The writer publishes ‘Esto no se dice’, a book in which he recounts the sexual abuse he suffered in childhood at the hands of a religious. Its publication coincided with the death of his ‘alleged rapist’, Brother Jesús Linares. The writer claims that his work serves to raise awareness of a social scourge “that can affect anyone” To prevent his voice and that of thousands of child victims of abuse from remaining in a simple “current peak”, Alejandro Palomas decided to leave a written record of his story. “I had to put it in black on white, because this is not erased” and the result is the most intimate and heartbreaking book of his. “This is not said” (Destiny), which by chance arrives in bookstores when the death of Brother Jesús Linares, the priest who raped him, has just been revealed. Question. How did you feel when you found out? Answer. I can tell you how I reacted. I was about to give a lecture and when they told me I had to go to the bathroom to vomit.Q. Didn’t you think that somehow something closed? No, the damage is already done, the wound is indelible. The abused child never dies, he continues to live in the adult forever. P. How has it marked the adult that you are now? Throughout. I have been a man who has always been asking for forgiveness for living. Believing that I didn’t deserve things, that no one was going to love me, that no one was going to fall in love with me because I was stained and they were going to find out. I have not enjoyed sex, when part of the sexual learning that I experienced, being the object of someone who blames you for giving him pleasure, sex becomes hell. The monster is always present. I’ve had a lot of self-esteem problems, I won’t even tell you. And I have always lived the joys with the feeling that they were not going to last. I have never fully enjoyed them. I have always thought when the other face will arrive, because surely there is another face, as there was another face with him. P. You just said it and you also tell it in the book, your abuser made you feel guilty…R. Yes, every time he abused me, when he finished he would say to me, do you see what you make me do? It’s your body’s fault, he repeated. I felt horrible because I thought what am I doing that hurts this man so much, that he is also so good, because I thought he was very good. It was perversion upon perversion. So he prayed that God would kill my body. If the problem was my body, I would have to get rid of it no matter what. I thought that if God killed my body and I could continue living without him, maybe all that would end. It’s not that I wanted to die, what I wanted was for my body to disappear because that way it wouldn’t happen anymore. And in the midst of that anguish is when you tell your mother. Yes, one of the things that moved me to do it and to tell my mother was the guilt I felt, because I knew that she was hiding something important from her. Sometimes he felt that she was betraying her and that she was lying to him. So I felt really bad because my mother was everything to me. Q. And what did you expect to happen next? Any. When I told it as a child it was a bit like when I have told it now. It was a totally visceral thing, a decision that I didn’t think about. I ran out of school and went to my mother’s arms to cry and tell her this is happening and I’m desperate, it was the result of desperation. I didn’t expect anything beyond consolation, it was a cry for help because I couldn’t take it anymore. What happened then? A. My parents went to talk to the school and the religious told them not to worry, that they would take action on the matter, but please be discreet because this was something internal and that it was better to leave it in their hands. And that’s what they did, they were other times. The next day I had to go back to school and face my abuser. I was afraid, because he was my tutor. But that first day he had already completely changed with me. The sexual abuse ended but the psychological abuse began. I went from being his foster child to someone who didn’t exist, I never existed for him again. It was hard because since he was so perverse and knew all my weak points, he took care of torturing me, and he made me do all those things in class that he knew terrified me. He played with it. It lasted until the end of the course. And then the harassment of my peers began.R. Because of my mannerism, I imagine. I was a delicate child, who did not play soccer, what I liked was reading. But in those moments I developed the terror that they were actually harassing me because they knew what had happened. I was thinking, you know, so I can’t answer, because even if they don’t say it, they know. I never told it at home and this lasted four years. Until I did 8th EGB and left school. P. Did you ever regret having told it? Yes, because my father’s reaction was also very, very ugly. He made me feel that I had failed him and that he was ashamed of me. From that day on he stopped taking me to school. He never took me to class again and I understood that it was because he didn’t want to be associated with me, to be seen with me. My mother gave me the excuse that he had changed the schedule at work, but it was a lie. She didn’t take me because he was ashamed of what had happened. My father was very involved in school, in the parents’ association, in sports, and then he saw that as a shame. I never got to talk to him about it. He was a terrible person. A man who did not know how to love. He was not raised to love. P. In the book you reveal an episode that you had never told of sexual abuse by your father, you say that he masturbated in front of you being alone at home R. Yes. It is a memory that I had blocked and that has come to me root of all this. I experienced it as an extension of what I had suffered with Linares. He didn’t understand anything, he didn’t know why it was happening, he thinks he did it after I told him about Brother. He didn’t know how to interpret it, if it was a punishment or what it was. I knew he couldn’t tell my mother, because she was killing her, so I kept quiet so he wouldn’t suffer. I came to think that what I had to do to win my father was the same as what the Brother forced me to do to him. It was terrible, but it was not repeated. I became a big boy too soon. A. Total. I learned right away that he was alone and that he was going to be alone forever. And from then on that was my way of relating to the world. I have never been able to fully trust another human being. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to bind myself like that. I don’t have that ability. The only way I can connect is through literature, telling my stories or my experiences through writing. But in real life I can’t, I don’t trust anyone. That’s why you say in the book that literature saved your life… R. Yes. I took refuge in writing because before I had taken refuge in reading and through reading I had discovered that there were worlds that were not this one and that They were much more suited to me than this one. That there were more people out there that I couldn’t see but could hear. And from there it was like wow, not everything is this. Not everything is this reality, but there are more planes. And well, I became a super avid reader and naturally what the avid reader wanted was to be the one to create those worlds, tailored to me. And above all I found it very attractive to be able to provoke in others with my work the same sensation and emotion that the books had managed to provoke in me. Invent other worlds to escape from yours. Yes, to survive mine I had to inhabit others.P. In this book, however, you open yourself up. Have you cried a lot writing it? I have discovered many things about myself that I had erased. It has been a journey of discovery. And yes I have cried, but above all remembering my mother. I have been sorry, but I have cried whenever the memory connected me with my mother. I still cry a lot for her because the duel is very recent and it’s hard for me to be without her. She died just over a year ago. P. She is noticeable, because she is very present in the pages. Her presence pervades everything. R. I always say that my novels are not written on paper, but on silence. And in this case the book is as if it were written on my mother’s photograph. And that changes a lot how you face the page because you know you’re talking to it. She has put me in a much more confident mode. It has been like an intimate conversation between the two, a trip to two in which one is not present, but this one. Q. Has she served You to heal the wounds? Well, I still don’t know. I have not written it for that, but I have discovered many things about myself in relation to my childhood that I did not know or had silenced. for which this was not the objective, but perhaps yes, something of this is beginning to appear. There will also be more or less healing depending on the reaction from outside. Q. And which one would you like it to be? I would especially like a wave of empathy. I think that’s the first thing I’d like to see happen. That when you finish reading it you feel emotion. I want to move people because social changes start with emotion, they don’t start with the head. This is a social reality that must be changed and to begin to do so we have to be emotionally aware that there are people who suffer from this scourge, and that it can affect anyone, us, our children, those we love the most. I would like it to serve to raise social awareness of the problem and so that at an institutional level the issue would be treated in another way, so that it would be given a boost. It is a book that calls for a step forward. Q. Is happiness possible after having experienced something like this in childhood? A. I consider myself a happy man, within the threshold of happiness that each one has. In my case it is relief. Being at peace. Being able to have a good dialogue with myself is enough for me. I start from the disadvantage, so peace, tranquility, this kind of balm comforts me. The truth is that I don’t know whether to call it happiness. Perhaps I should call it well-being rather than happiness. Q. What question would you like not to have had to answer since you decided to tell it? The why now. It is the most terrible thing you can say to someone who has decided to speak up after being silent for so long. The question should never be why now, but what has happened for so many years that he has not been able to speak. What was broken, that they killed him inside, what was he afraid of. I have tried to answer that in my book. I hope it’s useful for something.