The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

The unnamed narrators of “Our Lady of the Quarry” are teenage girls, and they refer to Silvia as their “grown-up” friend. She is older than them, with her own job and apartment. She knows more about music, drugs, art, and boys, and always has plenty of money, thanks to her job and her supposedly rich father. However, the girls want Silvia to be “ruined, helpless, destroyed” (13), mostly because she started dating a boy named Diego.

The girls met Diego in Bariloche during a senior class trip to southern Argentina. He was 18, older than the girls, but he was nice to them. He would talk to them and even kiss them, but he wasn’t interested in having sex. Back in Buenos Aires, they invited him to a party, and Silvia quickly “enthralled” him with stories about her many travels, even though she had no evidence of any of the trips she bragged about.

Silvia hates swimming pools and suggests they visit one of the quarry pools outside of Buenos Aires. She decides that the Virgin’s Pool is the best option. It is “the best, the cleanest,” but is “also the biggest, deepest, and most dangerous of all” (16) because the owner is rumored to set dogs on trespassers. Silvia, Diego, and the narrators go swimming every Saturday but never catch a glimpse of the owner or hear any sign of his dogs. As the summer progresses, the girls see Diego starting to notice their bodies. They are more beautiful than Silvia, but he remains “fascinated” by the other girl, and the narrators soon discover that Diego and Silvia are officially dating.

The girls are furious. Some of them have given blow jobs, but none of them have had sex, and they want Diego “to teach [them] sex the same way he taught [them] about rock and roll, making drinks, and the butterfly stroke” (19). One of the girls, Natalia, is especially “obsessed.” She is a virgin and is determined that Diego must be her first sexual partner. Diego is friendly to her, but he looks at her like she is “a pretty boring plant” (19). However, Natalia doesn’t give up easily, and one afternoon, she tells the other girls she put menstrual blood in Diego’s coffee after learning that “it was an infallible way to snag your beloved” (20). The blood doesn’t work; to the contrary, Diego and Silvia are more affectionate than ever with one another. The girls cannot understand why he prefers “old, flat-ass Silvia” (21) to the “impeccable” younger girls, and their desperation grows.

One afternoon, Diego suggests they swim to the other side of the quarry, where there is a shrine to the Virgin. The girls, however, are incompetent swimmers, so they must walk around the pool while Diego and Silvia swim. It is a long way, and the girls are sweating and out of breath by the time they arrive. Diego and Silvia take one look at them and take off swimming again, “mocking laughter” trailing after them as they head back toward the beach. The girls are furious and “humiliated,” especially Natalia, who insists that she still wants to see the Virgin’s shrine and goes ahead alone.

Natalia returns, smiling, and tells the other girls that it wasn’t the Virgin in the shrine. Instead, there was a naked “red woman made of plaster” (23). Natalia figures it was “a Brazilian thing” (23), and she asked the strange statue for a favor. Back at the beach, Diego and Silvia apologize, and the girls are on the verge of forgiving them when they are interrupted by a growl. A black dog so large that Diego initially mistakes it for a horse emerges from behind the quarry hill. It is joined by two more “slobbering pony-dogs” (24) that slowly advance on them. Natalia begins screaming at Diego and Silvia, calling them “arrogant assholes” and claiming that the dogs are hers. Diego doesn’t listen; he is too busy stepping in front of Silvia to protect her from the advancing creatures. The dogs are uninterested in the other girls, who get dressed and let Natalia lead them away toward the highway. Behind them, they hear Diego and Silvia start to scream. The bus comes, and the girls board “calmly so as not to raise suspicions” (25). They tell the driver they are “fine, great, it’s all good” (25).

The unnamed narrator of this story is a young girl who notes that on a Sunday afternoon, her neighborhood is full of activity. Her neighbor, Juancho is drunk and wanders up and down the sidewalk. Another neighbor washes his car, and the Spaniards who run the variety store drink mate on the corner. The narrator’s mother watches out the window as a villero, a man who lives in a low-income neighborhood, pushes a loaded cart down the street. He is drunk, and he pulls down his pants and defecates on the sidewalk. As the narrator and her family watch, Juancho rushes across the street and pushes the man, knocking him into his own excrement. Juancho then kicks him, screaming and swearing at him to clean up after himself. When the man begins to cry, the narrator’s mother goes outside to intervene. She is well-respected in the neighborhood, and everyone calls her “doctor” even though she is just a physical therapist. She tells Juancho to leave the man alone and urges the man to apologize and be on his way. Juancho throws a bottle at the man as he retreats, and the man turns around to shout something no one can understand. He looks the narrator’s mother straight in the eye, nods twice, and disappears around the corner.

The man’s cart remains on the corner, where it gets wet in the rain and begins to smell. About two weeks after the cart appeared, the neighborhood is struck by “an accumulation of misfortune” and “every one of the neighbors, all of a sudden, in a matter of days, [loses] everything” (32). Soon, no one can afford a phone line or electricity, and they begin tapping the wires. Some of the boys take to stealing and are arrested or killed. No one can afford alarms or security systems, and things begin to go missing from homes. When food starts to go scarce, a group of women works to organize rations, but when someone discovers that some people are keeping more for themselves, “[T]he goodwill [goes] all to hell” (33). One woman eats her cat and dies by suicide, and news of the neighborhood’s misfortune begins to spread. On the other side of the avenue, things are perfectly normal, and no one can understand why the bad luck is so “localized” or why neighbors just a few blocks away don’t help or “show solidarity.” After five months, crime is completely rampant, and “the neighbors [are] totally isolated” (34).

However, the bad luck doesn’t touch the narrator and her family. Her mother keeps her job, and her father’s pension continues to come through on time, so they can pay all their bills. They “[live] as battened down as the rest” (34), pretending that they share in the neighborhood’s misfortune to avoid drawing attention.

One afternoon, Juancho is drinking on the sidewalk and begins screaming that all their misfortune is the villero’s fault. Everyone believes that his cart had “[s]omething contagious […] brought from the slum” (34), and Juancho sets it on fire. Later that night, the narrator’s father calls a family meeting. He worries that the neighbors are getting suspicious and will soon “realize [they are] immune” from the collective misfortune (35). They make a plan to escape, and that night, no one can sleep. The narrator visits her brother’s room and they both agree that their mother “saved” them with her kindness to the villero, “so far” at least. Later that night, they smell burning meat. As the peak through the blinds, they see pungent black smoke coming from the terrace across the street. The narrator’s mother begins to cry, cursing that “[d]amn old ghetto son of a bitch” (36).