January
by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy.
Archipelago, 114 pp., $18.00 (paper)
In the first months of my pregnancy, I was so exhausted that walking downhill felt like walking up. The only food that appealed to me was pineapple. I tracked my physical state in the notebook where ordinarily I track the progress of my work. On bad days, I’d just write, “Tired tired,” too worn out to come up with another word. I got pregnant on purpose, at the time I thought was right, having wanted a baby since I was too young to bear one, and in those tired-tired months I could not stop thinking about the legions of pregnant people who were as ground down and physically miserable as me—or much more so—but not by choice.
The Argentine writer Sara Gallardo’s short and hair-raisingly good 1958 novel January, translated into English for the first time by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy, focuses on one such person. Nefer is the sixteen-year-old daughter of estancia laborers in rural Argentina; her family is so poor they have just one tea towel “used to wipe all the hands and mouths” around the dinner table. At her older sister’s wedding party, Nefer is raped by a drunk railroad worker—an “enormous man” whose body is suffocatingly hot on hers. She gets pregnant. For her very Catholic family and community, this is catastrophic. Nefer tries to keep her situation secret, which is a challenge on two fronts: she’s visibly sick, her exhaustion “like mud in my veins,” and she has no access to the abortion she wants.
Gallardo was twenty-seven when was published. Born in 1931, she grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of men
