Simona Gaetán’s abuse and confinement by her husband

Simona Gaetán’s abuse and confinement by her husband Renato Bley turn a remote estate into a private system of control: he regulates her daily life, isolates her from family, and uses violence to keep her from leaving. Her eventual freedom begins not with a rescue but with a catastrophe that removes her jailer, after which she returns to Buenos Aires and takes possession of a life he had denied her.

Marriage and the first fracture

After her marriage to Renato, Simona moved to his large, austere estate near Fortín Tiburcio, where she lived with his sisters Augusta and Salomé. At first, Renato treated her affectionately. He gave her a mare, and she grew fond of riding across the property; for the first two years, she was nearly content with her life there. That early period of tenderness makes the later coercion a reversal within the marriage, not simply an unchanging condition from the start.

The conflict over children exposed the lie and blame at the center of her confinement. Renato’s sisters monitored Simona’s menstruation and treated her failure to become pregnant as her fault. On Augusta’s advice, Simona consulted a family doctor in Junín, who told her that she could not have children because Renato was sterile, and that he already knew this from testing during his first marriage. When Simona told Augusta, her sister-in-law rejected the explanation and blamed her instead. Renato learned that Simona had sought medical advice and began beating her. The doctor’s disclosure did not free her; it gave the household another occasion to make her responsible for a condition that was not hers.

An estate organized around control

The violence became a seven-year regime in which Renato treated Simona as a dependent child. He chose her clothes and shoes, supervised her hair, set her meals, determined whether she could go for a walk, limited how far she might travel, and fixed the time she had to return. His rewards and punishments did not depend on her conduct so much as on his will. The girl who had once fought boys in vacant lots and insisted on her own way gradually submitted, not because she understood or accepted his authority, but because she was afraid to question it.

Renato made even Simona’s annual visits to Buenos Aires serve his control. Each April he promised that she could celebrate her birthday with her mother and sister. Before the trip, he beat her so she would not tell her family what was happening; after it, he beat her again in case she thought of staying. Affection and violence alternated, while expensive gifts and increasingly costly birthday jewelry offered an outward display that could not conceal her condition from her mother-in-law. The visits promised contact with home but were bracketed by threats that made disclosure dangerous.

The estate’s geography and household arrangements helped turn this authority into isolation. Simona was far from Buenos Aires, had no independent contact with people outside Renato’s economic orbit, and could not imagine a world beyond the property’s boundary fence. Augusta and Salomé watched her and participated in limiting her choices; later, Salomé took charge of the mail, cutting off even letters from Simona’s family. The fence was meant to contain livestock, but the narrative makes it equally a boundary around Simona’s life.

Family contact and the tightening of confinement

Simona’s mother continued to visit without warning, staying in a small hotel in Junín before taking the train to the estate. These visits gave Simona a link to the person she most needed, but they also brought danger because Renato resented her mother and treated her badly. When Simona was twenty-seven, her mother found her ill in bed with a fever. Augusta and Salomé had refused to obtain medicine or call for help, dismissing Simona as lazy. Her mother brought a doctor, bought antibiotics, and stayed beside her for three nights until she recovered.

When her mother proposed taking her to Buenos Aires until she was fully well, Renato forced her out of the house and threatened to kill both women if she returned. Her mother reported him to the gendarmes, but they refused to intervene on the ground that he was her husband. The response left the marriage’s private violence effectively beyond the protection of local authority. Afterward, Simona received no more letters from her family because Salomé intercepted the mail.

On Simona’s twenty-eighth birthday, Renato announced that she would never again set foot in Buenos Aires. She answered inwardly with a different resolve: she would not turn thirty in Fortín Tiburcio, even if she had to take her own life to prevent it. Imagining her own death initially seemed like an escape from a future she could not otherwise see. But the thought also changed her relation to the abuse. She recognized the mechanisms that kept her there—distance, loneliness, dependence, and the absence of a world beyond the estate—and became more alert to how she could comply outwardly, avoid punishment, and protect herself.

Escape and aftermath

Renato noticed that Simona had become quieter, and continued to beat her, but she no longer cried. She thought constantly about escaping. The practical obstacles were severe: Renato rarely left her alone, she could not drive, he had killed the mare he had once given her, and she slept in a locked room. She had begun to believe escape might never be possible when exceptional flooding changed the conditions of the estate.

After days of heavy rain, the Arroyo Salado overflowed, the land flooded, and the boundary fence broke apart. Renato ordered Simona to accompany him as he went to rescue cattle. During the work, he slipped near the water and was swept away. Simona heard him call for help and approached the bank, but could not reach him before the current carried him off. She later reported what had happened to the gendarmes in Fortín Tiburcio. Renato’s remains were found in stages over the following days; the final remains were so incomplete that even his head could not be confidently identified.

The flood had made escape physically possible, but Simona’s return was also an act of choosing where to go. She walked back from the river without fear, stopped to remember her mother, and went not to the house but to Fortín Tiburcio to notify the gendarmes. Simona turned thirty in Buenos Aires. The authority Renato had exercised over her ended with his death, and she soon cut her hair so that no one could drag her by it again.

Independence and narrative significance

As Renato’s widow, Simona took possession of the house, half the land, and a substantial amount of capital. Augusta and Salomé tried to discredit her among the neighbors and hired a lawyer, but they could not prevent her from inheriting. Renato’s brother-in-law Pedro, Augusta’s husband, dealt with her more pragmatically, recognizing that he would have to continue managing the estate with her. Simona settled the necessary papers with him and bought an apartment on Rivadavia Street, next door to her mother’s building.

For a time, she told no one what she had lived through. The account presents this silence not as evidence that the experience was minor, but as part of the distance she needed from a life in which others had controlled her movements and access to family. Eventually, Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s patient affection persuaded her to speak. When he pursued a relationship, she questioned why he would want a woman like her and suggested that she had already lived too much to offer him what he wanted. Her words show that survival and legal independence did not erase the effects of years under Renato’s authority.

Simona’s story also sits beside the book’s account of state violence in Spain and Argentina. Its emphasis remains on a husband’s private domination and on the gendarmes’ refusal to intervene, rather than equating her experience with the later machinery of dictatorship. The parallel is narrower and concrete: in both contexts, power can leave its target exposed while the institutions that might protect that person fail to act. Her escape, inheritance, return to her mother’s neighborhood, and eventual decision to tell Manuel mark the gradual recovery of choices that had been taken from her.