Chapter 2: My Name

My name doesn't matter! At least not now.
I'm not sure you can understand this, woman to woman… but it often happens that a woman like me does not like to reveal her full name. Some will say it's a matter of shame and guilt.
I'm telling you it is mainly fear and muteness that wrap around me every time I hear my name carried on the air.

That's how it is, when you lose the image of God within you.

It all happens at once. You stop loving, you avoid touch, you flinch from looking at yourself. You loathe your own reflection. I am asking you not to give up on me, not to give up on my story, not even at this stage. I promise you that the matter of my name, my recoiling from revealing so personal and important a detail, says nothing about how open I am, or how open my story is.

In return for your listening, for your agreement to stay with me and listen to the end, I promise you here and now that I will tell everything, keep nothing from you, share every detail down to the last. I will tell you exactly what happened there. In Gibeah. I have nothing to hide.

Except for one thing. My name…

Why?

Because I know myself. The moment my name is spoken, mentioned, smeared in ink on paper, I come apart. The moment a man's voice, deep-toned, or menacing, sounds my name in a violent cry, I am paralyzed. I vanish. I slip away. Lost.

Sometimes I compare myself to Lot's wife.TN2

In a certain sense… she took responsibility for her life.

In her death she became a stinging pillar of salt that stands firm and looks down in contempt on the whole desert.

I envy her, because next to her I do not truly exist. I only come apart, melt, and evaporate…

I believe that as you read these last lines, you are uneasy.

You are keeping your part of the bargain and listening, while I am still hiding behind the obscure epithet, "the concubine of Gibeah."

You have thrown yourself into the work of reading… and I, already, am failing your expectations, withholding from you a detail as important and central as my name.

True!

So many times I have failed the expectations of so many people… so please, at least you, let me be - me.

Accept me as I am.

Thank you for coming this far and not giving up on me. It calms me, and lets me share with you a little more.

A woman who understands what I mean knows that I am always afraid. I live in fear. Every stranger is a threat to me. And so, in every new bond, here, with you, too, I need a little room, a kind of freedom that lets me decide to flee if I feel the need, or to choose the caution it takes to commit and give myself over to you, and even then, only if I am able.

So, here it is -

Only when I truly strain do I let myself breathe and grow still for one long moment, and then I can still hear my mother's voice calling me.

My name, when my mother calls it, fills with so much strength. Not strength - joy.

I don't know if you can call it "joy." Wait… I don't know how to put it into words, but if my mother had known what really happened there… maybe I wouldn't have to be here with you now….

Where is my mother now?

In fact, where are all the mothers in the world when you really need them?

I miss her so much… my mother. That embrace, and the security it brought with it.

My mother, exactly like many other mothers, had good intentions.

But, as in so many other cases, she managed to maintain a way of life that became the sum of the acts that led me to hell.

My mother is part of this story that brought me here. And so that you understand, it is best that I tell you everything, right from the beginning.