Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V.

  Normally, when he was working in the dissection room, he did so to music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Madonna … Some of his colleagues preferred to listen to classical music, but he’d rather his head be filled with upbeat melodies and songs that invited you to hum along and not think. On this occasion, he said he wanted silence and was in no mood for jokes or chitchat. A little solemnity was the least he owed that ugly girl who’d remained a stranger while they worked together for six years. His assistant nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and started to saw bone.

  He had slept badly that night with one nightmare after another. He’d woken up exhausted and soaked in sweat. In one of those dreams, the only one he could remember, Eugènia, dressed like a bride, had smiled at him with her chubby, spot-infested face. Her hair was tied back with that blue ribbon and she was holding a hand out beckoning him to follow. He resisted.

  On his way to work, he thought how in essence there’d been nothing in the dream to justify the unpleasant, anguished feeling he’d woken up with. Standing in the morgue, preparing to stick his nose inside Eugènia’s body, the memory of that nightmare upset him again and made his pulse race. He took a deep breath and tried to regain his composure. He was a professional who had performed thousands of necropsies. He must chase off those ridiculous images and concentrate on the task. While he was cutting the skin on her trunk and proceeding to detach her thorax, he suddenly realized where he’d gone wrong. His scalpel fell to the ground and for a few moments it was as if he’d turned to stone while his brain strove to come to terms with the consequences of the discovery he’d just made. It was too sinister, too twisted. His assistant observed the scene in silence and retrieved the scalpel without opening his mouth, but he could see the doctor’s face was as white as the corpse he had just opened.

  He’d got it completely wrong. Eugènia’s request had nothing to do with any sense of tact, or with the fact they’d barely interacted. It was quite the opposite. Eugènia had died because she wanted him to look at her and touch her, as he’d never have done when she was alive. The girl was offering him her body the only way she knew he’d be prepared to receive it: stiff and cold. After all, she’d decked herself out with the attributes of a bride. She had understood that ending her life was the only way to be intimate with him, the man whose polite silences had slapped her ugliness in her face every day. That’s why she’d kept that postcard and sent him the strange message disguised behind such prosaic words. Had she also foreseen he’d visit her flat, or wasn’t that part of the script she’d written?

  He tried to control himself. He set her different organs down one by one on the table until he had gutted her. First he examined her brain. It weighed exactly 1,270 grams. It was entirely symmetrical and flawless. In fact, one of the most perfect brains he’d ever seen. There was no bruising, no minor hemorrhage, no imperfection, and it possessed the uncanny beauty of harmonious proportion and unusual refinement. That was what caught his attention. In all the years he had been working as a forensic, he’d never seen such a well-formed brain. It was riveting, a prodigy of undulating tissue that few eyes could have been privileged to contemplate over the centuries. He then went on to examine her remaining organs. They were all intact. No sign of edemas or blocked arteries, as if Eugènia had never swallowed the pills or the passage of time had left no trace in her insides. Each of her viscera was exquisitely proportioned in a way that was rare to find in a human body.

  Eugènia’s immaculate organs were the repositories of such extraordinarily sublime beauty that he was continually forced to catch his breath. Her entrails irradiated a hypnotic, luminous quality and the smell they gave off was in no way unpleasant. There were no signs of putrefaction. In some sense, it was as if Eugènia’s body allowed him to contemplate the great secret, the primordial model of absolute perfection. Once more, the thought paralyzed him.

  He stayed like that for a long time. Ecstatic. Astonished. Silent. However much he tried, he couldn’t take his eyes off that pure, unanticipated beauty. His assistant was frightened to see him in such a state and offered to accompany him outside, but he refused and vigorously ordered him to leave. The assistant was used to obeying and left the room without protesting, but he was sure the young man would soon be back with one of his colleagues. He barely had time. He now thought the body wasn’t at all deformed or monstrous, but a prodigy of beauty and perfection. He picked up the needle and thread and lovingly began to sew up Eugènia’s empty body. He personally wanted to look after it. He then put the ring back on her finger and the ribbon in her hair. Blue brings brides good luck. Finally, he put his lips next to the girl’s cold lips and kissed her.

  When they eventually found him unconscious on the ground, he said he had just fainted.

  In the months to come everyone noticed something was wrong with him. He hardly slept or ate, and the purple circles now established around his eyes made the pallor of his face even more alarming. He’d grown thinner and his hair had turned gray from one day to the next. Now it was almost white. He drank coffee all the time, and his left eye twitched nervously and forced him to blink compulsively. His pulse trembled and stuttered. His head of department was worried and repeatedly begged him to take sick leave or go on holiday but he refused, laconically asserting that he was fine. Despite his gradual, quite visible deterioration, despite his sickly, aged appearance, he continued to arrive punctually and nobody had any complaints. After all, he worked more hours than ever, as if he never had enough to do, and he engineered it so he was always on call. For the last few months he’d been a silent presence at every autopsy and always volunteered to give a helping hand to the less experienced forensics. Everyone avoided his company and few dared say a word to him.

  One night he was left all alone. The other doctor on duty was forced to go home suffering from a bad bout of summer flu. The rest of the staff had finished their shifts. The security guard was dozing as he did every night sitting in his cubbyhole with his radio blaring, and now and then he’d glance at the monitors that kept a watch on the entrance and sides of the building. Despite the apprehension the man had felt initially, when he’d been assigned to the old site of the Institute for Forensic Anatomy, experience taught him that problems always came from outside. He didn’t like the dead, but at least they never gave him any headaches.

  Recently there’d been a constant stream of bodies. Suicides, accidents, drug overdoses, bodies stabbed to pieces, anonymous faces no one could identify … The coolers in the basement were crammed with corpses patiently waiting their turn before they could be sent to the cemetery or medical students’ lectures, and the staff was complaining. If that rate were maintained, they’d have to do overtime. They didn’t even know what to do with the bodies. And couldn’t cope with the workload.

  There’d been no incidents that night. No calls, no emergencies. The next morning, shortly before eight, the head of service arrived. He liked to be the first and used that period of quiet to organize the day’s schedule and shifts before the phone started ringing. He wasn’t surprised not to see his colleague, because if it was a quiet night the forensics on duty got bored and often joined the nurses for coffee. He was probably upstairs in the library taking a nap or had gone to the cafeteria for breakfast. While he was rummaging in his pockets for his keys, he thought he heard a noise in the basement. It was a kind of feeble, barely audible moan, like a continuous sobbing. No doubt somebody had left the radio on. He sighed, put his coat and briefcase down, and took the stairs to the basement where the dead were stored. The door was just pulled to. As he opened it, he instinctively gave a start. The panorama in the autopsy room chilled him to the bone.

  He tried to shout but was unable to articulate a single sound. For a fraction of a second he thought it might possibly be a hallucination caused by the shadows in the morgue, a sly trick played on his brain by stress, but then he understood immediately that what he could see was for real.

  Decomposing bodies p
iled up on tables, on the floor, anyhow, open down the middle, with viscera chucked all over the room. It was impossible to take a step without treading on livers, encephalic matter, kidneys, or poorly dissected hearts. There were also intestines tossed in every corner, like macabre streamers decorating a lugubrious party where the guests were dismembered bodies and heads severed from their torsos. The stench was unbearable, as if hell itself had thrown its gates open. The only spotlight in the room barely lit the central table where they placed the bodies when they were performing necropsies, but the phantasmagoric skin of the mutilated corpses absorbed that light and projected a sad, sinister set of shadows. The moans were faint but could still be heard. They came from a man crying facedown on one of those disemboweled corpses, his gown dripping blood. No doubt about it. It was one of his doctors. He seemed to be holding something. And there was lots of blood. Lots. But the dead don’t bleed.

  He suddenly recognized her. She was one of their pediatric nurses, a particularly pretty girl with wonderfully blond hair. It was difficult not to notice that svelte well-proportioned girl and her bright cheerful eyes. It was less than a fortnight since she’d come to tell him how worried she was by the state of health of the man who at that moment was sobbing over her bloody, opened body. Now she was naked and completely still, somehow strapped to the table with plasters and bandages. The ball of cotton in her mouth must have suppressed her screams, but not asphyxiated her. She had undoubtedly resisted. Her blue eyes were wide open, but no longer smiling. Her vacant expression was one of panic.

  She’d been cut open from top to bottom, her ribs pulled apart and various organs wrenched out. As he closed in, he thought the man was holding something that pulsated rhythmically. Suddenly, he retched. It was the girl’s heart. Still beating.

  The doctor didn’t even notice he was there. Beneath the tears, his gaze wandered aimlessly. The startling beauty he’d discovered inside Eugènia’s body had made him lose his reason. From that day on he’d searched every corpse that passed through his hands with the fury of a man possessed. He’d examined hearts, livers, brains, uteruses, kidneys, each of the organs capable of hoarding the secret, dazzling beauty that had emerged unexpectedly from Eugènia’s imperfect body. In his despair, he had decided to look for it in the prettiest woman he knew, only to meet with failure once again. He now knew he would never again contemplate that golden mean of harmonious proportion, that unusual and extraordinary beauty Eugènia had generously given him as a present when she’d offered him her already deceased body. And such certainty meant the solitude overwhelming him at that moment was immense and irremediable. He had embarked on a journey into the deepest darkness, a prisoner of an ancient and tragic wisdom that would never again be within his reach. A journey on a one-way ticket from which he would never return.

  A HIGH-END NEIGHBORHOD

  BY JORDI SIERRA I FABRA

  Turó Parc

  Pelayo Morales Masdeu is ten years old and a bastard. Short, rather fat because of bad eating habits, blackhaired, bleary-eyed, with a small nose and mouth (a wreck of a face dominated by cheeks, chin, and forehead, four cardinal points of excess). When he smiles, his eyes shrink until they turn into horizontal slats. When he speaks, almost always shouting, he raises his eyebrows extravagantly. But the worst almost always comes when he does neither of these things. Then the whole world shakes.

  Pelayo Morales Masdeu was a child once upon a time. Now he’s an old man.

  A ten-year-old old man.

  “I want to go to the park.”

  “It’s late now, master.”

  “I want to go to the park NOW,” he says calmly and emphatically.

  “Don’t you think that after yesterday …?”

  “Whose side are you on, you stupid cow?”

  “Don’t talk like that, please.”

  “Let’s go to the park then.”

  “Look, come out to the balcony. The same mothers are there.”

  “So what?” He begins to get angry. “I didn’t push that moron down the slide! And I didn’t throw sand in the other kid’s eye! The first kid fell and the second is an asshole!”

  “The girls’ mothers are there too.”

  “Why do I care if they’re all jerks? All girls are the same!” His anger grows. “If you don’t take me to the park, I’ll go by myself!”

  “You know you can’t go by yourself. Your father has forbidden it.”

  “Who’s going to kidnap me? I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”

  “Master …”

  “Then come with me. You’re supposed to be here to serve me, right?”

  “Among other things, master.”

  “You’re so stupid … Sometimes I understand why they kicked you out of your country.”

  “They didn’t kick me out. I came to Spain to—”

  “Oh, go to hell! Are we going or what?”

  He’s already in the vestibule. Felipa doesn’t know what to do. He’s quite capable of opening the door and running downstairs. It wouldn’t be the first time. Then he’d hide and scare her to death. What he’d said about kidnapping were not just empty words. His father wants her to keep an eye on him at all times. His mother too.

  “Are you coming or not, you moron?”

  “Why don’t you play with your PC or with that little gadget—”

  “The little gadget, the little gadget,” he says, then bursts out laughing. “The PlayStation, stupid! Now leave me alone!”

  He opens the door and Felipa only has time to grab her jacket to cover her maid’s uniform. Pelayo is already one floor down, taking the steps two-by-two and three-by-three.

  “I’m telling you again: don’t talk to me like that, master, please! What will the neighbors think?”

  She hears his voice moving away from her: “What do I care what those old people say?”

  She catches up with him on the street. It’s useless to try to take his hand. He says that she sweats, that she smells, that she’s nothing but an Indian, like all of them. And when she reminds him that in the Philippines they don’t have Indians, he says he looked it up on a map and they’re all Indians, because they can’t live that far from North America and Europe and not be Indians.

  At least he looked at a map.

  They get to the park and people stare at them quite blatantly. Looks of disgust, looks of rejection. Looks. A woman calls her daughter and, grabbing her hand, starts to leave the park through the gate on Pau Casals Avenue, toward Francesc Macià Plaza. Another mother tells her son to stay away from the newcomer. A third mother hesitates for a second, and it’s just enough time for Pelayo to jump the pigeons, rock in hand. She stands up, calls both her children, and makes her way to the northeast exit, the one toward San Gregorio Taumaturgo Plaza with the round church in the middle.

  It’s a beautiful day to stroll down the Turó.

  Pelayo goes to the swings. He doesn’t have to wait too long. One of the kids jumps off right away, scared by Pelayo’s killer look. Felipa lowers her eyes. At times she still asks herself how someone can rip the wings off a fly just to witness its suffering, or sit there and watch a pigeon with torn legs and wings struggle to rise up and take flight.

  “Master, do not swing so high!”

  “Shut up, you idiot, or I’ll tell Mother you didn’t let me play!”

  Other nannies don’t come near her anymore. Mothers don’t talk to her. She’s alone.

  Pelayo Morales Masdeu flits from one place to another.

  The Turó Parc playground empties little by little.

  Vanesa Morales Masdeu is seventeen years old and a slut.

  Attractive, slender, almost anorexic, her black hair flows down to the middle of her back; she has light eyes, sensual lips, a pointy chin, an exuberant body, and beautiful hands. Young men, and some not so young, have been courting her like wolves for three or four years now, and she’s one of those who plays and plays well. Like a halfback on a soccer team. She plays the game and even allows herself th
e luxury of scoring a goal or two.

  Felipa sometimes asks herself why Vanesa’s parents spoil her so much, why they allow her so much freedom.

  She’s a mere girl.

  A devil too.

  At night, when the house is sleeping, Felipa leaves her room and walks barefoot to the enormous balcony overlooking Turó Parc. She is so tired, so exhausted, that at times she can’t get to sleep. If the weather is good, she goes out to the balcony and gazes at the dark and silent trees, so close at hand, so far from her life. People in Barcelona say Turó is the city’s most beautiful park: small, triangular, cozy, with plenty of places in which to get lost, to sit down, to read the paper, to absorb the sun in open spaces, to walk the dog, to play, or to amble about under the shadows of the tall trees and all the well-manicured shrubs. It’s a park for prosperous couples, rich old men aided by assistants with sad faces full of longing, and children with governesses and uniformed maids, all foreign, just like her.

  A park in a high-end neighborhood.

  She likes to look at it, especially at night.

  The south end, the narrowest and most open part of the triangle, opens to Pau Casals Avenue. On the sides and north, it’s straight, barely a hundred and fifty meters long by about two hundred. The pond with the invisible fish, because they’re rarely seen, is over to the left; the playground is just down from there; a tiny beverage stand with barely half a dozen tables is located in the center. There used to be a small theater. Once upon a time. The buildings bordering and trapping the park on the north and along the sides, to the left and right, are noble, regal, from when the rich began to move in and the neighborhood blossomed. Structures with ten or twelve stories, built in the ’50s and ’60s, solid, with uniformed porters instead of old doormen and women in aprons. From the top floors, it’s possible to glimpse the sea in the distance, and also the Tibidabo, with its Luna Park, the communication antenna put up for the ’92 Olympics. But only from the top floors.