![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/lisbon3.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: Deensel [CC BY 2.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>February 1, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n Sitting in the back seat of the taxi into Lisbon with Dom, I notice that I am wearing, more or less, the same clothes I wore when I traveled here alone eleven years ago: a worn-out black turtleneck, skintight black jeans. Though now I am one and a half dress sizes larger. Though now my jeans are tailored, and my sweater has a designer label. Though now I don\u2019t wear whimsical fur-collared coats or charming hats from the twenties to imply that I might be interesting.<\/p>\n The last time I came to this city, I could talk to any person in the world. I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year; with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus. I saw no problem in taking time from others, or accepting their hospitality, because I was paying it out in full. I had everything to give, because I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealized potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered.<\/p>\n \u2014In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, <\/em>you, you don\u2019t have much left to give.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014But it\u2019s true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didn\u2019t get much better.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n February 2, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n Some explanation. This is where it began. Lisbon, May 2006. Outside the club at the Santo Amaro docks, I dangled my legs over the edge of the wide river, my feet swinging like a purse at the end of a long strap. Above me was Lisbon\u2019s big bridge, red and hung, just like the Golden Gate. I puffed smoke into the air the way I do on long, boozy nights\u2014excessively\u2014though I hadn\u2019t had a drink for a couple hours.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/em>She\u2019s lying.<\/p>\n I drank water from a flimsy plastic bottle!<\/p>\n \u2014Or vodka lime soda? You might have still been on your caipirinha bent, after Coimbra. <\/em><\/p>\n \u2014A night opens up. Who is she to say no to it?<\/p>\n I was on a break between high school and university, working in bars and maxing out my credit cards for the privilege of seeing a world that wasn\u2019t mine. I was enrolled in a law program, which was to start the following year, which I never did do. Law, of all things.<\/p>\n \u2014No more secondhand bedsheets.<\/p>\n \u2014You thought you could evade me.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Her feeling of entitlement, of significance, she not yet knowing that it doesn\u2019t come.<\/p>\n The boys with callow faces, were they business students? They longed to visit Australia. So we swapped email addresses, just as I had swapped them, dropped them, in every other city I had stepped through along the way. Did anyone ever email? Yes. But only the boys who thought I\u2019d come with them to Corsica.<\/p>\n \u2014The Corsicans were the worst.<\/em><\/p>\n It was light now. The boys promised me breakfast, the best pastel de Bel\u00e9m<\/em> in Bel\u00e9m. I complied.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n February 3, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n Today I will call the police. I mean, I will call the tourist police, who do not police the tourists but rather take down tourists\u2019 statements on official stationery and stamp them, so that tourists may claim the value of their stolen wallets with their travel insurance companies. When I last came into contact with Lisbon\u2019s tourist police, eleven years ago, I had to wait for an hour against a wall lined with orange plastic chairs\u2014or maybe they were blue?\u2014as an endless parade of dusty-haired English and French couples reported acts of petty theft against them. I was there to report an almost-rape.<\/p>\n \u2014A sexual assault?<\/p>\n An encounter during which my flesh remembered the possibility of a violent death. When my body held, and understood for a second, the knowledge that corpses are dismembered to cover up crimes. But I had gotten away from the death by kicking and screaming and running, so what was there to report?<\/p>\n \u2014An attempt.<\/p>\n \u2014A terror.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014A scare.<\/p>\n Waiting for the tourist police then, eleven years ago, my organs felt heavy from no sleep, from the trauma, from the traces of alcohol still left in my blood. But I was chipper and businesslike. I buried my shame deep alongside my fear, and I gave my statement, describing how two young men had conspired to rape me and had almost succeeded, but I weaseled my way out by agreeing to other violations, and then by my hysteria, and then by my physical desperation to flee. I was so chipper that once I\u2019d finished and signed my statement, the tourist policeman wrote his number down on a piece of paper and said, \u201cI finish at ten. Let me take you out and show you the real <\/em>Lisbon.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n February 4, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t call the tourist police yesterday; today, Saturday, the office is closed. This might have been unconscious, an avoidance.<\/p>\n \u2014Or, lazy?<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014<\/em>Un-pleasure avoidance through pleasure? She wouldn\u2019t go that far.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not in the habit of living by Freud, but I admit that he has given me useful words to sort through my actions. I knew, for example, that I would come to Lisbon to find a copy of the police investigation; I knew that for many months. I knew, too, that I\u2019d be searching for the documents that detail, in some kind of truth of their time, what happened to me eleven years ago. But now that I\u2019m here, I can\u2019t even pick up the phone. I don\u2019t want to know.<\/p>\n \u2014But you do.<\/em><\/p>\n You know what the pleasure principle is: it is not calling up the tourist police when you intend to. It is preserving the self that you are used to living with and going to great lengths to protect it from disruptions. Freud\u2019s exact words won\u2019t assist me here unless I\u2019ve already been living by them.<\/p>\n Instead, I\u2019ve been living with the ubiquitous lingerings of pop psychology, ideas like:<\/p>\n The idea that confronting demons is, first, possible, and, second, a good idea.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n February 7, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes I think it\u2019s possible to live with anything. That we\u2019re wired to survive, survive, survive, to grip on to the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think it\u2019s not possible to live at all. Not at all.<\/p>\n The officer at the desk printed off the information he found, the initial report that I had made in 2006. Back home on the bed, bathed in sunlight, I turn the initial police report over in my hands. The names of the accused are written on it: \u201cFrancisco Rodrigues\u201d and \u201cRicardo.\u201d<\/p>\n We eat a dreary pasta dinner, and I sip my glass of wine too quickly. I pour another. The melodramatic, drunken thought crosses my mind: I\u2019m not safe. I\u2019ve never been safe.<\/p>\n \u2014Which is probably, technically, true.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n February 8, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n What does a man become in the eleven years that have passed since he threw a girl\u2019s sense of being into chaos? This is the question I effectively ask when I type \u201cFrancisco Rodrigues\u201d into Google. According to my yield, Francisco Rodrigues is a football hooligan. Francisco Rodrigues is also a yogi. He is a newlywed. He might be a mathematics professor in a woolen vest. Or a handsome Californian. A Miles Davis fan. An M.B.A. graduate looking for work. A thickset young dad pleased with his brood. A professional soccer player who played for Benfica from 1939 to 1942. A helicopter pilot. A sappy boyfriend. A self-promoting guru. A surfer. A guy in aviators you\u2019d avoid at a bar. A priest. A singer in a straw hat, laughing. A supply-chain manager. A teenage boy aware, and proud, of his burly new chest. A hotel manager with a sweet, plump fianc\u00e9e. An acquisitions manager who has the look of a murderer. A seventeenth-century author of books that I determine are about Portuguese court life.<\/p>\n \u2014Eleven years is a long time.<\/p>\n \u2014So you know their names, now, like you never forgot. Or maybe you\u2019re confusing them?<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014But Francisco is not the one she is afraid of.<\/p>\n While it was Francisco\u2019s cowardice that got me into that room that sorry morning, it was his cowardice that got me out, too. As I literally, literarily, kicked and screamed under the boys\u2019 weight, heaving-crying and thinking that I would die, I desperately repeated, \u201cI\u2019ll do anything, just please don\u2019t hurt me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014I\u2019ll do anything, just please don\u2019t hurt me.<\/em><\/p>\n Francisco lost his cool. He burst into tears and got off the bed. And it was suddenly clear to Ricardo that he couldn\u2019t handle the rape on his own. And then Ricardo said, \u201cTwo blowjobs then! You can leave when you give us two blowjobs!\u201d And I repeated the mantra, \u201cI\u2019ll do anything, just please don\u2019t hurt me.\u201d And Francisco kept crying and shouted at Ricardo in Portuguese. And Ricardo shouted, \u201cYou\u2019re not leaving.\u201d And I found my stockings and shirt and skirt and shoes, and I bundled them up in my arms. And Ricardo and Francisco screamed at one another. And I pulled my clothes on. And Francisco said to me, \u201cCome on.\u201d And I moved toward the door. And Francisco made as if to open it. And we, one of us, opened it. And Ricardo slammed his arm between me and it, and he said, he said, \u201cAre you afraid?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n February 15, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n They say that eyewitnesses are unreliable. Stories are told of survivors who made sure to rigorously study their attacker\u2019s face during the assault for later identification. On this compelling evidence, innocent men are said to languish in jail until they are freed on new DNA test results.<\/p>\n I braced myself for the first of the two lineups. Ricardo was easy. Unusually handsome and unusually unperturbed by the situation. The sight of him filled me with rage. And fear.<\/p>\n \u2014Yes, you were afraid.<\/em><\/p>\n Then the Francisco lineup: I knew who it was I was supposed to be identifying, the only one in the line of young men who vaguely resembled my memory of Francisco. But somehow my memory of him, only a few days old, was totally altered. Amorphous in my imagination, my memory had taken on a composite of faces I already knew the look of, erasing all of Francisco. But I saw in his face the look of fear and identified it. Francisco was the dark-haired boy who looked like he had been crying.<\/p>\n \u2014Even you had been holding it together. <\/em><\/p>\n \u2014What entitled him to his tears?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n February 9, 2017<\/em><\/p>\n On June 7, 2006, my older brother emailed, \u201cHey a letter from the Portuguese sexual crimes bureau came in today, so I\u2019m emailing to make sure you\u2019re okay?\u201d<\/p>\n I responded, saying:<\/p>\n Yes, I\u2019m fine, I had a scare one night and took it very VERY seriously, and thus put two potential sex criminals in jail. Well, not in jail, but they\u2019re going to trial in the next few months. Don\u2019t tell Mum and Dad, they don\u2019t need to worry about anything.\u00a0It was a pretty stressful situation, involving multiple trips to the police station and ID lineups \u2026 But it\u2019s all over and despite the fact that it has come down to my word against theirs (and they have lawyers and will actually be present at the trial whereas only my statement will be present), I feel that in some small way, the fact that I followed it through that a small amount of justice has been served \u2026 Apart from all that, I\u2019m fine and dandy. I\u2019m in Granada now which is very very beautiful. You\u2019d love it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I mean. Who speaks like that?<\/p>\n \u2014Eighteen-year-old you is who.<\/em><\/p>\n Eighteen-year-old me, who will not let this ruin her trip! Who has exhausted her legal duties and will demand no concern,<\/p>\n \u2014A small amount of justice has been served.<\/p>\n who can absolutely handle trivial things like ID lineups and sleazy cops by herself, in a foreign land,<\/p>\n \u2014Fine and dandy.<\/em><\/p>\n whose parents need not be informed lest they ruin her new life, her new life which is, for the first time, her own.<\/p>\n \u2014But it\u2019s all over \u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n