Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.
—Michelle Clayton, translator
“The Comet”
I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.
Back then, washing my hair was a kind of sacred ritual for me. My long hair tied me to a long line of strong women, starting with the red-headed Celts of centuries ago. Then came my great-grandmother, Eveline Hill, who had left Dublin on her own in 1910, boarding a ship at the mouth of the Liffey and crossing the sea in search of the Irish lover who was supposed to be waiting for her in Buenos Aires. She caught her first glimpse of the River Plate from the deck while she fixed her wind-swept hair. She never did find her old paramour in Buenos Aires, but she decided to stay on nonetheless. She did what she needed to in order to survive; with a man we know nothing about, she had her only daughter, Rose. And so her hair flowed on down to my grandmother, like a waterfall pouring from mother to daughter down a cliff of generations, a single river adorned with barrettes, ribbons, and flowers: all that coppery hair shining in a photo of my grandmother, young and laughing on a restaurant terrace, her head free of its nurse’s cap, her hair loosened in the sun. That river of heavy locks made its way through the years and the hands of my grandfather Charles Neylan, falling into strawberry-blond waves around my mother’s head and then streaming onward to me, into the mornings when my mother brushed my hair before sending me off to school, or the afternoons when she undid my braids, our hair exactly alike. All those women flowed through my hair, down to the tips where I felt their line ending – or maybe I’d be the start of another waterfall, with the water flowing down through my saturated locks; maybe I’d have a daughter of my own and the cascade would keep rushing onward. Or maybe not; maybe the water would simply land in this metal tub that I’d empty down the dark drain into the bowels of the sewers, and from there it would flow on down to the Riachuelo, where the girl trapped under the tram was still laying. I opened my eyes when they knocked on the door. My time was up. I was shivering.
***
The first Sunday afternoon I had off, Catalina and her boyfriend invited me to a funfair in El Bajo, near Avenida Callao. I had no desire to go; I had just gotten my first week’s pay and I wanted to hold onto every penny. But according to Catalina, Gabriel knew someone who would get us in for free. I really wasn’t in the mood, but they kept insisting and in the end I let them convince me. We met up in the park with a friend of Gabriel’s, a shy fellow on the shorter side. The funfair had a sad little train that went round and round inside a fake mountain. Catalina and Gabriel made the most of the darkness to start canoodling. Whenever we went past a light, it looked like they were strangling one another.
Then we passed some funhouse mirrors; Gabriel’s friend sidled over to the one that made him look taller. Gabriel stole a couple of alfajores and we snuck into a tent to eat them. There were some performances going on inside, and when the lights were lowered, out came a troupe of acrobats who looked somehow familiar to me. Two men with enormous thighs, lying on their backs, used their legs to toss two women back and forth; the women seemed as light as feathers, flying through the air curled into balls, unraveling at the height of the volley, stretching out their arms and legs, then diving back down to land with perfect precision on the opposite side. The younger one turned out to be a contortionist as well. She arched backwards until her head was between her ankles, and took a puff from a cigarette she held between her toes. That’s when I recognized them: it was the family of acrobats I had shared a room with the night I went through the tunnels looking for Alejandro. I wanted to tell Catalina, but it would have meant too much explaining. When they came out for a round of applause, I pretended to clap, trying to protect my chapped and swollen hands.
Later, Gabriel and his friend wanted to show off their shooting skills at the air-rifle stand. You had to pop some balloons spinning on a wheel or knock down one of the toys filing past: an ostrich, a puma, some kind of concoction of metal and fur. They got totally caught up in it, like little kids, brandishing their rifles at every shot they made.
We walked through the square together, then wandered off the beaten path. A short-eared hare hopped past us; it must have come from the zoo. I didn’t know why we were heading that way until Catalina and Gabriel suddenly flopped down in the grass, giggling. I sat down with Gabriel’s friend against a half-collapsed wall, making conversation through awkward silences that were filled with lovers’ moans.
“Do you work in the hotel?” he asked me.
“Yes. How about you?”
“I work in the port. I used to be a graphic designer. And how I complained about it! Look at my hands now, though – thick as gloves.”
As I looked at them, it struck me that there must be so many more like him: men who once had more or less stable, solid jobs who these days were being worked to a pulp on the docks, schlepping around dead weights in now-scruffy clothes, wearing caps to cover their greasy hair. To avoid showing him my own hands, I tucked them between my knees.
“I used to be a secretary.”
“D’you have a family?”
“No.”
“I used to, but they left for Spain.”
“And you stayed on here, on your own?”
“Yeah. I wanted to stay until things got better again – and if they don’t, well then: to the bitter end.”
It was cold now, and as we sat there not moving, my feet were starting to freeze. I suggested going back. We heard shots in the distance.
“It must be the elections,” he said.
“What d’you mean, the elections? That’s not until next Sunday.”
“No, it was today; they moved them forward.”
Catalina and Gabriel reappeared, with bits of grass in his sweater. Catalina was tying her hair up and smoothing out her clothes, avoiding my gaze.
“There must have been some trouble around the elections,” said Gabriel.
I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.
“What? What are you all laughing at?”
“Women don’t vote anymore,” Catalina explained.
“What do you mean? How is that possible?”
“We can’t. You can only vote if you’ve done military service, and that’s only for men.”
I thought they were pulling my leg. Soon enough I found out they weren’t.
Gabriel told his friend he wanted to see what was going on. They tried to convince myself and Catalina to go with them. But I had had plenty of excitement with the gunfight on my birthday. Catalina got annoyed with Gabriel and begged him to stay, but they went off anyway, up Avenida Callao, toward the kerfuffle. I had to put up with Catalina complaining about Gabriel all the way back to the hotel.
“Men just use you; that’s all they do”, she kept saying. And she asked me to help her pick the grass out of her sweater; if Doña Justina spotted any, there’d be hell to pay.
Passing Retiro, we saw groups of men with their hair slicked back, toting rifles and the Argentinean flag. We saw fires at some intersections, piles of lit tires and urns. Sailors and drunks trickled out of the bars and cabarets of El Bajo, curious about what was going on, firing their own guns in the air. There was gunfire all night long. The park we had been in earlier was now in flames.
Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Clayton
Pedro Mairal (born 1970) is a Buenos Aires-based novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, and professor of English literature. He is the author of four widely-celebrated and translated novels (which have gone through several editions in both Argentina and Spain), as well as two collections of short stories and three volumes of poetry. His first novel, Una noche con Sabrina Love (1998), won the prestigious Premio Clarín de Novela and was adapted into a film in 2000; his fourth novel, La uruguaya, won the Premio Tigre Juan in 2017, and was made into a film released in 2023. El año del desierto was first published in 2005, and reissued in 2023. A novel grounded in Argentina, it shares with fictions elsewhere the sense that the ground everywhere is shaky, and in telling its story, it argues compellingly for fiction’s ability to alert us to dangers in our pasts and our futures.
Michelle Clayton is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University, specializing in the international avant-gardes, interdisciplinary experiments, and contemporary narrative. She had the good fortune to work with a series of outstanding translators –and translation-advocates—from her undergraduate years onward: David Constantine at Oxford, James E. Irby at Princeton, Michael Heim at UCLA; and in recent years she has translated a range of Argentine/Uruguayan writers, from Julio Cortázar through Juan Carlos Onetti to Ricardo Piglia. She hopes to spend the coming year translating Mairal’s El año del desierto in its entirety.