Elena Knows - Tapa blanda

Acerca de los autores

Born in Buenos Aires in 1960, Claudia Piñeiro is a best-selling author, known internationally for her crime novels. She has won numerous national and international prizes, including the Pepe Carvalho Prize, the LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall). Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen, including Elena Knows (Netflix). Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. She’s also a playwright and scriptwriter (including popular Netflix series The Kingdom ). Her novel Elena Knows was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Claudia Piñeiro, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo. Her translation of Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic was granted an English PEN Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in journals such as Granta, Electric Literature , and The White Review , among others. She holds a BA in Spanish Language Literature from Louisiana State University and an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Buenos Aires. In 2022, Frances’ translation of Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Originally from Houston, Texas she lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

De la contraportada

In a single day, a journey across Buenos Aires reveals a daughter to her mother, a mother to herself, and the oppressive weight of received ideas to women connected by a fleeting encounter, twenty years before.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

The trick is to lift up the right foot, just a few centimetres off the floor, move it forward through the air, just enough to get past the left foot, and when it gets as far as it can go, lower it. That’s all it is, Elena thinks. But she thinks this, and even though her brain orders the movement, her right foot doesn’t move. It does not lift up. It does not move forward through the air. It does not lower back down. It’s so simple. But it doesn’t do it. So Elena sits and waits. In her kitchen. She has to take the train into the city at ten o’clock; the one after that, the eleven o’clock, won’t do because she took the pill at nine, so she thinks, and she knows, that she has to take the ten o’clock train, right after the medication has managed to persuade her body to follow her brain’s orders. Soon. The eleven o’clock train won’t do because by then the medicine’s effect will have diminished and almost disappeared and she’ll be back to where she is now, but without any hope that the levodopa will take effect. Levodopa is the name for the chemical that will begin circulating in her body once the pill has dissolved; she has known that name for a while now. Levodopa. The doctor said it and she wrote it down for herself on a piece of paper because she knew she wasn’t going to understand the doctor’s handwriting. She knows that the levodopa is moving through her body. All she can do now is wait. She counts the streets. She recites the names from memory. From first to last and last to first. Lupo, Moreno, 25 de Mayo, Mitre, Roca. Roca, Mitre, 25 de Mayo. Moreno, Lupo. Levodopa. It’s only five blocks to the train station, it’s not that many, she thinks, and she continues reciting the street names, and continues waiting. Five. She can’t yet shuffle down those five blocks but she can silently repeat the street names. She hopes she doesn’t run into anyone she knows today. No one who will ask after her health or give her their delayed condolences over the death of her daughter. Every day there’s some new person who couldn’t make it to the visitation or the burial. Or who didn’t dare to. Or didn’t want to. When someone like Rita dies, everyone feels invited to the funeral. That’s why ten o’clock is the worst time, she thinks, because to get to the station she has pass by the bank and today’s the day the retirees go to withdraw their pension, so it’s very likely that she’ll run into some neighbour. Or several neighbours. The bank opens right at ten o’clock, when the train should be arriving at the station and she’ll already have her ticket in her hand about to board, but before that, Elena knows, she’s going to have to pass the retirees lined up outside as if they’re afraid the money will run out so they have to get there early. She can avoid going past the bank if she makes the block, but that’s something the Parkinson’s won’t allow. That’s its name. Elena knows she hasn’t been the one in charge of some parts of her body for a while now, her feet, for example. He’s in charge. Or she. And she wonders if Parkinson’s is masculine or feminine, because even though the name sounds masculine it’s still an illness, and an illnesses is something feminine. Just like a disgrace. Or a curse. And so she thinks she should address her as My Lady, because when she thinks about it, she thinks “what a bitch of an illness.” And a bitch is a she, not a he. Excuse the expression, m’lady. Dr. Benegas explained it to her several times but she still doesn’t understand; she understands what she has because it’s inside her body, but not some of the words that the doctor uses. Rita was there when he first explained the disease. Rita, who’s now dead. He told them that Parkinson’s was a degradation of the cells of the nervous system. And both she and her daughter disliked that word. Degradation. And Dr. Benegas must’ve noticed, because he quickly tried to explain. And he said, an illness of the central nervous system that degrades, or mutates, or changes, or modifies the nerve cells in such a way that they stop producing dopamine. And then Elena learned that when her brain orders a movement to her feet, for example, the order only reaches her feet if the dopamine takes it there. Like a messenger, she thought that day. So Parkinson’s is the lady and dopamine is the messenger. And her brain is nothing, she thinks, because her feet don’t listen to it. Like a dethroned king that doesn’t realize he’s not in charge anymore. Like the emperor with no clothes from the story she used to tell Rita when she was little. The dethroned king, the naked emperor. And now it’s the lady, not Elena but her illness, the messenger, and the dethroned king. Elena repeats the names like she repeated the streets she has to pass to get to the station; the names keep her company while she waits. From first to last and last to first. She doesn’t like the naked emperor. She prefers the dethroned king. She waits, she repeats, she breaks them into pairs: the lady and the messenger; the messenger and the king, the king and the lady. She tries again but her feet are still foreign to her, not merely disobedient, but deaf. Deaf feet. Elena would love to shout at them, Move, feet, hurry it up! Dammit , she’d even shout, Move and hurry it up, dammit , but she knows it would be useless, because her feet won’t listen to her voice either. So she doesn’t shout, she waits. She silently recites the streets, kings, streets again. She adds new words to her prayer: dopamine, levodopa. She makes the connection between the dopa of dopamine and of levodopa, they must be related, but she’s just guessing, she doesn’t know for sure, she recites the words, plays with them, she lets her tongue get twisted, she waits, and she doesn’t care, she only cares that the time passes, that the pill dissolves, that it moves through her body to her feet so that they will finally get the message that they have to start moving.