Elena Knows

Novel · 143 pages · Paperback · Translated by Frances Riddle · Charco Press · 2021

What a mother cannot know

Elena crosses Buenos Aires by pill schedule after her daughter, Rita, is found hanging from a church belfry. Her head pulls down. Her feet stall. The police call it suicide. Elena rejects the conclusion. It was raining, and Rita feared the church in the rain.

That rain is where Claudia Piñeiro's Elena Knows begins its investigation. Elena reads it against everything she knows of her daughter: routes avoided, pavements untouched, Catholic rules obeyed or feared, superstitions treated as fact. A hanging body gives the police an answer. Weather gives Elena a contradiction.

The contradiction must cross the city in a body that can barely serve it due the onset of Parkinson's disease. Elena waits for levodopa, counts streets, leans on walls, is pulled from a taxi and gets stuck on a couch until the next chemical release. Trains and traffic run to a fixed hour. Elena runs on intervals of use. Her will remains intact. Her body answers late.

Piñeiro's sentences move in the same rhythm as the medication — short, stalled, released.

Rita's death is first read through habit. She was religious, severe, frightened by storms. Once dead, the Church calls her suicide a sinful misuse of a body that belongs to God. Elena's answer comes from bodily dispossession: she has not had full use of her own body for years. Faith survives in her as residue: Catholic idiom without belief. Heaven, sin and judgement remain in her head. Those words organise shame and place bodies under claim.

Piñeiro refuses to rescue care from disgust. Rita handles forms, cuts toenails, books appointments and shames Elena for her smell, drool, dentures and urine. She puts them in the same room and lets both stand.

The diagnosis names Elena's decline, but it names Rita's future too. Rita hears the prognosis as a verdict on her own future. She wounds Elena. She also speaks from knowledge gained at close range.

A mother may know her daughter's habits. She may know the routes, fears and tones of voice by which someone protects herself. The point at which another person's endurance ends lies beyond her.

Twenty years earlier, Rita found Isabel on the way to a woman who performed abortions. She preached at her, dragged her home and returned her to a husband Isabel was trying to escape. Elena has treated that afternoon as rescue. Isabel remembers it as capture. The Christmas cards kept the wrong story intact: husband, daughter, smiles, annual thanks. Isabel breaks the image. She did not want motherhood. Her husband forced sex on her. The happy family portrait was a document for other people.

Elena's demand is not an errand. It is another claim on Isabel's body: she wants Isabel to investigate, walk, act where Elena no longer can. Isabel answers from the history of her own body being used by others. The woman who demands to be heard has come to the woman she once helped silence. Rita's Catholic certainty, first visible as rule and temperament, becomes an act against another woman's stated will.

People discover what they can do only when they are put to the test in the flesh. Isabel thought she knew pregnancy before she was pregnant. Elena could have heard every description of Parkinson's and still not known it before the illness entered her own body. Rita may have learned, at the end, what she could not survive.

The title then becomes almost cruel. Elena Knows sounds like defiance against police laziness, clerical certainty and neighbourhood pity. By the end it has turned against her. She knows Rita's habits, the Church's hypocrisy, illness at first hand. What happened within Rita before the belfry remains beyond her. She does not know whether motherhood gave her truth or merely confidence.

The closing pages give Elena tea, a shortened straw and a cat. Isabel sits low enough to meet her face. Love, says Isabel, is always in its own way. Elena does not get Rita back. She does not get proof. The answer that drove her across the city will not return her unchanged. She gets one living body warm against her hand. Maybe tomorrow, after the first pill, she will know. Maybe after the second.