KILLED BY HER HUSBAND<\/strong><\/p>\nHer skin was lovely like
\na white rose petal,
\nbut we know from the papers that, when they
\nfought,
\nhe used to call her
\nalbino gobshite.
\nThe police suspects that
\nTatiana Spitzner, 29, a lawyer,
\ndid not commit suicide
\nbut was thrown from a fourth-floor window
\nby her husband, Lu\u00eds Felipe Manvailer.
\nImages from the security cameras show
\nTatiana
\nbeing beaten in their car,
\nbeing chased through the garage
\nand assaulted inside the lift.
\nNeighbors heard her shouting for help.
\nThey also heard the dull thud
\nof her body hitting the tarmac.<\/p>\n
It was Alceu who killed Eudin\u00e9ia & Heroilson who killed Iza & Wendeson who killed Regina & Marcelo who killed Soraia & Erm\u00edcio who killed Silvana & Creso who killed Chirley & still more, Degmar was killed by \u00c1dila & 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\u2019s time.<\/p>\n
Regina annoyed Wendeson, she used to break his concentration with the crap she had on the radio & Erm\u00edcio 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 \u00c1dila for a divorce & Iza died, actually, because she refused to channel funds into Heroilson\u2019s cacha\u00e7a. That\u2019s what Iza was like, Heroilson told the judge\u2014a 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, Erm\u00edcio testified. In her bikini! Turn down that fucking radio, Wendeson had warned a thousand times. But who says Regina ever obeyed?<\/p>\n
Erm\u00edcio & Henrique & Heroilson were drunk at the time of their crimes. The problem, one said, was that her rudeness got too mixed up with my cacha\u00e7a. That was the problem. Queila died because she got a promotion, from clerk to the clerks\u2019 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\u2019t a dickless wonder like you, he\u2019s got a job, Sinval, he has a big dick and he\u2019s a driver & one crucial detail: Tadeu acted in self-defense, this must be pointed out. In legitimate self-defense, Tadeu cut off Rusyleid\u2019s head.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s life. We are disloyal and vindictive\u2014it\u2019s 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\u2019t we refuse the invitation to go up to that hotel room with that brute if we didn\u2019t want to fuck? Well, now we\u2019ve been warned. Don\u2019t leave the house, certainly not at night. Don\u2019t get drunk. Don\u2019t be independent. Don\u2019t go this way, or that way. Don\u2019t work. Don\u2019t 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\u2019re independent. We have lovers. We giggle loudly. We support the household. We let it all go to shit. The strange thing is we don\u2019t kill. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s village. I was miserable for them. I took photos of a few. Rusyleid\u2019s mother was as pretty as her murdered daughter. \u201cDo you want to see my girl?\u201d 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\u2019t understand why they killed my little girl. Silvana\u2019s son, Cau\u00e3, who was six months old when she died, already knew how to read and write, his grandmother told me. \u201cSince he started going to school, he\u2019s been calling me his mother. I think it\u2019s because of the other children. He wants to have a mother, too.\u201d I thought of taking these photos back to show my boss. To show her the sweet little face of Cau\u00e3 who still cries and misses his mother. But dead women\u2019s children have no value in Denise\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014they walked free. When I mentioned this to the state\u2019s defending counsel, he said: \u201cThat\u2019s standard for crimes in Brazil these days. We\u2019re just putting Black people and the poor away for longer and longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dentist murderer had injured his right arm with the knife he\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know her attacker.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou seem surprised,\u201d Carla later remarked. \u201cType \u2018killed by\u2019 into Google and see what you get.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, I tried it.<\/p>\n
\u201cKilled by\u201d:
\nKilled by her boyfriend
\nKilled by her husband
\nKilled by her ex
\nKilled by her partner
\nKilled by her father
\nKilled by her father-in-law . . .<\/p>\n
The problem with discovering this kind of thing is that you get addicted. Every day I\u2019d type in \u201ckilled by\u201d and get that tide of blood head-on. It doesn\u2019t matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn\u2019t matter what you do for a living. It\u2019s dangerous being a woman.<\/p>\n
Translated by Sophie Lewis<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patr\u00edcia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression\u2014by 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2893],"tags":[4906],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[4818],"lal_author":[4816],"class_list":["post-31315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adelantos-de-traduccion-y-novedades-editoriales","tag-numero-29","translator-sophie-lewis-es","lal_author-patricia-melo-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31320,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31315\/revisions\/31320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=31315"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=31315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}