2023-11-18 20:09:18
With five bullets, the writer María Carolina Geel murdered her lover in a luxurious hotel in Santiago, Chile. The event, which occurred in 1955, would have been one more of a bygone era in a country far from Spain if the murderer, who remained calm during her arrest, had not written her time in prison in a notebook that would become – once pardoned at the request of the Nobel-winning poet Gabriela Mistral herself – in the book ‘Cárcel de mujeres’, which is now published by the Periférica publishing house.
Although he only spent a little more than a year behind bars for a crime that he never explained (“answers that I try to find in some corner of my understanding”), he poetically describes an environment where there are “non-stop murmurs,” screams, sobs, quarrels. , suicide attempts, illness and the “strange feeling” of “forbidden spell.”
“Between the thick walls of a prison, two people saturate their lives with passion,” he writes, before silence overcomes. Because Geel (Santiago de Chile, 1913-1996) entered prison with three novels published but in freedom he only published one more, some short stories and an essay.
In her diary, which has now become a non-fiction classic, she talks more about her companions. «A young woman came here because she had killed her father. “At night she suffered terrors,” says Geel, who has his eyes wide open and tries to understand them. She finds similarities between her routines and those in the congregations of nuns and compares those that arrive: «Living is strange. “I would never forge a check, but she won’t take anyone’s life.”
The writer José Ovejero, author of a prologue to this book for the short-lived publishing house Pica Lagartos, relates that after killing his lover, Geel – whose real name was Georgina Silva – kissed him on the lips. In the obituary that she appeared in ‘El Mercurio’ they describe her as “cultured and refined”, as well as “strong and susceptible”, adjectives that also work for ‘Women’s Prison’.
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