I was born and raised in a provincial town, in what here we call ‘the interior’ of the country or la Argentina profunda. The 1980s, the decade of my small-town adolescence, were another world: no internet, no cable TV, barely any telephones (telephones had to be requested from the company, and it could be a decade or more before one was finally installed). In my house, for example, we didn’t have a telephone, and we received calls at the house of a neighbour, the only person on our block who did. This seems unreal now. We found out about the news mostly from the radio, because there weren’t many terrestrial TV channels or national newspapers. There were small papers in each city or town that covered local news. We lived atomised lives, in a fragmented reality, focused only on what went on nearby. Like islands in the middle of nowhere. Some people found it comfortable and safe to live that way, in closed societies where we all knew one another. I found it suffocating. As a girl, I sensed that there wasn’t really anywhere I was safe. I’d already seen the signs. At the age of eight, when I was walking to my mum’s work one afternoon after church – my mother was a nurse and worked in a clinic a few blocks away – a boy on a bicycle pulled up in front of me and said: Let’s fuck! I can clearly remember the knot in my stomach, the way I froze in the middle of the pavement, my eyes filling with tears, unable to say anything or run away. I remember him laughing at my frightened face before riding off on his bicycle. It’s not the only example I have, or the worst, but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, as my grandmother used to say.
Violence was normalised. The neighbour beaten by her husband, the teenager next door who put up with her jealous boyfriend’s tantrums, the father who wouldn’t let his daughters wear short skirts or make-up. All the responsibility for what happened to us was laid at our feet: if you stay out late you might be raped, if you talk to strangers you might be raped, if you come back from a dance by yourself you might be raped. If you were raped, it was always your fault.
You could be raped at home as well, but nobody warned you about that. And if it happened and you said something, most likely no one would believe you. The protective family space, a hypocritical Christian concept that nobody questioned.
Maybe that’s why Andrea Danne’s murder was so shocking: stabbed in her bed, at home, as she slept. Maybe that’s why people quickly tried to blame her for her own death. She was young, pretty, desirable and desiring.
Andrea’s femicide happened when I was thirteen. Thinking about it now, it was a violent, horrible introduction to adolescence. Being a woman meant being prey. When I was seventeen, in my last year at school, another girl was murdered, in another province. We were the same age. Her name was María Soledad Morales. Unlike all the femicides that were only news in the place where they happened, her story spread throughout the country. It was also the first time there was a Silent March, a means of demanding justice that later became fairly common: a crowd walking through the streets of a city, in total silence. Again they blamed the victim, but this time they also investigated and caught the culprits, with a chain of responsibility that was, of course, made up of men: rich men, the sons of distinguished politicians having fun with lower-middle-class girls; and men from the girls’ own social class, who handed them over in exchange for money.
I wrote Dead Girls almost thirty years after the femicides of Andrea and María Soledad. At first, the book was going to describe three teenage femicides in the interior of Argentina in the eighties. Stories of women who would now be about my age.
The research (documents, interviews, surveying newspapers from the time; and extensive work with the Señora, a medium, a line of connection to the dead girls) took me three years. Writing the book you now hold in your hands took me three months. The writing process was sustained and painful. As I wrote the stories of Andrea, María Luisa and Sarita, fragments of my own life story and those of women I knew began to work their way in. My friends and I were still alive, but we could have been Andrea, María Luisa or Sarita. We were just luckier.
Selva Almada
Buenos Aires, March 2020