Elena Knows Page 13

  The novel which shot Piñeiro to fame in 2005 was Thursday Night Widows, which focuses on four deaths in an exclusive gated community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Much of the novel revolves around the social circumstances of the families in the community, following the economic boom of the 1990s in Argentina, during which the peso was pegged to the dollar, though the narrative present is post-9/11 and the financial crisis. Who goes in and out of this community is strictly controlled, and when crimes are committed, a claustrophobic climate of fear and mutual suspicion sets in amongst the residents, whose usual tendency to obsessively compare themselves with their peers becomes unhealthily magnified. The novel’s final provocative question, ‘Are you afraid to leave?’, as one family in crisis prepares to exit the dysfunctional social bubble, gently prods at the conscience of anyone who is living too comfortably in wilful ignorance of social division and breakdown around them.

  Betty Boo has a similar setting to Thursday Night Widows, opening with a crime in a gated community, but here the investigative process takes centre stage. Piñeiro uses it to contrast old-fashioned investigative journalism with contemporary internet-based research and instant online news, alongside the exploration of criminal motives through fiction. She uses the novel to draw ethical conclusions about the need for individuals to weigh up conflicting news sources for themselves, making this novel feel very timely in the era of ‘fake news’. A Crack in the Wall has an uninvestigated crime at its heart, but once again much of the plot is devoted to wider social scrutiny, examining the ways in which ideals of both individuals and institutions can become tarnished and behaviour compromised in a context of neoliberalist profit-driven practices. Furthermore, the presence of a buried body literally in the foundations of the building where the action takes place is used in the novel as a metonym for Buenos Aires’ recent dark history, when during the 1976-83 military dictatorship political repression resulted in ‘A city where so many of the dead lie outside the cemetery walls’ (A Crack in the Wall, p. 188).

  In All Yours, a superbly plotted and paced crime fiction novel, there is a secondary plot which competes for the reader’s attention with the suspense of the main narrative. This subplot revolves around the question of access to clandestine abortion, and the consequences of the secrecy and taboos surrounding it for a middle-class family in which the parents are too self-obsessed to even notice that their daughter is pregnant. This emerging theme points clearly in the direction taken by Elena Knows.

  Una suerte pequeña [A Little Luck] puts the main character Marilé into a crisis situation, where despite being a loving mother she feels she has no alternative but to abandon her husband and only son. Like many of Piñeiro’s other works, the relationship between parent and child is examined in a state of maximum tension. Las maldiciones [Curses], for example, sees Piñeiro examine the nature of fatherhood. She also turns her critical gaze on politics, on how politics is conducted nowadays in the globalized, media-driven contemporary world, where policies are frequently shaped by what will secure the short-term popular vote, rather than by long-term objectives. In the collection of short stories Quién no [Wouldn’t You], this cynical gaze alights on the world of bestsellers and moral bankruptcy in publishing in the stories ‘La muerte y la canoa’ [Death and the Canoe] and ‘Bendito aire de Buenos Aires’ [Blessed Air of Buenos Aires]; Piñeiro also returns her attention to the subject of abortion in ‘Basura para las gallinas’ [Scraps for the Hens], which focuses on two generations of women in a family passing on the painful knowledge of how to terminate a pregnancy with a knitting needle. This spotlight on women driven to take desperate measures, and on the hypocrisy and coercion of those around them, is at its most extreme in Elena Knows, which is Piñeiro’s most sustained intervention, through the medium of fiction, in the long campaign to legalise abortion. (The novel’s force can be likened to the impact of Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego’s 1998 series of etchings of abortions, which were reproduced in Portuguese national newspapers in the days leading up to Portugal’s second referendum on abortion in 2007.) It is perhaps for this reason that Elena Knows has not previously appeared in English: with this novel in particular, Piñeiro cannot be comfortably pigeonholed as (merely) a crime fiction writer; Elena Knows goes beyond its elements of crime investigation to raise urgent ethical questions, challenge religious hypocrisy and shake Catholic dogma to its core.

  Elena Knows

  Elena is an unlikely heroine; an elderly Argentinian widow suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease whose relationship with her daughter Rita – who is also her full-time carer – frequently descends into mutual resentment and bitter argument. In spite of the title, rather than what Elena knows, the key to this profoundly moving novel is what Elena doesn’t know. Piñeiro scrutinises their difficult mother-daughter relationship, using it to question to what extent women have control over their own bodies, and those of others. The story traces an arc from hubris to humility on Elena’s part, and from conviction to despair on the part of her daughter, Rita, though this trajectory is masked by a non-chronological development. Their antagonistic relationship is triangulated with the life of Isabel, who is also a mother, though she has lived a quietly tragic life rejecting that label.

  Elena’s biggest assumption is that as a mother, she knows her daughter, knows her fully and fundamentally, and therefore knows how she would react in any given circumstance. ‘No one knows as much about her daughter as she does, she thinks, because she’s her mother […] Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves. That’s what they say, that’s how it is.’ (p. 49)

  Elena’s dogmatic insistence launches her on a painful journey towards self-knowledge, towards unlearning what she thought she knew, and to the realisation that she did not, in fact, know her daughter as well as she thought. The journey is simultaneously exacerbated and propelled by Elena’s suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The fierce limitations that Parkinson’s imposes on her world, both physically and mentally, are compellingly drawn; Elena cannot move without the aid of medication and her perspective is limited by the inability to raise her head beyond a certain point. ‘Her time is measured in pills’ (p.70), we are told, and the narrative reinforces this, being divided into three parts, ‘Morning’, ‘Midday’ and ‘Afternoon’, the times for Elena to religiously take the second, third and fourth pills of the day. This ritual, like a vestigial echo of monastic offices, is enhanced by Elena’s personal litanies of repeated street names while she waits for the pills to take effect. Poignantly, we are left to speculate at what lonely point in the early hours, prior to the start of the narrative, Elena took her first pill of the day. Although not strictly observing unities of time, place and action, the three-part structure and intensity feels like a gesture towards Greek tragedy. The central plot takes place in the present, the single drawn-out day of Elena’s arduous journey to see Isabel, although it is fleshed out by flashbacks to the events of twenty years before. The setting gravitates around the local neighbourhoods of Elena and Isabel in Buenos Aires, and there is a sense of unity of action in that the whole novel stems from a single decisive intervention by Rita which had devastating and long-lasting consequences for them all.

  Societal forces are at work here which constrain the life choices of these three women. The Catholic church and its dogmas loom large, with its categorical statements about humans and their bodies: ‘The Church condemns […] any wrongful use of the body that does not belong to us, whatever name you want to give the action, suicide, abortion, euthanasia.’ (p. 53) Piñeiro explores these so-called ‘wrongful’ uses, giving a characteristic twist and creating many ironic parallels between her characters and the way their bodies use and are simultaneously used by others. Rita is seen to rigidly accept the church’s doctrines to the extent of imposing them on a stranger, preventing Isabel from having the abortion she desperately wants; indeed Rita and her middle-aged boyfriend Roberto a
re ‘united by their convictions […] about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced’ (p.88). Yet Rita’s body in turn is submitted to a painful and humiliating gynaecological examination, instigated by her mother and the medical establishment, to check if she has a womb and is fit for female purpose, and she later submits her own body to one of the church’s ‘wrongful uses’. Elena, meanwhile, suffers terribly at the hands of ‘Herself’, the ‘fucking whore illness’ (p. 3) as she resentfully calls her crippling Parkinson’s disease, yet she fully intends to (ab)use Isabel’s healthy body as a surrogate to carry out her own investigations into Rita’s death.

  Of all the characters, Isabel is the real victim; her body is assaulted from all sides, by her husband, by Rita, and (almost) by Elena. Yet as the tragedy unfolds, there is genuine resolution between her and Elena, as both women come to realise that not knowing, and not fitting into neat categories, is something that they share. Isabel, despite having a daughter, disavows motherhood saying ‘I’m something else, something that doesn’t have a name’ (p. 123), and Elena doubts her success as a mother and even her right still to be called one, now that her only child is dead. In a cinematic scene, the two distressed women tacitly bond over a substitute object of affection, Isabel’s cat, who goes back and forth silently between them.

  The issues raised by Elena Knows are universal, timely and complex: the obstacles to a woman’s right to control her own body, the myths and realities surrounding motherhood, the mental and physical constraints on women’s daily routines, the increasing challenges of an ill and ageing body. Although the issue of abortion is undoubtedly the central and burning theme of the novel, Elena Knows also asks the reader to put themselves in Elena’s unenviable place of age and infirmity. One of the most moving moments in the novel occurs when Elena leaves an appointment after receiving her disability certificate. Roberto sees she is crying and asks why, to which she simply replies ‘They treated me kindly’ (p. 83). In this moment of vulnerability, we gain a rare insight into Elena’s habitual brusqueness and forcefulness, which is revealed – at least in part – to be a necessary self-defence against the all-pervasive ageism and sidelining of elderly and disabled people on the part of society at large.

  Elena Knows challenges fixed ideas about ageing, disability and, above all, abortion. In her most recent novel, Catedrales [Cathedrals], Piñeiro dramatises even more forcefully the potentially tragic effects of a rigidly traditional Catholic standpoint on abortion. Catedrales was published during the global lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, and in a context of fierce public debates in Argentina around the legalisation of abortion, which was eventually approved by the National Congress on 30th December 2020. Its powerful multi-voiced narrative, with each chapter told from the perspective of a different character, imagines the horrific lengths that a family member will go to in their misguided desire for ‘decency’ and preserving family honour.

  In all of her work, Piñeiro does not shy away from the most pressing ethical questions. She places her characters in crisis situations where they have to take radical decisions; often her characters find that they do not know their own mind until their body is in peril, and at the crucial moment a deeper kind of knowledge emerges. Elena Knows, together with the more recent Catedrales, is perhaps the most deeply felt of Piñeiro’s novels in its ability to tap into the raw emotion and extreme feelings surrounding the abortion debate, whilst presenting the reader with an elderly detective-heroine who is light years from the likes of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: an objectionable and outspoken woman suffering advanced Parkinson’s who stubbornly persists against the odds in investigating the death of her own daughter. In choosing to re-launch Claudia Piñeiro in English with this particular novel, Charco Press presents the author at her most committed, taking the tropes of crime fiction into a deeper ethical dimension and demonstrating supreme moral integrity. In creating Elena, Piñeiro offers us a truly extraordinary example of humility, perseverance and willingness to change. Let us accept her gift.

  Dr Fiona Mackintosh

  University of Edinburgh

  March 2021

  Director & Editor: Carolina Orloff

  Director: Samuel McDowell

  www.charcopress.com

  First published by Charco Press 2021

  Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh, EH10 4BF

  Copyright © Claudia Piñeiro 2007

  Published by arrangement with Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria

  www.schavelzongraham.com

  First published in Spanish as Elena sabe by Alfaguara (Argentina)

  English translation copyright © Frances Riddle 2021

  The rights of Claudia Piñeiro to be identified as the author of this work and of Frances Riddle to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Work published with funding from the ‘Sur’ Translation Support Programme of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina / Obra editada en el marco del Programa ‘Sur’ de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9781999368432

  e-book: 9781999368494

  www.charcopress.com

  Edited by Fionn Petch

  Cover designed by Pablo Font

  Typeset by Laura Jones

  Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh