‘The Cart’ is an evocative morality tale, which also illustrates the way many people currently live only a touch of bad luck away from absolute poverty. Like many of the stories in this Personal Anthology, it balances absolute, highly detailed reality with an element which is a bit weird.
Two drunks get into a fight in a working-class Argentinian suburb. The outsider is humiliated then forced to abandon his shopping cart full of “bottles, cardboard, and phone books.” A couple of weeks later, bad things start happening in that street. People get ill, are arrested, disappear. The local drunk claims this means the shopping cart is cursed.
“After two months no one in the neighbourhood had a phone anymore – they couldn’t afford it. After three months, they had to tap the electricity wires because they couldn’t pay their bills.”
Enriquez builds a community of interesting people through cumulative specifics, then goes on to destroy almost every one of them in individual, contemporary ways. Only one household is secretly safe. The subtlety of the writing is such that it is never made clear whether there is a supernatural factor, or just a coincidence of ill fortunes.
“The taxi driver ventured on foot to the other side of the avenue. There, he said, everything was fine as could be.”
Collected in Los Peligros de Fumar en la Cama, Editorial Anagrama, 2017. First published in English in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta Books, 2022
A Personal Anthology 