Woodworm – Layla Martínez

[Two Lines Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott

One thing I love about magical realism, fabulism, and related genres is the delicious feeling of disequilibrium they produce. Without warning, logic twists to strangeness. Characters’ psychological states manifest through external objects and supernatural beings. These worlds feel both impossible and hyper-real as they make the implicit explicit. The consequences of repressed rage, bodies in the closet, a house of secrets: in Layla Martínez’s debut novel, Woodworm, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, these clichés are literal.

Woodworm opens in the matter-of-fact voice of a young woman arriving home. “I walked in and the house pounced on me,” she begins. “It’s always the same with this filthy pile of bricks, it leaps on whoever comes through the door and twists their guts till they can’t even breathe.” After finding her grandmother under a bed, catatonic, the narrator locks her in the attic. Then she changes out of her dirty clothes, dropping them in a drawer but not expecting to find them there later. “It’s always the same: you can’t trust anything in this house,” she says, “especially not the wardrobes or the walls.” Emerging from her catatonic state, the grandmother begins banging against the walls overhead. Speech, gesture, the power to be understood or the power to ignore—these concerns are the motive force of the novel.

Martínez’s narrator has a blend of youthfulness, bitterness, and supernatural savvy that immediately put me in mind of Merricat, the narrator of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle. “The people of the village have always hated us,” Merricat announces in the first few pages. “I always thought about rot when I come toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.” Like Jackson’s story, Woodworm centers on two women who live alone in a large house, and are ostracized by their surrounding community due to an initially unspecified prior incident. Both narratives eventually reveal the violent incident and the narrator’s role in it. But where Jackson’s Merricat is the sole narrator of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her unreliability a slow realization for the reader, Martínez’s Woodworm flips back and forth between the subtly conflicting narration of granddaughter and grandmother. Far from a madwoman in the attic, the grandmother is the more clear-eyed of the pair. “I should have given my granddaughter a good kicking as well,” the grandmother gripes in her first address to the reader. “That thing had grown inside her just like it had with my mother, just like it had with me. I tried my best but it’s no easy task getting rid of what’s inside us. And don’t we know it in this house.” Her voice is like a curdled, wiser version of her granddaughter’s. At times the two voices are indistinguishable.

The root of the family misery seems connected to the grandmother’s father. His infidelities and physical abuse took a toll on the grandmother’s mother, whose psychic distress turned the family home into a literal den of hungry shadows:

When my mother realized she was never getting out of that house, she stopped praying to the saints and started talking to the shadows. Each time she heard them murmuring under the bed or sensed them behind the door she’d sing songs to them as if they were children. And the shadows would settle and fall still, and they must have taken a shine to my mother and turned against my father because the whole house would ooze hostility the moment he came through the door.

At one point, the grandmother’s father hid from a military draft inside the walls of the house, handed food through a hole behind a wardrobe. Once the danger was past, his wife simply neglected to let him back out. The house and the shadows slowly absorbed him. This haunted house is both prison and protector, antagonist and ally. Subtly, over the course of the novel, Martínez seems to align this ambivalence with the downsides of vengeance itself.

The women of this family carry a class-conscious anger, on top of their resentment towards abusive fathers and husbands. The granddaughter, who we discover has returned home from prison, was suspected of abducting a boy she was babysitting. This boy’s family, the Jarabos, are wealthy, and disdainful of our narrators’ poor family. The two families also have a fraught history, tied up in the grandmother’s marriage to one of the Jarabos’s workmen. It seems, by the end of the novel, that the granddaughter did not lose sight of the Jarabo boy, as she claims, but in fact unlocked the front door and encouraged him out, perhaps even abducting him, carrying on the intergenerational feud. But it is not clear what this act of retribution has accomplished. It seems it may only isolate our narrators even further, making their tenuous existence even more precarious now that the granddaughter is out of work.

There’s a sense of intimacy in the way these women are written, and in the way they speak to us. We’re dropped into their lives as if we are fellow townspeople, or friends, or even another member of the family. Perhaps this is because Woodworm began with Martínez’s grandmother, and her grandmother’s house. In an interview with the Center for the Art of Translation, Martínez describes the work, originally a short story, as a kind of revisionist history of twentieth-century Spain:

I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother and great-grandmother and how they survived the class and gender violence they suffered and the repression of the early years of the dictatorship. But they had been victims of all that violence and I didn’t want to re-victimize them, I wanted them, at least in fiction, to be able to take revenge, to be able to get the justice they never had.

Martínez, a journalist, nonfiction writer, and translator, has written a great deal about gendered injustice and collective anxiety. (Carcoma, the novel’s title in Spanish, means not only “woodworm”—termite—but also “anxiety.”) Her previous nonfiction books have explored women’s reproductive rights and the possibility of building a utopia. If her debut novel is partly wish-fulfillment of feminist revenge, it is also an argument for women’s autonomy, a novelistic continuation of her journalistic career.

Appropriately for a novel with two narrators, Woodworm was co-translated by British translators Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Although there do not appear to be any direct interviews with either of them on Woodworm in particular, their previous work resonates strongly with Martínez’s novel. Both of them specialize in Spanish to English translation, and they have both focused on works concerned with poverty and violence against women. In an interview with the Booker International Prize committee for her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, Sophie Hughes wrote, “I greatly value literature that reminds us of the banality of evil.” Like Woodworm, Paradais investigates the violent reactions that class disparities can produce (although with far more graphic results). Hughes has translated three of Melchor’s books, all set in Mexico and written in a gritty, propulsive style blending myth and reportage. Martínez’s book seems to fit well within her wheelhouse, likewise concerned with the slow and horrible grindstones of poverty and domestic violence.

McDermott, too, is a natural fit for Martínez’s novel. In 2020, she translated Argentine writer Selva Almada’s Dead Girls, a novel interweaving Almada’s own experiences with stories of three murdered women from her hometown. These experiences are fictionalized for the purposes of the novel, but they highlight the terrifying closeness of such violent encounters in the everyday lives of women around the world. Almada and Martínez have both transformed personal, familial, and communal histories through fiction with activist intent. By revealing the autobiographical origins of these disturbing fictions, they ask the reader to reckon with seemingly fantastical descriptions of oppression and violence as common, relatable occurrences.

In Woodworm, the moments of realistic poverty and violence last just long enough for the reader to recognize them before the supernatural reasserts itself.  At one point, a teenage girl with long black hair appears on the grounds of the narrators’ house. She hovers around the property until she knocks on the door; the granddaughter opens it and suddenly recognizes the figure as her disappeared (possibly kidnapped) mother. This unaccountably young mother is also utterly devoid of voice, or seemingly of awareness of when or where she is. Whatever experiences she has had have destroyed her ability to speak and account for herself, or exert autonomy over her life—or perhaps death. It is unclear if she is real, a hallucination, a ghost, or something else. Reading this moment, I recalled the grandmother’s words to her granddaughter just a few pages before: “You still don’t get it. . . . You still don’t get that no one ever leaves this house.” Immediately, I thought of the trapped women in Cristina Rivera Garza’s “City of Men.”

Rivera Garza’s story is about a reporter sent to write a story on a city of men: “A report on the City of Men from the point of view of a woman would, her editor told her, be a guaranteed success.” She is reluctant, but, worried about her job security, takes the assignment. The reporter’s first few days in the City of Men are strange. She is shown around like any visitor, perhaps kept from seeing certain things like any visitor is kept from local secrets. She begins to uncover the stories of other women who have come to write about this city, and who have not been able to leave. She pieces together their stories from the boy who serves her coffee her first day, and then from digging through archived newspapers. In her hotel room, she begins to sense a creature, a strange woman who appeared in the City of Men some years back, covered in black hair, bent over like a beast and unable to speak. At the end of the story, the reporter is not driven to her flight out of the City of Men but deposited in the forest, with a handful of other women. These are women who eke out a shadowy existence on the outskirts of the city, unable to live with the men or escape them. Women who seem incapable of properly understanding or forming speech. 

It was this black-haired apparition and these voiceless, liminal women I thought of when the granddaughter’s mother appeared, silent, on the doorstep of the house in Martínez’s Woodworm. The narrators’ family, too, cannot escape a city—perhaps a country—of men. Nor can they escape a city and country controlled, as cities and countries tend to be, by the rich, at the expense of the poor. When asked, Martínez characterized her story as one of revenge. She said she wanted to “get the justice they never had.” And yet her characters seem more trapped, and more voiceless, than she hoped to make them. There is no public reckoning with the wealth disparities that have fed the tensions between the Jarabos and the narrators, no moment of confrontation. The granddaughter is socially silenced by a brief stint in prison. And whatever happens to the boy is kept quiet from the reader, as if the narrators still dare not speak of it, even to us.

Like Rivera Garza’s reporter, Martínez’s narrators seem to have hoped that their ingenuity and knowledge of the danger would allow them to outwit a system stacked against them. Instead, the reader is left with a remarkably similar vision at the end of the two stories: two or three women at the edge of town, carrying secrets and rage, slowly finding their voices and their desires less audible, less understood. Woodworm was marketed as a “grisly, mystical vision of justice” from “a terrifying new voice in international horror.” I expected more shock and gore from those descriptions than I discovered. While the dénouement is less surprising than Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and less grisly than Melchor’s Paradais, Woodworm’s brand of horror bores into you. In Martínez’s world, even powerful, eloquent, and magically-gifted women remain trapped by the logics of the cities of men. I may not come from a house of hungry shadows, but that’s a horror too close to home for my liking.

Caitlin Kossmann is a writer, editor, and historian from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She currently works for The Yale Review.