January: Sara Gallardo

On talking and thinking about pregnancies and abortions as a woman who doesn't date men.

I have a lot of hetero-romantic (cis-gender) female friends. That means they mostly date (cis) men for long-term relationships, but they might hook up with a girl or non-cis-person on the side. For most of them, abortion is deeply concerning, but it’s highly unlikely to be an issue that effects me personally. It’s interesting to me that despite that, most of those female friends with talk to me about abortion as a peer, with lengthy details of birth control regiments and access. Then they speak of abortion issues with their boyfriends/husbands and other male friends as if to explain why it’s a concern, although it would affect their boyfriends/husbands more than it affects me. This signals to me that most of the women I’ve spoken to see abortion as a feminist issue that impacts all women under a certain age. It’s the blunt conflation of heterosexuality/heteronormativity with being a woman, a conflation that maybe explains why I’ve had men and women tell me that they see me as less woman than a straight/hetero-romantic woman. An issue that does impact me is that the legal definition of marriage remaining between two people regardless of gender, and that I have continued access to the same legal rights in marriage that a heterosexual couple would should I want it. I’ve brought it up to hetero-romantic friends to illustrate that my concerns and lived experience of queerness, as someone who only dates women, are different from theirs. The conversation ends immediately after that because I’d sense the discomfort in the sudden tightness of their bodies or dropped whisper of their voice, or the sudden curt tone of texts, and I’d drop the subject. I’ve had this exact conversation with multiple people. The difference in expectation of how I should react to discussions about abortion and how I’m treated when I bring up same-sex marriage is one of the little ways in which homosexuality affects my life and goes beyond the choice of who I date or have sex with. One of the small ways in which I frequently feel like an interloper and an unnatural outsider person as a lesbian amongst my oh-so-progressive San-Francisco-bay-area hetero-romantic and straight friends. The issues that concern me aren’t so visceral or vivid to the vast majority, so much so that mentioning my concern about them results in the conversation shutting down.

So perhaps it’s strange that I read Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008), in which her life is deeply impacted by an abortion, and that inspired me to read Sara Gallardo’s January (1958, trans. for Archipelago Books by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy, 2023). I read them because being a poor/working class, unwed young woman who gets pregnant and has to figure out her options - if she has options - is a difficult situation to work through. It’s something that can alter the life or psyche of the woman who experiences it, as we see through Ernaux’s repeated mentions of it through more than one of her memoirs.

Sara Gallardo’s January focuses narrowly on that experience. When I receive a newly published book through Archipelago’s membership program, they’ll send a one-pager of notes and reviews of that book, and the one that came with this one called it an “abortion novel”. It isn’t…really. It’s a beautifully - beautifully, as nearly every other page had a few lines I wanted to commit to memory, kudos to Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy for their work in translating this book - written book about a sixteen-year-old girl in a rural area in the Argentinian pampas that becomes pregnant. The pampas cradle her as a mother would, yet her mother and beautiful older sister do not. Her father is loving but distant. Her options are even more limited than Annie Ernaux’s. She is not studious or smart, so doesn’t have the option of education as a means out. The power of the Catholic Church supersedes all other institutional or state powers in Nefer’s world, and its notions of sin threat to turn her and her family into pariahs. Thus, she is watched continually, nearly every interaction and place she goes is known to her family. There is a man Nefer watches - “without looking at him directly, she could see [him] the whole time…The whole day went on like that, with [him] at the center of it all” (p 10). That man hardly knows she’s alive, she all but ignores the young man who shows her kindness, and you won’t discover the father of her child until near the end of the novel. “Nefer measures the distance between her body and the table, thinking how before long she won’t be able to slip past and sit at the end of the bench.” (p 4). She seeks out a medicine woman but leaves before she can explain why she’s there. She visits her wealthy godmother, and cannot bring herself to explain what’s happened to her. She continually wishes for death, to be swallowed by the pampas or bury herself into it, as you have the sense that it’s her true mother and protector, because she’s trying to escape the dreaded fear and shame that undoubtedly will be hers once her family discover the illicit pregnancy. Nefer feels as I describe myself as feeling: an interloper, but she in her family, holding a secret that she feels unable to share with anyone because they cannot understand her fears and her lived experience. And over the weeks of dread, the dreadfully strange interloper inside of her body becomes a silent stranger that has kept her company through this period of anguish. In the end, Nefer accepts one of her very limited options, because it’s nearly the only one available to her.