhaps I should take up doing crack cocaine or something.....I don't know.  I just know that I want to get this all over with so bad!  I am so done!  I am so sad.  I hope you can try to begin to understand this Hermes.   It is not about you in any way - at all!  it is about ME! 

I just want you, and your wife, and my mom and my friend Tina, and everyone I love and care about to just hurry up and die!  So that I can get the fuck - out of here!  I hate my life!  I want it to be over!  I used to care about leaving a mark on the world.  - something meaningful and helpful to others - but I am out of "life" and I just don't even care anymore.  - Something inside me has died.   I just want to sleep.  I used to want to help other people to have an easier life and find happiness....but, I am sorry, I just don't care about me, or anyone else anymore. 

peace OUT!
 
May you trip the light fantastic, Erin!