Introduction: Argentine Horror and Social Criticism

3In order to fully comprehend the reality of the haunting described in the short story “The Inn” one needs to appreciate that Enríquez is writing a genre of Argentine horror linked to politics – it is a joining of political literature (such as testimonial literature) and horror. Heraldo Alfredo Pastor situates Enríquez’s writing as part of “Nueva Narrativa Argentina” [New Argentine Narrative] that emerged after the last military dictatorship in Argentina in which

• 4 In the original: “[…] la Argentina no ha podido abstraerse del factor político en la configuración (...)

[…] Argentina has not been able to separate the political factor from the configuration of its literature; and it seems to have validated itself on the discursive conventions of terror as genre and its antecedent, the gothic, as deemed appropriate to represent a terror of a political nature. (Pastor, 2012: 68)4

4Pastor adds that it is better said that Argentine horror literature participates in the horror genre because of its intrinsic relationship to the real terror of Argentine history and politics. When brought into her own writing Enríquez further explains that the

[…] border appears in the frontier between realism and the fantastic, that not-so-comfortable place where you recognize the setting and the words but reality dissolves into something sinister. I always find that the most interesting (and scary) horror lies in these kinds of narratives, the ones that work along this line. (Enríquez in Rice, 2018)

But what always haunted me once I knew the stories of these children is that there’s a question of identity. I mean, I went to school with children that I don’t know if they were who they were, if their parents were who they were raised by their parents or by the killers to other families. So there is a ghostly quality to everyday life. (in NPR Books, 2017).

8According to Katherine McKittrick (2006, ix) “geography is always human and that humanness is always geographic”. By extension, geographic stories reveal not only the subject’s imaginative space but also how geography, especially a haunted and/or demonic geography, has the possibility to speak for itself. Considering that “space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations”, they also form the “anchors of selfhood” against the socio-political processes of concealment and marginalization (ibidem: xi). Space not only anchors the self in history but can also be the same space through which hardship and human cruelty can be revealed and articulated (ibidem: xii). Within this dynamic of haunted geography, the past and present can also be linked as sites of struggle and even of unresolved stories – such as the case of the desaparecidos in the short story “The Inn”. It also intrinsically becomes a terrain for struggle for remembering and acknowledgment against dominant socio-political practices and discourses of disenfranchisement and erasure.

9Enríquez (in Rice, 2018) reveals in an interview with Literary Hub how she believes that “political violence leaves scars, like national PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder]” marked by clandestine concentration camps and detention centres. She also remarks that

There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the state [sic] that always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well. (Enríquez in Rice, 2018)

10Geography becomes “integral to social struggles” and when considering the spectral spaces described by Enríquez in “The Inn” they also reveal what McKittrick (2006: xxvi) has described as: “[…] practices of domination are in close contact with alternative geographic perspectives and spatial matters that may not necessarily replicate what we think we know, or have been taught, about our surroundings”. Recognizing at the same time that haunted geographies such as the Inn also include what McKittrick has termed as concealed and expendable human geographies (ibidem: xxxi). It is in the recovery of the hidden histories of past detention centres and concentration camps, such as the Inn, that the bodies of the desaparecidos become re-mapped onto the space via an ontological memorialization of previously erased human cartographies.

11Part of this inherited human cartography includes how the tragic figure of the desaparecido became institutionalized in Argentine history. In 1979, ex-general Jorge Videla defined the desaparecido as:

• 8 In the original: “En cuanto éste como tal, es una incógnita eldesaparecido. Si reapareciera tendría (...)

The disappeared are an unknown. If they reappeared they would receive treatment X, and if their disappearance became definitive in the certainty of their death, they would receive treatment Z. But while they are disappeared, they can’t have any special treatment, they are unknown entity, neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared. (apud Hernández, 2009: 1)8

13In 1983, due to economic collapse, social turmoil and other factors the Argentinean military government was forced to call for free elections. The government, under pressure from the tenacious perseverance of the human rights organizations (Argentina League for Human Rights; Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo; Relatives of Political Prisoners and Disappeared; The Ecumenical Movement, amongst others) formed the National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP, in the Spanish acronym) to investigate the violation of human rights during the military dictatorship. Through CONADEP, the country heard “the other history”, which had been silenced for seven years, from the testimonies provided by ex-political prisoners, those who were tortured, survivors of the secret detention centres and relatives of the desaparecidos.

15There is, therefore, a spectral quality of the desaparecidos in Argentina’s cultural memory that Enríquez builds upon in the short story “The Inn”. That is, in this short story Enríquez extrapolates the historical unaccountability of the physical body of the desaparecido and translates into the haunting of the Inn – a supernatural haunting that also stands in for the personal and psychological haunting for generations of Argentinians. The sense of fear and terror in the short story represents this intrinsic political awareness and underlines the effects of an intergenerational socio-political trauma compounded by the absence of knowledge of the physical landscape of the secret detention centres and concentration camps. It is an intergenerational experience of a psychological horror of a “not-knowing” where traumatized relatives of the desaparecidos are denied the knowledge of the whereabouts of their disappeared loved ones to the clandestine concentration and internment sites after their kidnapping by the armed forces. It is important to note that this haunting has been facilitated by an institutionalized denial and code of silence of those who were in power. On-going investigations were further revealing of the violence and injustice committed at these sites, thereby adding to the complexities of the “working-through” process for survivors and their families. This process of the corporealization of the desaparecido into official history then intrinsically affects the inherited trauma of a collective cultural space. Enríquez explains that, unlike journalism which tends to reveal more urgent in the moment reporting, fiction can make one “think in the long term or a very profound way” (ibidem). Considering her own role as a cultural journalist, Enríquez highlights that even though she is more in touch with popular culture, her “socio-political commentary comes more from [her] experience as a citizen than […] as a journalist” (Enríquez in Vitcavage, 2017).

16When asked about the political subtext of her writing, Enríquez makes the following comment to David Wallace in an interview with The New Yorker:

The sheer terror of the institutional violence and the dictatorships in South America has always verged on something that is beyond just a government’s mechanical repression – there was and is, when it surfaces, something more essentially evil about it. […] I care about politics and I’m interested in history, so it shows up in my work. The fact that I choose a genre that doesn’t usually deal with this is important, although I think that contemporary genre fiction approaches these issues more and more often now. But to me it’s just a circumstance of my writing. (Wallace, 2016)

The Haunting of the Inn

18In “The Inn” it is the main protagonist’s (Rocío’s) father who has the courage to mention the Inn’s past as a police academy 30 years prior to being transformed into a hotel (Enríquez, 2017: 41). This acknowledgment of a dark piece of town history is not accepted by his employer and ultimately leads to his dismissal as the town’s tour guide. Relating the Inn’s past as a police academy links it to the history of clandestine detention and torture centres: “it was a police academy during the dictatorship. You remember the stuff we studied in school?” (ibidem: 42). This is a recognition of a past the Inn’s owner wishes to ignore because of its negative impact on her business, yet the tourists express an interest in wanting to know more about the Inn’s past and “about disappearances, torture, whatever” (ibidem).

19“The Inn” is a ghost story that not only mixes Argentine history (of the desaparecido) with the supernatural, as previously mentioned, but does so by also including “social issues” and “fears we have as a society” (Enríquez in NPR Books, 2017). When asked in another interview what was the origin of her “macabre obsessions” Enríquez reveals that:

• 16 In the original: “Siempre fui una chica oscura. De niña me gustaban las historias de fantasmas, las (...)

I’ve always been a dark girl. As a child I liked ghost stories, the legends from Corrientes that my grandmother used to tell me. I like the genre, I like fear, I like those physical sensations that awaken the macabre, the dark. They have something that gives me an adrenaline rush, that cheers me up. Besides, they are very popular! (Mattio, 2014)16

21Considering Enríquez’s multi-faceted writing style that combines the aforementioned styles of gothic-horror and novela negra she also seems to incorporate similar characteristics in her writing that Isabel Pinedo has identified as postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film:

(1) there is a violent disruption of the everyday world; (2) there is a transgression and violation of boundaries; (3) the validity of rationality is thrown into question; (4) there is no narrative closure; and (5) the film produces a bounded experience of fear. (Pinedo, 1996: 20)

22Furthermore, Enríquez’s refusal of a narrative closure in “The Inn” blurs the lines between the real and spectral space to underline the representation of an unstable, paranoid universe where familiar categories collapse and where the human body is the site of this collapse (Pinedo, 1996: 20). Like the postmodern horror film, Enríquez’s short story “The Inn” remembers “ordinary people’s ineffectual attempts to resist a violent monster” (ibidem: 19) – though the monster in this story are the ghosts of past atrocities committed at the Inn. Enríquez does not have to describe the abuses inflicted on the prisoners brought to the police academy since this knowledge is a shared history in which “horror exposes the terror implicit in everyday life: the pain of loss, the enigma of death, the unpredictability of events, the inadequacy of intentions. […] By monstrifying quotidian terrors, horror unearths the repressed” (ibidem: 26). Enríquez writes not only in the liminal spaces of the public and political but also in the haunted minds and memories of the protagonists as they engage with hostile spectral spaces of violence, torture, and death. The dead do talk – and sometimes as a cacophony of urgency and desperation to be heard.

24The girls’ arrival at the Inn connotes an unseen “transgression and violation of boundaries” stipulated by Pinedo (1996: 20) – although Florencia knows that Rocío is seeking to punish Elena for firing her father she is also aware that “the real problem was something else. […] It was clear she [Rocío] wanted to punish Elena and defend her mother” (Enríquez, 2017: 44). The revenge plot is further complicated by Florencia’s enigmatic admission that “someone had told her once that if you wished hard for something you could make it happen, and she wanted Rocío to confide in her, to trust her. If only she would, then they would really be inseparable” (ibidem). In the midst of this politically charged revenge plot, this personal reflection seems odd and part of a separate story of which the reader is not entirely cognizant – Florencia’s own personal (lesbian love) narrative of which both reader and Rocío are unaware.

25Upon entering the Inn Florencia remarks that “[t]he Inn’s shape was odd – it really was a lot like a barracks” (ibidem: 45) – and with this short observation the reader is transposed back into a medial space that transgresses the real with horror and the supernatural. The girls enter the empty Inn under the cover of night and begin their sabotage plan of hiding various cured meats in cuts made into the mattresses of various rooms with the idea that “the smell of decomposing meat would be unbearable, and with luck, it would take them a long time to find the source of the stench” (ibidem). Considering the underlying historical narrative to the short story the hidden “decomposing meat” can be read as representing the dehumanized treatment of the political prisoners as well as the missing bodies of the desaparecidos executed, secretly disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Río de la Plata or in mass graves (like the aforementioned Gypsy’s Skirt). Nevertheless, “the stench” of these missing bodies reveals what history cannot hide – though missing bodies these ghosts make their presence felt despite an institutionalized denial of the events.

26As a result, the Inn is a space marked by a blurring of boundaries not only between what is real and what is imagined but it is also a space that questions “the validity of rationality” (Pinedo, 1996: 20). The supernatural intercedes into reality and it is up to the reader to make sense of the fear that the girls are experiencing but also that these are the disembodied ghosts of past victims of the Inn’s dark past. The girls’ experience is one of supernatural horror of the Inn as a site of memorialization of its hidden past as a clandestine detention and torture centre – a function not necessarily known as such by those living in the area. It becomes a spectral space haunted by the souls lost and the denial of the population of what was truly happening inside the police academy – like in many other similar sites across the country. Yet, at the same time they are carrying out their revenge plot, the girls seem to be working through an awkward yet undiscovered lesbian sexual awakening: “Florencia let Rocío press her hand against that warmth and she had a strange feeling, like she had to pee, a tingling just below her belly button” (Enríquez, 2017: 46). The story deftly intertwines a coming-of-age and sexual identification narrative with an esoteric historical narrative of imprisonment, torture and nameless death. In doing so Enríquez is linking past and present acts of violence in which socially perceived deviant and abnormal behaviour is punishable by death and/or torture.

Conclusion

29It becomes evident that the dark abandoned space of the Inn takes on its own role as a character in the story and reflects the tortured process of memorialization of a period of Argentine history. A time haunted by horrific acts committed onto bodies of people during an era of military and police surveillance, not only by those in political power but also the fear of policing done by neighbours and friends. The Inn becomes a site of convergence of a spectral past, a dark history written onto the walls of the building not only as an ex-police academy/clandestine detention centre but also as a mark of a historical reality that cannot be removed or denied no matter how much one hopes to discount it as a mere ghost story made up to destroy the Inn as a business. It is a reminder that no matter how much one desires to erase or deny the past, the “stench” of the rotting “meat” will denounce the atrocities committed and re-member the disembodied desaparecidos into both personal and national discourses. Yet, it goes beyond the psychological haunting of those who witness the ghosts in the shadows of history of the Inn – it is a spectral existence that forever marks not only the site but also the psyche of the Argentine nation. In the end, Enríquez admits that “I don’t think you can take the power back, not completely, but you can break the silence. I don’t know if that’s empowering.” (in Rice, 2018).

30In effect, “The Inn” is a fictional exploration of both the horror and the traumatic legacy of Argentina’s last dictatorship in which the reader can see a bifurcation of the testimonio from the traditional denouncing of the physical acts of injustice to a geographical testimonio that documents the clandestine locations where the atrocities were committed. Enríquez builds onto this testimonio her style of horror fiction that includes an historical knowledge and acknowledgment of the identification of previous clandestine concentration, torture and internment sites of Argentina’s political prisoners and desaparecidos.

31Ultimately, there are characters in Enríquez’s short stories whose bodies and minds acquire something that is so far distanced from the human that it becomes more bestial (Angulo and Stemberger, 2017: 317) – a reflection in itself of the dehumanization of the desaparecidos that still haunts Argentina’s past and present. It is a fictional horror that recognizes the real horror of the psychological and physical trauma of a troubling period of Argentine history. Enríquez’s fiction does what testimonial literature has done in the past: it unites the political and the social with the literary as a method of not forgetting the atrocities of the past so that they may not be repeated in the present nor in the future. Sadly, under the leadership of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) there has been a noticeable decline in projects related to human rights and social justice – causing many to fear not only an erasure of Argentina’s past infractions but also pointing out the fragility and erasability of historical memory once again.