We have seen how the four stories selected for this study combine the main characteristics of Piñeiro’s narrative. They revolve around a hidden violent event that occurs within the framework of a cold, repressed and competitive society. In the four stories, violence against women manifests beyond a specific physical attack that ends their lives. They resent the abuse perpetrated against them over time through, for example, the pressure on them in their roles as mothers and wives. In Piñeiro’s stories, women are also victims of other violent dynamics inflicted through, for example, policy measures that limit their power and control their bodies and sexuality. This situation is aggravated when the women are also victims of structural poverty, such as in the case of the protagonist of ‘Basura para las gallinas’. Yet, Piñeiro approaches violence against women as affecting all social classes. Such is the case with the elite residential neighbourhoods, which provide an idyllic setting when in reality they are a paradigm of a society in crisis with a disproportionate interest in material comfort and consumerism.
Piñeiro therefore calls into question the patriarchal model that perpetuates the superiority of men over women. Yet, far from indoctrinating, Piñeiro addresses gender equality, gender-based violence, the right to abortion, and the separation of Church and State in Argentina as collateral to the main plots of her stories.
Those who defy the norm become dissidents in Piñeiro’s narrative, and yet she tells us that defying the imposed norm is necessary to advance in life. In this way, Piñeiro problematises the notion of State repression and the ideology that subordinates women to males. This process of change reveals that human identity is fragile and must be in continuous evolution. Only those men and women who challenge the system have a chance to survive repression and violence. In this sense, Piñeiro’s stories recall past times in which repression and political violence dominated the political scene under Videla.
Luciana in ‘Claro y contundente’ feels that only death will free her from the suffocation of the disciplinary society; the mother in ‘Basura para las gallinas’ must get rid of the aborted foetus to move on; Hernán in ‘El abuelo Martín’ feels that he must tear down the walls that hide his grandmother’s body; and the protagonist of ‘Un zapato y tres plumas’ feels that he must leave to gather the courage to confront his father as a repressive element.
At the end of the book, the reader of
Quién no wonders: how many corpses are there hidden in Argentina? How could we find out within the framework of double discourse, taboo, loneliness and silence? The stories of
Quién no precisely capture the moments when the protagonists are about to collapse and rebel against an amnesiac, violent and hypocritical microcosm in contemporary society. The following excerpt from ‘Alquiler temporario’ (‘Temporary rental’, pp. 185–215) exemplifies well Piñeiro’s aim with the volume: telling the stories of ordinary people, sometimes too ordinary, who are facing existential dilemmas, past traumas and prolonged tense situations: ‘–They are strange people, don’t you think? – I don’t know – he answers –. Who isn’t a little weird?’
1 Spanish original: ‘– Son gente rara, ¿no te parece? – Qué sé yo – le contesta él –. ¿Quién no es un poco raro?’; ‘Alquiler temporario’, p. 196.