“Our Lady of the Quarry”
by Mariana Enríquez
translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
from the December 21, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I fully expected this to be the final issue of The New Yorker for 2020 since usually the last two weeks of the year are combined into one. Indeed, in 2016 Enriquez’s “Spiderweb” (the only prior publication she has in the magazine) was published in the December 19 & 26 issue (see the post here). Wow — those four years . . .
Enríquez has published four novels (that I can find), though I don’t believe any have been translated into English. As far as I can tell, at this point we have just one collection of stories, 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire. In January 2021 we will be getting a second, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.
Looking back at “Spiderwebs” I don’t believe I ever read it, though I was excited to based on her publisher’s comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar. It does appear that it was well received.
Here we have “Our Lady of the Quarry,” translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, whose work I really like. As this story begins, we learn about Silvia, the “grown-up friend” of our first-person plural narrator(s). Whoever is telling this story, they do not like Silvia, even if at first glance Silvia seems to be a good friend:
She was our “grownup” friend, the one who took care of us when we went out and let us use her place to smoke weed and meet up with boys. But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed. Because Silvia always knew more: if one of us discovered Frida Kahlo, oh, Silvia had already visited Frida’s house with her cousin in Mexico, before he vanished. If we tried a new drug, she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already got over her fandom of the same group. We hated that her long, heavy, straight hair was colored with a dye we couldn’t find in any normal beauty salon. What brand was it? She probably would have told us, but we would never ask. We hated that she always had money, enough for another beer, another ten grams, another pizza. How was it possible?
I can see a shade of Jackson here, and I like it! I hope to get to it today, and I hope to go back and read “Spiderwebs.”
Let me know what you think!
Good set-up, solid ending, consistent voice. The writer is smart and cagey, and the story is well-plotted. It’s a bit of an O. Henry tale told with a collective wild-youth voice that here in the US is used (not as well, I would argue) by Junot Diaz. It’s not gonna change your life, but it’s fast-paced and entertaining with a dose of nihilistic glee.
Agreed, a fine horror-weird story firmly placed in a believable mean teen environment with a narrator who is just a little bit snarky.
I liked the general idea, but there were several things about this story that bothered me and got in the way of my enjoyment of it.
One was the relationship of the older person to the younger group. There was no reason given for her to be hanging out with the group. It seemed to need some kind of explanation to be plausible for a working woman to be doing that, especially since she wasn’t particularly well-liked. Did I miss something?
The bus driver’s warning about wild dogs was supposed to be “strange”, but why? If there were wild dogs to watch out for, why would it be strange for him to warn the group about them? Seems like a good, normal thing to do, to me.
And finally, I was puzzled that the property owner would have the reputation of shooting at trespassers, but also put up a little entry for them at the highway, as well as have a path to the shrine. Doesn’t work for me, without further explanation. I also didn’t understand the little hint that a person owned the land which included the quarry was somehow odd. What was that about? As it happens, there’s a privately-owned property in my neighborhood with a quarry on it. It has never occurred to me that it was odd in some way.
@Mehbe, it may help to recall that these are teenagers in a different time (and also place) where rumors and fantasies and in end, a little dose of magic, abound.
It’s not unusual for 19 or 20 year olds to party with high school teenagers even in small towns in America today, and was even more common in developing countries decades ago. The divide between ‘high school’ and ‘working right out of high school’ is not quite so large if there is no collegiate rite-of-passage in between. And it’s possible that the story might hold more enjoyment if you read it with the perspective that while it’s true the older girl “wasn’t particularly well-liked”, this resentment is never made explicit to the older girl, and is kept secret and simmering below the surface. To me, the author excelled in bringing out the heady mix of naivete, malice, pride, and lust that make up the teenage experience
Regarding the drivers warning, the story’s exact quote is ‘Once, the bus driver said something strange to us: that we should watch out for wild dogs on the loose’. That the bus driver would warn passengers of dangerous animals is not strange – that there are vicious wild dogs roaming on the loose at all is the strange part, especially when coupled with the established fear of perhaps-fictional gun-toting quarry owners with attack dogs.
These property-owners tie into your last question; it’s not clear that these property owners actually exist in the way that the teenagers rumors depict. It’s much more likely (but not certain) these are exaggerated urban legends in much the same way that ‘the old man on the block is a serial killer’ rumors spread amongst neighborhood children. The dogs and violence in the end come from an entirely different, and much more menacing, source.
I hope you’ll give the story another chance, as I rather liked it and found it to be the best story the New Yorker has published in a long time.
BKQ – thanks for taking the time to respond. I actually did enjoy the story, by the way, even if the stuff I mentioned distracted me a little.
I still feel the relationship of the older person to the younger ones needed some kind of explanation or background. It just felt odd and contrived to me, as presented. This is in Buenos Aires, isn’t it? In a city that large, it seems more peculiar than if it were in some small, remote place with relatively few options for friends.
Point taken about the warning about the dogs – I misunderstood what was supposed to be strange. And I agree that the girls’ concept of the property owners may have been more urban legend than real. But in that case, the real entry to the property should have been their first clue that they might be wrong. Of course, that wouldn’t give them the same slightly scary thrill.
This sort of shift into the supernatural seems unearned here. Granted, the author leaves it a bit ambiguous as to what happened but still it seems as if Natalia has summoned up hellhounds of some sort. The tone of teen malice and pettiness had been compelling in a realist vein up to that point but the shift of gears did not work for me at least.