MARINA YUSZCZUK Thirst. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Argentinian writer Marina Yuszczuk puts her twist on the vampire novel in Thirst, set amid Buenos Aires’ oldest cemetery.

There’s something defiant about how she doesn’t look away when I fix my eyes on her. Her dark hair is a long, tangled mess; she looks like a bag lady, but that’s not what unsettles me. There’s something about her that doesn’t belong here … how can I explain it … in this reality. My heart slams against my rib cage when I realize why she looks so familiar. Fear carves a hole in my chest.

Alma, in Marina Yuszczuk’s prologue, has been wandering with her five-year-old son Santiago in Buenos Aires’ oldest cemetery, La Recoleta, when the cemetery closing time is announced. Many of those in the ‘sea of people surging in the alleys’ around the exit gate are tourists who have been photographing opulent tombs and finding plaques bearing famous names. Alma is already feeling nervous as they crowd at the gate when she sees this strange woman staring fiercely at her. The reason for her sudden panic is not revealed until the second part of Thirst, when Alma takes over the narrative. Part one is spoken by the vampire.

I am not usually a reader of vampire fiction but when this book was sent to me I was intrigued: ‘feminist Gothic’, the ‘fragility of vampires’, ‘nihilism’, ‘the history of Buenos Aires’. I was aware that horror, death, blood and sex are hallmarks of this genre, and they are all there in abundance in Thirst … but a feminist vampire?

The female vampire in Thirst does hate the Dracula-like ‘Master’ who, two centuries ago, took her from her desperate, starving mother for ‘a few coins’:

There were many others like me, little girls and boys held captive … We were at our Master’s disposal. He discarded some of us after draining their last drop of blood; he made others last … When our bodies became the bodies of women, one by one the Master turned us.

She hates the men who, centuries later, killed the Master, then hunted her and her sisters through the forest, led by a priest: ‘his eyes burned with the desire to destroy us’. They staked and decapitated her sisters, but took her to a doctor’s house, ‘because the poor fools wanted to study one of my kind’.

After her escape, however, she moves to the city, learns to play the piano and to ‘travel as a woman of society’. She takes lovers – male and female; roams Europe, changing her name ‘at each new destination’; and finds ‘companions willing to pay my way in exchange for my exotic presence as a mysterious polyglot foreigner’. She kills everywhere she goes, ‘because after feeding, I could hardly leave my prey alive with my marks on their necks’. When eventually she kills a powerful woman lover, the police get involved and they begin to hunt her. So, she charms her way onto a ship bound for Buenos Aires, determined to ‘learn to move without leaving a trace in this new land, to go entirely unnoticed … and have a chance – if only a chance – at survival’.

She is in Buenos Aires during the yellow fever epidemic of 1871, and allows a doctor, Francisco, who is exhausted by the horrors and the deaths he is dealing with, to rest in the house she has occupied. He is fascinated and aroused by her and begins to undress her, so

I unbuttoned his shirt, too, and ran my lips along his neck. I could feel the rhythm of his panting against my mouth. His head thrown back, he surrendered as I slid my tongue again and again over his Adam’s apple, the line where beard meets skin.

The sex is so intense that she passes out, and she wants his blood, ‘but not just yet’.

He returns several times to the house, and he tells her about himself, his family, and his younger brother who is a priest: ‘Francisco did his best to heal their bodies and Joaquin tended to their souls, which he deemed to be of greater value’.

So, she visits this young priest’s church:

I sat in one of the pews closest to the door and observed Joaquin … [He] at once attracted me and repulsed me. I was captivated by his fervour and hated everything he represented – the Church that, in its narrow vision of the world, assumed the right to declare that I and all those like me were creatures of the devil, departures from God’s plan, when in fact our existence was proof that the plan of which they spoke was an invention of man – and a fairly uninspired one, at that. On the other hand, it was a religion founded on a murder. How could I not find that appealing?

One night, on her rounds of the city, she follows him into his church, stirs him with a story of her dreams of being ravished by an inhuman beast, then, when she knows he is sexually aroused, she rapes him, performs a blasphemous, bloody ritual on his body, and leaves him ‘naked with his arms spread in the form of the cross’. Francisco, now ill with the fever, learns of his brother’s death and realises what she is and what she has done, so he forcibly restrains her while a photographer takes her picture, then reports her to the police before he dies. Again she is forced to flee, and the place she finds safest is the old cemetery.

She knows the history of this old cemetery from the time in 1580 when Juan de Garay named the country Buenos Aires and ‘planted a wooden cross on the earth where the main church would be erected’, to its establishment as the Cemetario del Norte on the deconsecrated site of the Convento de los Recoletos. The city grows to surround it.

It opens to receive the dead and also the living, whom it later expels to close over the dead once more, removing them from sight … Before confining myself forever to my crypt, I spent many nights admiring the multiplication of sculptures, bodies, stone flowers, birds, and inscriptions above our heads, the proliferation of symbols that translate death, the putrefaction of the flesh, into another language – elevated and aimed at eternity, at heaven.

Her passion is blood and the ecstasy of feeding on her victims, but there is no indication that she is a feminist. Over the centuries of her life she does have one long-term female companion, but she eventually bleeds her to death. Then there is Leonora, the beautiful young girl she rescues from a coffin in which she has been buried alive, feeds on, then, in order to keep her, turns her into a vampire like herself, but Leonora hates her.

During her life in the cemetery, she also makes a friend of Mario, a young Italian immigrant who works there. He knows what she is and keeps her secret, so she eventually entrusts him with a task he swears never to disclose:

Despair got the better of me, so much had been destroyed during those terrible years, and I wanted to make sure it never happened again… I would retire to my tomb. In the depth of my pain, I remembered the small key that hung from a chain inside my coffin and asked Mario to lock me inside.

It is this key that, in the present day, is passed to Alma by her mother.

Alma’s mother is dying of a degenerative condition which leaves her progressively more helpless. Unable to speak, she writes words, with help, in a notebook:

I opened the notebook to a blank page and pressed a pencil into my mother’s hand, then held her hand to the paper. After a struggle, she wrote a word and looked up at me. I turned the notebook around to see it better; it read key. I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘A key? The key to this house?’

She said no, more with her eyes than by shaking her head which she could barely move. I put the notebook back under her hand and she wrote two more words: box and papers. That I understood.

From a box of documents hidden on the top shelf of her mother’s bedroom closet, Alma retrieves an envelope. Her mother confirms that this is what she wanted, then writes the word NO in capital letters next to the word key. Alma is called away before she can learn more, and takes the envelope with her. When she opens it later, in the privacy of her old apartment, she finds another envelope inside that contains a document dated 1903. It is written in barely decipherable ‘ornate calligraphy’, but Alma puzzles out ‘Certificate of Ownership’ and the words ‘mausoleum’ and ‘Cemetario del Norte’. One of the signatures on the document is decipherable as Senor Mario. There is also a key.

Alma’s life is difficult. As well as grief and concern as her mother gets progressively worse, she is in constant pain from a recent spinal operation. She is also newly – amicably – divorced from Santiago’s father and worries about Santiago, who lives with her most of the time. Her story begins on November 6th, as she visits the La Recoleta cemetery with her photographer friend Julia, looking for a suitable image for a ‘trashy book of urban legends’ that her ‘bosses’ think will sell. It ends on May 8th the following year, when she goes back there with Santiago for the last time. She has sat in the cemetery often, because she finds peace and interest there, but there are also moments of sheer terror and, later, of horror.

To explain more would be a spoiler, but the link between the vampire and Alma provides all the elements required of this genre, and I found Thirst to be a rich and curious story full of macabre fascination.

Marina Yuszczuk Thirst translated by Heather Cleary Scribe 2024 PB 256pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Argentinian writers, Buenos Aires, La Recoleta, Marina | Yuszczuk, vampires