The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  That’s what she thought during the day. But at night, with the muffled sound of her parents’ television and the copies from the archive under her bed, she saw Vanadis’s smile of twisted teeth, and thought about that video she’d never seen—which would probably be on TV any day now if Pedro had managed to sell it—and she thought she wouldn’t let that girl in her house, either, that inert girl with her black hair and ghastly smile, that girl she’d almost fallen in love with and who now appeared in her nightmares.

  * * *

  …

  Marisol’s parents’ suicide and the neighbors’ reaction—as the days passed they were calling for lynchings, or at least the execution of the girl they claimed was a murderer—was the catalyst for change. Or rather, for the migration. The kids began to leave the parks. They went in processions, in the middle of the night, through the fog: the exodus occurred in winter. As they marched through the streets, people came out onto balconies to watch them. Someone shouted an insult, but others hushed him. The withdrawal was silent. As silently as they had come, they left. They walked down the middle of the streets as if they weren’t afraid of cars. The police, out of precaution or because they didn’t know what to do, closed the main streets to traffic. It lasted several days. Pedro sent Mechi an email from São Paulo, where he was now the resident expert on the returned Argentine children (Pedro always managed to make things work out in his favor). The email said:

  I saw it all on TV. Creepy, mamita. Here everyone is going crazy, these brazucas aren’t scared at all, they’re not wimps like we are, and they want to go and see it all from up close. People are different here, super cool, you’ve got to come, they’ll change the way you think. Anyway, as I was saying, you know what this procession of kids made me think of? How in Paris they moved the cemeteries at the end of the 18th century. Really weird. Apparently the cemeteries were crammed to bursting and they were sites of infection, just filthy, and then people decided to put all the bones underground and move the cemeteries to the outskirts of the city. They moved those bones for years, at night, in carts, with black blankets on the horses so they would fit the tone, and monks singing, and candles, of course. You’ll be wondering how I know all this, and it’s just because when I had the cash to go to Europe of course I went to the Catacombs!!! And they explain it all there. I always imagined it kind of like this.

  I got pretty fixated on what you said about the Japanese who think that when there’s no more room for souls, they come back. The bones in the Catacombs are kinda like that, they ended up under there because there was no more room in the cemeteries. I don’t know, weird shit. Don’t have nightmares. Come visit me. No, better yet, stay there and tell me all about it.

  Mechi thought about the monks and the bones, and she understood what Pedro meant. The kids’ withdrawal was funereal and had something religious about it.

  The strange thing was where they went. The first group, from Rivadavia Park, set the course: First they separated, and then each column went into a different abandoned house. Three hundred kids went into the house with the palm tree on Calle Riobamba, right downtown. Another three hundred went to the corner of Igualdad, in the Cafferata neighborhood of Chacabuco Park, into a house whose pink color was fading from neglect. It had a solitary window up close to the A-frame roof that the kids left open when they went in. The neighborhood, small and newly rich, was terrified, but the police in their sentry booths on the corners didn’t know what to do, and once the kids were inside, they didn’t dare try to get them out.

  They didn’t even go with a warrant.

  They were scared. They didn’t understand how the kids had gotten into that house. The door and windows of the pink house—except that middle window—were bricked up, and the kids had still gotten in. No one could say how. People had watched them enter, but they claimed the kids hadn’t gone through the bricks, not exactly. They had just passed, as if the bricks didn’t exist.

  The leader of the Cafferata group was Vanadis, whose family had disowned her two weeks after they’d joyfully picked her up. They’d given the same argument that all the families gave when they kicked their kids out or deposited them on a courthouse doorstep, or returned them straight to the parks: This isn’t the girl we knew, this isn’t our baby. We don’t know who she is. This person looks like her, has her voice, answers to the same name, she’s the same down to the last detail, but she isn’t our daughter. Do what you want with her. We don’t want to see her ever again.

  Mechi learned about Vanadis and the pink house through the newspaper. There was a photo of the girl in the first-floor window, peering out, her mouth shut and her eyes staring straight into the camera. Mechi felt dizzy looking into those eyes, and her hands started to sweat. She wanted to see Vanadis, ask her questions, how stupid not to have done it when she’d found her on the steps of the park fountain. She wanted to talk to Vanadis even though now she was very afraid of her, because she was sure that the real Vanadis was the one in the video, a teenager murdered by potbellied men in a sordid hotel on the city’s outskirts, used and exterminated, a teenager who thought she was streetwise and took too many risks, putting her faith in the immunity her beauty provided.

  She’d seen the video on TV. Pedro had sold it successfully, and he’d let her know when it would be on. The girl’s face was clear, and it was Vanadis. And though Pedro thought that girl in the video could be alive, Mechi was sure that she wasn’t. The tattoo artist’s last words had convinced her: in the video the girl’s mouth was half-open and you could see her large, sharp, pointed teeth, those vampire teeth the tattoo artist had mentioned. Could time have ruined them? Not that much. Not like that. The reappeared Vanadis’s teeth were not just yellow: they were broken, twisted. To Mechi, that was the proof that Vanadis was dead and the girl at the pink house wasn’t her, but she still wanted to see her, wanted to talk to her—she needed to.

  The bus ride was strange. People kept their distance, avoided touching each other, as if the others were carrying some contagious disease. Mechi hadn’t told her parents where she was going. She didn’t want to worry them. She had gone out with just her keys in her pocket and told them she was going for a walk in the English quarter, the prettiest part of Villa Devoto. But what she really did was run to the avenue and take the 134. Why had she run? Lately she felt like her parents were watching her. Once, even, while she was asleep, she heard the door of her room close, as if they’d been spying on her. She thought they were a little afraid of her. It was almost time to move, to leave her childhood home again.

  The perimeter of Cafferata was being guarded: Mechi could just picture those middle-class families she’d met over the years she’d worked there, they must have gone crazy straightaway, because they were incapable of comprehending any interruption to their comfortable lives. Still, the police let her through. They were pale and trembling. They would scatter at the slightest odd signal from the kids in the house, Mechi was sure. If that happened, would they send in the army? Would they kill them all, as Mechi had seen one mother call for on TV, claiming the kids were like shells, they had nothing inside?

  Maybe. But not yet.

  Mechi stopped on the sidewalk in front of the pink house, on the side of the small window that was still open. The sun was out, it was a cold but clear winter day, with the sky a blinding light blue. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted Vanadis’s name. She vaguely heard the sound of blinds and doors moving restlessly at other houses, she even heard a policeman come closer, but she paid no attention. She stared straight at the white window, waiting.

  Vanadis’s head appeared, that face of a Central American goddess, a teenage Bianca Jagger, and she greeted Mechi with an almost imperceptible gesture. There was recognition in her dark eyes. Mechi wanted to say something, but her trembling body and pounding heart wouldn’t let her speak. She breathed deeply until she calmed down and could get words out, although her voice emerged shaky
and much higher than usual.

  “Hi, Vanadis. What are you all doing? Why did you go in there?”

  Vanadis didn’t answer. Mechi asked her how many they were, and Vanadis said a lot, that she couldn’t tell, it was dark. Mechi asked where they came from, and Vanadis said they came from many different places. She asked if Vanadis wanted to go back to her parents, and Vanadis said no, and added that none of them did. And then she said, louder and more clearly, as if she were finally answering the first question:

  “We all live up here.”

  And other kids started to appear, their faces forming a circle around Vanadis. Mechi recognized most of them, teenagers and children, runaways and abductees, living and dead.

  “Are you going to stay up there long?”

  All together, the kids replied: “In summer we’ll come down.” Mechi felt then that they weren’t children, that they formed a single organism, a complete being that moved in a herd. The hands of the policeman from the corner took hold of her shoulders and Mechi screamed, startled. She’d been about to hit him but held back when she saw it was a cop, a man around sixty years old—why didn’t they send someone younger?—who was just as scared as she was, or even much more.

  “Miss, please leave.”

  “No, I have to ask them more questions.”

  “Don’t force my hand, please.” The cop had taken her by the waist and the shoulders, and though he was an older man, he was strong, strong enough to drag her far away from the pink house.

  “Okay, I’m going, let go of me,” cried Mechi, but he didn’t, he went on dragging her. Voices started to shout from neighboring houses, requests of “Officer, get her out, leave us alone,” and some people even banged on windows. Mechi lost sight of the pink house, and with a cry of effort she wrenched free of the policeman’s embrace and ran toward Asamblea, thinking that she was going to go far away before summer arrived, before the kids came down. Maybe she’d join Pedro, get someplace where children didn’t come back from wherever it was they had gone.

  The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

  Was it a nocturnal butterfly or a moth? She had never been able to tell the difference. But one thing was sure: nighttime butterflies turned to dust in your fingers, as if they had no organs or blood, almost like the still cigarette ash in the ashtray if you barely touched it. It wasn’t gross to kill them and you could leave them on the floor, because they disintegrated in just a few days. Another thing: it wasn’t true that they immediately burned up when they got too close to heat. Someone had told her that’s what happened, they caught fire as soon as they brushed against a hot bulb, but she had seen them hit against the lamp bulb over and over, as if they enjoyed the impact, and be left unhurt. Sometimes they got bored and flew out the window. Others, it was true, died inside the floor lamp: they got tired, or maybe they gave up or their time came. Just as they did outside, they burned up slowly, fluttering against the shade until they lay still. Sometimes she got up in the middle of the night to empty the lamp of dead butterfly-moths, when the burnt smell made her nose sting and wouldn’t let her sleep. Rarely did she remember to turn out the light before going to bed.

  But one night in early spring it was another kind of burning smell that woke her up. Wrapped in the gray travel blanket she used when it was chilly, she checked the kitchen to see if she had left anything on a lit burner. It wasn’t coming from there. Nor was it the moths—she’d turned off the light that night. The smell wasn’t coming from the hallway of the building, either. She raised the blinds. Outside, there was smoke and rain. Something was burning in the rain and she could hear the fire truck siren and the murmur of some neighbors in the street, awakened in the early morning, surely with raincoats thrown over their pajamas. She heard one of them, a man with a cracked voice, say, “Poor woman.” The fire was far away, and Paula went back to bed. Later, she learned from the ever-informed doorman that it had been a fifth-floor apartment in a building around the corner that burned. There was one casualty, a paralyzed, bedridden woman who had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between her fingers. Her daughter, who took care of her—and who was fairly old herself, around sixty—had realized too late, when the smoke woke her up coughing, choking, and she couldn’t save her mother. “Poor lady, it’s an infernal habit,” said the doorman, and he added that the woman smoked a lot and never went out. Paula wanted to ask him, “How do you know the woman smoked so much, when you’ve just told me she never went out? When did you ever see her smoking then, huh?” But she kept her mouth shut because it was impossible to argue with the doorman, and because she was starting to picture how the woman on the fifth floor must have watched the flames climb up from her feet, and since she couldn’t feel anything in her legs, she must have let the blanket burn. And surely she must have thought, Why not just let the fire keep going and do its job? It must be painful, but how long could it be before a woman like her, old and with exhausted lungs, would faint? What a relief for the daughter, too.

  The doorman pulled her from that vaguely soothing world of burnt old women, bringing her back to the landing to inform her that during the week a guy was going to come through and fumigate the apartments. Paula told him great, and then she decided that if she heard the doorbell she was going to let the fumigator in. Although there weren’t that many bugs in her apartment, except for the butterfly-moths, and she was sure the poison wouldn’t kill them because they didn’t live there, they came in from the street. Nothing lived in her house, not even the plants, which had assiduously died in recent weeks, one after another. She was the only living thing in her house.

  She said goodbye to the doorman and went straight to bed. The sheets were imbued with the smell of chicken cutlets. She had made two in the oven the night before. It had been hard to wrest them out of the freezer because the plastic bag was stuck to the ice. She had to use very hot water, almost boiling, and some of the drops had burned her bare legs. It turned out to be a fruitless method, and then she tried to pry them out with a knife, and she laughed at herself through tears of self-pity, thinking that she must look like a serial killer as she stabbed at the freezer, her arm up and the knife coming down like an ice pick. Finally she extracted the cutlets, her hands numbed from cold, and put them into the oven. They burned a little, but aside from that they were barely edible because they were infused with other foul flavors: the oven leaked gas, and she hadn’t cleaned it once in the three years she’d been renting the place. So she hadn’t been able to eat them, and now she was hungry again and the apartment stank and the smell wouldn’t let her sleep and she hated it, so much that she had to cry, and she cried because of the smell, because the incense she lit to get rid of it reeked even worse, because she never remembered to buy air freshener—which also smelled terrible—and because the cigarettes must also make everything stink but she couldn’t tell because she smoked so much, and because she had never been able to have one of those clean and luminous houses that smelled of sunlight, lemons, and wood.

  She made a tent in the bed, propping up the sheet with her knees and covering her head. Underneath, the only light came from the tip of her cigarette, which trembled and seemed to rekindle when the smoke whirled around it. The sheets were all stained by ashes. Paula opened her legs, and with the index finger of her free hand she started to caress her clitoris, first in circles, then with a vertical motion, then with delicate tugs, and finally side to side. It didn’t work at all anymore; used to be she would feel the start of that shiver right away, and the heat of the blood rushing and then her finger could feel the skin of the vulva grow a little rougher, granulated, and with the great final tremor came the wetness, she really felt like she peed herself—that’s how it used to be. But for so long now nothing happened, and she rubbed to the point of irritation and pain but stopped before the blood came; she knew that blood was the only wetness she could still squeeze out of herself.

  She put the bedside lamp under the
sheets. Her inner thighs were dotted with small, superficial red spots; it looked like an irritation from heat or allergy, but it was something called keratosis, and she also had it on her arms, her hips, and a little on her ribs. The dermatologist had told her that with a lot of treatment it could get better, that it was nothing like more terrible conditions like psoriasis or eczema, but she thought it was plenty terrible, just like her yellow teeth and the blood that flowed every morning from her gums when she brushed her teeth—not a momentary bleeding, real streams of blood that dripped into the white sink. It was called periodontitis, though these days dentists used another, fancier name that she couldn’t remember now. Anyway, she preferred the truth, she preferred periodontitis. Her body was failing in many more ways that she didn’t want to think about. Who would ever love her like that, with dandruff, depression, zits on her back, cellulite, hemorrhoids, and everything dry, so dry.

  She lit another cigarette under the sheet and used the smoke to chase a butterfly that had snuck into her refuge, until it died. So you could suffocate them with smoke? What a weak and stupid animal. She let it convulse between her legs, and she saw the butterfly-moth’s legs that looked like tiny maggot-worms; for the first time she felt disgust, and she kicked it out of her bed and onto the floor. She made smoke rings inside the tent until she got bored, then decided to touch the ember to the sheet and watch as the orange-edged circle grew until it seemed dangerous, until the flame crackled and rose. Then she put out the fire on the sheet by hitting it, and the remnants of burnt cloth floated in the tent. She laughed at the small circular fires. If she poked her head out of the tent and peered into the semidarkness of her room, the burnt circles in the sheet let the lamplight through, and the beams shone onto the ceiling so it seemed to be covered in stars.