Secrets and lies: Argentinian tales of terror
Mariana Enríquez and Samanta Schweblin were children during Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976-83, during which many thousands of leftwing countrymen "disappeared" — many of them drugged and dropped from helicopters into the Rio de la Plata.
Both writers exhibit a similar approach to assimilating their country's dark past, as two newly translated books show. Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire and Schweblin's Fever Dream mix literary realism with tropes normally found in horror films. This shared foreboding makes one wonder about the impact on the Argentine psyche of the terror and trauma of those years; what is it like to now live with the ghosts of the disappeared and the hidden presence of their abductors?
Enríquez's collection of short stories is set in and around Buenos Aires in the decades since the dictatorship, but consistently returns to its injustices. In "Adela's House", three teenagers explore a deserted house where they find shelves exhibiting fingernails and teeth, before the lights go out and one girl disappears forever. In "The Inn", a girl's tour-guide father is sacked for telling tourists that the inn used to be a police academy, provoking questions about "disappearances, torture, whatever". When she and a friend break into the inn to hide sausages inside its mattresses (to avenge her father's treatment), they are startled by the sudden sound of a vehicle approaching "so loud it couldn't be real", and the cries of men beating on the shuttered windows of the building. They scream until they are caught by the owner, but when they try to tell her what happened she assumes they're "making that ghost story up to ruin the Inn for her".
Enríquez uses supernatural elements as a metaphor for the problems of coming to terms with brutal civil repression: the fight between those for whom it's convenient to forget and those whose losses won't let them. The collection dramatises what it must have been like to be terrorised by the state, and the mood of claustrophobic terror extends to the stories that focus on contemporary ills, including drugs and extreme poverty.
All but one of Enríquez's protagonists are female, and men are mostly portrayed as weak or dangerous — unable to live up to their place in a macho society or deformed by it. Women put up with misogyny and internalise it until they reach breaking point. In my favourite story, "The Intoxicated Years", a gang of tough teenage girls declare their independence from men and promise each other to eat as little as possible. "We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls". The story, like so many in this stylish and compelling collection, ends with a chilling burst of violence.
Schweblin's Fever Dream — longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize — is a short novel that wraps around itself like a mobius strip. It takes the form of an extended conversation between a boy and a woman who wakes up paralysed in a clinic; the unexplained presence of this boy unsettles the reader and provides the novel with its sophisticated narrative device. David acts as a guide to Amanda's memory, prompting her to remember "the exact moment when the worms come into being"; the novel then plays out as a series of flashbacks, working backwards from her alarming opening assertion that she is going "to die in a few hours". It is David who accounts for the novel's urgent style, acting as an aggressive movie script editor — forcing her to focus on the exact events that have led to this point.
Amanda has left Buenos Aires to rent a holiday home in the country with her daughter Nina, where she has made friends with Carla, David's mother. Carla tells her how David nearly died when he was four after drinking polluted water. (They are surrounded by soy bean farms, a major source of freshwater and groundwater pollution in Argentina, one of the world's biggest exporters of genetically modified crops.) The plot becomes lurid here: she takes David to see a witch doctor, who tells her that only transmigration will save his life: she will "take David's spirit to a healthy body" but "also bring an unknown spirit to a sick body". She does this and David survives, but Carla tells Amanda how she has never recognised his personality again, how he disappears at nights and follows animals around who subsequently die.
Supernatural plot detail always treads the thin line between silliness and expressive metaphor. But here, whenever our suspension of disbelief is strained, David is on hand to force Amanda's and our attention back on the important question: what has been done to her and where is her daughter?
The image of disappearing children recurs in both books. If each writer's sense of horror has particular roots in Argentina's brutal history, there is much of the contemporary and universal in these books too: a focus on corrupt society, the damaged environment and whether it is ever possible to protect those we love. By focusing on the terrifying suspense of this last question, each writer transcends the sensational plot elements to achieve a powerful and humane vision.
Things we Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Meg McDowell, Portobello, RRP£12.99/Hogarth, RRP$24, 208 pages
Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Meg McDowell, Oneworld, RRP£12.99/Riverhead, RRP$25, 160 pages
Illustration by Becky Strange