Barcelona Noir
Page 8
1) There were two different weapons used in the killings, of different sizes, and Mercedes died after she was knocked out. But not Ycilio Massine, no. That robust young man, the Michoacán-born son of Italians, fought for his life.
2) There were no signs of forced entry in the house.
But Mercedes didn’t appear to have any enemies in the family.
That’s when, empty-handed, the police and the press visited El Frontón México23. In search of a social explanation to take care of everything. It was a place where people went to have fun, where there were few prejudices, and where Mercedes Cassola, finally, looked like a fish floating in the stagnant lake that’s hidden under Mexico City.
And even so, in that place taken advantage of by everyone: nothing. And in spite of the raids, the back-and-forth accusations, and the different connections published in the press every day, the crime committed against Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was eventually filed away for lack of evidence. Nothing came from the chauffeur named Clemente, who’d driven the couple from El Frontón to Lucerna Street the night of September 13, 1959, nor the young men of Italian lineage detained by the police in various raids, nor Mercedes’s former lovers who might have been angry over losing the money and freedom that Mercedes had given them. Nothing.
The tips they got after the murders were useless.
And this is how occupied-Barcelona and that Mexico of another time tried to forget the 1959 crime. They buried it. Nonetheless, what happened at 84-A Lucerna Street had a deep impact on Mexican society, while the Francoist steel curtain was able to keep the story out of the press.
Now drawn to new headlines in the newspapers24, the sad and violent deaths of the two lovers slowly disappeared from the public’s attention.
Soon after, the bodies had already been separated.
Both were far from home.
A last pause: a minute of silence for the dead.
So, after all that, there was practically nothing. Later, later meaning now, later, after the bodies were no more, after I was born in Sant Gervasi and traveled to Mexico, after Francoism, dictatorship, exile, and those huge scissors which can cut off colorful wings with bells and feathers, the 1959 double homicide was revisited in three texts25 (four counting this one)26, and the Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis turned it into one of those standard tales in the fight against homophobia in Mexico, a Let’s-Not-Forget-How-Things-Really-Are-Here.
It started because Güero Tellez, the Mexican investigative reporter, said, “This type of crime, as we all know, is characteristic among homosexuals, whose passions are infinitely more robust than other people.”27 He concluded, “The answer might be the following: the killer’s body type probably resembled Massine’s, and he was prepared, with a different knife in each hand, so that it was probably easy for him to overpower Mercedes Cassola and her lover.”
Everything was left like this: in the hate felt by a powerful and oblique homosexual octopus that extended its tentacles with a knife in each fist. An inhuman apparition that, in the final act, cuts up the bodies and writes something on the walls. 28
Like what happened, years later, to Sharon Tate29.
Unfortunately, the death of the lovers on Lucerna Street, Pompeu’s exile, and the victim’s father’s patience, like a man who’d lost a war, were transformed into Let’s-Not-Forget-How-Things-Really-Are-Here so that we could talk about the Big World Mercedes Cassola grew up in back in Barcelona. In Sant Gervasi.
She took the city with her, flying.
Amen for Mercedes Cassola.
Amen for Ycilio Massine.
And amen for us too, because we don’t really understand what infuriated the killer(s), why the victims were judged so harshly by the authorities and the press, the pain of trying to dig out the truth that the parents of the victims had to deal with in that neighborhood where families all know each other, as was the case in Sant Gervasi, there in the heart of Barcelona. Amen because we don’t know what Charles Manson’s “family” was based on but we can follow the clues to the crime30. Until now. Until now, because we—those of us who are here—now know that Charles Manson was judged because of his philosophy, and that the crime committed against Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was, in turn, almost buried by prejudice.
Two prejudices: one in Mexico, the other in Barcelona.
So Mercedes Cassola lost twice.
As Carlos Monsiváis tells it, the case had so much resonance because of “the unique circumstance of a woman from Catalonian high society who lived as she pleased” during Francoist times. And so: reporters, agents, elected officials, and detectives all agreed—the victims deserved what they got. And so: amidst the thousands of murders of gay people, the public only remembers the case of this fruit fly31 and her bisexual lover, the story told in lurid detail.”32
This is what the Francoist authorities would have said:
Why did she leave? She would have been safe here.
That was in 1959.
Mercedes Cassola dared to flee from the Sant Gervasi in which I was born eleven years later. In time, I too went to Mexico and then returned and wrote this story and understood that, unfortunately, time is implacable; I can’t say any more.
(Silence.)
Time doesn’t make the world a different place.
That’s why I searched the Barcelona telephone directory for some relative of Mercedes Cassola’s whose tale might make it possible for me to finish this narrative33 in a gentler fashion: bringing flowers to the dead, writing that I did in fact return. I realized that the crime against Mercedes and Ycilio can only be summarized like this: impunity, history, judgment, homophobia, freedom, fascism.
I look for Mercedes Cassola in Barcelona so I can take her away. Again, as if she were flying. I want to take her with me back to Mexico and hang her wings on the dead who we do remember.
The dead who did in fact receive pity.
But there’s nothing, even though I did manage to find some Cassolas34 in the city of Barcelona. And even though I visited their home in Sant Gervasi, I haven’t come across anything, yet I’ve seen everything: and everything was practically the same. The same quiet place in which I grew up, in which she grew up. And when I stood there, in front of the Past, I didn’t dare knock on the door to ask about a killing that took place more than forty years ago.
That’s why I haven’t said or written anything.
I returned home, where I went on the Internet to send this story exactly as it is35. Without a clear understanding of whether I had managed to open any locks to a spiraling world able to absorb everything. Without a sense of whether I had reached the exact point where the dead rest in This World and At That Time when Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine died36. And thinking, in my heart of secret gardens, that the world is like that sometimes, and that it stays that way in small spaces. There’s nothing I can do about it.
And as I understand it, more or less, this continues to be a world without me.
Without any of us.
1 For Héctor Tenorio Muñozcota, a friend.
2 Barcelona had already been occupied for twenty years by illegitimate Francoist forces who had usurped power from the republic after three years of civil war. The world was a gray place, and the neighborhood of Sant Gervasi, where the protagonist of this story comes from, was a repulsive place, for more than any other reason because it always stayed exactly the same. It was the same no matter what. Seemingly safe, bourgeoisie, flexible. Everything was understood. It was very similar in its warmth, its tranquility, and its silence to many other neighborhoods in other cities in the world. This is the main setting for this story, though war, exile, and fascism have expelled it very far away from itself. Now Sant Gervasi is in Mexico. At the time of the story, Barcelona was both here and there. Sant Gervasi was a place divided by those who left and those who stayed: twenty years after a war between brethren.
3 Ten years after Germany declared itself the Federal Republic of Germany.
4 Un
less it says otherwise, all the quotes are from the Mexican newspaper El Universal. They come from the B section published between September 14–20, 1959.
5 The name given to six of the cadets who fought in defense of Chapultepec Castle during the War of Intervention against the United States (1847–1848). Their names, which we can all recite from memory, are Agustín Melgar, Fernando Montes de Oca, Francisco Márquez, Juan de la Barrera, Juan Francisco Escutia, and Vicente Suárez. The cadets’ deaths, like so many other historic events, are enveloped in all sorts of legends.
6 Both countries were right, though neither ever acknowledged this. In fact, the space satellite Lunik 2, which had left earth September 13, 1959, with the goal of landing on the moon, crashed into the Sea of Serenity. So, in a way, it did get to the moon. But it didn’t actually land.
7 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born April 15, 1894, in the mining village of Kalinovka, and died September 11, 1971, in Moscow. At twenty-three, he had joined the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And from that point on, he fought with the Red Army during the Civil War (1918–1920), had a political career in the Ukraine, was first secretary for the Moscow region and the Ukraine, tried to suppress Ukrainian nationalists, directed resistance against the Germans during World War II (1939–1945), and was elected prime minister of the U.S.S.R. He used his power to reconcile with Tito’s Yugoslavia, to break with Mao Zedong’s China, to settle Siberia, and to aid the Hungarian government against an anticommunist uprising. In 1962, he was accused of encouraging a cult of personality, just as had happened with Stalin, and he was expelled from the Communist Party and forced to resign from his post.
8 Since 1825, September 16 has been officially celebrated as the beginning of Mexican independence: El grito.
9 Twenty-six years later, in 1985, an earthquake shook Mexico City, killing between ten thousand and forty thousand people.
10 Lolita Bosch: “In This World, and at the Time Mercedes Died” (“En este mundo y en aquel tiempo en el que murió Mercedes”).
11 Ten years before Argentina had satellite communications, and twenty years before Bokassa I was defeated in what is today the Central African Republic.
12 Ahmet Sukarno (Surabaya, 1901–Jakarta, 1970) founded the National Indonesian Party. As punishment for his nationalist audacity, the Dutch colonial authorities detained him and he spent two years in prison. In 1939, he was exiled to the island of Sumatra, where he was liberated by the Japanese in 1942, during one of the battles of World War II. When the conflict was over, he declared Indonesia’s independence on August 17, 1945. And thus began a war against the “low countries” that wouldn’t end until 1949, when Indonesian independence was finally recognized. In 1956, Sukarno suppressed all political parties, and he established a dictatorship in 1959 which he called directed democracy. In 1966, General Suharto removed him from power, then replaced him as president of Indonesia in 1968. Sukarno spent the rest of his days in isolation, under house arrest in Jakarta, where he died June 21, 1970, on the first day of summer.
13 Almost fifty years ago.
14 On an August night in 1968, Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, was having a party at her home with her friends Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Wojciech Frykowski. All were brutally murdered by followers of Charles Manson; they called themselves The Family. Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant and the killers wrote the word pig with her blood on the walls. Charles Manson, who had been in and out of prison frequently over the previous eighteen years, had moved to San Francisco in 1968, where he found followers to make up The Family. Allegedly, among his closest followers was Dennis Wilson, one of the Beach Boys. In 1971, Charles Manson was sentenced to life in prison after the death penalty was abolished in California. Four years later, Lynette Fromme, another one of his followers, would try to assassinate Gerald R. Ford, president of the United States.
15 From here on, unless noted otherwise, the material in quotations continues to refer to El Universal (see footnote number 4) but relates to the investigation by Eduardo Téllez, El Güero, a legendary crime reporter who worked at the time for the aforementioned newspaper.
16 The house where Mercedes Cassola was killed was among those that collapsed during the earthquake that flattened Mexico City at 7:19 on the morning of September 19, 1985. In the place where it once stood, there’s now a public parking lot, where it costs about twenty-five pesos an hour to park, or about two and a half dollars.
17 A country that borders the Mexican Republic on the south and that bicultural space called Canada on the north. And whose president, Ike Eisenhower, visited the Francoist dictator, Francisco Franco, when only the Peronist authorities from Argentina, Salazar from Portugal, and, a little later, the Holy See, had done so. With this visit Eisenhower influenced the international community, which didn’t take long to surrender, almost completely, before Franco’s government. He was treated to a tribute during his visit to Madrid that included sixty thousand flags, twenty thousand posters in which he was shown alongside Franco, one million bulbs and 360 lights illuminating Madrid, and many wreaths of glory. They also made him honorary mayor of Marbella, and an honorable member of the Spanish Baseball Federation. Ike Eisenhower stayed at Moncloa Palace and dined with the dictator at the Palacio de Oriente, where Franco dared to say, “Our two countries are together at the front of peace and freedom.”
18 Pompilio is the translation of the Catalan name Pompeu, which is rarely used in Spanish. A fairly common name among Catalonians (in honor of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 1868, exiled to Prada in 1948, an industrial engineer, the linguistic normalizer of Catalan and author of the reference dictionary Diccionari general de la llengua catalana, 1932). Pompeu also refers to one of the legendary kings of Rome and means “solemnity.” Although some say it refers to the Sabine numeral pompe, or five. From this point on in the story, his name will appear correctly in Catalan.
19 Ycilio Massine was the son of Doña Albina Solaini, who had been widowed a couple of years before when her husband went to Italy because of an illness and died on the operating table. Ycilio lived with his mother at 31 General Cano de Tacubaya Street; he’d dropped out of school and led a life that his relatives described as “not too decent.” Although he claimed to be a carpet salesman, he was in fact unemployed. It was his mother who maintained the household, thanks to her job at a boarding house that primarily served Italian immigrants who came to this part of the Americas looking for work.
20 Death: cessation or end of life. In traditional thinking, the separation of body and soul. (Dictionary of the Real Academia Española, Vol. II, Madrid, 1992.)
21 When it comes to the murder of a Catalonian, it’s hard for the surname of the chief of investigation not to remind us of Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893–Palma de Mallorca, 1983), painter, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist. Considered a master of surrealism. According to André Breton, “the most surrealist among us.” His work, according to Miró himself, was about “killing, assassinating, erasing” the formal approaches to painting in order to find a new, contemporary form of expression.
22 Although there’s no clear link between the two incidents, I’ll add here that almost two years after the death of Mercedes Cassola, on May 2, 1962, somebody pushed her father at the corner of Insurgentes and Bajío, in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, at the very moment a truck was passing by. So it was that Mr. Cassola died in Mexico, run over by a truck, though I have no idea why he was there and what he was doing. In the end, Pompeu inherited all the family money. If any of you think
23 El Frontón México was built in 1929 and is considered one of the most beautiful buildings of the era. It’s situated on more than three thousand square meters of land and has been the site of various world championships, including Pelota Vasca, martial arts, and the national boxing title, the Golden Belt. In 1939, it was the birthplace of the Partido Acción Nacional.
El Frontón closed its doors on October 2, 1996, after the site’s operator, Miguel del Río—who owed
over three million dollars for more than seven years of rent to the owner, Antonio Cosío Ariño—asked Ramón Gamez, the leader of the Sindicato de Trabajadores del Frontón México (STFM), the workers’ union, to put off a strike so he could continue operating until an eviction notice arrived.
In May of the previous year, after the union’s workers had decided to join the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos so they could rid themselves of their “charro” leader, the strike had ended and the workers symbolically gave the building back to its owner, who announced that he was going to remodel and open again. But the secretary of governance didn’t renew the owner’s sport and gaming license, a necessary requirement for El Frontón México to be able to operate. The workers begged the owner as well as those in the offices of the SEGOB (Secretaría de Gobernación) to get the license issued so El Frontón México could open its doors again. In the meantime, its facilities were ransacked and destroyed by thieves and the homeless, and water damaged its roofs, floors, and walls.
The building’s interior now resembles a trash heap: broken furniture, cut cables, random clothing, gravel, and garbage, as well as gallons of paint thinner and gasoline covering the floors, which in some places are flooded due to leaking. Humidity has weakened the walls and most of the ceilings have come loose from their moorings. The marble floors in the lobby are flooded, and the Art Deco which distinguished it is gone. (Mael Vallejo, October 23, 2005: “Agoniza el Frontón México,” La Crónica de Hoy.)
As I write this, El Frontón México is still abandoned.
24 After September 20, 1959, there was nothing published in the Mexican press about the double homicide. Following the description of the incident on the 14th, the rest were allegations: random tips, autopsy reports, interviews with those close to the deceased, and Doña Albina Solaini’s sadness. Nothing else. The murder of Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was never solved. And their bodies, loveless I suspect, finally said their farewells: they buried Ycilio in Mexico and Mercedes was repatriated to the world from which she’d been expelled.