—
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?”