Mariana Enriquez: "There was a huge ball on the table: it was cocaine."

BarcelonaThe popularity of Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) has continued to grow worldwide over the last decade. This week, dozens of readers of the Argentine author were left outside the new La Central bookstore in Consell de Cent, where she was presenting the reissue of the novel. How to disappear completelyPublished in 2004 and now republished by Anagrama, it delves into the life of a teenager, Matías, who becomes obsessed with the idea of fleeing Buenos Aires, in part because he has an older brother living in Barcelona. The discovery of a packet of cocaine could be the stroke of luck he's been waiting for.

The last time we spoke He told me he was about to make an important move. Have you settled in Tasmania yet?

— Yes. I've been living with my husband since March. I still haven't figured out the new, quiet, and boring routine I'd like to continue writing. One of the toughest challenges of this whole adventure has been moving my library.

Have many books been brought to Tasmania?

— About 5,000. And I've gotten rid of about 1,500, far fewer than I would have liked. The books are now in Australia, and they won't be returning to Argentina.

Is it a permanent transfer?

— The intention is that it be so.

He has traveled to Barcelona with two books at the new releases counter: one new, Archipelago (Ampersand, 2025) and the recovery of the novel How to disappear completely.

— Archipelago is part of a collection by the Argentine publishing house Ampersand in which an author is asked to talk about their relationship with reading. The authors who participated include Alan Pauls, Ida Vitale, María Moreno, Margo Glantz, and others. In my case, I was in the middle of thinking about moving my library, which helped me to shape the archipelago of books that have ended up shaping my taste. At the time I wrote How to disappear completely She was obsessed with Roberto Arlt, Hubert Selby Jr., and Dennis Cooper. She read a lot of sordid realism.

21 years ago he published How to disappear completelyWhat do you remember from that time?

— Yes. And many more that were already written. I wrote it before the 2001 crisis, a very difficult time in my country's recent history. To get ahead, you had to work four or five jobs. It was a very distressing situation. You lived with the feeling of being trapped. It was impossible to escape. This was one of the emotions I conveyed to Matías, the book's protagonist.

Did journalists like you also need to have so much work?

— Of course. At that time I was working for Page/12 and for three other media outlets. I also wrote scripts for Canal Rural. For a time, I knew everything about foot-and-mouth disease in cows. And I still had another job: modernizing the hyper-Castilian Spanish of some old translations of classics, such as Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky.

I'd venture to say that Raskolnikov and his Matthias have more than one thing in common: nihilism, a desire for change, rage... and taking risky decisions. Fortunately, Matthias doesn't kill any old moneylender.

— My character is just as crazy as Dostoyevsky's. You can't steal drugs from a drug dealer and pretend to sell them as if nothing had happened. This is the point that may sound less plausible today, but in Argentina at that time, it was possible.

Because?

— When I was writing this novel, I wasn't taking as many drugs as I used to, but I have flashbacks of what I experienced, and I remember, for example, going into friends' apartments where the dealer was also there, distributing the drugs. Once, there was a guy, who later ended up in prison—maybe he's dead now—who had a huge ball on the table. He thought it was a lamp, but it was cocaine. Around him, his friends were scratching it to make lines while he filled little bags.

What would it be like now?

— Nowadays, the environment is much more dangerous, at least in Argentina. Since synthetic drugs and other substances began to be sold, things have become more complicated. When I was young, the dealers made extra money selling drugs, but during the day they worked as taxi drivers or painted floors. There was a window of opportunity for many lower-middle-class dealers. Now, it moves so much money that it's become an industry. A criminal industry, by the way.

Matías lives with a sister with a deformed face, an abusive father, and a mother who says they are all killing her.

— The mother plays the victim, but she's complicit in the system, a bitch. I've never written from a politically correct perspective, but in this novel it's more evident than in other books. Here I show a middle class in absolute decline.

The escape valve is rock music. This would also be different if the novel were set now.

— I'm sure they would. Nowadays, the characters would listen to urban music, for sure. In the '90s, in addition to listening to rock, I liked bands like Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, and NWA, but I haven't been too interested in the evolution of rap into urban music. It was the last time rock dominated the mainstream. I'm not complaining that it's no longer the case. Everyone is from their own time.

How to disappear completely What is your most hopeless novel?

— Without a doubt. Paradoxically, it's the one with the happiest ending of all.

How did you manage to continue writing after hitting rock bottom with this novel?

— It saved me to write genre. A year after How to disappear completely I made my first foray into horror with a story, and thanks to this I'm ending up publishing my first compilation, The dangers of smoking on the leg (Anagrama, 2009).

In the book, the great hope is to go to Barcelona, ​​​​like the brother. When was the first time you went to Barcelona?

— It must have been the summer of '97 or '98. Between then and 2005, most of my friends came to live in Barcelona because of the crisis. My travels helped me debunk the myth. Barcelona is a magnificent city for some things, but not for others.

Because?

— People didn't tell you what they really did for a living, or how they lived, in Barcelona. Migrants go to a place where they'll accept doing things that would be unthinkable in their own country. I was impressed that my friends who lived in the Raval shared the bathroom with other neighbors.

How is?

— Because if there's one thing South American countries have, it's space. Anyone can afford their own toilet, even if they have to build it themselves, precariously, in their backyard.

How did you experience Catalan being spoken in Barcelona?

— I felt it less the first time. The second, much more. On one occasion, I remember that almost everyone spoke Catalan in Barcelona. Now things have changed again, or so it seems.

One of the myths about Catalans is that we don't change languages when someone speaks to us in Spanish.

— They've always changed their ways with me quickly. Perhaps in part because I'm not from the country, and my accent is immediately noticeable. I'm very aware that there's a problem with Spain. Since I'm from abroad, they don't have that problem with me.