The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Mechi works at the Chacabuco Park Development and Participation Center, managing Buenos Aires’s archive of missing children. Two other women, Graciela and Maria Laura, deal with the public, such as speaking with the families of missing children when they come to search the archive, while Mechi attends to the archive itself, fetching files and organizing information. The work is solitary, but Mechi is good at it and enjoys her job. Most of the children in the file cabinet are teenage girls, who perhaps ran off with boyfriends, fled abusive home lives, or were kidnapped and “disappeared in prostitution rings, never to resurface, or to resurface dead” (122). In moments when Mechi has the office to herself, she sometimes “daydream[s] about the children” (121), and she keeps files for children who have been found in a separate file cabinet.

Part of the reason for Mechi’s interest in and dedication to her job comes from her friend Pedro, whom she met five years earlier when she went out for a drink after work. She didn’t fit in with the rest of the after-office crowd, but the lack of attention from “the clean-shaven guys wearing suits and cologne” never bothered her (123).