Elena Knows

Claudia Piñeiro

4 ideas

1. Parkinsonian mother investigates daughter's belfry death

   Elena, a widow with advanced Parkinson's, cannot accept that her daughter Rita, found hanged in the belfry of the church Rita attended, killed herself, and argues that Rita feared storms and would never have gone near a church in the rain. With the police and the Church treating the case as closed, Elena spends one day crossing Buenos Aires, timed around her medication doses, to find Isabel, a woman Rita once 'rescued' from an abortion, and demand that she repay the debt by investigating. The visit undoes Elena's certainty. Isabel never wanted the child; Rita and Elena had coerced her into having it; and the evidence points toward Rita's despair, including her exhaustion from caring for her mother.

2. Coerced rescue is a theft of autonomy

   When one person overrides another's decision about her own body and calls it saving her, the rescued person experiences it as a lasting injury, not a gift. Isabel was forced out of an abortion and spent twenty years living a life she did not choose. The rescuers, meanwhile, believe she owes them gratitude. The same logic of control, whether exercised by family, Church or state, runs from Isabel's pregnancy to Elena's disease-captured body.

3. Chronic illness as a sovereign ruling time

   Elena treats her Parkinson's as a separate power that commands her body. She can only act in the window after a pill takes effect, and with her head bent forward she can see only her own feet. Seen this way, a disabled person's day is a negotiation with an occupying authority rather than a set of free choices. Distance, dignity and even thought are rationed by doses.

4. Certainty as grief's defense against guilt

   Elena's insistence that she 'knows' Rita was murdered protects her from a more painful possibility. Rita may have chosen death partly because caring for her dependent mother had become unbearable. The less evidence she has, the stronger her conviction grows, because a murderer would carry the blame that suicide would lay on the family. Her investigation is aimed as much at avoiding knowledge as at finding it.

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