Dead Girls by Selva Almada

Author:Selva Almada [Almada, Selva]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2020-12-16T06:00:00+00:00

7

I go several times to see the Señora. The green cloth folded in half, which was on the coffee table that first afternoon, is always there. She keeps the pack of tarot cards inside it. Each time, she peels the cloth back carefully, as if uncovering a sleeping child. She asks me to cut the deck into three. Then to shuffle each third, moving the cards in a circle, seven times, with my right hand. She forms a stack again and we hold hands over the freshly shuffled deck, saying aloud the name and surname of the girl we want to ask about. Then she draws cards and lays them on the cloth one by one. I see the figures upside-down. It makes no difference because I don’t know what they mean.

Other times, the girls get in ahead of the cards.

One afternoon she says she can’t breathe and raises a hand to her throat. She stays like that, her eyes closed. I sit still. All I can do is wait until whatever’s happening to her stops happening. When she comes to, opens her mouth and takes a breath, her eyes are shining.

I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating, it was so intense. Pressure here and a pain here, she says, pointing first to her neck and then between her legs.

It’s María Luisa, strangled and raped.

Poor little thing. Pulled up like a reed. She was still so young, with so weak a hold on life. Like the reeds that grow beside lakes, she says to me.

I remember the photos I saw of María Luisa. The one her brother showed me of her body in the morgue, swollen, muddy, with parts of her face eaten by birds. And another two I saw in the case file.

One is also of her body, in the place where they found her. It’s taken from a short distance away, and it’s in black and white. It shows the body of a woman floating in the water. This photo reminds me of the painting by John Millais, of the dead Ophelia. Like the character from Hamlet, María Luisa is floating face-up. Like in the painting, the flat green reeds curve over the lake, and the surface is covered in tiny aquatic plants. Not the purple flowers Queen Gertrude calls dead men’s fingers, and that Ophelia wove into her crowns, but others, known as duckweed. A tree, not the willow young Ophelia falls from, but one with a low, squat canopy, casts its shadow over María Luisa’s body. Death, for both of them, shot through with anguish.

The other photo is in colour and in it María Luisa is alive. It’s a family photo, of a group of women. Maybe it was taken on someone’s birthday. On the left is her little sister, then her mother in a fancy housecoat, then one of her sisters-in-law holding a baby girl, and finally María Luisa. All the others, even the baby, are smiling at the camera.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.