What do you win by stopping being a fairy in a freezing terrain
(for April or May)
Reconstructing the last months of Liliana’s life is not simple. In addition to being a determined
and luminous woman, a confinable friend that is at times protective, a chatty and sarcastic girl
that knows how to heal and harm with her words; in addition to the young student who was
falling more and more in love with her field of study; the shrewd, as some of her friends describe
her, the charismatic, the leader; also a woman who believed more and more in herself, it was
Liliana who turned the world upside down but that could not find the words to name the violence
that followed her.
Perhaps there was a diary as some of her friends, not the closest to her, assure that she
wrote. I did not find it among her things. What I did find were numerous handwritten notes
scribbled here and there in her school notes, between thoughtful disquisitions on (cimbas) and
house planning, history of art and multiple tasks. Misplaced between the sheets of the notebook
or sealed in boxes of tin or inside some handbags and leather wallets, there were also the
messages she wrote to herself or that she received from others. There are pieces of the puzzle
that I could never put together. One about the other, these writings are layers of experiences
that have been driven crazy with time. My task now is to disintegrate the writings. With the help
of the archeologist who touches without damaging, dust without breaking, my intention is to
open and preserve it this time the scripture: de and recontextualize in a lecture from the
beginning. Not Liliana, nor those of us who loved her, had at our disposal a language that would
allow us to identify the signs of danger. That blindness, which was never voluntary but social,
has contributed to the murder of hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico and in the world.
Just as well augmented by Snyder in No Visible Bruises, what we don’t know about domestic
violence, about intimate or couple terrorism, beginning with the ultimate decade of the twentieth
century, in a country where the violence against women was alarmingly increasing, invading a
night in my sister’s house in Azcapotzalco, it placed a pillow on her face and took her life. Death
due to suffocation. But her work, her hidden and constant work about violence had started long
before, since my sister was an adolescent. And Liliana, brave and loving, tried all the methods
that many other women in her place had as well: she opposed him, tired to escape, denied him,
attached herself to him, resisted, deactivated herself, negotiated with him, and did all that she
possibly could until barely just a little time before femicide took her life, it was because of him. It
was because of Angel. Emotionally. Physically.
According to Snyder and the growing chronology of danger that relates to the
relationships marked by couple violence, women are at a greater risk of losing their life in the
hands of their ex-partners in the three months post separation or in the three months post where
the manipulator realizes that the separation is real. Definite. If this is true, if the conclusions that
the specialist have arrived based on thousands of qualitative data and thousands of invaluable
testimonies of violated women, then something must have happened in the beginning of the
1990s between Liliana and Angel, something new and decisive, something sufficiently enough
to open the door wide open femicide violence. Something, maybe between March and April.
Something in May.