8.
His phone rang and Ramelli stretched his leg, accidentally spilling what little whisky was left in the bottle on the parquetry floor. ‘Come to my place right away, brother, it’s an emergency. We’ve got a paralytic,’ said Diazgranados. He hung up. Getting to his feet, Eduardo kicked the bottle again, then tripped while he tried to pull on a shoe. He was still half drunk. That was when Lucía appeared in the living room to ask where he was off to at that hour.
‘A friend’s in trouble, he needs my help, I’ll tell you about it later.’
Soon after, Lucía would empty the ashtray, clean the house and decide – even jot it down on the calendar in the kitchen – that from that point on, no one would smoke in her house. It was the early hours of 23 July.
They met in the 24-hour Carulla supermarket on Calle 63. Diazgranados was wearing a sky-blue sweater and sunglasses. It was five in the morning. They talked for around seven minutes. It was Ramelli’s idea to buy the Tryptanol. He knew in large doses it could cause respiratory arrest. The aim was to avoid a forensic investigation. If they got a credible death certificate, they could get out of an autopsy. They bought the drug. It was Ramelli’s job to dress Sabrina appropriately, clean her up, and get a taxi driver they could count on to take her to San Blas Hospital. Once there, they’d have Doctor Venegas, who owed them more than one favour, admit her and write up the certificate. ‘Patient with respiratory arrest due to an overdose of tricyclics,’ Doctor Venegas would write a couple of hours later. The evidence to corroborate the medical theory: an empty Tryptanol blister in her jacket pocket, and the taxi driver’s testimony. And that would be the end of it.
‘Venegas’s certificate will cost us a couple of million,’ Aníbal said to Ramelli while he pushed around a shopping cart loaded with papaya, pineapple, almond milk and a box of cereal.
‘Is this really the time for shopping?’ Ramelli protested.
‘Fucking calm down and look what’s in the cart. Take a good look. See any sausages, chorizos, lamb shanks, lard, beans, wine, sherry?’
Ramelli took the cart and looked at his associate again.
‘It’s a false lead,’ he said. ‘If whoever’s on checkout remembers what I bought, no one will believe it’s me.’ He burst out laughing.
‘You’re such a jerk.’ Ramelli didn’t feel like smiling.
‘Come on, give us a smile, brother. And relax a bit while you can because soon you’ll be cleaning up and dressing a dead girl.’ Aníbal gave him a pat on the back.
‘You sound like the godfather,’ said Ramelli. ‘No, that’s not right, that stupid top you’re wearing makes you look more like Pablo Escobar.’
‘How much is the taxi driver going to cost us?’ Diazgranados ignored the insult as he rearranged the shopping.
‘Ten,’ said Ramelli.
‘Sonofabitch! That’s what he’d earn in eight or nine months.’
‘Any better ideas?’
‘No,’ lied Diazgranados. ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on that runt, make sure he doesn’t play us. Where did you find him?’
‘Relax, he’s reliable,’ said Ramelli.
They parted ways in front of the chilled meat. Despite his false-lead theory, Diazgranados couldn’t help taking a tray of cut-price ribs. Each made his purchase at a different checkout. It didn’t occur to Ramelli to wonder why someone who had ties to the paramilitaries, who was responsible for several deaths and had access to the best hitmen around, was putting him in this situation. Until now, Ramelli’s own biggest crime was of the strictly white-collar variety: laundering money through a health-care provider to embezzle state funds. And even that was something he did under the influence of his new best friend.
Diazgranados was anxious. The intensification of his paranoia was proportional to his appetite. He was an obese man, yet those who knew him had noticed he’d gone up a size in the past few months. For breakfast he had four eggs, half a kilo of cheese, a jug of juice and three cups of coffee. At eleven, he had his bodyguard fetch him a cheese arepa, a chicken empanada, and beef, yuca and guava pastries. When Ramelli confessed to Karen, he said what most astonished him was the way Aníbal ate.
‘It frightens me,’ he said.
‘And it doesn’t frighten you that he’s a murderer, a criminal?’ Karen asked.
‘No. It frightens me, sickens me to watch him eat the way he does.’
9.
Karen went to the bathroom, blew her nose, splashed water on her face and called Maryuri to ask if she could stay the night. Maryuri said of course, but not without telling her that their place was very small. Wílmer was on nightshift and almost always got back from work around five in the morning. Karen said it wouldn’t be for more than three or four days. She stuffed her clothes into a suitcase. Though she tried to make as little noise as possible, her landlord stopped her on the stair. Then his hand was over her mouth and he was dragging her back to her apartment. Karen tried to shout for help but his hairy hand suffocated her. Karen felt like an idiot. That morning she had seen him on the corner, talking to the young man with the sagging jeans. Why hadn’t she realised what was going on? He must have been the one who robbed her. He was going to steal the 400,000-peso deposit he’d charged her when she arrived. And right now he was fondling her breasts through her blouse and biting her neck.
He threw her on the bed and struck her hard, nicking her cheek with the gold stone-encrusted ring that he wore on his right hand. He let go of her mouth to hit her, so Karen shouted. Then his swollen dick was inside her.
Karen stopped shouting, blinking, breathing, didn’t understand what was happening, nor even whether it really was happening, until the pain got so bad she couldn’t escape it. A choking feeling in her throat stopped her from shouting again or even trying.
Her landlord had always seemed vulgar to her. He was a bore, had filthy fingernails and smelled like rancid cheese. Karen thought she knew when a man wanted her. She hadn’t detected anything this time. Until today, the landlord had barely been friendly, seemed indifferent to her presence. Maybe he didn’t desire her at all. Maybe he just wanted to destroy her. Or maybe he only wanted to fuck her into submission so she wouldn’t make a complaint to the police. Rape as a bureaucratic procedure.
Karen sensed a presence in the room, turned her head. That’s when she saw, over her landlord’s head, Doña Clara leaning against the doorframe. He must have sensed something, too, because he turned to see his wife watching the scene with a strange expression on her face.
‘Oh, hun, the poor girl, what a sin, leave her be already.’
‘Fucking pester me just when I’m about to finish!’ The landlord pulled out his half-flaccid penis and dressed swiftly.
‘Do me a favour and get out of here. You hear me?’ he said to Karen, as if what just happened was her fault. ‘And if you haven’t come down in ten minutes, sweetheart, I’m coming up to get you.’
The woman went over to Karen, who was sobbing in a foetal position, trying to cover herself up.
‘Get in the shower and scrub away your shame, you dirty girl,’ she said.
Karen obeyed. Despondency overcame her. Even lifting the soap was a momentous task. She should have hated the old woman’s complicity with her rapist husband, but she was just grateful to have someone telling her what to do.
‘I’m calling you a taxi, you don’t want to hail one on the street only to have them take you on a millionaire’s ride. When you’re having a bad day, the bad luck just keeps on coming.’
Karen had stopped sobbing, but couldn’t speak. Her hands trembled. She felt tingles up and down her spine.
The scene would come back to her relentlessly. The notice that read APARTMENT FOR RENT FOR A SINGLE WOMAN had been an invitation to dispossess her, to brutalise her and then send her packing. Karen left her nightlamp behind. The bed and table didn’t belong to her, but the lamp had cost her 30,000 pesos and she liked it. Days would go by before the rage flooded her body. For the moment it was only pain, fear,
fragility. Enough had happened in one day to fill a lifetime. Not even ten hours had passed since Sabrina Guzmán’s funeral.
She didn’t tell me what happened until much later, when she was no longer the same woman I’d met that April afternoon in House of Beauty. The landlord’s wife gave the taxi driver the address Karen had jotted down on a piece of paper.
‘Doña Clara, why?’ was all Karen managed to say.
‘Well, what are you doing living alone? You have only yourself to blame.’ Then she shut the taxi door. Before turning away, she added through the open window: ‘For the good of everyone, it would be best if we didn’t hear from you again.’
Karen turned to the driver. ‘To San Mateo, Soacha, if you would be so kind.’
‘Yes, sweetheart. The lady already gave me the address. Lucky it’s past eleven, otherwise we wouldn’t get there this year.’
Karen leaned her head against the window and let herself be rocked by the car movements. Chico Trujillo was singing on the radio about kisses and caramel and heaven, and with each stanza she felt her stomach turning.
‘Señor, could you stop a moment.’
‘Of course,’ said the taxi driver, pulling over.
Karen opened the door and threw up in the gutter. The taxi driver handed her a cloth and asked:
‘Am I going too fast?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ said Karen and closed her eyes. ‘Let’s go, please.’
10.
Sometimes Karen appears in my dreams. Her dark skin, straight hair and straight nose. Her presence stirs a restlessness in me that I put down to her youth. To her beauty. I don’t want, can’t bear to acknowledge anything greater, anything resembling desire, carnal appetite. Perhaps because I’ve never felt anything like it, perhaps because even if I had felt it, I wouldn’t have recognised it, trained as I’ve always been to love men. Karen was so natural. In a place where not even flowers grow in the ground, it was almost an affront. I’m not even sure if that unsuspecting young woman is truly the reason for my disquiet, for what we might call my desire. I’m not sure it can be explained away as having to do with the fact that I’m ageing. After all, we’re always ageing, ever since the day we’re brought into this world. Yet it takes us so long to grow aware of it. We are blind to so much. We don’t see ourselves fade.
As I enter House of Beauty, I notice my hair is smelling foul, so I decide to have it hennaed. ‘Burgundy,’ I say to Nubia.
Little by little, I get used to being assailed by memories. They are crisp, ravenous, indifferent to my recent history. My mother powdering me in the boudoir in our island house; a lover kissing me on the beach beneath the full moon; sitting on my father’s knee, smelling the Jean Marie Farina lotion on his newly shaved, strong jaw; Aline’s birth; her first day of school; my naked body after a tireless lovemaking session. My body, not what it used to be, now has me lost, orphaned from myself. Though I’m healthy, as Lucía would say – she has that enviable gift of always focusing on the good. Yet I don’t think of myself as healthy. I feel unwell, or at least absent, gone, forsaken, replaced by another I don’t know, nor want to get to know, in my constant nostalgia for the woman who’s gone. Where have you gone? I try, but these ideas of a suffering woman, a woman who allows herself to be flooded by nostalgic longing, leave me as soon as I hear the water start to run. I submit to Nubia’s hands in my hair.
House of Beauty takes me in. I’m submerged in the silence and the expensive perfumes, the rosewater, oils and shampoo. I want to stay here, I tell myself, while I think of an excuse for yet another massage, another wax, though it hasn’t been long enough for that. Another hair colour – that’s it, another colour. Nubia is shampooing my hair so gently, almost affectionately. She’s stroking my scalp while I invent a memory of my mother washing my hair with chamomile shampoo, humming a song in French.
‘She’s become one of our best clients,’ says Annie, her cherry lips even more voluptuous, more tempting. She smiles. She has fake eyelashes, I note, and what months ago seemed vulgar now seems lovely. Provocative. I smile back. I don’t want to leave this land of women with dainty manners. I want to stay here forever.
‘Would you like to hear about our passport?’ Annie says in a soft voice while her lovely hands move with finesse.
‘A passport?’
‘We offer it to our best clients. It includes therapies for skin, body and hair, as well as relaxation, hydration, cleansing and rejuvenating treatments, among others. Bearing in mind that you come two or three times a week, you might find it great value. For women like you, House of Beauty is a home away from home, and we want to you feel completely at ease here. Would you be interested in taking the package?’
11.
Three weeks after her daughter had been buried, Conseulo Parades woke in a cold sweat. In her dream, Sabrina had been crying inconsolably, her body bruised.
When her breathing returned to normal, she dialled her ex-husband’s number. She didn’t care that it was three in the morning. On the other end, Jorge Guzmán’s phone went to voicemail. Since his daughter’s death, he didn’t give a damn about anything. His second wife had been understanding for almost a month, but now she was furious. Her husband had neglected his business, and barely said a word to her, or to their five-year-old daughter.
When the telephone rang a second time, she was the one who woke. Jorge was snoring thunderously, still wearing his clothes and shoes. She had fallen asleep before hearing him arrive around midnight.
‘Hun, your phone,’ she said, giving him a shove.
Impatient, she squeezed his nose between finger and thumb. Jorge opened his eyes and sat up in bed. His wife put his phone to his ear.
‘Jorge, is that you?’
‘What happened? What time is it?’
On the other end, Consuelo had started crying again.
‘It’s Sabrina. I had a dream. Our little girl was crying, she was battered, Jorge, and crying.’
‘A dream?’ said Jorge, his voice bleak.
‘Promise me one thing, just one,’ said Consuelo between sobs.
‘What?’
‘Come with me tomorrow morning to the Prosecutor’s Office. Do you really believe our girl would commit suicide? They didn’t even do an autopsy, so how could they know that … Where did they take her? Where was she that night? I want to know the truth.’
‘What did Sabrina say?’ asked Jorge.
‘When?’
‘In the dream, Consuelo, where else.’
‘She said, “I didn’t want to die, Mamá, I didn’t want to, forgive me for leaving, forgive me …”’
‘Did you talk to the beautician?’
‘I did. She didn’t tell me anything, but she must know something. Well, she did tell me something, she asked me why we hadn’t insisted on an autopsy.’
After a long silence, Jorge spoke: ‘I’ll pick you up at eight.’
12.
You can learn almost anything from a textbook. But when you have limited street smarts and little or no experience with actual cases, classic indicators could be staring you in the face and you wouldn’t see them. Or want to see them. I now know that Karen wasn’t the same after the night she left her apartment in a taxi that took her from Santa Lucía to San Mateo, her entire life packed into a suitcase.
Two minutes or fewer are enough to change everything. I should have connected the dots. On my second appointment with Karen after the minister’s daughter’s wedding, I noticed she was absent, distracted. She spread oil on me twice and then opened and closed the cubicle door, took the cubicle phone off the hook and hung it up again. For a second I thought she was doing it deliberately to make me laugh, a little Chaplin skit. But then I noticed the deep rings under her eyes, her dull gaze, her thinness.
‘Are you eating?’ I asked.
‘More or less.’
Now she had a static smile in place, like a jester’s, a smile that didn’t match the rest of her expression, much less whatever she was thinking.<
br />
‘And are you sleeping okay?’
‘What does that matter, Doña Claire?’
I’d irritated her. Then I noticed that her make-up was more pronounced. Her lips were cherry red, like the receptionist’s. Her eyeliner was very dark, and she was wearing blusher and mascara.
‘I haven’t been myself lately,’ she mumbled.
And at that moment I noticed a cut on her arm, like the wounds I’ve known some patients to self-inflict after traumatic events.
‘What’s the matter, Karen?’
‘Forget it … What’s a woman my age doing living alone, that’s asking for trouble.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘A situation I had with my landlord. He made me, but all the same I shouldn’t wear such tight clothing.’ She went quiet. ‘And there’s no good reason for a woman to live alone. I have only myself to blame,’ she added, as if reciting a lesson.
‘I don’t know what happened, Karen, but whatever it was, you can’t blame yourself,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I find it hard to breathe, Doña Claire. I keep getting palpitations, like my body’s out of control, and sometimes it’s as if someone’s squeezing the air out of me …’
‘I can write you a prescription for a tranquilliser. But tell me, did something serious happen?’
‘I don’t need a psychologist,’ she replied curtly.
‘What about a friend?’
‘We’re not friends,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have run my mouth off. Shall I get your bill ready?’
I took her hand and noticed her dry skin. I turned it over, looking at it.
‘Now you’re going to check to see I’m clean, like Doña Josefina does?’ she said as she moved away.
‘It’s not that. Your skin’s very dry.’
‘I have to wash my hands all the time, the dirt won’t come off.’
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