Marta, the other secretary, was on holiday and nobody was around. Eugènia’s computer was switched off and her table was neat and tidy, as if she’d not come into work that morning. It was strange because in the six years he’d worked as a forensic doctor at the Clinical Hospital in Barcelona he couldn’t recall that girl ever missing a day. Had she perhaps also gone on holiday? Not likely, the secretaries took it in turns and one couldn’t go off until the other was back. Besides, he’d seen her the previous afternoon behind her desk, as quiet and efficient as ever, and she’d said goodbye with a barely audible “see you tomorrow” when he nodded in her direction. She’d not mentioned any holidays, so she must be ill. He left the reports on her table and walked glumly back to his windowless cubbyhole. With a little luck, nobody would bother him and he’d be done by midday.
How old was Eugènia? About his age? He reckoned she was well past thirty, although he’d never actually asked her. In fact, the two of them couldn’t be said ever to do small talk. Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you. Here are those papers … and that was as far as it went. Eugènia was dour and introverted, and they had very little in common. And she was ugly, incredibly so. Her unusual structural ugliness derived from a range of small blemishes that weren’t easily sorted. In her case, genes had dealt her a bad hand and made her the repository of all the physical flaws of her ancestors. Poor Eugènia had simply been very unlucky. She was short and stout with stumpy legs propping up an overlong torso. Her breasts were massive in relation to her height, and she was round-shouldered. She was dark-haired and swarthy, but in a coarse dingy mode, not to mention extraordinarily hairy. When she depilated, her legs and arms were a mass of tiny red scars that only disappeared when her hair started to grow back. A real mess. As for her facial features, she hadn’t been let off lightly there either. Flabby cheeks, large bulbous nose, bulging eyes, and greasy spotty skin she tried to conceal beneath a thick layer of face cream. She dressed unpretentiously, normally in dark colors, but nothing she wore did her any favors. Though she’d never worried about her appearance, she’d long ago given up trying to look pretty and now merely tried to pass unnoticed.
He had found Eugènia off-putting from day one. When he had to go to the secretaries’ office to return a file, he always tried to deal with Marta, because her colleague’s unsightly appearance put him on edge. He couldn’t help it.
“Hasn’t Eugènia come in today?” he asked one of his colleagues.
“Eugènia? The poor thing’s downstairs. Didn’t you see her record?”
“Record? Which one? You mean the one for the woman admitted this morning?”
So secretary Eugènia, nature’s joke in poor taste, whom he’d been working with for six years, was the woman who’d committed suicide currently going cold in the basement. He put on his gown and went down to the room where they kept the corpses to take a look. According to her record, Eugènia was in cooler number ten. When he opened it, he came up against her misshapen body and familiar acne-splattered face. Yes, there she was, as white as marble except for her face that had a good color to it. How odd. The girl had felt spirited enough to make herself up before taking her own life. Powdered nose, rouge on cheeks, liner on eyes, red lipstick … She wasn’t wearing earrings or any other jewel, except for a small, apparently antique ring on the ring finger of her right hand, and she had gathered her hair up with a blue ribbon. One thing in particular caught his attention: the sweet scent given off by her body. A fresh, strong flowery fragrance, though he couldn’t say which flowers. All he was able to distinguish was the smell of roses and violets. But the odor emanating from Eugènia’s body wasn’t one of violets or roses, or perhaps it was but mixed up with others. All in all, it was extremely pleasant. He sniffed her legs, her belly, her breasts, her arms, her neck and hair. No doubt about it. She had splashed perfume all over herself, every fold and cranny, as if she’d wanted to ensure she would smell sweetly after death.
According to the preliminary report, she had been dead ten or twelve hours. If she’d not been pale as marble from the neck downward, you’d have said she was asleep. He glanced at her card again. Twenty-nine when he’d have guessed thirtyfive or -six. Yes, after looking at her close up, that girl wasn’t over thirty. It was really strange: she looked younger now that she was dead. The report said they’d found her at home, stretched out on her bed in a supine position, stark naked but covered by a blanket. Next to her they’d found a white summer dress yet to be worn and, on her bedside table, three empty boxes of Valium, a glass, and a bottle of mineral water. She had taken the trouble to send her neighbor a note so she’d find her early on and ring 061, and she’d also had the forethought to leave the door unlocked so the firemen wouldn’t have to force it open. Everything indicated that before swallowing the pills, Eugènia had seen to every last detail. Even to the point of choosing the dress she wanted to be buried in. You didn’t find many young suicides with such sangfroid.
Of course, he had never autopsied anyone he’d known. Forensics, like surgeons, never open family or friends. They leave that to someone else. In Eugènia’s case, the girl had been working at the hospital from the age of twenty and everyone knew her, even if the two of them had never hit it off. Anyway, he knew next to nothing about her. Whether she had a boyfriend (he thought not) or friends or was happy at work. As far as he was concerned, Eugènia was merely the secretary he greeted politely when he went in and out of the clinic, and to whom, every so often, he handed reports to be sent to court. In the six years they’d worked in that department, they’d never had coffee together or commiserated over setbacks in their lives. The truth was, Eugènia was a completely unknown quantity.
Even so, it felt strange to think that tomorrow he’d have her naked and defenseless on the autopsy table. He wished the case had been assigned to someone else. He did remember one thing about her: she was very shy and quick to blush. Whenever he poked his nose into the secretaries’ office, Eugènia would immediately turn red and hide her less than attractive face behind hair that was as rough and black as coal. Poor girl, he thought, genuinely moved, she was so ugly that no man could ever have given her a second look. Of course he never had. He had just treated her like a piece of the furniture and avoided sitting at the same table when they were both in the cafeteria. As far as he could remember, he’d never paid her a compliment or smiled at her beyond the call of politeness. And he’d never done so because she was ugly and her ugliness made him feel uncomfortable. He regretted that now.
He shut the door to the cold room and decided to put her out of his mind. He must concentrate on the paperwork. He went upstairs and straight to his office, determined to bury himself in his private backlog of bureaucracy. However, before doing so, he switched on his computer to take a look at his e-mails, as he always did midmorning. And saw it. A message addressed to him from someone he wasn’t expecting to hear from at all. Name of sender: Eugènia Grau. His heart missed a beat. It was a short message, barely two lines. It started Dear Doctor and signed off with a Yours sincerely. In a neutral polite tone, Eugènia asked one thing of him: that he personally carry out the autopsy on her when she was taken to the morgue. Nothing else. That was it. Taken aback, he read that concise text several times trying to decipher a possible hidden meaning. Eugènia had left no suicide note but, for some reason that escaped him, before ending it all she had taken the trouble to perfume herself, make her face up, and e-mail him that highly unusual request. His stomach felt queasy. He didn’t know what to think.
He decided not to say a word and spent the rest of the morning sitting in his office pretending to work. Just before two o’clock he informed his colleagues that he had a headache and was going home. It was true his head was throbbing. He was on his way, walking past the secretaries’ office, when he stopped in his tracks. He’d had a hunch. In a flash he went inside and started rummaging in Eugènia’s desk drawers. He soon found them. There they were. A set of her house keys, with a note of her address. Yes, it was the addr
ess that was also on her card. After ruminating for a few seconds, he put the keys in his pocket and rushed out. As soon as he hit the pavement, the light of the midday sun dazzled him and he had to shut his eyes. A motorcyclist almost knocked him down. What the hell was he up to? Almost unaware, there he was, in a taxi and asking the driver to take him to the address attached to the key ring. His heart was racing and he found it hard to breathe. Let alone think. The girl lived by herself, on Floridablanca Street, very close to where they worked. The taxi got there in only a couple of minutes.
Eugènia’s flat was near the Sant Antoni market, in a district on the left of L’Eixample that had never lost its noisy working-class character. The market was the first to be built outside the city walls when they were demolished in the last third of the nineteenth century, and it retained its spectacular iron structure and bustling atmosphere. It was still the center of the busy commercial activity that characterized the neighborhood where Eugènia’s family had lived for nigh on a century. At the end of May 1909, Eugènia’s great-greatgrandparents had moved there with their burden of children, belongings, and debts, and the expectation they would find home comforts that were nonexistent in the tiny dismal flats in the old part of the city. Little did they imagine that the streets of their new neighborhood would very soon be transformed into one of the scenarios of violent conflict between workers and troops in the Setmana Tràgica and that smoke from burning churches would blacken the sky over their new start in life. It had been a short journey from where they used to live, a brief ten-minute exodus on foot, but far enough to leave behind that labyrinth of damp narrow streets prey to overcrowding, dirt, and poverty. Unlike the well-off middle classes who had migrated further, to the distinguished buildings the architects had erected on the right of Balmes Street, more modest families like Eugènia’s were forced to settle for those humbler flats on the borders of their old district. Now, together with the Raval, it was one of the most densely populated parts of Barcelona and home to most of the immigrants coming into the city. You only had to look at the headscarves worn by the Arab women or listen to the melancholy voices of the men conversing in remote, incomprehensible tongues on street corners or sitting on benches. The frantic Babel of streets in Eugènia’s neighborhood was awash, as they had always been, with hope and rage, honest folk and hoodlums, next-door neighbors from way back and newcomers. Blocks and sidewalks harbored prostitutes and old dears going to their daily mass, pimps and shopkeepers, informers and plainclothes police. Traffic was nose-to-tail and car fumes polluted the air. There were few tourists strolling thereabouts. They preferred the beach or air-conditioned museums.
The block where Eugènia lived didn’t have a concierge. It must have had one once because there was a concierge’s cubbyhole, but at some point the neighbors clearly decided to install an automatic entry system and save money. Concierges are expensive, and it was still a modest neighborhood, however much the prices of flats had rocketed in recent years. It wasn’t difficult for him to find the front-door key, because there were only three on the ring. It was a narrow gloomy staircase, which at that time of day reeked of boiled cabbage. As it was summer and the windows were open, he could hear mothers shouting to their children to come and eat, and impatient, grumbling men demanding their dinner. Eugènia lived on the fourth floor (which was really the fifth) and there was no elevator. He gritted his teeth and started on the steep ascent.
Once he was at the top he opened the door and went into the girl’s flat, trying not to make any noise to avoid alerting the neighbors. What he was doing was probably not altogether illegal, but at the very least it was rather unorthodox. Forensic pathologists don’t visit the scene of the crime after the coroner has removed the corpse. It’s not part of their duties. Why was he doing it then? What was he hoping to find?
In all the time he’d been a forensic it had never entered his head before. Was he perhaps hoping to find a clue to why Eugènia had committed suicide? With those unprepossessing looks that life’s lottery had awarded her, it wasn’t difficult to imagine her leading a lonely life, being chronically depressed, or not feeling she belonged to a world where beauty and the attributes of youth seemed to determine the rules of the game. Eugènia must have tired of looking at herself in the mirror every morning and seeing only a reflection of her ugliness. She must have given up the struggle. And as she had been working at the morgue long enough to know that suicides always pass through the Clinical Hospital, she must have thought it preferable for the autopsy to be performed by the doctor she’d had least to do with. It was all a question of tact. Yes, that explained the message she had sent him. It couldn’t mean anything else.
The flat was light and strangely tidy, like her work desk. Not a speck of dust to be seen. It was a small flat, barely sixty square meters all told, but Eugènia had good taste. The few pieces of furniture she owned were solid and made of fine wood and the décor was sober without seeming characterless. There were rugs on the floor and plants by the windows, and books as well. Hundreds of books. Bookcases galore. Eugènia was a well-read girl, then. She was no ignoramus.
The kitchen was also tidy and the fridge was completely empty. Somebody had unplugged it. Nor was there any rubbish in the bin. Eugènia had had the forethought to empty the fridge and take the trash down to avoid leftover food rotting and stinking the house out: farsighted to the bitter end. He entered her bedroom apprehensively. The curtains were open and sunlight was pouring in. The forensic police must have taken the glass, bottle of water, and boxes of Valium because they were nowhere to be seen, but there was a slim volume on her bedside table. The book was open and a postcard marked the page. It looked vaguely familiar.
He took the postcard and turned it over to see who had sent it. A shiver ran down his spine. It was the postcard he himself had sent his colleagues at the hospital a couple of summers ago, when he was on holiday. He remembered it now. He’d spent three weeks touring the Balkans with a colleague who was an orthopedic surgeon, although their relationship had been short-lived. All the women he got close to did their best to take over his life, but he wasn’t ready to make commitments and in the end they all left him. He glanced at the postcard rather nervously. It was one of those typical cards that tourists like to send to friends or relatives, a landscape of the region of Thracia with a few ancient ruins in the background. The image meant nothing special. In fact, he could have sent that card or a dozen others. It had been a polite gesture. He put it down and picked up the book. It was a modern edition of Phaedrus, a translation. He dug into his memory and tried to disinter texts he’d read and forgotten in high school. Wasn’t Phaedrus the dialogue about beauty? Or was that Phaedon?
He was forced to sit down when the room started to spin. His body was drenched in sweat, a cold, unpleasant sweat. He was a doctor, and though his special interest was forensic medicine, he could still recognize when two symptoms were connected. That Eugènia had used this postcard to mark the page in the book on her bedside table the moment she committed suicide, and that she’d sent him the unusual request, couldn’t be two isolated acts. Perhaps the book indicated something as well. Had Eugènia chosen it to kill time while she waited for the pills to take effect, or had she decided to commit suicide as a result of reading it? If he recalled aright and Phaedrus spoke of beauty, the book reinforced his first hypothesis. Yes, that must be it. Eugènia had committed suicide because her ugliness made her tremendously unhappy.
He picked up the book and went off to the dining room. When he finished reading it was six p.m. He was right. The book was about what Eugènia wasn’t. Or maybe was, because right now he couldn’t be so sure. Wasn’t Plato really saying that beauty is independent of the physical world, a quality of the nonsensory world that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the one captured by our senses? The thought was highly disturbing. Reading the book, you could hardly say the philosopher was pouring scorn on ugly people; rather, he was warning of the error of trusting in appearances. On the other han
d, Socrates’s ugliness was proverbial. The old philosopher was no Adonis. So what if there was beauty after all in Eugènia’s misshapen body? But what kind of beauty? An inner, purely intellectual beauty, like the one Alcibiades had praised in Socrates in The Symposium and the one Eugènia cultivated with all her sophisticated reading matter? Yet if that was so, why had she committed suicide?
When he walked into the hospital the next morning, Eugènia was already on the autopsy table. Her body still gave off a flowery scent. They’d followed his instructions and taken off her ring and the ribbon with which she’d tied back her hair. They’d washed her face, her makeup was no longer visible, and she was now a pallid white. Her lips and nails had acquired the blue tone poisoning that diazepam brings, and she no longer looked if as she was asleep. She was frankly very ugly. He unhurriedly pulled on his gloves and put on a plastic apron, and cheerfully asked the assistant he’d been assigned for the day to proceed to open the back part of the skull while he took his scalpel and prepared to extract her other organs. He wasn’t expecting any surprises. Experience told him that they were dealing with a conventional suicide and that all they would find would be a general collapse provoked by the overdose of tranquilizers.
Normally, when he was working in the dissection room, he did so to music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Madonna … Some of his colleagues preferred to listen to classical music, but he’d rather his head be filled with upbeat melodies and songs that invited you to hum along and not think. On this occasion, he said he wanted silence and was in no mood for jokes or chitchat. A little solemnity was the least he owed that ugly girl who’d remained a stranger while they worked together for six years. His assistant nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and started to saw bone.
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