The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

When Sofía arrives in Barcelona, she notices that the city is dirtier than she remembered, and a smell “like rancid meat forgotten in the fridge” permeates the air (55). The smell is so strong that she eyes the other tourists she passes, expecting them to have their noses scrunched up in disgust. She once found the city enticing and romantic, but it no longer holds the same appeal. On her way to her friend Julieta’s house, Sofía sees a girl walking ahead of her on the deserted street. The girl turns around, looks straight at Sofía, undoes her jeans, and expels “an explosive, painful diarrhea” on the sidewalk before collapsing (57). Sofía tries to help the girl, and the police come to take her away.

Julieta’s apartment is actually a converted office, with a shared bathroom down the hall. It is “large by Barcelona standards” (58) and has a beautiful balcony. Sofía lets herself in and tells Julieta about the incident with the girl, which her friend dismisses as “normal for Barcelona” (58). Julieta complains that Barcelona is “[f]ull of crazies on the loose” (58), and she says that different ones appear in different seasons. She tells Sofía that she sometimes gets a “strange feeling” from the “crazy people,” almost as if “they’re not real” but rather “incarnations of the city’s madness” to prevent the other residents from “kill[ing] each other or [dying] of stress” (60). Julieta’s boyfriend, Daniel, chimes in from the balcony, claiming that Barcelona has turned into “a police city.”

Daniel and Julieta are both Argentinian, and as they talk, Sofía notices how they avoid using any words common to the Spanish of Spain. When she first visited them years ago, she teased them about their use of Spanish slang, but “[n]ow they [seem] to have completely erased all local words,” embracing their Argentine dialect with “a mixture of nostalgia and genuine unease” (60). Daniel shares a newspaper article about the efforts to clean up the Plaza de los Ángels, a popular gathering place for young people to enjoy a beer outside. He complains about the city’s “scandalous” rent prices, blaming it on tourists who “ruin everything.” He and Julieta want to move away, but they can’t leave their jobs.

After dinner, they go for an evening walk to a trendy bar named after a woman called Madame Yasmine. Daniel’s friend, Manuel, explains that Yasmine was born in Barcelona’s Chinatown when it “was a reeking hellhole” (63), and she became a madam at a brothel frequented by artists and anarchists. She fell in love with one of these men and had a child. However, Yasmine’s lover was killed, and her child was decapitated by a passing cart on Barcelona’s famous Las Ramblas avenue. Following this tragedy, Yasmin began drinking and smoking opium in her home. She went out weekly to do her shopping and always carried a headless doll whose neck was supposedly made of her dead son’s skin. Her house was demolished when the city built the new Rambla del Raval. Daniel calls the pedestrian walkway “depressing,” and Manuel claims that the avenue is known as the Rambla Triste or “sad boulevard” because the decapitated boy is still wandering around along with the rest of “Barcelona’s many ghost children” (64). Julieta insists they change the subject, and Sofía grows quiet. She thinks of the dead boy and the doll with the neck made of his skin and is suddenly disgusted by the bar, “with its date salads and designer cocktails” (64).

The next night, Sofía and Julieta go out alone, and Julieta confesses that she has been through “a rough time” (65). Sofía can smell the strange stench invading her nostrils again, but she doesn’t mention it as Julieta begins talking. She tells Sofía that she and Daniel tried to get pregnant. However, Julieta started to get intensely paranoid, believing that the helicopters that were always flying over the city were looking for her, trying to conduct experiments on her, or take her baby. Daniel found her hiding under the bed one day and took her to a therapist who put her on a mood stabilizer. She stopped trying to get pregnant and realized that wanting a baby “was part of [her] madness” (67). She tells Sofía that Barcelona “isn’t a place for kids” (67) and reminds Sofía of Manuel’s comment about the “ghost children” who wander the streets. She has seen Sofía “wrinkling [her] nose” and tells her the invasive smell is “[t]he stench of the kids” (67).

Julieta explains that she and Daniel moved to Raval in 1997, when the neighborhood was in the clutches of a large pedophile ring. The neighborhood was full of “[k]ids who never went to school, who carried knives, who turned tricks” (67). One boy was so filthy that his smell continues to fill the city as he haunts the streets. When the pedophile ring was exposed, the city began paying residents to leave their apartments. However, the case was apparently “an ambush” that the city used to force residents out and clean up the neighborhood. Now, no one talks about the Raval case because they don’t want to talk about the children “who were not alive” (69). She tells Sofía about some of the ghost children she sees, and she knows from Sofía’s face that she has seen them too. Sofía claims she hasn’t seen anything, but she tells Julieta about the smell. Julieta tells her that the children don’t let people leave Barcelona; she and Daniel are stuck there. She insists that Sofía should cut her trip short and leave the following day, telling her that she and Daniel will “get out someday” (71).

The daughter of the hotel’s owner was always afraid. She couldn’t sense the ghost known as The Lady Upstairs, who always wanted to reassure the girl, but she was constantly overcome with a fear of “seeing something unknown reflected” in the building’s large mirrors (73). There were also rumors about ghosts that haunted the hotel, but the Lady Upstairs had been there for years and never found a shred of truth in these stories. Now, she is “tired,” spending more time alone in the hotel’s tall lookout tower and longing for the day when she can relinquish her post.

Elina decided to stay at a hotel on the beach, thinking the sea air would do her some good and help her stop thinking about Pablo, but now she has little desire to go. She made sure to send Pablo a message with the hotel’s address and phone number so he could contact her, even though he broke up with her a year ago and she hasn’t heard from him since. She will be at the hotel for her birthday, however, and she is sure, if he is “alive, if he had ever loved her,” he will call (76). For a year, Elina has been stuck in a “suspended life of waiting for him” (76), missing him terribly and wondering if he is dead or alive. It has become so difficult for her “to fake a certain amount of sanity with family and friends” that she has isolated herself (75), stopped going to therapy, and started relying more on the pills her doctor prescribed.

The Lady Upstairs likes Elina and wants to take a physical form to reveal herself to her. However, she has frightened women away before and wants to do things carefully. First, she wants to know why Elina hates the sea, so she watches that night as Elina dreams of being raped on a beach when she was 17.

Elina told no one about the assault, and she thinks that Pablo left her because she struggled with intimacy. She would sometimes be overcome by the memory of the rape, and “he’d gotten fed up” (78). She thinks this is reasonable, believing he doesn’t want her because she is “ruined forever.” Elina stays in her room for two hours, waiting for reception to tell her she has a call from Pablo and contemplating her future. It occurs to her that she may no longer have a job teaching at the university after she began crying during a lecture. She’d shut herself in the teachers’ lounge until someone found her and called an ambulance. She woke up in a clinic, where she spent group therapy sessions and arts-and-crafts activities contemplating suicide. She was discharged, but only managed to work two more weeks at the university before taking sick leave. Through it all, Pablo never called to ask about her.

Elina eats only a few bites of lunch before heading to the beach. She is frightened by the shrub-lined path where someone could hide, but she perseveres and arrives at the sea. It begins to rain, and when she is drenched, she takes out a razor and begins to cut herself. On her way back to her room, she asks the receptionist if she has any calls, then she draws herself a bath and cuts herself again.

The next morning, a new girl sits at Elina’s table. Elina hasn’t slept and doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but there is something about the girl that she likes. As she takes her first sip of coffee, she feels her heart pounding and thinks that it would be “lovely to die” so “suddenly and without planning” (81). She tried to kill herself with pills once, but overdosing was harder than she expected, and she woke up in the hospital. The girl tells her about the hotel’s lookout tower, which is generally off-limits to guests because it hasn’t been renovated. However, the girl insists that the tower is safe and that the door isn’t locked.

The Lady Upstairs is “sure that Elina [is] the one” (83). She appeared to her as the new girl at breakfast and now leads her up the lookout tower’s steep stairs. Once they arrive at the small room atop the tower, Elina smiles at the view. The Lady Upstairs thinks that she will bring Elina back to the tower the next day and lock her in. She will “wait for her to grow desperate from hunger” and “tell her how no one would come looking for her, because no one cared about her” (84). If necessary, she will reveal “her true form,” “her true smell,” and most “terrifying” of all, “her true touch” (84). Elina will fall down the stairs or throw herself out the window, and The Lady Upstairs will be “free,” and Elina will be left to haunt the hotel in her place.