I was assaulted at 18. Eleven years on, could I find out what happened to my attackers?

In early 2017, I was invited to a four-week artist residency in Lisbon, Portugal. The residency was not particularly prestigious: it charged a fee for the room I was to stay in, a barely habitable space perched above a gallery behind a series of locked doors. The bed for my partner and I was a mattress on a stack of shipping crates; the kitchenette was little more than a microwave and a bar fridge.

To cover the residency fee, I applied for and received a small literary grant. In my application, I wrote that “engaging readers and collaborators internationally” would be a “vital step in my career development”. The residency would enable me to “learn new creative methodologies in transdisciplinary artistic workshops, alongside a host of international artists” and give me the opportunity to present my work “within an international context” for the first time.

None of this was technically a lie. I was a resident at the gallery; I did share pasta dinners and cheap wine with the other artists – from Brazil, Wales, Argentina. And we did discuss our respective projects, which might have been called presenting my work within an international context. But it wasn’t the whole truth, either.

My reason for being in Lisbon (I had plotted and planned to get back there) was to find court documents related to a sexual assault that had been committed against me in the city 11 years earlier, when I was 18 years old.

I read somewhere that the average age of a first violent sexual assault – for victims and perpetrators of rape or attempted rape – is 18 and a half. I haven’t been able to verify this statistic. Online, there are many different authoritative-sounding claims about ages and likelihoods: 16 to 19 for victims; 28 to 33 for perpetrators. Because of taboos and improper reporting methods, sexual assault data is not as strong as it should be. But that number, that 18 and a half, seemed right to me, stuck with me, because it was my number. That is exactly how old I was when, overseas for the first time, on a sabbatical from full-time study, I was lured, then kidnapped, then subjected to an attempted rape by two young men, Tomas and Salvator, in an apartment just outside Lisbon. It is exactly how old I was when I fought and screamed and ran, early morning, down a hill, through shrubbery, along a highway, where a cop picked me up and drove me back to the city, and groped my leg as I considered rolling out the door of the moving vehicle.

Eighteen and a half: just old enough to make serious claims on my independence; old enough to insist on taking responsibility for the risks involved in becoming a whole person. Eighteen and a half: so unbearably young.

• • •

Lisbon, May, 2006. Outside the club, I dangled my legs over the edge of the wide river, my feet swinging like a purse at the end of a long strap. Above me was Lisbon’s big red bridge, just like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The girl I had gone to the club with, the woman I had bonded with earlier in the night, was kissing her new man inside while I waited. Her hair was long and wavy, and she laughed at all my jokes. I was vaguely embarrassed that she’d brought me there to sit and wait for her. I smoked cigarette after cigarette and talked to two young men at the edge of the water. Boys, really. Were they business students? I am Australian. They longed to visit Australia. So we swapped email addresses, just as I had swapped them, dropped them, in every city I had stepped through along the way.

At daybreak, 6am or so, the club closed and the boys suggested we get breakfast, “the best pastel de Belém in Belém”. I went to say goodbye to my new friend. She told me not to go with them.

“I’ll go with them,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m a big girl.” The woman with long wavy hair wrote her number on a piece of card that I slipped into my wallet. I didn’t have a phone.

At 29, in 2017, I was not in denial about any of it. Not really. I had told the story of me in Lisbon at 18 hundreds of times. From the morning of the assault, I told anyone who would listen. The more I simplified the story, the more comfortable with it I became; I integrated the facts of it into my identity. I had been terrified, I said, but I wasn’t harmed, not beyond repair. While afterwards I trusted people a little less, I said, I didn’t fear sex, or men, or even travelling alone. I even told a psychologist about it once, and then quickly assured him that it was absolutely not the cause of my distress. I didn’t think about the word “trauma” until years later, when I noticed that my nerves could not hold still, not even in a minor crisis. Like when a little white dog we all thought had been killed at the traffic lights, popped out from under the bonnet a second later, unharmed. A kinky nothing said to me by a lover in bed, the same words that one of my assailants said as he pinned down my wrists, urging his friend to violate me. A kitchen fire at a dinner party, where the thud of terror yelled, “Don’t try to fight it – run”, to my embarrassment, while friends successfully smothered the flames with tea towels. The fantasy that things are somehow safe, which you need to have if you are to do anything at all, had been pulled right out from under me.

By the third day of the residency, I had settled in, and felt ready to start looking for the documents from the trial. I got the number for the police station and made plans to call.

I did not call the police that day. Instead I read, I chatted with other artists, I walked around the city. I looked out at the Atlantic Ocean from the edge of Lisbon, and I felt the mound of tension in my stomach grow. I wouldn’t work up the courage to call the number for the police until the sixth day.

“I have a strange request,” I said to the officer on the other end. “In 2006, I was the victim of a crime in Lisbon, and it went to court. But I had to leave Portugal before I was able to find out what happened, so I’d like to see if I can track down the documents from this time.”

“OK,” he said. “So it was 11 years ago. The problem is, 11 years later, our paper has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.”

“‘Absolutely no meaning whatsoever’,” I repeated. “What does that mean?”

The man explained his brilliant mistranslation: “It means,” he said, “that the situation was a long time ago and the situation is in the archives; it has been archived for 10 years.”

“Is it possible to access the file from the archives? I don’t intend to pursue the matter, I just want to read it.”

“I can print it for you,” he said, “but it has absolutely no meaning. If you want, you can send an email to the police. The situation is that we don’t give the police report in an email.”

“I’ll come in person,” I said, and hung up, put my shoes on, and left the gallery.

My partner and I walked to the police station downtown. I sat on a plastic chair to wait my turn, just as I had 11 years earlier. Back then, my organs had felt heavy from no sleep, from the trauma, from the traces of alcohol still in my blood. Yet I managed to perform the role of a strong, reliable, resilient witness to my own assault. I was chipper and businesslike. I buried my shame deep alongside my fear and I gave my statement, describing how two young men had conspired to rape me and almost succeeded, but I had escaped by agreeing to other acts of violence, and then by my hysteria, and then by my physical desperation to flee. I was so chipper that, once I’d finished and signed my statement, the policeman taking down my report wrote his number on a piece of paper and said, “I finish at 10 – let me take you out and show you the real Lisbon.”

At the station in 2017, I explained myself. I was looking for the documents, the paper that has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. The officer behind the desk printed off what he could find: the initial report I made in 2006. Then, he sent me to another office, an enormous, modern building a half-hour’s walk away.

At the Polícia Judiciária, I explained six, seven, eight more times what I was now referring to as “the situation”. Finally, someone seemed to understand what I was after. The report. The file. The verdict of the trial that I never found out. I was told to wait.

After an hour waiting in the vast lobby, a detective, Cristina, came out to explain that I would need to call yet another department. There would be a different reference number for my case: my name had been incorrectly spelled in the initial report. I thanked her, and walked the five miles back to the gallery.

• • •

In court, in 2006, before I left Portugal, the two boys’ lawyers were each allowed to ask me a question. Tomas’s lawyer wanted to know if I thought that his client was sorry for what he’d done. “Yes,” I said, knowing that this was true. He was, I believed, horrified by what he had done.

Salvator’s lawyer asked whether it was true that I’d said, before his client took me to an apartment, locked me in a room and pinned me down with the intention to rape me, “Take me home and I’ll fuck you”? I leapt up. “No! No, that’s not true. No, I’ve never said that to anyone.” Which was true. I had never even thought of that constellation of words before.

While it was Tomas’s cowardice that got me into that room that sorry morning (he could not stand up to his domineering friend), it was his cowardice that got me out, too. As I kicked and screamed under the boys’ weight, heaving-crying and thinking that I would die, I desperately repeated, “I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.” In that moment, I had a split-second vision that determined everything else I did to survive. The picture was viewed from above: my body being dismembered and thrown into the Atlantic.

Tomas – the coward, my hero – lost his cool. He burst into tears and rolled off the bed. And it was suddenly clear to Salvator that he couldn’t handle the rape on his own, not under the witness of his failed collaborator. And I repeated the mantra, “I’ll do anything, just please don’t hurt me.” And Tomas continued to cry and shouted at Salvator in Portuguese. And Salvator shouted, in English, “You’re not leaving.” I found my shirt and my skirt and my shoes and I bundled them up in my arms. Salvator and Tomas screamed at one another. I pulled on some of my clothes. And Tomas said to me, “Come on.” And I moved towards the door. And Tomas made as if to open it. And we, one of us, opened it. And Salvator slammed his arm between me and the door. “Are you afraid?” And I knew he was a psychopath.

So when Tomas’s lawyer asked if I thought he was sorry, I thought: yes, Tomas was sorry. I am convinced that if Tomas had not been there, I would not be alive, that Salvator would have raped and murdered me right there. I am convinced that my family and friends might never have discovered what had happened to me. Decades would have passed, and my mother would still be looking for me.

A week into my residency, I had the number of the office that was holding my files. I called every day. Yet every time I called, something intervened. My Skype app automatically updated itself. The sketchy gallery internet dropped out. The receptionist couldn’t understand me and hung up. After days of this, I tried the other number, the number that Cristina had given me in case I needed to reach her, and no one picked up. When finally I got through, I explained myself to an English-speaking receptionist, who put me on hold while I was transferred to another officer who didn’t speak English.

Each time I spoke to someone new, I explained “the situation”. Each time, it felt like a punch in the face. Like a boxer, I prepared myself for each blow. Yet when each one came, I was stunned.

Finally, I reached Cristina. “You want a copy of the investigation? Call back on Monday,” she said. “I have a lot of work today.”

I crossed my fingers and set an alarm, as if I could forget. I absent-mindedly wrote in my notebook: “This is my story. Yet I cannot find the documents. They are mine.”

I understood that just because something happened to me, it didn’t suspend the suppressions of time and the failures of memory and the most human of all errors, bureaucratic filing systems.

It did not escape me, either, that what I was looking for did not exist. Closure. Resolution. The true story. I wanted a copy of the investigation, which had been archived for 10 years and was seemingly impossible to dredge up; I wanted to find out how Salvator and Tomas described the events in their words, if only so I could scoff at their lies; I wanted to know what judgment concluded the trial, if only to suffer through a not-guilty verdict. But none of it mattered, not really. None of it could push the factory-reset button, or assist my interior life, except to make me remember things my body had buried.

• • •

On the 17th day, Cristina called and said I was to go to the district court in a distant precinct where she had discovered the file had been archived.

The regional train raced past the docklands, beneath the red bridge, out towards the beach. To the left, the Atlantic Ocean opened up before me, slick and chilly. To the right, blond apartments emerged in rows from the thick green hills strewn with wild yellow flowers. It was in there, in one of those apartments, that it had happened.

We found the courthouse, stark, fascist, Latin-white. I gave the young receptionist my notebook, where I had written my list of demands in Google Translate Portuguese. She called over an older woman with plump cheeks who spoke English. “You must apply to see the process file,” she said. “It has already been archived.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.”

“What is your reason?” she said. “Why do you want to see it?”

“I had to leave Portugal. I never found out what happened.”

The woman looked at the computer screen and typed. Finally, she said, “I can’t tell you the sentence, but I can say the man, the accused, his sentence was annulled.”

I blinked. “Oh,” I said.

“You will need to fill out a form to find the sentença, the precise judgement. The court will telephone once the judge has decided whether you can see the file.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll be in Lisbon for another 10 days.”

Five days later, I received the email saying that I had permission to access the files. The police report, the court notes, the verdict.

The court’s archivist, João, was gentle and authoritative. Exactly as he ought to be, I thought. He smoothed his hand over the open pages of the two thick binders, talking me through everything that had happened after I left.

Salvator corroborated my testimony. He was not charged. Tomas was prosecuted. He was given a suspended sentence of 12 months and required to pay €500 to a victims’ support organisation. Tomas then appealed, and his sentence was annulled.

As João methodically copied the documents, I swung around to my partner. “But Salvator was the evil one,” I say. “Salvator. Not Tomas.” And, of course, I knew in an instant that my memory was wrong. I must have, at some point, switched the names and faces. And if I had been so certain about something so wrong, what else? What else had I changed?

Another day, another anxious train ride home, I thought. But this time the anxiety had an object. I had their full names.

• • •

Back at the gallery, I typed their names into a search engine, but not much came up. Their names were common. I wanted revenge. I thought about hiring a private detective. And then, I found the private Facebook account of one Tomas with the same succession of middle and surnames as my assailant.

I wrote him a message: “Do you know me.”

Back at the gallery, I began to type passages from the court documents into Google Translate. I began to read a broken translation of Salvator’s statement. What it revealed stopped me in my tracks. The two boys had been speaking in Portuguese as they assaulted me, and I was too traumatised to notice. I am lucky I didn’t understand what they said to one another. Tomas’s deliberation and cruelty had been much worse than I’d known.

I read as much as I could, which was not much, and closed my laptop. My partner and I packed our things and flew home.

The documents are in a folder at the bottom of a box in my wardrobe. Tomas never responded to the Facebook message. I never hired a private detective. Something in me settled. I didn’t like the story – I still don’t like to think what might be necessary for a perpetrator of sexual assault to get a conviction – but I accepted it as a small part of my life that I could know, as much as I could know anything. Which is to say I knew the story now.

• Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding, by Ellena Savage, is published by Scribe on 9 April, priced £9.99. To order a copy for £8.39, go to guardianbookshop.com.