The catalog of horrors committed by the Argentine military dictatorship is already macabre. Now let's imagine that someone has the ability to see and hear the dead, all those drowned, raped and tortured with blindfold. That is what happens to the protagonist of the latest novel by Mariana Enriquez, Our part of the night (Anagram), a medium with supernatural powers capable of invoking Darkness. Their skills are required by a secret society formed by rich families of the Argentine elite descendants of English who celebrate atrocious rituals in search of eternal life for centuries.
At the beginning of the novel, the medium does not yet know if his six-year-old son, Gaspar, has inherited his strange gift . The mother has died in a suspicious accident and, despite her powers, the father is unable to communicate with her. We are in the 70s and both cross the country by car to the Iguazu Falls, in a kind of paranoid road trip where they will cross with ancient Brazilian, military, secondary cults in search of fast sex, distrust, superstition, poverty and fear . Then we will get to know in depth the powerful and fascinating family of the secret order and the impunity with which they kidnap indigenous babies and children to sacrifice them in wild ceremonies. Enriquez does not save any detail when describing a powerful circle in which "the exercise of cruelty and perversion as a path to secret illuminations" prevails and draws an addictive and unforgettable catalog of characters with "amorality as a class mark ", characters that operate with the same impunity as the military in a society crossed by inequality and terror.
"All fortunes are built on the suffering of others," Rosario reminds us, the missing mother, before telling us the origins of the secret order in 18th-century England, of which she is a victim and heiress. His ancestors found near Inverness, almost at the end of the world, the first seer in the son of a Scottish peasant who foretold the future using a sheep's shoulder blade. Hence the novel travels to the Swinging London of the 60s, where the bohemian, libertine and hedonistic atmosphere of the time and the "environmental esotericism" makes camouflage easier for initiates: at parties you smoke and consume acid while he talks about William Blake and Hölderlin and the conversations invariably revolve around Aleister Crowley, the I Ching and the Ouija . In addition, the children of members of the Order are strikingly similar to hippies: "radical political positions, sexual promiscuity, strange clothes, boys with too much money." We already know how that trip ended for some: wrong, with Charles Manson, the Angels of Hell and the article about My Lai. Rosario even has an affair with a musician named David who has "something of a reptile", "a doll with strange teeth, so attractive that sex with him scared me a little" that, we suspect, may be Bowie himself.
Enriquez was born in 1973, so he must be three years old when the Military Junta struck in 1976 and about 11 when the democratic opening began in 1984, followed by a prosecution process in which the media began to reveal the horrors committed for years. As a consequence, the day-to-day life of the Argentines (the covers of the kiosks, the conversations, the life) was filled with daily doses of gore .
In some interview, Enriquez has talked about what it was like to grow " in a country that created ghosts as a state policy ", with repressive forces that specialized in making 30,000 souls 'disappear'. The fear she must have felt was real, although it is likely that such barbarism was not entirely understandable to such a small girl and, perhaps for that reason, the adult Enriquez transforms that ground into a non-realistic, but phantasmagoric and nightmare literature. Something ghosts, spectral appearances and the dead that come back to life are the usual protagonists of their stories, both of the stories gathered in The dangers of smoking in bed and in Our part of the night , where the supernatural power of contacting the dimension of the non-living is a blessing but also a terrible condemnation. Terror is, almost always, also political.
Enriquez's style is incredibly elegant, at times it seems that he writes with expensive gloves. It describes in detail (like the best surgeon, it is handled with a breathtaking naturalness between blood, viscera and scars) and its prose hypnotizes and captivates in a terrifying way. It is inevitable to think of Stephen King and Shirley Jackson when reading it, but also Dracula or Emily Dickinson. Read Our part of the night is very similar to the perverse sensation of passing by a car accident : it is impossible not to look, even if it is wrong to do so and what one sees is horrible.
The reading of the last Herralde Novel Prize dazzles in a similar way to other books recently written by two other Argentine authors: María Gainza ( The Black Light ) and Samanta Schweblin ( Kentukis ). All three have a tremendously addictive, delicate and bestial style at the same time and, all, each in their own way, address in their stories the dark side of things: the mechanisms of deception, the evil that inhabits all of us, the drives most unspeakable humans. Our part of the night is the last jewel that this new and vibrant wave of Argentine female literature gives us. Hopefully many more like that.
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