Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

  “Yes, they can,” Silvina answered, “they can feed you intravenously, through a tube.”

  “Yes, but they can’t watch you all the time. You cut the tube. You cut off the fluid. No one can watch you twenty-four hours a day. People sleep.” It was true. That high school classmate had ended up dying. Silvina sat down with her backpack on her lap. She was glad she didn’t have to stand during the ride. She was always afraid a thief would open her backpack and find out what she was carrying.

  —

  A lot of women were burned before the bonfires began. It was contagious, explained the experts in domestic violence, in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television, anywhere they could pontificate. It was a complex subject to report on, they said, because on one hand it was necessary to sound the alarm about the femicides, and on the other hand the reports had a ripple effect, similar to what happens among teenagers with suicide. Men were burning their girlfriends, wives, lovers, all over the country. Most of the time they used alcohol, like Ponte (he had already been a hero to so many), but they also used acid, and in one particularly horrible case a woman had been thrown onto a pile of burning tires, part of some worker protest, in the middle of the highway. But Silvina and her mother only mobilized—singly, without consulting one another—after what happened to Lorena Pérez and her daughter, the last murders before the first bonfires. The father, before killing himself, had set fire to mother and daughter with the now tried-and-true bottle of alcohol. They didn’t know the victims, but Silvina and her mother both went to the hospital to try to visit them, or to at least protest outside; they ran into each other there. And the subway girl was there too.

  But she wasn’t alone, not anymore. Now she was accompanied by a group of women of various ages, none of them burned. When the cameras arrived, the subway girl and her companions moved into the spotlight. She told her story, and the others nodded and shouted encouragement. Then the subway girl said something dreadful, brutal:

  “If they go on like this, men are going to have to get used to us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don’t die. And wouldn’t that be nice? A new kind of beauty.”

  Once the cameras had gone, Silvina’s mother approached the subway girl and her companions. Several of the women were over sixty years old, and Silvina was surprised to see them so willing to spend the night in the street, to camp out on the sidewalk and paint their signs saying WE WILL BE BURNED NO MORE. Silvina stayed with them too, and in the morning she went to the office without having slept. Her coworkers hadn’t even heard about the burning of the mother and daughter. They’re getting used to it, thought Silvina. The fact that the girl is a child makes the case a little more horrible, but only a little. She spent the morning sending messages to her mother, who didn’t answer a single one. She was pretty bad about texting, so Silvina didn’t worry. At night, she called her at home and couldn’t reach her there either. Was she still at the hospital? Silvina went to look, but the women had abandoned their camp. All that remained were a few scattered markers and some empty snack wrappers swirling in the wind. There was a storm brewing, and Silvina rushed home as fast as she could because she’d left the windows open.

  The girl and her mother had died during the night.

  —

  Silvina’s first bonfire had taken place in a field off Route 3. The security measures were still very basic then—those of the authorities and of the Burning Women. Many people still refused to believe. True, the case of the woman who’d burned in her own car out in the Patagonian desert had been very strange. The preliminary investigations showed that she’d poured gasoline on the car and then gotten in behind the wheel, and that she’d sparked the lighter herself. No one else: there were no tracks from any other car and it would have been impossible to hide them in the desert, and no one would have been able to get there on foot. A suicide, they said, a very strange suicide. The poor girl must have gotten the idea from all those burned women. We don’t know why these attacks are happening in Argentina. These things belong in Arab countries, in India.

  “They’re some real sons of bitches, Silvinita, dear. Have a seat,” said María Helena, her mother’s friend and the head of a secret hospital for the burned. She had established it far from the city in the shell of her family’s old estate, surrounded by cows and soy. “I don’t know why that girl did what she did instead of getting in touch with us, but fine, maybe she wanted to die. That was her right. But these sons of bitches who say that burnings are for Arabs or Indians…”

  María Helena dried her hands—she’d been peeling peaches for a cake—and looked Silvina in the eye.

  “Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

  The cake was in honor of one of the Burning Women, who had survived her first year. Some of those who went to the bonfires chose to recuperate in regular hospitals, but many preferred secret centers like María Helena’s. There were others like it, Silvina wasn’t sure how many.

  “The problem is that they don’t believe us. We tell them that we burn ourselves because we want to, but they don’t believe us. Of course, we can’t make the girls who are staying here talk; we might go to jail.”

  “We could film a ceremony,” said Silvina.

  “We thought about that, but it would invade the girl’s privacy.”

  “Right, but what if one of them wanted it to be seen? And we could ask her to go toward the bonfire with, I don’t know, a mask, a disguise, if she wants to cover her face.”

  “What if they can tell where the place is?”

  “Oh, María, the pampa all looks the same. If we have the ceremony out in the grasslands, how will they know where it is?”

  And, almost without thinking about it, Silvina volunteered to take charge of the filming if one of the girls ever wanted her Burn to go public. María Helena got in touch with her less than a month after she offered. She would be the only one in the ceremony authorized to have electronic equipment. Silvina arrived by car—back then, it was still fairly safe. Route 3 was almost deserted, only a few trucks out on the road. She could listen to music and try not to think: not about her mother, who was in charge of another clandestine hospital in an enormous house in the southern part of Buenos Aires. Her mother, always so fearless and bold, much more so than Silvina, who went on working at the office and still couldn’t get up the nerve to join the women. Or about her father, dead since she was a little girl, a good and somewhat inept man. (“Don’t ever think I’m doing this because of your father,” her mother said to her once, on a break outside the makeshift hospital, while she was inspecting the antibiotics Silvina had brought her. “Your father was a delicious man, he never made me suffer.”) Or about her ex-boyfriend, with whom she’d ended things once she realized her mother’s radicalization was definitive, because she knew he would inevitably pose a danger to them. Or about whether she should betray the organization herself, tear it apart from within. Since when did people have a right to burn themselves alive? Why did she have to respect these women’s wishes?

  The ceremony took place at dusk. Silvina used the video function on a regular camera; phones were forbidden, she didn’t have a camcorder, and she didn’t want to buy one in case it could be traced. She filmed everything: the women preparing the pyre with enormous dry branches from trees in the countryside, the fire fed with newspapers and gas until the flames stood over a meter high. They were out in the backcountry, and a grove of trees and the house shielded the ceremony from the highway. The other road, to the right, was too far away for anyone to see them. There were no neighbors or workmen. Not at that hour. When the sun set, the chosen woman walked toward the fire. She walked slowly. Silvina thought the girl was going to change her mind because she cried the whole time. She had chosen a song for her ceremony, which the others—around ten, not many—were singing: “Your body, to the fire it goes / consumed quickly, devoured untouched.�
� But she didn’t change her mind. The woman entered the fire as if it were a swimming pool; she dove in, ready to sink. There was no doubt she did it of her own will. A superstitious or provoked will, but her own. She burned for barely twenty seconds. Then two women in asbestos suits dragged her out of the flames and carried her at a run to the hospital. Silvina stopped filming before the building came into view.

  That night she put the video online. By the next day, millions of people had seen it.

  —

  So Silvina took the bus. Her mother was no longer the head of the clandestine hospital on the city’s south side. She’d had to move when the secret of the century-old stone house, formerly an old folks’ home, had been discovered by one woman’s enraged parents (“She has children! She has children!” they’d screamed). Her mother had managed to escape the raid. She’d been tipped off by a neighbor who was a collaborator of the Burning Women, an activist who kept her distance, like Silvina. They had reassigned Silvina’s mother to a secret clinic in Belgrano—after an entire year of raids, they’d decided the city was safer than secluded locations. María Helena’s hospital had fallen too, though they never discovered the estate had been a location for the bonfires. Out in the country there’s nothing more common than burning fields or leaves, so there would always be scorched grass and earth out there.

  The judges expedited orders for raids, and in spite of the protests, women who didn’t have families or who were simply out alone in public fell under suspicion. The police would make them open their purses, their backpacks, the trunks of their cars, anytime and anywhere. The harassment was getting worse lately, because the bonfires had escalated. In the beginning there’d been one every five months, and now there was a bonfire a week. And those were just the burnings on record, the ones where the women went to a public hospital.

  And, just like that high school classmate of Silvina’s, the women managed to elude the surveillance remarkably well. The countryside was still vast, and couldn’t be monitored by satellite: plus, everyone has a price. If tons of drugs could be smuggled into the country, how were the authorities not going to let the occasional car pass with more drums of gasoline than was strictly reasonable? That was the only thing they needed, because the branches for the bonfires were already there, at every site. And the women brought their desire with them.

  “It’s not going to stop,” the subway girl said in a TV interview. “Look on the bright side,” she laughed with her reptile mouth. “At least there’s no more prostitution. No one wants a burned monster, or a crazy Argentine woman who could go off one day and set herself on fire—she could burn the customer too.”

  —

  One night, when Silvina was waiting for her mother to call about another delivery of antibiotics (she’d have to collect them from the Burning Women collaborators who worked in the city’s hospitals), she was struck by a sudden desire to talk with her ex-boyfriend. Her mouth was full of whiskey and her nose of cigarette smoke and the smell of sterilized gauze, the kind used for burns. It was a smell that never left her, along with that of burned human flesh, so difficult to describe. Mostly it smelled of gasoline, only with something more behind it, something unforgettable and strangely warm. But Silvina stopped herself from calling him. She’d seen him on the street with another girl. These days, of course, that didn’t mean much. Many women tried not to be alone in public now so the police wouldn’t bother them. Everything was different since the bonfires started. Just a few weeks earlier, the first survivors had started to show themselves. To take the bus. Go shopping at the supermarket. To take taxis and subways, open bank accounts, and enjoy a cup of coffee on the terraces of bars, their horrible faces lit by the afternoon sun, their hands—sometimes missing fingers—cupped around mugs. Would they find work? When would the longed-for world of men and monsters come?

  Silvina and her mother visited María Helena in jail. At first they’d been afraid that the other inmates would attack her, but no, they treated her remarkably well. “It’s because I talk with the girls here. I tell them that we women have always been burned—they burned us for four centuries! The girls can’t believe it, they didn’t know anything about the witch trials, isn’t it incredible? Education in this country has gone to shit. But they’re interested, they want to learn.”

  “What do they want to learn?” asked Silvina.

  “Well, they want to know when the bonfires are going to stop.”

  “And when are they going to stop?”

  “Oh, what do I know, child. If I had my way they’d never stop!”

  The jail’s visiting room was a big open hall with many tables, each with three chairs: one for the prisoner, two for visitors. María Helena spoke in a low voice. She didn’t trust the guards.

  “Some girls say they’re going to stop when they reach the number of witches hunted during the Inquisition.”

  “That’s a lot,” said Silvina.

  “It depends,” interrupted her mother. “Some historians say it was hundreds of thousands, others only forty thousand.”

  “Forty thousand is a lot,” murmured Silvina.

  “Over four centuries it’s not that many,” her mother said.

  “There weren’t many people in Europe six centuries ago, Mom.”

  Silvina felt the fury fill her eyes with tears. María Helena opened her mouth and said something else but Silvina didn’t hear it, and her mother went on and the two women conversed in the sickly light of the prison visitors’ room and Silvina heard only how the two of them were too old, they wouldn’t survive a Burn, the infection would carry them off in a second. But Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  A shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature. Like many of the adolescent democracies of the Southern Cone, the country is haunted by the specter of recent dictatorships, and the memory of violence there is still raw. Argentina’s twentieth century was scarred by decades of conflict between leftist guerrillas and state and military forces. The last of many coups took place in 1976, three years after Mariana Enriquez was born, and the military dictatorship it installed lasted until 1983. The dictatorship was a period of brutal repression and state terrorism, and thousands of people were murdered or disappeared. Since the dictatorship fell, Argentina has lived its longest period of democracy in recent history. Generations, including Mariana Enriquez’s, have lived their early years under the yoke of dictatorship and come of age in democracy.

  In Mariana Enriquez’s stories, Argentina’s particular history combines with an aesthetic many have tied to the gothic horror tradition of the English-speaking world. She’s been compared to Shirley Jackson, and her depictions of a labyrinthine and sinister Buenos Aires echo Victorian gothic renderings of London. Latin America has a gothic tradition as well, according to the critic María Negroni, that overlaps with what we’re used to thinking of as magical realism. Enriquez is the heir, perhaps, of Argentine gothic: Cortázar, Borges, Arlt, and Silvina Ocampo; it’s no coincidence that Enriquez wrote a biography of Ocampo, or that the protagonist of this book’s title story is named Silvina. But Enriquez’s literature conforms to no genre, and gothic is only one corner of the map of her aesthetic.

  What there is of gothic horror in the stories in Things We Lost in the Fire mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism. Haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs, and criminal pollution. Her characters occupy an Argentina scarred by the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and ’80s; a country whose return to democracy was marked by economic instability, hyperinflation, and precarious infrastructure; a nation that even in this decade has seen egregious instances of femicides and violence against women. Almost all of Enriquez’s protagonists, in fact, are women, and in these stories we get a sense of the contingency and danger of occupying a female body, though these women are not victims. The Chilean critic Lorena Amaro emphasizes that most of Mariana’s
characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and the vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.

  In “The Dirty Kid,” the narrator is a middle-class woman who chooses to live in the dangerous neighborhood of Constitución. The story has overt violence and hints of the supernatural, but for me one of its most disturbing lines is when the narrator says: “I realized…how little I cared about people, how natural these desperate lives seemed to me.” The horror comes not only from turning our gaze on desperate populations; it comes from realizing the extent of our blindness.

  In “Spiderweb,” a suffocating atmosphere of unease comes on the one hand from the looming presence of soldiers serving Alfredo Stroessner, the Paraguayan dictator, and on the other from the images of a lurking, violent natural world: the characters are caught between the brutality of man and that of nature. In “The Inn,” the girls’ everyday adolescent world of new sexuality and small revenge limns a horrifying history of state terror and clandestine torture centers. Silvina, in the title story, sympathizes with the Burning Women movement but doesn’t commit entirely, even toying with the option of destroying it from within. We understand that her choices are to betray her mother and the activists, or to burn herself—she cannot remain in between. The horror comes when Enriquez’s characters have to acknowledge their border position, to recognize the other reality and see themselves according to a different and dreadful new logic. As Amaro says, “The fear comes from looking into the courtyard next door and realizing that one day you could be trapped there, in a world that seems near, but is unknown and terrifying.”