Dead Girls Read online

  Selva Almada

  dead girls

  Translated by

  Annie McDermott

  Contents

  Dead Girls

  Author's Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  In memory of Andrea, María Luisa and Sarita

  Author's Note

  I was born and raised in a provincial town, in what here we call ‘the interior’ of the country or la Argentina profunda. The 1980s, the decade of my small-town adolescence, were another world: no internet, no cable TV, barely any telephones (telephones had to be requested from the company, and it could be a decade or more before one was finally installed). In my house, for example, we didn’t have a telephone, and we received calls at the house of a neighbour, the only person on our block who did. This seems unreal now. We found out about the news mostly from the radio, because there weren’t many terrestrial TV channels or national newspapers. There were small papers in each city or town that covered local news. We lived atomised lives, in a fragmented reality, focused only on what went on nearby. Like islands in the middle of nowhere. Some people found it comfortable and safe to live that way, in closed societies where we all knew one another. I found it suffocating. As a girl, I sensed that there wasn’t really anywhere I was safe. I’d already seen the signs. At the age of eight, when I was walking to my mum’s work one afternoon after church – my mother was a nurse and worked in a clinic a few blocks away – a boy on a bicycle pulled up in front of me and said: Let’s fuck! I can clearly remember the knot in my stomach, the way I froze in the middle of the pavement, my eyes filling with tears, unable to say anything or run away. I remember him laughing at my frightened face before riding off on his bicycle. It’s not the only example I have, or the worst, but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, as my grandmother used to say.

  Violence was normalised. The neighbour beaten by her husband, the teenager next door who put up with her jealous boyfriend’s tantrums, the father who wouldn’t let his daughters wear short skirts or make-up. All the responsibility for what happened to us was laid at our feet: if you stay out late you might be raped, if you talk to strangers you might be raped, if you come back from a dance by yourself you might be raped. If you were raped, it was always your fault.

  You could be raped at home as well, but nobody warned you about that. And if it happened and you said something, most likely no one would believe you. The protective family space, a hypocritical Christian concept that nobody questioned.

  Maybe that’s why Andrea Danne’s murder was so shocking: stabbed in her bed, at home, as she slept. Maybe that’s why people quickly tried to blame her for her own death. She was young, pretty, desirable and desiring.

  Andrea’s femicide happened when I was thirteen. Thinking about it now, it was a violent, horrible introduction to adolescence. Being a woman meant being prey. When I was seventeen, in my last year at school, another girl was murdered, in another province. We were the same age. Her name was María Soledad Morales. Unlike all the femicides that were only news in the place where they happened, her story spread throughout the country. It was also the first time there was a Silent March, a means of demanding justice that later became fairly common: a crowd walking through the streets of a city, in total silence. Again they blamed the victim, but this time they also investigated and caught the culprits, with a chain of responsibility that was, of course, made up of men: rich men, the sons of distinguished politicians having fun with lower-middle-class girls; and men from the girls’ own social class, who handed them over in exchange for money.

  I wrote Dead Girls almost thirty years after the femicides of Andrea and María Soledad. At first, the book was going to describe three teenage femicides in the interior of Argentina in the eighties. Stories of women who would now be about my age.

  The research (documents, interviews, surveying newspapers from the time; and extensive work with the Señora, a medium, a line of connection to the dead girls) took me three years. Writing the book you now hold in your hands took me three months. The writing process was sustained and painful. As I wrote the stories of Andrea, María Luisa and Sarita, fragments of my own life story and those of women I knew began to work their way in. My friends and I were still alive, but we could have been Andrea, María Luisa or Sarita. We were just luckier.

  Selva Almada

  Buenos Aires, March 2020

  that woman, why is she screaming?

  who knows

  look at the pretty flowers

  why is she screaming?

  hyacinths daisies

  why?

  why what?

  why is that woman screaming?

  Susana Thénon

  Dead Girls

  1

  The morning of November 16th, 1986, was clear and cloudless in Villa Elisa, the town where I was born and raised, in the central eastern part of Entre Ríos province.

  It was a Sunday and my dad was grilling meat in the backyard. We still didn’t have a proper barbecue, but he made do with a metal sheet on the ground, the coals on top, and a grill on top of the coals. My dad would barbecue in all weathers: if it rained, he just used another piece of metal to cover the meat and the coals.

  Near the grill, in the branches of the mulberry tree, a portable, battery-powered radio, tuned permanently to LT26 Radio Nuevo Mundo. They played traditional folk songs and read the news every hour, though there was never much to read. It wasn’t yet forest fire season in the El Palmar national park, around thirty miles away, which went up in flames every summer and set off the sirens in all the fire stations nearby. Aside from the odd road accident, always some kid heading back from a dance, barely anything happened at weekends. Not even football in the afternoons, because the heat meant the tournament had moved to the evenings.

  I’d been woken that morning in the early hours by a gale that shook the roof of the house. I stretched out in bed and felt something that made me sit bolt upright, heart racing. The mattress was damp, and some warm, slimy forms moved against my legs. Still half-asleep, it took me a few seconds to work out what was going on: my cat had given birth at the foot of the bed again. The lightning that flashed through the window showed her curled up, gazing at me with her yellow eyes. I pulled myself into a ball, hugging my knees, so as not to touch them again.

  My sister was asleep in the next bed. The lightning cast a blue glow over her face, her half-open eyes – she always slept that way, like hares do – and her chest as it rose and fell, far removed from the storm and the rain that had swept everything away. I fell asleep too, looking at her.

  When I awoke, only my dad was up. My mum, brother and sister were still sleeping. The cat and her kittens had gone from the bed. The only trace of the birth was a yellowish stain with dark edges, at one end of the sheet.

  I went out to the yard and told my dad the cat had given birth but I couldn’t find her or her kittens. He was sitting in the shade of the mulberry tree, away from the grill but close enough to keep an eye on it. The stainless steel cup he always used was on the ground at his feet, filled with wine and ice. The metal was sweating.

  She must’ve hidden them in the shed, he said.

  I looked over, but couldn’t bring myself to check. A mad dog we used to have once buried her puppies in the shed. She ripped the head off one of them.

  The canopy of the mulberry tree was a green sky w
ith the sun glinting golden through the leaves. In a few weeks it would be covered in fruit, flies would come buzzing around it, the air would be thick with the bittersweet smell of overripe mulberries, and no one would want to sit underneath it for a while. But that morning it was beautiful. You just had to watch out for the hairy caterpillars, bright and green like Christmas wreaths, which were sometimes so heavy they fell from the leaves and burned your skin with their acidic sparks.

  Then came the news on the radio. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I heard every single word.

  In the early hours of that same morning, in San José, a town twelve miles away, a teenager had been murdered in her bed as she slept.

  My dad and I remained silent.

  From where I stood, I watched him get up from his chair and arrange the coals with a metal rod, levelling them out, bashing them to break up the bigger lumps, his face beaded with sweat from the heat of the flames, the meat he’d just thrown on sizzling gently. A neighbour walked past and shouted something. My dad, still bent over the grill, looked round and waved with his free hand. Be right there, he yelled. And he began nudging the coals aside with the same rod, moving them to one end of the metal, closest to where the ñandubay wood was burning, and leaving just a few, which he figured would be enough to keep the grill hot until he came back. Be right there meant swinging by the bar on the corner for a few cold ones. He slid on the flip-flops that had disappeared in the grass, pulling on the shirt he’d hung from a branch of the mulberry tree.

  If you see it going out, shove a few coals back over. I won’t be long, he said, hurrying into the street with his sandals flapping, like a kid who’s just seen the ice-cream van.

  I sat in his chair and picked up the cup he’d left behind. The metal was freezing. An ice cube was floating in the dregs of the wine. I fished it out with two fingers and put it in my mouth to suck. At first it tasted faintly of alcohol, but then it was just water.

  When there was only a small piece left, I crunched it between my teeth. I laid one hand on my thigh, below the hem of my shorts. It was a shock to feel it so cold. Like the hand of a corpse, I thought. Not that I’d ever touched one.

  I was thirteen, and that morning the news about the dead girl hit me like a revelation. My house, any teenager’s house, wasn’t really the safest place in the world. You could be killed inside your own home. Horror could live with you, under your roof.

  In the days that followed, I learnt more details. The girl’s name was Andrea Danne, she was nineteen, blonde, pretty, with blue eyes, she had a boyfriend and was training to be a psychology teacher. Someone had stabbed her in the heart.

  For more than twenty years, Andrea was always close by. She returned with the news of every other dead woman. With the names that, in dribs and drabs, reached the front pages of the national press, and steadily mounted up: María Soledad Morales, Gladys McDonald, Elena Arreche, Adriana and Cecilia Barreda, Liliana Tallarico, Ana Fuschini, Sandra Reitier, Carolina Aló, Natalia Melman, Fabiana Gandiaga, María Marta García Belsunce, Marela Martínez, Paulina Lebbos, Nora Dalmasso, Rosana Galliano. Each one made me think of Andrea and her unpunished murder.

  One summer, spending a few days in Chaco, a region in the north-east of the country, I came across a story in a local paper. The headline was: Twenty-Five Years Since the Murder of María Luisa Quevedo. A fifteen-year-old girl killed on December 8th, 1983, in the city of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña. María Luisa had been missing for several days, and then her raped and strangled body turned up on a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the city. No one was tried for the murder.

  Soon afterwards I also learnt about Sarita Mundín, a girl of twenty, who disappeared on March 12th, 1988, and whose remains were found on December 29th of that year on the banks of the Tcalamochita river, in the town of Villa Nueva, Córdoba province. Another unresolved case.

  Three teenage girls from the provinces murdered in the eighties, three unpunished deaths that happened before people in this country even knew the word femicide. That morning I didn’t know the name of María Luisa, either, who’d been murdered two years before, or of Sarita Mundín, who was still alive, unaware of what would happen to her in two years’ time.

  I didn’t know a woman could be killed simply for being a woman, but I’d heard stories that gradually, over time, I pieced together. Stories that didn’t end in the woman’s death, but that saw her subjected to misogyny, abuse and contempt.

  I’d heard them from my mother, and there was one in particular that stuck with me. It happened when my mum was very young. She didn’t remember the girl’s name because she never knew her, but she did remember she lived in La Clarita, a little settlement near Villa Elisa. She was about to get married, and a seamstress in my town was making her wedding dress. She’d come to be measured and to have a couple of fittings, always with her mother, in the family car. For the last fitting she came alone; no one could drive her, so she came by bus. Not used to travelling by herself, she took a wrong turn, and by the time she realised what had happened she was on the road that leads to the cemetery. A road that got very quiet at certain hours of the day. When she saw a car coming, she thought she’d better ask rather than carry on going round in circles, lost. There were four men in the car and they took her with them. She was kidnapped for several days, naked, bound and gagged in what seemed to be a derelict building. They gave her just enough food and water to stay alive, and raped her whenever they felt like it. The girl simply wanted to die. All she could see through the tiny window was sky and fields. One night, she heard the men setting off in a car. She screwed up her courage, managed to untie herself and escaped through the window. She ran across the fields until she came to a house, and the people there helped her. She was never able to identify the place she’d been held captive, or her captors. A few months later, she married her boyfriend.

  Another of my mother’s stories was more recent, from some two or three years back.

  Three guys went to a Saturday dance. One was in love with a girl, the daughter of a traditional Villa Elisa family. She was playing hard to get. Whenever he came after her, she’d let him get close and then give him the slip. This little game of cat and mouse had been going on for months, and the night of the dance was no different. They danced, had a drink, chatted, then she blew him off again. He went to drown his sorrows in the cantina, where his two friends were already several drinks in. It was their idea. Why not wait for her outside the dance and teach her a lesson? The love-struck boy sobered up as soon as he heard them. They were crazy, what the fuck, it was time he went home. The booze was messing with their heads.

  But they were serious. These prickteasers needed to be shown. They both left early as well. And they waited on a patch of wasteland by her house. No matter what, the girl would have to pass that way.

  She left the dance with a friend. They lived a block apart. Her friend got home first and she carried on, unconcerned, along the route she always took after a dance, in a town where nothing ever happened. They ambushed her in the darkness, beat her, penetrated her, taking it in turns, over and over. And when even their dicks were too disgusted, they went on raping her with a bottle.

  2

  From early that morning, the sun was beating down on the metal roof of the Quevedos’ house in Monseñor de Carlo, a neighbourhood in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, Chaco. The first days of December gave a taste of the brutal Chaco summer to come, with temperatures in the region often hitting forty degrees. In the torpor of her room, María Luisa opened her eyes and sat up in bed, ready to get up and go to work in the Casucho family home. She’d got a job there not long ago, as a maid.

  When dressing, she chose lightweight but pretty clothes. She liked to look nice in the street, though she wore old stuff for work, a shabby t-shirt and skirt, faded from the sun and splattered with bleach. From her poor-girl’s wardrobe, she picked out a vest and a floaty cotton sk
irt, with a little leather belt pulled tight around her waist. She washed her face and brushed her hair, which was medium-length, straight and dark. She shook the aerosol deodorant and sprayed it under her arms, then sprayed a mist over the rest of her body. She floated into the kitchen in that sickly-sweet cloud, drank three or four times from the mate gourd her mother prepared her, and left the house.

  She’d turned fifteen recently, on October 19th, which that year coincided with Mother’s Day. She was a skinny girl, her body still undeveloped. Though fifteen, she could have passed for twelve.

  The Casuchos’ house was in the centre of Sáenz Peña and María Luisa made the journey, twenty blocks or so, on foot. That morning, December 8th, was the day of the Virgin, a half-holiday. Some of the shops were still open, but the city was quieter than usual, so she wouldn’t have seen many people on the way.

  She was happy because it was her first job. She started early, around seven, and left at three in the afternoon, after washing the dishes from lunch.

  If she’d been planning to stick around in town that afternoon, taking advantage of the holiday, she didn’t tell her mother, Ángela Cabral, who, when she saw it was getting dark and María Luisa – Chiqui, as her family called her – still wasn’t back from work, began to worry.

  Since separating from her husband and the father of her six children, Ángela had lived with her two youngest girls and Yogui, her unmarried son of twenty-seven. He was the man of the house, and his mother turned to him first.

  Making the most of his afternoon off, Yogui was at a public swimming pool with some friends. A cousin went to find him there and tell him Ángela was in tears because Chiqui hadn’t come home after work.

  The first place Yogui tried was their father’s house. Oscar Quevedo lived with his new wife, a Bolivian woman his children didn’t get on with. But María Luisa wasn’t there. The search intensified after that, and as the hours went by it grew more and more frantic.