And, almost without thinking about it, Silvina volunteered to take charge of the filming if one of the girls ever wanted her Burn to go public. María Helena got in touch with her less than a month after she offered. She would be the only one in the ceremony authorized to have electronic equipment. Silvina arrived by car—back then, it was still fairly safe. Route 3 was almost deserted, only a few trucks out on the road. She could listen to music and try not to think: not about her mother, who was in charge of another clandestine hospital in an enormous house in the southern part of Buenos Aires. Her mother, always so fearless and bold, much more so than Silvina, who went on working at the office and still couldn’t get up the nerve to join the women. Or about her father, dead since she was a little girl, a good and somewhat inept man. (“Don’t ever think I’m doing this because of your father,” her mother said to her once, on a break outside the makeshift hospital, while she was inspecting the antibiotics Silvina had brought her. “Your father was a delicious man, he never made me suffer.”) Or about her ex-boyfriend, with whom she’d ended things once she realized her mother’s radicalization was definitive, because she knew he would inevitably pose a danger to them. Or about whether she should betray the organization herself, tear it apart from within. Since when did people have a right to burn themselves alive? Why did she have to respect these women’s wishes?
The ceremony took place at dusk. Silvina used the video function on a regular camera; phones were forbidden, she didn’t have a camcorder, and she didn’t want to buy one in case it could be traced. She filmed everything: the women preparing the pyre with enormous dry branches from trees in the countryside, the fire fed with newspapers and gas until the flames stood over a meter high. They were out in the backcountry, and a grove of trees and the house shielded the ceremony from the highway. The other road, to the right, was too far away for anyone to see them. There were no neighbors or workmen. Not at that hour. When the sun set, the chosen woman walked toward the fire. She walked slowly. Silvina thought the girl was going to change her mind because she cried the whole time. She had chosen a song for her ceremony, which the others—around ten, not many—were singing: “Your body, to the fire it goes / consumed quickly, devoured untouched.” But she didn’t change her mind. The woman entered the fire as if it were a swimming pool; she dove in, ready to sink. There was no doubt she did it of her own will. A superstitious or provoked will, but her own. She burned for barely twenty seconds. Then two women in asbestos suits dragged her out of the flames and carried her at a run to the hospital. Silvina stopped filming before the building came into view.
That night she put the video online. By the next day, millions of people had seen it.
—
So Silvina took the bus. Her mother was no longer the head of the clandestine hospital on the city’s south side. She’d had to move when the secret of the century-old stone house, formerly an old folks’ home, had been discovered by one woman’s enraged parents (“She has children! She has children!” they’d screamed). Her mother had managed to escape the raid. She’d been tipped off by a neighbor who was a collaborator of the Burning Women, an activist who kept her distance, like Silvina. They had reassigned Silvina’s mother to a secret clinic in Belgrano—after an entire year of raids, they’d decided the city was safer than secluded locations. María Helena’s hospital had fallen too, though they never discovered the estate had been a location for the bonfires. Out in the country there’s nothing more common than burning fields or leaves, so there would always be scorched grass and earth out there.
The judges expedited orders for raids, and in spite of the protests, women who didn’t have families or who were simply out alone in public fell under suspicion. The police would make them open their purses, their backpacks, the trunks of their cars, anytime and anywhere. The harassment was getting worse lately, because the bonfires had escalated. In the beginning there’d been one every five months, and now there was a bonfire a week. And those were just the burnings on record, the ones where the women went to a public hospital.
And, just like that high school classmate of Silvina’s, the women managed to elude the surveillance remarkably well. The countryside was still vast, and couldn’t be monitored by satellite: plus, everyone has a price. If tons of drugs could be smuggled into the country, how were the authorities not going to let the occasional car pass with more drums of gasoline than was strictly reasonable? That was the only thing they needed, because the branches for the bonfires were already there, at every site. And the women brought their desire with them.
“It’s not going to stop,” the subway girl said in a TV interview. “Look on the bright side,” she laughed with her reptile mouth. “At least there’s no more prostitution. No one wants a burned monster, or a crazy Argentine woman who could go off one day and set herself on fire—she could burn the customer too.”
—
One night, when Silvina was waiting for her mother to call about another delivery of antibiotics (she’d have to collect them from the Burning Women collaborators who worked in the city’s hospitals), she was struck by a sudden desire to talk with her ex-boyfriend. Her mouth was full of whiskey and her nose of cigarette smoke and the smell of sterilized gauze, the kind used for burns. It was a smell that never left her, along with that of burned human flesh, so difficult to describe. Mostly it smelled of gasoline, only with something more behind it, something unforgettable and strangely warm. But Silvina stopped herself from calling him. She’d seen him on the street with another girl. These days, of course, that didn’t mean much. Many women tried not to be alone in public now so the police wouldn’t bother them. Everything was different since the bonfires started. Just a few weeks earlier, the first survivors had started to show themselves. To take the bus. Go shopping at the supermarket. To take taxis and subways, open bank accounts, and enjoy a cup of coffee on the terraces of bars, their horrible faces lit by the afternoon sun, their hands—sometimes missing fingers—cupped around mugs. Would they find work? When would the longed-for world of men and monsters come?
Silvina and her mother visited María Helena in jail. At first they’d been afraid that the other inmates would attack her, but no, they treated her remarkably well. “It’s because I talk with the girls here. I tell them that we women have always been burned—they burned us for four centuries! The girls can’t believe it, they didn’t know anything about the witch trials, isn’t it incredible? Education in this country has gone to shit. But they’re interested, they want to learn.”
“What do they want to learn?” asked Silvina.
“Well, they want to know when the bonfires are going to stop.”
“And when are they going to stop?”
“Oh, what do I know, child. If I had my way they’d never stop!”
The jail’s visiting room was a big open hall with many tables, each with three chairs: one for the prisoner, two for visitors. María Helena spoke in a low voice. She didn’t trust the guards.
“Some girls say they’re going to stop when they reach the number of witches hunted during the Inquisition.”
“That’s a lot,” said Silvina.
“It depends,” interrupted her mother. “Some historians say it was hundreds of thousands, others only forty thousand.”
“Forty thousand is a lot,” murmured Silvina.
“Over four centuries it’s not that many,” her mother said.
“There weren’t many people in Europe six centuries ago, Mom.”
Silvina felt the fury fill her eyes with tears. María Helena opened her mouth and said something else but Silvina didn’t hear it, and her mother went on and the two women conversed in the sickly light of the prison visitors’ room and Silvina heard only how the two of them were too old, they wouldn’t survive a Burn, the infection would carry them off in a second. But Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE