Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V. Lopez;Carmen Ospina

  25 José Ramón Garmabella: “Reportero de policía, ¡el Güero Téllez!, ¿Quién asesinó a los amantes de Lucerna?”; Carlos Monsiváis: “La impunidad al amparo de la homofobia.”

  26 Lolita Bosch: “In This World, and at the Time Mercedes Died” (“En este mundo y en aquel tiempo en el que murió Mercedes”).

  27 José Ramón Garmabella: “Reportero de policía, ¡el Güero Téllez!”

  28 I haven’t been able to find anything anywhere about the word, or words, that were supposedly written in blood at 84-A Lucerna Street in the early hours of September 13, 1959. Ten years later in California, Charles Manson’s gang wrote PIG in large letters on the front door of the Polanski family home.

  29 Roman Polanski’s wife.

  30 Charles Manson founded The Family in 1967, in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, two years before they killed Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife. The Family, whose violent philosophy is still followed by some satanic worshippers, had no rules other than those imposed by Charles Manson, who had managed to pull together a group of devoted fanatics; he called himself Satan, Jesus, or God, without distinction. And The Family revered him as such: at his last trial, some of his followers told how they’d seen Manson bring a bird back to life after taking it in his hands and softly blowing on it.

  During its first few years, The Family committed various murders that helped the group’s leader polish his philosophy. And in 1969, Manson announced the coming of the Apocalypse: the time had come for the black race to rise against whites. In the end, only 144,000 survivors would remain, taking shelter in a subterranean world from which they could only emerge if led by a new global king: Charles Manson. This is how he tried to convince various African Americans that they should embrace their destiny and kill whites.

  31 Fruit-fly is the name given to women who look for bisexual lovers in gay circles. In the ’50s in Mexico, this was a very tight community “with its fashionistas, painters, jewelers, Porfirian landlords, movie stars, midlevel bureaucrats, writers, all determined to live as freely as possible. The police focused on that community, especially after they found out that Massine was a male prostitute” (Carlos Monsiváis, see footnote 32). That’s something else we didn’t know until now, but which hasn’t made the crime committed on Lucerna Street seem any less terrible. The result is that the rest is just gossip and prejudice. The story just about ends here, except for one phrase.

  32 Carlos Monsiváis: “La impunidad al amparo de la homofobia.”

  33 Almost fifty years after the murders on Lucerna Street.

  34 Which means saucepan in Catalan, although I haven’t found any metaphoric connection with the ideas or incidents in this story.

  35 www.mail.yahoo.com.

  36 It’s possible that if I were to look over this text again, I might include another footnote. Nonetheless, I think those in the final version are representative of its finality. So the only thing left, then, is to be grateful for your careful reading and to wish you a good day. Take care of yourself.

  PART II

  SHELTERED LIVES, SECRET CRIMES

  SWEET CROQUETE

  BY DAVID BARBA

  El Carmel

  When I found out about the disappearance of Swiss gourmet Pascal Henry, I had no doubt that his body had become part of the larder for the liquid croquettes offered on the degustation menu at El Bulli. It happened June 12, 2008, when he went out to get his wallet and never came back for dessert; he left his hat, a notebook filled with gastronomic observations, and the bill, which was yet to be paid. He was never seen alive again.

  I decided to investigate the crime the minute I read the article about it in La Vanguardia while I was having my breakfast of café au lait and a Chester cigarette at the Delicias bar, across the street from the Montaña Pelada. Later I took a walk on the hill in order to get the facts of the case straight, especially because I couldn’t get that damned gourmet out of my head. Up there, I could sit and contemplate the city’s putrid sky and delight in the Sagrada Familia’s spires, the San Pablo Hospital watchtowers, the Cathedral’s needles, and the rail tracks along the port, not to mention the swarm of phalluslike glass-and-steel towers which have, in the last few years, smudged the kind face of Barcelona that I’ve known since childhood.

  Pascal Henry also had a kind face. I remember a picture of him next to chef Paul Bocuse, in which they’re both smiling and a little flushed from wine, their cheeks so puffy that a couple of quick slices would have produced a pair of succulent pork chops. After all, meat is meat, and anthropology long ago proved that if we’ve put aside cannibalism, it’s only because it’s been turned into a cultural taboo. In my opinion, we humans will end up eating each other sooner or later, and we’ll season the filets with fine herbs. We’re all gourmets.

  What I have in common with Ferran Adrià is that we were both born in a squalid neighborhood on the edge of Barcelona. As a kid, I also played with my chemistry set and my sister’s toy kitchens. So, with a little bit of luck, I too could have become a star chef. Unfortunately, fate also bequeathed me a fine palette and a certain taste for exotic meats. And I say “unfortunately” because, instead of being born in the bosom of a bourgeois family from Guy Savoy’s Paris, or Pierre Gagnaire’s or L’Arpège’s, I was born a boy in the Reyes Robledo family, an illustrious clan of short, pigheaded day laborers from the Cazorla Mountains, immigrants to Barcelona along with hordes of other cheap workers who came to fatten the industrious factories of Catalonia in the ’60s. Here, in the Carmelo neighborhood, my parents opened a butcher shop on Santuarios Street, in the same place immortalized by Juan Marsé in Últimas tardes con Teresa, that famous ode to the neighborhood that was always my home, or, in other words, the vulgar place from which my restlessness rose. I’m not from here or there; just an anonymous charnego, that pejorative that so well captures the traditional disdain that tried-andtrue Catalonians had for the descendants of Andalusians, at least until the arrival of all these blacks, Moors, Chinese, and South Americans who now make up the lowest rungs of our feverish and multicultural social ladder.

  Yes, I’m a racist. But no one should confuse me with the usual sociological profile of the uneducated child of immigrants who embraces xenophobia. I studied Spanish philology at the Universidad Central. With a little bit of luck, I might have been able to avoid my fate among pork chops, but nobody opened that door for me. If I’d been more of a trouser snake with one of those girls from college, I might have carved out a future as a landlord. But I couldn’t get rid of that outsider air about me and I preferred the comfort of marriage to Maruja, my lifelong sweetheart. When she was twenty-eight years old, she still had the big, perky tits I fell in love with; her ass was like a cow’s, and it only got better and better over time, as the composition of her muscles swelled. And better yet, my fresh-faced girl made a Córdoba-style salmorejo sauce to die for. Too bad that someday she’d want more out of life.

  Things went awry when they inaugurated the Juan Marsé Library a few steps from our house. Maruja signed up for a book club in which, inevitably, she discovered all of his novels. I suspect that quarrelsome charnego universe chock full of heroes made her reconsider our mediocrity. All of a sudden, she developed an enormous curiosity about the other face of Barcelona. She sought it out in novels like Eduardo Mendoza’s La ciudad de los prodigios, Juan Miñana’s La playa de Pekín, and Francisco Casavella’s El día del Watusi, which had the same effect on her as Don Quixote on chivalry: it alienated her from our modest food business. I wasn’t worried until the Sunday she didn’t tend to the chicken roaster so that she could lay on the couch and read. Although it’s true that it was our third week without a day off, I did think it was a bit much to simply declare, while painting her toenails a fiery red and never once lifting her gaze from a book of poems by David Castillo, that I shouldn’t count on her help with the business anymore. What kind of intellectual crap had she begun to believe? Did she think books were going to put food on the table? I’d had similar thoughts when I
graduated, when it still hadn’t sunk in that everything was already foretold, and that in Catalonia, without the right surname or relative, you can’t get very far. There’s nothing worse than a cultured peasant, than being aware of the glass ceiling above your head that will impede all your professional advancement. At first, I went to all the publishing houses, bookstores, and cultural centers in the city. I must have handed out two hundred resumes, but it was futile. I gave up a year and a half later, thanks to my father, who never quite got over looking at me as if I were a lazy ass and reminding me of the security that came with inheriting the business. The day I decided to put on an apron, I also decided I’d never read another book.

  Life went on, I kept cutting filets, until that notorious fall, when my stupid wife began wearing a Palestinian scarf, avidly watching Lorenzo Milá’s newscasts, and supporting the gay marriage law, obviously under the influence of her new friends from the book club. It was just a short step from there to reading Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s work.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked her one afternoon when I went upstairs wearing my bloody apron and found her working her back into some absurd yoga pose while reading the adventures of Detective Pepe Carvalho.

  “I just want to get some culture,” she answered. “It seems like all I do is go up and down the stairs from the house to the butcher shop.”

  Maruja had always read, but not much more than what was given as gifts to her parents, a pair of immigrants from Córdoba, and maybe a best seller by Dominique Lapierre or Jorge Bucay, and, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code, after which she began to show some bizarre tendencies like refusing to greet Don Victorino, the priest who married us at the parish of Mare de Déu del Coll.

  “Maruja, I meant your back,” I said, feigning concern. “You have scoliosis.”

  She shifted her body and brought her eyes up from Los mares del Sur like a cheap femme fatale. “Manolo, I’m going to study humanities,” she spit at me.

  Our marriage began to drift after the last New Year’s Eve we spent with the family. My parents barely spoke—they never had anything to say aside from things like “Slice up two hundred grams of jerky” and “Debone some pig’s feet.” But Maruja, who’d always been our family’s joy, didn’t say a word either, and after we were done with our coffee, she had the nerve to go throw herself on the couch to read another one of her novels, while the rest of us had to deal with Spanish TV’s New Year’s Eve special with the comedy duo of Cruz and Raya. Every now and then, Maruja would smirk while we laughed heartily. But the worst came when it was time to unwrap the gifts and I found myself with a recipe book by Ferran Adrià in my hands.

  “Let’s see if you smarten up and get the business up to date,” she said in a derisive tone.

  “Now you’re going to knock my cooking?”

  “It’s just that your ham croquettes are so common.”

  “What’s wrong with my croquettes?”

  “They’re dry. I dare you to try making El Bulli’s liquid croquettes.”

  This was too much. With a gesture that signaled I was offended, I went to my room, which upset my mother. At first, I just left Adrià’s recipe book on the night table. But after a while, curiosity got to me and I broke my vow against reading to see what in heaven’s name a liquid croquette could be. That recipe book was my undoing! Reading it robbed me of reason. I didn’t understand a thing. All of a sudden, my world of oxtails, sausages, and veal steaks came crashing down faced under Adrià’s techno-passionate cuisine, spherification with alginics, oysters with carrot, fake melon caviar, hot water gelatin dusted with agar … After going head to head with the ovens belonging to the messiah of modern liquidity, how could I continue the daily heresy of cooking dry croquettes? The first symptoms of depression arrived that spring.

  The same day I was coming back from the doctor with a prescription for headache medicine and an unemployment certificate in my pocket, I ran into Maruja sitting on the windowsill, with her back up against a wall, her feet bare, and her thighs obscenely escaping from under her dress. She was so absorbed in her reading, she didn’t even ask why I wasn’t at work at the shop.

  “What are you reading?” I only said this to break the ice.

  “It’s called La lectora,” she responded enthusiastically. “It’s by a friend from the book club. A genius! He even won a prize at the Semana Negra in Gijón. It’s about a student in Bogotá who’s kidnapped by a bunch of lower-class delinquents so she’ll read them a book. It’s because … they don’t know how to read.”

  I was stunned. What was this bitch telling me? Couldn’t she see she’d ruined my life? Hadn’t she noticed me utterly defeated before the ovens, trying desperately, in vain, to copy the damned postmodern liquid croquette recipe? Why did she have to engage with me now, after months of ignoring me, just to tell me about some asinine criminal plot birthed in some third world hut in the twisted and odious mind of some Latin American?

  Techno-passionate cuisine was my refuge as my marriage degenerated. I was soon making secret reservations at restaurants run by copycats of the star chef—and I discovered there were dozens of them, hundreds, most of whom destroyed the liquid croquettes as badly or even worse than I did. They all had something in common with me: they dreamed of setting foot one day in El Bulli, the exclusive restaurant on Cala Monjoi, which only serves eight thousand diners per season. My attempts to make a reservation were in vain. We’re sorry, please call again next year, they’d tell me over and over. A wall of gourmets and half the world’s plutocrats, all with wallets thicker than mine, moved in front of me. My frustration was growing at a dizzying rate and the headache medicine barely had an effect. It didn’t take long for me to start drinking, and on more than one night I ended up sleeping it off at the bar counter, crying on the shoulder of some obese dropout from the culinary school.

  One afternoon, everything came to a head. I had been strolling down Cala Monjoi, as I often did in those jobless days, so I could revel in the envy provoked by diners leaving El Bulli in their big cars, with a blonde as arm candy and a belly full of deconstructed tortilla española. I’d spent the afternoon planning to buy a rifle with a telescopic sight so I could fire above the diners’ heads; later I thought an AK-47 might be a better way to get a table without a reservation, like a Vietnam vet, and I got so excited at the thought that I almost killed myself on the highway, pushing my old SEAT Panda to the limit of how fast it could go. As I sped up the Carmelo highway and turned toward my house, a certain scent of burnt lamb made me think it might be better if I stopped at the mechanic’s on Santuarios to check the car while I calmed my nerves with a couple of drinks at the nearby bar, El Pibe.

  I was attended to by a young indigenous man with lips as thick as Mallorcan sausages. He had an air about him like a juvenile delinquent and, given the tiresome salsa music that was spilling from the speakers, I figured he was Colombian.

  “What’s up, bro? The spark plugs are practically dead!” he declared after a simple peek at the engine. “I’ll have it ready for you in a half hour.”

  I was on my way out the door when I happened to glance at the speaker delivering that relentless musical torture and saw a framed university degree, a master’s in philosophy and letters from the University of Cartagena de Indias. Another aspiring South American intellectual working like a peon in Barcelona, I thought as my gaze moved around the mess in the office and bumped into a familiar-looking book under some papers. It was a copy of La lectora. That’s when I realized the smell of burnt lamb wasn’t coming from the engine but from my own head.

  “Do you like to read, buddy?” the mechanic asked when he saw my eyes fixed on the book’s cover. “I’ll give you a copy of my novel. I just work here to put food on the table for my eight kids, but my real vocation is literature.”

  I left in a flash, with my stomach turning and the book in my hand. My wife was cheating on me with a South American mechanic with intellectual pretensions! That’s the thing about Spain: you pi
ck up a rock and uncover a writer underneath. We’re a country of Quixotes, poisoned by novels. It starts by abusing literature and ends by cooking with liquid nitrogen.

  After that terrible blow, I felt the moment had come for me to act but I contained myself: vengeance is best served cold, like a gazpacho frappé.

  I came up with my plan that very night: the next day I drove my SEAT Panda to an isolated curve on Aguas Road. I walked down to a phone booth on Avenida de Vallvidrera and called the mechanic.

  “Hello?”

  “Don Sergio, my car stopped working again.”

  “Don’t worry, buddy, I’ll come get you right away.”

  Everything went according to my plan: I killed time smoking one Chester after another, looking out at the city’s detestable new skyline, until, forty-five minutes later, the indigenous guy showed up, loudly honking the horn of his rickety tow truck.

  “Okay, bud, we’ll see what happened to your ride.”

  It was getting dark as he stuck his nose in the engine. A car went by, then another. Then it was deadly quiet. I took the knife for slicing ham from the car, hid it behind my back, and slowly approached. I’d lifted my arm toward his neck when, all of a sudden, a car flew past at top speed and blinded me with its lights. I couldn’t repress a hysterical scream. My heart was beating out of my chest and, with my nerves on edge, the knife fell to the ground. The Colombian, alarmed, jerked his head up and hit it on the hood of the car.

  “Goddamnit! That hurt! Why are you screaming?”

  I realize I lost it at that point. I should have gone for the knife and done things right, but, afraid I’d lose the advantage I had with the element of surprise, I decided to slam the hood down on his head with all my might. The first blow smashed his face against the engine. But it wasn’t enough: I pounded him fifteen, twenty times, until he quit screaming and ceased moving. I’d made enough noise to wake up the entire city. But when I finished the job, not even a fly was buzzing.