![]() “The Intoxicated Years” follows a group of reckless teenage girls. Adela screams and is never seen again.Įnríquez paints a vivid portrait of Buenos Aires neighborhoods that have succumbed to poverty, crime and violence. The house buzzes, glass shelves are lined with teeth and fingernails. Here, the story spins from reality to nightmare. They become obsessed with an abandoned house and leave her out of their many games and imaginings until, finally, the three decide to venture inside. They are slightly older and allowed to watch horror movies, while she is not. In “Adela’s House,” a young girl is jealous of the friendship between her brother and Adela, a neighbor. These stories are told in the same breath as actual ghost stories often, Enríquez’s tales jolt from reality to magical realism with dizzying speed. Around here you can just toss anyone, there’s no frickin’ way they’ll find you. The thieves got into the mobile home and they didn’t realize the old lady was inside and maybe she died on them from the fright, and then they tossed her. Other disappearances are commonplace in these stories: a girl steps off a bus and vanishes into a vast park, another child enters a haunted house and never comes out, a mobile home is stolen with an elderly woman inside. In “The Dirty Kid,” when a child is found decapitated, a young woman wonders if it’s the same boy she spent an afternoon with when his drug-addicted mother disappeared. Violence and danger are constant, shadowy presences for Enríquez’s characters. Although he also takes guests to “the Salamanca cave, where he told them ghost stories about meetings between witches and devils, or about stinking goats with red eyes,” stories of actual barbarity are banned. A police academy during the country’s last dictatorship, the Inn was the site of unspeakable acts. In “The Inn,” another tour guide in the small town of Sanagasta tells the history of the town’s Inn and loses his job for it. “An Invocation” features a bus tour guide who is obsessed with the Big-Eared Runt, a serial killer who began killing at the young age of nine. In Enríquez’s Argentina, superstitions and folk tales live side-by-side with stories of actual violence and horror. This violent story is an everyday part of life in these neighborhoods. ![]() “But there was nothing macabre or sinister about it,” Enríquez tells us. Throughout the neighborhoods of sprawling Buenos Aires, where many of Enríquez’s stories are set, shrines and altars can be found in his honor, bearing plaster replicas of the saint, often decorated with bright red reminders of his bloody death. When the policeman did as directed and his son was healed, tales of Gauchito Gil’s supernatural powers flourished. ![]() Before Gil died, he warned his murderer to pray for him, or else the man’s son would die of a mysterious illness. His death was horrific-tortured over a fire and hung by his feet, eventually his throat was slit. After a stint in the army, Antonio Mamerto Gil Núñez (the saint’s full name) became a Robin Hood figure, beloved by the poor of the country. Mariana Enríquez opens her debut collection, Things We Lost in the Fire, by recounting the story of Gauchito Gil, a popular saint in Argentina.
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