Stained White Flag

Once my sister decided that telling my parents that I was wrestling instead of going to volleyball, everything changed in my life. No more after school sports, which meant no more sneaking across town to get to the Kingdom of Pro Wrestling. Where I came from, there was no cellphones and no internet, so for all they knew, El Lagarto had fallen off the face of the planet.

And me? Well, I wished that I had.

After it happened, I had no choice but to give in to the inevitable. I wouldn’t be different, I wouldn’t break through and be something or somebody. I would be what I had always been destined for, and my parents made sure you start making arrangements for that in earnest following my sister’s revelation.

I spent four weeks in a small room, locked up. No bathroom, small morsels of food and liquid passed under a crack in the door. No light, no way to lay down, and even if I would have laid down, it would have been in my own urine and faeces.

To learn my lesson, to learn about respecting the privileges I had been afforded.

My mother was publicly shamed for having the audacity to allow me to play volleyball, when I should have been at home learning to cook or clean, and after that it never felt the same again. She had always slowed the push for my father to find a husband for me, told him that I needed time to come around to the idea of marriage and family, that I wasn’t like my sister who was all-in. The truth of the matter is that a mother’s instinct is usually correct, but after being slighted in this way and made to face her failures in public, she went against her instinct.

She wanted to punish me.

Lombardó was three years older than me, and an imposing guy. He must have been six foot five or more, and at least equally rotund. It wasn’t so much that he was a fat guy, but he was formidably built. In our gypsy language, Lombardó means Lion, and I would say that it wouldn’t have been the first animal I’d associate him with. A more apt one would be gorilla, or bear.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the misfortune of being matched with somebody by your parents, whose motives are very divergent from your own, but it is incredibly awkward. We would sit there, in the same room. Our parents would disappear, and as if by some sort of magical force external to us both, we were supposed to bond. We shared no common interests, he was a retiring and submissive type and I would have broken his spirit in no less than a month. He had no joie de vivre, no drive to be anything, no passion and no personality. Me? I was loud, a renegade, a contrarian to every authority that tried to impose itself on me. It was awkward. We were left for hours, whereby he would say something and I’d scrunch my nose up. I’d say something, and he’d cower like the oversized chubby cheeked toddler that he was.

“But mama!” I had protested, as she leaned into me aggressively whilst we walked back from taking Lombardó to his shack.

“I will not hear of it.” She snapped, stopping short in front of me and causing me to crash into her bony shoulder and hip. Her clothes hung from her bones like washing on a frame, and as I reached out to stop myself, I felt her ribs. She had spent all of her resources feeding her children and husband, and barely stopped to eat herself. Resources were always short, even for the family who headed up the community.

She shoved me back from her, maintaining the same distance that she preferred throughout her life and mine - an arm’s length. Not more, not less. I was stunned, realising that this was perhaps the first time I had actually touched my mother since I was an infant. A jarring reality.

“There’s a reason why he is eighteen and not already married off.” I mutter, under my breath. I should have known better because frail as she may seem, she had the ears of a vampire bat. They even curled up at the top and pointed a little.

“Hija.” She didn’t need to say anything more.

The decision was made for me.

When you feel a catastrophic loss, sometimes it feels like the whole world is closing in. Like the walls are creeping closer and closer, and inch by inch the space is disappearing, the oxygen in the room is running out and you’re starting to wonder if you can come back from it.

Rebounding from failure is difficult. Rebounding from catastrophe that you had no input into, is something different entirely. How can you fix something that somebody else broke?

You have to reinvent yourself, you have to find some kind of catalyst from within and use that to start change. Because making the same mistakes, doing the same thing over and over, will not change the fate of your future, will not solve your problems. Rebounding is hard.

But rebounding is imperative, lest you choose to wither and rot on the vine. Lest you choose to stagnate and resign yourself to the fate that you’d been assigned. Spent your whole life working this hard to get to the finish line and fall on your face. Is that your lot in life? Is that my lot in life?

Who says I have to accept it?

Weeks passed, and we repeated the same thing almost every afternoon. They would arrange what they would call ‘blending sessions’, they were basically pimping us out. “You two can go bowling!”

It wasn’t long before I convinced him to sneak off to see something exciting that the parents didn’t know about. “Volleyball”, I lied to him. It amused me that it had become my code word for mischief. El Rey del Sur put on a wrestling show on Friday nights in the community centre. Hardly anybody went, but I did. And I took Lombardó. He wondered why these ‘idiots in leotards were groping each other’, and it made me want to piledriver him on the spot. I had already learned that move and I was great at it. I bet it would’ve got a bigger pop than anything the ‘Wolfpack of Mancha Real’ had done that night. But I didn’t.

I bit down on my lip, restrained myself. It was not something that came easy to me, but something that I knew would be necessary. Lombardó wasn’t a threat, wasn’t even a factor as a matter of fact. He was nothing but an accessory that I had been chained to against my will, and so if I couldn’t get rid of him, he would have to tag along. I made plans to bring him to the Kingdom the following week for practice. He could sit outside, if he wanted. Or watch. But I needed him on my side if I wanted to carry on chasing my dream.

So, no piledriver.

Before the next week came, they were already talking about marrying us off at the weekend. They’d arranged for Lombardó’s parents to put up a pavilion in the centre of our settlement, and they’d been sending out sheet music to the guitarists for the songs that they would play. My grandmother was sewing fabric for what I could only imagine was my wedding dress and all of a sudden it came down on me like a ton of bricks.

How long could I string along the buffoon for? How many weeks would he blindly follow me to wrestling practice before he realised that he was ten times my weight and would have the support of the full community should he just decide that he is going to force himself on me? It was a matter of delaying the inevitable, instead of confronting the problem straight ahead. And somehow, some way, that didn’t vibe with me.

It may come as a surprise. Or maybe not.

As the mariachi played in the dusty, golden square in the centre of Jaén’s gitano community, the sun beat down on the pavilion and the entire settlement were in their best clothes, drinking homemade sangría and dancing around. I sat and watched, anxious, apprehensive, agitated.

Weddings in my culture are perhaps different to what I have seen in movies. The whole day is a party, and then the pastor will bless us, and then the party will continue long into the night, where the sangría will turn to moonshine, the music will get faster, the singing raspier and the dancing more physical. Voices will be raised, conversation will be vibrant, and they will all wait around for the Groom to emerge waving his stained white flag in the air triumphantly. The music will stop, then they will all stand and cheer, then the dancing will start up again along with the music and on and on it goes until the sun rises in the morning.

As my feet outstretched into the walkway, I looked down at them all below. So happy, so content, so satisfied, in their own way they had achieved their life’s mission. They’d made it to adulthood, procreated, and started another generation on their way. A simple life, but a life. They had accepted their fate, and said thank you for it.

My pistachio-coloured wedding dress hung from me in much the same way that my mother’s clothes hung from her, my frame sitting beneath the heavy collar. The style felt like something that was cool in the seventies, which is probably because my mother and grandmother conceived of it. From the bottom of the sprawling hemline, my toes jutted out of sandals and pushed against the stone barrier of the bridge. The coarse texture of old, eroded sandstone felt good against my skin. A little footpath bridge that overlooked the settlement.

“Move, you filthy whore.” It was a man’s voice. Spanish. He thrust his patented leather loafer into my thigh, kicking dust into it as he did so. “You fucking gypsies, everywhere.”

The derision dripped from his saccharine voice as he stepped over me, as though I was less than a person.

“Fuck you.” I snarled, under my breath.

He didn’t hear. He didn’t have vampire bat ears like mother. But I wanted him to hear, so I repeated myself.

“Fuck you.” Louder, more terse.

“What did you say, you stupid bitch?” He turned now.

He grabbed me by the head, yanking the white wedding bonnet from my head, ripping the pins that fastened it and clumps of my hair out in one go. I drove my knee into his groin and then an elbow into his eyebrow, then stamped hard on his foot, and finished him off with a knee to the nose as he doubled over.

Not bad for three training sessions in a ‘not real sport’.

The piledriver crossed my mind, but I looked down at my dress, covered in sandy dust, and drips of blood. At least Lombardó would have his stained white flag, eh?

I had been sitting on the bridge, collecting my thoughts, trying to square away all the loose ends in my soul. Everyone expected this for me. I had been a renegade all these years, I had slipped through most of Papa’s rules by one way or another, but finally they had decided that I had to become a woman, my own woman, and I would take my place among the adults in the community. They had already assigned us a shack, and it was a fairly decent one on account of Lombardó’s parents’ standing. It was time.

I could see him, standing in the doorway of our new home, waiting for me to arrive. That is when the party could officially start. The look on his face was ever-optimistic. There was no agitation, apprehension or anxiety. Naive optimism. He thought that this would be his happy-ever-after, and somewhere deep and buried I wondered if I should, for pity’s sake.

I knew the consequences. I would be ex-communicated. But what choice did I have? Truly?

Live a lie? Accept my fate? Allow somebody else to dictate my life?

Less than an hour later, the angry Spanish man would enter the settlement, with my bonnet clasped between his thick fists, apoplectic as he demanded the dirtbag step forth and beg for forgiveness. That is when they knew that I had gone, and Don Quixote took another beating at the hands of Lombardó, who felt compelled for the first time to show any semblance of a backbone.

Nathaniel Cartwright came from nowhere. From obscurity, to the Excellence Championship match in less than four matches.

Young, naive, gifted. Parallel in many respects to Holly Rhodes, who he and I both share a victory over. Seems to have delusions of grandeur and intentions to balance it all out by being a nice guy about it. His words, paraphrased though they may be. Wants to show that you can be the best without making it personal, and if that is the approach he wishes to take then may he go with all the grace in the world. Talent alone will take you so far, as he has seen, but rarely will it take you all the way.

He thinks that on Victory VI he will pick up right where he left off before Annihilation, after bulldozing through TJ Alexander, Chelsea Skye, and Holly Rhodes. Hardly the greatest pedigree, but nevertheless, he certainly thinks he doesn’t need to take a second to worry about the little gypsy girl who loses matches for fun.

That’s the thing with a fast rise, though, isn’t it? If you climb a mountain without taking the time to place anchors, when you fall off, you are going right to the bottom. A loss like that, it changes people forever. It’s hard to rebound, remember? It isn’t going to be business as usual for him, back to steamrolling everyone else.

If you spend five minutes listening to Nathaniel Cartwright, he will tell you how proud he is of his achievement at Annihilation. How happy he is with his failure. He came so far, fell short, and now he wears it with a badge of honour. A loyal and satisfied second place,

Me? I’d be embarrassed. I’d be furious, vengeful. To go that far, to give that much, only to fall short? Perhaps you can say that I was embarrassed when Holly Rhodes managed to pin Xaria Linette in that triple threat that I was part of, but at Victory V I put that to rest, when I emphatically asserted dominance over that behemoth of a woman.

He has so many lessons to learn if he wants to be what he thinks he already is. He isn’t the intimidating monster that took Damian Ayla to the limit, he is the imbecile too foolish to quit when the inevitable descends. He doesn’t believe the words he taps into his phone as he tweets at me about what he is made of. He did all of that just for a belt? And failed?

Who is stupid enough to do so much for something so seemingly meaningless? He is not emotionally driven to be the champion. This is why he could not win, this is why he puffs his chest out big and tells the world how happy he is with his participation trophy.

What I can’t get my head around is the paradox. Nice guy, mean guy. No beef, beef. He wants to be level headed and do this for a sport and be the best that he can be without getting emotionally involved, or does he want to take his anger out on me? He is goading me on Twitter, begging me to give him a reason. Why does he need a reason? Sometimes it is hard to follow, and I know why. It’s because he’s trying to convince himself. Trying to tell himself that it was a blip, that he is the best of the rest and that he can build himself back up to try again. It’s a noble and valiant pursuit, but one rooted in fallacy.

You can’t fool yourself. You can try, but much like I looked down at my fat, offensive-looking husband-to-be as he excitedly scanned the periphery of the buildings for his bride and thought “I should probably do it, just to keep everyone happy”, you know the truth deep down.

I knew that it’d be a week or two of unfulfilled frustration and I’d end up pushing him into traffic.

Nathaniel knows that no matter what he tells himself, or says out loud for others to hear, it’s empty. It is what he thinks sounds good in a given moment, it’s hollow. Meaningless. Just like his performance at Annihilation. You can count the stitches you put into Ayla’s head, you can play dot-to-dot with the blood you sprayed all across Centre Bell, you can listen to the adulation that Montreal lavished upon him when all was said and done and say that you played a part in it. But the truth is, you don’t believe it.

You’re crushed. You’re sprawling around on your knees in the darkness, fumbling for something, anything to cling on to. You’ve tried attaching yourself to pride, acting like you’re happy about what happened. That you’ve accepted it. Deep down, when you trace the scars he left you with, it isn’t pride. It is regret. Regret that you didn’t get a little more invested, regret that you didn’t get a little more emotional, regret that you didn’t dig that much deeper. To make it seem like you didn’t go tumbling from the top of the mountain right back to the bottom. So threaten me, tell me you don’t need anger. Be angry. Do whatever it takes, it's futile anyway. A long time ago I made the decision that nobody would decide my fate for me, you will not be the one to change that.

Nathaniel took his beating, accepted his fate, and thanked the guy for his inconvenience. With a smile on his face.

Damian Ayla waved his stained white flag in the sky and as the crowd rose to their feet, the music started and the party continued.

Does that sound like the man to beat somebody like me? It wasn’t then, it certainly isn’t now.