PRIMAL MOODS: Headlights

Back in late 2018, I was lucky enough to hear Samanta Schweblin speak at a talk on Latin American literature at the South Bank Centre. Both insightful and deeply perceptive, I left with the certainty that her work would be well worth checking out. It wasn’t long before I was completely captivated by her terrifying, anxiety-inducing debut novel, Fever Dream.

Almost two years later, I wanted to review some of her equally terrifying and anxiety-inducing short stories in her latest work, Mouthful of Birds. Upon release, the text was described as “the stuff of nightmares”.

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Headlights

“In the flat darkness of the countryside, there is only disappointment, a wedding dress, and a bathroom she shouldn’t have taken so long in.”

Schweblin’s first story, Headlines, explores feelings of longing, loss, and rage through a lens of retrograde gender norms. From the outset, the reader is introduced to a young woman named Felicity who has just been abandoned on the side of the road by her husband because she took too long in the bathroom.

“Deep in the shock of abandonment” Felicity patiently waits by the side of the road in the hope that her husband will return for her. She “stares out at the highway down which he disappeared”. She does this until she is approached by an older woman named Nene who asks whether this is Felicity’s first time, it appears that she is well-versed in the distress caused by men who simply don’t care for their partner.

Nene is described as having the “old and bitter face of a woman who was surely once more beautiful than Felicity herself.” It is noted that “amid the marks of premature old age, clear eyes and perfectly proportioned lips still remain”. The sharp, succinct manner in which Nene is portrayed may appear ordinary and commonplace, but her countenance and overall behaviour actually go on to have an impact on the symbolic purpose of the narrative.

While Felicity sits on a rock in a state of solemn disbelief, Nene effectively takes the younger woman under her wing, telling her to “screw all that crying”. Although curt, cold, and callous, Nene’s character maintains a tough-love attitude and a strong maternalistic level of support.

As the plot unfolds, we discover that the field next to the highway is dotted with unseen, but certainly not unheard, crying women, all of whom have been abandoned by their male partners. All the woman, excluding Nene, are unified in the way they choose to express their despair and the way in which they reject Nene for manifesting her despair as criticism of men in general, making her something of a pariah. This is seen in the tirade of insults that Nene receives throughout the story: “Pyscho!”, “Miserable, unfeeling bitch!”, “hysterical shrew!”, “Crazy woman!”, “Sorry old tramp!”, “Ugly old bitch!”. Of course, Nene is none of these things, yet she is condemned for going against the grain and targeting the men that abandoned her. I’d argue, here, that Schweblin is critiquing the way in which, in our society, women often receive pariah, outsider status for addressing injustice.

As Felicity and Nene speak to one another, to the former’s shock, another woman is left by the side of the road. This woman is referred to only as, Grandmother. Amid the din of insults from the women around them, the three see another car on the highway and make a decision to approach it.

This time, however, it is a man who steps out of the car and goes to use the restroom. While he’s inside, Felicity, Nene and Grandmother rush over to the car and jump in. Inside, they find another woman, the newcomer. “They can hear the women’s cries even once they’re in the car, and in front of them, detached from the darkness by the headlights, stands the frozen, terrified fire of a man who is not thinking about the same thing he was a minute ago.”

As the four of them drive into the distance, the newcomer confides in them that, “I never loved him… When he got out of the car, I thought about taking the wheel and leaving him by the side of the road. But I don’t know, the maternal instinct…” The blanket suggestion here being that women are supposedly more committed, honest and faithful than their male partners.

Finally, the women are surprised to see a car coming towards them, heading back in the direction of the abandoned man. Felicity assumes that the men are coming back for them, all the women left behind. Nene challenges this and says, “it’s them, yes. But they’re coming back for him.”

Ultimately, Headlights leaves us with the lasting suggestion that, while women can upend negative cultural paradigms, hegemonic gender inequality is something that is much harder to defeat. Even when injustice appears to overcome and overturned, the return of prejudice can often look like the distant manifestation of headlights growing brighter and brighter.

Schweblin’s Headlights is battle cry. It’s subversive and powerful, but also contemplative on how high many of society’s hurdles have become. It feels as if Schweblin is robustly aware of how pervasive injustice is and perhaps how many battles must follow this initial skirmish.

The story acts as a relatively simple, yet beautifully stylised, metaphor of a much more complex assertion. Earlier on in the text, Nene looks out at the road and says, “This highway is shit… Just shit, the very worst kind.” In the story, the highway is everything. It’s injustice. It’s freedom. It’s disappointment. The highway is life and Schweblin is sick of it.