Free Blood of My Brother by James Lepore

skirt, a white blouse, white socks, and penny loafers—was of a different mind. And why defy Rafael—a rising and brilliantly corrupt star in the PRI, the all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party—who would shepherd Herman’s brother, Lazaro, an idealistic young lawyer, to the top or very near the top of the government? So near that Herman and Lazaro and their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren would never have to worry about money and all that it could buy.
    Herman was also concerned for the girl, not that she would lose her innocence to a jaded, fifty-year-old politician, but because she was such an exotic flower, and might wilt and never recover from the shock of being fucked for the first time by Rafael, a pig who found his only sexual pleasure in brutal “love” with young girls, especially virgins when he could find them. They were partners, were they not, in the matter of Isabel, as they were in many other matters, and had they not spent good money in cultivating her from a
seedling? But this argument, discreetly made, fell on ears made deaf by the drumbeat of lust.
    Herman did defy his partner on one minor point. On the evening of her first “date” with Rafael, he tried to prepare Isabel for what lay ahead. He did this to give her some means of softening the blow she was about to receive. She was an incredible beauty, a treasure, but would be of no use to them if she broke down mentally and retreated into a more or less permanent state of semishock as he had seen some girls do in the same situation.
    Rafael wanted to actually rape his virgins, and did not want them spoken to beforehand. Some, taken from the streets or from the dirt of the countryside, had felt some of the world’s harshness and were able to recover, but others, from orphanages or bought from good peasant families, were mortally wounded in their spirit, and had to be disposed of. Herman did not want to lose Isabel to that fate, and so he sat her down in the living room of his spacious apartment overlooking Alameda Central—Mexico City’s answer to Central Park—about an hour before his bodyguard, Stefan, was scheduled to take her to meet Rafael, and her destiny.

    “Do you know what sex is, Isabel?”
    “Yes.”
    “And love?”
    “Yes.”
    “They are not the same, do you know that?”
    Isabel did not answer. She was wearing blue jeans—her first pair—with white sandals, a shimmering silk blouse, a new bra, and tiny new panties, all purchased for her by Uncle Herman on a shopping trip he had taken her on earlier in
the day. American jazz was coming softly from the apartment’s hidden speakers. But the music was not soothing or distracting, and the new clothes were beginning to be not so exciting. Uncle Herman had insisted on watching her change into them.
    “You are a very beautiful and desirable young woman, do you know that?”
    “I am happy to be here.”
    “You will be meeting Senor de Leon tonight. Stefan will take you.”
    In the three days that Isabel had been living with Uncle Herman, there had been no mention of her working as a servant, or training as a nanny, as Sister Josefina had told her would be the case. There had been television and good food and an occasional exchange with Stefan—a dark and muscular giant—and then today’s shopping, exhilarating until she was made to disrobe while Uncle Herman sat on her bed and watched, turning her this way and that with his hand from time to time.
    “Rafael will have sex with you,” Uncle Herman said. “It will hurt, and you will bleed, but it will not kill you. It happens to all young girls, it is how they become women.”
    Isabel knew that she had not sinned, had done nothing to earn the strange nauseating mix of fear and remorse churning in her stomach—nothing to offend God. And yet she must have offended Him, must have sinned, must be a truly bad person in the sight of all the saints and martyrs, and the Blessed Virgin, to whom she had