From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression—by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.
To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she learns about the attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only an epidemic of femicide but also persistent racism, deforestation, and a deep longing for answers to her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance—and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a lamentation for the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history and truth; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is now available via Restless Books.
KILLED BY HER HUSBAND
Her skin was lovely like
a white rose petal,
but we know from the papers that, when they
fought,
he used to call her
albino gobshite.
The police suspects that
Tatiana Spitzner, 29, a lawyer,
did not commit suicide
but was thrown from a fourth-floor window
by her husband, Luís Felipe Manvailer.
Images from the security cameras show
Tatiana
being beaten in their car,
being chased through the garage
and assaulted inside the lift.
Neighbors heard her shouting for help.
They also heard the dull thud
of her body hitting the tarmac.
It was Alceu who killed Eudinéia & Heroilson who killed Iza & Wendeson who killed Regina & Marcelo who killed Soraia & Ermício who killed Silvana & Creso who killed Chirley & still more, Degmar was killed by Ádila & Ketlen was killed by Henrique & Rusyleid was killed by Tadeu & Juciele was killed by Itaan & Queila was killed by Roni & Jaqueline was killed by Sinval & Daniela was killed by Alberto & Raele was killed by Geraldo and none of these crimes, which happened seven, ten, twelve years ago, took any more than three hours of a court’s time.
Regina annoyed Wendeson, she used to break his concentration with the crap she had on the radio & Ermício found a photo of Silvana on her phone wearing a bikini & Daniela wanted to split up with Alberto & Rusyleid wanted to take a break from Tadeu & Degmar had already asked Ádila for a divorce & Iza died, actually, because she refused to channel funds into Heroilson’s cachaça. That’s what Iza was like, Heroilson told the judge—a complicated woman, difficult even. Do you know who Silvana sent that photo to, of herself in her bikini? To a colleague at her office. I let Silvana work and she did this to me, Ermício testified. In her bikini! Turn down that fucking radio, Wendeson had warned a thousand times. But who says Regina ever obeyed?
Ermício & Henrique & Heroilson were drunk at the time of their crimes. The problem, one said, was that her rudeness got too mixed up with my cachaça. That was the problem. Queila died because she got a promotion, from clerk to the clerks’ manager. She thought she was all that, her murderer said. And Sinval asked Jaqueline, in tears: did you screw that guy, Jaque? To which his victim replied: yes, I screwed him all night, Sinval, he isn’t a dickless wonder like you, he’s got a job, Sinval, he has a big dick and he’s a driver & one crucial detail: Tadeu acted in self-defense, this must be pointed out. In legitimate self-defense, Tadeu cut off Rusyleid’s head.
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men are taken down a peg and kill us. Men get home tired after work and kill us.
And, in court, everyone says the fault is ours. We women know how to provoke. We know how to make life hell, how to wreck a guy’s life. We are disloyal and vindictive—it’s our fault. We are the trigger. Really, what are we doing here, at this party, at this time, in these clothes? Really, why did we accept the drink we were offered? Worse still, why didn’t we refuse the invitation to go up to that hotel room with that brute if we didn’t want to fuck? Well, now we’ve been warned. Don’t leave the house, certainly not at night. Don’t get drunk. Don’t be independent. Don’t go this way, or that way. Don’t work. Don’t choose that skirt or that neckline. But whoever said we follow the rules? We wear miniskirts. Necklines down to our belly buttons. Shorts that barely hang on by our bum-cracks. We go too far. We go down dark alleys. We keep our pussies charged up and ready to go. We draw conclusions. We work all day. We’re independent. We have lovers. We giggle loudly. We support the household. We let it all go to shit. The strange thing is we don’t kill. It’s incredible how rarely we kill. Given the stats on how many of us are dying, we ought to be killing more often. But, due to some problem that could be glandular or could be structural, possibly ethical or possibly physical, we prefer not to kill. That’s how it is; we generally end up tossed onto waste ground, like Chirley. For defiance. We are chopped up and buried, like Ketlen, in the yard. For disobedience.
You could have filled a stadium, one of those really big ones, with the fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and daughters and sons and cousins and friends who came to the courthouse to grieve the deaths of these women. In the hot sun, amid the storms, I saw them arrive in groups, all as crushed as the people from Txupira’s village. I was miserable for them. I took photos of a few. Rusyleid’s mother was as pretty as her murdered daughter. “Do you want to see my girl?” she asked, and showed me Rusyleid smiling in a 3 x 4 photo that had grown so worn it had the velvety texture of old paper money. This is Rusyleid: lighthearted, hard-working, a good girl, never in trouble with anyone, I don’t understand why they killed my little girl. Silvana’s son, Cauã, who was six months old when she died, already knew how to read and write, his grandmother told me. “Since he started going to school, he’s been calling me his mother. I think it’s because of the other children. He wants to have a mother, too.” I thought of taking these photos back to show my boss. To show her the sweet little face of Cauã who still cries and misses his mother. But dead women’s children have no value in Denise’s book of statistics. So I stuck them into my notebook where the dead women were piling higher everyday. The women from the court cases as well as those I fished from the papers. Already my notebook was overflowing with murdered women and I still had another week of work to go.
During that time, there were two longer hearings with white defendants and their own private defense teams. Both were acquitted. Dalton and Reinaldo got away with it. One was a businessman, the other a dentist. One rich, the other a millionaire—they walked free. When I mentioned this to the state’s defending counsel, he said: “That’s standard for crimes in Brazil these days. We’re just putting Black people and the poor away for longer and longer.”
The dentist murderer had injured his right arm with the knife he’d used to kill his wife. Before he appeared in front of the judge with his eye-wateringly expensive lawyers, there was some complication with his condition and he ended up losing his arm. The jury decided for that reason and that alone, he’d already been punished enough. A dentist without a right arm is like a singer without a voice. A storyteller without a tongue. A footballer without a foot. The homicidal dentist left his trial by the front door, smiling, with his new lover hanging off his bionic arm.
The other defendant, despite being found guilty by the jury, enjoyed a similar fate. Given that he was responsible for the distribution of chilled drinks across the state and a major patron of the city’s cultural life, a first-time offender and a good father, the judge gave him a one-year prison sentence. One year! But with probation granted on the spot, this murderer also left by the front door.
In nine of the fourteen cases, the victims knew their executioners. Six were killed by their husbands, two by their boyfriends, one by a neighbor. Some had already filed formal complaints. This too was part of my work: to evaluate the statistics. Only Raele, the clerk, didn’t know her attacker.
“You seem surprised,” Carla later remarked. “Type ‘killed by’ into Google and see what you get.”
Later, I tried it.
“Killed by”:
Killed by her boyfriend
Killed by her husband
Killed by her ex
Killed by her partner
Killed by her father
Killed by her father-in-law . . .
The problem with discovering this kind of thing is that you get addicted. Every day I’d type in “killed by” and get that tide of blood head-on. It doesn’t matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn’t matter what you do for a living. It’s dangerous being a woman.
