Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V. Lopez;Carmen Ospina

  I avoided Sr. Candau, couldn’t bear when he looked at me with his lecherous wink, poking out the purple raisin of his tongue and oozing complicity. I did what business I could in the confines of my office, avoiding contact with anyone else, and continued to watch her in the garden. I ached to have her, to help her, to protect her. But not once did she ever look up or acknowledge me. Never the slightest show of curiosity to know if I was still there.

  On the fourth day, early on the eve of Saint John’s holiday, which pagans call midsummer, one of the hermanas Furest appeared in my office. “From the señora,” she said, handing me a black calla lily. I was expected to join the Candaus for the Verbena de Sant Joan that evening in the courtyard. “La Señora has asked that you come early to help her prepare the garden for the festivities. Sr. Candau had to step out.”

  My throat constricted at the thought of being alone with her and my head throbbed from the previous night’s binge. I sniffed at the black flower and tried to get ahold of myself, but the musty perfume only intensified my state and revived the sordid images in my head. I went to the bathroom and threw cold water on my face before going downstairs. When I arrived she was smoothing some loose soil near the fountain. Without turning around she motioned for me to follow her into the boudoir. She closed the door and motioned me to sit down on the bed. She was more beautiful now in this subtle, dusky light than I had ever seen her before.

  “I know my husband put you up to it, and he made it impossible for you to say no. He can be a very persuasive man. But you have witnessed something that was not yours to see and you will have to pay for it.”

  She parted my legs and moved in close. I reacted immediately to her smell but didn’t dare move to hide it. She came in a little closer and brushed her hip against my thigh and touched me. She smiled at the strength of my response. “I like tall men,” she said, blue eyes twinkling. She brought her fingers to my mouth and kissed me, nibbling my lip till I could taste blood.

  “Alright then, I have a proposition to make. I will give you a choice.”

  Dusk was diffusing the shadows and the moon appeared ghostly at the courtyard’s horizon. We hung lighted dragonfly garlands and set candles around the gallery and built a tower of twigs and branches for the bonfire inside the circle of blood grass. We dressed the marble fountain with bowls of herbs and incense, coca de forner pastries and cava for toasting. The leaves in the garden seemed to sway in communion, following some sort of organic rhythm, and the garden looked richer and more lush than usual. Every so often a black blossom would set off into a shiver like a cat’s tail, and the ferns rattled their deep green, spider-lace leaves. A slight breeze flickered the candle light and jostled the blossoms that covered the garden’s faun. I was sure I saw his merry flute closer to his mouth than ever.

  Sr. Candau came up behind me and slapped me so hard on the back that it sent me into a coughing fit. The shadows seemed to suddenly deepen and panic burned the pit of my stomach.

  “Lighten up, son. Let’s have a drink. Look like you could use one.”

  “Here, Marcelo,” Lydia said. “It’s an infusion I made especially for the verbena. And here’s a little something for you too, Guillem. I know you are going to like it.”

  “Lydia, dear, you know I don’t like those concoctions you are always making me drink. I want some real spirits. It’s been a very long day.”

  “And spirits you shall have, darling. But first, humor me. Let’s celebrate this midsummer moon. It’s when the beekeepers harvest, you know. Poor bees, they work so hard then the keepers just come in and take it all away.”

  I was nervous to drink her brew, but I knew I had no other choice. My fate had been sealed when I agreed to witness things I wasn’t supposed to see. So I drank it down in one long draught, resignedly. It started as a mere suggestion of something tickling the base of my spine. It felt good. I was content and relaxed. Something warm had entered my bloodstream and was spreading slowly through my veins and capillaries. My ears began to hum and everything took on a kind of dreamscape quality. I was so light, as if my skull could no longer hold me inside, and I was going up and up and floating over the moon. I watched myself from above, quite at peace with being freed of this mortal coil; my body a shell, an automata way down there in the garden below.

  I saw in Sr. Candau’s eyes the shock of realizing that something was terribly wrong. He was losing control over his body, becoming paralyzed little by little. He fell to his knees, then to the ground, writhing, fighting. But eventually he lay still, looking upward at the glittering freckles of the nocturnal sky. In a last act of sheer will, he raised his hand as if to grab at the crescent moon above, to gain purchase. But then his face froze into an expression of terror like some theatrical death mask and his hand dropped to his side, useless.

  Lydia and the hermanas Furest waited for the shadows to swallow the rest of the courtyard. The snaps of children’s firecrackers outside gave way to an orgy of pyrotechnics—Roman candles and cracking girandoles—announcing the adult veneration had begun. The night air burst with whips and whistles and thunderous explosions, sending clouds of acrid smoke into the atmosphere. Lydia called her dog into the courtyard so it wouldn’t be spooked by the tumult and it ran straight to Sr. Candau, lying inert upon the garden floor. It sniffed at his fingers and nipped at his crotch.

  “It’s time. First the left hand, like I told you,” Lydia said as she handed me a silver stiletto.

  From above, I watched myself slice his wrist open in one clean stroke as I had been shown by the hermanas. It was so very easy. They bled him and poured the liquid into the fountain, which gurgled and tinted the water with a deep ruby cloud. I sliced the other wrist and repeated the ritual as instructed.

  The night was hot and my scalp tingled with the agitation of our deeds. And yet I was deeply at peace, as if my life had always been leading me right here. I cleaned my hands in the fountain and didn’t recognize my own reflection; it seemed as if some other man was looking back at me. I smiled at this shade of me and took a deep breath to prepare myself. Then I turned right around, picked up the axe, and chopped Marcelo’s left hand off in a single blow.

  I have yet in my life to see a bonfire like the one we set ablaze that night. Its lips snapped hungrily all the way to the second floor of the palace. The five of us kept to our task throughout the evening, cutting Marcelo up and feeding the pieces to the flames, perfuming the night air with sprigs of herbs, until there was nothing left of him but ashes. A little past midnight I began to feel the weight of myself once again, the blood rushing into every extremity, engorging my fingers, my toes, my lips. My groin tingled and came to life. Lydia had been watching me and waiting. When she saw my expression she sent the hermanas away and initiated me into the ways of her garden.

  Now, when I am called by the treble chimes of Rius i Taulet to lie with my wife, I make it a point to stop and linger for a moment near the fountain. I stand in contemplation of the black lily that grows ever stronger, nourished by the ashes of that midsummer’s fire. I water it with excessive care and remove any weeds that threaten the health of the dusky token. And bow my head in a moment of silence to thank him for all that he has given me.

  THE SLENDER CHARM OF CHINESE WOMEN

  BY RAÚL ARGEMÍ

  Montjuic

  The secret of any great city—let’s say, Barcelona—is that it comprises many cities juxtaposed one over the other, breathing side by side but with few actual points of contact.

  You can be yourself in any of those parallel worlds and then cross the street and become someone else, completely different and free of your previous identity.

  But there are people who are born distinct and so the residents of each of these worlds recognize them with the same name, alias, or nickname, without realizing that at other times, with other people, they’re the same, but different.

  That’s what happened with Delgado. He had an inadvertent talent, almost animal-like, to transform himself so that in each
city he was perceived as one of the locals.

  Delgado’s story only took up about a week’s worth of police bulletins, each time more brief, until it got lost in the whirl of those humid and suffocating summer days. But I wasn’t the only one who thought that the Barcelona of brothels, of Japanese tourists, South American waiters, and junkies from all over the place—to name a few Barcelonas—could be stalking grounds in which hunter and prey would kill each other without impediment.

  Naturally, there are three professions that facilitate jumping from city to city: cop, musician, and journalist. My excuse is that I’m a reporter. “Freelance”—in other words, like a pirate searching for the treasure that will save me; most of the time I just have to be satisfied with leftovers from the lions.

  I first found out about Delgado, or El Delgado, on a Monday.

  It was early, or late, a relativity that’s typical of juxtaposed realities, and I’d arrived alone at Clavié, because Paty, my longtime girlfriend, had left me at some point, perhaps tempted by a better offer. She also has the excuse of being a journalist.

  I had to wait awhile. Like everywhere else, Clavié, an afterhours joint, pretends to be closed, so they took their time in responding to my rapping on the door. Patience. When all the bars are closed, your last resort to get away from a bed filled with failed dreams is an afterhours place, and this piano bar didn’t smell bad and wasn’t full of drunks.

  Inside, time seemed to stand still. The fresh air from the AC, the low lights, and the sound of the piano accompanying the movement of the waiters made the world seem far away. The customers were the same as always, or looked the same as always. They were the appropriate mix for an afterhours spot, dressed uniformly, with drinks in hand, chatting or singing along with popular classics, anything to avoid going home.

  And, well, because fate can be this way, that Monday was the first time I ever saw Delgado. It was impossible not to see him, since he was almost as big as the piano on which he rested an elbow; he was wearing a yellow shirt. He smiled and bopped along to the music.

  Cavalcanti, who’s there every night with the religiosity of a sinner, was singing a schmaltzy tango in the company of two older, and perhaps temporary, gal pals. Cavalcanti saw me as I came in and, just as he was letting his throat warble to produce a sheep-like “vibrato,” he winked my way and nodded toward the tables that were a couple of steps down from the piano and the singers.

  He’d taken a liking to me since he’d found out I’m a reporter and had begun to gather material, characters from Barcelona nights, for a future book. To be honest, he didn’t have a job and mostly got by on his utopian disposition.

  The old tango singer landed at the table and ordered whiskey. With a wave, he brought Delgado over and let his two gal pals join us as well. They looked me over, we looked each other over, and then we all ruled each other out.

  The man extended his hand, as big as an oar, but didn’t break my fingers, and then sat down in a crimson armchair, muttering a greeting I didn’t quite understand.

  As usual, Cavalcanti was high on coke. That was his biggest charm with women: he always had a lot of coke, and he was generous with it. But his gal pals had decided to switch gears, now that they were at a table, and to light up a hashish joint.

  Cavalcanti gave me a lopsided smile, like Gardel. “We have to forgive them,” he said. “They still allow themselves childish things, hippie things.”

  I had enough time to nod and sip the whiskey before Cavalcanti spoke up again in his Argentine and Iberian–fused Spanish: “This guy here, just look at him—he has quite the past, my friend.”

  I glanced at Delgado and couldn’t imagine anything but Wrestlemania. Of course, I understood that Delgado was his surname.

  Later, when I saw him pop up in the papers, one of the messier points was, in fact, his name. What’s important now, what matters, is that everyone called him Delgado, and when he wasn’t around, El Delgado, the Slender Man.

  As so often happens, his nickname had nothing to do with his physical presence. He was a huge mound of a man, tall and wide, with as much muscle as fat. A mound with slow, deliberate movements that framed his constant smile, no matter what was going on, and dry hair like hay that stuck up and crowned his head. Between the smile and hair there were two tiny eyes, blue pinpoints that looked like they belonged to someone else—someone who was spying from inside his body, waiting to figure out who knew what.

  That was Delgado. At first sight, he was laughable. A clumsy giant, a guy who could stand there all night, not drinking or smoking, just laughing at everybody else’s stories, even when everybody else was pretty sure he didn’t understand a thing.

  He was inoffensive.

  Inoffensive until silence fell, and then he’d say something to save himself, in a chewed-up Spanish filled with weird echoes that some thought were Bosnian or Moldavian or Danish or Bulgarian gypsy, or maybe some mixed argot from a shipless sailor.

  He widened his smile a little more, looked at the ceiling with the blue pinpoints, and said, “Ah, the slender charm of Chinese women.”

  That’s why they called him Delgado. Because then he’d lower his eyes and the psycho crouched inside him would look at us from under his fleshy lids until the silence thickened and someone would try, clumsily, to start a conversation or suggest we sing.

  That’s what happened the first time I met him. For a few minutes, we passed the joint around and laughed haplessly, as if we were in a hurry.

  Over the next hour, Cavalcanti tried to convince me the man was a Vietnam vet, one of the gal pals tried to get close to Delgado, and the other downed four whiskeys without showing it. The women who end their night at that bar are real women. They can be drunk off their asses but you’d never know it. They’re such ladies that if they have to puke, they do it in private.

  “This guy you see here is a war hero, my friend.”

  Cavalcanti called everybody “my friend,” or used the Argentine pibe, because he couldn’t remember anyone’s name.

  “Cavalcanti, that’s impossible. This man wasn’t even born during the Vietnam War, or if he was, he was in diapers.”

  “Are you nuts, pibe? That was practically yesterday! I’d left the orchestra; I was hanging out with some Colombians. Miami, Las Vegas, Cali, Medellín … We partied our asses off!”

  “Were you dealing drugs?”

  “No, pibe, no! What are you thinking? Music! We imported tropical stars, we opened for them. I want to die whenever I remember all the women. Drugs weren’t part of the deal, they were just for pleasure. Here, take a drag …” He casually slipped a diamond-fold of coke in front of me.

  “Cavalcanti,” I said before heading to the restroom, “it’s been more than thirty years since Vietnam. If you weren’t so out of your mind, you’d realize that.”

  When I came back, pissed at anybody who cuts coke with plaster because it burns your nose, the old singer was looking at three of his fingers as if they belonged to someone else; the drunken gal pal continued in her elegant catatonia, and the other was whispering who-knows-what into Delgado’s ear while he just smiled.

  When I tried to give the coke back to Cavalcanti, he showed me his fingers and his generosity. “You can keep it,” he said. “I have more. I’m getting old, my friend. Three decades. Do you realize what that means? It makes me want to die …”

  “Not tonight, Cavalcanti. I’m not in the mood for a wake.”

  Cavalcanti’s laugh was purely operatic. He dried a tear and, with the effects of his last whiskey in plain view, made his way to the restroom.

  It was late. I know this because after a while I started to see everything as if it were underwater, through a submarine porthole. At that hour, exhausted and sleepy, I knew—and that’s why I would never try it—that if I stretched my hand to touch somebody, my fingers would just bump up against the porthole.

  Cavalcanti returned rejuvenated, his nostrils smudged with white powder.

  “You’re right,” he
said emphatically. “It was the Gulf War.”

  “What?”

  “Delgado was decorated in the Gulf War.”

  “I don’t believe you, it doesn’t make sense. El Delgado isn’t even American. What the fuck was he doing in the Gulf?”

  He didn’t respond, just drank his shot of whiskey and raised various fingers to order another round for everyone.

  “Hey, buddy … big guy … I’m talking to you, deaf dude … show your arms to this piece-of-shit Uruguayan who doesn’t believe me.”

  El Delgado hesitated before grasping what he was being asked, then finally rolled up his sleeve and stretched his arms out, both hands on the table. They were full of scars too small to be smallpox.

  “They used needles, wooden splinters, and who knows what other shit,” Cavalcanti explained. “The Turks tortured him.”

  Delgado stayed in the same position for a long minute, raising his little blue eyes at me as if he was waiting for something—maybe congratulations, or a word of support—until he eventually rolled down his sleeves and took cover again behind his smile.

  I didn’t say anything because at that moment I saw Cavalcanti making faces like he was at death’s door and I thought perhaps this was the big one and that it had all come to pass thanks to his dedication to cocaine. But I was wrong. Delgado then widened his smile and took bites at the air as if he were a shark in a Disney cartoon. He had false teeth, and the upper dentures hit the bottom ones like castanets, revealing bright blue gums smeared with spit.

  “They kicked his teeth out. What do you think of that?”

  I couldn’t tell him what I thought because, just then, the night’s drinks and tobacco turned my stomach and a cold nausea indicated I had to leave unless I wanted to roll around on the ground like a poisoned dog.

  I left Clavié with the shakes. The sun was shining outside, promising to cook us all.

  A few days later, Paty, my sporadic lover when she’s got nothing better going on, asked me to accompany her somewhere. One of those sources who can’t be revealed had told her they had some ugly info for her, and the place to confirm it was ugly too. Knowing Paty’s nature, I prepared for the worst.