There are novels that seem written before they occur, as if the clock were running in the opposite direction, and, when they occur, they pass through us even more vividly by the hand of the events they have unintentionally immortalized. The crime of Fatima Cecilia Aldriguett Antón, the seven-year-old girl whose murder has shocked Mexico, catches me reading Empty Houses, an incredibly beautiful book articulated around two mothers: the one who suffers the disappearance of her son and the one who has kidnapped him . Brenda Navarro (Mexico City, 1982) has faced two parallel voices that ignore each other and that only readers see as inverse and deformed mirrors of a polyhedral reality.
"Are you killed there too?" Asks the Spanish mother-in-law to the Mexican protagonist when the child is still a project.
The answer is yes. They kill ten women a day and feminicides have not only grown unstoppable in a decade but have shot up in the last year, according to various accounts. The president, however, blamed neoliberalism and corruption as if such a thing and did it in a kind of sermon of aspirational dye, as if it was not he who had the reins of the country.
López Obrador also opened the blame wound, that shroud heavier than death, that rotten seasoning that forever aggravates the lives of those who have suffered a disappearance. The president appealed to strengthen family values as the "main security institution in our country." "Affection and attention to all family members is essential," he said. "Not only of bread the man lives".
But Fatima did not die because of her family, nor of neoliberalism, but of her murderers and, in any case, of her impunity.
"There was talk of blood, of murders, of figures, but nobody talked about us," Navarro wrote in empty houses (Sixth Floor). “Our children disappeared twice: once physically; another, with the indolence of others ”.
Indolence. Guilt. Bureaucracy of disappearance. Maternity interruptus. Aborted Maternity It is what Navarro has painted.
And the awareness that losing the child is not ending maternity, but starting to crawl in an unwanted, imposed, guilty, truncated, irresponsible form of motherhood that will stigmatize you forever before you and others. "She will be remembered as a victim, I as a victimizer." Because "everyone knows that a mother is responsible for the being that fed in her gut."
As always, only literature saves us.
