Blood Crime

by Sebastia Alzamora

  When the spinning top lost momentum and finally fell on its side on the desk, the superintendent clicked his tongue against his teeth, as if expressing a sense of fatality. He picked up the toy, slipped it in his pocket and sighed again. He had to admit that Doctor Pellicer’s explanations about vampirism had surprised him, but then again, there was no need to overemphasize their significance. Lunatics had always existed, in all shapes and sizes, and since the war began they were even more common. About a month ago they had arrested a drunk who got turned on by exposing himself to young girls, no doubt an example of the paraphilias Doctor Pellicer had referred to. Regardless, psychiatric theories were of no use to the fellow when they dragged him off to the basement and gave him the usual treatment in these cases. When they were through with him, neither the guy nor anyone else would ever have to worry again about anything happening below his belt.

  He swallowed: the aftertaste of formaldehyde and decay were still there. But now there was an added ingredient.

  “Goddammit, Sirga!” roared the superintendent without turning around. “You smell like whorehouse soap!”

  “What’s that, sir?” asked the red-haired policeman standing at the threshold to the superintendent’s office.

  The superintendent wheeled his chair around brusquely and faced his visitor. “You whoring bastard, that’s what I said.” He rose from his chair, strode toward the officer and gave the visor on the man’s cap a thump, flipping it backward. The superintendent was acting on instinct; he liked to heed his intuition.

  “Ha, ha,” laughed Sirga, in appreciation of the gesture of camaraderie.

  “Don’t laugh, you idiot,” the superintendent snapped at him. Sirga’s laugh instantly froze. “I don’t like whoremongers. Reminds me of my father. You know what my father used to say, Sirga?”

  The young man was silent; he was so stiff it looked as if he’d been starched. He didn’t even dare to blink.

  “He used to say: sometimes a man’s gotta empty his sack of cojones! And then he would smack Mother around a couple of times and head to the whorehouse. Downtown they all knew him as the Moor. The Moor who liked to go slumming. What do you say to that, Sirga?”

  The man being questioned swallowed. “Disgraceful, sir.”

  “Disgraceful—good word. And you know why they called my father the Moor, Sirga?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because he had a big one, very big, that’s why!” he thundered, holding his hands far apart. “Haven’t you heard that Moors are well endowed? And my father’s was long, hairy, thick, and veiny, and he had black balls that were glued to his ass, like a tiger! You know what tiger’s balls are like, Sirga?”

  The officer couldn’t smother his smile, and for once Superintendent Muñoz didn’t call him an idiot, but gave a roguish smile in return. “When my father strutted into the slum, the whores ran for the hills so they wouldn’t have to take that huge gift of God between their legs! Can you imagine? They said it almost ruptured them, and after being with my father they were out of commission for a solid week. But the man always managed to find a girl willing to take it for a few more coins. It’s like he said, from time to time a man needs to have his pouch emptied . . . But not his coin pouch!” And Muñoz roared with laughter, his hands cupped in an evocatively vulgar gesture. “You follow me, Sirga? The pouch, the pouch!”

  Sirga couldn’t hold back either, and he burst into a, guttural, rubbery laugh. After laughing together for a long while, Superintendent Muñoz placed his hand on the officer’s shoulder. “So, Sirga, since we’re here chewing the fat, I can tell you aren’t one to settle for just anything . . . You’re not like my animal of a father, who would go for any old street hooker. No, sir, you’re a fellow with a fine palate who prefers a first-class bawdy house with pretty girls with soft asses who wash your cock with expensive soap. Right? So, here’s my question: With your miserable salary, where do you find the dough to pay for such select merchandise, if you pardon my curiosity?”

  Sirga stopped laughing; he stood there, his mouth half open, unable to say a word, which made him appear as stupid as the superintendent believed him to be. Following his intuition, Muñoz tried to unblock him.

  “Got a seat on some gravy train, Sirga?” He placed his hand flat on the desk and stared at Sirga. “You got a job outside the police department?”

  Sirga ran two fingers through his red hair and scratched his scalp. The shadows that the carbide light cast on the whitewashed walls seemed on the point of engulfing him, and it was possible that Sirga himself thought that would actually be a good idea. After a long moment, he mumbled: “I . . . I do a few hours at a warehouse, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” the superintendent exclaimed with disdain. “And where exactly is this warehouse, Sirga?”

  Another thick silence ensued, so Muñoz asked again.

  “Is this warehouse perhaps in the neighborhood of Poblenou?”

  “Yes . . . yes, sir,” Sirga managed to stammer out, discomfort written all over his pockmarked face. “Yes, it’s in Poblenou.”

  “A warehouse for grain storage, Sirga?”

  “And . . . and flour. Flour and grains, sir.”

  “And your job there is to load and unload sacks?”

  “My job there is to load and unload sacks, yes . . . yes, sir.”

  Superintendent Muñoz nodded a few times as if pondering a difficult question.

  “Well done, Sirga. A man has to work to earn a living,” he said, smiling again. “So, you’ll give me the address of this splendid bordello?”

  “Did you have a word with Superintendent Muñoz, as I suggested?” Judge Miquel Carbonissa asked.

  “Yes, of course,” replied Doctor Pellicer. “But, as I warned you, I only said what I thought was most appropriate. Even so, I didn’t get the impression he was paying much attention.” He sighed. “What about you, judge? Did you frighten that poor young Marist brother with your stories of revenants who suck the blood of the living?”

  A faint ironic smile flickered across the judge’s face. “Your dismissive tone is remarkable, considering the issue that has brought us here.”

  The doctor nodded in agreement. “You are right. The truth is, I am quite anxious to see it,” he said with a nervous laugh, excitement in his eyes.

  “Well, let’s get on with it then!” exclaimed Judge Carbonissa, as he placed a hand on either side of the gutta-percha armchair, preparing to rise.

  The two men had arranged to meet at the judge’s home, the ground floor of an elegant building at the bottom of Carrer Aribau, almost at the corner of Gran Via. They were in the library. Judge Carbonissa had drawn the heavy velvet curtains across the large windows to keep out the intense light of that September afternoon. On the small ebony table between the two winged armchairs, he placed a bottle of Armagnac and two tiny glasses of etched crystal and quickly filled them. The room was large. Three bookcases filled with volumes of every size and width reached all the way to the ceiling, occupying three full walls. A rolling ladder set between two of the bookcases—so as not to be in the way—ensured access to the uppermost shelves. Altogether it created a welcoming atmosphere, orderly, clean. The two men raised their tiny glasses, and Doctor Pellicer made a toast: “To Hadaly,” he said with gusto.

  “To Hadaly,” repeated the judge, then downed his glass in one gulp.

  At that moment the wailing of a siren was heard outside, announcing an imminent air raid. It was a muffled sound that reached Judge Carbonissa’s library, as if it were coming from afar. But soon they heard the roar of explosions in the streets and buildings, and a slight tremor shook the room. The judge filled his glass again, after serving his guest; this time both men sipped the brandy, savoring it as they listened to the rumbling of the air strike. Doctor Pellicer rolled a cigarette and busied himself blowing smoke rings that hung in the air for a few seconds before dissolving wi
thout a trace. They sat like that for quite a while. Then, exchanging looks of complicity, they rose from their armchairs as one, their movements practically synchronized.

  They left the library, crossed the rather formal dining room and a more diaphanous foyer and came to a door that led to a courtyard the size of a watermelon patch (that was the comparison that came to Doctor Pellicer’s mind). From there they could distinctly hear the air raid, the deafening wail of the sirens, the sinister whistle of the bombs that rained from the sky. But this was not what captured the interest of the two scholars, enticing them to rashly appear in the open at that terrible hour. Without wasting a second, Judge Carbonissa strode to one side of the courtyard and approached a sort of rectangular cinder-block storeroom that measured about two meters in length by no more than one in height. The judge removed a key from his trouser pocket and inserted it in the lock of the cover across the top of the rectangle and opened the double doors, exposing an empty space. An entranceway.

  “If you would be so kind,” the judge said, pointing to the open doors.

  Doctor Pellicer peeped inside and saw a metal ladder attached to a wall, by which he surmised he was to climb down it. Which is what he did, but once again, his age, and especially his considerable heft, made the maneuver more difficult than expected. Finally, with the judge’s help, he managed to get a firm grip on the rungs of the ladder and began to descend like a slow, fat spider. As he moved down, he heard the judge’s footsteps as he closed the doors behind him—forcing them to descend in darkness—and then the magistrate’s feet on the ladder. The echoes of the air strike, as it ran its course, were farther and farther away.

  Suddenly Doctor Pellicer remembered an expression from his rural childhood near a village in the Ponent region, one they used when the wagon-man passed by the farmhouse where he grew up. The man’s job was peculiar and specific—to collect the carcasses of dead animals: a lamb, a dog, a pig, a goat, occasionally a cow or horse that had died from accident or disease. Flesh of misfortune, they called it. The wagon-man—who in the doctor’s memory always seemed so jovial and industrious—passed by the various farmhouses in the district, loading the wagon everybody recognized; then he carted the animals away and tossed them in a lime pit, where putrefaction transformed them into fertilizer. Flesh of misfortune, they called it, although that cheerful, agreeable man subjected the dead animals he collected to a process by which they nourished new life. And in this fashion nature demonstrated that life always asserts itself, that from death and putrefaction emerges life and that which supports it. There is no beginning and no end, reasoned the doctor, only a loop, a cycle that recommences over and over again throughout time.

  As the two men climbed farther down, the air grew colder and more humid, making their skin feel cool, as if they were near a water tank. After a long while, Doctor Humbert Pellicer’s foot finally touched the ground.

  “I’ve reached the bottom!” he exclaimed, looking up into the darkness, his hands cupped around his mouth to amplify his voice.

  “Don’t move, I’ll be right down,” came the reply, attenuated by the echo.

  Lying on a cot in her cell, Sister Concepció tried to settle her breathing in an effort to overcome the anguish that had been gnawing at her stomach like a pack of mice since she had the fit of retching in the courtyard that morning.

  It had frightened her, she had never vomited so much or with such virulence, to the point that only greenish spittle issued from her mouth: evil thoughts escaping, she told herself. It was dark now and Sister Encarnació—who made it clear that she had been sent by the mother abbess—had finally departed after convincing her to drink a glass of almond milk, leaving the novice alone in her cell. A lone candle lit the bleached nudity of the room: a case for her change of clothes and the habits she wore on Sundays and feast days, a bedpan in the event of bodily needs during the night, a narrow cot with a straw mattress to sleep on and, above the bare cot without a headboard, affixed to the wall, a crucifix. Nothing else. Sometimes Sister Concepció entertained herself by observing the Christ figure, carved in something resembling ivory that reminded her (she always confessed thoughts like these) of a doll she used to play with when she was a child, a little sailor.

  Had she been thinking about mice? She had seen some the other day in the woodshed when she was fetching kindling for the kitchen stove. Being the youngest, she was always dispatched on the most tedious errands. She didn’t mind, of course, but gracious, how everyone had settled into the ease of having the girl (as the majority of the sisters called her) handle the heavy chores. Well, at the woodshed she had surprised two mice, and when they noticed her presence they had scurried to hide behind a stack of the largest trunks, where they must have had their nest. The cats that haunted the cloister were too lazy, too well fed by the nuns, especially Sister Encarnació, who always saved the table scraps for them. Naturally, they were fat and their shiny fur was lovely to look at (particularly the tabby she liked and petted every time she encountered it); but they didn’t so much as glance at the mice, which roamed the convent at their leisure.

  She thought she heard a little sound at the door, and she half-raised herself to see what it was: Could a mouse have gotten into her room? She hoped not; she was afraid of them and if there was one she’d have to leave her cell and go ask one of the sisters for help. Perhaps Sister Anunciació, who was a bundle of nerves—that’s why she was so thin—and went about killing spiders and beetles, and now that it was hot and it was the season for them, also the bedbugs that got into the vegetable garden, as well as the grasshoppers, and every now and then a mantis—those curious insects that were so cute and looked as if they were praying with their legs, though she’d been warned they were poisonous and couldn’t be trusted. Well then, if there were mice in her cell she’d go fetch Sister Anunciació and have her take charge and kill them, because she didn’t want them near her while she was sleeping. But, straining her eyes a bit, she confirmed there were no mice, only the glimmer of the flickering candle flame on the floor.

  She let her head fall back on the thin pillow on her cot and started weeping. Softly, simply. She was just a frightened girl who imagined she was seeing mice all around her.

  How was she to compose a Stabat Mater? How could His Excellency the bishop have charged her with such an impossible mission? And why had the mother abbess appeared so severe and downcast, and why had Bishop Perugorría—God in heaven—caused her such repulsion? Still more thoughts for which she would have to confess, thoughts that seemed viscous and green like the saliva drooling from her mouth a few hours before. How could she possibly set about composing an entire Stabat Mater? Her modest reinterpretations of famous songs weren’t up to a challenge of such magnitude. She hadn’t the slightest idea where to begin. Vague intuitions of arrangements, as feeble as herself, came to her from time to time, presentiments that were not yet notes, not even ideas, but mere sensations—of scope, of distance—that the novice was eager to transfer to the pentagram, even though she did not feel herself capable of it. She rejected those intuitions, but they still plagued her thoughts. She needed a long, uninterrupted sleep to restore her from the chill, the aching bones, and the stomach cramps that governed her body. But she could not fall asleep.

  Almost mechanically she leaned over the hymnal that Sister Encarnació had brought at her request, together with the almond milk, and began to read:

  Stabat mater dolorosa

  iuxta Crucem lacrimosa,

  dum pendebat Filius.

  Cuius animam gementem,

  contristatam et dolentem

  pertransivit gladius.

  O quam tristis et afflicta

  fuit illa benedicta,

  Mater Unigeniti!

  Quae mœrebat et dolebat,

  pia Mater, dum videbat

  nati pœnas inclyti.

  Quis est homo qui non fleret,

  Matri Christi si videret

&nb
sp; in tanto supplicio?

  Quis non posset contristari

  Christi Matrem contemplari

  dolentem cum Filio?

  The Stabat Mater poem was the work of Jacopone da Todi, who wrote it in trochaic tetrameter, and over the centuries it had been set to music by countless composers, among them some of the most exalted. According to her book, at least five hundred musical versions of the Stabat Mater were known, for soloists or for choir, or even for choir and soloists. Reinterpretations, then: calling the word to mind relieved some of the weight of the task that had been pressed upon her. She had listened to some of these versions with enormous pleasure: the one by Rossini, majestic; the one by Pergolesi that sent chills down her spine and made the hair on her arms stand on end; Dvořák’s, so precise. And hers? What sort of rereading of the Stabat Mater could Sister Concepció offer, she who was but a child and the most humble servant of Our Lord, the beloved daughter of a mother whose foremost concern had been to bring her up in the joy of her faith?

  One didn’t need much Latin to grasp that the poem spoke of the excruciating pain of the Mother of God upon the death of her son on the cross. Sister Concepció also understood that she could not fully comprehend that supreme pain, for she was still a child, and furthermore, she would never be a mother. But she strived to, her head dizzy as it struggled to find a way to convey the feelings of a mother confronted by the sight of her immolated son: Jesus of Nazareth, God become man, who took upon himself the cruelty, contempt and infamy of the men of his time in order to free—and shield against the insult of original sin—the men of future times and the souls of the living and of the faithful deceased.

  It was this imaginative leap that led her to recall Saint Eulàlia’s torments, which had made such an impression on her and quite possibly had caused her stomach cramps. She envisioned Saint Eulàlia in her starched white dress, grazing her thirteen geese that were also white, not thirteen ugly, sad, savage geese like the thirteen torments, but thirteen merry, pretty geese, like Saint Eulàlia’s thirteen years. In her mind, Saint Eulàlia resembled a beautiful girl named Emília who had taken singing and sol-fa lessons with her in the children’s section of the Orfeó Català choral group. What could have become of her? Sister Concepció had missed her friend since entering the convent, and she prayed that the war had not destroyed Emília’s house or her life or those of her brothers and sisters and parents. And now, as she read the Stabat Mater poem and tried to imagine the lacerated soul of the Mother of God kneeling before the cross, the name, face and voice of her own mother came to her. She missed her and wished with all her heart that she were there, protecting her now when she was feeling so poorly, tending to her, caressing her with those hands that were strong and soft and always smelled of jasmine. She started reciting the Lord’s Prayer to implore that no harm would befall her mother or father and that one fine day the three of them would find themselves at home again, reunited, she hand-in-hand with her beloved mother, far from the convent, far from her cell and the Stabat Mater and the verses of Jacopone da Todi. She realized again that she would have to confess and ask for forgiveness for these thoughts that went against everything His Excellency the bishop and the mother abbess expected of her—if they indeed expected the same of her. Could there perhaps be in the bishop’s absurd request a trial that she must endure in order to gain the salvation of her soul? If that was the case, what sin was she guilty of that she now had to face such an extreme task?