The Lion in the Garden

Marianna Marlowe

Word Count 1044

Angela León and I weren’t great friends. I went to her house just once in the four years I lived in Quito. She was in my grade in our Evangelical middle school, and one of the only Ecuadorians there. Our school was primarily for temporary expats and missionaries, and the only nationals admitted at that time were those who had at least one international parent. I assume this was the case with Angela León, although I don’t recall what her parents looked like or what their first names were, because, besides being flawlessly bilingual in Spanish and English, she had light brown hair and intense blue eyes. Both her hair and her eyelashes, coincidentally, reminded me of manes. Her hair was thick and bushy around her thin white face. She had big eyes that had a mesmerizing effect because of their dense, almost black lashes.

What stands out to this day about the one sleepover I had at Angela León’s house was the marathon talk we had in her bedroom before we finally fell asleep in the early morning, still fully clothed, without having brushed our teeth or washed our faces. We spent some time outside, in her garden, and I do remember it was full of green—trees and shrubs, vines and leaves—like a jungle, almost, or, as my mother would have put it, casi como una selva. Still, there must have been some order to the chaos, because they had a gardener. In South American countries like Ecuador, and in cities like Quito, it was common for households in certain neighborhoods to have a gardener or even two who came from morning till night to tend the plants and lawns every day, six days a week.

This garden, lush and overgrown as it remains in my memory, also had a fence. I know it was there because Angela León told me about it. She told me about playing outside, in her garden, on her own. Was she an only child? She must have been—there are no siblings in my recollection of that night at her house. When she played in that jungly garden by herself, she sometimes wished to go over this fence. But the problem was that it was too tall for her and she couldn’t do it on her own. This is when, as she told me that night, the gardener would appear. Apparently, anytime she approached this fence, the gardener appeared behind her. “¿Quiere usted ayuda?” he must have asked, using the formal “usted” rather than the informal “tú.” Or did he use the informal “tú” because she was, at eleven or twelve years old, so much younger than him? Perhaps he said, “Espera un momento, yo te ayudo.” All I know for sure is what she told me: that he appeared behind her, like an unbidden genie, to help her climb the high fence. He helped her by placing his hand in between her legs so that it cupped her crotch, and then—every time—squeezing as he lifted and guided her over.

She told me this in a shy kind of way, not looking at me, her voice quiet. I don’t know how I responded. Did I say, That’s gross? Or, That’s kind of weird? Did I ask what it felt like? Did I say anything at all? Maybe I just listened, imagining as she talked, this gardener letting go of a shovel or mower dirty with yard debris to reach his arm under her from behind and put his hand over that most intimate part of her body. This was foreign territory to me, an alien territory where a man—a relatively strange man, one who had been defined to me as belonging to a different class, the servant class, and therefore unknowable—had intimately touched a young girl, my friend.

Two feelings dominate my memory of that one sleepover and even of that particular friend. One is the freedom of talking into the night alone in her room, of bonding over school and gossip and the cute boys in our class, independent of parents and bedtime routines. We laughed together, intoxicated by our newfound intimacy, flush with that feeling of recognizing the self in the other, of finding the same things funny or sad or titillating. There was a wildness about that freedom, at least for me—it felt strange and rebellious to flout the civilized habits inculcated into me for years by my parents. At home I couldn’t imagine going to bed before brushing my teeth, or in anything besides a pair of clean pajamas. But then the darkness, the shadow narrative, imposes itself on my memory and I see again a stain, a mark that impressed itself upon me as I listened to my friend’s confession all those years ago.

Angela León never told her parents about the fence and the gardener. I never told my mother or father about them either. I thought of my friend’s story as a secret to keep rather than a tale to tell. I went home the next day with my wrinkly clothes and mossy teeth, and when my mother asked “¿Cómo te fue?” replied only, “Fine.” Why was that? Did Angela León and I feel the same sense of shame? Of discomfort? Of vague unease with speaking the unspoken and revealing the hidden? We accepted the sense of shame, of blame, as ours, and thus protected the perpetrator with our silence.

I never saw Angela León again outside of school. Our single lasting bond was one of keeping a secret. Life went on for me as part of my club of friends—meeting at the campus courtyard for lunch, calling each other after school to discuss homework or plans for the next day, attending elaborate sleepovers where we dressed up in the host mother’s clothes and performed skits that were hysterically funny only to us. I left Angela León behind to her own inner circle of friends, and to a secret that I helped her keep. As a mother and an aunt today, I despair at my complicity in my friend’s molestation; I cannot understand why I kept silent. But back then, so many years ago, as a daughter, a young girl, a middle school friend, I didn’t think there was another option.

Marianna is a Latinx writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. After devoting years to academic writing, her focus now is creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review, among others. Her memoir in essays, Portrait of a Feminist, will be published in the Spring of 2025.