(1923–2025)
My uncle Alejandro Tort, the only surviving sibling of my father, died today at the age of 102.
If we recall my first entry on the review of Consumption, we will see that part of the murder of a soul is that adults don’t want to know the tragedy that occurs in their family. For example, we saw that Benjamin’s mother not only failed to ask him what had happened when he was raped at the age of six, but when he dared to tell her decades later, she trivialised what had happened: something that only adds insult to injury.
Countless things like this have happened to me, not only when trying to communicate it to my (now deceased) parents, but also to relatives. I talk about it in the middle part of my Hojas Susurrantes, translated into English here, in the series “Nobody wanted to listen”. It’s curious how in that 2020 translation I still wanted to protect, to some extent, the identity of my sisters by slightly changing their names. For example, instead of Corina, I used “Korina”; and instead of Genoveva, I used “Genevieve”. Now I don’t give a damn about those scruples.
In that section of Hojas Susurrantes I also mentioned cousins, acquaintances and even so-called mental health professionals. No one wanted to listen to me except for a woman who had romantic hopes for me, Paulina, whom I talk about in the eleventh entry of that translation. But Paulina listened to me twenty-two years after the tragedy that killed the souls of Genoveva, Corina, and me; that is, when the damage was already done.
Corina, who died in 2016, used to visit Uncle Alejandro and his daughters, our first cousins, trying to unburden herself to them about what our mother was doing to her. They never listened to her. And when a year ago I sent Nina and Alejandra, the daughters of the uncle who died today, the first two books of my trilogy, all I received was an email dated 24 June 2024, which I translate below:
Hello Cesar
I want to let you know that I already picked up the books, I gave Nina hers, and I’ve been leafing through both of them. From what I’ve read so far, I think they will be very interesting: Your own perspective and point of view on important family events.
I will read them carefully (both of them) and then I would like us to get together to discuss them. Thank you in advance for the books and for taking the trouble to send them.
Alejandra Tort
Since then, I have heard nothing from Alejandra, let alone Nina, who didn’t even bother to reply to the printed letter I sent her along with the book.
Corina was treated the same way in Uncle Alejandro’s large house. And Benjamin too. However, according to Benjamin, the only one who finally dared to read his book was his mother—although she died a few days after reading it, and finally feeling sorry for her son!
How can I go to the funeral tonight if Uncle Alejandro didn’t treat me well when my parents were destroying my life? He never tried to find out anything and in 1983, when I was living with his mother, my grandma Mecho, he even wrote me a letter repeating the slander he had heard from my mother without asking me if it was true (I still have his letter).
Corina, like me and countless other children abused by their parents, was destroyed because no one wanted to listen to her. This is an endemic phenomenon. The massive damage that abusive parents cause to their offspring is the greatest taboo of the human species. No one wants to know about it although there are sometimes exceptions, such as Benjamin’s mother very shortly before she died, or Paulina, who read my Letter to mom Medusa in her home country while I was living in Houston.
Well, it’s better that one person listens to us than none! When I recently mentioned in the comments section that in 2018 my first cousin Octavio Galindo, with whom I was very close in the 1980s, had strangled his teenage daughter and then hanged himself, I omitted that he had no one to confide in. I would have listened to him attentively and even helped him, but I was unaware that his depression was so severe. That’s what happens when there is no communication about serious problems in a family. I mention his case in Lágrimas (Tears), the final book of my trilogy.
I feel like expanding the section on “No one wanted to listen” linked above by talking online about many other relatives who have mortally offended me with their deafening silence, even after sending them my books. But I also have to do something about the fourteen words.
Uncle Alejandro was not a bad person, nor are my cousins mentioned above. But I won’t see these women at the funeral tonight. They are just like everyone else: the children’s complaints about abusive parents are simply ignored even though if, addressed, tragedies like what happened to Octavio could be avoided.
