One supposedly humanitarian and devoted League of Nations supporter, Gilbert
Murray, proclaimed:
There is in the world a hierarchy of races...those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long-run to be done by lower breeds of men. This much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious.
And they do accept it as obvious indeed. Perhaps in this third millennium nobody, I should hope, would dare publicly utter, let alone put into print, such words. But that’s what is engraved in the pink psyche from infancy. The words remain branded in all our psyches - the one psyche nodding agreement and basking in it while the other - especially that of Afroancestralsä, wherever they are - nodding in silent agreement and thus “accepting” our “predestined” place in the ladder of human hierarchy.
In all my writing, I completely avoid the B and W words, especially when I remember the impact they had on me in my young years in an English boarding school. I then realised what these words had on small children. What does an Afroancestralä child feel and experience the moment he learns or discovers that his complexion is not “beautiful”, nor is his hair, mouth, nose – the lot – and furthermore, that these facts relegates him and his entire people to an all-round lowest rung of the human ladder physically, economically, intellectually, morally and even aethetically? Added to this later, comes the cultural and spiritual/religious confusion and the naked poverty! The entire psyche of Afroancestralsä would seem to be one heap of disjecta membra! This child has a great deal of his self-worth ruined for him and might easily develop acute complexes and resign himself to them. Many citizens of India, Sri Lanka and East Asia are darker-skinned than many Africans and Afroancestralsä but nobody refers to them as “blacks”, least of all they themselves. Asiancestralsä do not refer to themselves as skin colours. But out of whatever irreparable collective psychological damage regarding an artificial term they adopted from Euroancestralsä, Africans and Afroancestralsä religiously refer to themselves as “blacks”. They are wonderfully doing the job of perpetrating the notion that somebody else must then, therefore, be “white”.
The Euroancestralä or Asiancestralä child also encounter the same processes and experiences. But on a different rung. The Euroancestralä child discovers that he and his people are the rulers of the current world (or any other world that has ever been, for all the child learns in his society and cares for), and he carries this complex into his adult life. He is part of the rulers by virtue of his complexion and characteristics. All the way to economic, militarily, morally and technologically. He grows up “elevated” by the fact that he and his people are not at the bottom of this human ladder and never have been. He is further cushioned by his people’s apparent cultural and religious clout. The worst that can happen to him is that he grows up with superiority complexes harmful not only to the others but also to himself as well. These are what I call Megignoarrogance complexes – mega ignorance and mega arrogance combined, which is so characteristic of Euroancestrals.
Especially the “I have nothing against other races” type.
The Asiancentral child is possibly “comforted” by the fact that he and his people are not at the bottom rung of the ladder. Not even in complexion, if perhaps in characteristics. Moreover, the Asiancestralsä have religions – however conceived as against African religions – and cultures that have endured or even repelled the impact of the Euroancestralä all-round hegemony.
I do not use the artificial complexion notions, because they simply are false and are not a restitution of the truth. The colour black is threatening even to animals of the jungle. It represents evil, invisible danger, dark powers, treacherous beings, the colour of death itself. Certain films, whether deliberate or coincidental, are so ridiculously colour-polarized that the Afroancestralsä acquire the colour of black river stones and the Euroancestralsä the colour of the ash of a cigarette that has burnt without being smoked.
Euroancestralsä, since the 17th century, have always been so bent on putting down Afroancestralsä that they would stop at nothing including maintaining that physical features and shade of skin influence everything. Writers like Peter Scholl-Latour to this day find a plethora of “cannibalistic” Africans with untold ugliness right across the continent. Anything positive in Africa since time immemorial is always attributed by Euroancestralsä to non-Africans. Such writers attribute organisational talent, orderliness, beauty and intelligence to physical features such as the breadth of one’s nose, the width of the mouth, the thickness of the lips and the (lighter) shade of the skin, even when it comes to Rwanda, with the Tutsis who since the colonial days were promptly labeled Europaeden and therefore perched over the Hutus who were judged as being Negroiden. Which begs the question of why these “Europaeiden” Africans are the worst lost cases in Africa. Chad is a dictatorship with special dungeons right under the presidential palace for torturing and murdering the nation’s citizens. Sudan is a nightmare for humankind and beasts. Rwanda was horrendously biblical in its slaughter of humankind, killing nearly a million in less than a hundred days. Somali is not even an existing state. Eritrea and Ethiopia are at each others’ throats in the most archaiv presentation of wars.
But the Euroancestralä writers are fixed in the 18th and 19th century classification system. The difference, as far as what I am writing about is concerned, is that I have the decency and maturity to try to see things with “Euroancestralä eyes”. But Euroancestralsä have forgotten that other people too should be seen with their own eyes, not the Euroancestralä ones, and have the right to be measured by their own “yardsticks”. The rest of us have to eat too to help us do the “lowest jobs” allegedly assigned us by divine providence. The Euroancestralä “lifestyle” one should keep off me. I wish every African all the wealth they long for, but I would not want them to lose their humane and open nature, their love of companionship and togetherness, their acceptance of sharing as an obvious human trait, their innate elegance and proud humbleness. I pray that no African female pop or film star would attain sensationalism and send fans shrieking and tearing their hair out because she knows how to get out of the limousine smiling at photographers and cameramen and leaving no doubts in their minds that she does not only wear no panties but can also never get a bra on the planet that fits her.
But once Western scholars came up with the concept of “race”, it was only compatible with the nature of human behaviour – and possibly forgivable – that Euroancestralsä used their “might” to give them the right to elevate their own to the top, make themselves the pièce de résistance. To this day humankind (even scholars and authors who ought to know better at long last) keeps on confusing ethnic groups, languages and nations with this fictitious “race” syndrom. History was segmented into successive ladders of “races”, with each “race” in a sort of relay race, each wielding power for a period of time before passing on the crown to a more “superior” variant. And now this segment we are in has this Western variant who is inundated with the terror of ever passing on this power to a new “superior” variant. So they eat more, arm themselves to above the teeth, acquire more material wealth, have gadgets in their homes to cash in real-time wasted in cooking, dishwashing, doing the laundry. They watch the telly while walking to the greengrocers and simultaneously talking to the same multi-tasking screen with the old peoples home to find out whether grandma is keeping up her hunger strike in rebellion to good family advise not to leave all her fortunes to her dog Pucci. Gadgets for raising the footrests of the comfy chair in the sitting room, or bed positions to watch the bedroom television. Gadgets that tell them that the baby, several rooms away is awake, or the Christmas turkey should be put into/taken out of the oven. Gadgets that peep to remind them that the visit to the GP is at ten-thirty this morning… All that and more, but they FOREVER HAVE NO TIME! Not even for each other. They are so short of time that anybody out there who wants to make trillions should start working on an adult high-tech nappy-toilet so that no time is wasted for calls of nature.
But back to “the ruling colour.” In this hurdles race, an assortment of scientist cabals were in a mad classification and systematisation frenzy, from archaeologists, palaeontologists, Indologists, historians, linguists and philologists – and all the other -ologists, -ogists and -uists in between, all the way to Pluto and back, sabre-rattling at each other. All the way to the use of fabrications of medieval monks who had done their holiest best to interpret the Book of Genesis literally. I quote Dr J.P. Mallory: “When the Greek word for oak is the same as the Germanic word for beech and the Russian word for elder, on what grounds does one ascribe an original Proto-Indo-European meaning to the word?” (In Search of the Indo-European, 1989, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. p.112)
Back in Eurasia of some 6,000 years ago an ancestor was found who spoke the languages of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. But especially in Europe, there was a near-universal desperate longing for an illustrious ancestry all their own, according to Dr J.P. Mallory. To begin with, Troy gave the Romans their illustrious past. Come the Middle Ages and the Spanish aristocracy, and only the Spanish aristocracy, mind, had their ancestral blood dripping directly into their veins from the veins of the superior Visigoths. Caught between hell and a furnace that gave them chronic schizophrenia, the French didn’t know whether they should head off towards the pedigree of Vercingetorix and his Gauls/Celts or make a run for Charlemagne and his Franks (Germans). The Germans were careening all over the entire European landscape anyway. I quote again from J.P. Mallory:
“The Germans, on the other hand, saw their own history begin with those expansions that provided the Visigoths, Franks and Saxons – the illustrious ancestors – of their neighbours. When Tacitus maintained that the Germans were pure of blood, unmixed with other races and autochthonous, there was little reason to deny that their origins lay in Northern Europe. If the Church required a Biblical link, then Ashkenaz, a grandson of the prolific Japheth, could be found to trek his way to Northern Europe and establish the German people.” (In Search of the Indo-Europeans, p. 266).
The English were your regular (so to speak) Europe’s Mestizos, octoroons and quadroons and whatever other “-roons” they themselves were so meticulously fussy about in the New World. The English were the dandy mixture of Anglo-Saxons, Britons, Normans, Vikings and Whoever. When you’re hit this hard, they must have thought to themselves, just reach out to the Promised Land. And so the English brought, from across the seas, some lost tribe of Israel just to make their ancestry even more ancient. Notice the oscillation between the pseudo-sciences and the Bible. An answer must always be found, an explanation given even if it means boarding the Discovery with a Bible, mind-boggling scientific formulae and equipment that makes a mockery of the Christian faith.
With the roaring intellectual salons of those days in Berlin, Vienna, London – and the busy seaports of Germany, England, Scandinavia and Holland – the Caucasians were furiously concocting theories into facts. They indeed magnanimously recovered from their inferiority complexes against the sophisticated and richly endowed “Mussulmans and Ethiopians”. By the 19th century, physical anthropologists measured “racial” superiority or inferiority by using the cephalic index. Dolichocephalic (long-headed) Nordics and their brachycephalic (broad-headed) southern neighbours. With this new patchwork of Dolichocephalic Nordics, simply look up the customs of the ancient Egyptians who, from birth, artificially formed their babies’ heads to acquire the long-headed shape, add to it the sort of anthropological excavations and grave-robberies of the 18th and 19th centuries, salt that with the splendours of the Indian Maharajas who now “belonged” to The Empire, etcetera etcetera, and you hit the jackpot. The blond blue-eyed fellow who had previously been relegated to the caricature of the dreamy romantic was flipped over.
Around 1870, he became the stereotype of the virile Nordic Garth types.
Again to quote from J.P. Mallory:
A superior Nordic physical type had been discovered by science; it remained for the philologists to provide him with an ancient and illustrious ethnic identity. The discovery of the Indo-European language family did more than simply elucidate the historical relationship between many Europeans and Asian languages. It severed once and for all the fantasy of deriving all languages from Hebrew, and by extension, Adam. The indivisibility of the human race was being destroyed not only by those who profited from exploiting different peoples, but by science itself. Following the West’s discovery of the wealth of Indic and Iranian literature, European scholars looked beyond Eden to seek their own more illustrious forebears in Central Asia, Iran and India. Although Indo-European and Indo-Germanic had both been coined early in the nineteenth century, Max Müller, and other linguists, encouraged the use of Aryan to describe the ancient Indo-European. Naturally, if these early Aryans were the ancestors of the Europeans, then they too must have been part of the superior white race (p.267).
Having climbed so high, you had to climb higher before things would fall apart. And things were falling apart – in the New World – and in fact more rapidly than it rose to the heights. But with a hell of a lot of clowns in the circus. Superiority of physical type, culture and language aside, other elements were missing for full-blooded Aryanism. Although the word-based language of the Chinese had been found “simple” and dropped to the bottom of the ladder, Asia was too far from Europe and quite frankly not pink enough or not at all pink. The intellectual environment of 19th and early 20th century Aryan “fitted with mental endowments” and “promoters of true progress” (V. Gordon Childe) was pulled away from the Hindu Kush or Himalayas and slotted in by Canon I. Taylor as “an improved race of Finns”. Theodor Poesche was of the grand opinion that if one could locate a spot in Europe with the highest cases of albinism, they would hit smack bang on the centre of the Aryan “race”. Then a European homeland was found by the Aryanists in the Pripet marshes of Eastern Europe. Come 1883 and one Karl Penka is ruling out any possibility of the “powerful, energetic blond race” ever developing from the unhealthy environment of a swamp. After rummaging through archaeology, mythology, etymology, linguistics and anthropology, the good fellow had it: Aryans originated in southern Scandinavia and could not be derived from elsewhere, no, sir, definitely not. Soon the entire European round tables were of a single conviction: Aryans had from the very fist cell been “blond Dolichocephalics”. It was, by Jove, “Aryan eyes”, “Aryan hair”, “Aryan blood…” The Indologist Max Müller got so nettled over the madness of the monster he had created that he slammed back that it was as if a linguist would speak of “a Dolichocephalic dictionary or a Brachycephalic grammar.”
“But it was too late. The Indo-Europeans and racism had become inseparable in the minds of many scholars… the superiority of the ancient Aryan Nordic race had entered popular political culture,” concludes Mallory on the subject of the search of the “Master Race”.
Well then, off to the Caribbean for another few shiploads of sugar, or to the Guinea Coast for loads of heathen prime sub-humans – the choice is yours, Christian. British colonisers, the only ones I and my family and people ever had to deal with, displaced and expelled and then seized the land for themselves. It was a long-established tradition. Like the horrors of the Celtic Irish in 1565. Everybody was a savage whose culture was useful or not useful enough, whose culture was not to be recognised and accepted, or so good that it had to be misappropriated.
The genes responsible for the colour of the skin are not responsible
for the colour of eyes or hair. This is why Africans often have green eyes, less often blue eyes.
Many Afroancestrals (at first under the power of the gun, later quite voluntarily through conditioned thinking) had gradually turned to eating lamb at Easter and turkey at Christmas, to replace the white cock at births or the brown cow at harvesting. The black-and-white bull at funerals gave way to the Lord's Prayer, by the same processes. But still the Afroancestralsä were treated with contempt or with the angry tolerance one would accord a retarded but harmless child. The cross with a naked man in a loincloth, even if made of wood or crude leather, was better than the ancestral carvings and figurines in bone and ivory and wood, better than the lion claw – for hanging around the neck as the fetish of fashion. An invisible God, in a non-existent heaven was better than the invisible but evident Gods deep in the earth, in trees, roaming the air, dwelling in the sun and the moon and so on, and sometimes even manifesting themselves in human, animal or other forms including thunder, lightning and eclipses. Has anybody ever seen the Holy Ghost? Is it not superstition? So why do Christians believe in this ghost? A voice to Moses in the wilderness or to Abraham about to slaughter his son, is the true religion! Is this where the West got acquainted with the idea of cannibalism as a religious ritual? The ancestors, the very ones who created you and whose blood runs in your veins and in the veins of your children and children’s children – to hold them for Gods is animism! To hang a lion’s tooth pendant around the neck is fetishism, but not hanging the cross around the neck whether the cross is in gold, ivory or in leather thongs holding a wooden cross! Only one very important fact was conveniently forgotten: Euroancestralsä have never come up with a religion that became a world religion. Christ is from our corner of the world, not from Reykjavik. We know him since the 3rd century AD, in both Eastern Africa and Egypt. And Africans have a world religion – Candomblé. It is not only practised in Africa and Europe but also in the entire Americas and the Caribbeans.
Meanwhile these so-called primitive carvings and figurines and other symbolisms of ancient Africa – the “primitive art” – are sitting pretty in European museums (Chirac just opened himself a brand new one in Paris, for Africa and Oceania) or private homes, as increasingly precious curiosities called collections, and worth enough to feed, heal, prevent diseases, educate and house the entire African continent for at least a few decades.
I often wonder what the current coin would look like if, for the sake of perspectives, the Afroancestralsä were the worshippers of a crucified man stripped down to a loincloth, with a thorny crown around his head? If the Afroancestralsä were the ones with the weekly rituals of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of this crucified man, and so on? If the Afroancestralsä were the ones making the sign of the cross on the front of their bodies or waving smoking containers or practising institutionalised exorcism or sprinkling water over their infants’ heads to welcome them into a faith they are still far from even fathoming? And then, on the other hand, have the Euroancestralsä as the worshippers of nature and their ancestors! I can see them converting the world into their religion with convincing arguments like: Nature and the ancestors are the true Gods – you stand in a direct line of ancestry with them not with some imaginary white-bearded fellow in an imaginary heaven with a practically naked “son” crucified on a cross wearing a crown of thorns! Stop this practise of the remaining stocks of your cannibalistic days when you ate human flesh and drank human blood! Turn to your True Creators whose blood is in your veins!
With the sword and the gun, I don’t doubt that not just the Japanese Shintoists but the majority of the world too, would turn to Ancestor-Worship, with Nature as God’s Messenger. And the planet would sigh with everlasting gratitude and equity, for everybody
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Human Rights Award to Daughters of Africa
Africa’s Daughters Are Gems
“Place Africa in the hands of the African womenand the continent would leave the rest of the world way behind.” APKY in DARKEST EUROPE AND AFRICA’S NIGHTMARE: A CRITICAL OBSERVATION OF NEIGHBORING CONTINENTS
“Place Africa in the hands of the African womenand the continent would leave the rest of the world way behind.” APKY in DARKEST EUROPE AND AFRICA’S NIGHTMARE: A CRITICAL OBSERVATION OF NEIGHBORING CONTINENTS
Eugénie Musayidire receiving the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award 2007 from the Lord Mayor of Nuremberg Dr Ulrich Maly at the Nuremberg Opera House
The whole world knows about them – the mighty daughters of Africa such as Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist and political activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Two other daughters of Africa have won the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award which is a biennial event that was started by the city of Nuremberg in 1995, attended by an international audience and by invitation only. On each occasion when my sisters were awardees, I clapped my hands in the Opera House until my palms were ready to produce sparks, shouting Bravo! Bravo! for the duration of the standing ovations, the veins snaking down my neck, as I’ve been informed. Since the founding of the award, there have been nine awardees, five men (two of them jointly for their engagement in fostering a better understanding between Israelis and Arabs) and four women. Two of the women are daughters of Africa – Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania in 1999 and the 2007 award went to Rwandan Eugénie Musayidire.
Inspired by the message contained in the "Way of Human Rights", the city of Nuremberg established the "Nuremberg International Human Rights Award" endowed with Euro 15,000 (19,000 dollars). The first award was presented on September 17, 1995 to the Russian human rights activist Sergej Kovalev, almost exactly 60 years after the passing of the National Socialist – Nazi – racial laws and 50 years after the end of World War II. It is a response to the human rights violations of those years and intended "to symbolise that any messages emanating from Nuremberg in the present and in the future will be symbols of peace reconciliation and human understanding". This award, to quote from its statutes, “is intended to contribute towards the observance and implementation of Human Rights as a universal and indivisible principle ... It honours individuals or groups who have, in an exemplary manner, committed themselves to the respect of Human Rights, sometimes at considerable personal risk. "The Nuremberg International Human Rights Awards is also to be seen as a call for individual commitment and is hoped to contribute to a spirit of responsibility towards human rights. The decision on the award is made by an international jury.
Eugénie tells her own story thus:
“I grew up in the village of Nyanza [in Rwanda] and have happy memories of my childhood there. My father was a doctor and was killed in 1959, but my mother didn't marry again, and I grew up with my mother and brother. In 1973 when I was in my 20s, I found my name on a list of Tutsis who were going to be arrested. I escaped overnight to Burundi. Four years later I sought asylum in Germany, where I raised a small family. My mother used to come and visit me every year for three or four months. Her last visit was from May-September 1993. I should have kept her with me. My mother thought that nothing would happen to her in Rwanda - she was an old lady, the oldest in the village, the lively and cheerful granny of orphan children. Who would dare to harm her? She was mistaken.
“My mother died on 22 April 1994, in Nyanza where all the Tutsi were killed on that day. In all, 29 members of my family were killed then: my mother, my brother, his four children and his wife, my aunts, uncles, cousins, godchildren and friends. The only members of my family who survived were already living in Europe before 1994. Now I have nobody living in Rwanda. My trauma and pain in experiencing the genocide from Germany were indescribable. I would watch the television news, searching for the faces of my mother, brother and friends, hoping against hope to recognise my loved ones amidst the mass of refugees. But they were nowhere to be seen. My anguish was doubled by the fact that I knew my mother's murderer. He was one of our Hutu neighbours, long known to the family. He and I had played together as children. My mother taught his wife to sew, prepared his daughter for her wedding, looked after the two little ones when they were young. She used to take his family presents from Germany: soap, lotion, chocolate, biscuits, exercise books and pencils for the children. How was it that he gathered up those innocent people and marched them for an hour to prepared mass graves?
“I went back to Rwanda in January 2001 to meet my mother's murderer. His sister didn't understand what her brother had done. His mother felt the same. She took me in her arms and we cried and cried together. It's difficult to explain my feelings about meeting the person who killed my mother. I can't pardon him. I don't want vengeance, but I need time and distance from him. I could possibly forgive him but he has refused to admit his responsibility for the genocide and for my mother's death. He doesn't show remorse. Forgiveness is a two-way process. I am the victim and I feel sadness and mourn, but the killer must show remorse and sadness for what he or she has done.”
The 1999 awardee, Lawyer Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania
The 54-year-old Eugénie returned to Rwanda in 2001 of her own free will and founded the association Izere (Hope), which looks after orphaned young people, some of whom are still today suffering awfully from the horrible experiences of the 1994 genocide. Izere is an encounter and therapy centre. The young people receive expert help. Some of them live there permanently because they lost all their family members during the genocide. Eugénie is also tackling the task of reconciliation which is still far from being accomplished. At first she was herself shattered and in need of therapy and received psychotherapeutic assistance for a long time before she could gradually stand on firm grounds again. During the therapy she started writing to get all her grief, rage and despair off her chest. The result of this arduous process was her book “Mein Stein spricht” (My Stone Talks) published in 1999. But for this determined daughter of Africa, writing was not the end. So after returning to Rwanda in 2001 she visited the man who killed her mother with two strokes of the axe on the mother’s head, in a Nyanza prison where he is serving a life sentence. A TV documentary “My Mother’s Murderer” was produced which covered the terrible journey Eugénie made. The documentary won the Grimme Media Prize in 2003. The murderer talked with Eugénie and admitted killing people including the mother of Eugénie, but refused to apologise, claiming that he had been forced to act like he did, that he had bowed to outside pressure, followed others. With these excuses the man tried to justify himself to Eugénie.
Dealing with the causes and, most of all, the repercussions of genocide is now one of the tasks Eugénie is tackling in Izere, the place of security and comfort for the traumatised young people, both Hutu and Tutsi. She focuses on caring for young people who are traumatised, some of them severely, because of the 1994 genocide. She is now making plans to build a small school with her prize money, where her protégés can catch up on their qualifications, for example in the tailor’s workshop in Izere. And of course the psychotherapeutic assistance.
Fatimata M’Baye was born in 1957 in Mauritania. She is a lawyer and has been fighting with admirable courage and at high personal risks for the rights of her Afroancestral ethnic group in Mauritania. This group is still being discriminated against by the country’s Moorish majority and elite. Fatimata is fighting for the rights of women and children and against slavery which is still in existence in the country. She has been imprisoned time and again but always picks up her struggles the minute she steps out of the prison gates. She has become a symbolic figure fighting for respect for human rights in Africa. In awarding her the prize in 1999, the Nuremberg jury acknowledged her exemplary and courageous commitment to human rights. Fatimata initiated projects in Mauritania which are intended to support the Afroancestral population, among them the foundation of an association fighting for legal reappraisal of human rights violations and offering new perspectives for the future of the victims’ families.
Power to, and God bless, the Daughters of Africa!
Friday, 13 June 2008
HELENA'S SECRET
Chapter 1
Barcelona, Saturday 31st of July 2004
“My ears always go funny on board,” Helena told Enrique, settling in her seat in the private jet again. She had just had a shower with him in the small bathroom. “My first flight was somewhat illegal. It was in an RAF plane and I was scared stiff. Then Grandpa, an RAF commander, told me to hold my nose and gulp. Always works especially at takeoff.”
“I prefer the sweets.” He leaned back on his seat, eyes closed and hands cradling the back of his head. Unlike her he had not got back into his clothes. A towel was wrapped around his hips.
She was so excited about the coming prospects. She was going to meet her future family. She had just left her lifelong family in Cyprus, worried. They were not as confident in her relationship with Enrique as she herself was. She had just been made love to in the air – a first for her. He was the love of her life, she was convinced. They had known each other for over two months. And she would tell him all about her before this night was over. The secret wedged between them was an imperfection that had to be removed by surgical words. This was the only unpleasant prospect for her to deal with tonight when they finally arrived in Barcelona. Tomorrow would be too late. Be honest with him, darling, before you meet his family, Mummy had said – for the umpteenth time.
Helena watched Paphos diminish in the widening blue mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Cyprus the golden, like an autumn leaf tossed onto the sea by a careless Divinity, rocking on a glittering endless blue hammock.
Earlier today in Limassol, she had called Ramón and asked him to meet them at the airport but Ramón had rejected her request. She couldn’t blame him. There was only so much selflessness a man could afford. Still, if Ramón had met them, she had planned to tell him her story first and ask him how he thought Enrique would react to it. It was ever so easy to talk to Ramón about anything and everything. Almost easier than talking to Uncle Alex who, before Ramón, was her number one tell-all, let-me-hear-the-dirt confidante. On the other hand something about Enrique made her want to really be nothing other than perfect, his Star of Cyprus. No warts on the cheeks, no growths in the heart. She shared in his idolized “sexiest star advocate in the international business community” image, and revelled in having bulbs flashing and cameras whirring wherever and whenever they were part of the public life, as he called it. Helenrique! Helenrique! Whoever had coined that, Enrique or the media? But her new world was all so intoxicating. On the screen Enrique became so present, so crackling with energy, the perpetually stray black strand of hair hugging his eyebrow, his forget-me-not blue eyes so intense – everything about him so three dimensional that he almost blasted into the room through the screen.
“A penny for your thoughts, Corazón?”
“Enrique.” She blushed furiously, taking her eyes away from the porthole and her thoughts. She felt as if Enrique had caught her thinking about Ramón through an aria in the Mathew Passion. “Are you sure you should be walking around like that?” He still had only the towel around his hips.
“Nobody’s complaining but you. Awhile ago you didn’t mind me naked with you all over me. Does the towel make me more naked?”
“You’re impossible. But anybody could walk in now, perhaps. The crew and your media people, I mean. When will we be in Barcelona?”
When they boarded the jet, she had not known that the media people were waiting inside to welcome them. She quickly got over the surprise and found herself wishing that Mummy and Daddy would know about the media. Just to demonstrate to them how much he cared for her, how much he was proud of her, wanted to show her to the world. She could handle the media by now and Enrique said she was such a natural any day anywhere with the paparazzi. But her parents had not gone farther than the VIP lounge at Paphos International Airport.
“Eight, eight-thirty. Don’t mind supper on board, d’you?”
She shook her head. “More reason you should put something on.”
“The crew may burst in here after a discreet knock or throat-clearing. The media – never, unless invited to, okay?” She nodded. “Beautiful.” He placed a hand on her bare shoulder. “You’re so beautiful, Helena. After next week, let’s just lock ourselves up somewhere and never come out till the holidays are over.”
She remembered the Saturday afternoon in May, when he burst into her scene with Ramón like a sudden whirlwind, standing between them and squeezing a male and a female shoulder in each hand. That moment when two opposing forces battled in her, making her knees threaten to buckle under her. She was wearing this same flimsy white cotton dress with the tight bodice, spaghetti straps and knee-length skirt gathered at the waist for the petticoat look, and the belt cinching in her waist. Enrique was always a solid gale when he entered a room or even a hall.
“A great idea, darling. Filise me…” she added in Greek, tugging at the towel.
Three hours later, they were under the shower again, this time in a bathroom that was large enough to be an executive office. The whole duplex apartment made her too enthralled to find the right words for it. When they came in she had simply let him take her hand, like a trusting child, and show her the rooms and the several remote control and safety gadgets. Even in the shower where they were now, all one had to do was to press buttons for “shower”, “temperature” and “start”. She personally thought it all a bit too much, unless one was an invalid or something, but she enjoyed the pleasures he enjoyed, was proud of the same things he took pride in.
They trailed from the bathroom past the dressing room, wrapped in heated towels, into the huge bedroom dominated by an enormous bed. He lowered her onto the bed and then touched switches and there were soft lights and music and an electric fireplace – simply a visual effect in summer. There was a bottle of chilled champagne in a bucket and two crystal goblets. He poured the champagne and they drank it from each other’s mouths. He poured some on her navel and sucked on it, making her tingle.
“I have to learn Spanish,” she murmured. "The music sounds so erotic, but the words!”
“I’ll translate…sort…of… in…between…Corazón…”
It was much, much later, taking another short break, sipping champagne and listening to endless music from some invisible central source, that she felt relaxed and confident enough to tell him. She had gone over the HOW many times in her mind and had long decided that the best way to do it was the way Mummy had told it to her. From the beginning. From when Daddy had confessed to Mummy, and the two ended up sharing “our secret” and are still happy and in love with each other, despite the secret.
“Darling…” she raised her shoulders off the bed and looked at him in the eyes. With the soft lighting, his eyes were ink blue and glistening in their deep sockets.
“Corazón…?”
“There’s a family story I have to tell you. I want you to know it before we meet your family tomorrow and…”
“Today, beautiful. It’s already past midnight.” He put an arm around her and pulled her closer to him, punching the pillows on the headboard for comfort. “What is it, then?”
Her heartbeats accelerated. She drained her glass and placed it on the night table next to the bucket with the champagne bottle. She was shaking badly.
“Corazón?”
She pushed her loose hair to one side of her using both hands. “I’m all right. But, err, … oh God…! It’s about Daddy. About me and Daddy…”
“What?”
“Please don’t interrupt me or my courage will fail me, Enrique,” she said with renewed determination.
Then she told him. Everything from the days in Timberlake Priory in Yorkshire to moving over to Cyprus. She quickly ploughed on and on and on, leaving nothing out. She didn’t look at him anymore. But she felt his reactions as she told him the story. His arm slid away from under her. His body continuously inched away from her. Was it shock? Was it empathy? Was it pity? Or did he feel disgust?
She didn’t look at him until the end of her story. Then she did.
He had jumped out of bed and was pacing up and down making strange noises. He came back to her and stood close, a little bent from the waist. On her side of the bed. At first it was shock that she saw etched in his handsome features. His mouth kept opening and closing before whatever he wanted to say could be said. But slowly, disgust replaced the shock. He said perdón rapidly several times, giving the word no time to breath between the repetitions, the word an ugly protrusion prodding his tongue and consciousness. Then the rest of the words thundered out of him.
He screamed them at her. She had never seen him so sentient.
She closed her eyes in order not to see his face, so contorted with disgust at her. He kept on screaming at her. As if it was all her fault. As if she had had any say, any choice in the whole thing. As if she had happily rolled herself around in the mud like a baby elephant.
She curled up and hoped to disappear from the face of the earth, too hurt to even cry.
“Wait a minute;” he said and walked to one of his gadgets and flicked the light on from soft to a stark white to illuminate her better. Her golden skin refused to own up, remaining innocent, perfect and beautiful. As innocent as an infant’s. Untouched by anything but a mother’s loving hands. He pulled the sheets off her. She made herself into a ball and the humiliation began to set in. What did he expect to discover, that she grew horns at night or turned into a vampire? She began to tremble like a leaf and did her best not to sob. She endeavoured to marshal her whirling thoughts and senses, willing herself to remain as calm as she could.
But his words crashed inside her head over and over again. Sliced her flesh into strips. Plunged deep in her vital organs like a dagger handled by powerful hands. Over and over again. Nasty and cheap words she never expected from him. They broke her bones to splinters, dismembered her. She began to sob relentlessly. She sobbed even harder thinking about her father.
Enrique’s mind spun out of its natural revolutions. His disgust acquired other tinges. For himself, being the self-centred trailblazer that he was. Deep black tinges. An abyss. Losses instead of gains in prestige. The media, all these several weeks. How was he going to undo all that? And how was he going to explain all this to the family? Well, the family will understand. That he nearly made her his wife! The mother of his children, for God’s sake!
His rage and vexation soared and roared to an inferno, like a building on fire whose windows shatter to let in the oxygen. He turned to her. On her.
“You bitch! How could you have done this to me, huh?”
If she had told him the truth from the very beginning, everything would have been slotted in their correct compartments. He would have enjoyed being with her, sleeping with her, buying her expensive presents. But not going so far as to get engaged with a…
“All right, Helena. Now we can fuck.” The voice solid like reinforced concrete.
She saw the madness in his eyes, began crying in pleas. She was no longer on a silk-gilded bed with a man who could take her to heaven and back. This was the beast her father had warned her against, not the noble savage of her fantasies with Mummy. But even Mummy had warned her against this particular beast, that she might find herself out on a limb with Enrique. Her mind was running marathons but in a circle. The pain, the fear, the disgust and revulsion as he tried to pin her down. He pried her thighs apart with his strong legs as his hands pinned her wrists to the headboard. She screamed and fought him.
“Shut up! You’ll love it rough, won’t you?”
He was too strong for her but still she combined pleas with fighting back. “Enrique, please! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before… I was scared of your… Please don’t do this to me! Don’t…! It’s still me, Enrique, your Star of Cyp…!”
They had been making love for half the day and night. He penetrated her painfully but effortlessly. Only her wild struggles disconnected them, throwing him off before he would thrust into her anew. He decided to do something in order to achieve his intentions. He released her right hand in order to use his own hand to guide himself into her and hold her pressed to him.
It was her chance.
She used her released hand to whip the champagne bottle out, knocking the bucket almost noiselessly to the fluffy floor. He was so busy in his mad endeavours that he didn’t notice her grab the bottle. She raised it in the air and brought it down, with all her might, on the side of his head. The bottle broke, shooting off a stream of champagne. A noise caught in his throat and he slumped. She pushed him off her and made for the dressing room. But he was so still that she stopped to look at him. He lay lifeless across the bed.
“Enrique?” What to do… what to do… what…to…do? Was he dead? The police…
Too many things bowling around her head. “Enrique?”
She rushed back to him, holding the top half of the broken bottle as a weapon. She tilted her rumbling head to one side like an intelligent dog. Enrique said nothing and the room was full of it. Before she could think she prodded him with the broken bottle on his naked side. He remained still. His head was lying in a pool of blood, the pool widening. More fresh blood welled out from his side. She stiffened.
Think! Call an ambulance! The mobile! Where’s the mobile…my handbag…the dressing…no – the bathroom!
She ran into the office-sized bathroom and found her bag on a dressing table. With one hand she opened it and shook the contents out as she ran back to the bedroom. The mobile thudded to the floor in the dressing room and she picked it up, dropping the handbag. She had only one free hand. The hand with her weapon, she poised ready for any eventualities. Her head was spinning and droning. She reached the bedroom.
Enrique was gone.
God almighty, he’s not dead! He had moved! Where to? “Enrique?”
There was a weak groan from the other side of the bed, then bloodied fingers clawed on the bed sheets. The dark half dome of his head matted with blood, glistening as it caught the light, appeared. She screamed involuntarily before worrying about her safety.
He’s dangerous! Call the police! Bring yourself to safety! Explain to the police! You didn’t mean to kill him! Bring yourself to safety and call the police!
“BUT HOW!” she screamed out aloud. “HELP! HELP! HELP ME!”
His shoulders appeared from the opposite side of the bed.
THINK!
“You b-b-bi—tch!”
The gadgets. What had he said, showing off his gadgets to her? When you don’t want the servants to surprise you in the bedroom, dressing room or bathroom, this button makes it impossible for anyone to come in from the outside…
The bathroom!
He was clawing halfway across the huge bed towards her. She bolted to the bathroom, locking the dressing room. Oh shit! Simply a sliding glass screen between the bedroom and the dressing room. No lockable door. Oh God! She had dropped the remote control and bent to recover it, mobile phone in the same hand. Through the glass door to the bedroom she saw him still creeping across the bloodied bed sheets towards the dressing room, calling her dreadful names. She bolted out of the dressing room, collecting her dropped things and the half empty handbag. She ran into the bathroom and, feverishly reading and deciding on the codes on the display, she bolted all the doors leading to the bathroom, grateful for the English language. Stop. Start. On. Off. Lock. Unlock. She heard him pounding on the dressing room door to the bathroom. What if there was another reserve gadget? She wanted to cry but told herself she had to think. She had put herself in this situation. She had to get herself out of it.
The police. He wasn’t dead after all. They would understand a foreign girl panicking. She had acted in self defence. But how did one dial the Spanish police…?
Enrique was getting louder both in voice and the pounding. Was he nearer? Outside the bathroom door perhaps? Which one of the doors? How long before he worked that or any other door open? Flinching with each pounding outside, she punched the speed-dial for Mummy. Then she remembered she was in Spain and it was in the middle of the night anyway. Her mother and father would more likely die of a heart attack than arrive in time to rescue her. Uncle Alex! Maybe he knew at least the Spanish police or fire brigade number. But what time was it in Tokyo? Was he on stage? Tokyo code?
“You fucking bitch, open the door! Open up…!”
For a moment she broke down crying. That was Enrique out there calling her names. She had loved him. He had loved her. What happened to it all? She wept bitterly but the banging and abuses and insults propped up her mental spine. She had NOT loved him, she had loved a fake. Just as he had never loved her, Helena. He had loved his own dreams.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t open this door at once!”
He couldn’t get in. That threat says he can’t get in!
She felt much better. Her head cleared. Well, fuck you too mate. She rummaged in the cupboards. A boiler? Anything where some kind of telephone number was written even if it belonged to a plumber or the electricity company. But everything was high tech to a fault. It was like being in a luxury clinical ward of a spaceship.
And then his name hit her memory with a force that made her stop searching and sit on the floor in her nakedness. Her hands were shaking as she punched his speed-dial. Her tears began to flow again – with relief. The number started ringing.
The banging and insults outside the bathroom door jarred her nerves.
Please, Ramón! Have the phone on! Wake up! I need you desperately!
Oh God, he was a Ruíz de Alarcón too! Would he want to have anything to do with her after this? After knowing? In panic, she disconnected the number. Her fear mingled with a sudden sense of doom. Both hovered above her like a dark starless sky about to drop and squash her on her last leg to hell. But the banging from the door was getting incessant.
“I need the fucking first aid kit, you bitch!”
Dear God. Her brain was doing everything to detach itself from her body and she had to summon something to assist her in not reinforcing such a situation. She crept as far away from the doors as possible and crouched in a corner, bitterly sobbing. Twenty-two years, a first lover eleven years older, out in a foreign country, and now this.
But maybe Enrique was bleeding to death! For him Ramón would come. And if he came for his cousin she would also get out of here. She punched Ramón’s speed-dial again and was determined to wait. If it was the mailbox, she was ready to leave a mess…
“Mi vida? Is anything wrong?”
And all else broke in her anew, slithering into her like the moment of birth but in reverse. Between bitter sobs she managed, “Ramón, please come and help me…Please come and help me, Ramón… Enrique…hates me… Help me…or send…the police…to…help me…Ramón… Please…please…Ramón…help…me…”
On the other end of the line, Ramón shook himself wide awake. He could hear her desperation. “Helena? Please calm down, mi amor…what’s…?”
“Send me….some…help…Ramón…”
“Hey, calm down. I’m on my way. Tell me what happened, Helena.” He was already frantically stepping into his clothes. What on earth has Enrique done? “Helena?”
“Help me…please…Ramón…I’ll never…ask you…for anything…again…”
“Why should I send the police?” Then he heard the banging and gabbled voice in the background. Jesus! What was going on?
His words sent her into fresh paroxysms. “Please, Ramón…get…me…out of…here…!” Dear God, please make him come to me. Or send the police.
“Helena, don’t disconnect the line, okay? Where’s Enrique? Are you hurt ?”
“Outside the door…I’m…in the…bath…roooom…!”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a moment, mi vida. Stay where you are and don’t disconnect.” Relieved and much stronger inside, she curled up on the floor under the sink, her mobile pressed to her ears, listening to his soothing words until they were more like a lulling mantra repeated again and again. Her mind drifted back to the day she had first met the cousins and made the biggest mistake in her life.
Barcelona, Saturday 31st of July 2004
“My ears always go funny on board,” Helena told Enrique, settling in her seat in the private jet again. She had just had a shower with him in the small bathroom. “My first flight was somewhat illegal. It was in an RAF plane and I was scared stiff. Then Grandpa, an RAF commander, told me to hold my nose and gulp. Always works especially at takeoff.”
“I prefer the sweets.” He leaned back on his seat, eyes closed and hands cradling the back of his head. Unlike her he had not got back into his clothes. A towel was wrapped around his hips.
She was so excited about the coming prospects. She was going to meet her future family. She had just left her lifelong family in Cyprus, worried. They were not as confident in her relationship with Enrique as she herself was. She had just been made love to in the air – a first for her. He was the love of her life, she was convinced. They had known each other for over two months. And she would tell him all about her before this night was over. The secret wedged between them was an imperfection that had to be removed by surgical words. This was the only unpleasant prospect for her to deal with tonight when they finally arrived in Barcelona. Tomorrow would be too late. Be honest with him, darling, before you meet his family, Mummy had said – for the umpteenth time.
Helena watched Paphos diminish in the widening blue mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Cyprus the golden, like an autumn leaf tossed onto the sea by a careless Divinity, rocking on a glittering endless blue hammock.
Earlier today in Limassol, she had called Ramón and asked him to meet them at the airport but Ramón had rejected her request. She couldn’t blame him. There was only so much selflessness a man could afford. Still, if Ramón had met them, she had planned to tell him her story first and ask him how he thought Enrique would react to it. It was ever so easy to talk to Ramón about anything and everything. Almost easier than talking to Uncle Alex who, before Ramón, was her number one tell-all, let-me-hear-the-dirt confidante. On the other hand something about Enrique made her want to really be nothing other than perfect, his Star of Cyprus. No warts on the cheeks, no growths in the heart. She shared in his idolized “sexiest star advocate in the international business community” image, and revelled in having bulbs flashing and cameras whirring wherever and whenever they were part of the public life, as he called it. Helenrique! Helenrique! Whoever had coined that, Enrique or the media? But her new world was all so intoxicating. On the screen Enrique became so present, so crackling with energy, the perpetually stray black strand of hair hugging his eyebrow, his forget-me-not blue eyes so intense – everything about him so three dimensional that he almost blasted into the room through the screen.
“A penny for your thoughts, Corazón?”
“Enrique.” She blushed furiously, taking her eyes away from the porthole and her thoughts. She felt as if Enrique had caught her thinking about Ramón through an aria in the Mathew Passion. “Are you sure you should be walking around like that?” He still had only the towel around his hips.
“Nobody’s complaining but you. Awhile ago you didn’t mind me naked with you all over me. Does the towel make me more naked?”
“You’re impossible. But anybody could walk in now, perhaps. The crew and your media people, I mean. When will we be in Barcelona?”
When they boarded the jet, she had not known that the media people were waiting inside to welcome them. She quickly got over the surprise and found herself wishing that Mummy and Daddy would know about the media. Just to demonstrate to them how much he cared for her, how much he was proud of her, wanted to show her to the world. She could handle the media by now and Enrique said she was such a natural any day anywhere with the paparazzi. But her parents had not gone farther than the VIP lounge at Paphos International Airport.
“Eight, eight-thirty. Don’t mind supper on board, d’you?”
She shook her head. “More reason you should put something on.”
“The crew may burst in here after a discreet knock or throat-clearing. The media – never, unless invited to, okay?” She nodded. “Beautiful.” He placed a hand on her bare shoulder. “You’re so beautiful, Helena. After next week, let’s just lock ourselves up somewhere and never come out till the holidays are over.”
She remembered the Saturday afternoon in May, when he burst into her scene with Ramón like a sudden whirlwind, standing between them and squeezing a male and a female shoulder in each hand. That moment when two opposing forces battled in her, making her knees threaten to buckle under her. She was wearing this same flimsy white cotton dress with the tight bodice, spaghetti straps and knee-length skirt gathered at the waist for the petticoat look, and the belt cinching in her waist. Enrique was always a solid gale when he entered a room or even a hall.
“A great idea, darling. Filise me…” she added in Greek, tugging at the towel.
Three hours later, they were under the shower again, this time in a bathroom that was large enough to be an executive office. The whole duplex apartment made her too enthralled to find the right words for it. When they came in she had simply let him take her hand, like a trusting child, and show her the rooms and the several remote control and safety gadgets. Even in the shower where they were now, all one had to do was to press buttons for “shower”, “temperature” and “start”. She personally thought it all a bit too much, unless one was an invalid or something, but she enjoyed the pleasures he enjoyed, was proud of the same things he took pride in.
They trailed from the bathroom past the dressing room, wrapped in heated towels, into the huge bedroom dominated by an enormous bed. He lowered her onto the bed and then touched switches and there were soft lights and music and an electric fireplace – simply a visual effect in summer. There was a bottle of chilled champagne in a bucket and two crystal goblets. He poured the champagne and they drank it from each other’s mouths. He poured some on her navel and sucked on it, making her tingle.
“I have to learn Spanish,” she murmured. "The music sounds so erotic, but the words!”
“I’ll translate…sort…of… in…between…Corazón…”
It was much, much later, taking another short break, sipping champagne and listening to endless music from some invisible central source, that she felt relaxed and confident enough to tell him. She had gone over the HOW many times in her mind and had long decided that the best way to do it was the way Mummy had told it to her. From the beginning. From when Daddy had confessed to Mummy, and the two ended up sharing “our secret” and are still happy and in love with each other, despite the secret.
“Darling…” she raised her shoulders off the bed and looked at him in the eyes. With the soft lighting, his eyes were ink blue and glistening in their deep sockets.
“Corazón…?”
“There’s a family story I have to tell you. I want you to know it before we meet your family tomorrow and…”
“Today, beautiful. It’s already past midnight.” He put an arm around her and pulled her closer to him, punching the pillows on the headboard for comfort. “What is it, then?”
Her heartbeats accelerated. She drained her glass and placed it on the night table next to the bucket with the champagne bottle. She was shaking badly.
“Corazón?”
She pushed her loose hair to one side of her using both hands. “I’m all right. But, err, … oh God…! It’s about Daddy. About me and Daddy…”
“What?”
“Please don’t interrupt me or my courage will fail me, Enrique,” she said with renewed determination.
Then she told him. Everything from the days in Timberlake Priory in Yorkshire to moving over to Cyprus. She quickly ploughed on and on and on, leaving nothing out. She didn’t look at him anymore. But she felt his reactions as she told him the story. His arm slid away from under her. His body continuously inched away from her. Was it shock? Was it empathy? Was it pity? Or did he feel disgust?
She didn’t look at him until the end of her story. Then she did.
He had jumped out of bed and was pacing up and down making strange noises. He came back to her and stood close, a little bent from the waist. On her side of the bed. At first it was shock that she saw etched in his handsome features. His mouth kept opening and closing before whatever he wanted to say could be said. But slowly, disgust replaced the shock. He said perdón rapidly several times, giving the word no time to breath between the repetitions, the word an ugly protrusion prodding his tongue and consciousness. Then the rest of the words thundered out of him.
He screamed them at her. She had never seen him so sentient.
She closed her eyes in order not to see his face, so contorted with disgust at her. He kept on screaming at her. As if it was all her fault. As if she had had any say, any choice in the whole thing. As if she had happily rolled herself around in the mud like a baby elephant.
She curled up and hoped to disappear from the face of the earth, too hurt to even cry.
“Wait a minute;” he said and walked to one of his gadgets and flicked the light on from soft to a stark white to illuminate her better. Her golden skin refused to own up, remaining innocent, perfect and beautiful. As innocent as an infant’s. Untouched by anything but a mother’s loving hands. He pulled the sheets off her. She made herself into a ball and the humiliation began to set in. What did he expect to discover, that she grew horns at night or turned into a vampire? She began to tremble like a leaf and did her best not to sob. She endeavoured to marshal her whirling thoughts and senses, willing herself to remain as calm as she could.
But his words crashed inside her head over and over again. Sliced her flesh into strips. Plunged deep in her vital organs like a dagger handled by powerful hands. Over and over again. Nasty and cheap words she never expected from him. They broke her bones to splinters, dismembered her. She began to sob relentlessly. She sobbed even harder thinking about her father.
Enrique’s mind spun out of its natural revolutions. His disgust acquired other tinges. For himself, being the self-centred trailblazer that he was. Deep black tinges. An abyss. Losses instead of gains in prestige. The media, all these several weeks. How was he going to undo all that? And how was he going to explain all this to the family? Well, the family will understand. That he nearly made her his wife! The mother of his children, for God’s sake!
His rage and vexation soared and roared to an inferno, like a building on fire whose windows shatter to let in the oxygen. He turned to her. On her.
“You bitch! How could you have done this to me, huh?”
If she had told him the truth from the very beginning, everything would have been slotted in their correct compartments. He would have enjoyed being with her, sleeping with her, buying her expensive presents. But not going so far as to get engaged with a…
“All right, Helena. Now we can fuck.” The voice solid like reinforced concrete.
She saw the madness in his eyes, began crying in pleas. She was no longer on a silk-gilded bed with a man who could take her to heaven and back. This was the beast her father had warned her against, not the noble savage of her fantasies with Mummy. But even Mummy had warned her against this particular beast, that she might find herself out on a limb with Enrique. Her mind was running marathons but in a circle. The pain, the fear, the disgust and revulsion as he tried to pin her down. He pried her thighs apart with his strong legs as his hands pinned her wrists to the headboard. She screamed and fought him.
“Shut up! You’ll love it rough, won’t you?”
He was too strong for her but still she combined pleas with fighting back. “Enrique, please! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before… I was scared of your… Please don’t do this to me! Don’t…! It’s still me, Enrique, your Star of Cyp…!”
They had been making love for half the day and night. He penetrated her painfully but effortlessly. Only her wild struggles disconnected them, throwing him off before he would thrust into her anew. He decided to do something in order to achieve his intentions. He released her right hand in order to use his own hand to guide himself into her and hold her pressed to him.
It was her chance.
She used her released hand to whip the champagne bottle out, knocking the bucket almost noiselessly to the fluffy floor. He was so busy in his mad endeavours that he didn’t notice her grab the bottle. She raised it in the air and brought it down, with all her might, on the side of his head. The bottle broke, shooting off a stream of champagne. A noise caught in his throat and he slumped. She pushed him off her and made for the dressing room. But he was so still that she stopped to look at him. He lay lifeless across the bed.
“Enrique?” What to do… what to do… what…to…do? Was he dead? The police…
Too many things bowling around her head. “Enrique?”
She rushed back to him, holding the top half of the broken bottle as a weapon. She tilted her rumbling head to one side like an intelligent dog. Enrique said nothing and the room was full of it. Before she could think she prodded him with the broken bottle on his naked side. He remained still. His head was lying in a pool of blood, the pool widening. More fresh blood welled out from his side. She stiffened.
Think! Call an ambulance! The mobile! Where’s the mobile…my handbag…the dressing…no – the bathroom!
She ran into the office-sized bathroom and found her bag on a dressing table. With one hand she opened it and shook the contents out as she ran back to the bedroom. The mobile thudded to the floor in the dressing room and she picked it up, dropping the handbag. She had only one free hand. The hand with her weapon, she poised ready for any eventualities. Her head was spinning and droning. She reached the bedroom.
Enrique was gone.
God almighty, he’s not dead! He had moved! Where to? “Enrique?”
There was a weak groan from the other side of the bed, then bloodied fingers clawed on the bed sheets. The dark half dome of his head matted with blood, glistening as it caught the light, appeared. She screamed involuntarily before worrying about her safety.
He’s dangerous! Call the police! Bring yourself to safety! Explain to the police! You didn’t mean to kill him! Bring yourself to safety and call the police!
“BUT HOW!” she screamed out aloud. “HELP! HELP! HELP ME!”
His shoulders appeared from the opposite side of the bed.
THINK!
“You b-b-bi—tch!”
The gadgets. What had he said, showing off his gadgets to her? When you don’t want the servants to surprise you in the bedroom, dressing room or bathroom, this button makes it impossible for anyone to come in from the outside…
The bathroom!
He was clawing halfway across the huge bed towards her. She bolted to the bathroom, locking the dressing room. Oh shit! Simply a sliding glass screen between the bedroom and the dressing room. No lockable door. Oh God! She had dropped the remote control and bent to recover it, mobile phone in the same hand. Through the glass door to the bedroom she saw him still creeping across the bloodied bed sheets towards the dressing room, calling her dreadful names. She bolted out of the dressing room, collecting her dropped things and the half empty handbag. She ran into the bathroom and, feverishly reading and deciding on the codes on the display, she bolted all the doors leading to the bathroom, grateful for the English language. Stop. Start. On. Off. Lock. Unlock. She heard him pounding on the dressing room door to the bathroom. What if there was another reserve gadget? She wanted to cry but told herself she had to think. She had put herself in this situation. She had to get herself out of it.
The police. He wasn’t dead after all. They would understand a foreign girl panicking. She had acted in self defence. But how did one dial the Spanish police…?
Enrique was getting louder both in voice and the pounding. Was he nearer? Outside the bathroom door perhaps? Which one of the doors? How long before he worked that or any other door open? Flinching with each pounding outside, she punched the speed-dial for Mummy. Then she remembered she was in Spain and it was in the middle of the night anyway. Her mother and father would more likely die of a heart attack than arrive in time to rescue her. Uncle Alex! Maybe he knew at least the Spanish police or fire brigade number. But what time was it in Tokyo? Was he on stage? Tokyo code?
“You fucking bitch, open the door! Open up…!”
For a moment she broke down crying. That was Enrique out there calling her names. She had loved him. He had loved her. What happened to it all? She wept bitterly but the banging and abuses and insults propped up her mental spine. She had NOT loved him, she had loved a fake. Just as he had never loved her, Helena. He had loved his own dreams.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t open this door at once!”
He couldn’t get in. That threat says he can’t get in!
She felt much better. Her head cleared. Well, fuck you too mate. She rummaged in the cupboards. A boiler? Anything where some kind of telephone number was written even if it belonged to a plumber or the electricity company. But everything was high tech to a fault. It was like being in a luxury clinical ward of a spaceship.
And then his name hit her memory with a force that made her stop searching and sit on the floor in her nakedness. Her hands were shaking as she punched his speed-dial. Her tears began to flow again – with relief. The number started ringing.
The banging and insults outside the bathroom door jarred her nerves.
Please, Ramón! Have the phone on! Wake up! I need you desperately!
Oh God, he was a Ruíz de Alarcón too! Would he want to have anything to do with her after this? After knowing? In panic, she disconnected the number. Her fear mingled with a sudden sense of doom. Both hovered above her like a dark starless sky about to drop and squash her on her last leg to hell. But the banging from the door was getting incessant.
“I need the fucking first aid kit, you bitch!”
Dear God. Her brain was doing everything to detach itself from her body and she had to summon something to assist her in not reinforcing such a situation. She crept as far away from the doors as possible and crouched in a corner, bitterly sobbing. Twenty-two years, a first lover eleven years older, out in a foreign country, and now this.
But maybe Enrique was bleeding to death! For him Ramón would come. And if he came for his cousin she would also get out of here. She punched Ramón’s speed-dial again and was determined to wait. If it was the mailbox, she was ready to leave a mess…
“Mi vida? Is anything wrong?”
And all else broke in her anew, slithering into her like the moment of birth but in reverse. Between bitter sobs she managed, “Ramón, please come and help me…Please come and help me, Ramón… Enrique…hates me… Help me…or send…the police…to…help me…Ramón… Please…please…Ramón…help…me…”
On the other end of the line, Ramón shook himself wide awake. He could hear her desperation. “Helena? Please calm down, mi amor…what’s…?”
“Send me….some…help…Ramón…”
“Hey, calm down. I’m on my way. Tell me what happened, Helena.” He was already frantically stepping into his clothes. What on earth has Enrique done? “Helena?”
“Help me…please…Ramón…I’ll never…ask you…for anything…again…”
“Why should I send the police?” Then he heard the banging and gabbled voice in the background. Jesus! What was going on?
His words sent her into fresh paroxysms. “Please, Ramón…get…me…out of…here…!” Dear God, please make him come to me. Or send the police.
“Helena, don’t disconnect the line, okay? Where’s Enrique? Are you hurt ?”
“Outside the door…I’m…in the…bath…roooom…!”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a moment, mi vida. Stay where you are and don’t disconnect.” Relieved and much stronger inside, she curled up on the floor under the sink, her mobile pressed to her ears, listening to his soothing words until they were more like a lulling mantra repeated again and again. Her mind drifted back to the day she had first met the cousins and made the biggest mistake in her life.
HELENA'S SECRET - Synopsis
Helena, twenty-two years old, is a Greek Cypriot endowed with the beauty of her ancient Greek namesake. A successful marketing executive at the Limassol Palace Hotel, her career is on the rise. Until she wins two cousins from an old Spanish family – who are also in the hospitality business – as clients for her hotel. It’s love at first sight. But in a triangle. And Helena has a secret buried deep inside her that she wanted to keep away even from herself. When she finally reveals it to the man she loves, he rewards her with an experience that is every woman’s nightmare. To end a lifelong of inner torment, she decides to find out the source of her secret. Accompanied by Ramón, the man who loves her selflessly, the search takes Helena to a Benedictine monastery in Kenya, where assassins are waiting to kill her. Because the revelation of Helena’s secret threatens high profile political and religious powers in the African country, who conspire to have her murdered before she gets to the root of her secret.
Prussian Blind Love
EXOTIC: Emil Doerstling’s painting, „Preußisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happy Love) from 1890 showing Gustav Sabac el Cher and his fiancée Gertrud Perlig. They married in 1901.
A Walk Through the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Berlin has a lot of artwork and treasures from Africa. The original head of the Egyptian Queen Nofretete, for example, this wife of King Akhenaton who introduced humankind to monotheism.
Axel Sabac el Cher lives today in the city of Stuttgart, the capital of the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg neighbouring Bavaria. From his name and from the skin colour of his father who died in 1962, Axel knew that his ancestors had lived in Germany for generations. One day in 1999, a scientist from the Historical Military Museum in Dresden appeared at his door with an oil painting from 1890. The painting depicted an obviously loving couple happily and peacefully in each other’s arms. She had pale pink skin and reddish blonde hair. He was as dark as the Nubian he was, leaving no doubt that he was an African. But in the uniform of a Prussian Guard.
Gustav Sabac el Cher in a Prussian Military uniform ca. 1900
(German Historical Museum)
The German Historical Museum in Berlin had bought the painting from an arts dealer in Munich. The dealer’s father had supposedly acquired it during the war in his hometown of Königsberg. The father had no idea who was depicted in the painting but he knew that the famous 19th century painter Emil Doerstling had signed it and wrote down the time he finished painting it: 1890. That was the year when Emperor Wilhelm II drove Chancellor Bismarck out of office, the year when Germany’s pearl in East Africa, Zanzibar, was given over to the British in exchange for Helgoland, since then a German island in the Baltic Sea. The time Vincent van Gogh himself was painting a lot of self-portraits.
But how did it come about that an African was, in the 1800s, wearing the uniform of the imperial army. The Museum turned to the historian Gorch Pieken for expert advice, and the scientist took a dive into Prussian military history, starting from the world of royal and imperial military music. And he came out with a find that has been filmed for the TV channel Arte in a documentary form as well as a book taking its title from the painting – Preussisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happy Love). The story of the African in a Prussian uniform. The research began about this African in the imperial jacket, red collar, golden buttons and the white belt. The research took the historian to Königsberg, to be exact to the music corps of the 1st Prussian Grenadiers Regiment. Pieke found the lists of orchestras of the time and soon came upon the name Gustav Sabac el Cher. But who was he really? He started checking out lists of military music corps, christening certificates, private diaries of sojourners to Africa in the 19th century and many other documents. When he finally sorted out all the information he had come up with the story about the painting and Gustav Sabac el Cher. The puzzle was solved.
In the beginning there was murder. In the 1840s in Prince Albrecht’s palace in Berlin. The marriage of the Prussian Prince Albrecht was on the rocks. He wanted to push his wife into a chamber. A sentry soldier screamed out of fear to be involved in an embarrassing situation. Albrecht, furious, stabbed the soldier. But a Prussian prince could not be sent to prison in those days. Under such circumstances the blue-blooded offender was sent out of the country for a while. Albrecht was sent to Egypt, a country very much in vogue in Europe at the time. Tons of antique treasures were being excavated and shipped off to Europe. Europeans had rediscovered a longing for the Orient, Cairo and the Nile. And the children of Africa as companions for good or evil, or merely as mementos. Mehmed Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, gave Albrecht a little boy as a gift.
Back in Europe, the “little Nubian boy” was first of all called by Prince Albrecht “Sabac el Cher” which translates into “Good morning”. It became the boy’s surname. He lived in the attic with other European servants and was taught the language and religion of his new land by Prussian teachers. At the age of sixteen, the memento was renamed August Albrecht Sabac el Cher in a christening ceremony where he became a Protestant. All this happened without anybody worrying about how the boy himself felt. In his birth certificate he is supposed to have been born in Cordovan, a Sudanese province.
August remained with the prince even when the prince married his second wife Rosalie, living primarily in Albrechtsberg Castle near Dresden and accompanying the prince on military expeditions to North Caucasus and Moscow where they visited Prince Albrecht’s nephew, the Tsar Alexander II. The Tsarina even gave August a golden watch as a present. This watch is still the property of the family. In the Battle of Königgraz against Austria in 1866, young Sabac el Cher fought side by side with the Prussian prince. He married quite young - in 1867. The bride was a twenty-four-year-old Berlin young woman called Anna Maria Jung, whom he married in the Trinity Church, the church that today finds itself in the street called Mohrenstrasse (Moor Street), supposed to remind everybody of the first African in Berlin, these Africans who came in the 1600s from West Africa – the scene of slave trade “adventurers” from Brandenburg (read article: Pink Declines Whiteness). The records of the church notifications testify that the marriage had to be hurried, but mentions nothing about racism or prejudice. Three months later, Gustav was born, the musician in the painting and grandfather of Axel in Stuttgart.. A year after that the daughter Elise was born. Love is forever fruitful where it can be.
There is now, next to Alex, Angela Sabac el Cher. She speaks freely of what difficulties she had as a child with such a surname. “It was very foreign and I didn’t know exactly where it came from. I came to terms with it at the age of fourteen or fifteen – that this name was mine. Then I swore to myself never to reject it.” This dark-haired woman, I remind myself, is Gustav’s great-great-granddaughter. The dark skin tone that the painter exaggerated in Gustav is long since gone. Apart from the colour of her hair, Angela is as pink as they come. She is forty-two, studied economy and is the managing director of a company producing recycled cooling equipments. She had never known about her family history and now takes it with surprise and estrangement. Up to now she only knew from her father a goodnight story about the “little Nubian boy” that was so enriched and told of a stolen son of a desert sheikh who had a huge army. “He’s supposed to have come from somewhere near Aswan,” Angela recalls the story. The story has also taken different angles and tinges owing to the division of Germany into East and West, historically. In Senzig in Brandenburg, south of Berlin, there are memories and relics of the family. Gustav is buried there on the side of his wife Gertrude. On the gravestone: “Former bandmaster/conductor, Grenadier in the Regiment of Crown Prince No. 1”
As a musician and conductor, Gustav was a star even after retiring from the military.
Formerly Axel was a textile salesman but is now in pension, but from time to time he teaches diving in the Indian Ocean. Ever since the historian knocked on his door with the painting of his grandparents, Axel has joined the team of researchers digging for more details about his ancestors. He now knows that his grandfather Gustav was born in Prince Albrecht’s palace. Gustav was a musician only up to the First World War, and after that he was a highly successful bandmaster and conductor in the first radio orchestra at the beginning of the 1920s. Later he and his wife Gertrud Perlig run a garden café in König Wusterhausen. The unbelievable bits are for example that this man, photographed in a newspaper (where he of course does not look as “black” as in the painting – as usual!) is quoted during Hitler’s coming into power, that he thought the political change to Hitler was a good thing. But soon he and his wife had to close their “Negerlokal” – nigger café in König Wusterhausen. They went right ahead and opened a new one in Berlin but it didn’t help much. Gustav died in 1934.
The research has also uncovered a condolence written from the Netherlands to the widow Gertrud on the death of her husband by no less a person than Emperor Wilhelm, who himself died shortly afterwards. According to Pieke both sons of the couple, Horst and Herbert were even darker-skinned than their father but served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Horst fell but Herbert, Axel’s father, became a violinist after the Frist World War at the Mannheim National Theatre.
The story of Africans towed over to Germany is long and goes back to the greatest of princes. The rulers in Germany and Europe as a whole saw possession of an African as a status symbol that put them above mere mortal citizens and brought great respect among fellow aristocrats. But Gustav Sabac el Cher is the only Afroancestral celebrated conductor in the Prussian army.
A Walk Through the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Berlin has a lot of artwork and treasures from Africa. The original head of the Egyptian Queen Nofretete, for example, this wife of King Akhenaton who introduced humankind to monotheism.
Axel Sabac el Cher lives today in the city of Stuttgart, the capital of the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg neighbouring Bavaria. From his name and from the skin colour of his father who died in 1962, Axel knew that his ancestors had lived in Germany for generations. One day in 1999, a scientist from the Historical Military Museum in Dresden appeared at his door with an oil painting from 1890. The painting depicted an obviously loving couple happily and peacefully in each other’s arms. She had pale pink skin and reddish blonde hair. He was as dark as the Nubian he was, leaving no doubt that he was an African. But in the uniform of a Prussian Guard.
Gustav Sabac el Cher in a Prussian Military uniform ca. 1900
(German Historical Museum)
The German Historical Museum in Berlin had bought the painting from an arts dealer in Munich. The dealer’s father had supposedly acquired it during the war in his hometown of Königsberg. The father had no idea who was depicted in the painting but he knew that the famous 19th century painter Emil Doerstling had signed it and wrote down the time he finished painting it: 1890. That was the year when Emperor Wilhelm II drove Chancellor Bismarck out of office, the year when Germany’s pearl in East Africa, Zanzibar, was given over to the British in exchange for Helgoland, since then a German island in the Baltic Sea. The time Vincent van Gogh himself was painting a lot of self-portraits.
But how did it come about that an African was, in the 1800s, wearing the uniform of the imperial army. The Museum turned to the historian Gorch Pieken for expert advice, and the scientist took a dive into Prussian military history, starting from the world of royal and imperial military music. And he came out with a find that has been filmed for the TV channel Arte in a documentary form as well as a book taking its title from the painting – Preussisches Liebesglück (Prussian Happy Love). The story of the African in a Prussian uniform. The research began about this African in the imperial jacket, red collar, golden buttons and the white belt. The research took the historian to Königsberg, to be exact to the music corps of the 1st Prussian Grenadiers Regiment. Pieke found the lists of orchestras of the time and soon came upon the name Gustav Sabac el Cher. But who was he really? He started checking out lists of military music corps, christening certificates, private diaries of sojourners to Africa in the 19th century and many other documents. When he finally sorted out all the information he had come up with the story about the painting and Gustav Sabac el Cher. The puzzle was solved.
In the beginning there was murder. In the 1840s in Prince Albrecht’s palace in Berlin. The marriage of the Prussian Prince Albrecht was on the rocks. He wanted to push his wife into a chamber. A sentry soldier screamed out of fear to be involved in an embarrassing situation. Albrecht, furious, stabbed the soldier. But a Prussian prince could not be sent to prison in those days. Under such circumstances the blue-blooded offender was sent out of the country for a while. Albrecht was sent to Egypt, a country very much in vogue in Europe at the time. Tons of antique treasures were being excavated and shipped off to Europe. Europeans had rediscovered a longing for the Orient, Cairo and the Nile. And the children of Africa as companions for good or evil, or merely as mementos. Mehmed Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, gave Albrecht a little boy as a gift.
Back in Europe, the “little Nubian boy” was first of all called by Prince Albrecht “Sabac el Cher” which translates into “Good morning”. It became the boy’s surname. He lived in the attic with other European servants and was taught the language and religion of his new land by Prussian teachers. At the age of sixteen, the memento was renamed August Albrecht Sabac el Cher in a christening ceremony where he became a Protestant. All this happened without anybody worrying about how the boy himself felt. In his birth certificate he is supposed to have been born in Cordovan, a Sudanese province.
August remained with the prince even when the prince married his second wife Rosalie, living primarily in Albrechtsberg Castle near Dresden and accompanying the prince on military expeditions to North Caucasus and Moscow where they visited Prince Albrecht’s nephew, the Tsar Alexander II. The Tsarina even gave August a golden watch as a present. This watch is still the property of the family. In the Battle of Königgraz against Austria in 1866, young Sabac el Cher fought side by side with the Prussian prince. He married quite young - in 1867. The bride was a twenty-four-year-old Berlin young woman called Anna Maria Jung, whom he married in the Trinity Church, the church that today finds itself in the street called Mohrenstrasse (Moor Street), supposed to remind everybody of the first African in Berlin, these Africans who came in the 1600s from West Africa – the scene of slave trade “adventurers” from Brandenburg (read article: Pink Declines Whiteness). The records of the church notifications testify that the marriage had to be hurried, but mentions nothing about racism or prejudice. Three months later, Gustav was born, the musician in the painting and grandfather of Axel in Stuttgart.. A year after that the daughter Elise was born. Love is forever fruitful where it can be.
There is now, next to Alex, Angela Sabac el Cher. She speaks freely of what difficulties she had as a child with such a surname. “It was very foreign and I didn’t know exactly where it came from. I came to terms with it at the age of fourteen or fifteen – that this name was mine. Then I swore to myself never to reject it.” This dark-haired woman, I remind myself, is Gustav’s great-great-granddaughter. The dark skin tone that the painter exaggerated in Gustav is long since gone. Apart from the colour of her hair, Angela is as pink as they come. She is forty-two, studied economy and is the managing director of a company producing recycled cooling equipments. She had never known about her family history and now takes it with surprise and estrangement. Up to now she only knew from her father a goodnight story about the “little Nubian boy” that was so enriched and told of a stolen son of a desert sheikh who had a huge army. “He’s supposed to have come from somewhere near Aswan,” Angela recalls the story. The story has also taken different angles and tinges owing to the division of Germany into East and West, historically. In Senzig in Brandenburg, south of Berlin, there are memories and relics of the family. Gustav is buried there on the side of his wife Gertrude. On the gravestone: “Former bandmaster/conductor, Grenadier in the Regiment of Crown Prince No. 1”
As a musician and conductor, Gustav was a star even after retiring from the military.
Formerly Axel was a textile salesman but is now in pension, but from time to time he teaches diving in the Indian Ocean. Ever since the historian knocked on his door with the painting of his grandparents, Axel has joined the team of researchers digging for more details about his ancestors. He now knows that his grandfather Gustav was born in Prince Albrecht’s palace. Gustav was a musician only up to the First World War, and after that he was a highly successful bandmaster and conductor in the first radio orchestra at the beginning of the 1920s. Later he and his wife Gertrud Perlig run a garden café in König Wusterhausen. The unbelievable bits are for example that this man, photographed in a newspaper (where he of course does not look as “black” as in the painting – as usual!) is quoted during Hitler’s coming into power, that he thought the political change to Hitler was a good thing. But soon he and his wife had to close their “Negerlokal” – nigger café in König Wusterhausen. They went right ahead and opened a new one in Berlin but it didn’t help much. Gustav died in 1934.
The research has also uncovered a condolence written from the Netherlands to the widow Gertrud on the death of her husband by no less a person than Emperor Wilhelm, who himself died shortly afterwards. According to Pieke both sons of the couple, Horst and Herbert were even darker-skinned than their father but served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Horst fell but Herbert, Axel’s father, became a violinist after the Frist World War at the Mannheim National Theatre.
The story of Africans towed over to Germany is long and goes back to the greatest of princes. The rulers in Germany and Europe as a whole saw possession of an African as a status symbol that put them above mere mortal citizens and brought great respect among fellow aristocrats. But Gustav Sabac el Cher is the only Afroancestral celebrated conductor in the Prussian army.
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