Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V. Lopez;Carmen Ospina

  Just a second before the woman rang the bell for the eighth floor, I whispered into her neck: “Give me my stuff and take me to the dealer. And shut up!”

  That’s how it was. Everything was okay, as it always is. There was something left over from the old times. I figured the junkie would get a good beating, because she was gullible and dumb, and the creep who would beat her would know she had it coming, and I wondered why I’d done that. Nostalgia? Probably. Partly, I had a nauseous feeling and the ephemeral happiness that comes from shady deals sewn in the memories of a risky and delicious youth. That’s what they called it: risky. And I also had anger.

  It was obvious that, with my belly, I wasn’t going to put that gram in my body, that poison that was actually less expensive now than twenty years ago, the only consumer item whose price hadn’t gone up in that time. It was cheaper now. But who knows what that white powder I had put in my back pocket was actually made of: paracetamol, laxative, amphetamine, lime from the bathroom wall … I didn’t want poison, I had no real need to meet that fucking dealer, what a face, what pain; I had no intention of getting that poor toothless girl into any more trouble. Let her fuck herself. I only wanted to test the strings, to prove something to myself. There was no soundtrack. Fucking thieves, old-time rats. I’d had a rough time in Nou Barris but I still knew how to get around. It was just that I was checking things out … for nostalgia’s sake.

  “I can’t believe it! The queen visiting my humble abode …”

  It was Santo, still in his flat. Río de Janeiro Avenue, next to the sign reading Goodbye, Barcelona right on the outskirts, next to Meridiana Avenue, waving goodbye to the city with the stink of an immigrant buried in poverty and oilcloth. Nou Barris was the sad fringe of the city. It had been the workers’ bastion, solidarity with Cuba, oh Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, until victory forever and lunch for the poor, but now nobody remembers any of that. Shovelfuls, millions of bags later, and he was still there, skinny, with his dark hide covered in thick gold chains, stooped like an awning over a passerby, a visitor, the one footing the bill, the solicitor.

  “Hi, Go-Getter.”

  That was him now, the Go-Getter. I noticed my tone of voice. A bit more seductive than required. A bit nicer. I could admit to being nice, but not seductive, damnit, not with that belly.

  “Come on in, my queen. Enter my humble abode. You will find something to your liking … I’m sure.”

  But I didn’t go in. It took me a few minutes to recognize the smell, the same smell from those other times, of disinfectant and rancid smoke. The smell of a closed bar seems rather sinister in a house. I remembered the nights, so many visits at such a wrong time, without clocks, Santo’s bed—he was still Santo—and Magic Hand’s solo marking the beat of everything that was going on in that house, with fifty-hour days full of insomnia and crappy poker. He was looking at me from the arch his head formed at the top of the marquise, at the end of his too-long neck; a bird’s neck. He smiled, because he knew, and he looked at my belly. His fingernails were yellowed by cigars. His eyes were yellowed by vice. His brown skin was smooth and brilliant on his bones. Short straight hair, brown, soft, a girl’s hair.

  I went in. “I’m not staying long.” I touched my belly: It’s just a moment, little one, a couple of minutes.

  “My queen, even the day you show up here legless, dragging yourself, dry like an empty wineskin, I’ll still want you. You know that.”

  But the Go-Getter didn’t want anything. He had it. He had started back in the day, in Santo’s day, buying and selling what drugs he could find and even those he couldn’t. He was the only opium dealer in Barcelona. He was flexible, and that worked in his favor. When the girls didn’t have money, he accepted payment in long, complicated fucks. They were anxious. Barely wet, just sex machines. Then he started to make tapes. Later he set up the mirrored room. Only the dirtiest couples and the men knew about that. They could stay behind the glass in the next room and watch feats with hi-tech dildos and latex costumes in which young girls, who were new to the needle, faked contortions while getting fucked, and generally let anything be done to them. He managed to get quite a clientele. The rest came later, and by then he was already the Go-Getter. Everything, everything you couldn’t find through legal channels, everything you could imagine—unmentionable whims were sold in that flat in the slums.

  “I want a hand. The hand of an aging rocker who’s dying.”

  He laughed. He always knew.

  “I don’t have any hands, my queen. I don’t deal in them … I don’t know anything about that business.”

  “How can you cut a hand so cleanly, so quickly, in the middle of a crowd?”

  “You’ve always been a romantic—”

  “How?”

  “Look for a reap hook. And above all, a really fucking first-class specialist.”

  “Where?”

  “At the aviary, the old civic center in the Cañellas area … And come back.”

  A reap hook, no less. Do you know what a reap hook is? One of those fucking knives shaped like a sickle, like Arabs have, the blade on the outside, painful just to look at, infallible, zaz! She came into the office out of breath, swinging twenty necklaces over those two juglike tits; yum, I swear, yum, yum! She told me we were going to Cañellas to look for a reap hook. Cañellas, no less. That’s how it is with her. And why? Don’t ask.

  Located on the fucking outskirts of town, it’s well known that the only outskirts that are any good are the ones with swimming pools. But people in Cañellas hadn’t seen any pools other than the puddles made by their own piss walking back from dives in the middle of the night. It was next to the woods, close to the foot of the Collserola range, where Barcelona ends, but on top, on the upper part. Cañellas was so far out on the fringe that they hadn’t even been able to put up a shitty mall, if that gives you an idea. And the worst of the worst were the small barracks—that’s what they called them, barracks—that the socialist city council had set up when there were still placard-carrying neighbors around. She loved that, the placard-carrying neighbors, but now there were no more neighbors and no more placards, there were only unemployed fuckers, and the children of the bitterly unemployed with their stupid graffiti.

  We went to what had been a youth center and was now … how can I explain it to you? It was at the foot of a hill that, if I took a picture and showed it to you, telling you it was Barcelona, you’d burst out laughing. There appeared to be a hen coming out of it … it was full of bums. Shit, Moorish bums, you know, in case you wanted a rug or some couscous.

  They were waiting for us.

  “Everything’s fine here. You don’t want anything here.”

  They were talking to me, of course, because you can imagine that a woman like Vicky, and with that belly to top it off, would surely make the hair on their asses stand on end. She wouldn’t say a word to them. And so, well, I had to talk.

  “Go-Getter sent us. He says perhaps you might be able to help us with what happened with the rocker’s hand …”

  The fucking rocker’s rotten hand, what the hell did we care about the stupid hand, it was only going to cause us problems and not make us a cent. You can’t understand women and, besides, when they’re pregnant, they’re fit to be tied, fit to be tied … Of course, I was the one who had to talk, she couldn’t; the last thing we needed was to piss off the Moors … But she talked, of course she did. I think that as soon as she saw it was going to happen, she couldn’t not talk. She started, and that’s when things got bad for us—because as soon as Vicky opened her mouth, another five Moors came out, all very serious, bearded, barefoot. And I said to her, Victoria, you’re fucking us up. Vicky, cut it out, these guys aren’t kidding around, what the fuck?

  “I’m here to find out who contacted you to cut the poor old man’s hand off. I’m not interested in anything else. You know who I am. I couldn’t care less about the old man. I couldn’t care less about the guy who did it either. And I don’t care about you. What I
want to know is who has the hand? Who paid for the hand, the collector?”

  I still wonder what got into her about the rocker’s hand. I swear, I still don’t know why, or who the collector was, or what the hell, but the fucking hand almost cost us big time, you understand? You get my meaning? It was just a scar but it could’ve been a prayer for the dead, right?

  There we were, me shitting in my pants and her with a flashiness that already smelled like a run through the woods, surrounded by guys murmuring the way they do, which no god other than their god can understand. Then, in an attempt to warm up to them, she tells them it’s okay, and she takes a bag out of her back pocket. Why don’t they offer her some tea while she lays out some lines? Tea! Lines! I swear, I couldn’t believe it. The chick was out of her mind. She thought she was in our neighborhood, because we all know the Moroccans in the corner shops are Moroccans, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing ever does in those places, but everywhere else, with those beards, they’re another kind of Moroccan, you understand what I’m saying? They looked at each other and whispered amongst themselves again, and yes, she can go with them, but I have to stay outside.

  “The ugly dude can’t come in.”

  It was the spokesman who said this, and you had to see him, the guy thought he was Omar Sharif. Do you think my objections had any weight? Oh, it would be better if she paid attention to me sometimes. I’ve been around the block a few times but she’s a know-it-all, she does everything on her own, and whatever she gets, she earns unassisted. Unassisted. I stood there like a jerk, looking at the sign on the door where you could still see Centre de Joventut de Canyelles. I had no time to come up with a plan because my lovely eyes were still on the sign when I heard her scream and saw her rush out, her hand covering her bleeding face. God, I ran after her as fast as fear allowed; it didn’t even cross my mind to go in and ask who the fuck had hurt my boss. I didn’t even consider it. If those Saracens already thought my face was so ugly, I sure didn’t need a scar. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them they were wrong, no fucking way.

  The Go-Getter had sent me to the slaughterhouse. Why? They could have hurt me even worse, but the cut on my nose would leave a mark. I didn’t want to think about it. They almost sliced it off, damn them, eight stitches. And my pride. Nou Barris was built on the backs of Andalusian, Extremaduran, Galician immigrants, with strikes, demonstrations, and civil guards, but now there was only shit left, nothing of that area from the ’70s full of small struggles and early drug usage, all to the tune of long-haired guitars. There was nothing worthwhile left of old Magic Hand. There were two zeros left in my checking account, sort of like my possibilities. I cursed the moment in which fucking nostalgia gave way to that fit of passion.

  “I saw the reap hook, Go-Getter. Very funny. We could say I even tried it.”

  Once more at the door. I was back, like he’d asked, and I was furious.

  “Touché. You look at me like that one more time and you’ll kill me, my queen.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you expect me to talk in the doorway? If you say yes, I will bring a couple of chairs to the landing—”

  “Why did you have me cut?”

  “Oh my Queen, my queen, I would never do anything to alter your tremendous beauty.”

  I went in. I got to the living room, grabbed a beer bottle on top of the TV, and threw it against the glass shelves. A storm of raining, cascading glass. A glass jar remained untouched and I threw it against that horrific stained-glass door to the kitchen. I had always found it threatening. Only the lead molding was left.

  “Don’t stop now, darling.”

  The Go-Getter opened a small built-in compartment in the bar. Cups, tall glasses, short glasses, fat glasses, and miniatures. I looked at him with a raving hunger to hurt. My blood pressure made the patch on my nose burn. I bit down.

  “Why?”

  “My angry queen, you are the only one to blame for that cut, though I have no doubt it has a delicate and glorious future on your face. You alone are to blame.”

  “Who has the hand?”

  “Are all your cravings like this?”

  “I want the hand.”

  “My nostalgic empress … What do you think you’re looking for, Victoria? A queen doesn’t rummage about in the garbage. I fear your treasure is now in some dump outside of town, rotten, devoured by rats.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Santo.”

  But he was no longer Santo, just the Go-Getter. There was no reason for him to fuck with me. I was being ridiculous. I felt ridiculous, my legs, my belly, the boobs about to blow up. I had to sit down. Stupid. The memory of the night when Magic Hand played for us, for Santo and me—or only for me, because that was how I remembered it—that magic summer night in which I decided to be who I was during the course of a concert aglow with bonfires and the smell of Sant Joan gunpowder; to be who I used to be—that memory played a dirty trick on me. You can’t have your soundtrack ripped off like that, you can’t be thrown off like that, all the time, by things as strange as a mall. That hand had worked my patience so hard; I had turned it into a symbol, a personal aggression that had now become pure, hard shame in front of this guy, the Go-Getter, no longer Santo.

  It was getting dark and the multicolored lights from the expansive mall surprised us through the large window like a balm. The inside of that dirty cave wasn’t the same either. Pink, lilac, blue, yellow neon lights. I let enough time pass so that my Santo’s explanation, the old Santo, wouldn’t embarrass me too much.

  “Give me some of that whiskey, dude.” I touched my belly. It’s all good, little one. Just a drink.

  “Have you heard of Dubai?”

  I’d heard of Dubai, of course. Who hadn’t? “Do you have clients on that fake palm-tree island, Go-Getter?”

  “No, but if I did, I’d try to comply with my commitments. If you stick your nose in other people’s business, they’ll chop it off. Look at yourself. That’s a warning, you owe me for that. If you make a commitment to do a concert, you play your fucking music, whether your name is Magic Hand or Manolo, and if Magic had a hangover, or if he was lazy or had a prima donna attack, it would have been better for him to swallow it, because these guys don’t put up with nonsense, my queen, these guys pay, and if they don’t get what they want, they get it back the only way they know. So if you say you’ll give a concert for them, you play. At least I would. The punishment for stealing from them is rather gruesome, isn’t it?”

  It was a good thing he didn’t turn the light on. The tower from the mall was surrounded by blinking neon lights: pink, lilac, blue, yellow.

  Pink, lilac, blue, yellow.

  BRINGING DOWN THE MOON

  BY VALERIE MILES

  Gràcia

  “Let the black flower blossom as it may.”

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

  He split her open like a pomegranate, and I knew then I had made a big mistake.

  That late-June day had been airless and hot and caused tears of sweat to trickle down the valley of muscle that cupped my spine. I was hiding, crouched in a tiny space behind an unsteady dressing screen in her boudoir. Heel bones dug hard into my rump to keep balance, wary to make the slightest move lest I upset the wicker screen safeguarding my intrusion.

  The bell tower of the Rius i Taulet plaza tolled three p.m. I knew she would be coming. My body tensed at the sound of the third chime and sent a hard cramp through my thigh. It felt as though someone were pulling a ribbon of red muscle straight out of my leg. I grunted through the pain. Even the slightest move echoed in wicker-speak and wobbled the delicate screen. I had been compelled to the dirty enterprise, but it would soon be over, I told myself, trying to relieve my conscience.

  I heard Lydia open and close the door of the workshop where she spent her mornings with the hermanas Furest. They were expert weavers, the three of them, and she oversaw their work on fabric designs, sewing splendid patterns. Her light staccato steps tapped over the
old stones of the courtyard as she crossed the open-air garden, which was encircled by a gallery of arches and intricately carved stone columns. The tic, tic, tic … punctuated the soporific murmurs of the plants growing there. This was all that remained of an edifice that at one time must have belonged to an opulent family. The rest of the palace, now located in Vila de Gràcia, was built around this ancient spot over a hundred years ago, before the city of Barcelona swallowed the village in its thirst for expansion. Now, one could hardly imagine such a lush and centuried interior—always still, so very still—existing among the boom and bangle of daily life in this rough and tumble part of the city.

  Lydia spent most of her time here, caring tenderly for her breathing things: the ivy serpents and tendrils of morning glory that had grown over and bearded the statue of a dancing faun, the purple blossoms hanging like jewels from his marble flute. Sometimes a slight wind would rustle the buds, making it seem as though the creature were dancing or playing a melody. She also grew savage herbs such as belladonna, monkshood, cinquefoil, foxglove, and herb-of-grace, or rue. A row of Japanese blood grass encircled the fertile foliage, guarding the place at the center reserved for the dusky flowers. There, only black blossoms did Lydia grow.

  Lydia would have stopped at the marble fountain on her way across the courtyard; its pool of cool water was what sustained these extraordinary botanicals. It was something she did every day, a ritual ablution of sorts: wet her hands in the gurgling water, anoint her brow, brush her throat with long, delicate fingers.