Judge Carbonissa also knew of several extraordinary cases of dead persons who had momentarily revived when saintly men had called upon them to return to life. He gave the example of a story, recorded by Saint Augustine, of a young man who was pursued by the law for an unsettled debt which the young man’s father had in fact repaid, though the paper that proved it could not be found. The father’s soul, wrote Saint Augustine, appeared piously before the son and told him where he could find the receipt for the troubling debt.
In Egypt, there was the remarkable case of Saint Spyridon, who found himself in a difficult situation after his daughter Irene died, for a certain man professed that she had agreed to safeguard some money for him, a fact she had not disclosed to her father. As the money could not be found anywhere in the house, Saint Spyridon finally went to his daughter’s tomb, called to her by name and questioned her about the contentious sum; she responded from her grave, revealed the location of the money, and Saint Spyridon was able to return it.
The judge also told the story of Saint Macarius of Egypt, who revived a dead man so that he might testify as to the innocence of the person accused of having killed him: the dead man exonerated the accused but refused to divulge the name of the perpetrator. In another one of his feats, Saint Macarius implored the help of a dead person in a dispute with a heretic of the Amonoean sect—or the Hieracitae, depending on the author. As the heretic would not listen to reason, Macarius proposed: “Let us go to the tomb of a dead man and ask him to reveal to us the truth which you do not wish to accept.” The heretic did not dare to make an appearance, but Saint Macarius, accompanied by a multitude, went to the sepulcher and questioned the departed man, who responded from the depths of the tomb that if the heretic had attended the assembly he would have risen from his grave to convince him and give testimony of the truth. Saint Macarius then ordered the dead man to resume his slumber, in the peace of the Lord, until the end of time.
The majority of the stories of revenants were not, however, saintly tales, but macabre or morbid ones, and once Judge Carbonissa had begun to retell them it seemed he would never finish. Brother Darder was particularly struck by the story of Count Estruch—or Estruga—a vampire who, according to legend, had inhabited the castle of Llers, in the Alt Empordà region of Catalunya; it was believed that a group of witches also lived in that area, and, according to the judge, they had recently been sung by the local poet Carles Fages de Climent. This Count Estruch, a Catalan noble, had died at the beginning of the thirteenth century (coinciding, as some authors noted, with the birth of the Catalan King Jaume I), and he came back to life in the form of a vampire. He would sink his teeth into animals and people and drink their blood, but his most appalling deed was seducing young girls and impregnating them: at the end of nine months they gave birth to tiny, deformed, aberrant monsters that died shortly after being born. The horror lasted until the day Estruch’s sleeping body was discovered by a hermit—a half-Jew—who drew on an ancestral cabalistic spell to force the count to rest in peace.
These lurid fantasies originated, in the judge’s well-founded opinion, in matters of faith. Such as the controversy that arose between the philosophers Celsus and Origen when the former made public his writings attacking Christians, in which he maintained that the appearances of Jesus Christ before his disciples were not real, but simply the result of dancing shadows that some wished to interpret as something they were not. But Origen turned the argument against Celsus by reminding him that pagans had also left written accounts of appearances by Apollo and Aesculapius: If they accepted these accounts as factual, as Celsus did, how could they not accept as true the ones referring to Jesus, which had eye witnesses and were acknowledged the world over? After all, a long list of enlightened minds—including Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas—had demonstrated that what Christian narratives tell us about Jesus Christ helps to confirm one of the saving doctrines of humankind.
Origen had recorded it thus, and it had been accepted as such by the uneasy judge. The magistrate then brought up the remarkable figure of the Benedictine monk Antoine Augustin Calmet, author of the admirable Commentary on the Old and New Testament, which garnered him the well-deserved distinction of being one of the most scholarly and pious men of eighteenth-century France. But this same excellent author also penned—and at the height of the Enlightenment, no less—a rather obscure, troubling volume titled Treaty on the Apparitions of Spirits and Vampires; Or, Ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, &c., a collection of all the accounts he could find about the dead and undead who had returned from the other world to feed on the blood of the living. Naturally, Calmet’s conclusion was that there was no place for this type of story in Christian moral and thought. So why, then, would a man of such faith and reasoning have invested so much effort in collecting, classifying, transcribing, and publishing these accounts? Why had he devoted as much zeal and attention to this treatise of obscene fancies as to his prestigious works of Biblical erudition?
With a lump in his throat, Judge Carbonissa recalled some of the traits and attitudes Father Calmet ascribed to revenants or vrykolakas, as he sometimes referred to them. For example, it was believed that revenants used to masticate inside their tomb, devouring everything they encountered, including their own flesh; there were reports that claimed that the sound of chewing—similar to that of a pig—could be heard coming from inside certain tombs. The stories of the vampires of Moravia were no less horrifying, such as the one concerning a locksmith from a Bohemian village; after his death, he would appear on the streets and with an unearthly voice he called out the names of certain villagers, who inevitably met their death a few days later. This situation persisted until the villagers agreed to dig up the locksmith’s body and hand it over to the executioner, who placed the corpse in a wagon, transported it to the outskirts of the village, and threw it into a bonfire. As it burned, the body wailed furiously, its feet and hands flailing as if he were still alive. When the executioner drove a stake into the chest and abdomen, the corpse let out a spine-chilling scream and a large amount of bright-red blood gushed forth. The corpse was finally reduced to ashes, and the ghostly infestations ceased. This cemented the belief that the only effective remedy against these apparitions was to behead the revenant, pierce its body with a sharp stake, and incinerate it.
Just as Brother Pau Darder was tiring of Judge Carbonissa’s long-winded account, the magistrate returned to the question that seemed to obsess him: Why would a man of the Church as prominent as Father Calmet concern himself with this drivel about vampires? The judge could only find one answer: for the simple reason that Calmet must have believed it worthwhile. And if the illustrious Benedictine had drawn this conclusion it meant he did not believe these stories to be nonsensical, idle tales passed down from fathers to sons during long winter nights by the hearth, but saw them as depositories of valuable information. Something most men disregarded, but the wise Father Antoine Augustin Calmet had not overlooked.
For finally, the judge reasoned, tales of vampires speak to us of horror, a reality over which we generally prefer to draw a veil of incomprehension and scorn. And yet, this capacity for horror is inherent to all human beings. The wonder of creation—which had been capable of fecundating nothingness and spawning the Universe from it—was so immense that it inevitably contained imperfections, like a perfect musical score bespattered by miniscule ink spots: insignificant, but sufficiently noticeable to cause the reader of the score to make mistakes. Applied to the full scale of creation, the sum of these errors in reading produced what is conventionally known as evil, which finds in monstrosity one of its preferred forms of expression.
However—the judge continued—the awareness of evil is precisely the instrument God gives us to defend ourselves from it. Because we are possessed of reasoning, we are able to understand the existence of evil and the meaning of horror, and to take measures to correct these defects—to become, in a way, collaborators in God’s work and to make ourselve
s useful in the task of restoring balance to creation. As the good Antoine Augustin Calmet noted, it was possible that persons buried alive either by mistake or out of wickedness might become so crazed on waking inside the tomb that they would begin chewing on their own flesh or on the bodies of the dead buried alongside them, and it was terrible to imagine such baseness. But the notion that the truly dead would move their jaws and occupy their time chomping on whatever was at hand would have to be regarded as the figment of a childish imagination, perhaps on par with the Manducus of Ancient Rome. The Manducus was an anthropomorphic, articulated doll with a large mouth and teeth. The game that amused children and adults alike consisted in activating the jaws by means of a special mechanism; the Manducus would then grind its teeth with a crunching sound, giving the impression that the grotesque figure was starving and begging for something to eat.
Brother Darder, at this point even more confused than when the conversation began, asked Judge Carbonissa to kindly explain where all this was leading. “Machines,” the judge murmured. It wasn’t clear to the Marist if he was responding or simply thinking aloud. But then the judge added that the Manducus was obviously a machine, that is to say, an artifact devised by human intelligence: specifically, an automaton which, as such, emulated human behavior. In addition to providing entertainment during the Roman Empire, centuries later the Manducus had helped Father Calmet to situate the legend of the masticating dead in its proper realm—that of monsters. The ability to reason that has been bestowed on us over all other creatures in this world allows us to compose texts and construct machines that can not only describe evil—and in so doing help us to comprehend it—but also combat it. “Automatons,” Judge Carbonissa murmured again, seemingly overwhelmed, his forehead in his hands. Tired of not comprehending, Brother Pau Darder again pressed the judge—more vehemently this time—to clarify the meaning of his senseless rambling. But the judge consulted his pocket watch and, exclaiming that it was late, thanked Brother Darder for his attention and apologized for his sudden departure. Before Brother Darder could reply that there was nothing to thank him for, the judge had disappeared down the corridor of Pension Capell and headed out of the building, slipping away as abruptly as he had appeared.
Brother Darder was left stunned and listless, sitting in a chair in his sad room. Enveloped by the benevolent summer light that streamed through the tiny window, he considered the visit from Judge Carbonissa. The man was clearly an eccentric, but was there anything in all of the hodgepodge he had spewed that was worthy of attention? What could that nonsense about vampires and automatons have to do with the death of Don Pere Gendrau? And with the child found in the nearby alleyway? The vulnerability and terror conveyed by the two horribly desecrated bodies tormented Brother Darder, and he could not help but return again and again to the same question: What kind of God would contemplate, unmoved and unresponsive, as his creation sank into sordidness and barbarity? Was this the infinite, divine mercy he had so often extoled in heated conversations at the seminary?
“Brother Pau? Are you there?” a ridiculous voice called from behind the door.
Brother Darder sighed. It could only be one person.
“I’m here, Brother Plana.” He rose from his chair to open the door. “Are you needing to confess, perhaps?”
Brother Plana squirmed about with a reptilian movement. “No, no. Thank you, Brother Darder, it’s about a different matter.” He cleared his throat. “Brother Lacunza sent me to inform you that Don Émile Aragou, the adjutant dispatched by our esteemed order, is now in Barcelona. Brother Lacunza and I will meet with him this afternoon to welcome him and prepare tomorrow’s appointment with the negotiators from the FAI. Brother Lacunza asked me to keep you abreast of the news and wishes to know if you would like to accompany us tomorrow . . .”
The indefatigable Brother Lacunza and his mediations that never led anywhere. Only a couple of days ago he would have expressed his reservation rather unceremoniously. But now the memory of Don Pere obliged him.
“What time is the meeting?” he asked.
Sprawled in a chair in his office on Via Laietana, enveloped by the grainy light of a carbide lamp, superintendent Gregori Muñoz breathed deeply as he struggled to dispel his queasiness and cleanse his senses of the memory of the stench at the morgue. He always left with the feeling of being soaked in that smell, as if he too had been submerged in formaldehyde in the company of the cadavers—whole or dismembered—that Doctor Pellicer enjoyed naming and labelling. Blood, lymph, bodily fluids. Death, Superintendent Muñoz reflected, was a sticky matter, and once you had seen it up close it was difficult to rid yourself of it.
The superintendent was absentmindedly twirling an object in his hands; then he suddenly stopped and studied it with close attention, as though transfixed. It was the spinning top—a memento mori, according to his own conjectures. The criminal might have been an absolute beast, but he was certainly not inept—the superintendent was forced to admit that he had never seen a crime scene so scrupulously neat and clean, so maddeningly devoid of information. No fingerprints, no hairs, no textile fibers, none of the tiny bits of filth you would usually find on the ground or on walls. Nothing that could offer the slightest clue as to the assassin’s provenance or motivation, much less his identity. The footprints in the gravel of the alleyway had been carefully erased, and only the blood-stained top was left as a token of the crime. Memento mori. Remember that death awaits you. Awaits us all. A macabre and unscrupulous redundancy in a time when death marauded through the streets taking lives at every turn. Women, children, the elderly. Young lovers preparing to marry and start a family. Mothers who cared for their children and children who tended to their elderly parents. Robust, strong men who for fifteen or sixteen hours a day worked without faltering in metal foundries, in heavy equipment factories. Distinguished businessmen and prosperous merchants who had enjoyed exemplary careers and whose children were preparing to take over the family business, or men who worked as doctors, engineers or attorneys. It didn’t matter: they would all be wiped out, disemboweled by a bomb, ripped apart by a murdering sniper, riddled with bullets by a hired gun, or shot by members of the FAI who expressed their revolutionary orthodoxy through executions carried out on the Arrabassada road. The superintendent gave a resigned smile as he recalled Doctor Pellicer’s questions: no, no he did not care for priests or nuns or any of those sacristy rats, but they did not evoke in him one tenth of the disgust he felt for the beasts from the FAI—that band of pretentious pricks who were running the show now, real macho men when they got their hands on a loaded revolver. They made him sick. Especially Aureli Fernández from the Department of Investigations and his toady, a real bastard by the name of Ordaz, who were sucking the life out of him. All day long bugging him for reports, citations, more reports. They didn’t trust him, and truth be told, they were right not to: Superintendent Muñoz would have been especially pleased if someone had stuck a gun up Fernández’s ass—after all, he loved guns—and emptied the clip. The same went for that blasted Ordaz, but he wouldn’t be that fortunate. And besides, there wasn’t much he could do about it; he was only a functionary of the Generalitat, at the service of whoever was at the top. And those were times of unquestioning obedience. Fortunately, he didn’t have to deal with the big guy in the Service, a man named Escorza, of whom it was said that his body was maimed, though not nearly as much as his brain.
Doctor Pellicer was right: if the Department of Investigations got wind that he had let a flock of pious turtledoves fly the coop, he would be pissing blood. Fernández and Ordaz would be thrilled. But he had decided not to partake of the madness that had been unleashed in Barcelona against people of the church; he could do nothing to stop it, but he hoped at least to come out of it with his hands unbloodied. He set the tip of the spinning top on the table, grasped the crown between his thumb and index finger and gave a quick twist with his right wrist. The top spun around, fast, weightless, its red a
nd green decorative pattern immediately blurring, then blending into a single smudge of an indefinite color. Never mind that the toy was forensic evidence—acting on impulse, the superintendent had appropriated it for himself. It wouldn’t make any difference, he thought. Give or take a top, it’s not going to determine whether we catch our killer. On the other hand, he had no use for the spinning top: he had no children, no nieces or nephews, no child close to him to whom he could give it. The fact was, Superintendent Muñoz’s solitary, austere habits applied to all aspects of his life. But when nothing seems to mean much anymore, he mused, the purpose of things is also lost. One such example: for many years he had defended the notion that the function of the police was to guarantee that no crime went unpunished. But reality—at least the reality taking shape in the folds of Superintendent Muñoz’s brain—showed that in an age of assassins, the presence of yet another killer was a trivial matter. The motive? That was beside the point. He smiled, recalling the petulant young Marist brother who spun theories as to the reasons for murder. He must not have been taught at the seminary that in a large percentage of cases there is no motive, or it is so slight as to be irrelevant. A murderer needs no real motive for killing; a favorable environment is all he requires. And there must have been few cities in the world now where killing came as easily as in Barcelona.
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