But those little cracks held the brightest light, piercing through the darkness and shining a spotlight in some of the blackest places of the heart. Javier had those cracks, that sharp light, and it was blinding sometimes. I felt I was special just to witness it.
That was just a memory now. I’d met men that had no soul, men like Salvador, who proved my theory wrong. And now I was with Esteban, a man who was far, far worse than my ex-husband and abuser. Salvador was rough and wicked but for all the bad that he was, it wasn’t unusual. Men like him thrived in the cartels, they were born to be narcos. You knew who he was from the start. He made no apologies, he wanted to frighten the world.
But Esteban Mendoza was pure evil. He wasn’t even human, I knew that. If you believed in absolute evil, he was evil absolute. He hid under the persona of being young, dumb, careless man and even though he certainly wasn’t smart, his capacity for inflicting pain and suffering was beyond my understanding.
And what I couldn’t understand, I had no choice but to fear. This was a man beyond reasoning and help and what hurt most of all, what made me feel like I was too stupid to live, that I almost deserved his cruelty, was that I had never seen it coming. I fell for him. Not the real thing, but at least a tempered version of that. I fell for the illusion of someone that was bad, but not that bad. I was lured in by a man who said all the right things and was there when my husband wasn’t and made me feel like I was someone worth loving, if not liking. If not respecting.
I never dreamed that beneath the easy smile and jealous tendencies, the devil incarnate was lurking.
He was a living nightmare.
And I couldn’t wake up.
Esteban kept me locked in my room most of the time. The irony was that it used to be the very room that Javier had held me captive in, the one with the windows that didn’t open, couldn’t break. Looking back, I would have given anything to have been under Javier’s wrath instead of this. I held strong with Javier during that time because somehow, somewhere, I knew that I could get through to him.
Instead, Javier had gotten through to me.
But now, now it was different. It wasn’t even a place. It was this black, nebulous hole of pain and humiliation. Sometimes it was Esteban who had his way with me, other times it was Juanito. At least he was someone I could appeal to. My tears seemed to keep his violence at bay, because Juanito’s violence was only taught through Esteban. It wasn’t in his nature, like it wasn’t in so many people’s nature. He wasn’t born this way, it was thrust upon him and he was molded by the bad and the wicked. We were a nation of people under this heavy hand.
But Esteban’s nature was evil from the moment he came out of the womb, disguising it from day one from the rest of the world, fooling us all. The minute his plan went into effect was the moment that he let it blossom, flourish, transforming himself into someone bad into someone straight from Hell. And when he dealt with me, I could feel it.
It was all I could feel. Nothing but evil. I was sleeping in my own feces and urine, forced to drink water from the same water they let the hogs drink out of. Sometimes live chickens would be placed in my room, chickens who were angry and starved and they would peck at me over and over again until I had no choice to kill them. I was given no food at all and when I asked for some Esteban shoved their rotting carcasses in my face, telling me that was my food.
By day five, I stripped the chickens of their feathers and was forced to eat them raw. It was either do that or starve and I needed every ounce of strength I could get.
Because despite everything that was happening to me and the brutality that I kept witnessing, that kept branding me, I needed to fight back. It didn’t matter if the room was covered in feathers and I was cowering in the corner naked, bruised and beaten, with matted hair, tearing into a putrid chicken with blood-stained teeth. I had plans to get out of here.
Or I was going to die trying.
And if I was going to die, I was going to try and inflict as much pain and bloodshed as I could as I went out.
Maybe then I’d die with a smile on my face.
I may have underestimated Esteban.
But I would make sure he underestimated me.
The days and nights passed slowly in the house. I had no way of keep track because sleep rarely came for me and I kept the curtains closed all the time. I lived in darkness and in that darkness, I grew something sharp and ragged in my heart. It was strength and it was vengeance and it was enough to keep beating, to keep me alive.