NO EXIT

I will be leaving the cool climes of Mexico City for the tropical heat of Brownsville. I am looking forward to making love to Carolina and Karla in the comfort of my air-conditioned apartment. I will return to a different solitude. I have been living in a self-imposed exile in Mexico City, but I have been residing with Adela who has routinely smoothed the edges.

I have to come to terms with my mother informing me that I am no longer wanted in California. I received a letter from her before I left that I wasn't welcomed back home because one of my sisters had accused me of raping her. Almost sixty years ago, I was more or less ten and she was more or less eight, we started touching each other. As we grew older, I would finger her while I masturbated. 

We averaged these encounters on a weekly basis for several years. As we matured into teenagers, we seldom had these moments. There was an exception etched in my mind. It was late afternoon and we were at home alone. She called me into her room and from her purse extracted a condom. I can remember the setting sun shining through the window. She wanted to have sex and I cooperated, but we were too inexperienced to connect physically. To the best of my knowledge it was the last time that we were intimate. 

My sister stuttered from the time she started talking and throughout the years she had terrible confrontations with my mother. My mother once called the police and the officers took my sister away while all the neighbors watched her being placed in the squad car.

"Looking back I now realized the cause of her distress," my mother wrote as I became the convenient scapegoat for her failures. If anyone has suffered from those encounters, I have been the victim. I can blame my sister for turning me into a sex addict because the pleasure has always been too overwhelming to resist. 

With the exception of my youngest brother, I don't communicate with the rest of my siblings. When I informed him that mother had exiled me permanently, he wrote scathingly, "We're talking about something that happened more than half a century ago. Our sister doesn't quit, does she? If it isn't one thing, it's another. Don't worry. You will always be good with me."