Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

Constitución isn’t easy, and it’s beautiful: all those once-luxurious alcoves, like abandoned temples now occupied by unbelievers who don’t even know that inside those walls hymns to old gods once rang out.

I remembered what they were celebrating: it was January 8, the day of Gauchito Gil, a popular saint from the provinces of Corrientes who has devotees all over the country. He’s especially beloved in poor neighborhoods, though you’ll see altars all over the city, even in cemeteries. Antonio Gil, it’s said, was murdered at the end of the nineteenth century for being a deserter. A policeman killed him, hanged him from a tree and slit his throat. But before he died, the outlaw gaucho told the policeman: “If you want your son to get better, you must pray for me.” The policeman did, because his son was very sick. And the boy got better. Then the policeman went back, took Antonio Gil down from the tree, and gave him a proper burial. The place where he had bled to death became a shrine that still exists today, and thousands of people visit it every summer.

the story of the miraculous gaucho,

There was the plaster saint, with his blue shirt and the red bandanna around his neck—a red headband, too—and a cross on his back, also red. There were many red cloths and a small red flag: the color of...

And she told me that “back there” she’s seen a lot of shrines to San la Muerte, the skeleton saint of death, with his red and black candles.

The lack of food was good; we had promised each other to eat as little as possible. We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls. “We don’t want to leave footprints in the snow,” we’d say, even though in our town it never snowed.

“We’re going,” we told him, and I smiled. Paula didn’t smile because she was so thin that when she showed her teeth she looked like a skull.

But I let it go, like I let every petty little thing pass while a white stone grew in my stomach that left very little room for air or food.

I knew he didn’t want to kill me, he just wanted to treat me badly and break me so I’d hate my life and wouldn’t even have the guts left to change it.

I find it very strange that poor blondes exist,

I thought about beautiful bodies like Vera’s, if she were whole: white bones that shine under the light in forgotten graves, thin bones that sound like little party bells when they hit against each other, frolicking in the fields, doing dances of death. He has nothing to do with the ethereal beauty of those naked bones: his are covered with layers of fat and boredom. Vera and I will be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth enfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons. Vera and I—no flesh over our bones. A week after giving up food, my body changes. If I raise my arms my ribs show through, although not much. I dream: someday, when I sit on this wooden floor, instead of buttocks I’ll have bones, and the bones will poke through the flesh and leave bloodstains on the floor, they’ll slice through the skin from inside.

We all walk over bones in this city, it’s just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead. I have to dig, with a shovel, with my hands, like a dog. Dogs always find bones; they always know where they’re hidden, where they’ve been abandoned, forgotten.

Their life together was bearably calm, but it wasn’t friendly.

Sad people are merciless.

Maybe he decided that his sadness was going to be my companion forever, for as long as he wanted, because sad people are merciless.

But I’d rather forget them because forgetting people you only knew in words is odd; when they existed they were more intense than people in real life, and now they’re more distant than strangers.

And always, when she finished telling her audience about her days in the hospital, she named the man who had burned her: Juan Martín Pozzi, her husband. She’d been married to him for three years. They had no children. He thought she was cheating on him and he was right—she’d been about to leave him. To keep that from happening, he ruined her. Decided she would belong to no one else.

“Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

When would the longed-for world of men and monsters come?

shall plunge down into the abysmal horror of madness and death—or I shall walk upon the dawn. —Marjorie Cameron

A shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature. Like many of the adolescent democracies of the Southern Cone, the country is haunted by the specter of recent dictatorships, and the memory of violence there is still raw.