A Mundane Odyssey | An Interview with Claudia Piñeiro

By Frances Riddle

Elena’s daughter, Rita, is found hanging from the church bell tower. The detectives say it’s an open-and-shut case of suicide, but Elena knows that’s not possible. It was raining the day Rita died, and she would never go near the bell tower on a rainy day because she was terrified of being struck by lightning. Someone has to get to the bottom of what really happened, but the police, the priest, and Rita’s boyfriend are unwilling to help. It’s all up to Elena.

But there’s a problem. Elena’s body doesn’t work. She has advanced Parkinson’s disease, and her daily life is structured around the pills she takes to make tasks as simple as standing and walking possible (if still difficult). She has to find a body that can work for her in her place, and she knows just the person: a woman named Isabel who owes Rita a debt of gratitude. So, shuffling, drooling, hunched perpendicular to the ground, viewing the world out of the corner of her eye, Elena makes the journey by foot, train, and taxi across Greater Buenos Aires to the house where she hopes Isabel still lives. She plans to call in that debt incurred by Isabel when Rita found her vomiting outside of an abortion clinic and saved her from making what Elena knows would’ve been the biggest mistake of her life. But when Elena finally arrives at the house where Isabel still lives, she will be forced to question everything she thinks she knows.

In Buenos Aires, where we both live, I spoke with award-winning, best-selling Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro about her book Elena Knows, out in my translation this week from Charco Press.

Frances Riddle: You’ve published more than ten books, won some major literary prizes, and you’re the most translated Argentine author after Borges and Cortázar. In short, you’ve had a very successful literary career. How did you get your start as a writer? What first put you on this path?

Claudia Piñeiro: The need to write was ontological in the sense that it came formatted in my DNA, the need to express myself with the written word. What I’ve had to do over the course of my life is find out how to do it as well as possible. At first, it was a more chaotic, less systematic search. Then, when I went to university, I was going to study sociology. Sociology isn’t literature, but it’s a more humanistic degree than economics, which is what I ended up studying because the military dictatorship in Argentina had closed all the humanities departments, including sociology, at that time. I had to finish up my degree in whatever I could, and I chose between the options available. So my literary formation didn’t come from school. But I always went to literary workshops with different teachers. At that time, and still today, creative writing workshops are very common. Not within the academic framework but outside of it, in houses or bars or cafés where a very well-known, important writer will give a creative writing workshop. I went to several, but the person I recognize as my mentor was Guillermo Saccomanno. I studied with him the longest. Then I completed a degree in screenwriting and writing for the theatre. I think that Elena Knows has something of dramatic writing in it. It could be a play. If I could sum it up: my formation has been just me seeking out things I could add on to learn to write better.

FR: You’re a very busy person. You’re active in the feminist movement in Argentina, so I imagine you get a million e-mails a day and have a lot of balls in the air at one time. Then people like me come along asking you to do interviews. What do you do to make time to write? Is there a sacred time of every day that you carve out for it? Do you lock yourself away from the world when you’re working on something, or do you just get in writing whenever or wherever you can?

CP: In Argentina, and I suppose in many other countries too, writers can’t make a living on writing alone. There are many other factors that go into what you have to do on a daily basis that make it hard, especially for a task like writing, where your head has to be clear to think. Right now, I’m a judge for two writing contests. One is a manuscript contest for books that aren’t published, Futurock, and I’m also a judge on the FILBA panel. Today, I’m reading the fifteen manuscripts for the Futurock Prize. I really like reading new writers who are writing different things and seeing where they go. In the meantime, all these energies, especially in the pandemic when there are so many more uncertainties, they get to you. For example, I’m doing this interview with you, and I’m worried because I have this work trip, and I don’t know if it’s been canceled or not. It’s hard to create a glass bubble and keep everything from affecting you. There are writers who manage it. Mostly I know more male writers who manage it better than female writers. They manage to create this impenetrable bubble. But I always wrote with my kids around me, someone ringing the doorbell for some reason, another person asking you for something. Sometimes respect for the work of women, especially when it’s a job like this—quiet, creative—gets less respect than when it’s a man working. With time that’s improving, it’s changing. But when I wrote Elena Knows, my three kids were young. I’d drop them off at school then write the whole time they were there. I was a lot more organized in terms of when to work and when not to because I needed to use those hours of my day. Then, when my kids got bigger and needed less from me, I got more disorganized in terms of my schedule. But I’m a hard worker. I find a way to put in the hours for writing. I’m a morning person so I can get up very early and write. By a certain time of night, I can’t keep writing. If you’d asked me before, I’d have told you I can write anywhere, that I don’t have any problem moving around with my laptop between the kitchen, the living room, outside the house, wherever. But, during the pandemic, I was suddenly quarantined with my partner and one of my three kids. I had to find a space where I could close the door so no one would come in because when I was in the places where I used to be able to write, there was always an interruption. Something always happened; there was always some question, some issue to solve. It’s hard on a daily basis when the world is always interrupting you and pulling you out of the fantasy that you’re immersed in.

FR: Elena Knows has a bit of a mystery. And there’s a kind of twist at the end of the book which reveals what this story is truly about. I think the reader will be surprised; I was surprised. Can you tell us about your process? Do you sit down and map out the plot, or do you just start writing and see where the book takes you?

CP: I don’t have an outline. I know some writers who work with an outline where they have the turning points, where they know the line each of their characters will take. At the Casa José Saramago Museum in Lisbon, there are blown-up pictures of his notebooks where he has mapped out, point by point, what is going to happen in every chapter. I don’t do that. But I do have an idea—a global idea—of where the characters will go and what’s going to happen. And I do imagine the ending. Then, during writing, sometimes I take those routes, or sometimes I veer off onto other paths. Often the ending changes. In the case of Elena Knows, I thought that the ending was a certain way, but I got stuck with the writing. I couldn’t continue with it until I finally realized that wasn’t the place I had to go; it was somewhere else. And when I changed the ending, the novel took off again, and I was able to finish it. But I don’t have all those twists and turns planned out in advance. They just emerge as I write. What appears for me is an image, an image of a character that sparks it all. I let that sit in my head, ripening, macerating, and then that image of the character starts to tell me the whole story, starts telling me what happens, et cetera. That’s when I start to let them move and show me where the story is going, how it might continue, and what the possible end might be.

FR: This book deals with the theme of abortion and the right to choose. The three main characters are all female, and each has a different relationship to motherhood. Elena automatically accepts it as a woman’s duty. Rita is not a mother but also thinks motherhood is a woman’s duty, which is why she effectively forces Isabel to become a mother by interrupting her plans to have an abortion. You’ve been a prominent figure in the feminist movement in Argentina in recent years and very vocal in the fight for the legalization of abortion, which finally passed at the end of 2020. But this book was originally published in 2007. So women’s rights are something you’ve been thinking about for a long time. Did you set out to write a book about motherhood and the right to choose, or was the original seed for this story something different?

CP: Sometimes I’m asked if my latest book, Cathedrals, reflects these changes in the law. And I have to explain that, ever since Elena Knows, these themes have been present in my work. Themes of the woman and her place in the world; of the roles assigned from the traditional places and discomfort with those assigned roles. In All Yours, which was my first book, the issue of abortion appears. A teenage girl considers having an abortion and decides not to go through with it. Just because it’s legal and a person can have an abortion safely doesn’t mean that every person (or every literary character) will choose to do it. But, yes, they can consider it, and, in this case, it’s a teenage girl who has to consider doing it clandestinely. In Thursday Night Widows, there’s the issue of domestic violence. In Elena Knows, the issue of abortion again. It’s one of my obsessions. These themes don’t appear in everything I’ve written, but they’re issues that repeat themselves, just as themes repeat themselves in other writers’ works. Other themes that I often return to are the idea of being caged in, hypocrisy, concern with what other people will say. But certainly, the place that women occupy and the roles that pigeonhole them into certain positions—these themes appear in almost all my books. But they present themselves to me on an unconscious level. I don’t know why these specific elements appeared in that setting with this woman who I saw sitting in her kitchen waiting for her Parkinson’s medication to take effect so she could stand up, so that she could get up and walk. Yes, she had a daughter. And that daughter didn’t want to have children, but she also had a very brutal opinion about abortion and the obligation other women have to be mothers. Still, I didn’t consciously think of this book in those terms. It’s like when you dream. You dream, and you can start to pull a thread and say to yourself, “OK, I dreamed this because of this; I dreamed about this person because I ran into them on the street, but I switched what happened to them with what happened to another person.” You mix everything up in dreams. In that initial stage of the creative process, I think there’s something similar. For me it was this woman in her kitchen, waiting for a pill to let her move, to begin to function, because she had Parkinson’s.

Elena Knows is a book that I have a special fondness for. It’s a book I wrote because Parkinson’s is an illness that I know very intimately. My mother had it. It’s also a disease that, as Elena experiences, people often look away from. The sensation I had was that my mother stopped being seen when she began to suffer from this illness. She had the same problem as Elena in that she became hunched over. She didn’t have the shaking symptomatic of Parkinson’s, but she did have that rigidity, and people are often uncomfortable looking at someone when they have an illness that’s visible in the body—worse still if it’s visible in the face. So, in a way, Elena Knows was a way to put my mother’s sick body right in the foreground. Anyone who wants to read that book has to look at her. They have no other choice but to look at this person and see what is happening to her. The particularities of the plot, the ins and outs, et cetera, obviously weren’t my mother’s or mine. But that link between sickness and Elena’s body and the daughter’s reaction to that sick body is something that I know very well. Probably, if I’d had to research that illness in another way, I wouldn’t have arrived at those small details of everyday life. Because nowhere does it explain to you what it’s going to be like when you’re drooling uncontrollably, or when you can’t get out of bed, or when certain things affect your daily life. In general, they avoid giving you those details. So Elena Knows is a book that I love because, in a way, my mother is present in it even though the story has nothing to do with us except for that sick body. This book has given me a lot of satisfaction also because of the feedback I’ve received from people who treat this kind of illness. They’ve told me that, after reading the story, they were able to much better understand what was happening to their patient. They’ve even told me that sometimes they use the book in courses for nurses, psychologists, doctors, et cetera, assigning it to help them fully comprehend the emotional pain that goes along with Parkinson’s.

FR: One of my first experiences with culture shock when I moved here was riding the Sarmiento train line at rush hour. I almost had a panic attack in that train car with people sitting in the open window grabbing onto the roof because there was not enough space inside, and yet more people kept pushing their way in at each subsequent station. I’d never experienced that level of crowdedness before, that massive crush of bodies. It felt really unsafe to me. After I forcibly tunneled my way out at my stop, I immediately lit a cigarette to try and recover from the stress of that experience. So my point is that Buenos Aires is a difficult city to get around, even for the able-bodied, which lends Elena’s journey to find Isabel an even more epic quality. What has your relationship to the city been like? Have you also found it difficult to navigate?

CP: I was born and raised in the same place that the novel occurs. So that train ride that Elena takes is one I made regularly—to go to school everyday, with the added difficulty that those were the days before the train was electric. It was a steam train that came whenever it felt like. To get on, you had to push, and you often had to ride hanging out the window, literally. If not, you wouldn’t be able to fit, and you might miss your test (for example). So I have firsthand experience of all those difficulties of public transportation in Buenos Aires. When I wrote the novel, I retraced that old route several times. I already lived in the city, but I got on the train and took that trip because I thought maybe things had changed. The train was now electric, but it hadn’t changed that much. It had improved, but not by a lot. There’s a surrender to difficulty and discomfort in that commute. In a way, that difficulty and discomfort have been naturalized. We don’t have any other choice. We have to travel this way. We get on the train knowing it is going to be uncomfortable, and we accept that. As a foreigner, maybe it was more of a shock for you. Maybe, after living here so many years and having to do it everyday, it wouldn’t shock you anymore. What seemed interesting to me in the novel is how an everyday thing like commuting, something that’s a minor daily inconvenience, can become an odyssey, not only because of the difficulties specific to that train line but also because of being an older person with a sick body. Elena’s odyssey is a fifteen-mile train journey from her little town to Buenos Aires. That seemed interesting to me—to transform a mundane chore into an odyssey.

FR: We’ve already talked a little bit about your early influences. Can you tell us who you’ve been reading more recently? Which writers interest or inspire you today?

CP: It was hard for me to read fiction early on in the pandemic because I felt very wary about what the future would be like. Any fiction I picked up seemed false to me. Things that happened in those stories . . . I thought, “This can’t happen,” because the world had changed. Maybe now that things are getting better, I can go back to those stories and read them with the hope that the world will be different, yes, but maybe not so different. And hopefully it will be different for the better and not for the worse. So, during quarantine last year, I reread more non-fiction, essays, and autobiographies by authors I like a lot such as Natalia Ginzburg and Clarice Lispector. I also read a Greek writer who has lived in Sweden for a long time, Theodor Kallifatides. I discovered him thanks to Samanta Schweblin, a writer friend who recommends books from time to time. I read several things by Vivian Gornick, who I’m sure in the US has been read for many years but her translations came to us just recently in Argentina. I also read Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. I had an old edition but it was recently republished in Argentina. Although it’s fiction, it felt real to me since it’s so autobiographical. Books that felt real or that I’d read before so I could open up to any page and feel that what I would take away from that page or that paragraph would serve me at that moment—those are the books I’ve been reading. And recently there’s been a lot of important writing by Latin American women, such as Fernanda Melchor, Lina Meruane, to name a few. In Argentina, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Samanta Schweblin, Ariana Harwicz, Mariana Enríquez, Camila Sosa Villada—they’re all writers I follow. Whenever a book by one of them comes out, I try to read it. Carolina Sanin in Colombia, María Fernanda Ampuero in Ecuador, Mónica Ojeda—they’re all authors who I think are interesting, and I’m always on the lookout for their new books.

Frances Riddle is a Spanish to English literary translator who has published over a dozen book-length translations as well as many short stories and essays in translation. Originally from Houston, Texas, she has lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina since 2010. Her forthcoming translations include Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows and Isabel Allende’s Violeta.

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