A shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature. Like many of the adolescent democracies of the Southern Cone, the country is haunted by the specter of recent dictatorships, and the memory of violence there is still raw. Argentina’s twentieth century was scarred by decades of conflict between leftist guerrillas and state and military forces. The last of many coups took place in 1976, three years after Mariana Enriquez was born, and the military dictatorship it installed lasted until 1983. The dictatorship was a period of brutal repression and state terrorism, and thousands of people were murdered or disappeared. Since the dictatorship fell, Argentina has lived its longest period of democracy in recent history. Generations, including Mariana Enriquez’s, have lived their early years under the yoke of dictatorship and come of age in democracy.
In Mariana Enriquez’s stories, Argentina’s particular history combines with an aesthetic many have tied to the gothic horror tradition of the English-speaking world. She’s been compared to Shirley Jackson, and her depictions of a labyrinthine and sinister Buenos Aires echo Victorian gothic renderings of London. Latin America has a gothic tradition as well, according to the critic María Negroni, that overlaps with what we’re used to thinking of as magical realism. Enriquez is the heir, perhaps, of Argentine gothic: Cortázar, Borges, Arlt, and Silvina Ocampo; it’s no coincidence that Enriquez wrote a biography of Ocampo, or that the protagonist of this book’s title story is named Silvina. But Enriquez’s literature conforms to no genre, and gothic is only one corner of the map of her aesthetic.
What there is of gothic horror in the stories in Things We Lost in the Fire mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism. Haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs, and criminal pollution. Her characters occupy an Argentina scarred by the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and ’80s; a country whose return to democracy was marked by economic instability, hyperinflation, and precarious infrastructure; a nation that even in this decade has seen egregious instances of femicides and violence against women. Almost all of Enriquez’s protagonists, in fact, are women, and in these stories we get a sense of the contingency and danger of occupying a female body, though these women are not victims. The Chilean critic Lorena Amaro emphasizes that most of Mariana’s characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and the vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.
In “The Dirty Kid,” the narrator is a middle-class woman who chooses to live in the dangerous neighborhood of Constitución. The story has overt violence and hints of the supernatural, but for me one of its most disturbing lines is when the narrator says: “I realized…how little I cared about people, how natural these desperate lives seemed to me.” The horror comes not only from turning our gaze on desperate populations; it comes from realizing the extent of our blindness.
In “Spiderweb,” a suffocating atmosphere of unease comes on the one hand from the looming presence of soldiers serving Alfredo Stroessner, the Paraguayan dictator, and on the other from the images of a lurking, violent natural world: the characters are caught between the brutality of man and that of nature. In “The Inn,” the girls’ everyday adolescent world of new sexuality and small revenge limns a horrifying history of state terror and clandestine torture centers. Silvina, in the title story, sympathizes with the Burning Women movement but doesn’t commit entirely, even toying with the option of destroying it from within. We understand that her choices are to betray her mother and the activists, or to burn herself—she cannot remain in between. The horror comes when Enriquez’s characters have to acknowledge their border position, to recognize the other reality and see themselves according to a different and dreadful new logic. As Amaro says, “The fear comes from looking into the courtyard next door and realizing that one day you could be trapped there, in a world that seems near, but is unknown and terrifying.”
This is Enriquez’s first book translated to English, but she has a long publication history; much of her previous short story work has also employed the tools of horror, though often in more intimate or personal settings. Things We Lost in the Fire is her work that most employs the tools of realism, and also the one that most mines Argentine culture and history for its horror. As Enriquez has said herself, the stories here have something of the supernatural to them, but the fear comes more from police, neighborhoods, poverty, violence, and men. “The Intoxicated Years,” for example, delves into the period of alfonsinísmo. Raúl Alfonsín was democratically elected when the dicatorship ended in 1983; the period of his government, though, had its own kind of terror. People were depressed and isolated, literally in the dark, the atmosphere charged with anxiety. There are few to no supernatural elements in the story, but the horror is there—a horror specific to being an adolescent in a particular political moment, but also a more animal fear that comes from living in a world that has seemingly forgotten you.
Mariana Enriquez’s particular genius catches us off guard by how quickly we can slip from the familiar into a new and unknown horror. The wraiths of Argentina’s violent past appear in her stories, but ultimately Enriquez’s literature is not tied to any time or place. Rather, it appeals to ancient, creeping fears that prowl our subconscious, and that, in the worst of times, are acted out on our political stage.