Why?
Months and months repeating the same useless question: Why?
Why did they take us prisoner?
What did we do, what did we think, what did we say, what threat did we pose without realizing? The country was calm and seems to be staying calm, as though nothing, as though we had never existed. Eighteen women writers deleted. House arrest. Fucking fiasco.
Maybe I’ll get a glimpse of an answer if I start to write, if I recount what happened on the Mañana, all these months of lock-up it’s been eating away at my brain as I try desperately to find an answer to this stupid and very pregnant question.
The mere idea of writing makes me want to vomit. It’s all because of writing that eighteen women writers are where we are. But. Writing might lead to some form of understanding, and questions were always my spur. The moment has come to face this thing, enough already with impotence, frustration, and fury.
I have no choice.
I must write, make a show of having hold of my life, even though they are constantly deleting me.
At least it will be one more adventure.
Sunday
I know it’s Sunday but I’ve lost all notion of dates. The men only mark a few days of the week: Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Bastards. The air now has turned warm, it smells of spring. So it’s more than six months since they stormed in on us, in the middle of the dance, in the middle of the night. It was easy for them. We were sailing gently along, almost becalmed, the river barely slapping the sides of Mañana. Of the boat named Mañana, and also our Mañana, our future, because the day before we’d already realized how long five days afloat could be. But at the moment of the siege, we were celebrating like mad and they had no right, they had no right, a few of us screamed in the face of a few of them once the fracas cooled and we could grasp what had just happened. If they really and truly had to do it—if the order was so iron-clad—they could have chosen another moment, for example, unleashed themselves during one of our most heated arguments.
They did it deliberately during the dance, the best part of our conclave which among ourselves and with a good dose of irony we named the FimFen, First Confidential Meeting of Female Novelists. They threw themselves at us once our conflicts had been filed down, once we’d battled with language and played with it and trampled it and even splashed around in it as in preverbal times, and to celebrate all this we were dancing like crazy, really kicking it up, even Ophelia in her wheelchair was dancing…
In that very first sudden instant, we were happy to see them. Men! We were delighted, men! Like it was manna fallen from heaven. Totally the opposite. More like released from the river, from the tame and heavy water that had been our friend until that moment when the wide river turned traitor and allowed those minions to sneak onto our boat in their rubber boots, their black rubber boots, their black everything. Everything they wore was black, but their skin tones were every color—the youngest were darker, the ones in charge contemptibly white. But when sheathed in black they burst into the dining room—we’d moved the tables for the sarao—they looked divine. Especially a few, to a few of us, looked especially divine. A male body can be very good for dancing and other carnal pursuits. At least for some of us, like Ophelia who was the first who managed to get close, wheelchair and all.
Holy sh–! we yelled, come aboard! we yelled once the shock faded and we thought we could turn the tables and pounce on the men who just moments before had silently invaded our ship. Come aboard! we yelled, as though flipping the rules, though they looked less like pirates and more like the storm troops they really were. Adela, our DJ, switched to heavy metal and for a few instants we fantasized that these men in black had come to throw us in the air like the rock-and-roll of times past.
Throw us up in the air was exactly their intention, which had nothing to do with fun or pleasure.
At first the invaders didn’t know how to react to our explosion of enthusiasm. When we women writers throw parties, we throw parties. They stopped dead, astonished, then they started forward in single file, very close together and hugging the wall, the better to surround us. They didn’t seem fierce until the platoon leader started spitting out orders. Because a platoon is what they were, that was now clear, and if at first, we laughed and soaked up their rivers of testosterone, it’s because our guard was down, we were deep into our farewell party and a little tipsy on top of it all.
In that first bewildered moment, a few of the youngest men had come forward unsuspectingly to dance. They’d taken a few of us by the waist and who could know where that might lead. But the leader reacted in time. Their leader. Whom now we have to call Captain, as though our ship had lacked a capitán, or better said, capitana, we’ll talk about that if they should let us talk—if they do let us, if they don’t cut out our tongues, which they clearly want to, we can read it in their eyes.
They turned the page on us. Blotted us out for a whole new story. Eighteen women writers from our own country, erased from the literary map.
I am so full of rage that I can’t even tell it right, shitfuckingdammit, and I’ve been trying since they locked me up.
It feels like I’m evaporating under the press of time, desperation, and impotence. But not because of my rage. Rage endures: it’s a combustible fuel, it’s what stokes me to keep making these notes. Rage is flammable, I know because it’s burning my guts, and if all my notes end up erased like us writers, it would be better for them to burn in a great pyre of rage and not in the slow fire in which they intend us to suffocate.
You’re women, women have no intellectual interests: stop thinking, enjoy the solitude, work out, concentrate on your appearance. That, more or less, is what they told us; to synthesize, although they lack all ability to synthesize, they’re wild and ferocious and. Now that they’re in charge, the men are not merely men; I must be careful, keep repeating this, so as not to fall into the trap of easy dichotomies. They are power itself: men and women sick with power, never forget this; they are the law, a fucked-up law persecuting us without reason, without giving any explanation.
Why?
They planted drugs on the Mañana, planted guns in every caliber, the latest models. They accused us of being terrorists, witches, lesbians, and conspirators. They even planted a string of electrodes supposedly for making bombs. They didn’t plant anything else because that’s all that would fit. And they did it with the utmost sneakiness, while we in glorious oblivion were dancing in the dining room and forecastle, honoring the figurehead whose high breasts cut through the waters of the river. We were all dancing, even Ophelia in her chair, from the Capitana to the deck hands, it was a ship crewed entirely by women, now that was something to celebrate. At dawn we would reach the city of Corrientes, Our Lady of the Seven Currents, hallelujah!! To Her we danced, not to the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, which is what the eighteen novelists would soon become.
Of course there were lesbians among us. Maybe a few nostalgic witches, not to omit transgressors, and who knows what. Language terrorists or guerrillas, but no more than that. We were an eclectic group and we were happy. It was the last time we were happy.
In thanks, we’d even sent up some flares. Tracer bullets, the minions declared in the rush to trial that was a total hoax, an enormous lie to numb the resistance of those who couldn’t understand why the country’s most prominent female writers were being persecuted.
That never came out, no one even hinted at the real reason for the kidnapping. What kind of threat could one think we represented? We ourselves didn’t understand. I still don’t. We’d only been weighing possibilities, trying to open spaces for reflection, for ways to write from greater depths. Playing with language, possessing it for ourselves. Nothing more. Nothing less, they’d decided behind our backs. Now we have all of time ahead of us for thinking from the depths—because that’s all we can do even though it’s forbidden: No thinking! they warn us, and they’ll keep warning us until who knows when. We have all of time ahead of us, yes, but it’s strangled time, and no thoughts can squeeze through. If only we could communicate among ourselves, even if only for a few minutes, if these words could reach even a few of the others. But I know they won’t reach anyone.
But your families, aren’t they doing anything, protesting, filing appeals for protection or whatever, some invisible interlocutor keeps asking me. I imagine that those who have family will be better off, having company under house arrest—although you never know, because confinement in company can turn into a Sartrean hell, still I hope Ophelia has someone to be with her. I wouldn’t know how to answer, since I have only a distant cousin who won’t have been informed. And the international organizations, they’re not doing anything? They’ll be trying to do something, no doubt about that, but a lot of people must feel more comfortable with our voices silenced, and who knows what horrors they’ve been led to believe, how many lies, how much slander they’ve been told. All they’ve left me is a device that switches in equal intervals between folk music and classical, with a bit of tango or cumbia, but not too much of the latter, just in case. I’m sick and tired of “Amor silvestre”; enough already with “Amor silvestre,” I turn off this fake radio and listen, in silence, to the street sounds. My apartment is at the rear of the building and I have no neighbors. My bad luck. I bought it for this very reason. Not for the bad luck, for the tranquility. It’s on the thirteenth floor, I’m not superstitious, it has a lovely balcony full of plants that point up to the sky. It’s a calm neighborhood high on the embankment. The vast river is not close, they keep reinforcing the shoreline, so every day it’s a bit farther away. But at least one can still get a glimpse from a distance.
At the beginning of being locked up, I distracted myself by throwing paper airplanes made from the pages of the few books they left me—a desperate attempt, vandalism—but it’s obvious that no one wants to get involved, brainwashed for sure, and the eighteen women writers from the retreat, we’re anathema, we’re a plague, we’re subversives; to a certain degree, those labels would honor us, if we didn’t have to suffer this house arrest, it’s perverse, unimaginable.
I’m lucky to be surrounded by objects I love. But there are days and especially nights when I come to hate them. During one of my attacks of rage I threw more than one piece of pottery against the wall, things I brought back from my travels, and some token of what’s left of my meager family. More than once I’ve felt the impulse to bust up everything, including my own head, or throw myself over the balcony. Until one fine day, they got suspicious and installed some very high barbed wire, thick, cage-like, it makes me despair. And I had to pay for it out of my own pocket.
Right on time I receive the rent on the apartment downtown, purchased when I won the Astralba Prize; I’m telling this so that if anyone asks—but who the fucking hell is going to worry about my fate?—or even read these annotations that will go straight to the devil as soon as I decide to click on Select All, Delete?
And then, like every other time, the screen goes white with cynical innocence.
I must stay calm.
It is the only way I can fight them.
Ideas have stopped coming, I’m losing my grip on language. Where have my documents gone to? My archives burned or erased. As though publishers had never existed; that shitty piece of information the minions blew in my face, the very ones who usually never say a word. They said: For the publishers, not one of you is worth a dime, your numbers are nothing, and so on and so on…
but here I stop
breathe deep
because I was on the verge of giving my desk such a kick that I would have wrecked the old computer I have here, a black and white monstrosity long obsolete, one of those laptops from the eighties fit for a museum. One of the first things they did was take my latest-generation shining jewel that let me communicate with the world and was even gratifying to touch. With her I could do anything, even talk face-to-face with many of my interlocutors, and now I have this mute, insipid, inert, and blind monstrosity, and here I sit though I was just on the verge of smashing it into a thousand electronic pieces and now I worship it because it’s the only thing that can connect to anyone. It connects me to myself; it’s my intermediary, my buddy.
My language center. My creature.
My female minder said that the other participants in the retreat are just like me, totally cut off from information. No one keeps us from writing because we need something to somehow pass the time, but the minder—that’s what I call her—comes on every Saturday, to erase the hard disk. They don’t allow us a printer or external hard drive, not a pencil or any equivalent; we have no way to save a document. I don’t even care anymore, I’m writing for myself, it’s only on principle that I’m addressing you who aren’t here and won’t ever read this; I’m doing it out of a need for company, so I don’t lose the memory of dialogue. How long has it been since I talked with someone? I no longer even have the books my friend wrote, my bookshelves have been stripped, all I have left are some solitary texts by those damned masters, the docile masters, not the maîtres maudits I so admire.
Which brings me back to an earlier question: No, I have no family, well hardly any, and the few distant relatives I have left think that writing is a form of contamination. Better to be business managers, like them. Them—women as well as the rest of them. Let’s be honest, we have always fought against this eternally masculine conventional plural when it discriminated against us, but we mustn’t forget the exceptions to the rule, and accept that many women have allied themselves first and foremost with men.
Is that clear? What the hell do I care if it’s clear!
Before I abhorred exclamation marks, now I abuse them !!!!!!!!!!! Ratatatatatá. It’s the only protest I’m allowed, my little machine gun.
Ellipses I also used to avoid but now I use them… and moreover…. and moreover…. At least they leave room for a little hope.
We’d planned the retreat a year in advance. It was our chance to get together, behind closed doors, to exchange ideas, design a collective project, and evaluate past victories. For we did have victories over the last decades, there are (were!) many.
The country’s first closed-door conference of women writers, without critics or academics, not even an audience or any publicity whatsoever. It sounded interesting, no doubt about it. Invitation only—and not for the most famous, but for the boldest. The organizing committee was made up of young women who were full of enthusiasm, some already with a third novel, and they needed the conference to go as well as it possibly could.
The proposal seemed more than ambitious, even a little pretentious, but I was happy to sign on. It was a precious opportunity to meet in privacy with my peers and to focus on what matters most, that’s to say, language.
It would be the most intense and possibly only conference of this magnitude (although magnitude isn’t the right word, is it, pertaining to women). And now we’re locked up, silenced, the word is forbidden, writing is forbidden. Maybe thinking is also forbidden.
Was the Mañana/the Tomorrow a Pandora’s Box? That’s what they tried to turn it into, the agents of repression, the minions or whatever they are, because what should we call the enemy?
Our final goal was the city of Corrientes, where many of us would disembark to take the first plane back to the Capital, where obligations of all sorts awaited us.
Are still awaiting us.
House arrest for mothers means being with family, of course, but from what I’ve understood they suffer even more surveillance than those who are single or, like me, divorced. When they take us out for air, we have to wear a chador; not that anyone notices, because the chador is in fashion, more and more women are wearing it, but not writers, on the contrary, it’s the husbands and boyfriends and lovers (but are there any lovers left, I wonder, with things having become so conservative, I understand there are even mass weddings), who want women to be demure and entirely in their possession.
For me, the actions are less important than the words, the indelible marks, with which they designate the actions. The veil can be removed; “veiled” as adjective covers us forever.
I was born a rebel, so now what?
This happened because we embarked on the Mañana, a ship with a punning name. How should we translate it? Mañana in the feminine form is that which is happening now, flowing beyond our reach, and one mañana will bring another mañana, but only a neutral mañana with no specific gender which is no more than the following day: I’ll see you mañana por la mañana. On the other hand, the masculine mañana contains everything, the promise of a better future, “mañana will come and nothing will be the same,” says the poem, including us, still here and yet transformed, yes, in a milky mañana made of gentle clouds where they’ve pinned us like butterflies to a noun, like those joking and very productive anglophones: Mañana, mañana, they say in our own language, as a synonym for a promise that will never be honored.
Adela Mignone was the one who told us about the ship, and it seemed like a brilliant idea. It ended all the quibbling, some wanting the conference in the mountains up north, others in the lakes down south, a big group saying here in the capital, but no one wanted it to be public. On that we all agreed: no audience, only a closed-door meeting for the first and almost certainly last time, because enough already with separating ourselves from the body of literature, enough already with women writers on one side and men on the other, enough with all those discriminations.
That’s how the ship named Mañana sailed into view, floating in our dreams. It seemed perfect with a figurehead salvaged from earlier times, a sort of siren pointing with her breasts to a safe future, to the best harbor. The Mañana had her own female captain who would assemble—she promised—an entirely female crew. We took it as a joke, but we were also reassured: we well knew the power of enchantment sailors have over the tender souls of certain female writers, even if they’re only freshwater sailors and the slow crossing lasts only five days including nights and even if these writers have their minds on other matters. The mind, yes, said one of us, but the body?… and thus, we unanimously agreed to sail with a crew of women. To sail with a fixed destination, our ideas floating free.
I must go to bed, and like every night, I will miss my sweet bitch Sand. The locked-up writers with cats have somehow managed, but I had to give Sand to my doorman. The guy raises canaries, I hope at least with animals he has a kindly disposition. It killed me to give up Sand, but how could I take her out to the sidewalk three times a day when they only take me out twice a week if it doesn’t rain. Monday and Thursday. At 6:30 in the morning, the hour of my best dreams. But that was before. When I could dream. Now I try to sleep; that’s all I can do. Mañana (to repeat the term) will be another day exactly like all the others but I’ll keep writing, until my last breath I’ll keep writing, that’s to say, until next Saturday when the minder comes and erases everything, and I’ll start writing again and the next week and the next and a mark will be left on this screen that turns totally gray and luminous, and laughs at me, but I will keep marking like one who writes with water on a rock and one day, one day that rock will be chiseled. I don’t have much time. I don’t have millennia but it’s as though I did. Time arrested is all time.
Tuesday
DON’T BE FRIGHTENED
I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
PLEASE DON’T PANIC
DON’T SCREAM I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
I’M OMER KATVANI FROM ISRAEL
DO YOU REMEMBER ME?
“Medusified” is the word Elisa Algañaraz would have chosen if she could have expressed her horror, her disorientation. It was Tuesday, no one was supposed to disturb her, she’d finally managed to get some real sleep after nights of insomnia and at eight in the morning she felt fresh, ready to dive back into writing without paying attention to her pathetic circumstances. With some real enthusiasm she fired up the screen on the old laptop and even before opening that obsolete WordStar, the only program available, she was faced with the same message and read it again:
DON’T BE FRIGHTENED
I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
PLEASE DON’T PANIC
DON’T SCREAM I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
I’M OMER KATVANI FROM ISRAEL
DO YOU REMEMBER ME?
She pressed every single key but nothing happened and she gradually fell prisoner to a paralysis that started at her fingertips and spread until it completely overwhelmed her. Medusified, like one who accidentally saw the atrocious head of snakes and was turned to stone. Don’t scream, said the message, as though she could have screamed or had any reaction before such an enormous intrusion from the beyond.
Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz
