The Incest Diary

My father controlled my mind, my body, my desire. I wanted him. I went home. I went back for more

Salvador and Valentina were thrilled by the fact that she looked just like his mother when she was young and he looked just like her dead father. Octavia referred to her husband and his cousin Valentina as Akhenaton and Nefertiti. They would have married each other, but they wanted babies. And they didn’t want babies with tails. I liked that he was in love with a woman because she looked like his mother and he like her father. It all fit neatly. They were secrets, their bond was sex and family

My father’s mother was raped by her father, the same Paul. She told me about it when she was dying. She wanted to talk. She had always kept things to herself, but now she was desperate to talk. She said that she got her cancer from keeping everything in. She told me not to worry about making mistakes in life, that everyone does, but don’t ever be overweight.

I have two things from my great-grandfather Paul: a silver crucifix that says Semper Fidelis—the marines’ motto—and the legacy of the use of small children for sex.

I felt desire, but I liked feeling pure even more. Purity with rare interruptions of deviousness. Purity in those days was doing very well in school. Purity was memorizing dates of historical significance. The Battle of Hastings. The year Machiavelli wrote The Prince. The birth of Johann Sebastian Bach. The year that Caravaggio painted The Seven Acts of Mercy.

Deviousness in those days was letting that boy suck my tongue when I should have been in chemistry class.

I also like telling her about beautiful things coming out of terrible things. Like the beetles who can lay their eggs only in the charred trees left by a forest fire. New life in the wake of destruction. I also feel the need to remind her of triumph. It comes from a fierce rage, too.

Claude
Lévi-Strauss wrote that the key difference between animals and humans is incest prohibition. What does this make me?

I
was afraid of fire. I was afraid of the house burning down. Afraid of my body being burned. But I burned my body. I burned my own body. I needed to feel pain. I remember that gray gas heater

Does this mean I have felt the most pleasure in the world? My body is pure rapture.

I told her that I felt like I was going crazy and I didn’t know what to do. She leaned over to me and I thought she was going to embrace me, but she put her hand over my mouth. “Get over it,” she said. “Don’t talk about it. Forget it, and get over it.”