Elena doesn’t know anything anymore, she will come to think; for now, she is all certitude. Elena knows her daughter Rita has been found hanged in the church belfry, and she knows it can’t have been suicide, in spite of what everyone else thinks, because her daughter never went near a church when it was raining, for fear of being struck by lightning. On that day, Elena knows, it was raining. She also knows she has advanced Parkinson’s — the “fucking whore illness,” as she calls it — and that she’ll need to recruit “another body to help her” discover what really happened to her daughter. So she travels through Buenos Aires to cash in a twenty-year-old debt incurred by a third character, the mysterious Isabel.

The closer Elena inches to her destination, the more evident it becomes that her excruciatingly paced, single-day odyssey represents her shedding of previously unshakeable beliefs. Why did Rita insist on booking an appointment at the beauty salon for her mother on the day of her death, perfectly aware that it would keep her busy? Does Isabel owe Elena, or does Elena owe Isabel, for the incident that occurred two decades ago? As Isabel will tell Elena during their cathartic encounter, “People confuse thinking with knowing, they let themselves confuse the two.” The novel turns out to be as much about Elena knowing as about her not knowing.

Piñeiro deftly shifts the reader’s attention away from finding out what happened to Rita, allowing the tension to emanate instead from the relationship between Elena’s ebullient inner world, full of thought and purpose, and the hostilities outside: her body, dwindling in energy and capability, and a society downright violent toward the experience of being elderly, disabled, and a woman. Just as her muscular problems force her to walk with head bowed, constant mistreatment has plunged Elena into bitterness. A moment of kindness surprises her so much she is moved to tears: “What’s wrong Elena, why are you crying? They treated me kindly, son, she said, and couldn’t say anything more.”

Elena’s oppressors, both patriarchal and clinical, rarely grant her a respite. This withholding comes across beautifully through Piñeiro’s language, smartly translated by Frances Riddle to maintain its original Spanish cadence. Piñeiro’s prose is perfectly attuned to Elena’s rhythms. Her movements, terse and deliberate, are meticulously chronicled:

She places her palms on her seated thighs, she puts her two feet together so that her knees are at ninety-degree angles, then she crosses her right hand to her left shoulder and her left hand on her right shoulder, she begins to rock back and forth on the chair and then, with the momentum, she stands up.

At the same time, her thoughts are winding and obsessive:

It’s too soon for the effect of the medicine to have worn off and even though she knows that her time isn’t measured with clocks she looks at her watch; it’s more than an hour until her next pill, so it’s better for Isabel to take her time, she thinks, since her time that isn’t measured with clocks has begun to run out like sand slipping between her fingers, like water, and, Elena knows, she won’t be able to get off that couch until after she takes her next pill.

In Elena Knows, there is no time to look away. Elena is on a tight schedule dictated by her medication, her movements confined to the meager intervals the levodopa gives her. Piñeiro is also on a tight schedule. Structured around Elena’s daily schedule of pills, the novel unfolds in intervals in which violences of many kinds — sexual, obstetric, financial, religious — act in a coordinated effort to subjugate Rita, Elena, and Isabel.

When Elena’s doctor announces that her Parkinson’s is rapidly advancing and explains to Rita the consequences this will have as her caretaker, there is a remarkable instance of rebellion. “You’re going to have to be your mother’s mother, Rita,” he says. “I don’t think I can become the mother you’re asking me to become,” Rita replies. Her eloquence recalls Piñeiro’s own activism. A writer of enormous ethical stature who is committed to using her fiction in service of political and social causes, Piñeiro has defended the right to abortion in Argentina long before it was thrust into the national spotlight in the run-up to its legalization in late 2020.

The suspense with which Piñeiro imbues the novel stems from its characters, who confront others’ misguided certainties and suffer the consequences of their application, especially to women’s bodies. In the character of Elena, Piñeiro has created an uncommon Virgil who reminds readers of the damaging and even deadly effects of imposing one’s convictions on others, the hypocrisy of public discourse with regard to what women can and cannot do, and the uncomfortable process of being confronted with one’s mistakes.

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