The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  The filmed tour of Marcela’s naked body lasted over half an hour. Nico told me he would have liked to lie down beside her, but he held back. Instead, dazed, he had left the room to go find the mother. He knocked shyly on her bedroom door: through the crack he could see her lying on the double bed, facedown. The mother got up and composed herself before walking him to the door, but she didn’t say a word to him, or even look him in the eyes. Nico told her he would bring the video as soon as possible, but not even then did she reply.

  On the next visit it was the father who received him. I’d imagined a shy, timorous man. But Nico told me that, somehow, he’d looked more like a cop or a soldier. We were both wrong; he was just your average physical therapist. He seemed more open to conversation than his wife had been. He served coffee, and, running his hand through his graying hair, he contributed a few more valuable details, though they were surely wrong. Marcela had always had a lot of imagination, and he felt guilty for having encouraged her. She’d always played with invisible friends. But it had never been a problem until she got to high school and started to withdraw more and more, and she never wanted to go to parties, or spend the night at classmates’ houses, or go dancing, much less meet boys. He said he was a modern father, he’d assumed it was a phase and let it go. After all, Marcela had always done well in school. The bigger problems had begun just a year before, and he couldn’t think of any trigger, no traumatic event that would explain it. His daughter’s breakdown was a mystery to him.

  Neither of the parents, Nico pointed out to me, ever mentioned the mutilations or the masturbation. It was as if they were talking about a minor problem, like they’d found a marijuana cigarette on their daughter’s nightstand. The second video also ended with a long discovery of Marcela’s body, slender and destroyed. Same as in the first, the camera didn’t record the existence of that being she claimed to see when she hallucinated.

  * * *

  —

  There were no more videos, but there was another phone call. By then, Nico had pointed out Marcela’s house as we drove by, a simple façade: garage, side door, and large window, brick walls and wooden details. It was the father who called: the mother, Nico thought, was having a breakdown of her own. He said his daughter didn’t want another film session, but she did want to talk to Nico.

  She didn’t say much. She had him sit down. It was a strange day at the end of October, humid, almost hot. It was the first time Marcela hadn’t worn long sleeves, and her scars were in full view. They weren’t ugly: they were surprisingly symmetrical, as if she had used her skin as a canvas, or as wood she worked with a chisel. Her hair was growing out, a blond fuzz that shone under the artificial lamplight, because she never raised the blinds. The TV was still off, and the childhood photos Nico had seen before were gone.

  Marcela spoke slowly and without looking at him, shy but determined, as if she had to solve an urgent and unpleasant matter. She told him he was the only person who had believed her, and that it was a shame he hadn’t been able to see. She’d thought that Nico was the one, the chosen one, but she’d been wrong. She told him she didn’t want to do those things to herself, but lately she couldn’t help it. And she wanted to see the videos of her naked body. Nico started when he heard that, and he thought about asking her not to tell her parents. But she reassured him: It hadn’t bothered her that he filmed her. She just wanted to see.

  “I’ve never seen my body,” she explained. “I shower with my eyes closed. I change clothes with my eyes closed.”

  “But when you cut yourself…?”

  “I don’t cut myself. He cuts me. While I’m asleep.”

  Then she asked him to leave because she had something to do. Nico decided then that he was never going to give her that video to watch, and that he would never go back to that house.

  We barely ever talked about Marcela again. I thought Nico had fallen in love with her, and that he was a coward for not trying to see her again, but I probably would have done the same thing. We stopped meeting up as often: being together was being with Marcela, and neither of us wanted to have her always between us, naked and ravaged. I went back to my ex-friends, but I never told them anything: one must maintain certain loyalties. I asked him once, in one of our no-longer-habitual chats, if he still had the videos. He said yes. He asked me if I wanted them. I said no. He assured me that he was going to throw them out that very night. I don’t know if he did. I never asked.

  Kids Who Come Back

  When she started the job at the Chacabuco Park Development and Participation Center, which was just under the highway, Mechi thought she would never get used to the constant shaking above her head, a muffled sound that combined the speeding cars, the vibration of the asphalt joints, the efforts of the pillars. It seemed to throb, and Mechi sat right beneath it in a perfectly square office she shared with two other women, Graciela and Maria Laura, both employees with much more experience, both charged with attending the public, something Mechi didn’t know how to do and didn’t want to. But as the months passed she did start to grow accustomed to the highway over her head, and she even came to recognize different vehicles: when a large truck passed, it was like the ceiling received blows from a hammer, or like a giant were walking over the office; buses produced a slow whistle, and cars were a slight, beating hum. The rhythm of the traffic accompanied her work and gave her the feeling of being cloistered, or in an aquarium, and somehow it helped her.

  Mechi’s silent work kept her isolated. Her task was to maintain and update the archive of lost and disappeared children in the city of Buenos Aires, kept in the largest file cabinet in the office, which was part of the Council on the Rights of Children and Teens. Not even she was clear yet on the bureaucratic networks of councils and centers and agencies that they belonged to, and sometimes she felt hazy on who exactly she was working for; but in her ten years as a city government employee, this was the first time she had liked her job. Since she’d taken over—almost two years before—the archive had received lavish praise. And that was in spite of the fact that it had a merely documentary value: the important files, the ones that mobilized police and investigators to follow up clues about the kids, were in police departments and prosecutors’ offices. Her archive was more useless, a sort of constantly expanding report without the capacity to inspire action. Although it was, on the other hand, open to the public: sometimes relatives came in to go over the archive and see if some loose thread would allow them to put together the puzzle of where their lost children were. Or they came back in to add new suspicions, new details. Among the most desperate were those referred to in the office jargon as “victims of parental kidnapping.” Fathers or mothers whose spouse or partner had fled with the baby they shared. Usually, it was the mothers who ran. And the men came in often, distraught: for them, time was essential, because babies’ appearances change very quickly. As soon as the first personality traits emerged, hair grew out, and eye color was defined, that baby, frozen in time in the photo on the “Missing” posters, would disappear once again.

  In all the time Mechi had been in charge of the archive, no child kidnapped by a mother or father had ever reappeared.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to look the missing children’s families in the face. When they came into the office, if they wanted to see their file, Graciela or Maria Laura asked Mechi for it and then they would hand it over to the relatives. The system was the same if people came in to give new information: they left it with or told it to one of the other two women, who then passed it on to Mechi, and she added it to the correct file—or rather files, one digital and the other paper. Sometimes, especially when Graciela and Maria Laura got caught up in their long personal conversations, or went out to eat and took their time coming back, Mechi opened the files and daydreamed about the children. She even had a separate file cabinet where she kept the solved cases, those of the kids who had reappeared. The ones who were found were almost
always teenagers and usually girls: kids who’d said they were going out dancing, and then didn’t come back. Jessica, for example. She lived on the corner of Piedrabuena and Chilavert, in Villa Lugano. The house shown in the photos was squat and had a dirty white façade. It didn’t advertise what went on inside. Six kids, a single mother, and Jessica’s room, bare walls of unfinished bricks, a foam mattress over boards (technically, she didn’t have a bed), and her section of the wall—because she shared the room with two siblings—decorated with photos of Guille, her hero. Pictures of Guille torn from magazines, or more or less whole posters, covered in pink kisses, and “I love yous” written in red marker. Jessica always met up with other girls in Plaza Sudamérica, recently refitted with new iron benches (so it would be uncomfortable to sit for very long, or, even worse, sleep on them) and police guards. People said she wasn’t a troublemaker, she’d never even been caught smoking a cigarette. But one day she ran away, and her desperate family went out to search the neighborhood and put up flyers; they made sure to leave the photocopies of Jessica’s picture at all the taxi stands, because taxi drivers know everyone. Jessica reappeared two months later: she’d been staying at a friend’s house after an argument with her mom, who had yelled at her, “If you keep this up, I’ll ship you off to Comodoro Rivadavia.” That was where Jessica’s father lived. When the girl reappeared, Mechi sat looking at her photo—her hair dyed a deep shade of red, her lips glossed, and earrings shaped like music clefs—and she thought she should tell the kid—Jessica was fourteen years old—that surely Comodoro Rivadavia was much better than Villa Lugano, and maybe her dad would get her a bed that didn’t look like a giant sponge. But Jessica wanted to stay in Buenos Aires so she could go to all of Guille’s concerts there; Guille never went to Patagonia.

  There were many Jessicas, because most of the missing kids were teenage girls. They took off with an older guy, or got scared by a pregnancy. They fled from a drunken father, from a stepfather who raped them in the early morning, from a brother who masturbated onto their backs at night. They went out to the club and got drunk and lost a couple of days, and then were afraid to come home. There were also the crazy girls, who heard something snap in their heads the day they decided to go off their medications. And the ones who were taken, the kidnapped girls who disappeared in prostitution rings, never to resurface, or to resurface dead, or as murderers of their captors, or as suicide victims on the Paraguayan border, or dismembered in a Mar del Plata hotel.

  * * *

  …

  Mechi thought her meticulousness in maintaining the archive, her serious interest in the missing kids, must be connected to Pedro, one of her few friends. She had met him about five years before, when she was still working right downtown in an office near Plaza de Mayo. She’d get distracted looking out the window at the marches and protests, and practically her only entertainment—her only strong emotion—came when some manifestation ended in repression, and the sirens, screams, and the burning smell of tear gas reached her window. Some afternoons Mechi decided to have a beer before going back to her apartment. She didn’t much care for any of the bars in the area. At the end of the day, around six in the evening, they filled up with young executives, well-paid administrative employees, and secretaries in expensive clothes, who all went to happy hours and ordered imported beers and tried to call attention to themselves, to meet each other, and, if possible, take someone they liked to bed. No one tried to talk to Mechi. She was too skinny and short, she wore platform boots in summer, and she never wore makeup. She was weird. Nor did she expect any of the clean-shaven guys wearing suits and cologne to treat her to an Iguana beer; Mechi easily accepted the reality of a situation, and wasn’t one to agonize over it. Those bars weren’t her place. But she liked to get home a little buzzed, to walk down the avenue while the sun sank and it became very easy to ignore what went on around her. Sometimes she even brought a book to the bar, and that attracted some glances, but no one had ever bothered to ask what she was reading. With a book, she could tune out the conversations of the other office workers, which didn’t interest her at all.

  One of those evenings she met Pedro, who pulled her from her isolation when he asked if he could share the table—the bar was full. He talked a lot, with no need for her to ask any questions: he told her he was a journalist, that he worked at a nearby newspaper, that he was a police reporter and that he rarely left the newsroom to drink a beer in the evening (he left work after ten at night), but that day had been particularly hectic and he’d needed to clear his mind. He asked for her number and Mechi gave it to him without much expectation: Pedro was nervous, attractive, with a five o’clock shadow and big, dark eyes. That kind of guy rarely noticed her.

  But Pedro called the next night. He invited her for a beer at another bar, different, cheaper, and far from the office workers’ circuit, and later on to drink more at his apartment. Mechi still remembered the place, the litter box in the laundry room beside the kitchen overflowing with shit; he must not have cleaned it in weeks. Books in the corners, a beautiful stone balcony, the computer on the table, and a vintage poster of the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. They sipped their beers sitting on the sofa and went to bed before they’d finished them. Bed was a mattress on the floor, with the alarm clock to one side, a full ashtray within arm’s reach, and the white sheets overly used, so much so that in the center they looked gray. Mechi hadn’t enjoyed the sex with Pedro. For some reason she’d been unable to concentrate, and she spent the whole time looking at the decorative details on the closet doors, the night sky, the cat’s curious eyes peering in through the cracked door, even the lit window of the apartment across the street, which she could see from the bed. She’d acted like she enjoyed it because Pedro seemed to be having fun, and she’d reacted with enthusiasm and delicacy when necessary. She’d kissed him deeply and caressed his back, but when he reached for a second condom, Mechi gently stopped him, kissed his cheek, and asked for a cigarette. They stayed up smoking until dawn. Pedro did a little cocaine—she didn’t feel like it—and told her details of some of the most lurid cases he’d covered. He told Mechi that he liked it that she didn’t get disgusted by the details, that she was never shocked. She explained that crime stories did frighten her, but they also entertained her. She left Pedro’s apartment as the sun was coming up, sure that they wouldn’t have sex again. And she wasn’t wrong there, but she misjudged Pedro when she thought that they would never talk again either. Pedro wanted to keep seeing her, though he didn’t try to sleep with her. That first night something had become clear that they didn’t want to say out loud: they weren’t attracted to each other, they’d known it even before going to bed together, but they still wanted to try, because they were alone and they’d both fantasized that the encounter could be, at least, the start of a companionship. Quite simply, they hadn’t fallen in love, but they had begun a friendship that was consistent even if it wasn’t all that close. At first Mechi called him to comment on his articles, and he called her to inform her of the outcome of cases she was interested in. Over the years, they confided in each other about frustrated relationships and small hopes that in general vanished quickly. Pedro changed girlfriends often; Mechi was more solitary. And although they complained, they both knew they preferred being alone.

  In recent years, Pedro’s police beat had changed. Tired and a little frightened after years of Mafia crimes, he’d started to investigate teen disappearances, especially girls. He ended up discovering networks trafficking in minors, and characters every bit as sordid and fearful as any narco murderer. But there was something in the terrible journeys of these girls—mostly girls, though he also investigated cases of missing boys—that led him to write special-feature essays, long and detailed, that were much commented on and brought congratulations from his bosses, and even salary raises.

  Almost like a strange coincidence, while Pedro was insinuating himself into provincial brothels and dark police stations in
search of the missing kids, Mechi was offered the job in the council’s archive of disappeared children. She accepted immediately, and the first thing she did after saying yes and finishing the bureaucracy to make the change official was call Pedro, who received the news of Mechi’s new job with shouts of joy and “I can’t believe it” repeated so many times it disturbed her. He started to visit her often, and when the archive finally had the seal of Mechi’s order and dedication, she became an obligatory consultation for him. Before Mechi, the archive was a pile of messy papers that no one paid much attention to, except for the poor, desperate families. In three months, according to Pedro, she’d turned it into a treasure.

  “Girl, this thing is worth its weight in gold,” he always told her, as he turned the pages and copied details into his notebook. “I always talk about you to the prosecutor. You’ll have to meet her, she’s a dyke who smokes black tobacco, she’s got a voice like a dude’s and a really bad dye job, you have no idea! One of these days we’ll have breakfast together, okay?”

  That meeting never happened—Pedro was never awake at breakfast time, and plus, he traveled at least every fifteen days to go after kidnappers of teen girls. With help from Mechi’s archive and Pedro’s investigations, the police had already caught one of the czars who trafficked in women and teens: a missionary settled in Posadas, where he had several open escape routes to Brazil and Paraguay, and whose tentacles reached to the southern edge of Greater Buenos Aires. He was brought to court and the terrifying details were published, and some of the girls were interviewed—several had lived right in Palermo, crammed into a one-room apartment. They weren’t allowed to go outside; a woman watched over them and brought them food and essential items, and they had pale skin and cracked lips from the confinement. Pedro became a TV star, and he took part in panels, news shows, even went on cable access programs. He bought a few jackets and white shirts for his peak of stardom, and Mechi thought how easy fame and TV were for men, they just showed up in different jackets and their elegance was guaranteed; if it had been her, she would have had to buy twelve different dresses and accessories to match. Pedro was sincere and generous in interviews, and he mentioned Mechi several times, because he had deciphered much of the prostitution ring by cross-checking information, and the archives of the Council on the Rights of Children and Teens had been key. But no one had called Mechi in to talk about her kids on TV, she’d just been interviewed for a few newspaper articles. She’d received some of the journalists at the Chacabuco Park office, and they all commented on the noise of the highway that monotonously filled the office. Mechi told them that after a while you stopped hearing it, but that wasn’t true, and they didn’t believe her, she could tell from their false smiles. “At least you’ve got the park nearby,” they said, and Mechi had to admit that was indeed a compensation for the racket of the highway overhead. Sometimes she took her lunch hour there: she’d quickly eat a sandwich sitting on a bench, or at a café if she hadn’t brought lunch, and then she walked for a while. She especially liked the part near the subway station, a small, romantic rose garden with benches, gazebos, and pathways, whose elegant decadence was ruined only by the highway’s constantly passing cars and its horrible, eraser-shaped pillars. Sometimes she brought files with her to go over the names and circumstances of the kids, mentally filling in the ellipses by inventing stories for them. She found it strange that the photo the family chose, usually the same one used for posters and flyers in the search, was almost always terrible. The kids looked ugly; the camera took in their features from so close up they looked deformed, or from so far away they were blurred. They wore strange expressions under erratic lighting; she almost never saw photos where the missing kids looked good.