The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enriquez

  Except for Vanadis. Vanadis, such a strange name. Mechi had looked it up in an encyclopedic dictionary: it was a variation on the name of the Norse goddess Freya, deity of youth, love, and beauty, and also the goddess of death. Vanadis, who’d disappeared at fourteen years old, was almost the only real beauty in the whole archive. There were more than twenty photos of her, many more than usual, and in all of them she was a mystery of dark hair and almond eyes, high cheekbones and lips pursed in an expression of immature seduction. Mechi had never gotten obsessed with any of the kids, but with Vanadis she came close. Also, there was something about her story that didn’t fit. They’d found her turning tricks on the transvestites’ turf in Constitución, where no women usually worked, especially not young girls. No one in her family wanted to take her in when the social workers intervened, and she’d been sent to a reform school, which she ran away from. Nothing more was ever heard from her. The family didn’t seem too interested in finding her. Her street friends did sometimes turn up with information. Other kids who idolized her, street vendors, taxi drivers who started their shifts in the early morning, young people who worked at the twenty-four-hour hot dog and hamburger joints, kiosk workers, other prostitutes, a few transvestites. Some of them came into the office and talked about Vanadis, but others dropped off letters, small, handwritten anecdotes, even cut-out hearts or red ribbons to give her if she ever reappeared. Graciela recorded many of them, and then passed on the cassette—there was no way to get her to understand how an MP3 worked—to Mechi, who transcribed them. Those voices later stayed with her on the subway home. Vanadis’s file was thick and hard to close. So much so that one afternoon, at lunchtime, one of the photos fell out near the Emilio Mitre station. When she ran after it—it was windy and she was afraid it would fly away—she saw that face on the sidewalk for an instant, and she thought that nothing bad could have happened to Vanadis, the girl who looked like Bianca Jagger but had been born in Dock Sud. Because nothing bad ever happened to goddesses, not even when they were so sad and streetwise.

  * * *

  …

  When Vanadis used to turn tricks near Constitución, she’d sometimes run into the kids from the prison. Not inmates: these were kids, boys and girls—and a few adults as well—who squatted in the ruins of the Caseros Prison. Those walls were supposed to have been demolished years ago, but there they remained, towering and dangerous, and no one seemed to care except the neighbors. Little by little it had filled up with addict kids, usually hooked on cocaine paste, but also on glue and alcohol. The kids had run off the poor families and homeless people who had settled in the ruins. No one else could live where the addict kids lived. There were fights, overdose deaths, dealers who murdered and were murdered, theft, an abysmal squalor. No one dared walk close by the prison, and the neighborhood around the ruins slowly died. The addict kids usually emerged from the prison at dusk and went out to panhandle nearby.

  A girl from the Caseros Death House—one TV station had referred to the ruins that way, and the macabre name stuck—came in one day to the Chacabuco Park Development and Participation Center and said she wanted to report what she knew about Vanadis. She didn’t want to go to the police or the judge, she told Graciela, because she was in too deep and didn’t want to go to jail or rehabilitation—she wanted to die in the street, she didn’t care about anything. Her arms and legs were covered in sores, and she’d lost two pregnancies in the Caseros ruins; she didn’t know who the fathers of her unborn children were, she figured they must have been other addicts, but she didn’t remember. And she surely must have slept with them for money or more drugs, because she liked girls. She didn’t want to give her name in her testimony, and she asked to just be called Loli. Graciela said that Loli stank, her clothes were so dirty that her jeans and shirt both looked brown, and her toes were poking out of her sneakers. She said Loli was so skinny there was something wolfish about her, with her teeth and jaw jutting out of her face like an animal’s maw. And that the girl had told her own life story before telling about Vanadis—Loli never stopped talking, or only to take in breath with a guttural sound. It was the first time Graciela had seen a moribund person walking, a person whose mind didn’t register the death of the body. She’d been shocked.

  Loli told about how one night she had gone out of the Death House, desperate. She didn’t have a cent to her name, everything hurt, she couldn’t think, she needed money. She went along the side of Constitución Station, but carefully, because she didn’t want any cops to see her, and she didn’t want to ask the trannies for money, because they beat up girls like her. She had to find someone who was waiting for the bus, or just walking along, going to the kiosk or back home. She had the broken neck of a bottle hidden in her jacket pocket.

  About an hour passed, she thought, and she didn’t come across a single person she could mug. Regular people no longer walked around the neighborhood at that hour, they knew it got dangerous. And just when she was losing all hope, she saw Vanadis. Loli was out of her mind, but right away she knew this was no tranny. She went up behind her and pressed the sharp edge of the bottle into her back. Vanadis turned around very fast, almost with a jump—she was much more alert than Loli had thought. They looked at each other, and Vanadis ceded without any need to threaten her again. She gave Loli thirty pesos and told her, “But now you can’t ask for more for fifteen days, okay? Don’t bust my balls. Remember I gave you money, don’t be lame.”

  Loli ran off with the money and a strange feeling: it was as if she hadn’t robbed that girl. If the girl had said she wouldn’t give her anything, Loli would have left without pushing further. She didn’t understand why, when she was so desperate for money, but that’s how it was: she would have left her alone.

  Some days later—Loli didn’t know exactly how long, time didn’t count for the people of the Death House—she saw her again. Vanadis told her, “Don’t even think about it. You remember, right?” Loli did remember, and when Vanadis smiled at her, she fell in love. She asked if she could stick around, and Vanadis said yes. Loli told her story, talked about the Death House, and Vanadis got worried. She didn’t do drugs herself, she found their effect so sad. She told Loli she wanted to see it, wanted to visit the Death House, but Loli refused to take her. It was too dangerous, and plus she didn’t want Vanadis to see the awful place where she lived. Those nights, when they smoked cigarettes together between Vanadis’s customers, Loli thought she could get off drugs, start eating again, go to the free hospital to cure everything that had surely gone to shit in her body, and confess her love. Maybe Vanadis would love her back—there were loads of lesbo whores, she’d met a ton of them and she’d even had a hooker girlfriend back before she started smoking paco.

  Loli told Graciela that Vanadis worked a lot. No doubt she took customers away from the trannies, but for some reason they let her work in peace, no one bothered her. Loli never even saw the johns—they were always inside a car and it was always night. Vanadis didn’t talk about them either—in general she talked very little and almost never about herself; she never mentioned her family, her home, nothing that came before her life in the street. If Loli asked her, Vanadis just smiled and changed the subject. But she had told Loli about one pair of johns who were “weird.” That’s what Loli wanted to come in and report: because when Vanadis ran away from the reform school and disappeared, she thought maybe those weird guys had taken her. Plus, when Loli found out that Vanadis had disappeared—one of the trannies told her—she realized she was never going to quit paco and that she was going to die in Caseros. Vanadis had been her last door out, and it was closed now. Loli wanted to tell what she knew so her death wouldn’t be so futile.

  The weird guys picked Vanadis up together and brought her to a hotel nearby, almost right across from the station. While one of them fucked her the other one filmed, and they took turns. They made her do normal things: suck dick, take it up the ass, regular sex. But they filmed her.
Vanadis had asked them what they did with the videos and the guys said they were just for personal use, they weren’t doing anything strange. Vanadis didn’t believe them, and Loli didn’t either. When Vanadis kept insisting they tell her where the videos would end up, online or what, they told her that if she said anything they’d kill her, that she was nothing but a street kid, and who in the world would give a fuck about her. Vanadis didn’t argue, and she kept doing the videos, but she was afraid of those men. She wouldn’t admit it but Loli could tell, even though Vanadis always denied it, saying they were just a couple of assholes, and anyway she didn’t care if they put her videos online or sold them, it was all the same to her. The men, of course, paid more than the usual customers, and that was enough for her.

  Loli hadn’t learned that the social workers and police had come to Constitución until after Vanadis was sent to reform school. She hoped she’d come back, and after a really long time—it seemed like years—the tranny told her Vanadis had disappeared. And that just killed her, said Loli, it killed me. Maybe they’d killed her too. That girl was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life.

  Everyone agreed that Vanadis was beautiful, especially on her MySpace page; it was remarkable how many of the disappeared kids left Facebook and MySpace profiles behind. They sat immobile, like headstones, visited only by a handful of the kids’ hundreds of friends and a few family members who went on leaving messages with the hope of one day receiving an answer.

  Vanadis’s profile had surprised Mechi. It had new messages almost every day. There wasn’t much information about her, though. An extraordinary photo, taken with a cellphone: she had her hair pulled back very tight and you could see her whole face, her full lips in a soft smile. She’d completed the information requested with a strange mixture of truth and macabre fantasy: she was a fan of heavy metal and horror movies. She called herself “Vagabond of the Night,” described herself as “the worm that lives in every death,” and claimed to be 103 years old. She’d left the space for “About me” blank, and for “Who I want to meet,” she’d put “Everyone.”

  The rest went like this:

  INTERESTS

  General: No time now, I’ll finish later

  Music: metal!!!

  Movies: saw, the exorcist, the others, japanese movies

  TV: I don’t have one it’s bad for you!!!

  Books: haha

  Heroes: my fingers

  Groups: marilyn manson, slipknot, korn

  Status: None

  I’m here for: friends

  Orientation: bisexual

  Hometown: the underworld

  Measurements: 5 foot 2, super skinny!!!

  Ethnicity: ?

  Religion: nothing

  Sign: scorpio

  Drink/smoke: yes and yes

  Children: poor kids

  Schooling: ?

  Salary: haha

  She had 228 friends and 7,200 messages. “hope you come back pretty girl i luv you!” “hey beautiful, I love you come back you are missed.” Some of her friends had profiles of their own, but not many had filled them out. Except for Negative Zero, a tattoo artist who had an extensive profile full of photos of his work, including several of Vanadis: he had tattooed two wings over her shoulder blades and a tear on the nape of her neck—or at least, those were the tattoos of hers that he displayed. But he left messages at least once a week on Vanadis’s profile: some of them were short (“tell me where you are dollface,” “if anyone hurt you I’ll kill them”), and others very long, up to the limit of words allowed for one message: “witch girl, I’ll never forget you or what you told me, I looked for you last night everywhere in constitución and in patricios I even went into the prison and almost got mugged if you started smoking that shit I’ll beat your ass but I’ll save you ok, tell me where you are I feel like you’re not dead the other night you came to me in a dream you floated above my bed I was naked face up and you were floating with real wings like the ones I gave you and your eyes were weird and silvery, it made me remember when you came here and told me you had to sleep under covers even if it was hot because you felt like hands touched you during the night, you had some really fucking crazy dreams and sometimes you heard voices whispering in your ear that wouldn’t let you sleep, I looked for you in the hospitals too, have you gone crazy out there? Sometimes you seemed really crazy my love I went to open door and to the moyano but you’re not anywhere I’m gonna go crazy.”

  Mechi gave Graciela the guy’s name and asked if he’d ever come in to give information, but no, she’d never seen him. Mechi believed him, he seemed truly in love, and she felt so sorry for him that sometimes she thought about breaking her promise not to get involved with the kids beyond the archive. She wanted to go see the tattoo artist and ask him to tell her more about those dreams and those voices, but in the end she decided to keep her distance. The special attention she paid Vanadis seemed unfair to the other kids, and she decided, as always, to leave the matter alone.

  * * *

  …

  It had been a year since that sensational case of the missionary who ran a child prostitution ring, and except for the individual successes of a few girls who reappeared (mostly girls—Mechi was amazed, so many girls), the office went on with its usual rhythm, distressing but routine. Pedro had gone back to his maps marked with the movement of the kidnapped girls: he often followed their trails thanks to inscriptions that they themselves left in bathrooms of gas stations and hotels: “It’s Daiana, I’m alive mom I’m kidnapped I love you help.” Every fifteen or twenty days he visited Mechi and her archive. He took notes, and when Graciela wasn’t looking he photocopied the pages he needed. Mechi, though, preferred to meet up with him at the bar. It was uncomfortable at the office because Pedro shouted all the time, even more after he’d had a few beers. He’d already been a little like that when they first met, excitable, chain-smoking, answering the phone nonstop. But these days he drank too much and got drunk quickly. It embarrassed Mechi, and she felt a little disgusted at the sight of the saliva droplets flying out of Pedro’s mouth with every peal of laughter. But sometimes he made her laugh too. And she liked to sit in the grass in the park and drink a beer with him, as if they were a couple of teenagers, while they talked about the reasons behind all those ugly photos, or how many taxi drivers ran off with minors, or if the kidnapped kids were smuggled out of the country through Paraguay (as the child welfare advocate said), or through Brazil, as the NGO investigators and the journalists suspected.

  Things went on pretty much the same, until one day Pedro turned up with a tip that he called “fabulous.” One of his “sources”—he never fully explained to Mechi who his informants were—was selling a video with an underage girl who’d been reported missing. She’d been filmed with a cellphone: the girl was wrapped in a blanket, or tucked in a sleeping bag or something like that, and presumably was supposed to remain hidden. The girl was dead, and what happened in the cellphone video was that, in a clumsy movement while they were carrying her out a door to load her into a truck, the wrapping fell and you could see her uncovered face perfectly. Pedro was going to pay for that video, and what he asked from Mechi was to be able to check her archive afterward to try to place the girl from the video. In Pedro’s voice Mechi heard the same eager exhilaration he’d had when he was investigating the missionary case. She said yes, that after he watched the video—she absolutely didn’t want to see it herself, though Pedro offered her a copy—he should come to the office and check the archive. Pedro called at the end of the day one Monday, and he arrived agitated, smelling of subway and with droplets of sweat on his forehead, as if it were summer and not August in Buenos Aires.