“What do you know about what really goes on around here, mamita? You live here, but you’re from a different world.”

“The house tells us the stories. You don’t hear it?”
“Poor thing,” said Pablo. “She doesn’t hear the house’s voice.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Adela. “We’ll tell you.”
And they told me.
About the old woman, whose eyes had no pupils but who wasn’t blind.
About the old man, who burned medical books out by the empty chicken coop, in the backyard.
About the backyard, just as dry and dead as the front, full of little holes like the dens of rats.
About a faucet that never stopped dripping, because the thing that lived in the house needed water.

We all walk over bones in this city, it’s just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead. (No Flesh Over Our Bones)

The city didn’t have any great murderers if you didn’t count the dictators—not included in the tour for reasons of political correctness.

“Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

“Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

A shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature. Like many of the adolescent democracies of the Southern Cone, the country is haunted by the specter of recent dictatorships, and the memory of violence there is still raw. Argentina’s twentieth century was scarred by decades of conflict between leftist guerrillas and state and military forces… Generations, including Mariana Enriquez’s, have lived their early years under the yoke of dictatorship and come of age in democracy.