A Sweet Scent of Death

by Guillermo Arriaga

  Washington Square Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Guillermo Arriaga

  Translation copyright © 2002 by John Page

  Originally published in Mexico in 1994 as Un dulce olor a muerte by Grupo Editorial Planeta Translation originally published in Great Britain in 2002 by Faber and Faber Limited

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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  ISBN: 1-4165-3948-4

  978-1-4165-3948-3

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  Chapter I

  Adela

  1

  Ramón Castaños was dusting his counter when he heard a faraway, piercing shriek. Listening carefully, he heard only the usual morning hum. He decided it was just the screech of a chachalaca, many of which flapped about the hill. He went on with his dusting. Taking down a shelf, he prepared to clean it, when there was another scream, much closer and clearer. This was followed by another, then another. Ramón put down the shelf, jumped over the counter and went out the door to see what was happening. It was early Sunday; he found no one. But the screams became more and more frantic and continuous. Walking out to the middle of the street, he saw three boys in the distance, running towards him, shouting at the top of their lungs.

  ‘A dead woman…a dead woman…’

  Ramón moved toward them and stopped one as the others fled among the houses. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘They killed her…they killed her…’ howled the boy.

  ‘Who? Where?’

  Without another word the child raced off, back where he’d come from. Ramón followed him, running along the path to the river, until they reached a field of sorghum.

  ‘There,’ gasped the frightened child, pointing to one side of the field.

  A corpse lay among the furrows. Ramón approached slowly, his heart pounding at every step. The woman was nude, lying face up in a pool of blood. The moment he saw her he could not take his eyes off her. At sixteen he had often dreamt of seeing a naked woman, but had never imagined finding one like this. He surveyed her smooth, motionless skin more in shock than in lust, for it was a young body. With her arms stretched back and one leg slightly bent, she seemed to implore a final embrace. The sight moved him. He swallowed hard and took a deep breath, noticing the sweet scent of cheap floral perfume. He felt like giving her his hand, lifting her, telling her to cut out the pretense of death. She remained nude and still. Ramón took off his shirt, his Sunday best, and covered her as well as he could. As he bent over, he recognized Adela. She had been stabbed in the back.

  2

  A crowd of curious villagers, led by the other kids, arrived noisily, almost stumbling over the body. But the sight of it silenced them. They surrounded it quietly, some furtively examining the dead woman. Ramón realized that her body was still partly exposed. He broke off a few sorghum stalks to cover the bare parts. The others watched him, surprised, as if intruding on a private rite.

  A fat, gray-haired man pushed his way to the front. He was Loma Grande’s ejido delegate, Justino Téllez. He stopped momentarily, reluctant to go beyond the circle surrounding Ramón and the dead girl. He would have preferred to stay out of the way, in the crowd, but he represented authority and as such would have to intervene. Taking three steps forward, he spat on the ground and said something to Ramón which no one heard. He knelt beside the body, raising the shirt to look at the girl’s face.

  He crouched, examining the corpse for some time. Finally, covering it again, he stood up with difficulty and clicked his tongue. With a bandanna from his pocket he wiped the sweat trickling down his face.

  ‘Bring a cart,’ he ordered. ‘We have to take her to the village.’

  No one moved. Aware that he was not being obeyed, Justino Téllez examined the faces watching him and stopped at Pascual Ortega, thin, awkward and bowlegged. ‘Move it, Pascual; go get your grandfather’s cart.’

  As if he had been brusquely awakened, Pascual took one look at the corpse, then at the delegate, swung around and dashed off to Loma Grande.

  Justino and Ramón stood wordlessly face to face. Among the whispers of the curious, someone asked, ‘Who is she?’

  No one really knew who she was, but an unidentified voice declared, ‘Ramón Castaños’ girl.’

  A buzz of murmurs rose, then stopped, leaving a heavy silence, broken only by chirping cicadas. The sun began to bake the air, raising humid heat from the ground. There was not a breath to cool the inert flesh lying before them.

  ‘She wasn’t stabbed very long ago,’ murmured Justino. ‘She isn’t stiff, and there aren’t any ants yet.’

  Ramón looked at him, bewildered. Téllez continued even more quietly, ‘She was killed less than two hours ago.’

  3

  Pascual returned with the cart and parked it as close to the victim as possible. The circle drew back, but remained expectant for the long time it took Ramón to decide to put his arms under the corpse and lift it. Unexpectedly one of his hands touched the sticky wound and, repelled, he moved it brusquely. The shirt and stalks fell away, leaving the woman nude again. And again morbid eyes stared at the exposed skin. Ramón made an effort to spare Adela’s vulnerable modesty by turning his back on the crowd and walking away across the furrows. The onlookers yielded with no effort to help him. Stumbling, he approached the cart and gently deposited the supine figure. Pascual handed him a blanket with which to cover her.

  Justino came up to make sure that all was well and ordered, ‘Take her away, Pascual.’

  The boy took the driver’s seat and whipped up the mules. The cart staggered along, shaking the body on its boards, followed by the crowd. The rumor was confirmed among those in the funeral procession: Ramón Castaños’ girl had been murdered.

  Justino and Ramón stood watching the cortège move away. Still affected by his brush with that warm flesh, Ramón felt his veins burning. He missed the weight of what he had just carried, feeling as if he had lost something that had always belonged to him. He looked at his arms, marked by faint bloodstains, and closed his eyes. He was suddenly seized by a dizzying need to chase after Adela and embrace her. The idea upset him and he felt faint.

  Justino’s voice brought him out of it. ‘Ramón,’ he said.

  Ramón opened his eyes. The sky was a cloudless blue, the rust-colored stands of sorghum ready for harvest, and death was the memory of a woman in his arms.

  Justino bent down to pick up the shirt still lying on the ground. He handed it to Ramón, who automatically accepted it. It too was stained with blood. Rather than put it on, Ramón tied it around his waist.

  The delegate scratched his head. ‘I’ve got to admit,’ he said, ‘I’m damned if I know who that woman is.’ Ramón sighed softly. He might have said the same. He had seen her no more than the five or six times she had come to buy at his store. Since then, he had found her very attractive. She was tall, with light eyes, so he had asked around for her name, and it was Juan Carrera who told him it was Adela. That was all he knew about her, but now that he had held her close to him, so naked and so close, he se
emed to have known her all his life.

  ‘Adela,’ murmured Ramón. ‘Her name was Adela.’

  The delegate frowned; the name meant nothing to him.

  ‘Adela,’ repeated Ramón, as if the name pronounced itself.

  ‘Adela what?’ asked Justino.

  Ramón shrugged his shoulders. The delegate looked down and examined the spot where the corpse had rested, now the site of a large bloodstain. Footprints were barely visible among the hardened, cracked lumps of earth. Justino followed them into the sorghum until they disappeared in the direction of the river. He squatted and measured the footprints by handspans. One of the prints measured one span: Adela’s. Another measured a span and three fingers: the murderer’s. Her prints were barefoot, his those of a high-heeled cowboy boot.

  Justino took a breath and made his decision: ‘Her killer was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, right?’

  Ramón assented, almost involuntarily. He hadn’t listened.

  Justino moved a little earth with his shoe and continued, ‘He killed her with a long sharp knife, because he cut through her heart with one stab.’ He scanned the place in search of a weapon. Not finding one, he continued: ‘She fell face down, but the killer turned her over to see her face and left her that way…as if in the middle of a sentence.’

  A flock of white-winged doves flew over them. Justino followed them with his eyes until they were lost on the horizon. ‘She was a very young victim,’ he said as if to himself. ‘Why the hell would he want to kill her?’

  Ramón didn’t even turn to look at him. Justino Téllez spat on the ground, took him by the arm and began to walk him along the path.

  Chapter II

  The School

  1

  They returned to Loma Grande to find the cortège waiting for them, motionless around the cart, Adela’s corpse swelling under the sun and dust. Other neighbors had joined the group. Among them, the word spread that Ramón Castaños’ girl had been murdered.

  Jacinto Cruz, butcher, and grave-digger in the village cemetery, approached Ramón. ‘What’s to be done?’ he asked.

  Irritated, Justino interposed; as local authority, it was he who should have been asked.

  ‘Take her to the school,’ he ordered.

  Jacinto accepted the order, and when he was about to withdraw in compliance, the delegate stopped him.

  ‘And tell the girl’s parents.’

  Jacinto Cruz looked at him inquisitively. ‘And who are they?’

  Téllez shrugged his shoulders and turned to Ramón, expecting a reply, but he didn’t know either.

  ‘I know them,’ said Evelia, Lucio Estrada’s wife. ‘They live two lots beyond Macedonio Macedo’s house.’

  A few months before, Macedonio’s house had marked the end of Loma Grande, but so many people kept coming from elsewhere to the village that its boundaries changed from week to week.

  ‘Well, do me the favor, Evelia,’ said Téllez in his hoarse voice; ‘tell them what’s happened.’

  The body was taken to the school and, unintentionally, Ramón headed the funeral procession. The crowd did not move until he took the first step.

  They laid her out on the floor of one of the only two classrooms, putting her on a straw mat so that she would get no dirtier, and left her covered with Pascual’s blanket. Someone lit four votive candles, one at each corner of the mat, as the classroom began to get crowded. People pushed and shoved to position themselves as close as possible to the action. In spite of the tension, they never encroached on the space occupied by Ramón, as if it were marked by some invisible barrier.

  2

  In the midst of the crowd and the heat, Pedro Salgado, Ramón’s cousin, came up to him.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your girl, cousin,’ he said.

  Ramón looked at him in confusion. ‘What girl?’

  Pedro embraced him, exhaling a breath heavily laden with alcohol.

  ‘I feel for you, cousin,’ he whispered in Ramón’s ear. Releasing him, he removed his shirt and gave it to Ramón.

  ‘Here, so you don’t walk around bare at a difficult time like this.’

  Ramón realized that he was not wearing his own.

  ‘No thank you,’ he said, embarrassed, pointing to the shirt around his waist; ‘I have my own.’

  Pedro looked at him with unfocused eyes. He opened his mouth and slapped his chest.

  ‘Cousin, your shirt’s dirty, and I’m giving you mine with all my heart.’

  Bewildered, Ramón took the shirt and thanked him for the favor. His cousin responded with a pat on his back.

  ‘Whatever you need, Ramón,’ he said with eyes on the verge of tears, kissing his cousin on the forehead. ‘I know you loved her very much,’ he murmured, stumbling away.

  Ramón tried to catch up with him to make it clear that Adela had never been his girl and was a stranger to him as to everyone else, but the crowd prevented him. His only consolation was that his cousin was drunk.

  ‘He didn’t know what he was talking about,’ thought Ramón.

  He looked at Pedro’s shirt. It smelled slightly of sweat and beer, but it was cleaner than his own, so he put it on and buttoned it up. It was a size larger than his.

  Less than an hour after the murder was discovered the rumor of Ramón Castaños’ girlfriend’s death had spread to every corner of Loma Grande.

  Crowded around the school, the villagers tried to find out about Ramón’s relationship with the strange girl. Some took advantage of the opportunity to brag. Juan Carrera boasted that he had been a friend of the dead girl when in truth he had only wished her a ‘Good day’ one distant Thursday in June, which Adela had not deigned to answer.

  ‘I introduced her to Ramón,’ he maintained. ‘Thanks to me they began to go steady.’

  3

  The widow Castaños was scaling tilapias she had received from Melquiades and Pedro Estrada, when she saw the funeral procession passing a few blocks away. She paid no attention, thinking it just another of the many religious processions organized by the evangelicals on Sunday mornings. She went back to her work, finished cleaning the mojarras and rinsed them to remove the last vestiges of gut. María Gaya and Eduviges Lovera arrived to tell her what had happened, just as she was finishing. They told the tale, interrupting each other constantly. The widow admitted she was surprised. She had never heard about a relationship between her son and this Adela, nor had Ramón ever confessed to having a girlfriend. The boy had never shown signs of the kind of craziness typical of people in love, the kind that might have given away a secret passion. No, that romance could not be true. She would never have missed something so important. However, her friends insisted Ramón was Adela’s steady boyfriend and Adela had been murdered at dawn. The widow refused to believe the story. Eduviges Lovera suggested she accompany them to the school to see for herself. She accepted, dropped the fish into a bucket, sprinkled them with salt and covered them with a piece of cardboard to keep off the flies, and set off.

  When she reached the classroom and discovered her son at one end of it, the widow lost all doubt about the truth of what her friends had told her. Ramón looked pained and sad, the way men look when they lose the woman they have truly loved.

  The widow Castaños hesitated an instant, unsure whether to console the youngest of her children. She did not dare to do so. Ramón’s face revealed a suffering that she would be unable to ease. Full of sorrow, she left the classroom.

  4

  People continued to arrive at the improvised wake. The room could hold no more, but those outside wanted to come in and those inside refused to leave. Everyone wanted to be there, to murmur about this relationship that had been cut short, to get a whiff of the corpse and butt in to someone else’s sorrow.

  To make more space inside the classroom, the onlookers removed desks, chairs, blackboard and anything else that got in their way. They were so careless that several desks were broken in half. Desperate, Margarita Palacios, the only teacher in Lom
a Grande and its environs, tried to restrain the turmoil. Gesturing frantically, she insisted, ‘Get that girl out of here. It will scare my pupils and they won’t want to come back to school.’ But her protests were in vain; the adults paid no attention, more interested in the buzz of events than in the vehemence of her arguments. Meanwhile, the children, far from being frightened, seemed infected with the furor of their elders. Pressed against the classroom windows, they tried their utmost to explore this unusual situation.

  In the midst of the turmoil, Justino Téllez finally faced the inevitable: Adela had been Ramón Castaños’ girlfriend. At first he had refused to believe it, thinking it was only claptrap; but the phrase was repeated so often by so many mouths that he finally accepted it as true. He was then able to explain Ramón’s confusion, his vacant stare, his tense jaw; but he could not understand why Ramón had not confessed the truth, nor why he had hidden his relationship with Adela.

  As an ejido, rather than a police, official, Justino Téllez was not much concerned to find answers to his questions. Instead, he faced Ramón, saying, ‘You sure had it covered up.’

  At first, Ramón did not realize that Justino was talking to him; but as the delegate stood staring straight at him, it finally dawned on him he had been addressed.

  ‘Covered up what?’ he asked, annoyed.

  Justino smiled and pointed his jaw at the shape of Adela’s corpse. ‘That she was your girlfriend.’

  The response froze Ramón. Stammering, he tried to deny it: ‘No…she…I…’

  But there was no time to say any more, because at that moment someone yelled, ‘Here come the rangers!’

  Chapter III

  Carmelo Lozano

  1

  Two blue-gray pick-ups crunched to a halt in front of the school. Their arrival was violent and ostentatious, raising a cloud of dust and scaring the kids. Carmelo Lozano, chief of the rural police based at Ciudad Mante, got out of one of them. Carmelo was not in the habit of making rounds on Sundays, but that morning he had woken up with the conviction that something serious was happening around Loma Grande. ‘I’ve got the vibes,’ he said to his subordinates. He ordered them into the pick-ups and, following his instincts, led them without hesitation across forty kilometers of tangled dirt road to the village.