Buenos Aires is a city of ghosts. For many, this sentence conjures the enduring cultural scar of the Dirty War: thousands of forced disappearances during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. For me, it calls to mind a rainy winter morning when I wandered the Recoleta Cemetery, trench coat collar turned up against the chill. The neat rows of sarcophagi mimicked the posh streets just outside the gates, evoking a strange commune between the living and the dead. The eerie stories of Things We Lost in the Fire push this idea to a horrifying conclusion: Buenos Aires is a city of monsters whose tentacles reach well beyond the city limits.
This sinister collection has a masterful translator at the helm: Megan McDowell, acclaimed for her work with Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, and Diego Zúñiga. She notes how Enriquez creates a world where “haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs, and criminal pollution.” I’ll focus on a few of these interwoven themes, drawing relationships between the supernatural and corruption, between violence and the feminine.
Among the stories, “Under the Black Water” enmeshes social consciousness and horror, opening with a DA exasperated at the sight of a corrupt policeman: “The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt.” The effectiveness of McDowell’s translation is on full display here; every word feels crucial. In a slum where “the reasons for killing poor kids [are] many and despicable,” a pair of cops have beaten two teenagers and thrown them into the Riachuelo, the polluted river surrounding Buenos Aires.
The consequences of this tragedy extend beyond police brutality and environmental devastation. As a priest warns our lawyer protagonist, one of the boys has returned after waking up “the thing sleeping under the water,” a sinister creature inspiring cult-like worship in local residents. Intermingling the grotesque and political critique runs the risk of privileging one element over the other. With such intense sociological and ecological issues, who needs Cthulhu or the creature from the black lagoon (and vice versa)? But with a horrified priest and a death cult at hand, the river monster feels like a fitting final act in a world gone mad. There is also a religious subtext, an underlying tension between Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian cults with uncertain rituals, that would be intriguing to trace in Enriquez’s other works.
Things We Lost in the Fire also offers an intriguing perspective on women and violence. In Enriquez’s tangled world, female characters are victimizers, victims, enablers, and horrified witnesses of brutality. Depicting a marriage on the skids and an ill-fated trip to the Paraguay/Argentina border, “Spiderweb” illuminates a fine line between boredom, contempt, and the sinister. The narrator regrets her hasty marriage to elitist and verbally abusive Juan Martín, a reaction her family shares. As he becomes a petulant presence on their day trip to Paraguay, her cousin, Natalia, reminds her that “death is the only problem without a solution.” Though far from a pleasant character, Juan Martín is also the only one willing to point out atrocities of the Paraguayan dictatorship. When he expresses outrage at the sight of soldiers sexually harassing a waitress, the protagonist has a visceral reaction: “…he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night…And all because he needed to be a hero and prove who knows what.”
The message seems clear; there is no room for egoistic idealism, and desensitization is the only way to survive. Yet her other observations signal complicity rather than determined indifference, as when she fantasizes about “hand[ing] him over to [the] soldiers and let[ting] them do as they pleased with him.” By the time we reach a mysterious conclusion, the story’s scattershot insect imagery—droning cicadas, dying ladyflys, glowing fireflys—seems a portal into a primal landscape where no one is exempt from violence. In drawing connections between cruelty and the dark impulses of a woman’s mind, Enriquez makes a unique contribution to horror literature, while also reflecting on the viciousness of a grim period in South America’s history.
I’ve so often heard short stories described as “middle brow,” consigned neither to high literature nor mass market appeal. It’s a fate Things We Lost in the Fire doesn’t deserve. As haunted as the streets of Buenos Aires, these stories need to be read.
Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire, trans. Megan McDowell (Hogarth Press, 2017)
Photo Credit: Anthony, “Black Spider,” via Pexels.com.
