Dead Girls

by Selva Almada

  In the article Enrique Sdrech writes for Clarín, on September 10th 1995, there’s a special inset box about Fabiana. It’s headed The Sister’s Promise. And it says:

  When María Andrea Danne was killed nine years ago, the most outlandish theories did the rounds in San José. Many people saw the shadowy hand of a cult behind the murder, or of drugs, or prostitution, and suspicion even fell on the victim’s own father, Eymar Pablo Danne.

  For a long time afterwards, María Fabiana, María Andrea’s sister, was said to have behaved ‘strangely’ in mopping the floor and washing the bloodstained clothes. ‘What people don’t realise is that I had permission to do it from the police officer on duty at my house. I always dreamed of studying law, qualifying as a lawyer and going back through the file on my sister’s murder. Now I’ve qualified and I know the file off by heart and I won’t rest until the case is resolved,’ Mariana Fabiana, who has just turned twenty-six, told Clarín.

  Fabiana never agreed to an interview with me, only to answer a short email questionnaire around three years ago, when I was just beginning my fieldwork. After that, all my emails and calls to her law firm went unanswered. This is what she said to me then:

  Andrea and I got on really well, we confided in each other, though after she got a boyfriend we didn’t always go around together or share all the same friends. I don’t remember much of what happened on the day she died. For years I remembered it intensely, minute by minute, but nothing ever stood out as unusual. But then, I was organising the school prom and would have been busy all that day, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed even if there had been anything strange. Still, I can’t imagine her having a problem and not telling me. She definitely wouldn’t have told our parents, because they were strict and uptight. They never hit us, but a look or a simple no were enough. They didn’t want us having boyfriends. It didn’t stop Andrea, but I never dared bring anyone home. I found out what happened because my twelve-year-old brother came with a neighbour to get me, at the dance I was at, a couple of blocks from home. Andrea’s had an accident, they said. It was raining and the three of us ran back to the house. The whole time I was thinking she and her boyfriend had had a motorbike accident. I was really scared. I sensed it was serious, but I never imagined what was coming. When I got there, my mum took me by the shoulders and told me Andrea was dead. I don’t remember her exact words, but I remember her anguished expression. I can’t keep remembering because what happened that night destroys me, even after so long. At first I thought her boyfriend might have killed her, because he was extremely jealous, that’s why I wanted to be the one to go and get him, and I even said I blamed him. But when I saw his reaction to the body, I didn’t think it could have been him. We had no more contact with him or his family after that. A few years ago we ran into each other and said hello, but we didn’t mention what happened.

  My life was never the same after my sister’s death. My parents went to pieces, with my mum depressed and my dad very withdrawn. And my brother, who was twelve, looking after them both because I soon went to study in Buenos Aires. I think I only slept in that house with my mother two more times. Then never again. When I visited at weekends I steered clear until Sunday morning, or stayed with friends in the neighbourhood. I think it was all a way of escaping.

  11

  As a girl I loved going to the cemetery. On sunny afternoons, on winter Sundays, with bags of chrysanthemums or dahlias, flowers my gran grew in her garden with the sole purpose of adorning the graves of our dead. Summer Sundays, too, but in the early morning, before the sun came beating down on our heads, when the cypresses lining the main avenue still gave off a fresh cool scent and the burial niches and tombs cast their shadows on the graves below. I took other seasonal flowers in the bags, and always carnations and pinks, which last longer, which don’t give in so easily, so meekly to the heat. And sprigs of sword fern, which also endure.

  Two tombs in particular fascinated and scared me, in a dark, romantic way that for a girl of seven or eight was impossible to explain. They were two tombs in opposite niches, facing one another. In the first, a young woman who died of an illness. In the second, a youth barely older than her, who died in an accident. Her picture was a studio portrait, the kind women in the 1940s or 1950s sat for once in their lives, before their wedding photo. His was a photo from an ID card, showing him serious and with very short hair, probably because he was an army conscript at the time.

  I don’t know if I was told this or if I made it up, but I remember I liked to look at them because they’d been courting before they died. Death took her first. And it came for him soon after. That’s what the dates on the bronze plaques said. I think I must have got the part about the illness and the accident from the epitaphs, too. I never left the cemetery without paying them a visit. I’d stand in between them, but a few steps away, so it seemed like the two photos were looking at each other. And I felt there was no greater love than that of this pair, who for a long time now had been no more than love-struck dust.

  I think my relationship with death was far more natural in my childhood. Perhaps because we’d been told that the father of my cousin, who was like a twin brother to me, had died in an accident before either of us were born. Or because many of our dogs and cats died prematurely, crossing the road, hit by trucks. Or because a neighbour’s little boy had died that way, too; and a girl at my school; and another neighbour, a boy, Buey Martín, who came off his motorbike after a dance. Back then, death wasn’t only for the old and sick. I’d hear people saying that so-and-so had died in the flower of youth and I thought it was a beautiful image.

  Then my views changed. I don’t know exactly when or why, but I began to be afraid. I stopped going to the cemetery because at night I dreamt the dead were coming after me.

  Somehow, my meetings with the Señora changed those feelings. The afternoons we spent together were like those afternoon trips to the cemetery. A kind of reconciliation.

  A taxi driver agrees, begrudgingly, to take me to the outskirts of Sáenz Peña. It’s midday and the sun is splitting above us like a ripe cheese. The guy would rather be at home by now than crossing the city, dodging the packs of scooters that buzz along, clogging the full width of the roads. On the way I try to convince him to wait for me, just for a bit, fifteen minutes at most, but he says no. No, lady, I’m already off duty, but I’ll send a car later if you like. I say yes, though I doubt he’ll send anyone, or that anyone will want to come at this hour, when everyone’s going to sleep, when the city is dying until five o’clock.

  Where shall I drop you? he asks when we’re arriving.

  Here’s fine.

  He brakes near the intersection of Calle 51 and Calle 28. While I’m paying, I try again.

  Sure you can’t wait just a little?

  Madam, I’ve already told you, I’m off duty. I shouldn’t even have brought you this far, honestly.

  I haven’t finished closing the door and already he’s making a U-turn and disappearing at full speed in a cloud of dust.

  To one side of me there’s a social housing development. Identical little houses, all painted white, blinding where they reflect the sun. All with identical water tanks on the roof.

  On the other side, a rubbish tip. A shimmering swamp, blue and green from the flies. A dog, every now and then, nosing around in the piles of trash. It smells foul.

  The other two corners of the intersection are empty lots, covered in weeds.

  María Luisa Quevedo’s body was thrown into one of these four bits of land, but which?

  I look around, a bit disoriented. There’s no one here. In some places, noon feels more frightening than the dead of night. For something to do, I take a few photos with a little camera I have in my rucksack. I don’t know why, the landscape’s grim and desolate. I tell myself it’s so I can remember it later, but I know I’ll never download the photos, that most likely I’ll dele
te them or lose them.

  As I’m doing that, I hear a voice behind me.

  Go on, take more, take more, let the governor see the squalor he’s got us living in.

  A woman is on her way home, her house is right on the corner, and she’s wheeling her bike. She seems to think I’m a journalist.

  I walk over and say hello. She’s a young woman, slim and energetic.

  Are you taking pictures for the paper?

  No. But maybe you can help me. I’m looking for where a girl’s body was left, some years ago. I don’t know if you remember. Was it here, in the rubbish tip?

  Maira Tévez? Yeah, right there, they threw her on that tip there.

  The murder of Maira Tévez is more recent, though the papers were also quick to link it to María Luisa Quevedo. Maira was twenty-one, and training to be an English teacher. In 2010, her boyfriend, Héctor Ponce, shot her in the head and then cut her body into pieces and deposited them in different places: the arms and legs went in the septic tank of the apartment block where the girl lived; the head was most likely thrown into some wasteland and then dragged by dogs into the yard of a neighbour, who reported it; the torso was found on this rubbish tip.

  No, I’m asking about another girl: María Luisa Quevedo. Was her body left there too?

  Oh, no. They put the Quevedo girl over there.

  She points to one of the patches of scrubland.

  My husband found her...

  Your husband found the body?

  Yeah, my mother-in-law’s always talking about that story.

  He’s not in, by any chance? I’d like to speak to him.

  Yeah, he’s here. Actually, hang on a second, I’ll ask him. Is it for the paper?

  No, I’m writing a book...

  The woman nods and goes through a door to what looks like a concrete patio. She soon reappears and invites me in.

  The house is in semi-darkness, with all the shutters closed and a floor fan that barely shifts the air.

  With the flies and everything we have to keep it all closed, she tells me.

  When my eyes adjust, I make out a man sitting at the table with a baby girl in his lap, who he’s feeding.

  We say hello and I tell him why I’m there.

  I don’t want any trouble, he says.

  I can leave your name out if you’d prefer.

  That would be good.

  The woman is standing next to him.

  Go on, tell her, she urges him.

  A friend and I used to come here all the time, to the bit just over there. The reservoir would fill up when it rained and there was always fishing. It was so shallow you could do it just with a stick. To hit the fish with, you know? Anyway, that’s what we were doing the morning we saw the Quevedo girl under a tree on the shore. We were young. It scared us shitless and we ran to find an adult.

  He falls silent and goes on loading the spoon with baby food and seeking out the little girl’s mouth. She stares at me with her large eyes.

  And tell her the bit your mother always tells, the woman says. She seems to be finding her husband’s story incomplete.

  They made our lives hell after that, back and forth from court all the time, endless questions. That’s why I said I don’t want trouble. We had enough of it back then.

  When I leave, the woman follows me and pokes her head round the door.

  See if you can do something about the flies, she says. We can’t even drink mate outside, there are so many. Maybe you can report it in the paper, eh?

  And she shuts the door quickly so the swarm doesn’t slip inside.

  I walk slowly towards the wasteland. The weeds would come up to my knees so I stay on the road, out of fear of snakes. There’s no sign of the reservoir, that watery bed that cradled María Luisa before she came to rest on the table at the morgue, and then in the municipal cemetery.

  I think about the man I’ve just spoken to. I think about the ironies of fate. The neighbourhood where he lives seems pretty new, it can’t be more than ten years old. The houses are allocated by a lottery. That he should end up with one right opposite the place where he saw the most horrific sight of his life: the swollen body of the teenager, her face and one eye eaten by the birds.

  Those bones resting in a niche together with the bones of the boy who died young, from a heart attack, and the baby who was just beginning to live, are not the remains of Sarita Mundín. Where are you, Sarita? Who is the other dead girl?

  A sign at the entrance to the San José cemetery says it closes at six on Sundays. There are fifteen minutes left. I go in and glance around for the attendant so I can ask where Andrea’s grave is. The guy’s nowhere to be seen, so I start looking by myself. I decide to begin with the burial niches. I try the ones in the back wall, but the dates are from a long time ago. I move to one of the sides. These are more recent. I scan them quickly, up, down. Nothing. Where’s the attendant gone? I’m running out of time. I’m going to have to leave without visiting her.

  I hear laughter, muffled by the walls of the tombs. I follow the sound. It’s two teenage girls, heading for the exit. They’re laughing, who knows what about. I intercept them.

  I’m looking for a niche. Maybe you’ve heard of Andrea Danne, a girl...

  Yeah, the one who got killed in her house.

  Uh-huh.

  I think she’s over there, one girl tells me. When I was younger I used to come here all the time, but I haven’t been in a while. I think it was over there.

  I hurry in the direction they’re pointing. I read names, up, down, dates, I look at photos. Until, finally, Andrea. The front of the niche is marble, the colour of milky tea. As well as the plaque with her boyfriend’s inscription, there’s one from her family and another from her schoolmates, the Class of ’85. A simple cross, and a photo of her smiling, her long blonde hair loose, wavy and with a few coloured braids. In two vases, purple daisies, orange roses and some stems of white freesias.

  They’re the same flowers that decorate her father’s niche, one row down – no marble front, just bare concrete and the name written in chalk – and her mother’s, also unfinished and with a sign attached, made on the computer, giving her name and the date of her death.

  I leave at six on the dot. As soon as I’m through the gates I hear a noise behind me. It must be the attendant, I think, but I don’t turn round to see.

  They say that when you’re leaving a cemetery, you should never, ever look back.

  Epilogue

  The new year began a month ago. In that time, at least ten women have been killed for being women. I say at least because these are the names that appeared in the papers, the ones that counted as news.

  Mariela Bustos, stabbed twenty-two times, in Las Caleras, Córdoba. Marina Soledad Da Silva, beaten and thrown down a well, in Nemesio Parma, Misiones. Zulma Brochero, knifed in the forehead, and Arnulfa Ríos, shot, both in Río Segundo, Córdoba. Paola Tomé, strangled, in Junín, Buenos Aires. Priscila Lafuente, beaten to death, half-burned on a barbecue and then thrown in a stream, in Berazategui. Carolina Arcos, killed with a blow to the head, on a building site in Rafaela, Santa Fe. Nanci Molina, stabbed, in Presidencia de la Plaza, Chaco. Luciana Rodríguez, beaten to death, in the capital of Mendoza. Querlinda Vásquez, strangled, in Las Heras, Santa Cruz.

  We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck.

  Yesterday I said goodbye to the Señora. The pack of tarot cards was in the green cloth as usual, but we didn’t touch them, I didn’t move the cards in circles with my right hand, I didn’t ask any questions. She told me it’s time to let go, that it�
�s not good to spend too long drifting from one side to the other, from life into death. That now the girls have to go back to where they belong.

  As she said this, she reached over the table between us and took my hand in hers. Squeezing it, each of us sitting where we’d sat in every session. I squeezed her hand back and then gradually she began to let go. I held on a little, a moment longer, I could still feel the girls through her. She looked at me. Or they looked at me and I understood and I began to let go as well.

  Three white candles. My farewell to the girls.

  One white candle for Andrea. One white candle for María Luisa. One white candle for Sarita, and if Sarita is alive, please let her be alive, then the candle is for that nameless girl who washed up on the banks of the Tcalamochita river over twenty years ago. The same wish for all of them: sleep well.

  I spent the summer before Andrea’s murder in the countryside, at my grandparents’ place. It was the last summer I’d spend there with my aunt Liliana, who was about to get married and move to the town, to her new house. In the siesta one day we went to see Teya, her neighbour and confidante, a woman with grown-up children. It was about three miles from my grandpa’s farm to Teya’s. That year I’d had a growth spurt and was as tall as my aunt, who was a short woman. We walked along arm in arm, and slowly, though the sun was fierce. I knew my aunt wouldn’t be the same after she got married, that this intimate bond we’d shared ever since I was little, and that had become closer as I grew up, wouldn’t be the same either. From then on, she would live with a man, her husband. We’d never again sleep in the same bed, or be able to stay up until all hours chatting about nothing. That walk was special.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want us to get sad. But I think she was feeling something similar. Then she told me a story I’d always heard in bits, the way children eavesdrop on conversations they shouldn’t. I don’t know if she told me by chance or because she also sensed the finality of that walk through the countryside and wanted to tell me something that was important to her.