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Who knows why night? Perhaps because it's the time of monstrosity , of the possibility of a queer and dissident life. Perhaps because of its secrets, its infinite elasticity, its sharp shadows. “I didn't kill Diego. I was an accomplice. I don't feel guilty. I don't regret it.” Thus begins “The Sickness of the Night” (Random House, 2023), the latest novel by Mariana Komiseroff, a thriller that unfolds in one of the nerve centers of Buenos Aires: the National Congress . But, contrary to the rest of the world, this story takes place when the sun sets, the doors of the building close, and inside, security forces and ghosts coexist.

“I like to blur the lines between fiction and reality, so that it’s unclear whether it’s me or the character, whether I’m capable of being an accomplice to murder or not. These are things I ask myself.” Narrator and author, at times, become indistinguishable. The former, the narrator, is sent to work nights as if it were a punishment. Her task, like that of many women, is caregiving: she cares for the Congress, she cares for her brother, who suffers from diabetes, and she cares for Jorge, her trans partner. The latter, the author, also worked as a security guard at the National Congress, eventually becoming a permanent employee, experiencing nights surrounded by ghosts and suffering firsthand from insomnia, her chronic illness.

"Psychologists are now what priests once were."

If security is a job tied to cismasculinity, the narrator, who constantly questions what she lacks to be the “orthodox lesbian” she never quite becomes, and Jorge, a lesbian character who transitions throughout the novel, come to dismantle these binaries. “ I don’t want to write manifestos, I’m not interested in that kind of literature, but I am interested in thinking about how politics influences everyday life within homes and orchestrates our lives. I’m interested in characters who are contradictory, who have different layers, in seeing what they do, what happens to them, and what decisions they make in their daily lives.” Perhaps the night is nothing, and conjectures about it are nothing, and the beings who experience it are nothing, Pizarnik writes. And perhaps, for that very reason, the night is the perfect setting for everything to happen.

Mariana Komiseroff (1984) was born in Don Torcuato, Buenos Aires Province, and almost all of her literature unfolds between the subjective and the social, between the Greater Buenos Aires area and the city of Buenos Aires. She has published the books “Mósforos mojados” (Suburbano Ediciones, 2013), “De este lado del charco” (Conejos, 2015), “Una nena muy blanca” (Emecé, 2019), and “Györ. Cronograma de una ausencia” (Patronus, 2021). She grew up in a shantytown, received a Catholic education that she soon forgot, and had a child at fifteen. In a note published in Clarín's "Intimate Worlds" section in 2015 , Komiseroff wrote: “Victoria, one of my psychologists, said it wasn't a coincidence that I got pregnant after my 11-year-old brother's diabetes diagnosis, which was getting all the attention. Psychologists are now what priests used to be: they free you from tremendous responsibilities or implant guilt where before there was only coincidence.”

Becoming an abortionist and updating feminist debates

Insomnia is different when it's shared. Much of "The Night's Sickness" takes place inside the National Congress while, outside, half a million people marched for legal abortion in Argentina. The scenes refer to 2018, when the bill passed the Chamber of Deputies but met its final resistance in the Senate . Abortion is a recurring theme throughout Komiseroff's life, and she was convinced that this should be the context for this story, which centers on the Congress. "I have a relationship with abortion, first as someone who used clandestine abortions, then as a supporter, and finally as an activist. That's my journey with abortion rights."

But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 2018. Despite her conviction, she had to argue with a literary agent to convince her that it should be that law, and not another, that served as the novel's context. “I spoke with Cristian Godoy and Tomás Downey, who review everything I publish and vice versa. Tomás agreed with the agent, but Cristian pointed out that I've been writing about abortion since my first publication and that it would be unfair if, now that there's a wave of writers talking about it, I couldn't.” 

Komiseroff won that debate, though she feels many others were lost along the way. “Lately, I’ve been thinking that feminists have made many mistakes. One of them is the idea of ​​a political subject with masculine characteristics associated with power, with masculinizing discourses. In other words, there’s a certain notion that we empower ourselves through masculinity. I recognize myself as part of a movement that used to say ‘rapist penises into the blender,’ but today I think that discourse excluded many people who didn’t want to go out and kill the macho, and that it was all just talk. We didn’t kill any machos. And the gun that was pulled, ultimately, pulled on Cristina’s head, not Milei’s.”

“The cakes are divided into two: the queens and the bag carriers”

Between the pages of the novel, a theory emerges: according to Jorge, the world is divided into two types of lesbians: queens and bag-carriers. “The queen can’t know what she needs because the bag-carrier satisfies her needs before the queen can even think about them. (…) And we bag-carriers confuse our needs with the queen’s,” says Jorge. The narrator asks for the right to reply to complain: “Ah, everything’s so binary,” she answers.

In the prologue to *De este lado del charco* (On This Side of the Pond), Ana Fornaro writes about Komiseroff's literature: “Orality pervades and sets the rhythm of the narrative. It's no coincidence that the author also works in theater: she has a keen ear.” This ear is what translates certain common-sense discourses of our time into literature, giving rise to the irruption of humor. “I'm cynical, and that comes through in my writing,” the author affirms. And she goes further: “I want to hear how my characters speak, what their catchphrases are. I have insomnia, so at night I think about the character all the time . What they were first fed, their astrological chart, and how they inhabit and speak in this world.”

Jorge is a character that everyone could like, and yet, at the same time, “he’s kind of a jerk,” says Komiseroff. A contradictory character, defying categorization, who recounts a particular situation based on his own experience and his way of inhabiting the world.

“It’s also very violent when certain lesbians are treated as men, for example, when they enter a women’s restroom. Or I had a trans colleague whose body was subjected to a lot of invasion, something that happened long before he transitioned. He was very young, so I had a maternal instinct and it drove me crazy every time it happened, but after he transitioned, men distanced themselves, showing a kind of respect. I don’t know if the same thing would have happened if a colleague had transitioned to a trans woman. In this sense, I say that we didn’t know how to defend femininities the way trans women do. But feminists didn’t.” 

"We have to guarantee that they let us live."

When Komiseroff began circulating her novel among writer friends, the first thing they told her was that the character of Jorge represented queer violence. “But I’m head over heels in love with Jorge. He’s a Frankenstein of my trans girlfriends and boyfriends,” she asserts. The debate about violence among lesbians, for example, is one that, for the author, we still need to have.

“ I’ve been through some really awful things and I’ve lost feminist friends because when the violence is between a cis man and a woman, it’s obvious who needs to be isolated, but when it’s violence within the community, the response seems to be different. Even I often didn’t know how to react to situations of violence that my friends suffered in their dissident relationships. Feminist friends. Now that it seems the right wing is going to govern, we’re much further from having that debate. First, we have to guarantee that they let us live.”

“The Night’s Illness” is a novel that delves into the inner workings of the state to expose the shortcomings of its bureaucratic apparatus. It does so through a critique of public health. The characters are driven by a desire for permanent government jobs, a yearning for job security for life. In addition to Jorge and the cisgender male colleagues with whom she spends her nights, the narrator must also care for her brother, who suffers from diabetes.

" The bureaucratic system generates exhaustion ."

“Certain chronic illnesses have their own specific laws. The state or private health insurance company has to guarantee 100% of the medication for diabetic individuals, such as test strips, monitoring devices, and lancets. That's been the law in Argentina for many years. Now there's a mental health law, but medication isn't covered. However, access remains difficult, even with a diagnosis of irreversible illness. On top of that, you constantly have to go and prove you're sick, have to bring the paperwork again, or have the prescription written incorrectly. The bureaucratic system is exhausting. It's part of the invisible care work that women do, and it's very tiring,” she explains.

Komiseroff is quick to point out that she disagrees with shrinking the state and welcomes these laws, but that they don't guarantee access to healthcare. For her, it's a separate job: in addition to working to survive, you have to work to care for a sick person or to get their medication.

“I also wanted to show a certain feminization of the disease, because sick men are feminized or childlike, and I wanted the brother's character to be like that. In fact, in one of the first chapters, there's a guy who kidnaps him on a bike, and the character's defining feature is that he had long hair, meaning that one interpretation could be that the guy mistakes him for a girl, and then, when they get him back, the father cuts it. The haircut as a punishment.”

Between reality and fiction: books as a refuge 

The first chapter of “The Night’s Sickness” lists some of the losses the narrator suffers when she moves from Buenos Aires to La Pampa: her parents’ house, the armchair scratched by cats, the libraries, the garbage dump on the corner. She also loses Jorge, her anxiety, and her insomnia. Now, Mariana Komiseroff wakes up every day in Toay, the town where the poet Olga Orozco was born. Last October, she and her wife, Pilmaiquén, opened a bookstore-bar called Tinta y Tiempo (Ink and Time) , where, in addition to selling books, they organize reading clubs and give writing workshops. Despite the similarities, her character is ahead of her because, unlike Orozco, Komiseroff has not yet been able to shake off her insomnia.

“The losses I list in the novel are controversial. I didn’t lose a wonderful house, but a house that was falling apart, the dogs living outside in a very poor neighborhood, and I gained a lot of peace of mind, confidence in my life, the knowledge that I had a professional career with literature and that I don’t need to be tied to a formal job,” she confesses.

The rhythms of La Pampa and her new job are a big help with her insomnia. “It’s my biological rhythm; if I go to bed late, it’s logical that I’ll wake up late, and in Buenos Aires I used to beat myself up about it.” Her relationships have also changed: “I thought I was friends with everyone. I’d go out and have a glass of wine with people I saw very often, but when I got sick, it turned out I wasn’t friends with everyone. Here I have fewer friends, but they’re stronger connections.” 

"Laws are made based on what happens in Buenos Aires."

Komiseroff's fiction warns us about certain domestic, period-specific experiences. “I witnessed terrible situations in Congress, and that completely ruined my mental health. There weren't any murders, but there were cases of pedophilia, although not while I was working there, and to this day, there's still a lot of gender violence.” During the years of the pandemic, Komiseroff traveled back and forth to La Pampa, where his partner lives, and when he returned to Buenos Aires, he felt unwell. “It was in March 2021 that I stabilized; I wanted to rebuild my life in Buenos Aires. I was there for a month, I joined a gym, I went back to work, and it was all a tremendous effort. March 1st was the opening session of Congress; I had to be there at 8 a.m., and I couldn't. I just couldn't do it anymore.”

In Toay, she also understood the true meaning of federalization. “Here, the debate about Greater Buenos Aires and the City of Buenos Aires is being revived. For the people here, I'm from Buenos Aires, and being born in Don Torcuato doesn't give me any distinction. Federalization, which I used to talk about to be politically correct, takes on a different meaning now that I'm far from the capital.” Stepping back provides perspective, and the obvious becomes clear: laws are made based on what happens in the City of Buenos Aires, media coverage highlights activism from the capital, and the problems are the problems of the capital. “As if our struggles could only be told from Buenos Aires.” 

“The Sickness of the Night” is the result of five years of writing. Five years of living with inner conflicts until he could finally express them in literature and leave them there. “It’s pure selfishness,” he asserts. “I do it for myself and only for myself. I don’t believe literature is going to save anyone. At most, it will provide someone else with a bit of leisure time.”