Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [106]
"That would make them…"
"Crazy. Yes, that is what it did do. And those children who acted crazy were displayed as proof of the fact that they were crazy to begin with. Comprende?"
"But why? Who wants to protect people who fuck their own kids?"
Pablo sighed, disgusted as always with my political ignorance. "Look at it this way. Suppose a slave were to escape from the South and make it to New York. Suppose we put him into psychotherapy—suppose we convinced him that the whole experience of slavery was nothing more than a bad dream—do you not see the political value? We would not have to confront the slave–keepers—we could continue to practice trade and commerce with them, maintain our own self–interest economically. Yes?"
"But slaves…" I said, groping for the clincher to prove Pablo wrong, "they'd still have the scars…"
"You think an incest victim would not have scars?" he said.
I lit a cigarette, thinking of Flood and the scars she made on herself to replace the brand of a rapist—how she poured gasoline on herself over the tattoo the gang put on her, lit a match, and held on to her one friend in the world until the fire made them free. "What good would it do to trick a kid like that?" I asked.
"Children don't vote," he said.
"And Freud said there was no such thing as incest?"
"Freud did not make a conscious decision to accept the women stories as fantasies—he lived within a political climate and he responded to it."
"But we know it happens."
"Now we know. But to truly know it then, you had to experience it.
"So if you thought the experience was all in your mind…"
"Yes," said Pablo, grateful that I was finally seeing the light that shone so brightly for him.
I got to my feet, pacing uncomfortably in the small room. "Forget politics for a minute," I said. "We know people do these things to kids, okay? Do we know why?"
Pablo tilted his head until he was gazing at the ceiling. "I will tell you everything we actually know—it won't take long. We know people have sex with children—the children of strangers and also their own. We know this has something to do with power—the power grown people have over children. In fact, sex with children is not sex as you would understand it, Burke. It is not, for example, the kind of adaptive mechanism which could cause a man to turn to other men when there are no women—like in prison. This is another dimension entirely. The pedophile—the one who has sex with children—he may be able to have sex with women, or with grown men. But he does not prefer to do this. The more intelligent the pedophile, the more skillfully he may rationalize his behavior, but the truth is really simple—he knows what he does is wrong and he does it anyway."
"I thought those freaks couldn't help themselves?"
"No! They can stop—they choose not to."
"It can't be that simple," I told him. "Who the fuck would choose to pass up women and force little kids to?"
"All that is within them is within you and me, my friend. If every man who felt sexual violence toward a woman acted on that feeling, New York would not be a city—it would be a graveyard."
"You mean it's not?"
"You joke when you do not understand. Just because some of the lower beasts walk our streets does not make our community into a jungle— not so long as people struggle against the beasts."
Pablo took a dark bottle down from a shelf and poured himself a glass of that jungle juice he drinks all the time. I passed up his offer with a shake of my head.
"To rehabilitation!" he said, tossing down half the glass.
"You ever try that with one of these freaks?" I asked him.
"One time. One time we did just that," he mused, his eyes somewhere else. "My people brought a man in here years ago.