The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

Author:Mariana Enriquez [Enriquez, Mariana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Meat

So some of him lived but the most of him died.

RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE VAMPIRE”

All the TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and radio programs wanted to talk to the girls: Julieta, the younger, and Mariela, the older. The television vans stayed parked outside the psychiatric clinic where they were hospitalized for over a week, but the reporters got nothing. When the girls were released, the cameramen took off after them, some getting tangled in the cables, a few falling onto the concrete. But the girls weren’t running away. They looked into the cameras with smiles that were later described as “terrifying” and “cryptic,” and they got into the car that Mariela’s father drove away. The girls’ parents wouldn’t talk either: the cameras could only record their nervous pacing through the hospital hallways, their fearful eyes, and Julieta’s mother sobbing when she came out of her house with a bag full of clothes.

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. Julieta and Mariela, sixteen and seventeen years old, two girls from Mataderos who were fans of Santiago Espina, the rock star who in less than a year had left the suburbs behind to fill theaters and stadiums in downtown Buenos Aires; Santiago, whom the music press loved and hated in equal measure: he was a genius, he was pretentious, he was an unclassifiable artist, he was a commercial artifact for hypnotizing alienated girls, he was the future of Argentine music, he was a capricious idiot. El Espina—as he was known by both his worshippers and his detractors—had stupefied the critics with his second album, Meat, eleven songs that split opinions even further: on one side they called it a masterpiece; on the other, a self-indulgent anachronism. Sales skyrocketed, and the record label started to dream about an international release. Santiago Espina was strange, yes, he was unpredictable and almost never gave interviews, but how could he refuse promotional tours through Mexico, Chile, Spain? They just had to convince him to finally make a video once and for all, so the world could get a glimpse of his eyes and the way his pants hugged the sharp bones of his hips.

One month after Meat sold out, the city—papered end to end with Espina’s face—received the news that he had disappeared, mere days before he was going to present his hit album at Obras Stadium. Tickets were sold out. His fans—almost all of them girls, which only increased his detractors’ contempt—sobbed in spontaneous gatherings in the street, organized marches, and recited Meat lyrics in an ecstatic litany, kneeling before posters of Espina Scotch-taped to monuments and trees in all the plazas of Buenos Aires, as if praying to a moribund god.

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