Claudia Piñeiro

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.

Elena Knows

𝒏𝒐𝒏 ❦

People confuse thinking with knowing, they let themselves confuse the two. 

As if her religion were based more in the rituals, in the folklore and traditions, than in the dogma or faith. 

Line

Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves. That’s what they say, that’s how it is. She loved and still loves her daughter even though she never said it, even though they fought and kept their distance, even though their words were like cracks of a whip, and even if she didn’t hug or kiss her daughter, she felt a mother’s love. Is she still a mother now that she doesn’t have a child? If it had been her who’d died, Rita would have been an orphan. What name does she have now that she’s childless? Has Rita’s death erased everything she was? Her illness didn’t erase it. Being a mother, Elena knows, isn’t changed by any illness even if it keeps you from being able to put on a jacket, or freezes your feet so that you can’t move, or forces you to live with your head down, but could Rita’s death have taken not only her daughter’s body but also the word that names what she, Elena, is?

The aborted babies cry inside their heads. I’m the one who cries inside my head. Don’t kill an innocent being. I’m an innocent being too.

That afternoon, Rita, who was not a mother and never would be, forced another woman to become one, applying the dogma she’d learned to another woman’s body.

People like your daughter, who didn’t even know me, your daughter who didn’t have the nerve to become a mother herself but who treated my body as if it were hers to use, just like you, today, you didn’t come here to settle a debt but to commit the same crime all over again twenty years later. You came here to use my body.

Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don’t keep the names other people give you, Elena.

Elena Knows quotes

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