His moment of calm was short-lived. The two policemen peered around the market door and paused to study the square. Fernandito sank into the shadows and slipped away.
As soon as he’d turned the corner onto a narrow street bordering the old Hospital de la Santa Cruz, toward Calle del Carmen, he bumped into her: peroxide blonde, skirt so tight it looked poised for an explosion, and the face of a decidedly unpious Madonna wearing flaming lipstick.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be getting your hot cocoa ready before going to school?”
Fernandito eyed the tart and, above all, the promise of shelter offered by the doorway behind her. The building itself was most uninviting. An individual with a sallow complexion acted as front desk man, occupying a cubicle the size of a confessional.
“How much?” Fernandito said, surveying the entrance to the narrow street.
“That depends on the service. Today I have a special offer for altar boys and breast-feeding babes, ’cause when it comes to brea—”
“Fine,” cut in Fernandito.
Having concluded the sales pitch, the hooker took his arm, pulling him toward the stairs. The customer had taken only three steps when he stopped to look behind him, perhaps alerted by the prudish radar all novices have inside them, or by the aromas emanating from the building. Fearing a financial loss in what was already a bear market of a night, she gave him a passionate squeeze and whispered in his ear, in the wettest of tones, “Come on, little birdie, come to Mama. I’m going to take you on an end-of-term trip that will sweep you off your feet.”
As they walked past the cubicle, the attendant handed them the supply kit, which included soap, rubbers, and other assorted accessories. Fernandito followed the Venus-for-hire up the stairs without taking his eye off the entrance door. Once they’d turned the corner to the first-floor landing—which opened onto a cavernous corridor with rooms smelling of hydrochloric acid—the tart gave him an anxious look. “You seem to be in a bit of a hurry, love.”
Fernandito sighed, and she searched his nervous eyes. The street bestows fast-track diplomas in psychology, and experience had taught her that if a customer didn’t warm up at the mere promise of a good tumble and her lush, abundant good looks, he was likely to change his mind once he stepped into the filthy room that served as her office. Or, worse still, that he might go back on his word before pulling down his trousers and beat a retreat without delivering on expectations or fees. “Look, sweetheart,” she said, “rushing is not a good idea when it comes to love, especially at your age. I’ve seen more experienced sailors than you burst the cork with just one touch of this luscious bosom. You need to calm down and enjoy the whole thing like a cream cake. One little mouthful at a time.”
Fernandito mumbled what the hooker took as capitulation before the irrefutable evidence of her firm flesh. The room was at the end of the corridor. On the way, the boy could hear the tunes of bump and grind filtering under the doors. Something in his face must have given away his scant familiarity with these matters.
“First time?” asked the tart, opening the door and ushering him in.
The boy nodded in anguish.
“Well, then, don’t worry, novices are my specialty. Half the rich brats in Barcelona have passed through my consulting room to learn how to change their own diapers. Come in.”
Fernando glanced at his temporary refuge. It was worse than he’d expected.
The room exhibited a full inventory of misery, exuding a stench that seemed to peel the green paint off the walls, leaving damp patches of a suspect nature. The minute bathroom, its door open onto the bedroom, featured a lidless toilet and an ocher-colored sink. Leaden light filtered through a tiny window, and the water pipes whispered a strange melody of gurgles and drips that inspired anything but the atmosphere of romance. A washbasin of considerable proportions at the foot of the bed suggested mysteries he’d rather not dwell on. The bed consisted of a metal frame, a mattress that may have been white about fifteen years ago, and pillows with a lot of miles on the clock.
“I think I’d better go home,” he said.
“Relax, kid, now comes the best part. Once I’ve gotten you out of your trousers, this will look like the nuptial suite at the Ritz.”
The hooker led Fernandito to the bed and helped him sit down, with a fair bit of pushing. Once her client had given in to her shoves, she knelt down in front of him and smiled with a tenderness that cut through the makeup and the sadness oozing from her eyes. A commercial patina in her expression ruined what little low-life poetry Fernandito had tried to imagine. The girl was looking at him expectantly.
“The gates of Paradise open only at the sight of coin, my darling.”
Fernandito nodded. He rummaged in his pockets and pulled out his wallet. The tart’s eyes lit up with expectation. He took the money he had on him and gave it to the woman without counting it. “It’s all I’ve got. Is that all right?”
The hooker left the money on the bedside table and looked at him with studied sweetness. “I’m Matilde, but you can call me whatever you like.”
“What do people call you?”
“Depends. Minx, whore, slut, or the name of their wife or mother. . . . Once, a repentant seminarist called me mater. I thought he meant ‘water,’ but it turns out that’s ‘mommy’ in Latin.”
“I’m Fernando, but everyone calls me Fernandito.”
“Tell me, Fernando, have you ever been with a woman?”
He nodded with the slimmest of convictions. Not a good sign.
“Do you know what to do?”
“The truth is that I only want to be able to stay here for a while. We don’t need to do anything.”
Matilde frowned. The twisted ones were the worst. Determined to straighten out the situation, she proceeded to undo Fernandito’s belt and pull down his trousers. He interrupted her.
“Don’t be afraid, love.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Matilde,” said Fernandito.
She stopped and looked straight at him. “Is someone following you?”
Fernandito nodded.
“I see. Police?”
“I think so.”
The woman stood up and sat next to him. “You’re sure you don’t want to do anything?”
“I just want to be here for a while. If you don’t mind.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“That’s not what I meant. You’re very attractive.”
Matilde chuckled. “Do you have a girl you like?”
Fernandito didn’t answer.
“I’m sure you do. Go on, tell me, what’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
The woman was looking at him inquisitively.
“Her name’s Alicia,” said Fernandito.
The woman’s hand settled on his thigh. “I’m sure I know how to do things that your Alicia doesn’t.”
Fernandito realized that he didn’t have a clue about what things Alicia knew or didn’t know how to do, and it wasn’t from lack of speculation.
Matilde observed him with curiosity. She lay down on the bed and took his hand. When he looked at her in the light of the anemic bulb, which gave her a yellowish hue, he realized that she was much younger than he’d imagined. She might have been only four or five years older than him.
“If you like, I could teach you how to caress a girl.”
Fernandito choked on his saliva. “I know how to do that,” he managed to articulate, rather dispiritedly.
“No man knows how to caress a girl, sweetheart. Take it from me. Even the most experienced men have fingers like ears of corn. Come, lie down next to me.”
Fernandito hesitated.
“Undress me. Slowly. The slower you undress a girl, the faster you win her heart. Imagine I’m Alicia. I might even look a bit like her.”
You’re like chalk and cheese, thought Fernandito. Even so, the image of Alicia lying before him on the bed with her arms stretched over her shoulders clouded his
eyes. He clenched his fist to stop the trembling.
“Alicia doesn’t have to know. I’ll keep the secret. Go on.”
19
Buried in a dark corner of Calle Hospital’s nether regions stood a somber building that looked as if it had never been touched by sunlight. An iron door forbade entrance, and there was no notice or sign to hint what was inside. The police car stopped in front of it. Vargas and Linares got out.
“Will that poor devil still be here?” asked Vargas.
“I don’t suppose job offers are raining down on him,” said Linares as he rang the bell.
After about a minute the door opened inward, and they were greeted by the reptilian glare of an unfortunately built little man, who admitted them with a somewhat unfriendly expression.
“I thought you were dead,” he said to Vargas once he recognized him.
“I’ve missed you too, Braulio.”
The old hands knew about Braulio, a humanoid creature with a skin weathered by formaldehyde and the unsure step of an old beetle. Braulio, man of yet untapped talents, acted primarily as errand boy and assistant to the pathologist. According to malicious gossip, he lived in the basement of the morgue, turning filth into an art form and drifting into old age in the safe haven provided by a decrepit, bug-ridden bed. He possessed a single change of clothes, which he was already wearing when, at the age of sixteen, he was admitted to the institution under unfortunate circumstances.
“The doctor is waiting for you,” he said.
Vargas and Linares followed him through a litany of damp corridors tinged with a greenish half-light that led to the heart of the morgue. Legend had it that Braulio had arrived there thirty years earlier, after being run over by a tram opposite the San Antonio market while fleeing from the scene of a petty theft—a scrawny chicken or a handful of petticoats, depending on the version. The driver of the ambulance that picked him up, seeing the tangle of impossibly knotted limbs, pronounced him dead at the scene and, after loading him into the van as if he were a sack of rubble, stopped to have a few rounds of beer with a few pals of his in a bar on Calle Comercio before handing in the battered jumble of bloody bones at the police morgue in the Raval quarter, which was more on his way than the Hospital Clínico. Just as the trainee pathologist was about to dig his scalpel into him, the dying man opened his eyes, big as saucers, and jumped back to life. The event was declared a miracle of the national health system and enjoyed wide coverage in the local press, because this happened in the middle of the summer when newspapers liked to come out with curious news items and trivia to liven up the blistering heat. “Poor Wretch Revives Magically One Step Away from the Grave,” the front page of El Noticiero Universal blared.
Braulio’s fame and glory were short-lived, however, and in tune with the frivolity of the times. For it turned out that the person in question was exceedingly unsightly, and after his large intestine had become braided like a horse’s mane, he suffered from chronic flatulence. The readers were put in the awkward position of having to forget all about him in great haste and concentrate again on the lives of music-hall singers and soccer stars. Poor Braulio, having drunk from the capricious fountain of celebrity, couldn’t handle his return to the most ignominious of anonymities. He considered taking his own life by eating an enormous amount of rancid Lent fritters, but in a moment of mysticism that came upon him while sitting on the toilet—owing to the resulting severe colitis—he saw the light and understood that the Lord, in his manifold ways, had wanted him to exist in the shadows, at the service of rigor mortis and its accompanying mysteries.
As the years went by and boredom grew, the police force’s fertile wit devised a most elaborate mythology around the figure, misadventures, and miracles of Braulio. According to this narrative, during his interrupted passage between this world and the next, Braulio had been adopted by a malevolent spirit who refused to go down to hell, feeling more comfortable in that Barcelona of the 1930s, which was—so experts maintained—its earthly equivalent.
* * *
“You still haven’t got yourself a girlfriend, Braulio?” asked Linares. “With this perfume of stale black sausage you let out, they probably throw themselves at you, begging for your favors.”
“I have plenty of girlfriends,” Braulio replied, winking with a droopy, purplish eyelid that looked more like a patch. “And they’re nice and quiet.”
“Stop uttering such filth and bring the body, Braulio,” ordered a voice from the dark. At the sound of his master’s voice, Braulio hurried off.
Dr. Andrés Manero, pathologist and Vargas’s old comrade in arms, stepped forward and held out his hand. “There are people you only see at funerals, but you and I don’t even manage that: we only meet for autopsies.”
“A sign that we’re still kicking.”
“You can say that, Vargas—you look as fit as a bull. How long since the last time?”
“At least five or six years.”
Manero nodded with a smile. Even in the faint light floating around the room, Vargas noticed that his friend had aged more than normal. Soon they heard Braulio’s uneven footsteps pushing the stretcher. The body was covered with a cloth that clung to it, becoming transparent where it touched the moisture.
Manero approached the stretcher and lifted the part of the shroud covering the face. His expression remained unchanged, but he turned to look at Vargas. “Leave us, Braulio.”
The assistant raised his eyebrows in annoyance. “You don’t need me, Doctor?”
“No.”
“But I thought I was going to assist with—”
“You were wrong. Go out for a while and have a smoke.”
Braulio threw Vargas a hostile look, being in no doubt that he was to blame for his not being allowed to take part in the forthcoming feast. Vargas winked back at him and pointed to the door.
“Clear off, Braulio,” Linares ordered. “You heard the doctor. Go and have a really cold shower.”
Visibly annoyed, Braulio set off, limping and cursing under his breath. Once they were rid of him, Manero removed the entire shroud and lit the strip of adjustable lamps hanging from the ceiling. A pale light of icy vapor carved out the outline of the body. Linares took a step forward, and after a quick glance at the corpse, let out a sigh. “God almighty . . .” Linares looked away and went over to Vargas. “Is it who it looks like?”
Vargas kept his eyes fixed on Linares’s, but didn’t reply.
“I’m not going to be able to cover this up,” said Linares.
“I understand.”
Linares looked down, shaking his head. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“You could get rid of the leech.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Someone is. One of yours.”
Linares fixed his gaze on Vargas, his smile leaving him. “I have no one following you.”
“It must have been someone from the top, then.”
Linares shook his head. “If there was anyone doing that, I’d know. Mine or not mine.”
“It’s a young guy, quite bad. Smallish. A novice. His name’s Rovira.”
“The only Rovira in headquarters is in the archives. He’s sixty and has enough shrapnel in his legs to open a hardware store. The poor man couldn’t follow his own shadow if you paid him.”
Vargas frowned.
Linares’s face oozed disappointment. “I may be a lot of things, Vargas, but not someone who stabs his friends in the back.”
Vargas was about to reply, but Linares raised a hand to silence him. The harm was done.
“You have until mid-morning,” Linares said. “After that, I must file a report. This will have its consequences, as you know.” He moved toward the exit. “Good night, Doctor.”
* * *
Anchored in the shadows of the narrow street bordering the morgue, Braulio watched the figure of Linares disappear into the night. “I’ll get you, you bastard,” he said to himself. Sooner or later, every one of these co
cky pricks who loved nothing more than disrespecting him would end up like all the rest, a piece of swollen meat laid out on a marble slab at the mercy of a well-sharpened blade and whoever knew how to handle it. And he was there to give them the farewell they deserved. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. Those who thought death was the final indignity life gave you were wrong. An extensive catalog of mockery and humiliations awaited backstage once the curtain had fallen, and good old Braulio was always there to collect a memento or two for his trophy case and make sure that they all stepped into eternity with their fair reward. He’d had his eye on Linares for some time. And he hadn’t forgotten his buddy Vargas, either. Nothing keeps memory more alive than resentment.
“I’m going to bone you like a piece of ham and make myself a key ring with your nuts, you jerk,” he murmured. “Before you know it.”
Accustomed to listening to himself but never bored of it, Braulio smiled with satisfaction. He decided to celebrate the good fortune of his clever thoughts with a cigarette, to help fight off the cold permeating the streets at that late hour. He felt the outside pockets of his coat, which he’d inherited from a deceased with subversive leanings who had come to pay his dues a few weeks earlier, in conditions that proved there were still real experts with balls on the police payroll. The packet of Celtas was empty. Braulio buried his hands in his pockets and watched his breath forming spirals in the air. With what Hendaya would pay him when he told him what he’d just seen, he’d be able to buy a few cartons of Celtas and even a tub of fine Vaseline, the perfumed sort they sold at the rubber shop of Genaro the Chinaman. Some customers had to be treated with class.
* * *
The echo of footsteps in the dark roused him from his dreams. He looked carefully and noticed a silhouette forming among the folds of the mist. It was advancing toward him. Braulio took a step back and bumped into the entrance door. The visitor didn’t seem much taller than he was, but he transmitted a strange calm and determination that made the few hairs remaining beneath Braulio’s blondish hairpiece stand on end.
The individual stopped in front of Braulio and offered him an open packet of cigarettes. “You must be Señor Don Braulio.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 50