The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

“To save them from the shock, when we went out together—or rather, when she followed me out and I had no choice but to let her—I used a kind of backpack to carry her (it’s gross to see her walk—she’s so little, it’s unnatural). I also bought her a bandage to use as a mask, the kind burn victims use to cover their scars. Now when people see her, they’re disgusted, but they also feel compassion and pity. They see a very sick or injured baby, but not a dead baby.”

The narrator describes the combination of revulsion and pity that Angelita inspires in the few others who can see her. This passage highlights the grotesque elements of Angelita’s appearance, particularly her ability to walk even though she is the size of a three-month-old baby, and it is these deviations from the normal and expected that make her so unsettling.

“We couldn’t understand it. The red bikini with hearts on one of us; the super-flat stomach with a belly button piercing on another; the exquisite haircut that fell just so over the face, legs without a single hair, underarms like marble. And he preferred her? Why? Because he screwed her? But we wanted to screw too, that was all we wanted! How could he not realize, when we sat on his lap and pressed our asses into him, or tried to brush our hands against his dick like on accident? Or when we laughed near his mouth, showing our tongues. Why didn’t we just throw ourselves at him, once and for all? Because it was true for all of us, it wasn’t just an obsession of Natalia’s: we wanted Diego to choose us.”

The narrators of “Our Lady of the Quarry” list their own attractive features to express their shock over Diego’s interest in Silvia. Their unabashedly sexual language contrasts the idealized image of beautiful, innocent, virginal young women with the modern reality of teenage girls who are manipulative, jealous, and driven by desire. Their collective narrative voice amplifies their group identity and loyalty.

“If we thought about getting help, we didn’t say anything. If we thought about going back, we didn’t mention that either. When we got to the highway and heard Silvia’s and Diego’s screams, we secretly prayed that no car would stop and hear them too; sometimes, since we were so young and pretty, people stopped and offered to take us to the city for free. The 307 came and we got on calmly so as not to raise suspicions. The driver asked us how we were and we told him, fine, great, it’s all good, it’s all good.”

The girls’ detached narrative voice conveys their complicity, amplifying the horror of their actions through their understated language. Their calm demeanors also suggest their moral ambiguity as they don’t seem to experience any guilt. The final repetition—”it’s all good, it’s all good”—takes on a menacing tone in light of their actions.

“My mom intervened. Everyone respected her, especially Juancho, because she would give him a few coins for wine when he asked her. The others treated her with deference because though Mom was a physical therapist, everyone thought she was a doctor, and that’s what they all called her.”

In this passage from “The Cart,” the narrator describes her mother stepping in to prevent Juancho from beating up the drunk villero. Although the neighborhood quickly turns on the unhoused man, the fact that the narrator’s mother is called a “doctor” and is well-respected for being a physical therapist suggests that the neighborhood is more working-class than the residents would like to admit. Additionally, Juancho likely has such an extreme reaction to the villero because he is similar to him, though he doesn’t want to be: Juancho is drunk, like the villero, and the detail about him asking the narrator’s mother for money highlights his own lack of wealth and status.

“Everyone had thought it was the cart. Something in it. Something contagious it had brought from the slum.”

“The Cart” is primarily a story about economic instability and the intense fear of poverty. The residents treat poverty as something dangerously contagious, and this fear leads them to see the villero’s cart as the source of this contagion that infects this neighborhood. Thus, the cart symbolizes their fear of “the slum.”

“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.”

Throughout the collection, witchcraft, superstition, and folklore are portrayed as the domain of women. Men in the stories, such as the narrator’s father in “Angelita Unearthed” and Josefina’s father in this passage, often scorn these beliefs and practices, representing rationality. However, these practices are shown to hold unexpected truth and power, emphasizing the power inherent in marginalized female narratives.

“San La Muerte said he wouldn’t hurt you as much, because you were pure. But the saint lied to me, or I misunderstood him. Those three wanted to pass it on to you, and they said they would take care of you. But they didn’t take care of you.”

Here, the witch who cured Josefina’s mother, grandmother, and sister explains how the family offered Josefina up as a kind of familial sacrifice. The figure of San La Muerte (or Saint Death), an Argentinian folk saint, encapsulates this betrayal since he “lied” or was “misunderstood.” Enriquez explores familial complicity in perpetuating cycles of trauma, using supernatural elements to represent the damage passed down through generations.

“Sofía realized her friends made every effort not to speak the Spanish of Spain. They didn’t call the apartment a ‘piso,’ but a ‘departamento’; they would never call anything sketchy ‘chungo’; something could be ‘malo,’ but never ‘mal rollo’; a mess was a ‘quilombo,’ never a ‘mogollón.’ She remembered how before, on her first visit, she’d laughed at how many ‘guapas’ and ‘vengas’ came out of the couple’s mouths. Now they seemed to have completely erased all local words, unless one slipped out by accident. It was surely intentional; a kind of Argentine fundamentalism, a mixture of nostalgia and genuine unease.”

In this passage, Sofía notices how her friends have reclaimed the Argentinian dialect in their speech. At first, they had eagerly embraced the Spanish of Spain, but now that they realize they cannot leave Barcelona, they are struck by homesickness and a desire to reconnect with their Argentinian identity. Argentina is a country with a long history of citizens living in exile, whether from political unrest or economic instability, and this passage captures the complexity of missing a home that is impossible to return to.

“The other day they slapped a fine on a guy who was drinking a Coke in a plaza. They charged him like two hundred euros because he didn’t want to get up when they went to hose the place down. They spray water all the time. And now you can’t smoke in bars. Yeah, I know that’s happening everywhere, but a bar isn’t supposed to be a healthy place, goddammit. It’s a place you go to scheme, to relax, to get wasted. But not here. The rents are scandalous: they only want rich people to live in this city, no one else. It’s for tourists. They’re cleaning the graffiti! There were some that were really beautiful, no other city in the world had graffiti like Barcelona’s. But just try to explain to those brutes what art is. The fuck. They ruin everything.”

Here, Daniel complains about the gentrification of Barcelona, which results in the loss of its identity. The quote’s bitter tone highlights Daniel’s anger at these changes. The government’s gesture of “cleaning the graffiti” is a metaphor for their erasure of marginalized voices and cultural authenticity.

“He had left and he hadn’t called her again, or written; she didn’t know if he was alive or dead and she would prefer either possibility, either of them, to this suspended life of waiting for him for a year now. As always, she sent him a message to let him know where she would be. She even included the phone number. She was going to spend her birthday at the hotel. If Pablo was alive, if he had ever loved her, he had to call.”

This quote from “The Lookout” illustrates the depth of Elina’s longing and her denial. She is simply unable to move on, even convincing herself that Pablo died tragically because this is easier than accepting that he no longer loves her. The statement of facts—"He had left and he hadn’t called her again, or written”—juxtaposed with her belief that “he had to call” creates dramatic irony, with readers understanding that Pablo will not call.

“But she knew that it was why Pablo had left her. Because sometimes he touched her and she remembered the sand between her legs and the pain, and she had to say enough, and she’d never been able to explain anything because of the fear, until he’d gotten fed up, and why wouldn’t he, when she was ruined forever.”

This passage describes Elina’s past trauma of sexual assault when she was a teenager. Instead of blaming the man who assaulted her, Elina sees her inability to be a willing sexual partner to Pablo as a personal failure. The quote highlights Elina’s sexual trauma through tactile imagery; she associates being sexually intimate with “sand” and “pain.”

“We just dove into pleasure. He liked to have his heart listened to. He was very sick, and so he tended to get rejected in chats and online communities. People thought he was too extreme, that he went too far, that he ruined the idea of play and pleasure.”

Here, the narrator of “Where Are You, Dear Heart?” describes her initial encounters with her new lover. Although their play is outside of sexual norms, even for the fetish communities they belong to, both are consenting adults and are eager to explore these extremes. In this respect, there is nothing inherently wrong about their relationship. Enriquez explores how unconventional desires challenge societal norms, confronting the taboo nature of combining illness and desire.

“But I think I ended up hating him. Maybe I hated him from the start. Just like I hated the man who had made me abnormal, who’d made me sick, with his tired penis in front of the TV, and that beautiful scar. The man who’d ruined me. I hated my lover. Otherwise some of our games were inexplicable.”

As the narrator’s relationship with her lover becomes more extreme, she starts to identify a hatred in her increasingly insatiable desire that traces back to the man who abused her when she was a child. Even her reaction to that first sexual encounter is complex: Though she was abused and feels anger, characterizing her abuser as the man with the “tired penis” who “ruined” her, she also recalls the experience with pleasure. Her desire for her new lover is marked by the hatred she feels for her first sexual partner, showing how the damaging effects of trauma linger on.

“The silence provoked an extreme hysteria. The front pages of the newspapers talked about the most shocking case of teenage fanaticism not only in Argentina, but in the whole world. The story was picked up by international media outlets. Psychiatrists and psychologists were called in as experts; the case monopolized the news, the gossip shows, the afternoon tabloid and talk shows, and the radio talked of nothing else.”

This passage describes the public’s reaction to teenagers Julieta and Mariela cannibalizing the body of their rock idol. The act is greeted with horror but also a kind of morbid fascination that is intensified by the girls’ silence on the matter. This illustrates society’s paradoxical horror and fascination with the girls’ act of cannibalism, making it complicitous in the violence.

“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.”

In “Meat,” Enriquez’s interest in pop culture, music, and goth subculture materializes in her writing. Santiago Espina is a Marilyn Manson-esque figure who inspires a cult-like following among teenage girls known for dressing all in black and wearing exaggerated makeup. The metaphor of the “second coming” as well as Eucharistic imagery in the song lyrics link Espina to Jesus Christ, highlighting that the girls’ obsession with him is akin to religious devotion. Like “Our Lady of the Quarry,” this closing passage of “Meat” suggests the violence and power of teenage girls.

“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.”

In this passage, the narrator of “No Birthdays or Baptisms” describes the freedom of being able to wallow in her depression without anyone to stop her or urge her to behave differently. The darkly humorous tone emphasizes that the narrator enjoys having no one around to critique her, challenging conventional ideas about depression. Like Elina in “The Lookout,” she isolates herself to avoid the pressure of acting normally in front of friends and family.

“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.”

Marcela’s parents maintain a strict silence regarding their daughter’s behavior, underscoring societal denial around taboo behaviors. The narrator uses the simile that they were acting “like they’d found a marijuana cigarette on their daughter’s nightstand” to highlight how they were trying to minimize the seriousness of the situation.

“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.”

This passage uses repetition of brutal scenarios to emphasize the particular vulnerability of teenage girls in a patriarchal society. The sheer variety of ways in which the girls disappear illustrates the many hazards they face, both at home and outside. The horror in this story begins in the real world before moving to the realm of the supernatural.

“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.”

This quote highlights gender inequalities within professional environments. While Mechi works behind the scenes, Pedro performs the flashy, investigative work and is celebrated for it. Pedro’s easy public image contrasts with Mechi’s uncertainty, which is a result of her gender.

“What did disturb her was that she’d felt like she was in danger. Maria Laura would have been capable of killing her.”

This quote focuses on the motif of fear that runs through these stories, especially highlighting that this fear is often displaced. The returned children do nothing to actually harm anyone. All the damage and “hysteria” in the wake of their return are reactions to the uncertainty they inspire. However, Mechi’s co-worker attacks her and threatens to kill her, showing that true danger comes not from the children but from how people lash out when they are afraid.

To Mechi, that selective silence was proof that they knew about the father’s beating, and they weren’t talking about it because…of course, because the beating had happened three years before. Years during which Marisol had maintained the exact same length and color of her hair as the day she ran away.

Sometimes Mechi trembled with rage at such cowardice, such fatuousness. She wanted someone to start shouting on TV, to howl, to say, ‘This is weirder than shit, who are these kids, who are they?’”

Enriquez critiques societal denial through Mechi’s outrage. Her rhetorical questions and emotionally charged language reflect her frustration at the public’s determination to ignore the uncanny strangeness of the children’s reappearance. This quote highlights society’s unwillingness to acknowledge disturbing truths.

“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.”

This passage from “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” exemplifies the grotesque depictions of the female body that populate the collection. The narrator has her aging body literally hidden beneath her sheets as she looks herself over with a critical eye, illustrating how female bodies that don’t conform to conventional attractiveness are often ridiculed and forced out of sight by society. She uses imagery of blood and decay to expose her internalized sense of shame.

“The thing was that everyone knew Julita’s parents hadn’t died in any accident: Julita’s folks had disappeared. They were disappeared. They’d been disappeared. We didn’t really know the right way to say it.”

“Back When We Talked to the Dead” is the only story in the collection that deals directly with the military dictatorship that governed Argentina in the 1970s and 80s and disappeared tens of thousands of people. It was a time of intense fear and uncertainty. Although the girls in the story have learned a lot about the dictatorship, their uncertain diction mirrors the enforced silence of those years. Their inability to articulate this trauma reflects how this violent period continues to impact them.