In Conversation with Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enríquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. In English, she has published the novel Our Share of Night and three short story collections: Things We Lost in the Fire, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and, this September, A Sunny Place for Shady People. I sat down with Enríquez at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and talked about bad neighborhoods and dead man’s towns, the relationship between horror and empathy, and what it means to take evil seriously. —Natalie Adler

NATALIE ADLER I want to start by asking you about class, especially the middle class. In your stories, poverty and homelessness terrify the fragile middle class, which rings true to me — God forbid you should lower yourself. How do you write about that fear without making the poor inhuman? 

MARIANA ENRIQUEZ The ones who fear them really are the ones who are monstrous. Very obviously. It’s not a question of whether I agree or disagree with them, I just show how ugly they are. It’s just a mirror. In a way that’s a very realistic fear because in Argentina you can actually become poor in a second. It’s not like class is something stable, it’s not like you are middle class and that’s how you’re going to die. You can die in poverty because of anything. It’s ideological of course but it’s also realistic. 

NA I was thinking about how many of your stories are about a “bad neighborhood” so to speak, which is such a specter for a certain kind of upbringing. Like the beginning of “The Dirty Kid:” “everyone thought I was crazy for living in this neighborhood.” A Sunny Place opens with a story about a neighborhood wedged between a slum and a housing project, and ends with a story about a homeless encampment — that’s the arc of the fear. In that final story, “Black Eyes,” Flora’s mistake is to let what she thinks are helpless, hungry kids into her home — she doesn’t see they’re evil. [“Black Eyes” is narrated by a pragmatic woman who works in a soup kitchen at a homeless encampment and is at odds with her idealist coworker. When two children ask to be let into their van, the narrator recognizes them as evil while her coworker only sees poor kids.]

What kind of boundary should we keep with this supernatural pain, this unresolved pain, world historical pain, even? Should we not open up the Ouija board?

ME In both stories, they let them in. The thing is, in the first one, there’s a possibility of a dialogue. [“My Sad Dead” is narrated by a former doctor who can communicate with the ghosts of victims of violent crime in her neighborhood. The other inhabitants of the town can hear them, but they’re even less inclined to help them dead than they were living.] In the last one, with the kids, there’s no possibility of a dialogue. Not even between the activists. Those two girls will never be able to talk, they’re in two different levels of activism. The ones who are very blindly progressive, they’re not helping anybody. They’re just virtue signaling. The ones who really get in there, they know it’s complicated. I think that’s a story more about them than about the kids. The impossibility, even between people who think the same, to be on the same page. I want to talk about that because that’s something that really disturbs me — how can we agree and we’re fighting so much about this?

NA Right, she’s such a glutton for that suffering, it becomes a kind of narcissism — I could help these poor boys, but she doesn’t see them —

ME for who they are, yes.

NA I think anyone who’s ever worked at a nonprofit can see themselves in that story. How do you see the relationship, in your work, between horror and empathy?

ME I think horror helps us to empathize in a way we don’t notice. Especially when you talk about social stuff it’s so difficult. Sometimes I think I can do it because I come from a lower middle class background, and I know that neighborhood, the neighborhood in the first story is my neighborhood. Often in the literary community I didn’t feel a lot of understanding or empathy for certain situations, especially for the story with the man with no face, “Face of Disgrace.” [In that story, a family curse is passed down from mother to daughter after an experience of sexual assault: the women’s facial features disappear.] It’s a very personal story, because in situations of vulnerability, you prefer not to talk about certain things, like rape or violence in the family, because there are more urgent things, like, I stay with my husband because he provides, it doesn’t matter if he hits me, and I don’t want my kids to know. 

NA I’d rather stay with the devil I know than the devil I don’t. I’d rather stay with the husband who hits me than leave because I don’t know what’s there.

ME People say why doesn’t she leave if she’s unhappy?

NA Because they don’t! People don’t!

ME [More often, the reaction is,] why can’t you just forget about it? He didn’t kill you!

NA It could be worse!

ME All these things build up and create a circle of silence that doesn’t protect you, like a magic circle. It isolates you completely. Doing it in horror shows it, look, this is awful, okay?

NA Look at it, acknowledge it, sit with it.

So much gothic horror is about the rich, their castles, their horrible incestuous families, which is partially a question of who had the ability to write a novel in the nineteenth century. But your work mostly takes place in these working class neighborhoods. I just read your essay on Bruce Springsteen and I thought, oh my god, that’s what all this is about, living death in lower middle class post industrial New Jersey suburbs. I can’t believe it never occurred to me that Stephen King quotes “Born in the USA” at the beginning of IT: “born down in a dead man’s town.” You’re born dead here, and you’re gonna repeat the same thing forever like a ghost.

ME Obviously Bruce is so American, not for me, but I’m like, listen to the lyrics, that’s my neighborhood. That was my fear all the time, how to get away from this.

NA You gotta get out.

ME And then it follows you like a ghost. In gothic novels, they were talking about power that was falling: the power of the church, the kings, and that’s why they’re set in the ruins of castles. The new gothic is built on the ruins of a certain kind of capitalism. So that’s why it’s industrial sites, parking lots, all these places where people worked and made goods, and now they’re ruins. 

The ruins we have in Argentina are the ruins of former detention centers, which sometimes are castles, which is like the progression of the rich. The rich in the 1930s were so rich because they were exploiting the land, which was of course stolen from the Indians. Bloody, bloody money. They made a castle like the castles in Europe because that was their ideal. They lost money, some in the ’40s because of the war and not being able to export anymore, some in the ’30s when the markets crashed, and [those properties] all went to the state. So the state in the ’70s used those sites for detention and torture. 

It’s like, ghosts, ghosts, ghosts: the ghost of money, the ghosts of capitalism, the ghosts of land, the ghosts of the people you killed in your castle. It’s gold for a horror writer, but it’s absolutely horrific. It also shows you how these are not tropes. These are things that people, especially women, have been using [in their writing] for centuries at this point. Tools for pointing to the power that is falling. Because usually a ruin is haunted by ghosts, and the one who sees it is the one who can sees it from a distance. The woman, unfortunately, can see that factory better from a distance than the man who goes to work there.

NA There used to be ruin in my hometown of a Ford plant that closed in 2004. We just turned it into a mall. 

ME And that’s so spooky too. It’s the death of lives, of futures. 

NA It feels like you take evil very seriously in your work. What does evil mean to you?

ME I think evil appears not just through violence, but has a certain aesthetic. In Argentina and South America in general, with the dictatorship, it’s very obvious. Take, for example, when the narcos do their mass killings. They choose a tunnel, they take the bodies, they cut off their heads, and illuminate it from above. It’s like a cathedral. What that produces, it’s terrorism. The time it takes to do it, the thinking [it through] — those people are possessed by something. That something can be the total inability to think that what they’re doing is very, very damaging. 

I used to take a lot of cocaine, and I stopped because a friend told me you need to stop, not only because of health and addiction and all that, but because it’s full of death. It’s full of evil. We have a bigger responsibility — we can’t be responsible for everything, but there are some things we can do. I don’t want a substance that makes me feel great but its production is full of evil. It’s the same with the killings during the dictatorship, when they’re throwing alive people from planes — why don’t you just shoot them? 

NA So that terror is the last thing they feel when they die.

ME Exactly. So to me, why would you do that if there’s not something you can call evil? Because you can cut resources, make decisions for people, but on top of that, humiliate them, expose them, make other people be scared and laugh. We were talking about empathy before — that kind of dehumanization of the other makes the other person a zombie, a military objective; that’s not a person, that has nothing to do with me. Therefore I can cut it to pieces and dance on it. That’s evil. That doesn’t mean the person who does it is evil — they’re possessed by something. 

NA I’ve been thinking about the role of horror in this post-pandemic, “back to normal” moment. We’re repressing so much. In this city, we had freezer vans full of dead people. I was thinking how good it is to have horror that says no, we’re not past it, we carry it with us on a cellular level. We don’t forget things, actually. 

ME With trauma, you try to forget everything, but if it’s big enough, it explodes. Of course it’s not over, because of the inequalities it exposed. The people in the rich countries got the vaccines first, then the rest of the world. I always knew I lived and grew up in a country that was second in line, but it was the first time I felt it so clearly, because it was like [the Global North was saying] “we are gonna get the protection and you? Fuck off.” Wow, that’s brutal. 

As a writer, there’s the whole vocabulary you have to incorporate. Delta, Pfizer, mask. In two months, we were Zooming. I’m trying to remember the words now. It feels very fragile. And that’s a traumatic experience, it’s never over.

NA That there is no endpoint is constitutive of trauma. You might start repressing it, but it picks up again. Freud said the goal of psychoanalysis was to turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. Horror does the opposite, it turns ordinary unhappiness into hysterical misery. Do you have any interest in psychoanalysis? I know it’s an Argentinian pastime.

ME I’ve been doing psychoanalysis since I was a child. Now I’m doing a more reasonable form of therapy because psychoanalysis is very long and sometimes quite stressful. The things you take as familiar stop being familiar, including the body and discomfort in the body, and I think that’s very useful for writing in general, but for writing horror it’s priceless.