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The scene of a group of mothers protesting with their children in front of the police station in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, where Mariana Komiseroff now lives, was the starting point for writing Perfect Beasts: The Lucio Case (Emecé). The text revisits a deliberate infanticide in 2021, which was in the spotlight from the start: the crime was committed by a lesbian couple.

In Perfect Beasts , Komiseroff explores all the complexities of the case in her social analysis, from unwanted motherhood to feminism and anti-feminism to society's mistreatment of children. She also raises a series of questions that generate, at the very least, discomfort.

How to look from feminisms

That scene of the demonstration of mothers and children in front of the police station was the first time Komiseroff witnessed the cruel infanticide in La Pampa. At first, she thought it was a father who had killed the son of a lesbian couple. "It was the easiest thing to think," she says. "The next day, the uprising broke out in Santa Rosa. But by then, I already had information about who had killed the child. There were many questions, which of course I can't answer, and which I'm still going to think about. There were a lot of conflicts, but the first one I faced was that of ' the truth .' Then I relied on legal discourse. Because material truth is not the same as symbolic truth and the truth that each person has about the events that happened to them."

The book includes interviews with Abigail Páez's defense attorney, her mother, and the two convicted women. This material created a map of events, meanings, and questions that are summarized in the prologue, which raises the most intense debate: looking at the case from a feminist perspective. "I was somewhat afraid that the right might say, ' You see, even lesbians say they're murderers .' And I was worried that my own community would think, ' Why bring this up again ?' Because part of society thinks that feminists are to blame for this crime and that it's okay to close the Ministry of Women ," she says.

– What happened once the book came out??

Unlike my fiction books, where there's always some comment or message, this book hasn't had that happen so far. Yes, I've had many two-line messages from mothers. One, talking about interventions on children's bodies, especially when it comes to treating their health. And on the other hand, a ton of messages from mothers telling me, for example, that they found themselves putting their child under the cold shower. Another telling me, "I found myself forcibly shoving food into my disabled child." That's real life, and of course, it's the violence that Lucio Dupuy suffered, and it's also part of everyday life, and oftentimes it's impossible to talk about, express, or share. Not even to tell other mothers, "This is happening to me, how do I deal with it?" To the woman who wrote to me and told me about the cold water, I said, "Please don't do that again." If you can talk about it with someone else, they'll tell you something. 

"We are very alone in motherhood and in caregiving."

-It's important to include your experience with motherhood. Without that journey, it's difficult to read the chats between the two of you. What was the review of your own motherhood like for you? 

– I'm interested in families, and especially those that don't work properly . When I started writing the book, something of my own motherhood began to stir, even before my first contact with them. I began to have nightmares, to dream about the child, and to remember my own motherhood. For example, what I'm talking about, about putting the baby in very hot water. I was a very young mother; I say this without meaning to justify myself, but it wasn't that the memory was veiled. I remembered, but I hadn't been able to talk about it with anyone because it made me feel so guilty. It was very difficult to write this book with the intention of showing the murderers as beasts or monsters if I didn't put myself in the first person. How do I talk about them without demonizing them if I don't talk about myself as a demon?

–And how do you think about it now?

– Maybe this book is an excuse to talk about compulsory motherhood, even when we decide to have our children and we love them and everything's fine . I think of it in Magdalena's sense: she had already freed herself from her son in a way, because he was being raised by his paternal uncles. She decides to go look for the baby, and that's because she feels guilty. It's very common to hear people say, "Why the hell did she go looking for him if she killed him later?" That's a good question. But why don't we ask why society expects so much from a mother, to the point where the mother feels more relieved with the dead child than with the child with the uncles? I myself tend to romanticize motherhood. But compulsory motherhood has many facets and depths that can't be resolved with the abortion-or-no-abortion debate . Even those of us who decide to be mothers and who desire and love our children, we are very alone in motherhood, which encompasses the work of caregiving, because the people who care for us are also women. Not only minors but also older adults. And we are also very much alone in this task.

-How do you analyze the meeting with them today? 

I wanted to see them in person. Just talking on the phone wasn't enough; I interviewed them by phone in October, November, and December. And I went to see them in January, that is, two months later. And all that time I was worried they might change their minds. That's how I related to the interviews; it wasn't moral. Of course, I have an opinion about what they did, which coincides with that of the Justice Department, but my interest lay elsewhere. Entering the prison was more disturbing because I had never entered a prison before meeting with them.

I couldn't record, so I was focused on retaining the exact phrases as much as possible. After those visits, I recorded everything I remembered and everything that had happened inside. When I was transcribing the material, I realized a few things. For example, I think because of my own prejudices about motherhood, I'm more sensitive to Magdalena than to Abigail. I can be more sensitive to Magdalena, firstly, because I no longer feared being denied a visit; I was already there, and secondly, because she's the biological part. There's a biological issue that, even though I believe biology isn't destiny, happens to me: this girl had the baby in her belly. How could she have allowed it? Those details. But I was kind of alienated; my emotions didn't play a big role while I was doing the interviews.

"Lesbians are considered perfect beasts "

-Why did this crime shock society so much?

There's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy about two lesbians killing a child. But in truth, it's the only case of its kind in Argentine criminology . That's an exception, in principle. On the other hand, I have all the material on child abuse cases, and it's not that mothers don't intervene. Mothers intervene more than we'd like to hear in torture and infanticide. They also intervene a lot, covering up for their husbands. But generally, they're heterosexual couples. It's not common for lesbian couples to be involved . In any case, we have to think about what we're reproducing within the LGBT community, that we want to resemble those heterosexual families, even with these statistics.

-But there is a particular burden when it comes to lesbian women

-Yes. And the same thing happens with trans women. Society's ideal is male, so the worst thing is for a woman to desire another woman. But I mean, what about masculinities within the LGBTI community, like Abigail's, who also exercise this type of violence? Does this mean all trans men want to be straight, patriarchal, murderous men? No, of course. But the privileges men have are more desirable. Imagine if you don't want the privileges of being a man, and you don't even want to sleep with a man, you don't even want to have a family with a man... Social thinking collapses with that. And on top of that, historically, lesbians have been portrayed as violent, masculine, and so on. The perfect beasts.

But there's something else. There's something very serious happening, and that's violence against children . We're at a historic political moment in which hatred of children comes from the state. The president fighting with a disabled child, a senator saying the country's children don't have the right to care in a national hospital, the defunding of Garrahan, the presidential metaphors regarding child sexual abuse... Society is killing many children. But this idea of ​​"these two slaps killed the kid" remains here.

The lid is blown off that way, and we stop looking at our own families . My proposal is that we think from within our own families . They've already been tried; they've received the maximum sentence . It's striking that society continues to demand justice. And when I say this, I'm referring to society in general; I'm not referring to the Dupuys, to the victim's family, who are also victims. Because I believe they have the right to confuse justice with revenge, but the rest of society shouldn't.

This interview was originally published in the newspaper Tiempo Argentino and is republished as part of an agreement with partner media.