To make matters worse, the subway girl wore tight jeans, see-through blouses, even high-heeled sandals when it was hot out. She wore bracelets on her wrists, and little gold necklaces hung around her neck. For her to flaunt a sensuous body seemed inexplicably offensive.
When she begged for money she was very clear: she wasn’t saving up for plastic surgery. There was no use, she would never get her normal face back, and she knew it. She only needed money to cover her expenses, for rent, for food—no one would give her work with a face like that, not even in jobs where the public wouldn’t see her. And always, when she finished telling her audience about her days in the hospital, she named the man who had burned her: Juan Martín Pozzi, her husband. She’d been married to him for three years. They had no children. He thought she was cheating on him and he was right—she’d been about to leave him. To keep that from happening, he ruined her. Decided she would belong to no one else. While she was sleeping, he poured alcohol over her face and held a lighter to it. While she couldn’t talk, when she was in the hospital and everyone was expecting her to die, Pozzi claimed she’d burned herself, that she’d spilled alcohol during a fight and then tried to smoke a cigarette, still wet.
“And they believed him.” The subway girl smiled with her lipless, reptilian mouth. “Even my father believed him.”
As soon as she could talk, still recovering in the hospital, she told the truth. Now he was in jail.
When the burned girl left the subway car no one talked about her, but the silence that was left, broken by the shaking as the train moved over the rails, said, How disgusting, how frightening, I’ll never forget her, how can someone live like that?
Maybe it wasn’t the subway girl who started it all, thought Silvina, but she definitely introduced the idea in my family. It had been a Sunday afternoon, and she and her mother were coming back from the movies—a rare excursion, since they almost never went out together. On the train, the subway girl got into their car, gave kisses to the passengers, and told her story. When she finished, she thanked everyone and got off at the next stop. The usual uncomfortable and ashamed silence didn’t follow. A boy, who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, started saying, “How manipulative, how gross, how desperate.” He also cracked jokes. Silvina remembered how her mother—tall, with short, gray hair, her whole aspect one of authority and power—had walked to the boy, crossing the aisle almost unwaveringly though the train shook as much as always. She’d drawn back her arm and punched the boy in the nose, a decisive and professional blow that made him bleed and cry out, “You old bitch, what’s wrong with you?” But her mother didn’t respond, not to the boy crying in pain nor to the other passengers, who weren’t sure whether to berate her or come to her defense. Silvina remembered the quick look, the silent instruction in her mother’s eyes, and how they’d both shot out of the train as soon as the doors opened, how they’d kept running up the stairs from the platform even though Silvina wasn’t in good shape and she got tired right away—running made her cough—and her mother was over sixty years old. No one followed them, but they didn’t realize it at first. On the busy corner of Corrientes and Pueyrredón they mixed in with the crowd to shake off any guards, or even police, but after two hundred meters they realized they were safe. Silvina couldn’t forget her mother’s elated laughter, so relieved. It had been years since she’d seen her so happy.
Still, it took Lucila and the epidemic she unleashed for the bonfires to start. Lucila was a model and she was very beautiful, but more than that she had a quirky charm about her. In TV interviews she seemed distracted and guileless, but she had intelligent and audacious things to say, and she became famous for that, too. Or half famous. True celebrity only came when she announced she was dating Mario Ponte, number 7 on the Unidos de Córdoba team. They were a second-division club that had heroically made it to the first, and they’d remained among the best during two championships thanks to a great squad, but above all thanks to Mario, who was an extraordinary player. He had rejected offers from European clubs out of pure loyalty—although some commentators said that at thirty-two and with the level of competition in Europe, it was better for Mario to become a local legend than a transatlantic failure. Lucila seemed to be in love, and though the couple got a lot of media coverage, no one scrutinized them too closely. They were perfect and happy—quite simply, they lacked drama. She got better modeling contracts and closed out all the fashion shows; he bought himself a very expensive car.
Drama came one morning at dawn when they carried Lucila on a stretcher out of her and Mario’s apartment: seventy percent of her body was burned, and they said she wouldn’t survive. She survived a week.
Silvina vaguely remembered the news reports, the gossip around the office. He had burned her during a fight, they said. Just like with the subway girl, he’d poured a bottle of alcohol over her while she was in bed, and then he’d thrown a lit match onto her naked body. He let her burn a few minutes before covering her with the bedspread. Then he called the ambulance. Like the subway girl’s husband, he claimed that she’d done it to herself.
That’s why, when women started burning themselves for real, no one believed it at first, Silvina thought while she waited for the bus (she didn’t use her own car to visit her mother, since she knew she could be followed). People preferred to believe those women were protecting their men, that they were still afraid of them, in shock and unable to tell the truth. The bonfires were just too hard to comprehend.
Now that there was another bonfire every week, no one knew what to say or how to stop them, except through the usual measures: inspections, police, surveillance. None of it worked. Once, an anorexic friend of Silvina’s had told her, “They can’t force you to eat.”
“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.