The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Spain as Los peligros de fumar en la cama by Editorial Anagrama in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright © 2017 by Mariana Enriquez.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Sucker’s Evening” from Songs of Love and Horror: Collected Lyrics of Will Oldham by Will Oldham. Copyright © 2018 by Will Oldham. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Enriquez, Mariana, author. | McDowell, Megan, translator.

  Title: The dangers of smoking in bed : stories / Mariana Enriquez ; translated by Megan McDowell.

  Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Hogarth, [2020] | Originally published in Spain as Los peligros de fumar en la cama by Editorial Anagrama in Barcelona, Spain, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020003911 (print) | LCCN 2020003912 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593134078 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593134085 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Enriquez, Mariana--Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PQ7798.15.N75 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PQ7798.15.N75 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003911

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003912

  Ebook ISBN 9780593134085

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and collage: Donna Cheng

  Cover images: Ritchard Rodriguez/Alamy (woman), CVI Textures/Alamy (stars), channarongsds/Getty Images (skull), bauhaus1000/Getty Images (flowers)

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Angelita Unearthed

  Our Lady of the Quarry

  The Cart

  The Well

  Rambla Triste

  The Lookout

  Where Are You, Dear Heart?

  Meat

  No Birthdays or Baptisms

  Kids Who Come Back

  The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

  Back When We Talked to the Dead

  Dedication

  By Mariana Enriquez

  About the Author

  Stay here while I get a curse

  To give him a goat head

  Make him watch me take his place

  Night has brought him something worse

  —Will Oldham, “A Sucker’s Evening”

  Angelita Unearthed

  My grandma didn’t like the rain, and before the first drops fell, when the sky grew dark, she would go out to the backyard with bottles and bury them halfway, with the whole neck underground; she believed those bottles would keep the rain away. I followed her around asking, “Grandma why don’t you like the rain why don’t you like it?” No reply—Grandma dodged my questions, shovel in hand, wrinkling her nose to sniff the humidity in the air. If it did eventually rain, whether it was a drizzle or a thunderstorm, she shut the doors and windows and turned up the volume on the TV to drown out the sound of wind and the raindrops on the zinc roof of the house. And if the downpour coincided with her favorite show, Combat!, there wasn’t a soul who could get a word out of her, because she was hopelessly in love with Vic Morrow.

  I just loved the rain, because it softened the dry earth and let me indulge in my obsession with digging. And boy, did I dig! I used the same shovel as Grandma, a very small one, like a child’s beach toy only made of metal and wood instead of plastic. The plot at the far end of the yard held little pieces of green glass with edges so worn they no longer cut you, and smooth stones that seemed like round pebbles or small beach rocks—what were those things doing out behind my house? Someone must have buried them there. Once, I found an oval-shaped stone the size and color of a cockroach without legs or antennae. On one side it was smooth, and on the other side some notches formed the clear features of a smiling face. I showed it to my dad, thrilled because I thought I’d found myself an ancient artifact, but he told me it was just a coincidence that the marks formed a face. My dad never got excited about anything. I also found some black dice with nearly invisible white dots. I found shards of apple-green and turquoise frosted glass, and Grandma remembered they’d once been part of an old door. I also used to play with worms, cutting them up into tiny pieces. It wasn’t that I enjoyed watching the mutilated bodies writhe around before going on their way. I thought that if I really cut up the worm, sliced it like an onion, ring by ring, it wouldn’t be able to regenerate. I never did like creepy-crawlies.

  I found the bones after a rainstorm that turned the back patch of earth into a mud puddle. I put them into a bucket I used for carrying my treasures to the spigot on the patio, where I washed them. I showed them to Dad. He said they were chicken bones, or maybe even beef bones, or else they were from some dead pet someone must have buried a long time ago. Dogs or cats. He circled back around to the chicken story because before, when he was little, my grandma used to have a coop back there.

  It seemed like a plausible explanation until Grandma found out about the little bones. She started to pull out her hair and shout, “Angelita! Angelita!” But the racket didn’t last long under Dad’s glare: he put up with Grandma’s “superstitions” (as he called them) only as long as she didn’t go overboard. She knew that disapproving look of his, and she forced herself to calm down. She asked me for the bones and I gave them to her. Then she sent me off to bed. That made me a little mad, because I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to deserve that punishment.

  But later that same night, she called me in and told me everything. It was sibling number ten or eleven, Grandma wasn’t too sure—back then they didn’t pay so much attention to kids. The baby, a girl, had died a few months after she was born, suffering fever and diarrhea. Since she was an angelita—an innocent baby, a little angel, dead before she could sin—they’d wrapped her in a pink cloth and propped her up on a cushion atop a flower-bedecked table. They made little cardboard wings for her so she could fly more quickly up to heaven, but they didn’t fill her mouth with red flower petals because her mother, my great-grandmother, couldn’t stand it, she thought it looked like blood. The dancing and singing lasted all night, and they even had to kick out a drunk uncle and revive my great-grandmother, who fainted from the heat and the crying. There was an indigenous mourner who sang Trisagion hymns, and all she charged was a few empanadas.

  “Grandma, did all this happen here?”

  “No, it was in Salavina, in Santiago. Goodness, was it hot there!”

  “But these aren’t the baby’s bones, if she died there.”

  “Yes, they are. I brought them with us when we moved. I didn’t want to just leave her, because she cried every night, poor thing. And if she cried when we wer
e close by, just imagine how she’d cry if she was all alone, abandoned! So I brought her. She was nothing but little bones by then, and I put her in a bag and buried her out back. Not even your grandpa knew. Or your great-grandma, no one. It’s just that I was the only one who heard her cry. Well, your great-grandpa heard too, but he played dumb.”

  “And does the baby cry here?”

  “Only when it rains.”

  Later I asked my dad if the story of the little angel baby was true, and he said my grandma was very old and could talk some nonsense. He didn’t seem all that convinced, though, or maybe the conversation made him uncomfortable. Then Grandma died, the house was sold, I went to live alone with no husband or children, my dad moved to an apartment in Balvanera, and I forgot all about the angel baby.

  Until she appeared in my apartment ten years later, crying beside my bed one stormy night.

  The angel baby doesn’t look like a ghost. She doesn’t float and she isn’t pale and she doesn’t wear a white dress. She’s half rotted away, and she doesn’t talk. The first time she appeared, I thought it was a nightmare and I tried to wake up. When I couldn’t do it and I started to realize she was real, I screamed and cried and pulled the sheets over my head, my eyes squeezed tight and my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear her—at that point I didn’t know she was mute. But when I came out from under there some hours later, the angel baby was still there, the remnants of an old blanket draped over her shoulders like a poncho. She was pointing her finger toward the outside, toward the window and the street, and that’s how I realized it was daytime. It’s weird to see a dead person during the day. I asked her what she wanted, but all she did was keep on pointing, like we were in a horror movie.

  I got up and ran to the kitchen to get the gloves I used for washing dishes. The angel baby followed me. And that was only the first sign of her demanding personality. I didn’t hesitate. I put the gloves on and grabbed her little neck and squeezed. It’s not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person, but a girl can’t be desperate and reasonable at the same time. I didn’t even make her cough; I just got some bits of decomposing flesh stuck to my gloved fingers, and her trachea was left in full view.

  So far, I had no idea that this was Angelita, my grandmother’s sister. I kept squeezing my eyes shut to see if she would disappear or I would wake up. When that didn’t work, I walked around behind her and I saw, hanging from the yellowed remains of what I now know was her pink shroud, two rudimentary little cardboard wings that had chicken feathers glued to them. Those should have disintegrated after all these years, I thought, and then I laughed a little hysterically and told myself that I had a dead baby in my kitchen, that it was my great-aunt and she could walk, even though judging by her size she hadn’t lived more than three months. I had to definitively stop thinking in terms of what was possible and what wasn’t.

  I asked if she was my great-aunt Angelita—since there hadn’t been time to register her with a legal name (those were different times), they always called her by that generic name. That’s how I learned that even though she didn’t speak, she could reply by nodding. So my grandmother had been telling the truth, I thought: the bones I’d dug up when I was a kid weren’t from any chicken coop, they were the little bones of Grandma’s sister.

  It was a mystery what Angelita wanted, because she didn’t do anything but nod or shake her head. But she sure did want something, and badly, because not only did she constantly keep pointing, she wouldn’t leave me alone. She followed me all over the house: she waited for me behind the curtain when I showered, she sat on the bidet anytime I was on the toilet, she stood beside the fridge while I washed dishes, and she sat beside my chair when I worked at the computer.

  I went about my life more or less normally for the first week. I thought maybe the whole thing was a hallucination brought on by stress, and that she would eventually disappear. I asked for some days off work; I took sleeping pills. But the angel baby was still there, waiting beside the bed for me to wake up. Some friends came to visit me. At first I didn’t want to answer their messages or let them in, but eventually I agreed to see them, to keep them from worrying even more. I claimed mental exhaustion, and they understood; “You’ve been working like a slave,” they told me. None of them saw the angel baby. The first time my friend Marina came to visit me, I stuck the angel in the closet. But to my horror and disgust, she escaped and sat right down on the arm of the sofa with that ugly, rotting, gray-green face of hers. Marina never knew.

  Not long after that, I took the angel baby out into the street. Nothing. Except for that one man who glanced at her in passing and then turned around and looked again and his face crumpled—his blood pressure must have dropped; or the lady who started running straight away and almost got hit by the 45 bus in Calle Chacabuco. Some people must see her, I figured, but it sure wasn’t many. To save them from the shock, when we went out together—or rather, when she followed me out and I had no choice but to let her—I used a kind of backpack to carry her (it’s gross to see her walk—she’s so little, it’s unnatural). I also bought her a bandage to use as a mask, the kind burn victims use to cover their scars. Now when people see her, they’re disgusted, but they also feel compassion and pity. They see a very sick or injured baby, but not a dead baby.

  If only Dad could see me now, I thought. He had always complained that he was going to die without grandchildren (and he did die without grandchildren, I disappointed him in that and in many other ways). I bought her toys to play with, dolls and plastic dice and pacifiers she could chew on, but she didn’t seem to like anything very much, she just kept on with that damned finger pointing south—that’s what I realized, it was always southward—morning, noon, and night. I talked to her and asked her questions, but she just wasn’t a very good communicator.

  Until one morning she turned up with a photo of my childhood home, the house where I had found her little bones in the backyard. She got it from the box where I keep old photos: disgusting, she left all the other pictures stained with her rotten flesh that peeled off, damp and slimy. Now she was pointing at the picture of the house, really insistent. “You want to go there?” I asked her, and she nodded yes. I explained that the house no longer belonged to us, that we’d sold it, and she nodded again.

  I loaded her into the backpack with her mask on and we took the 15 bus to Avellaneda. When we’re traveling, she doesn’t look out the window or around at other people, she doesn’t do anything to entertain herself; the outside world matters as much to her as the toys I bought her. I carried her sitting on my lap so she’d be comfortable, though I don’t know if it’s possible for her to be uncomfortable, or if that concept even means anything to her; I don’t know what she feels. All I know is that she isn’t evil, and that I was afraid of her at first, but I’m not anymore.

  We reached the house that used to be mine at around four in the afternoon. As always in summer, a heavy smell of the Riachuelo River and gasoline hung over Avenida Mitre, mixed with the stench of garbage. We walked across the plaza and past the Itoiz hospital, where my grandmother had died, and finally we went around the Racing stadium. Two blocks past the field we came to my old house. But what to do now that I was at the door? Ask the new owners to let me in? With what excuse? I hadn’t even thought about that. Clearly, carrying a dead baby around everywhere I went had affected my mind.

  It was Angelita who took charge of the situation, pointing her finger. We didn’t need to go inside. We could peer into the backyard over the dividing wall; that was all she wanted—to see the backyard. The two of us looked in as I held her up—the wall was pretty low, it must have been poorly made. There, where the earthen square of our backyard used to be, was a blue plastic swimming pool set into the ground. Apparently, they’d dug up all the earth to make the hole, and who knows where they’d thrown the angel baby’s bones, shaken up, lost. I felt bad for her, poor little thing, and I told her I
was really sorry, but I couldn’t fix this for her. I even told her I regretted not having dug up her bones again when the house was sold, so I could rebury them in some quiet place, or close to the family if that’s what she wanted. I mean, how hard would it have been to put them in a box or a flowerpot, and bring them home with me! I’d treated her badly and I apologized. Angelita nodded yes. I understood that she forgave me. I asked her if now she was at peace and if she would leave, if she was going to leave me alone. She shook her head no. Okay, I replied, and since her answer didn’t sit well with me, I started walking fast toward the 15 bus stop. I made her run after me on her bare little feet that, rotten as they were, left her little white bones in view.

  Our Lady of the Quarry

  Silvia lived alone in a rented apartment of her own, with a five-foot-tall pot plant on the balcony and a giant bedroom with a mattress on the floor. She had her own office at the Ministry of Education and a salary; she dyed her long hair jet black and wore Hindu shirts with sleeves wide at the wrists and silver thread that shimmered in the sun. She had the provincial last name of Olavarría and a cousin who had disappeared mysteriously while traveling around Mexico. She was our “grown-up” friend, the one who took care of us when we went out and who let us use her place to smoke weed and meet up with boys. But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed. Because Silvia always knew more: If one of us discovered Frida Kahlo, oh, Silvia had already visited Frida’s house with her cousin in Mexico, before he disappeared. If we tried a new drug, she had already overdosed on the same substance. If we discovered a band we liked, she had already gotten over being a fan of the same group. We hated that she had long, heavy, straight hair, colored with a dye we couldn’t find in any normal beauty salon. What brand was it? She probably would have told us, but we would never ask. We hated that she always had money, enough for another beer, another twenty-five grams, another pizza. How was it possible? She said that in addition to her salary she had access to her father’s account; he was rich, she never saw him, and he hadn’t recognized paternity, but he did deposit money for her in the bank. It was a lie, surely. As much a lie as when she said her sister was a model: we’d seen the girl when she came to visit Silvia and she wasn’t worth three shits, a runty little skank with a big ass and wild curls plastered with gel that couldn’t have gotten any more greasy. I’m talking low-class—that girl couldn’t dream of walking a runway.