Cathedrals is the latest work by Argentinian crime writer Claudia Piñeiro to be published in English by Charco Press, in a translation by Frances Riddle. The crime is the murder and dismemberment of 17-year-old Ana Sardá 30 years ago. Yet, as ever in Piñeiro’s work, nothing is quite what it seems.
Each section is written from the perspective of a key character, and the truth emerges gradually as the stories intertwine. The first section is narrated by Lía, Ana’s middle sister. Cathedrals opens with Lía’s loss of faith, confirmed 30 years earlier at Ana’s funeral. This sets up a core premise of the book: how can a barbaric act that takes a human life ever be rationalised as “God’s will”?
Lía left Argentina, unable to remain with a family who, apart from her father Alfredo, were all content to move on when the local police closed the unsolved murder investigation. Now running a bookstore in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Lía corresponds with Alfredo via a postal locker, refusing to hear any news of the rest of her family.
This silence is shattered when the eldest sister, Carmen, and her husband Julián turn up in Lía’s bookshop. Their son Mateo has disappeared, and they believe Lía can help them find him. In the course of the conversation, Lía learns that Alfredo is dead.
Narration of the next section falls to Mateo, who has grown up with the family scar of the murder and dismemberment of an aunt he never knew. Despite Carmen and Julián’s dogmatic efforts to impose a “normal” family life on him, Mateo is defined by the inherited trauma of Ana’s death. Urged on by his grandfather Alfredo, Mateo embarks on a pilgrimage that will be Alfredo’s last gift to his family.
The distinctive voices of each narrator represent one of the great successes of Riddle’s translation. She deftly navigates a significant shift in style in the third section: this is narrated by Marcela, Ana’s best friend, a retrograde amnesiac. Condemned to create no new memories after a statue fell on her head the day of Ana’s death, Marcela’s section is cyclical, returning again and again to her final memory: Ana dying in her arms. Yet everyone tells Marcela that this moment, in which her memory is forever suspended, cannot truly have happened.
Next we hear from Elmer, the now-retired police officer assigned to Ana’s murder case, whose investigations were shut down by a line manager keen to move on from a community scandal. Narration of the final chapters then returns to Ana’s family: first her weak brother-in-law Julián, and then Carmen, a sister blinded by unquestioning religious faith. In a moving twist, the last words fall to Alfredo.
Cathedrals is crime fiction with social comment. The characters’ experiences are connected to the sociopolitical context in Argentina: the dictatorship is still fresh, and society has not broken free of its restrictions. Poverty is rising, and religious doctrine is a powerful means of keeping women in set roles, because in the Bible “[n]o one cares about heroines, they care about mothers and wives.” Those who think for themselves or break with expectations are ostracised.
Piñeiro takes on the institution of the Catholic church, describing its teachings as “stories that do not stand up to the credibility we demand from any minor work of fiction”, and exposing the hypocrisy of those who preach God’s word as a way of hiding from their own sins. As the truth is revealed little by little, the most aberrant crime is reasoned away as part of “God’s plan”. How easy it is to hide a crime in a society that normalises gender violence, and how cruel it is to twist faith into some kind of moral immunity.
With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Piñeiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them. Yet she also tells a personal tale of loss, scars and kinship that shows humanity in the darkest of human experiences, and the dignity we can afford others by acknowledging our own failings.
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