The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  That afternoon the news filtered to the media. Two teenagers had dug up Santiago Espina’s coffin using a shovel and their own hands. The grave, only a month after his burial, still didn’t have the definitive marble slab that would have made their task more difficult. But the exhumation was just the beginning. The girls had opened the casket to feed on Espina’s remains with devotion and disgust; around the grave, pools of vomit bore witness to their efforts. One of the policemen threw up too. “They left his bones clean,” he told the TV reporter, who, shaken, was speechless for the first time in his career. The girls were brought in a patrol car to the station, and there it was decided they’d be taken to a private clinic. The police said that Julieta and Mariela had never cried, or even spoken to them; they only whispered into each other’s ears and held hands the whole time. It was leaked that when the nurses at the clinic tried to bathe the girls, they resisted with such fury that one nurse ended up scratched and bitten; the girls were finally sedated and bathed in their sleep.

  Talking to them, to their families, their doctors, became a priority. But they were all silent. Espina’s family had decided not to press charges against Julieta and Mariela, in order “to put an end to this horror.” The star’s mother, it was said, went through life overloaded on tranquilizers. Stories of a previous suicide attempt by Espina couldn’t be confirmed; nor could any girlfriend be found, only lovers who hadn’t spent more than one night with him, and they had little to tell. The musicians in the band refused to talk to the press, but those who knew them said they were in shock, and, above all, disgusted. They all quit music for good. They had never had a great relationship with Santiago, they were his employees, or more like slaves who accepted his whims with resignation, out of ambition and a distant admiration.

  Fans sat sullenly at televised round tables and panels to fight with hosts and psychologists. They had decided to avoid black clothes, and they appeared sprawled in armchairs with red lips, leopard pants, shiny shirts, and nails painted red, blue, green, pink. They answered questions with monosyllables, or sometimes ironic giggles. One of them, however, cried openly when she was asked what she thought about the girls who had eaten her idol. Defiantly, she shouted, “I envy them! They understood!” And she babbled something about meat and the future, she said that Julieta and Mariela were closer to Espina than any of the rest of them, they had him in their bodies, in their blood. There was a special program on the teenage cannibal soldiers of Liberia, who believe they receive the strength of the enemies they devour, and who wear necklaces made of bones. The channel that showed it was vilified as an example of shallow bad taste. Necrophilia was spoken of as the national perversion, and the cable channels programmed Alive and Raw. Even Carlitos Páez Vilaró took part in a roundtable and found himself forced to differentiate between his anthropophagy “out of necessity” and “this madness.” Rock culture specialists and sociologists scrutinized the lyrics of Meat; some compared Espina to Charles Manson; others, horrified, denounced their ignorance and simplemindedness and raised Espina to the category of poet and visionary.

  Julieta and Mariela, meanwhile, remained in their houses in Mataderos, separated by ten blocks; they’d been forbidden to communicate. They didn’t go to school. Mariela’s father threatened the cameramen with a gun from the porch, and the media withdrew to the corner. The neighbors did talk, and they said the predictable things: good girls, slightly rebellious teenagers, what an atrocity, this can never happen again. Many of them moved away. The girls’ smiles, frozen on their TV screens and on front pages of newspapers, terrified them.

  Meanwhile, all over the country, in every internet café, the Espinosas gathered before computer screens, because the emails had started to come. No one could swear they were from Julieta and Mariela—who knew if the girls even had internet access in their isolation—but they all sensed that they were, they wanted it to be true, and they jealously guarded their secret. The emails spoke of two girls who would soon turn eighteen and would be free of their parents and doctors to play the songs of Meat in basements and garages. They talked about an unstoppable underground cult, about They Who Have Espina in their bodies. The fans waited, glitter on their cheeks, their nails painted black and their lips stained with red wine, for the message that would give them the date and place of the second coming, the map of a forbidden land. And they listened to the last song on Meat (the one where Espina whispers, “If you are hungry, eat of my flesh. If you are thirsty, drink from my eyes”), dreaming of the future.

  No Birthdays or Baptisms

  He was always around, the kind of acquaintance who turned up at parties although no one knew who invited him, but I only became friends with him that summer when all my other friends decided to become assholes—otherwise known as the summer when I decided to hate all my friends.

  He was different from the others. He never slept, same as me, and our nocturnal connection united us, at first by chance in desolate chat rooms at four in the morning, when our screen names always appeared, the only ones awake at that hour wanting to talk: zedd and crazyjane. He had chosen the last name of a legendary underground New York director he adored, in spite of the fact that he’d never seen a single one of the man’s movies. I had chosen mine from a Yeats poem. I think we became friends just because he knew immediately who Crazy Jane was, and I knew who Zedd was.

  Then we started to meet up at bars. Both of us hated the people who got drunk to the point of vomiting or acting ridiculous and making pathetic confessions, so we would sip our whiskeys slowly and criticize everyone else. I never met anyone who smoked as much as him: he’d go through three packs in one night.

  Nico (Zedd’s real name) had studied film for fifteen minutes and hated everything, but thanks to a preposterous job (dog walking), he’d managed to save enough money to buy a camera. That summer, he still hadn’t decided what to do with it. But in one of our talks at the bar, while some awful band played (everything seemed awful to us that summer), Nico came up with a way to make money with the camera.

  The following Monday his ad started to run in the newspaper. It said: “Nicolás. Weird film projects. I don’t do birthdays, baptisms, or family parties. Ideal for voyeurs. I don’t do anything illegal or work for cuckolds. Call…” I told him it wasn’t likely anyone would call, or would even understand what he was trying to say with the ad. He replied that weird or disturbed people would understand. He was sure. And he was right.

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t tell me when he got his first jobs, but he called me as soon as he had a few videos ready. We shut ourselves in to watch them in his one-room studio, which had two bookshelves full of movies on VHS and DVD meticulously organized in alphabetical order, and a mountain of books with paragraphs underlined on every page. Any normal person would have suffocated in his apartment from all the smoke. But for every three packs he went through, I smoked two. All my efforts to cut down to ten cigarettes a day had been in vain. All my willpower had evaporated that summer, and I couldn’t manage to meet goals as simple as sleeping at night and eating at least twice a day. Since I lived alone, there was no one around to point out my depression or try to cheer me up. I hadn’t had such a good time in years.

  Most of the videos were of couples fucking. The strange thing was that no one (or almost no one) made sure Nico didn’t keep a copy. I guess that would be asking too much, and plus there was no way to be sure, and probably they didn’t care. Nico explained to me that they got extra turned on by being filmed, they treated him like he was a porn director. They didn’t want to film their amateur movie themselves and keep it private as a couple. They wanted someone else to do it—that was part of the excitement. He showed me a few of the videos, but they were boring. Watching people fuck is boring. Neither Nico nor I could understand why the pornography business rakes in millions.

  Another video was of women in high heels walking down the street. Couldn’t they find t
hat in sex shops that sold fetish videos? Well, Nico explained, you could find women in high heels, of course, but these guys asked him to film women walking down specific streets in the city: they didn’t want generic heels on anonymous walks. Another video was, precisely, a tour of the city; that was a request from a phobic girl who hadn’t been able to leave her house in six months. He told me that when he gave her the film, the girl had hugged him, in tears. He’d never seen a person so pale, he said.

  Now comes the most interesting one, he said then, and he placed in the tray a CD that he’d titled “Girls” in black marker. He explained that a man had hired him to film girls out in the open, in parks, in the street, on school playgrounds. He only wanted them under twelve but over six, and exclusively blond ones. Nico didn’t ask why or what for, but it wasn’t hard to imagine, and that’s why he’d had to pretend to be sitting on a park bench with the camera on his knees, waiting, when in reality it was on and he was trying to stealthily focus on the little girls as they played. Nico didn’t have a fixed price for filming (generally he negotiated with his customers), but he wasn’t surprised when the presumed pedophile offered him three thousand pesos. Really, Nico became convinced the guy was a pedophile when he announced the figure he was willing to pay.

  He turned in the video, he told me, and the next day the man called back, displeased. At first he didn’t know or couldn’t explain why, until finally, after a lot of hemming and hawing, he said only that the video didn’t have enough skin. Nico replied that he thought he had the solution, and he asked the man to trust him; the guy committed to paying double if he was satisfied. We watched the video: Nico had chosen a warm-water pool at a club, a swim class for girls between six and nine years old. There were several blond ones: it was a club in Barrio Norte. Through the steam, the girls trotted along the edge of the pool, and the zoom focused in on their wet swimsuits hugging pubic areas, droplets sliding over their little asses or down between their legs. One of the girls caressed the hair of another who, in a fit of childish affection, kissed her effusively and then rested her head on her friend’s shoulder. In the pool you could see kicking legs, little asses swimming away through the choppy water; at the poolside, some of the girls adjusted their suits when the straps slipped down and left their flat chests almost bare.

  “Did he like it?” I wanted to know.

  Nico smiled, and in reply he told me he’d received six thousand pesos, with a tip of five hundred more.

  * * *

  —

  When Nico called me one terrible, freezing day while I was trying to study something tedious, I could tell from his tone that this was something urgent related to his job; it was the only thing that ever made him sound happy.

  A woman had called him two days earlier, he said. She hadn’t wanted to explain anything over the phone, but that didn’t seem strange to him: requests for erotic videos were always like that. He went to her house with no great expectations. But right away he realized his intuition had failed him. There was something about the woman, her curved posture, her meticulous but overdone makeup that didn’t hide the lack of sleep or the circles under her eyes, and above all the fact that she offered him tea. Nymphomaniacs never made tea, he explained. Always coffee, or in the evening a glass of red wine.

  The woman started to explain what she wanted with almost didactic calm: Nico guessed she was a teacher, not just because of how she laid out the facts, but because in spite of how she wrung her hands and tried to hold back tears, she had looked disapprovingly at his dyed hair, and she’d paused for a second, confused, at the black polish Nico used on his nails.

  Her daughter had started to hallucinate, the woman explained. Not long ago. The girl had always said that she saw things, but the mother had never believed her. She’d always been a normal girl. Shy, but normal. She didn’t have many friends, but the family had moved a lot in recent years and Marcela, the daughter, hadn’t had time to make friends.

  They had tried psychiatric treatment with no results. The woman was desperate. The girl refused to accept that what she saw in her hallucinations wasn’t real. No one had been able to convince her otherwise. So her husband had had an idea (Nico knew the bit about the husband was a lie: no man would invite a stranger in to witness the horror his daughter had become; plus, there was a reason he wasn’t present for the conversation). They would film her while she was hallucinating, and that’s how they would prove to her, when she saw the tape, that she was alone, screaming at the walls. It had to be VHS, because Marcela was suspicious and she wouldn’t believe them if they used more modern and sophisticated formats; she would say they had manipulated the image to fool her. That was no problem, Nico had the equipment. When Nico said yes, he would do it, the woman looked at him resolutely and tried to hide her emotion. With a certain ceremoniousness, she invited him upstairs to her daughter’s room.

  Nico admitted he was expecting something else. A girl tied to the bed, or drugged, even a padded room. But, he said, Marcela was wearing an enormous sweater, like a man’s except it was a shade of old rose, and jeans several sizes too big. There was no telling if she was fat or thin. Her head was shaved—the wisest course of action after the prolonged and systematic yanking out of her hair that had started along with the hallucinations, the mother had explained earlier. On her cheek was a thin scar, a faint silvery line. In the room he saw a bra tossed on the bed, several dolls sitting in a row on a wooden shelf, a TV, several photos of Marcela in frames and others tacked to the wall: Marcela in the snow wearing a blue wool hat, Marcela receiving a diploma, Marcela in front of the altar, her expression frightened, at her First Communion. She wasn’t hallucinating just then. When the mother excused herself and left Nico alone with her, Marcela came closer. Nico told me she was wearing a cheap and old-fashioned perfume that reminded him of aunts and mothers. She told him softly, “I know why she brought you here. You’ll see it’s true. I never lie.” Then she smiled at him, and Nico believed it all. When, a little later, she came even closer to give him a light, Nico got a big whiff of the smell that the spinster perfume was meant to hide. It was on her hands; they stank of vaginal fluids, blood, sex, dead fish rotting in the sun.

  * * *

  —

  She didn’t hallucinate that day, and the mother asked Nico if he had a cellphone. Obviously, Nico did. The woman had called him on a cellphone, it was the number in the ad. She was a little overwhelmed, poor thing. In any case, what she wanted to know was if she could count on him full-time in the coming days. He promised not to take any other jobs, but he asked her for more money. We spent the next day waiting for the call together, in his studio, the phone on the bed, staring at it as if we were expecting a call from a kidnapper who had taken the person we loved most. We tried to reconstruct Marcela’s story with the clues we had. Catholic school. Hallucinations since childhood. Something about religion/taboo/sex, hence the compulsive masturbation. The self-harm: I told him I thought Marcela always used long-sleeved shirts or sweaters because, just as she’d cut her face, she must be cutting her body. Marcela seemed so intense to us; I think we envied her. She was so different from everyone else, everyone we felt contempt for or fled from, those people who held no mystery, with their boring problems and their cowardice. We went back to the story the mother had told. We knew without anyone telling us that Marcela was an only child. We’d bet money she was a virgin.

  The mother called Nico at seven in the evening. I knew I couldn’t go with him, and I could barely stand the tension of those incredibly long three hours during which he filmed Marcela from every possible angle. Later on we watched her together, her shaved head banging against walls while she pulled off her enormous sweater (and there were scars on her arms, they looked like a map or a spiderweb), until the moment when, facedown, she stuck fingers in her vagina and ass, screaming “Enough!” and “No!” We were silent when the tape reached the end and the lines came back on the screen, gray,
white, and black. Nico admitted that, for a moment, he had expected and hoped to see on the tape the thing Marcela saw. He had believed such a thing was possible. He would have liked it to be possible, to be real.

  * * *

  —

  Marcela refused to believe the tape showed her alone. After she saw it, the mother said, it had been very difficult to calm her down. This time, the mother didn’t offer Nico any tea. She just said that Marcela wanted him to film her again and she hadn’t been able to refuse, but she couldn’t pay him any more. Nico said he would do it for free. The mother didn’t seem sufficiently grateful.

  When Nico filmed Marcela the first time, the mother had run from the room right at the moment when her daughter pulled down her pants. After the masturbation, Marcela had climbed into bed to sleep, completely naked. Her body was beautiful in spite of the scars. Nico had filmed her as she slept, and then he’d cut that part out before turning in the tape. Her sunken stomach, almost free of scars, her pointed breasts, without nipples (she’d cut them off), pulsing faintly to her heartbeat, her soft thighs covered in golden fuzz, their tautness interrupted by brutal scars that looked like seams, and the astonishing web on her arms that bore witness to their butchering.