The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  Her mother gave her a slap that could well have made Josefina cry, except that she was used to those nervous wallops that ended in sobs and hugs and “My baby, my baby, if anything ever happened to you.” Like what? Josefina had thought. She’d never considered jumping into the well. No one was going to push her. She just wanted to see if the water would reflect her face the way wells always did in fairy tales—her face like a blond-haired moon in the black water.

  Josefina had fun that afternoon at The Woman’s house. Her mother, grandmother, and sister, sitting on stools, had let Josefina nose around among the offerings and knickknacks piled up in front of an altar; Aunt Clarita waited discreetly outside in the yard, smoking. The Woman talked, or prayed, but Josefina didn’t remember anything strange—no chanting, no clouds of smoke, no placing of hands on her family. The Woman just whispered to them low enough that Josefina couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she didn’t care. On the altar she found baby booties, fresh and dried bouquets of flowers, photographs in color and black-and-white, crosses adorned with red cords, a lot of rosaries—plastic, wood, silver-plated metal. There was also the ugly figure of the saint her grandmother prayed to, San La Muerte, Saint Death—a skeleton with its scythe. The figure was repeated in different sizes and materials, sometimes in rough approximations, others carved in detail, with deep black eye sockets and a broad grin.

  After a while Josefina got bored and The Woman told her, “Little one, why don’t you rest in the armchair, go on now.” She did, and she fell asleep immediately, sitting up. When she woke it was nighttime, and Aunt Clarita had gotten tired of waiting for them. They had to walk back on their own. Josefina remembered how, before they left, she’d tried to go back and look into the well, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was dark and the white paint shone like the bones of San La Muerte; it was the first time she felt fear. They returned to Buenos Aires a few days later. That first night back in their house, Josefina hadn’t been able to sleep when Mariela turned off the light.

  * * *

  —

  Mariela slept soundly in the little bed across from her, and now the night-light was on Josefina’s bedside table; she didn’t feel tired until the glowing hands of the Hello Kitty clock showed three or four in the morning. Mariela would be hugging a doll, and Josefina would watch its plastic eyes shine humanly in the half dark. Or she’d hear a rooster crow in the middle of the night and remember—but who had told her?—that at that hour of the night a rooster’s crow was a sign that someone was going to die. And that had to mean her, so she took her own pulse—she’d learned how by watching her mother, who always checked the girls’ heartbeats when they had a fever. If her pulse was too fast, she’d get so scared she wouldn’t even dare call her parents to come and save her. If it was slow, she kept her hand against her chest to be sure her heart didn’t stop. Sometimes she fell asleep counting, eyes on the second hand. One night, she discovered that the blot of plaster on the ceiling just over her bed—a repair after a leak—was shaped like a head with horns: the face of the devil. That time she’d told Mariela, but her sister, laughing, said that stains were like clouds, you could see all kinds of shapes if you looked at them too long. And Mariela didn’t see any devil; to her it looked like a bird on two legs. One night Josefina heard the neighing of a horse or donkey and her hands started to sweat at the thought that it had to be the Mule Spirit, the ghost of a dead woman who’d been turned into a mule and couldn’t rest, and who went out to gallop at night. That one she’d told her father; he’d kissed her head and told her those stories were rubbish, and that afternoon she’d heard him yelling at her mother: “Tell her to stop feeding the girl all that bullshit! I don’t want your mother filling up her head with those superstitions, the ignorant old bag!” Her grandmother denied telling her any stories, and she wasn’t lying. Josefina had no clue where she’d gotten those ideas, she just felt like she knew, the same way she knew she couldn’t put her hand to a hot stove without burning herself, or that in the fall she needed to wear a jacket over her shirt because it got cool in the evenings.

  Years later, sitting across from one of her many psychologists, she had tried to explain and rationalize her fears one by one: what Mariela said about the plaster could be true, and maybe she had heard her grandmother tell those stories, they were part of the Corrientes mythology, and maybe one of the neighbors had a chicken coop, maybe the mule belonged to the junk sellers who lived around the corner. But she didn’t believe any of those explanations. Her mother would go to the sessions too, and explain how she and her own mother were “anxious” and “phobic” and they certainly could have passed on those fears to Josefina; but they were recovering, and Mariela no longer suffered from night terrors, and so “Jose’s issue” was surely just a matter of time.

  But time dragged on for years, and Josefina hated her father because one day he took off and left her alone with those women who, after years of hiding away inside, now planned vacations and weekend outings, while Josefina felt faint when she reached the front door; she hated that she’d had to leave school, and that her mother had to take her at the end of the year to sit for exams; she hated that the only kids who visited her house were Mariela’s friends; she hated how they talked about “Jose’s issue” in quiet voices, and above all she hated spending days in her room reading stories that at night turned into nightmares. She’d read the story of Anahí and the ceibo flower, and in her dreams a woman had appeared wrapped in flames; she’d read about the potoo bird, and now before she fell asleep she would hear its call, which was really the voice of a dead girl crying near her window. She couldn’t go to La Boca because it seemed to her that the river’s black surface hid submerged bodies that would surely try to rise up as soon as she got near its edge. She never slept with a leg uncovered, because she just knew she would feel a cold hand touching it. Josefina’s mother left her with Grandma Rita when she had to go out; if she was half an hour late Josefina would start to vomit, because the delay could mean only that her mother had died in a car crash. She ran past the portrait of the dead grandfather she’d never met—she could feel his black eyes following her—and she never went near the room that held her mother’s old piano, because she knew that when no one else was playing it, the devil took a turn.

  * * *

  —

  From the sofa, her hair so greasy it always looked wet, Josefina watched the world she was missing go by. She hadn’t even attended her sister’s fifteenth birthday party, and she knew Mariela was grateful. She went from one psychiatrist to another for years, and certain pills had allowed her to go back to school, but only until the third year, when she’d discovered that there were other voices in the school’s hallways, beneath the hum of kids planning parties and benders. Then there was the time she’d been in a bathroom stall and seen bare feet walking over the tiles, and a classmate told her it must be the suicidal nun who’d hung herself from the flagpole years before. It was useless for her mother and the principal and the school counselor to tell her that no nun had ever killed herself in the schoolyard; Josefina was already having nightmares about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Christ’s open chest that bled and drenched her face in blood, about Lazarus, pale and rotting as he rose from a tomb among the rocks, and about angels that tried to rape her.

  And so she’d stayed home, and went back to taking exams at the end of each year with a doctor’s excuse. Meanwhile, Mariela was coming home at dawn in cars that screeched to a halt in front of the house, and she heard the kids’ shouts at the end of a night of adventure that Josefina couldn’t even begin to imagine. She envied Mariela even when her mother was yelling at her about a phone bill that was impossible to pay; if only Josefina had someone to talk to. Because her group therapy sessions sure didn’t work; all those kids with real problems—absent parents or violent childhoods—who talked about drugs and sex and anorexia and heartbreak. But she kept going anyway, always in a taxi there and back�
��and the taxi driver always had to be the same one, and he had to wait for her at the door because she got dizzy and her pounding heart wouldn’t let her breathe if she was ever left alone in the street. She hadn’t gotten on a bus since that trip to Corrientes, and the only time she’d been in the subway she had screamed until she lost her voice, and her mother had to get her out at the next stop. That time, her mother had shaken her and dragged her up the stairs, but Josefina didn’t care, she just had to get out of that confinement any way possible, away from the noise and that snaking darkness.

  * * *

  —

  The new pills—sky blue, practically experimental, shiny like they’d just come from the lab—went down easy, and in just a little while they managed to make the sidewalk seem less like a minefield. They even let her sleep without dreams she could remember, and when she turned out the bedside lamp one night, she didn’t feel the sheets grow cold as a tomb. She was still afraid, but she could go to the newsstand alone without the certainty she would die on the way. Mariela seemed more pleased than Josefina was. She suggested they get coffee together, and Josefina got up the nerve to go—in a taxi there and back, of course. That afternoon she’d been able to talk to her sister like never before, and she surprised herself by making plans to go to the movies (Mariela promised to leave halfway through if necessary), and even confessing that maybe she wanted to go to college, as long as there weren’t too many people in the classrooms and she could stay close to the doors or windows. Mariela hugged her unabashedly, and when she did she knocked one of the mugs to the floor, where it broke right in half. The waiter picked up the pieces with a smile; and why wouldn’t he? Mariela was so beautiful, with her wispy blond hair hanging over her face, her full lips always damp, and her eyes lightly lined in black so the green of her irises would hypnotize all who looked at her.

  They went out several more times for coffee—they never made it to the movies—and one of those afternoons Mariela brought along the brochures for different majors she thought might appeal to Josefina: anthropology, sociology, literature. But she seemed jittery, and it wasn’t the same nervousness of their first outings, when she’d had to be prepared to call an emergency taxi—or, in the worst case, an ambulance—to bring Josefina back home or to the hospital. She pushed her long blond hair behind her ears and lit a cigarette.

  “Jose,” she said. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember when we went to Corrientes? You must have been six years old, I was eight…”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, do you remember that we went to a witch? Mom and Grandma wanted to go because they were like you, they were afraid all the time, and they wanted her to cure them.”

  Josefina was now listening intently. Her heart was pounding fast, but she breathed deeply, dried her hands on her pants, and tried to concentrate on what her sister was saying, like her psychiatrist had advised her to do: “When the fear comes,” she’d said, “pay attention to something else. Anything else. Look at what the person next to you is reading. Read billboards, or count how many red cars go by in the street.”

  “And I remember the witch said they could go back if it happened to them again. Maybe you could go. Now that you’re better. I know it’s crazy, I’m as bad as Grandma with her small-town superstitious bullshit. But they got over it, right?”

  “Mariela, I can’t travel. You know I can’t.”

  “What if I go with you? I can do it, seriously. We’ll plan it really well.”

  “No way. I can’t.”

  “Okay. Well, think about it. What do I know? But I’ll help you, for real.”

  * * *

  —

  The morning she tried to leave the house to go register for college, Josefina found that the stretch between the door and the taxi was insurmountable. Before she could put one foot on the sidewalk, her knees were trembling, and she was already crying. It had been several days since she’d first noticed a stalling and even a reversal in the pills’ effect. She’d gone back to feeling it was impossible to fill up her lungs, or more like she paid obsessive attention to every inhalation, as if she had to oversee the entrance of air for the system to work, as if she were giving herself mouth-to-mouth resuscitation just to stay alive. Once again she was paralyzed at the slightest change in the placement of objects in her room; once again she had to turn on the bedside light before she could sleep, and now also the TV and the ceiling lamp, because she couldn’t bear a single shadow. She expected every symptom—she recognized them as they appeared—but for the first time she felt something else beneath the resignation and despair. She was angry. She was also exhausted, but she didn’t want to go back to bed and try to control her shaking and her pounding heart, or drag herself to the sofa in pajamas to imagine the rest of her life, a future of psychiatric hospitals or private nurses. Because she couldn’t resort to suicide—she was so afraid of dying!

  But she did start thinking about Corrientes and The Woman. And about what life had been like in her house before that trip. She remembered her grandmother crying and kneeling beside the bed to pray the storm would stop, because she was afraid of the flashing lightning, the thunder, even the rain. She remembered how her mother stared out the window with wide eyes every time the street flooded, and how she shouted that they were all going to drown if the water didn’t stop rising. She remembered how Mariela had never wanted to go out and play with the neighborhood kids, not even when they came over to get her, how she’d hugged her dolls as if afraid someone would steal them. She remembered how once a week her father had taken her mother to the psychiatrist, and how she always came back half-asleep and went straight to bed. And she even remembered Doña Carmen, who’d taken care of running errands and cashing pension checks for her grandmother, who didn’t want to—who couldn’t, Josefina now knew—leave the house. Doña Carmen had been dead for ten years now, two more than her grandmother, and after the trip to Corrientes she’d only come over for tea, because all the isolation and terror had ended. For them. Because, for Josefina, they were just beginning.

  What had happened in Corrientes? Had The Woman forgotten to “cure” her? But there’d been no need to cure her of anything, because Josefina wasn’t afraid. But then, a little while later when she’d begun to suffer from the same thing as the others, why hadn’t they taken her back to The Woman? Didn’t they love her? And what if Mariela was wrong? Josefina began to understand that her anger was the end, that if she didn’t hold on to the anger and let it carry her to a long-distance bus, to The Woman, she would never come out of that isolation, and that it was worth dying to try.

  She waited up one dawn for Mariela, and made her a cup of coffee to clear her head.

  “Mariela, let’s go. I want to do it.”

  “Where?”

  Josefina was afraid her sister would back out, withdraw her offer, but then she realized Mariela was slow to understand because she was a little drunk. “To Corrientes, to see the witch.”

  Mariela looked at her, suddenly completely lucid.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I thought about it. I’ll take a lot of pills and sleep the whole way there. If things go bad…you give me more. They don’t do anything. Worst case, I’ll sleep a whole lot.”

  * * *

  —

  Josefina boarded the bus practically asleep; she’d waited for it sitting next to her sister on a bench, snoring, her head resting on her bag. Mariela had looked frightened when she saw her take five pills with a sip of 7UP, but she didn’t say anything. And it worked, because Josefina woke up at the Corrientes terminal, an acid taste filling her mouth and her head pounding. Her sister hugged her during the entire taxi ride to their aunt and uncle’s house, and Josefina tried to stop her teeth from chattering so hard she thought they’d break. She went straight to Aunt Clarita’s bedroom—their aunt was expecting them—and s
he wouldn’t accept food or drink or visits from relatives. She could barely open her mouth to swallow the pills, her jaws hurt, and she couldn’t forget the flash of malice and panic in her mother’s eyes when she’d told her she was going to look for the witch, or how she’d said, “You know full well it’s pointless,” in a triumphant voice. Mariela had shouted at her, “You evil goddamn bitch,” and wouldn’t listen to any reasoning. Locked in the room with Josefina, she stayed awake all night without a word, smoking and picking out light pants and shirts for the Corrientes heat. Josefina was already drugged when they left for the terminal, but she was conscious enough to notice that her mother hadn’t come out of her room to see them off.

  Aunt Clarita told them The Woman was still living in the same house, but she was very old and didn’t attend the public anymore. Mariela insisted: they’d come to Corrientes just to see her, and they weren’t going to leave until they did. The fear in Clarita’s eyes was the same one she’d seen in her mother’s, Josefina realized. And she also understood her aunt wasn’t going to go with them, so she squeezed Mariela’s arm to interrupt her shouting (“But what the hell is wrong with you? Why won’t you help either? Just look at her!”) and she whispered, “Let’s go alone.” For the three blocks to The Woman’s house—which felt like miles—Josefina thought about that “Just look at her,” and she got angry at her sister. Josefina could be pretty too if her hair weren’t falling out, if she didn’t have those patches above her forehead where her scalp showed through; she could have those long, strong legs if she were capable of walking at least around the block; she would know how to put on makeup if she had somewhere to go and someone to go with; her hands would be beautiful if she didn’t chew her nails down to the cuticles; her skin would be golden like Mariela’s if the sun touched it more often. And her eyes wouldn’t always be red and sunken if she could only sleep, or distract herself with something other than TV and the internet.