by Adriana V.
Dos Emes sighed. “You said Diana Gallard returns to Italy this afternoon?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“And you don’t plan to speak with her again?”
“What for?”
She looked at me with that face of hers that says, Boss, I know you, then sighed again. “Well … to find out, for example, if she’s coming back for the wedding, although I’m certain that she won’t. It’s going to be conducted with absolute privacy. You’ll see.”
And, yes, I spoke with her, but only on the phone. I called her on her cell just before she boarded her flight. She was already at the airport. I’d returned to the patio at Catamarán and I was looking out at a serene ocean. I was trying to imagine it when it was more of a dung heap than a beach. I also tried to imagine the lives of those two women during the dictatorship, and in the post-Franco era, and through the transition. A secret kept in the deepest closet until there were no more obstacles. Their lives had changed just like their neighborhood, except that they were forty years too late. To reopen the case, interrogate Diana Gallard, and complete the puzzle would be to reimpose a black-and-white existence on the three of them.
I told her what we’d discovered (well, not me, it was Dos Emes, but I didn’t point that out). I told her the police were considering reopening the case.
“It’s possible they may want to question you,” I added, “but don’t worry—in my statement I mentioned that you were with your mother that night. They’ll probably drop it when they see that.”
“Thanks,” she said in that voice so low you almost couldn’t hear it, like she always did when she was saying something compromising.
Planes were flying low, toward the horizon, en route to the airport. It was easy to imagine tourists and other visitors looking out the windows, contemplating the towers in the Olympic village, the new buildings, the port, the beaches … I wondered how many of those eyes realized that not so long ago, the neighborhood didn’t exist in Technicolor.
IN THIS WORLD, AND AT THE TIME MERCEDES DIED1
BY LOLITA BOSCH
Sant Gervasi
It wasn’t like this in Barcelona in 19592: on Saturday, September 123, the disfigured corpse of “a very well-dressed”4 man was found in a Mexico City canal. Not far from there, “a radio cable electrocuted a little girl who was playing with her dolls. The little girl, who was one and a half years old, sustained the shock in her neck,” ten thousand kilometers from Barcelona.
Fifty years ago, fifty years from me.
Two decades after Francisco Franco rose against the legitimate republic, won the Spanish Civil War, and imposed a fascist regime that would cover the entire country with a gray darkness that would blur everything.
On Sunday, September 13, 1959, a day before vacation started at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a Soviet rocket sped to the moon at three thousand kilometers per second. That same day, just as the patriotic celebrations to honor the Child Heroes5 began, the newspapers proclaimed that there would not be a scarcity of tortillas during the strikes in nearby Mexico City.
The next morning, September 14, 1959, Russia confirmed its rocket landed on the moon, though the United States denied it.6 Spain sided with the U.S., of course, because in the fascism of our youth, communism was a social cancer. And while the two countries spent the day arguing, with Barcelona’s population unable to listen in on the arguments, a literacy campaign was launched in the Mexican state of Guanajuato and three notices appeared in the papers honoring Mr. Ricardo Ochoa Faist, head of public relations for Gillette Mexico, a European business. Abroad, Indonesia’s attorney general was arrested and accused of being a communist. There were tributes to Simón Bolívar in Caracas, London observed Anti-Nuke Week, and the Brazilian army threatened to expropriate cattle if the meat supply wasn’t reestablished. In Mexico City, America’s soccer team beat Atlante 0 to 1. And in Barcelona, ten thousand kilometers from the Mexican capital, two weeks by boat, fifteen hours by plane including the layovers, forty years of dictatorship, an infinite political distance, Barça scored four goals against Bilbao’s Atlético.
Final score: 4 to 1, much emotion, Catalonian, restrained at the start of the playoffs. A sigh.
A little bit of a breather for Barcelona.
Joy in the transported neighborhood of Sant Gervasi in Mexico City.
On September 15, as Khrushchev7 was flying to the United States and the world debated the truth regarding the Soviet rocket’s moon landing, international legislation sought to establish rights to the moon to avoid old conflicts, Mexico was celebrating its national holidays, and a two hundred–kilo tusk from some prehistoric animal was discovered in the Olive Valley in Chihuahua.
An intact souvenir from a disappeared world.
Two days after the national holidays8 and the subsequent hangovers, on September 18, 1959, Khrushchev condemned capitalism “but tasted and enjoyed it,” 1,500 candidates for parliamentary office presented themselves in Great Britain, and typhoon Sara left behind “a wake of death and destruction” on American shores.
Nothing happened in Barcelona because there, or here, the world was turning more and more into a place like any other.
And abroad, in spite of the Republican efforts to take Barcelona and Catalonia in a journey to exile, everything was being transformed.
The world was lying in wait.
And on the following day, September 19, 19599, as Khrushchev proposed retiring all the world’s armies in four years and Mexico debuted a new system to light public areas in the capital, Barcelona continued slowly darkening. It was turning into something opaque, hermetic, authoritarian, and fascist that was getting harder to move away from by the minute. It was harder to feel safe. It was more unimaginable to flee, to fly, to escape.
Francoism had been in power twenty years, which is why one Barcelona remained living there and another had left. And this story10 is about a famous crime in Catalonian high society, abroad. The one in the other Barcelona, in the other Sant Gervasi, so cozy and pleasant, which had needed to escape.
But then, on September 20, 195911, in the Mexican newspaper El Universal, a woman named Amalia published her recipes for pastries to accompany tea: marion cookies, nut pastries, almond croissants, and tropical bread. A woman named Amalia published a breath of fresh air in the midst of all that reality and alienation.
A pause. A cookie + a hot sip.
Slurp. Napkin. Thanks.
Just as the press confirmed that field mice were devouring babies in Mexican towns, it also reported that in Santa Cruz de Juventino, Guanajuato, a little girl named Elsa Medina Huerta had died: Elsita.
Amen.
Amen for this world, and for that time in which Mercedes Cassola died; she was born long before Francoism, long before the war, long before the republic, exile, the frozen world in which both of us were born that was what Sant Gervasi had become, and which she took with her ten thousand kilometers away.
Amen for Mercedes Cassola, who had to leave the sunny city in which she was born.
Twice as close to me.
And amen for this world, and for that time in which Mercedes Cassola died so far from home and from how things might have been. Amen at last for Mercedes Cassola, far from History and from the inertia of the Barcelona neighborhood in which she grew up, and in which she lived through the war, and from which she escaped when they locked her in and she realized that she had to leave because she wouldn’t be able to do so later. Everything would turn into Mary Nothing-Going-on-Here Poppins. Instantly, her world would be closed off. Asphyxiating. Claustrophobic. Constantly the same. Repetitive. The environs kept purifying itself until it turned into the placid neighborhood it had been before, and which it wanted to be after the war, and even later: today. A peaceful and quiet neighborhood in which its inhabitants took refuge when Barcelona was under siege. Even though today, again, the wind whistles between streets, parks, balconies, houses, one-story buildings.
I was born in this ne
ighborhood. And these continue to be our streets, our parks, our balconies, our homes, our onestory buildings.
Not so before. Before me, fifty years ago, Sant Gervasi was an immovable place in which those who stayed wanted to believe in the feeling that they were safe. A beautiful Mary Poppins world in which things had only one meaning which defined their context, a world into which I was born eleven years later.
Then 1959 arrived.
That’s when the Cuban Revolution triumphed and the first photos were taken of the dark side of the moon. Then—still 1959—Francoist forces celebrated twenty years in power, the United Nations declared the Rights of Children, the Inter-American Development Bank was established, and Sukarno12 installed a dictatorship in Indonesia.
Boris Vian, Camilo Cienfuegos, Buddy Holly, and Lou Costello died.
But Robert Smith, Rigoberta Menchú, Jeanette Winterson, and Evo Morales were born.
In this world, at that time, Mercedes Cassola13 died far from her home, from her past, and from the simple world that she’d left behind so as not to suffer within it. A world she’d wanted to take with her when she left Sant Gervasi: leaving Barcelona.
This was ten years before the murder of Roman Polanski’s wife in California14.
In that world, and at that time, things happened this way: On September 13, 1959, Mercedes Cassola was killed in Mexico City in an eminently Republican neighborhood that could have reminded her of her hometown of Juárez in Mexico—“eighteen stab wounds made by a slender knife plunged from the tip to the bottom of the blade.”15 She lived in a house she owned on Lucerna Street, number 84-A16, which would have reminded us of a building in her native Sant Gervasi, our Sant Gervasi, a solid and safe neighborhood that managed to be flexible enough to imagine itself in America, flexible enough to imagine itself in Mexico. Far from that broken neighborhood in Barcelona in which Mercedes Cassola got the impression that people were too much alike, more and more so all the time, and a feeling that Francoism was going to bury them up to their necks.
Especially before.
Because before, when Mercedes Cassola was born, before the war, before the dictatorship, and before exile, Sant Gervasi—especially Sant Gervasi—was a kind of “old neighborhood” that in Barcelona is referred to as a barrio-desiempre, a forever kind of place: peaceful streets, families with familiar surnames, similar lives, parks with playgrounds, small hills that are really centuries-old private gardens, low buildings, open skies, guards keeping watch, solid steel fountains, trees. Kids.
A pleasant place. A peaceful world. Safe, pretty.
Time passed the same as always, because it was the only way everyone knew to feel safe. That we knew. Because what’s certain is that we, all of us, aliens in a devastated Barcelona, were a little safer. A little farther away from that city depressed by the impunity of the fascist authorities which surrounded it with big, invisible eyes spying on everyone all the time.
Huge Eyes Watching Everyone.
But not Mercedes Cassola. She was able to leave at the right moment, to flee barefoot until she was found many years later by one of her two servants—María Luisa Monroy—when she went to wake her on the morning of September 14, 1959:
“I awoke at six and went to the mistress’s bedroom. I saw the light was on. I found it odd and thought she’d already gotten up. But when I went in the room, she was stretched out on the bed and covered in blood. I screamed in terror and Amelia came running. I told her I couldn’t look anymore and we went out together. Amelia, who is braver, is the one who found the lifeless bodies.”
Mercedes Cassola had been planning to travel that very day to the United States17. Her brother Pompilio18 had agreed to pick her up at seven p.m. to take her to Benito Juaréz International Airport in Mexico City, although he later told the authorities he had no idea his sister intended to fly with a companion that day.
They didn’t know each other well. They were siblings, but different. Yes, they’d left Barcelona together, but for different reasons. Yes, they both missed the war. But Pompeu went to Mexico because he thought he could continue living his life there exactly the same way he had in Sant Gervasi. As if everything could be the same and he could be safe that way. Mercedes, too, but not in the same way. Mercedes left, not just by lifting her city by a corner and packing it all up, but because she wanted to shake things up. To discover the empty spaces she’d missed. To win back the destiny she’d lost in the war. To build a world. To make plans, with her wings spread over Mexico, feathery and accessorized with bells. To draw Sant Gervasi from the sky and take refuge in it. Yet in America—here, she, it—all was different. More free. That’s why, among the many things strewn across the house on Lucerna Street, there were two passports with American visas and this other information:
• Mercedes Cassola Meler, 39, Barcelona, Spain, naturalized Mexican citizen, divorced, living at 84-A Lucerna Street.
• Ycilio Massine Solaini, 23, Uruapan, Michoacán, single, businessman.19
The rest was a chaotic and incomprehensible mess, like so many other things: the phone line was cut, “various curiosity seekers managed to get in,” a bag of jewels disappeared during the investigation, ashes were found on the dining room floor, “two open suitcases and all their contents thrown about the floor.” And in the main bedroom—furnished with European wood like their native Barcelona home, although painted in tropical colors typical to Mexico’s south—two lifeless bodies.20 Far from everything.
María Luisa Monroy and Amelia Martínez Pulido, both twenty years old, had worked for a long time in Mercedes Cassola’s home, and when they discovered the murders, they called a neighbor and then the police. Nobody wanted to touch the dead. Not without permission. Ycilio Massine had forty-seven stab wounds, almost all from the shoulders up, with three on the right arm and another on his belly. Mercedes Cassola was still in her negligee on the bed and had two rings on her fingers which the killer(s) apparently hadn’t been able to remove. That’s how the bodies were when they were transferred to the police department and then to Juaréz Hospital for an autopsy.
The bodies were transferred together.
Supervising the investigation was attorney Ana Virginia Rodríguez Miró21 and her secretary, Armando Zamora Negrete. Only one suspect could be considered responsible for the murder at 84-A Lucerna Street: the victim’s ex-husband, Felix Herrero Recalde. He was also Catalonian, also from Sant Gervasi, also a resident of Mexico, also far from home.
Also because of a lost war.
He was a man with whom Mercedes Cassola shared origins, codes, wings.
But it was just a theory. And Pompeu Cassola himself rejected it that very morning, after he went to the police when he got to his sister’s house and saw the bodies and the authorities and the two maids and the neighbor who didn’t want to touch anything.
After a few days, Felix Herrera Recalde himself proved the theory wrong, since he had been visiting in Catalonia when Mercedes Cassola was killed and returned to Mexico to make a statement to the police.
He declared he had returned to Mexico of his own accord.
He said he hadn’t killed anybody.
He said he had returned to his native city for the first time with a reentry permit and now had to leave again.
After their separation, Mercedes and Félix had not hated or resented each other, or felt anything close to that. They’d simply divorced ten years before and he’d moved to the port of Veracruz. They both had great fortunes and neither of them had any desire to kill anyone.
They’d both fled from death.
When Mexico opened the door of exile to them, together, Mercedes and Félix made a great deal of money in construction. And though they divorced later, they divided everything equally and remained friends.
Friends who led different lives.
Nothing more.
There was nothing else to it.
And now another pause, but without tea and cookies.
Another pause because the police really don’t h
ave a clue.
Negligence? Desperation? Indifference? Prejudice?
Later, they performed autopsies on the two corpses, together, at Juárez Hospital.
Then Mercedes Cassola’s father went to Mexico to reclaim his daughter’s body22. He was a gentleman from Sant Gervasi, who looked like those men who walk their dogs in private parks in the afternoons, who live quietly waiting for the world not to darken completely all of a sudden, for the Mary Poppins Time to turn into a burst of light, to turn silent again, to turn away again from this absolute fear that anything can happen. He was a man who never managed to distinguish with any exactitude the Sant Gervasi that stayed behind from the Sant Gervasi that left, and which the government had allowed him to visit with a special permit so he could retrieve his daughter. Mercedes Cassola’s father arrived in Mexico City a confused stranger, and waited for the autopsy report with the patience of a man who’d lost a war. Later, he sent his daughter home in a sealed coffin and buried her in the cemetery in her native city, our native city. The real neighborhood.
This was eleven years before me.
The discreet funeral consigned Mercedes Cassola to the orchard, the forest, the world, the garden from which it was a scandal to escape without seeming different.
The dead woman returned in silence: she was already home.
No obituary in her hometown paper, in our hometown paper. Not a word about Mercedes Cassola’s death in America, nor in Barcelona. The daughter of the Cassolas died far away because she had business there with her husband; she was buried in Sant Gervasi because that was the place where she grew up, where she lived, and from which—in spite of the flexible wings with which she wanted to fly to Mexico with, taking her city with her, folded up and held by a corner—she couldn’t leave. She couldn’t escape from it.
And, now everything stops. Just like that, without a pause.
So that in spite of the time, this story, and her colorful wings, feathers, and bells, Mercedes Cassola ended up inheriting a tainted city, a wounded city, that same old neighborhood.