Medusa's Antidote

Tapas restaurants have become quite popular lately. To be honest, I don't even know what would constitute authentic in such places, nor do I know if it matters. My friends have recently become fans of this local tapas place called Le Matador. The linguistic choice of a French article for a place of Spanish cuisine struck me as odd, but supposedly it demonstrates the “Pan-European fusion” of their palette.

Despite the noted eccentricity of it, the title of the restaurant did not catch my attention nearly as much as their logo. It was a fairly minimalist silhouette of a bull’s head in a tribal tattoo style, consisting of shadowy swirls that lured my mind into a Rorschach test. And what I saw, staring into the gaping holes-for-eyes of that animal, was my father.

“The Raging Bull” is the nickname my brother and I had developed for him by the time we were teenagers. It was not that my father was a terrible man, but there were often moments when one small spark could set him off into violent tantrums. He did not target people with his violence, but he also did not spare them. It was like anything that moved was drenched in red.

When we were young, my brother and I learned to escape his rage by holding perfectly still and quiet. Most of the time, that meant that our father would stand there with a heaving breath and pulsing veins until some orange in the kitchen rolled over the countertop, or a slight breeze from the window rustled the corner edges of a newspaper. Then splat! The orange was steamrolled until its guts gushed out. Or ffffrrt! The newspaper was shredded to pieces and tossed into the air, floating down like a winter’s first snow.

The problem was, my mother was not so well trained as us in the art of impersonating statues. She too tried to hold still, but sometimes her nerves got the best of her, and her legs gave out, or she let out a small whimper. Then smack! She was on the ground. And my brother and I, still frozen, did nothing, said nothing, the terror paralyzing us to the bone. After the dust of his latest demolition settled, our father’s heavy breaths would subside to a slow, deep sigh, and he would turn and walk away. The next time he would reappear, there was no recollection in his face of anything he had done in his rage.

That’s when my brother and I began our secret meetings. We were caught between fear, tying us to acts of self-preservation, and desperation, screaming for us to move or shout when our mother could not hold back her trembles. We would invent all sorts of creative, sometimes silly, plans of how we were going to save everyone: each other, our mother...and our father. Because it wasn’t him, of course. We would go on some mystical adventure one day, years from now, and find out that he had been cursed, and it was a demon inside of him, and he was fighting as hard as he could because he loved us, and we could banish it, and then he could be free, and then we would all collapse in the kitchen holding each other, crying tears of relief and laughing with the joy of knowing that this nightmare was over.

Sometimes, I wonder if we believe in magic so that we can believe that something out there is powerful enough to save us, or whether we believe in it to make sense of the things too terrible to be real. If it couldn’t protect us, at least it could explain how things ever got so bad. What other than an evil spell could hold us to silence when our insides screamed so uncontainably?

My brother was the first to break this spell. For weeks, we had been perfecting what we had called “Medusa's Antidote,” a potion of courage that would unfreeze us in our time of need. At first, it was whatever concoction of syrups and herbs and spices we could forage in the kitchen: lemon juice, a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of coriander, crushed pepper, ketchup, ginger ale, soy sauce, coffee grounds. The worse it tasted, the more courage it took to drink, thus the more powerful the potion. A few times, we even managed to steal a bit of the clear no-no water our father kept on his high shelf, or “The Elixir of Fire” as we liked to call it. We had to be careful, though. Too much fire mixed with too much courage and we would transform into fire breathing dragons who would inevitably end up getting chased out of town.

Instead of becoming dragons, though, we became bullfighters. I remember that day I had a stomach ache and couldn’t drink my share of the potion, so my brother drank ours both. “There still has to be enough courage for the both of us,” he had said. I guess all he needed was courage for two, because that night, when my father came stomping in, my mother let something slip too carelessly from her hand, and he went straight for her. My brother somehow managed to let out a cracked squeak, somewhere halfway between “no” and “stop,” but it was enough to lure the bull and he swerved directions.

My brother, shocked at his own bravery, seemed to have let his throat turn back to stone. Right as my father drew near to him, in a panic, I swept the bundle of utensils off the table and they clattered loudly as they fell to the tile floor. My father’s rage was now tripled by the time he turned to me, and my brother’s initial attempts to draw his attention back with the sound of more crashing objects failed. As a last resort, he sputtered out, “St-tupid- cr-crazy man! I hate you!”

Thwack. Our father got him. I was too stunned by my brother’s bold words to keep up with our impromptu strategy. Seeing my brother crumple to the ground from what seconds ago could have been done to me frightened me back to my frozen silence. My mother had screamed and collapsed into sobs, but the bull had already sighed his way back to his pen.

I felt guilty for not having drunk my share of the potion that night. Because afterwards, the paralysis spell doubled down on me. I never did find my voice, but my brother continued to carve out his, the thaw eventually making its way down to his arms and feet. He would taunt our father and run around, dodging, sometimes managing to go right out the front door to escape the arena after the raging bull had become too tired for pursuit.

My mother was not grateful for this. She constantly begged my brother behind the scenes not to make it any worse. Over time, she seemed to forget that there had even been a problem before my brother decided to get involved. She seemed to truly believe that if he stopped “asking for it,” the issue would resolve on its own. I began to convince myself of this too, as the years went on. There were moments when our father appeared to tire, but my brother chose to antagonize him into another run. I still helped him out occasionally with a distraction when he accidentally got himself cornered, but for the most part, I let my brother play toreador while I stayed back as rodeo clown.

It does perturb me on occasion how readily I was willing to change my view of my brother from hero to bully, victim to offender. Perhaps I wanted to convince myself that I was not a coward for not standing up to my father like he had, that I was somehow better off for not having found my voice. Maybe admitting that my brother was right, while my mother would not, meant losing her too, and I would rather abandon my brother on the battlefield than risk having no home to return to.

“Do you mind if I mix in the spicy sauce?” My friend's question abruptly brought me back to the present. “They said it goes well with the grilled octopus.”

“Oh, sure,” I replied. I actually hated the taste of spicy food, though the spiciness itself never bothered me. Oh well, what did it matter. I wasn’t hungry anyway.