Bad Girls

Description

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins.
 
In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Córdoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. She quickly rallies the pack to save him, and they adopt the child into their fascinating surrogate family as they have so many other outcasts, including Camila.

Sheltered in Auntie Encarna’s fabled pink house, they find a partial escape from the everyday threats of disease and violence, at the hands of clients, cops, and boyfriends. Telling their stories—of a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars—as well as her own journey from a toxic home in a small, poor town, Camila traces the life of this vibrant community throughout the 90s.

Imbuing reality with the magic of a dark fairy tale, Bad Girls offers an intimate, nuanced portrait of trans coming-of-age that captures a universal sense of the strangeness of our bodies. It grips and entertains us while also challenging ideas about love, sexuality, gender, and identity.“Beautifully written…a stunning meditation on gender, our bodies, and the ties that bind.” —NPR

“A fantastical world that is equal parts violent and tender. In beautifully rendered language, this debut novel…challenges contemporary ideas of gender, sexuality, and love with the magical touch of a fairy tale.” —Wall Street Journal, 10 Best LGBTQ+ Books for Pride Month

“After I finished reading Camila’s story, it kept growing in me…As a story of gender oppression, Bad Girls (beautifully translated by Kit Maude) would sound familiar almost everywhere…To record the travesti experience, no matter how harrowingly painful, as something precious is [its] purpose.” —Graciela Mochkofsky, The New Yorker
 
“[Sosa Villada] is a wise, uncommon, and bewitching storyteller.” —Esquire, Must-Read Books by Queer Writers

“This fantastical story about the power of chosen family is entrancing.” —BuzzFeed
 
“Every so often, a slim book absolutely clobbers you with its exuberance and beauty—for me, this was that book.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw, and honest. In skillfully rendered language, charged with poetic energy, it takes us deep into the world of trans prostitution and explores the violent and tender bonds that unite the women who inhabit it.” —Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season

“Remarkable…Bad Girls is a generational testimony as well as a personal one. It imagines a future and exorcises a past, being exceptional for what it promises and for the portrait of a life it leaves behind.” —Astra Magazine

“There’s a touch of the miraculous, a sort of stop-motion fabulism, sprouting through the cracks of the Córdoban asphalt in Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls, imbuing the novel’s ragtag company of trans deities, miscreants, and sex workers with an enduring sense of fantastical improbability…a vivid and boisterous translation…a plaintive vigil that feels like a party.” —Justin Walls, Center for the Art of Translation Blog
 
“[A] poignant trans coming-of-age novel.” —Book Riot, Queer Books from Indie Presses You Definitely Don’t Want to Miss This Year
 
“An incredible debut novel…Taking a page from writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Roberto Bolaño, Villada’s work blends a stark depiction of violence and trauma with a distinctly queer magical realism.” —Apartment Therapy
 
“This book cements [Sosa Villada] as a new exciting voice in world literature.” —She Reads

“Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls blew Argentina’s collective mind with its exquisite power, tenderness, and riotous imagination.” —Carolina De Robertis, author of The President and the Frog and Cantoras

“This is an important book: fun, tragic, political, and full of marvel. It makes you understand the lives of these women and the wonder and pain of being different and rejected. It’s full of pride and exquisitely written. It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance, full of love and sorrow.” —Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“Confrontational, radical, hopeful, Bad Girls does one of the most important things a book (or a life) can do. It looks at all the rubble and the dirt and asks: ‘Can we make anything beautiful from this?’” —Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass

“An exquisite book full of poetry, warmth, and magical, raw honesty. Gorgeously written stories of lives entwined and enmeshed in the toughest of spaces, stories that felt so bloody generous through the act of sharing. Simply beautiful.” —Juno Roche, author of A Working-Class Family Ages Badly

“A work of searing, confrontational beauty.” —Juno Mac, coauthor of Revolting Prostitutes

“Without hiding the reality, this novel celebrates trans life with lyricism and wonder. Bad Girls is a gem to be savored.” —Elle (France)
 
“[Sosa Villada] constructs a language that seems to come from dreams, fairy tales, and adventure novels…a literary sensation.” —Rolling Stone (Argentina)
 
“From a life reminiscent of a Pedro Almodóvar film, Camila Sosa Villada has drawn a novel, an incredible piece of literature…powerful.” —Vanity Fair (France)
 
“An homage to sex workers suffused with magic.” —Le MondeCamila Sosa Villada was born in 1982 in La Falda (Córdoba, Argentina). She is a writer, actress, and singer, and previously earned a living as a sex worker, street vendor, and hourly maid. She holds degrees in communication and theater from the National University of Córdoba. Her play Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de un travesti was selected for the 2010 National Theater Festival held in La Plata. Her first novel, Bad Girls, won the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro and will be translated into six languages.
 
Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of classic and contemporary Latin American writers such as Armonía Somers, Jorge Luis Borges, Lolita Copacabana, and Ariel Magnus for a wide array of publications and writes reviews and criticism for several different outlets in Spanish and English including the Times Literary Supplement, Revista Ñ and Otra Parte.The night air in the Park is dense, dark, and freezing. The ancient trees, recently stripped of their leaves, look askance to the heavens, pleading for some obscure boon essential to vegetation. A group of travestis makes its rounds in the shadows cast by the branches. They almost seem to move as one body, cells from the same animal, or members of a pack. Potential johns cruise by in their cars, slowing down to inspect the group before selecting one with the wave of an arm. The chosen woman answers their call. Night after night, nothing changes.
Sarmiento Park is right in the heart of the city. A large green lung with a zoo and a theme park. At night it turns wild. The travestis wait in the shelter of the branches or by the side of the road, casting their spell from the jaws of the wolf that stands next to the statue of Dante, who also lends his name to the avenue. Every night, the travestis drag themselves out of a hell that no one would ever think to write about, to bring spring back to the world.
With them is a pregnant woman, the only one of them to have been born female. The rest, the travestis, have worked their own transformation. Among the fellowship of travestis of the Park, she’s different, the pregnant woman who always plays the same joke: grabbing an unwitting travesti’s crotch as though to catch her out. She reaches for one now and they all laugh.
The caravan of travestis isn’t fazed by the cold. A hip flask of whiskey is passed from hand to hand, scraps of folded paper filled with cocaine go from nose to nose, some of which are large and natural, others cut down to size by the surgeon’s scalpel. The devil lends what nature has withheld. In the Park that borders the center of the city, the seductive allure of travesti bodies emanates from pits of damnation. Auntie Encarna joins in the sabbath with ferocious enthusiasm. The cocaine has given her a boost. She’s one of the eternals, invulnerable as an ancient stone idol. But something out there, in the depths of the cold night, attracts her attention, drawing her away from her friends. Something is calling to her from the darkness. As mouths embellished with lipstick cackle and ingest the whiskey and cars honk in search of a moment’s happiness with a travesti, Auntie Encarna makes out a very different sound indeed, a sound made by someone not at all like the cast of characters to whom we’ve been introduced so far.
The other travestis continue on their way, ignoring Encarna. Auntie has been a little scatterbrained lately. There comes a time in everyone’s life when their memory isn’t what it used to be. To keep up, she’s taken to writing everything down in notebooks and sticking notes to the refrigerator. Some think she’s going crazy, others that she’s grown weary of remembering. Auntie Encarna has suffered more than her fair share of beatings; boots belonging to policemen and tricks alike have danced plenty of jigs on her head and kidneys. The latter organs are now so badly damaged that she pees blood. So no one pays any attention when she goes off, leaving them behind, answering the siren call of fate. She wanders away, a little disoriented, treading painfully in acrylic shoes that at 178 years of age make her feel as though she’s walking on a bed of nails. She hobbles through the dry earth and weeds that grow in the neglected regions of the Park, careering across Dante Avenue like a wolf whistle, into an area full of brambles, hillocks, and a cave where faggots seek out lips and reassurance, now known as the Bears’ Grotto. A few feet farther on is Rawson Hospital, where infections are seen to: our second home. Ditches, emptiness, thorn bushes, masturbating drunks. While Auntie Encarna disappears into the thickets, the magic begins to happen. Whores, horny customers, chance hookups in an improvised forest, everyone giving and receiving pleasure in cars parked askew, lying among the weeds, or up against a tree. This is the hour when the Park becomes a pleasure womb, a recipient for sex with no shame attached. There’s no telling whose hands and tongues belong to whom. Right now, in this place, couples are fucking. But Auntie Encarna is on the hunt for a voice, or scent maybe. You never know when she’s going to go off sniffing for something. She gradually begins to realize what she’s looking for: a crying baby. Auntie Encarna feels through the darkness with her shoes in hand, plunging farther into the inhospitable undergrowth, determined to see it with her own eyes. Hunger and thirst. The baby’s cries are full of them and in response Auntie Encarna desperately quickens her pace: somewhere in the forest a child is suffering. It’s winter in the Park, cold enough to freeze your tears. Encarna eventually finds him by the drainage ditches where the whores hide from police cruisers. The child is covered in prickly branches, wailing desperately. It feels as though the Park is crying with him. Auntie Encarna is frantic, the horror of the world presses down on her throat.
The boy is swaddled in an adult coat, a green puffer jacket. His bald head makes him look like a parrot. She gets scratched as she reaches down to rescue the child from his tomb of thorns. Her skin starts to bleed, staining the cuffs of her blouse. She looks like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal. She feels no pain, doesn’t even notice the cuts. She keeps pulling away the brambles and eventually gets to the child, who is still howling into the night. He’s covered in shit, the stink is unbearable. Gagging and bleeding, Auntie Encarna hugs him close to her chest and starts to call to her friends. Her cries have to travel all the way across the avenue, it seems unlikely that they could possibly hear. But the travesti bitches of Sarmiento Park in the city of Córdoba have much better hearing than your average human. Auntie Encarna’s summons reaches them because they can smell the fear in the air. They are suddenly alert, their skin puckered with goose bumps, hair standing on end, lungs taking in as much oxygen as they can, jaws clenched.
“Travestis of the Park! Come! Come look what I’ve found!” A three-month-old boy abandoned in the Park.
Covered in branches, left for death to have her way with him. Or maybe the stray dogs and cats that live there: children make for a tasty morsel wherever you come from.
The travestis come over curiously, they look like a pack of hungry zombies stumbling toward a woman with a baby in her arms. One puts her hand, a hand big enough to cover the sun, to her mouth. Another declares that the child is gorgeous, a peach. Another immediately starts to back away, saying that she wants nothing to do with this, she hasn’t seen a thing.
“Figures . . . ,” says another, meaning that when push comes to shove, you can’t trust a hairy faggot.
“We’ll have to call the police,” says one.
“No!” barks Auntie Encarna. “Not the police! You can’t give a child to the police, it’s the worst thing you can do!”
“But we can’t keep him,” says a reasonable-sounding voice.
“The boy stays with me. He’s coming home with us.” “But how are you going to get him home? He’s all covered in shit and blood.”
“In my purse. Look: he fits perfectly.”
 
The travestis walked from the Park to the area by the bus station at a remarkable pace. They were a caravan of cats, hurried by circumstance, their heads down to make themselves invisible. They were going to Auntie Encarna’s house. The queerest boardinghouse in the world, during desperate times it had offered shelter, protection, succor, and comfort to an endless stream of travestis. They were going there because they knew it was the safest possible place for them to be, carrying the baby in a purse. One of them, the youngest, worked up the courage to say what they were all thinking.
“It’s a cold night to spend in jail.”
“What?” Auntie Encarna demanded.
“Nothing, just that prison is pretty cold this time of year.
Abducting a baby . . .”
I was scared half to death. I trailed behind and kept having to break into a trot to keep up. The sight of the baby had hollowed me inside, as though my organs, blood, bones, and muscles had all been scooped out. It was partly panic and partly determination, two emotions that always go hand in hand. The girls were nervous, their breath billowed in the cold air as they panted in fear, praying to every saint they knew that the boy would stay asleep, that he wouldn’t start squealing as he had just a few moments ago, like a pig in the slaughterhouse. Along the way, they were passed by cars driven by drunk drivers, squad cars that slowed down when they saw them, insomniac students out for a pack of cigarettes.
Just by bowing their heads, the travestis pulled down the cloak of invisibility that was given to them when they were baptized. They pretended to be lost in thought, repressing their terror of getting caught. Oh, to truly know fear you need to be a travesti carrying a blood-soaked newborn in a purse. They got to Auntie Encarna’s house. A large, pink, two-story building that looked a little run-down but welcomed them with open arms. They walked down a bare passage and went straight into the patio, which was surrounded by glass doors in which the faces of other travestis appeared looking extremely curious. A falsetto voice singing a sad song upstairs was silenced by the commotion. One of the girls got a basket ready, another ran to the pharmacy for diapers and baby formula, another fetched clean sheets and towels, another lit a joint. Auntie Encarna murmured to the child very quietly, a litany, a lullaby, a spell to stop him from crying. She undressed the boy and took off her own shit-stained dress as well. Half-naked and surrounded by friends, she bathed him on the kitchen table.
Some were bold enough to make jokes, even though their asses were clenched like a vise over the insanity of bringing the kid home. Keeping him as a pet, like a rescue dog. They started to wonder what his name was, where he came from, who the terrible mother that abandoned him in the Park might have been. One ventured that if she was planning to throw him in a ditch she wouldn’t have named him. Another said that he looked like a Twinkle in Her Eye. Another dismissed this as poetic nonsense, reminding her of the danger they were in. The police were going to come roaring in with their sirens, guns blazing, the news programs were going to shriek bloody murder, editorial pages would fume, society, always up for a lynching, was going to bay for vengeance. Travestis and children don’t go together. The very sight of a travesti carrying a baby was a sin to these people. The bastards preferred to hide them from their children, to shield them from the degeneracy of which man is capable. But even though they were well aware of all this, the travestis supported Auntie Encarna in her crazy endeavor. It was the orphans’ code.
 
Once the baby was clean and wrapped up in a sheet like cannelloni, Auntie Encarna sighed and went off to rest in her room, which was decorated like a sultan’s bedchamber. Everything in there was green, hope was in the air; it was the light. Her bedroom was the place where good faith was eternal. Little by little, the house settled down. The travestis withdrew, some to go to bed, others back out onto the street. I collapsed onto a sofa in the living room. The starving child had been given a bottle and they’d grown tired of gazing at him, trying out names, deciding whom he resembled. Once he was done crying, the boy started to look at them with intelligent curiosity, straight into each of their eyes. It was a shock, they’d never been seen like that before. The pink house, the most travesti house in the world (plants in every window, entangled with other plants, fertile plants that sprouted flowers like fruit, in which the bees danced), had suddenly gone quiet so as not to scare the child. Auntie Encarna bared her silicon breast and brought the baby to it. The boy sniffed the giant, hard tit and calmly latched on. He wasn’t going to get a drop of milk out of that nipple but the travesti in whose arms he rested pretended to nurse him, singing a lullaby. You’ve never truly slept unless you’ve fallen asleep to a lullaby sung by a travesti. Maria, a very young deaf-mute waif, slipped past me like a succubus and opened Encarna’s door gently without knocking. She was met with the scene. Auntie Encarna suckling a newborn with a breast full of aircraft oil. Auntie Encarna was a couple of inches away from the bliss into which her whole body was settling, the boy was drawing a lifetime’s worth of pain out of her. It’s the best-kept secret of wet nurses, the pleasure and pain of being drained by a kid. A painful injection of peace. Auntie Encarna’s eyes had rolled up into the back of her head, she was in absolute ecstasy. She was whispering, shedding tears that bounced off her tits and onto the baby’s clothes. Maria brought her fingers together pointing upward, asking Encarna what she thought she was doing. Encarna answered that she didn’t know, the boy just started to suck on her tit and she didn’t dare pull him away. Maria the Mute made a cross over her breast, pointing out that Encarna couldn’t nurse a child, she didn’t have any milk.
“Doesn’t matter,” Auntie Encarna answered. “It’s symbolic.”
Maria shook her head disapprovingly and closed the door just as gently as she had opened it. In the dark, she stubbed a toe on a table leg and covered her mouth to stop from crying out. Her eyes filled with tears. When she saw me on the sofa, she pointed to Auntie’s room and used the same finger to draw circles around her temple: Encarna’s gone nuts. It’s symbolic. The symbol of a woman obeying the urges of her body, like Romulus, Remus, and Luperca.

From the sofa I commandeered as my bed that night I remembered what they used to say at home about when I was born. My mother was in labor for two days, she was never able to dilate and couldn’t stand the pain. The doctors refused to give her a cesarean until my father threatened the head doctor. He put a gun to his head and informed him that if he didn’t operate on his wife to let the child out, he’d be dead before the night was through. Afterward, people used to say that I had been born on pain of death. My father would repeat this approach, again and again, forever after. Everything that brought me life, every desire, every love, every decision I made, would be subjected to threats. My mother, meanwhile, said that after I was born she had to take bromazepam to get to sleep. Which was probably why she was so unenthusiastic, so passive, about her newborn son. Precisely the opposite to what was going on behind that door, in the room where the light was still on. A green glow to dazzle death, threatening her with life. Warning her to stay back, to forget about the child found in the Park, warning her that she no longer had jurisdiction on the matter. From my sofa, covered in coats belonging to other travestis, I fell asleep to the sound of Encarna’s lullaby. The story of my painful birth, told to me a thousand times, dissolved like sugar in tea. In our house of travestis, sweetness leavened death. In that house, death could be beautiful.US

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