The Absence of Choice
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
The past decade has been extraordinary for English-speaking fans of Argentine fiction, as a wave of remarkable titles has arrived in US bookshops. And the boon has come largely thanks to women. Translators Annie McDermott, Megan McDowell, Sarah Moses, Carolina Orloff, and Frances Riddle have brought forth the work of Mariana Enríquez, Ariana Harwicz, Claudia Piñero, and Samanta Schweblin, all of whom were nominated for the International Booker Prize between 2017 and 2022. And it is not only these contemporary standouts translating and being translated. Suzanne Jill Levine and Maureen Shaughnessy have delivered work from the late Silvina Ocampo and Hebe Uhart. Perennial luminaries Jennifer Croft and Robin Myers have translated two of my favorite recent titles: Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery and Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche. Readers are truly spoiled for choice.
The latest addition to this growing library comes courtesy of Riddle and Shaughnessy, who have collaborated to produce a beautifully melancholy translation of Sara Gallardo’s January for Archipelago Books. Gallardo’s debut novel, originally published in 1958 when the influential and prolific porteña was twenty-seven years old, is only the second of her works to appear in English, after Jessica Sequeira’s 2018 translation of Land of Smoke. But where the stories in that collection often feature elements of the uncanny characteristic of much of the contemporary Argentine fiction now appearing in English, January is intensely—and often heartbreakingly—realistic. The novel is a portrait of sixteen-year-old Nefer, a country girl who becomes pregnant after she is raped at her sister’s wedding. The main action of novel is set over the course of several days after Christmas as Nefer wrestles with her situation and tries to find a solution on her own. The inherent strictures of Catholicism influence all of Nefer’s actions as the annual “mission” arrives in town, and with it her only chance at confession to prevent “hell itself” from slipping inside her soul.
From the outset, Nefer emphasizes how she, as the youngest child, is repeatedly passed over. As Gallardo writes in the novel’s first paragraph: “No one pays any attention to her, still and silent in the corner.” Her oldest sister, Porota, is freshly married; her eighteen-year-old sister Alcira is “the prettiest girl in town”; even her godmother’s maid refers to Nefer as “the other one.” In the girl’s mind, this inconspicuousness is to blame for her situation. If she had stood out, “if instead she had been someone else,” then maybe Negro Ramos—the debonair, celebrated horseman she has a crush on—would have noticed her rather than doting on the pampered shopowner’s daughter Delia. Instead, Nefer draws the attention of the man who rapes her, a railroad worker named Nicolás. When Nefer runs outside to throw up because of morning sickness, Gallardo levels this symbolically devastating observation: “Far away, a train glides endlessly over the shadowy plains.” Riddle and Shaughnessy’s choice of “glides” perfectly captures the lack of consequences Nicolás faces.
Riddle and Shaughnessy render Nefer’s terrible despair with stark beauty. Nefer can be a petulant teen, as when she hopes that “her mother’s shoes hurt her feet,” but her emotions mostly convey unthinkable pain. She feels that her child is “growing inside her like a black mushroom,” that it is “choking her, might turn against her.” Sometimes her sorrow is plaintive, as in, “Another day lived for nothing.” At other times, her sorrow is poetic. “What is the world when everything inside you shudders? The sky darkens, houses swell, merge, topple, voices rise in unison to become a single sound.” While uniformly impressive, the translation deserves special notice for the figurative language Gallardo uses that often evokes the carnality of the assault, an event which is never described in detail. For example, the road during the intense midday heat “is a long dry tongue.” A lantern in Nefer’s home has a “tin skirt,” and its heat “laps at their faces.” But some of January’s most memorable passages concern the dress that Nefer makes for her sister’s wedding day—the dress into which she has put all her dreams.
Mending sweaty bombachas ripped from so much rubbing in the stirrups in a chore; darning shirts is dull, but a dress—a dress you’ve made a pattern for and tried on a thousand times, unstitched and reworked until its final form takes shape in your hands—a dress is something else.
After the rape, Nefer laments that Negro never even notices the dress she has labored over. So she imagines herself imploring him to “Look at my dress, it was supposed to be for you.” And at the novel’s conclusion, another dress, “lifeless on the hanger and worn from use,” provides an acutely painful contrast.
Many of Gallardo’s scenes have a contained quality that emphasizes Nefer’s sense that she is trapped, either in the crowded confines of her home or in the confessional with its “little wooden grate so close to her face.” The notable exception is a solitary ride the girl takes during siesta in the heat of the afternoon—“that translucent furnace of a day”—to the Borges ranch. The narration implies that she intends to avail herself of an unspecified remedy, an herbal potion or magical procedure provided by the Borges matriarch: something that she hopes will terminate her pregnancy. Although it is a desperate act, it’s the only option available to her. While “rich girls […] have their ways,” girls like Nefer have no options.
En route to the ranch, Nefer spurs her horse into a gallop in the hope that maybe the physical discomfort will provide an out. Arriving at the estate, the girl is mocked by the Borges’s grandson playing in the dirt. “Gotta ride on horseback when you’re a whore,” he taunts her. When the old woman finally appears, Nefer is unable to speak and leaves without asking for anything.
The word abortion only appears once in January, near the end of the novel when Nefer recalls that her godmother told her it is “worse than a crime, because it’s killing someone who can’t defend themself.” After Nefer reveals her secret and her mother takes her to a clinic for a pregnancy test, Nefer and her mother talk around the threatened abortion without ever saying the word. At the time Gallardo wrote the novel, abortion was illegal in Argentina, and it remained that way until 2020, when their legislature voted to legalize the procedure after a decades-long struggle by activists. The surprising victory sparked a so-called “Green Wave” throughout Latin America, wherein a succession of countries have since taken steps to liberalize abortion access, most recently Mexico, which decriminalized abortion nationwide in early September.
That “Green Wave” is a testament to the work Argentina’s abortion rights advocates began in earnest twenty years ago. In 2003, they adopted the color green—so redolent of life and nature—to try and reclaim the narrative from so-called “pro-life” opponents. Then in 2015, fourteen-year-old Chiara Paez was beaten to death by her sixteen-year-old boyfriend. Paez was pregnant and had wanted to keep the child. Paez’s murder led to the Ni Una Menos protests, which demanded not one more woman’s life be lost to violence in Argentina and quickly spread across the region. Eventually, the movement came to encompass calls for safer and easier access to abortion services for women who wanted or needed them, culminating in the 2020 legislative victory.
Whether or not Gallardo’s intent was to write a galvanizing novel about abortion rights is unclear. In 2018, Lucía de Leone who, along with Laura A. Arnés and María José Punte, literally wrote the book on the history of feminist literature in Argentina, told the Spanish-language newspaper Infobae that she doesn’t know what Gallardo would make of contemporary interpretations of January. “It’s frequently been read in recent times as a novel about abortion. I don’t know if Sara Gallardo would agree with that idea. Maybe she would be uncomfortable and at the same time happy with it. But of course we can’t not do this reading today” (translation mine). The novel’s devastating conclusion arranged by Nefer’s godmother refocuses the discussion on the girl’s lack of agency, but the fallout of her visit to the clinic highlights the importance of choice, both to Nefer and to January. All Nefer really wants is the freedom to control what happens to her body. In Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, they finally have that right. Hopefully, some coming January, the “Green Wave” will also wash over the United States.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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