Barcelona Noir

Sweet Croquette by David Barba

El Carmel

When I found out about the disappearance of Swiss gourmet Pascal Henry, I had no doubt that his body had become part of the larder for the liquid croquettes offered on the degustation menu at El Bulli. It happened June 12, 2008, when he went out to get his wallet and never came back for dessert; he left his hat, a notebook filled with gastronomic observations, and the bill, which was yet to be paid. He was never seen alive again.

I decided to investigate the crime the minute I read the article about it in La Vanguardia while I was having my breakfast of café au lait and a Chester cigarette at the Delicias bar, across the street from the Montaña Pelada. Later I took a walk on the hill in order to get the facts of the case straight, especially because I couldn’t get that damned gourmet out of my head. Up there, I could sit and contemplate the city’s putrid sky and delight in the Sagrada Familia’s spires, the San Pablo Hospital watchtowers, the Cathedral’s needles, and the rail tracks along the port, not to mention the swarm of phalluslike glass-and-steel towers which have, in the last few years, smudged the kind face of Barcelona that I’ve known since childhood.

Pascal Henry also had a kind face. I remember a picture of him next to chef Paul Bocuse, in which they’re both smiling and a little flushed from wine, their cheeks so puffy that a couple of quick slices would have produced a pair of succulent pork chops. After all, meat is meat, and anthropology long ago proved that if we’ve put aside cannibalism, it’s only because it’s been turned into a cultural taboo. In my opinion, we humans will end up eating each other sooner or later, and we’ll season the filets with fine herbs. We’re all gourmets.

What I have in common with Ferran Adrià is that we were both born in a squalid neighborhood on the edge of Barcelona. As a kid, I also played with my chemistry set and my sister’s toy kitchens. So, with a little bit of luck, I too could have become a star chef. Unfortunately, fate also bequeathed me a fine palette and a certain taste for exotic meats. And I say “unfortunately” because, instead of being born in the bosom of a bourgeois family from Guy Savoy’s Paris, or Pierre Gagnaire’s or L’Arpège’s, I was born a boy in the Reyes Robledo family, an illustrious clan of short, pigheaded day laborers from the Cazorla Mountains, immigrants to Barcelona along with hordes of other cheap workers who came to fatten the industrious factories of Catalonia in the ’60s. Here, in the Carmelo neighborhood, my parents opened a butcher shop on Santuarios Street, in the same place immortalized by Juan Marsé in Últimas tardes con Teresa, that famous ode to the neighborhood that was always my home, or, in other words, the vulgar place from which my restlessness rose. I’m not from here or there; just an anonymous charnego, that pejorative that so well captures the traditional disdain that tried-and-true Catalonians had for the descendants of Andalusians, at least until the arrival of all these blacks, Moors, Chinese, and South Americans who now make up the lowest rungs of our feverish and multicultural social ladder.

Yes, I’m a racist. But no one should confuse me with the usual sociological profile of the uneducated child of immigrants who embraces xenophobia. I studied Spanish philology at the Universidad Central. With a little bit of luck, I might have been able to avoid my fate among pork chops, but nobody opened that door for me. If I’d been more of a trouser snake with one of those girls from college, I might have carved out a future as a landlord. But I couldn’t get rid of that outsider air about me and I preferred the comfort of marriage to Maruja, my lifelong sweetheart. When she was twenty-eight years old, she still had the big, perky tits I fell in love with; her ass was like a cow’s, and it only got better and better over time, as the composition of her muscles swelled. And better yet, my fresh-faced girl made a Córdoba-style salmorejo sauce to die for. Too bad that someday she’d want more out of life.

Things went awry when they inaugurated the Juan Marsé Library a few steps from our house. Maruja signed up for a book club in which, inevitably, she discovered all of his novels. I suspect that quarrelsome charnego universe chock full of heroes made her reconsider our mediocrity. All of a sudden, she developed an enormous curiosity about the other face of Barcelona. She sought it out in novels like Eduardo Mendoza’s La ciudad de los prodigios, Juan Miñana’s La playa de Pekín, and Francisco Casavella’s El día del Watusi, which had the same effect on her as Don Quixote on chivalry: it alienated her from our modest food business. I wasn’t worried until the Sunday she didn’t tend to the chicken roaster so that she could lay on the couch and read. Although it’s true that it was our third week without a day off, I did think it was a bit much to simply declare, while painting her toenails a fiery red and never once lifting her gaze from a book of poems by David Castillo, that I shouldn’t count on her help with the business anymore. What kind of intellectual crap had she begun to believe? Did she think books were going to put food on the table? I’d had similar thoughts when I graduated, when it still hadn’t sunk in that everything was already foretold, and that in Catalonia, without the right surname or relative, you can’t get very far. There’s nothing worse than a cultured peasant, than being aware of the glass ceiling above your head that will impede all your professional advancement. At first, I went to all the publishing houses, bookstores, and cultural centers in the city. I must have handed out two hundred resumes, but it was futile. I gave up a year and a half later, thanks to my father, who never quite got over looking at me as if I were a lazy ass and reminding me of the security that came with inheriting the business. The day I decided to put on an apron, I also decided I’d never read another book.

Life went on, I kept cutting filets, until that notorious fall, when my stupid wife began wearing a Palestinian scarf, avidly watching Lorenzo Milá’s newscasts, and supporting the gay marriage law, obviously under the influence of her new friends from the book club. It was just a short step from there to reading Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s work.

“What are you thinking?” I asked her one afternoon when I went upstairs wearing my bloody apron and found her working her back into some absurd yoga pose while reading the adventures of Detective Pepe Carvalho.

“I just want to get some culture,” she answered. “It seems like all I do is go up and down the stairs from the house to the butcher shop.”

Maruja had always read, but not much more than what was given as gifts to her parents, a pair of immigrants from Córdoba, and maybe a best seller by Dominique Lapierre or Jorge Bucay, and, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code, after which she began to show some bizarre tendencies like refusing to greet Don Victorino, the priest who married us at the parish of Mare de Déu del Coll.

“Maruja, I meant your back,” I said, feigning concern. “You have scoliosis.”

She shifted her body and brought her eyes up from Los mares del Sur like a cheap femme fatale. “Manolo, I’m going to study humanities,” she spit at me.

Our marriage began to drift after the last New Year’s Eve we spent with the family. My parents barely spoke — they never had anything to say aside from things like “Slice up two hundred grams of jerky” and “Debone some pig’s feet.” But Maruja, who’d always been our family’s joy, didn’t say a word either, and after we were done with our coffee, she had the nerve to go throw herself on the couch to read another one of her novels, while the rest of us had to deal with Spanish TV’s New Year’s Eve special with the comedy duo of Cruz and Raya. Every now and then, Maruja would smirk while we laughed heartily. But the worst came when it was time to unwrap the gifts and I found myself with a recipe book by Ferran Adrià in my hands.

“Let’s see if you smarten up and get the business up to date,” she said in a derisive tone.

“Now you’re going to knock my cooking?”

“It’s just that your ham croquettes are so common.”

“What’s wrong with my croquettes?”

“They’re dry. I dare you to try making El Bulli’s liquid croquettes.”

This was too much. With a gesture that signaled I was offended, I went to my room, which upset my mother. At first, I just left Adrià’s recipe book on the night table. But after a while, curiosity got to me and I broke my vow against reading to see what in heaven’s name a liquid croquette could be. That recipe book was my undoing! Reading it robbed me of reason. I didn’t understand a thing. All of a sudden, my world of oxtails, sausages, and veal steaks came crashing down faced under Adrià’s techno-passionate cuisine, spherification with alginics, oysters with carrot, fake melon caviar, hot water gelatin dusted with agar... After going head to head with the ovens belonging to the messiah of modern liquidity, how could I continue the daily heresy of cooking dry croquettes? The first symptoms of depression arrived that spring.

The same day I was coming back from the doctor with a prescription for headache medicine and an unemployment certificate in my pocket, I ran into Maruja sitting on the windowsill, with her back up against a wall, her feet bare, and her thighs obscenely escaping from under her dress. She was so absorbed in her reading, she didn’t even ask why I wasn’t at work at the shop.

“What are you reading?” I only said this to break the ice.

“It’s called La lectora,” she responded enthusiastically. “It’s by a friend from the book club. A genius! He even won a prize at the Semana Negra in Gijón. It’s about a student in Bogotá who’s kidnapped by a bunch of lower-class delinquents so she’ll read them a book. It’s because... they don’t know how to read.”

I was stunned. What was this bitch telling me? Couldn’t she see she’d ruined my life? Hadn’t she noticed me utterly defeated before the ovens, trying desperately, in vain, to copy the damned postmodern liquid croquette recipe? Why did she have to engage with me now, after months of ignoring me, just to tell me about some asinine criminal plot birthed in some third world hut in the twisted and odious mind of some Latin American?

Techno-passionate cuisine was my refuge as my marriage degenerated. I was soon making secret reservations at restaurants run by copycats of the star chef — and I discovered there were dozens of them, hundreds, most of whom destroyed the liquid croquettes as badly or even worse than I did. They all had something in common with me: they dreamed of setting foot one day in El Bulli, the exclusive restaurant on Cala Monjoi, which only serves eight thousand diners per season. My attempts to make a reservation were in vain. We’re sorry, please call again next year, they’d tell me over and over. A wall of gourmets and half the world’s plutocrats, all with wallets thicker than mine, moved in front of me. My frustration was growing at a dizzying rate and the headache medicine barely had an effect. It didn’t take long for me to start drinking, and on more than one night I ended up sleeping it off at the bar counter, crying on the shoulder of some obese dropout from the culinary school.

One afternoon, everything came to a head. I had been strolling down Cala Monjoi, as I often did in those jobless days, so I could revel in the envy provoked by diners leaving El Bulli in their big cars, with a blonde as arm candy and a belly full of deconstructed tortilla española. I’d spent the afternoon planning to buy a rifle with a telescopic sight so I could fire above the diners’ heads; later I thought an AK-47 might be a better way to get a table without a reservation, like a Vietnam vet, and I got so excited at the thought that I almost killed myself on the highway, pushing my old SEAT Panda to the limit of how fast it could go. As I sped up the Carmelo highway and turned toward my house, a certain scent of burnt lamb made me think it might be better if I stopped at the mechanic’s on Santuarios to check the car while I calmed my nerves with a couple of drinks at the nearby bar, El Pibe.

I was attended to by a young indigenous man with lips as thick as Mallorcan sausages. He had an air about him like a juvenile delinquent and, given the tiresome salsa music that was spilling from the speakers, I figured he was Colombian.

“What’s up, bro? The spark plugs are practically dead!” he declared after a simple peek at the engine. “I’ll have it ready for you in a half hour.”

I was on my way out the door when I happened to glance at the speaker delivering that relentless musical torture and saw a framed university degree, a master’s in philosophy and letters from the University of Cartagena de Indias. Another aspiring South American intellectual working like a peon in Barcelona, I thought as my gaze moved around the mess in the office and bumped into a familiar-looking book under some papers. It was a copy of La lectora. That’s when I realized the smell of burnt lamb wasn’t coming from the engine but from my own head.

“Do you like to read, buddy?” the mechanic asked when he saw my eyes fixed on the book’s cover. “I’ll give you a copy of my novel. I just work here to put food on the table for my eight kids, but my real vocation is literature.”

I left in a flash, with my stomach turning and the book in my hand. My wife was cheating on me with a South American mechanic with intellectual pretensions! That’s the thing about Spain: you pick up a rock and uncover a writer underneath. We’re a country of Quixotes, poisoned by novels. It starts by abusing literature and ends by cooking with liquid nitrogen.

After that terrible blow, I felt the moment had come for me to act but I contained myself: vengeance is best served cold, like a gazpacho frappé.

I came up with my plan that very night: the next day I drove my SEAT Panda to an isolated curve on Aguas Road. I walked down to a phone booth on Avenida de Vallvidrera and called the mechanic.

“Hello?”

“Don Sergio, my car stopped working again.”

“Don’t worry, buddy, I’ll come get you right away.”

Everything went according to my plan: I killed time smoking one Chester after another, looking out at the city’s detestable new skyline, until, forty-five minutes later, the indigenous guy showed up, loudly honking the horn of his rickety tow truck.

“Okay, bud, we’ll see what happened to your ride.”

It was getting dark as he stuck his nose in the engine. A car went by, then another. Then it was deadly quiet. I took the knife for slicing ham from the car, hid it behind my back, and slowly approached. I’d lifted my arm toward his neck when, all of a sudden, a car flew past at top speed and blinded me with its lights. I couldn’t repress a hysterical scream. My heart was beating out of my chest and, with my nerves on edge, the knife fell to the ground. The Colombian, alarmed, jerked his head up and hit it on the hood of the car.

“Goddamnit! That hurt! Why are you screaming?”

I realize I lost it at that point. I should have gone for the knife and done things right, but, afraid I’d lose the advantage I had with the element of surprise, I decided to slam the hood down on his head with all my might. The first blow smashed his face against the engine. But it wasn’t enough: I pounded him fifteen, twenty times, until he quit screaming and ceased moving. I’d made enough noise to wake up the entire city. But when I finished the job, not even a fly was buzzing.

After that I only remember flashes, until I got the damn Indian naked on the counter of the butcher shop. His face was a bloody mess and he wasn’t moving. I went to sharpen the machete, and when I came back to hack him to pieces, I found him sitting up, glancing around.

“What am I doing here?” he mumbled.

There was no time to waste in response, which consisted of a sure blow with the machete, leaving the instrument embedded in his head just above an ear. He died instantly, with a great spasm but without unnecessary suffering. I’m a good guy: I don’t like to drag out anybody’s agony. When animals suffer too much, they get poisoned with adrenaline and then don’t taste good.

That morning at the Delicias bar, reading about Pascal Henry’s disappearance, I decided to give Maruja another chance. To celebrate the end of the betrayal and rivalry with the Colombian, I invited her to dine with me at Can Fabes, the famous restaurant owned by Santi Santamaria, which was much more accessible than El Bulli. On the back page of La Vanguardia, I had read an interview by Ima Machín with one of the survivors from the plane crash in the Andes, a guy who rebuilt his life by creating an ostrich ranch in the Pampas. When they asked him why ostriches and not cattle, he said that, to his surprise, he found ostrich meat much closer to human flesh. Both were sweet, almost porklike, and very, very tender.

That same night, sitting at a table in Can Fabes, I wanted to try an ostrich filet. The waiter was quite taken aback with my demand but decided to ask in the kitchen if it’d be possible to satisfy my caprice. After a few minutes, all the waiters were staring at me as if I’d killed someone. Maruja got tense and asked if we could leave, but it was too late: we were already sitting under Santi Santamaria’s round shadow with carving knives in our hands.

“I understand that you’d like a dish of exotic meats,” a raspy voice whispered a few centimeters from my wrinkled nose.

“It’s okay, just bring us the degustation menu,” I said apologetically.

“Why don’t you try my râble cuit au moment with cocoa sauce? If you don’t like it, no problem at all...”

“Ah, well, unfortunately, I’m allergic to cocoa.”

The chef lifted his own carving knife in a compulsive gesture while muttering terrible threats in a barely comprehensible Catalan, as if he were the witch doctor in an African tribe about to stuff a careless explorer into the pot. Finally, he bellowed: “Get out of my restaurant! Go home, cut your own leg off, and have some pig’s feet!”

No other phrase could have suited me better. I took it as culinary advice from a master on the subject, and also as proof that Santamaria must have engaged in some kind of ritual cannibalism. I left smiling, but Maruja was very upset that we’d been kicked out and misunderstood my quick retreat as an act of cowardice. I drove home as fast as I could and dropped her off without paying any attention to her recriminations or insults and offering no explanations. Once alone at the butcher shop, I grabbed the best of my slicing knives, opened the industrial freezer, dropped the Colombian’s semifrozen cadaver over my shoulder, and deposited him on the chopping block. With an expertise that’s totally mine, I managed to cut off a leg without much blood splatter. Then I lit the stove, put a pot over a low flame, deboned the limb, and cut up a bit of onion. I sliced the meat in uneven pieces, dropped them in the water, and set it to boil. With a bit of butter and cream, I poached the onion and added it to the meat and its broth. After twenty minutes over the fire, I ran it through the food processor until I got rid of all the lumps. Later, I heated up the croquette mix and put the mass in spoons which I’d dipped in alginics. I fried up some bread crumbs and battered the croquettes. Finally, the result of all of my sacrifice was there before my eyes, challenging my palette, saying, Eat me. And so I did: I ate three in one shot! I couldn’t believe the results: the croquettes exploded in my mouth, filling all my taste buds with a torrent of flavor. I’d found the star chef’s best kept secret!

Energized with curiosity prompted by the Swiss gourmet’s disappearance, I began outlining a new strategy to get a reservation at El Bulli. This time, I pretended I was a respected German gastronomist on vacation in Spain. I thought the Henry case might have caused a rush of cancellations — no diner wants to think they could die at the table — and two days later I received a call from Cala Monjoi.

“Mr. Jürgen Klinsmann?”

“Jawohl! ”

“We have a free table on Thursday.”

Maruja was very happy that I was finally taking her to dinner at the most distinguished restaurant in the world. She was radiant that night in her ethnic dress and bead necklaces. She looked like a Spanish-gypsy version of the Queen of Sheba.

“The Klinsmanns, I presume,” said the kindly maître d’ when we arrived at El Bulli.

“No,” said Maruja.

“Yes,” I said.

“Who is Klinsmann?” she asked as they led us to our table.

“A literary pseudonym.”

There was no more conversation that evening. Maruja didn’t know how to even begin eating those spherified yogurt knots with ficoïde glaciale, and I couldn’t wait to taste the famous liquid croquettes. When the sacred moment of communion with the master finally arrived, my hands were trembling with excitement. But everything fell apart with the first bite — not a trace of Pascal Henry in that toasted bread crumb! No matter how hard I concentrated, I could not find the characteristic porklike taste of human flesh in the liquid croquettes or in any of the other dishes I ordered from the degustation menu.

This being the case, where was the gourmet? Who had eaten him? Santi Santamaria probably kidnapped him, I thought as I descended into this new abyss of depression. He probably ended up in the pots at Can Fabes. Pascal Henry had dined at Can Fabes exactly two nights before his disappearance from Cala Monjoi. Santamaria’s calculations would have been as simple as they were perverse: wait for the gourmet to leave El Bulli before striking like a bird of prey — I wondered if he’d sent some underling from the kitchen or if he’d kidnapped the man himself. The consequences would fall on his competitor: a media frenzy, clients vanishing, perhaps a city inspection that would unveil a dangerous arsenal of chemicals and gels...

Upon arriving home that night, only one thought hammered at my temples: to slice Maruja’s neck with the ham knife to quiet her constant recriminations. She was going at me the whole way home. “You didn’t say a word during the entire dinner; I’m sick of your bored and boring personality; your lack of consideration has no limits.” To be honest, I was used to her criticisms. What really enraged me was that she asked for a divorce. And all because of that asshole Colombian and his book.

After I took my shoes off, I quietly opened the box of kitchen utensils where I’d hidden the weapon and, with cold blood, went looking for my wife. She too had taken her shoes off to snuggle up with the cushions on the couch and surrender to the final pages of Andreu Martín’s Prótesis. She never got to the end. So absorbed in the book, she only realized she was going to die when she felt the traitorous blade on her neck and I whispered: “No more reading at home.”

As I wrapped her up in plastic and cleaned the stairs that went from our apartment to the butcher shop, I mused how the next day I’d take all her damn detective novels to the San Antonio market and see if a bookseller would give me a decent price for all of them.

I decided to begin by cutting off her head, since part of the work had already been done. When I managed to separate it from her neck, I held it high, in a kind of Hamlet pose.

“No more cheating on me with some South American!” I yelled, and I laughed with all my might.

Later, I ripped open that stupid ethnic dress, which was now soaked with blood, removed her underwear, and began to slice off her arms and legs. I figured I’d use them to give the business a boost. Next weekend, instead of roasted chicken, there would be liquid croquettes!

That radiant summer Sunday, I wrote a brilliant advertising on the butcher shop’s board: Try Ferran Adrià’s cuisine without leaving El Carmelo! Half an hour later, the place was full of diners, retirees, and Andalusian widows dressed in black. Trays of croquettes just flew out the door and I realized that what was left of my late wife’s and her lover’s bodies would not be enough to satisfy more than a week or two of demand. I needed to find myself some other spacey Pascal Henry type. But I didn’t even have to go out to look for him: that same evening, my mother-in-law called from Córdoba to tell me she was about to get on a train to come visit. I’d told the whole neighborhood that my wife was with her parents, so that crazy old woman actually posed quite a threat to my story. I went to get her at the station, and as soon as we got home, I didn’t even give her a chance to take her coat off before I’d sliced her neck and dragged her down the stairs. I realized right away that this one wasn’t such a good idea: an old hen will make a good broth but has little meat. I saw quite clearly that, at my current sales pace, I’d be out of provisions in no time.

Then I remembered my hateful neighbors from across the street and I decided to kill two birds with one stone: I’d become famous for my haute cuisine while ridding the neighborhood of immigrants. There, just a few meters from my door, was the illuminated sign of my biggest competitors: the Chinese owners of Tiananmen Segundo Restaurant. Nobody would ask uncomfortable questions about a couple of “yellows,” so that very Monday I decided to have a “happy meal” to lure them to my store. All those things fried in MSG made me want to vomit, but in the end I decided to try what was most in accord with my exotic tastes: shark fin soup. But the maître d’ made me change my order.

“It doesn’t taste like much, sir. Allow me to recommend a specialty that’s not on the menu.”

“Interesting. What is it?”

“Giraffe meat, sir. Just arrived from the African savannah.”

“Now we understand each other, China boy.”

That week, I found myself eating at Tiananmen Segundo every night. Mr. Hu Jintao offered me a truly personalized service: before my astonished eyes, he paraded dishes of succulent zebra filets, savory wild feline ribs, delicious turtle soups, and other delicacies made from animals en route to extinction that I savored unquestioningly. The prices were reasonable, especially in comparison with the incredibly expensive restaurants of the great chefs. And to top it off, this was across the street from my house. My nascent friendship with my former enemies allowed me to closely observe these restless beings, destined to be used as my raw material. It was still too soon to think about a kidnapping. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before I lured one of these slanty-eyed anthropoids to my shop.

Everything was going smoothly until Mr. Jintao heard about the growing popularity of my liquid croquettes and wanted to try one. At first, I tried not to give it too much importance, but in the face of his insistence, and the shots of rice liqueur that he served me after each screaming monkey foot or rhino back, I decided to give the Oriental a little taste of my delicacy. The following Sunday, a feverish day in terms of sales, I went over to Tiananmen Segundo with a tray of liquid croquettes. Mr. Jintao was at a table with about seven or eight other Chinese guys eating rice and spring rolls.

“Don Manolo, would you like to join us?”

“No, thank you — I’ve put myself on a diet,” I said as I uncovered the tray to offer my goods.

All at once, and with appreciative grunts, they launched their little yellow paws at the croquettes; I waited for these to explode in their mouths so I could take pleasure in the looks of satisfaction on their faces. But that wasn’t exactly what happened. Instead, Mr. Jintao began to gag, he turned green and then purple. Finally, he spit with a disgusting noise and a slew of curses in his native tongue. The other diners were aghast, not sure whether to chew or spit, until, one by one, they followed their host’s example. What had gone wrong? Was my most recent larder of lesser quality than the previous ones? What was wrong with my mother-in-law? Did I use too much alginic? I didn’t get a chance to ask because Mr. Jintao, like an enraged Bruce Lee, screamed and grabbed a knife, coming after me with the clear intention of killing me. Luckily, the table was long enough to give me a head start and I was able to make it to the door.

When I finally turned back, just about when I reached the middle of Santuarios, I saw all the diners staring at me with hate from the door of Tiananmen Segundo: they had all kinds of knives in their hands, baseball bats, bottles, and even guns. This was pretty serious. How did they discover my secret? I asked myself over and over as I locked myself in my house, totally freaked out, and with the added fear that they’d call the police. Later, a bit calmer, I realized they wouldn’t call: it was perfectly clear that Mr. Jintao knew the taste of human flesh as well as I did. That gave me a bit of time: for the rest of the afternoon, I used my furniture to barricade all my doors and windows, then sat down, filled with anxiety, to wait for the yellow horde to come for my head like gremlins in the night.

But instead of being subjected to all their firepower, at eleven o’clock I heard the light rapping of knuckles outside. Then I heard the little Chinese man’s familiar voice.

“Don Manolo, I’ve come in peace. I only want to talk, and to make you an offer.”

“Why should I believe you, Mr. Jintao? You just tried to kill me!”

“I am so sorry, Don Manolo! It was a moment of confusion. I beg your eternal forgiveness for my censurable act. I give you my word that nothing will happen... if you cooperate.”

“Just tell me what you want and let’s get this damn farce over with!”

“Don Manolo, I merely want to buy all of the supplies you might have of your, ahem, excellent exotic filets. I need them for my restaurant. I promise there won’t be any reprisals. My organization will pay for your goods at a price you won’t be able to turn down.”

I vomited just then. Not because I suddenly knew Mr. Jintao had been feeding me human flesh all those nights, but because I must have eaten a bunch of old Chinese dudes who probably couldn’t have passed a simple health inspection. And with all those diseases out there! How could that Chinese man have fooled me so badly? Where was my gastronomic knowledge? Where was my palette? And, more importantly, how had Mr. Jintao managed to make it seem like it was a different meat every time? What was his secret ingredient? Damnit, I thought, I’m going to have to ask him for the recipe!

“Look here, Don Manolo,” Mr. Jintao said as soon as I dared to unlock the door, “we’ve had a great increase in clientele in our chain of restaurants. Spaniards like our products. You’re a barbaric people, bloody and cannibalistic, as is evident in your sausages, your bullfights, and your tomato fights in Buñol.”

“Fine, it’s a deal. Take it all and cook it up! All I want is for you to leave me alone.”

“That we can’t do, Don Manolo. You have a special talent, a talent as a provider, and you’re going to work for us: ever since the economic crisis, fewer people are coming from our country. We can’t allow such an abrupt drop in supplies. From now on, consider yourself employed by the Red Dragon Triad.”

“No, no, never! I don’t want to be a contract killer with the Chinese mafia, I’m strictly a killer on an as-needed basis.”

“You don’t have a choice, Don Manolo. If our restaurants go empty, you’ll be the next one in the freezer. Consider yourself lucky to be alive and go get us some good meat. If not, you might wind up as chop suey.”

Since that day, my life hasn’t been the same. It’s true that that demonic Fu Manchu lookalike paid me very generously for the arms, heads, and ribs I still had in the freezer. But I was overcome with fear, and now my days aspiring to be a star chef are over. Where am I going to find my next victim? How long until the cops get their hands on me? I suspect that, sooner or later, Mr. Jintao will be true to his word and I’ll be eaten like some vulgar duck l’orange. But this week, I intend to survive: I’ve been hanging around El Bulli again and I’ve noticed that Ferran Adrià likes to stroll on the beach every day at sunset. It’ll be easy to take him from behind by surprise, slice his neck, and stuff him in the Panda’s trunk. I’m also going to try to get the Chinese to include my delicious liquid croquettes on their menu, since I’m the one who copies them best. Adrià is chubby and well-formed, he’s going to have a lot of meat: we’ll prepare him in soy sauce and a serving of Three Delicacies rice. Then it’ll be Santi Santamaria’s turn. They’ll all be licking their fingers when they taste my star chef râble.

[Editors’ Note: all characters and places in this story — even those based on real people and restaurants — are fictional or used in a fictional context.]

The Offering by Teresa Solana

Sant Antoni

Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush

That morning when he got to the Clinical Hospital and saw the medical record for the body that had just come in, he didn’t give the name a second thought. Eugènia Grau Sallent. Twenty-nine years old. Circumstances surrounding death: possible suicide caused by an overdose of diazepam, no signs of violence. The victim hadn’t left a note. The autopsy was timetabled for the following day and he was the forensic scheduled to perform. As one half of the staff was on holiday and the other hadn’t a spare moment, it was only reasonable for him to be assigned the case, though he was hardly idling. Fortune had it that no corpses had been admitted for a couple of days and he’d been able to spend some time on his backlog of paperwork. But the party was over. Experience showed that when one dead body came in more would soon follow.

The name of the woman whose autopsy he’d have to perform made him think of another Eugènia and the bunch of reports he had promised to take her that morning. Eugènia was one of the secretaries who worked for the forensic pathology department and she’d been expecting that batch of overdue files for weeks. He glanced at the dossiers piling up on his desk and sighed. The bureaucratic procedures of the judiciary never failed to put him in a foul mood, but he decided he might as well complete the files that were almost finished. At the very least, he’d give Eugènia something to be getting on with. A couple of hours later, feeling pleased he’d dispatched some of those tedious reports, he hummed his way to her office with a sheaf of files under his arm.

Marta, the other secretary, was on holiday and nobody was around. Eugènia’s computer was switched off and her table was neat and tidy, as if she’d not come into work that morning. It was strange because in the six years he’d worked as a forensic doctor at the Clinical Hospital in Barcelona he couldn’t recall that girl ever missing a day. Had she perhaps also gone on holiday? Not likely, the secretaries took it in turns and one couldn’t go off until the other was back. Besides, he’d seen her the previous afternoon behind her desk, as quiet and efficient as ever, and she’d said goodbye with a barely audible “see you tomorrow” when he nodded in her direction. She’d not mentioned any holidays, so she must be ill. He left the reports on her table and walked glumly back to his windowless cubbyhole. With a little luck, nobody would bother him and he’d be done by midday.

How old was Eugènia? About his age? He reckoned she was well past thirty, although he’d never actually asked her. In fact, the two of them couldn’t be said ever to do small talk. Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you. Here are those papers... and that was as far as it went. Eugènia was dour and introverted, and they had very little in common. And she was ugly, incredibly so. Her unusual structural ugliness derived from a range of small blemishes that weren’t easily sorted. In her case, genes had dealt her a bad hand and made her the repository of all the physical flaws of her ancestors. Poor Eugènia had simply been very unlucky. She was short and stout with stumpy legs propping up an overlong torso. Her breasts were massive in relation to her height, and she was round-shouldered. She was dark-haired and swarthy, but in a coarse dingy mode, not to mention extraordinarily hairy. When she depilated, her legs and arms were a mass of tiny red scars that only disappeared when her hair started to grow back. A real mess. As for her facial features, she hadn’t been let off lightly there either. Flabby cheeks, large bulbous nose, bulging eyes, and greasy spotty skin she tried to conceal beneath a thick layer of face cream. She dressed unpretentiously, normally in dark colors, but nothing she wore did her any favors. Though she’d never worried about her appearance, she’d long ago given up trying to look pretty and now merely tried to pass unnoticed.

He had found Eugènia off-putting from day one. When he had to go to the secretaries’ office to return a file, he always tried to deal with Marta, because her colleague’s unsightly appearance put him on edge. He couldn’t help it.

“Hasn’t Eugènia come in today?” he asked one of his colleagues.

“Eugènia? The poor thing’s downstairs. Didn’t you see her record?”

“Record? Which one? You mean the one for the woman admitted this morning?”

So secretary Eugènia, nature’s joke in poor taste, whom he’d been working with for six years, was the woman who’d committed suicide currently going cold in the basement. He put on his gown and went down to the room where they kept the corpses to take a look. According to her record, Eugènia was in cooler number ten. When he opened it, he came up against her misshapen body and familiar acne-splattered face. Yes, there she was, as white as marble except for her face that had a good color to it. How odd. The girl had felt spirited enough to make herself up before taking her own life. Powdered nose, rouge on cheeks, liner on eyes, red lipstick... She wasn’t wearing earrings or any other jewel, except for a small, apparently antique ring on the ring finger of her right hand, and she had gathered her hair up with a blue ribbon. One thing in particular caught his attention: the sweet scent given off by her body. A fresh, strong flowery fragrance, though he couldn’t say which flowers. All he was able to distinguish was the smell of roses and violets. But the odor emanating from Eugènia’s body wasn’t one of violets or roses, or perhaps it was but mixed up with others. All in all, it was extremely pleasant. He sniffed her legs, her belly, her breasts, her arms, her neck and hair. No doubt about it. She had splashed perfume all over herself, every fold and cranny, as if she’d wanted to ensure she would smell sweetly after death.

According to the preliminary report, she had been dead ten or twelve hours. If she’d not been pale as marble from the neck downward, you’d have said she was asleep. He glanced at her card again. Twenty-nine when he’d have guessed thirty-five or — six. Yes, after looking at her close up, that girl wasn’t over thirty. It was really strange: she looked younger now that she was dead. The report said they’d found her at home, stretched out on her bed in a supine position, stark naked but covered by a blanket. Next to her they’d found a white summer dress yet to be worn and, on her bedside table, three empty boxes of Valium, a glass, and a bottle of mineral water. She had taken the trouble to send her neighbor a note so she’d find her early on and ring 061, and she’d also had the forethought to leave the door unlocked so the firemen wouldn’t have to force it open. Everything indicated that before swallowing the pills, Eugènia had seen to every last detail. Even to the point of choosing the dress she wanted to be buried in. You didn’t find many young suicides with such sangfroid.

Of course, he had never autopsied anyone he’d known. Forensics, like surgeons, never open family or friends. They leave that to someone else. In Eugènia’s case, the girl had been working at the hospital from the age of twenty and everyone knew her, even if the two of them had never hit it off. Anyway, he knew next to nothing about her. Whether she had a boyfriend (he thought not) or friends or was happy at work. As far as he was concerned, Eugènia was merely the secretary he greeted politely when he went in and out of the clinic, and to whom, every so often, he handed reports to be sent to court. In the six years they’d worked in that department, they’d never had coffee together or commiserated over setbacks in their lives. The truth was, Eugènia was a completely unknown quantity.

Even so, it felt strange to think that tomorrow he’d have her naked and defenseless on the autopsy table. He wished the case had been assigned to someone else. He did remember one thing about her: she was very shy and quick to blush. Whenever he poked his nose into the secretaries’ office, Eugènia would immediately turn red and hide her less than attractive face behind hair that was as rough and black as coal. Poor girl, he thought, genuinely moved, she was so ugly that no man could ever have given her a second look. Of course he never had. He had just treated her like a piece of the furniture and avoided sitting at the same table when they were both in the cafeteria. As far as he could remember, he’d never paid her a compliment or smiled at her beyond the call of politeness. And he’d never done so because she was ugly and her ugliness made him feel uncomfortable. He regretted that now.

He shut the door to the cold room and decided to put her out of his mind. He must concentrate on the paperwork. He went upstairs and straight to his office, determined to bury himself in his private backlog of bureaucracy. However, before doing so, he switched on his computer to take a look at his e-mails, as he always did midmorning. And saw it. A message addressed to him from someone he wasn’t expecting to hear from at all. Name of sender: Eugènia Grau. His heart missed a beat. It was a short message, barely two lines. It started Dear Doctor and signed off with a Yours sincerely. In a neutral polite tone, Eugènia asked one thing of him: that he personally carry out the autopsy on her when she was taken to the morgue. Nothing else. That was it. Taken aback, he read that concise text several times trying to decipher a possible hidden meaning. Eugènia had left no suicide note but, for some reason that escaped him, before ending it all she had taken the trouble to perfume herself, make her face up, and e-mail him that highly unusual request. His stomach felt queasy. He didn’t know what to think.

He decided not to say a word and spent the rest of the morning sitting in his office pretending to work. Just before two o’clock he informed his colleagues that he had a headache and was going home. It was true his head was throbbing. He was on his way, walking past the secretaries’ office, when he stopped in his tracks. He’d had a hunch. In a flash he went inside and started rummaging in Eugènia’s desk drawers. He soon found them. There they were. A set of her house keys, with a note of her address. Yes, it was the address that was also on her card. After ruminating for a few seconds, he put the keys in his pocket and rushed out. As soon as he hit the pavement, the light of the midday sun dazzled him and he had to shut his eyes. A motorcyclist almost knocked him down. What the hell was he up to? Almost unaware, there he was, in a taxi and asking the driver to take him to the address attached to the key ring. His heart was racing and he found it hard to breathe. Let alone think. The girl lived by herself, on Floridablanca Street, very close to where they worked. The taxi got there in only a couple of minutes.

Eugènia’s flat was near the Sant Antoni market, in a district on the left of L’Eixample that had never lost its noisy working-class character. The market was the first to be built outside the city walls when they were demolished in the last third of the nineteenth century, and it retained its spectacular iron structure and bustling atmosphere. It was still the center of the busy commercial activity that characterized the neighborhood where Eugènia’s family had lived for nigh on a century. At the end of May 1909, Eugènia’s great-greatgrandparents had moved there with their burden of children, belongings, and debts, and the expectation they would find home comforts that were nonexistent in the tiny dismal flats in the old part of the city. Little did they imagine that the streets of their new neighborhood would very soon be transformed into one of the scenarios of violent conflict between workers and troops in the Setmana Tràgica and that smoke from burning churches would blacken the sky over their new start in life. It had been a short journey from where they used to live, a brief ten-minute exodus on foot, but far enough to leave behind that labyrinth of damp narrow streets prey to overcrowding, dirt, and poverty. Unlike the well-off middle classes who had migrated further, to the distinguished buildings the architects had erected on the right of Balmes Street, more modest families like Eugènia’s were forced to settle for those humbler flats on the borders of their old district. Now, together with the Raval, it was one of the most densely populated parts of Barcelona and home to most of the immigrants coming into the city. You only had to look at the head-scarves worn by the Arab women or listen to the melancholy voices of the men conversing in remote, incomprehensible tongues on street corners or sitting on benches. The frantic Babel of streets in Eugènia’s neighborhood was awash, as they had always been, with hope and rage, honest folk and hoodlums, next-door neighbors from way back and newcomers. Blocks and sidewalks harbored prostitutes and old dears going to their daily mass, pimps and shopkeepers, informers and plainclothes police. Traffic was nose-to-tail and car fumes polluted the air. There were few tourists strolling thereabouts. They preferred the beach or air-conditioned museums.

The block where Eugènia lived didn’t have a concierge. It must have had one once because there was a concierge’s cubbyhole, but at some point the neighbors clearly decided to install an automatic entry system and save money. Concierges are expensive, and it was still a modest neighborhood, however much the prices of flats had rocketed in recent years. It wasn’t difficult for him to find the front-door key, because there were only three on the ring. It was a narrow gloomy staircase, which at that time of day reeked of boiled cabbage. As it was summer and the windows were open, he could hear mothers shouting to their children to come and eat, and impatient, grumbling men demanding their dinner. Eugènia lived on the fourth floor (which was really the fifth) and there was no elevator. He gritted his teeth and started on the steep ascent.

Once he was at the top he opened the door and went into the girl’s flat, trying not to make any noise to avoid alerting the neighbors. What he was doing was probably not altogether illegal, but at the very least it was rather unorthodox. Forensic pathologists don’t visit the scene of the crime after the coroner has removed the corpse. It’s not part of their duties. Why was he doing it then? What was he hoping to find?

In all the time he’d been a forensic it had never entered his head before. Was he perhaps hoping to find a clue to why Eugènia had committed suicide? With those unprepossessing looks that life’s lottery had awarded her, it wasn’t difficult to imagine her leading a lonely life, being chronically depressed, or not feeling she belonged to a world where beauty and the attributes of youth seemed to determine the rules of the game. Eugènia must have tired of looking at herself in the mirror every morning and seeing only a reflection of her ugliness. She must have given up the struggle. And as she had been working at the morgue long enough to know that suicides always pass through the Clinical Hospital, she must have thought it preferable for the autopsy to be performed by the doctor she’d had least to do with. It was all a question of tact. Yes, that explained the message she had sent him. It couldn’t mean anything else.

The flat was light and strangely tidy, like her work desk. Not a speck of dust to be seen. It was a small flat, barely sixty square meters all told, but Eugènia had good taste. The few pieces of furniture she owned were solid and made of fine wood and the décor was sober without seeming characterless. There were rugs on the floor and plants by the windows, and books as well. Hundreds of books. Bookcases galore. Eugènia was a well-read girl, then. She was no ignoramus.

The kitchen was also tidy and the fridge was completely empty. Somebody had unplugged it. Nor was there any rubbish in the bin. Eugènia had had the forethought to empty the fridge and take the trash down to avoid leftover food rotting and stinking the house out: farsighted to the bitter end. He entered her bedroom apprehensively. The curtains were open and sunlight was pouring in. The forensic police must have taken the glass, bottle of water, and boxes of Valium because they were nowhere to be seen, but there was a slim volume on her bedside table. The book was open and a postcard marked the page. It looked vaguely familiar.

He took the postcard and turned it over to see who had sent it. A shiver ran down his spine. It was the postcard he himself had sent his colleagues at the hospital a couple of summers ago, when he was on holiday. He remembered it now. He’d spent three weeks touring the Balkans with a colleague who was an orthopedic surgeon, although their relationship had been short-lived. All the women he got close to did their best to take over his life, but he wasn’t ready to make commitments and in the end they all left him. He glanced at the postcard rather nervously. It was one of those typical cards that tourists like to send to friends or relatives, a landscape of the region of Thracia with a few ancient ruins in the background. The image meant nothing special. In fact, he could have sent that card or a dozen others. It had been a polite gesture. He put it down and picked up the book. It was a modern edition of Phaedrus, a translation. He dug into his memory and tried to disinter texts he’d read and forgotten in high school. Wasn’t Phaedrus the dialogue about beauty? Or was that Phaedon?

He was forced to sit down when the room started to spin. His body was drenched in sweat, a cold, unpleasant sweat. He was a doctor, and though his special interest was forensic medicine, he could still recognize when two symptoms were connected. That Eugènia had used this postcard to mark the page in the book on her bedside table the moment she committed suicide, and that she’d sent him the unusual request, couldn’t be two isolated acts. Perhaps the book indicated something as well. Had Eugènia chosen it to kill time while she waited for the pills to take effect, or had she decided to commit suicide as a result of reading it? If he recalled aright and Phaedrus spoke of beauty, the book reinforced his first hypothesis. Yes, that must be it. Eugènia had committed suicide because her ugliness made her tremendously unhappy.

He picked up the book and went off to the dining room. When he finished reading it was six p.m. He was right. The book was about what Eugènia wasn’t. Or maybe was, because right now he couldn’t be so sure. Wasn’t Plato really saying that beauty is independent of the physical world, a quality of the nonsensory world that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the one captured by our senses? The thought was highly disturbing. Reading the book, you could hardly say the philosopher was pouring scorn on ugly people; rather, he was warning of the error of trusting in appearances. On the other hand, Socrates’s ugliness was proverbial. The old philosopher was no Adonis. So what if there was beauty after all in Eugènia’s misshapen body? But what kind of beauty? An inner, purely intellectual beauty, like the one Alcibiades had praised in Socrates in The Symposium and the one Eugènia cultivated with all her sophisticated reading matter? Yet if that was so, why had she committed suicide?

When he walked into the hospital the next morning, Eugènia was already on the autopsy table. Her body still gave off a flowery scent. They’d followed his instructions and taken off her ring and the ribbon with which she’d tied back her hair. They’d washed her face, her makeup was no longer visible, and she was now a pallid white. Her lips and nails had acquired the blue tone poisoning that diazepam brings, and she no longer looked if as she was asleep. She was frankly very ugly. He unhurriedly pulled on his gloves and put on a plastic apron, and cheerfully asked the assistant he’d been assigned for the day to proceed to open the back part of the skull while he took his scalpel and prepared to extract her other organs. He wasn’t expecting any surprises. Experience told him that they were dealing with a conventional suicide and that all they would find would be a general collapse provoked by the overdose of tranquilizers.

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 piled 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...1”

“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 the 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.

Like hers.

Suddenly Felipa sees her, as if emerging from the night. The car moves too fast along Ferran Agulló Street and brakes sharply in front of the house. Felipa leans out a little, just enough to see her, running, tossing her black hair. The figure of a young man exits from the other door. He takes her under the streetlight and they kiss in a singular fashion, as if eating each other up.

Then he does something else.

He sticks his hand under her skirt, up the back, then the front.

The girl opens her legs, offering herself, squeezing against him.

One minute, two, five, until they separate and she enters the building.

Felipa miscalculates the time. She should have gone back to her room right away. But she’s still hanging around closing the window. Vanesa is already inside the enormous 400-square-meter duplex apartment. An apartment you can lose yourself in.

“Good evening, Miss Vanesa.”

“Oh God, you scared me! What are you doing here?”

“I couldn’t sleep. Shall I fix you something?”

“What would you fix me at this hour of the night?” She takes a quick glance at her watch. “And you...” She struggles for the right words. “Are you spying on me?”

“Me?”

“Shit, Felipa. If you tell Mother, I swear I’ll make your life a living hell!”

Felipa’s about to tell her that she couldn’t make it any worse, but ends up not saying anything. It can always get worse. There’s always a way. The laundry that’s not washed on time, and the blouse that, although she has ten others, is precisely the one she needs to wear that afternoon; hot meals, cold meals; searching pockets before the wash and sometimes finding incriminating things such as condoms... She has lied for Vanesa so many times, to protect her, but ultimately also to protect herself.

“I have never told your mother a thing, miss.”

“Of course...” Vanesa crosses her arms.

“What?”

“You people were already doing it when you were like eleven or twelve, right?”

“Doing it?”

“C’mon or I’ll smack you. Doing it like rabbits.”

Felipa thinks she knows what Vanesa’s talking about but doesn’t want to get into it. After all, she’d found the girl one day with a boy, in her own bedroom, when she was barely fifteen. Her parents weren’t home, like always, and though it was her free afternoon, she’d come back early because she wasn’t feeling well, didn’t have any money to spare, and knew all too well she had nowhere to go.

“If there is nothing you want, I’m going to bed,” and she tries to leave.

“May I ask you a question?”

From the look of contempt on the face of this know-it-all, Felipa is sure the question won’t be to her liking. “Of course.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working, miss. Working.”

“You’re revolting.” Her face stresses the disgust. “You come to Spain penniless and take care of other people’s children because you can’t feed your own. Why do you have them then?”

“Children are a gift from God.”

Vanesa bursts out laughing. “Go on with that nonsense.” She almost spits the words out. “Mother told me that your first husband left you and that you didn’t even have time to hug the second one before he knocked you up.”

“My Manuel died, miss.”

“Who takes care of your children?”

“My mother.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen them?”

It’s hard for her to speak the words. Sometimes it’s too much, much more overwhelming than usual.

“Almost three years, miss.”

Vanesa Morales Masdeu holds her gaze.

Then Felipa looks down, unable to resist. “Good night.” She starts to leave.

The girl says nothing.

A few steps.

“Don’t go making noise in front of my room tomorrow. Clean somewhere else, okay?” she hisses suddenly.

Felipa nods and walks on. When she gets to her room, she knows exactly how difficult it’s going to be to fall asleep.

Laia Masdeu Porta is forty-seven years old and a slave driver.

A natural blonde with two liposuctions and three facelifts, she’s a Botox addict, does four or five hours a day in the gym, a sauna, massage, and intensive care; always corporal, never intellectual; almond-eyed, generously siliconed lips, an adolescent’s body, large breasts, well-manicured hands, and expensive clothes. She rarely smiles so as not to provoke unnecessary wrinkles. She never voices strong opinions because she doesn’t have any. Her hourglass is perfect.

As solid as her amorality.

The first thing she does when she crosses Turó Parc on her way home from the gym is to look up to see her wide balcony. It’s not the first time she’s surprised to find Felipa up there, doing nothing. But, of course, it’ll be the last if she catches her again. The most amazing thing is that she always says she’s cleaning the windows or sweeping. For God’s sake, they’re all alike. A herd of beggars. Although Felipa has been with her for a long time. Years now. But it doesn’t mean she’s the least bit fond of her...

They’re nothing more than third world animals living like rats in a society that’s beyond them.

Laia Masdeu Porta goes up the elevator by herself and enters her apartment without making a sound. She takes off her jacket, looks at herself in the mirror, the front and sides, all mechanical gestures, and then walks away with the same circumspection.

Her maid is in the bathroom, on her knees, scrubbing the toilet.

Laia relaxes, although not too much.

First, the kitchen. She opens the fridge. She keeps tabs on the food, because recently she’s discovered that sometimes there’s a missing steak, or yogurt, or custard. She hates to be robbed. But all those wretches steal. They can’t help themselves. That’s the way they’ve been brought up. Deep inside, she knows she should feel sorry for them.

But she doesn’t.

They know well enough to send their money back to their countries.

And then they complain. They complain! The day before, she’d had a talk with her and made things clear.

“Look, Felipa, if you’re not happy, there’s the door, understood? I just have to tap my foot and fifty more like you come rushing out. But not even like you! Cheaper! We’ve done quite a bit for you. What more do you want?”

She goes to the dining room. The mail is waiting on a large cut-glass platter on top of a little table, next to the door, so everyone can pick up their own. She glances at the letters from the bank but doesn’t open them. José María will take care of them. She grabs hers, all junk mail. But she does take a look at the phone bill. She rips open the envelope and studies the calls.

None to the Philippines.

She sighs.

It’s not about the charges for two or three euros that she finds on the bill. It’s the actual fact, the detail. Aren’t there telephone centers for immigrants? Let them talk from there! What if there’s a truly important call for her while Felipa is chattering or whimpering with her children or her mother?

And Felipa calls them every week.

Well, it’s hard, but she’s already taken her in hand.

The poor thing can’t cope with more—

“Felipa!”

Laia sees her emerging from the bathroom almost bent in two, rubbing her hands on her apron and wearing her eternally frightened face.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Anything new?”

“No, no.”

“Calls?”

“No, no.”

“Oh, girl, please wipe that look of horror from your face. Good heavens! It’s not the Gestapo questioning you!”

The maid doesn’t know what to say.

She doesn’t know what the Gestapo is, of course.

“My God.” Laia Masdeu Porta sighs. “You’re such a sad person, eh?”

Felipa doesn’t move; she holds the same expression.

“I am going to my studio to relax. I’d like a salad for lunch, but careful with the vinegar. And scrub your hands well. You just had them in the toilet!”

Laia goes to her room. First, she changes into something more comfortable. She opens the dressing room and checks out her clothes. Half the things in it aren’t good anymore. It’s impossible to wear them anywhere. Even less with the staff watching her. Mariano, Alberto, and Andrés’s wives are really something... and the “new ones” are much worse. Ignacio’s is a twenty-two-year-old kid. Although she’s already thirtyfive, Francisco’s wife also looks like a supermodel.

She’ll clean things out this afternoon.

Everything in the trash.

She doesn’t want to see Felipa, like that other time, a year ago, when she caught her rummaging through the cast-offs for a sweater, a blouse, a skirt...

This cheapskate behavior makes her shudder.

She undresses, looks at herself in the mirror again, the one in the dressing room, from the front, the side; she tucks in her belly, lifts her breasts, strokes her behind with both hands. Everything’s solid. José María doesn’t touch her anymore, but that’s because her husband’s impotent and stupid. The young man at the gym, the one at the door, didn’t take his eyes off her. He was checking her out. She can still make anybody scream in bed. She just has to decide to do so. She’s going through the best period of her life. The age of wisdom.

Too bad sex is so exhausting, so sweaty...

She puts on clean clothes. House clothes, but classy, because you never know when someone might call or come over. Dignity is in the details. Her mother used to say: “Hold your head high, even when you step in shit.”

She leaves the room and goes to the studio that serves as her oasis. She hears Felipa singing softly to herself. Laia hates it when she does that. She’s asked her not to do that, but if she starts to argue about it she’ll end up with a migraine and that’s not what she needs right now: a wretched headache because of that idiot. So, for once, she lets it go. She closes the studio door and opens a window. Turó Parc immediately restores her peace of mind. This is her world. The rest can go to hell. That green patch and the surrounding buildings. That is her Barcelona, exclusive, unique, her own.

The world works, in spite of all the damned Felipas.

Laia Masdeu Porta lets herself drop into her favorite armchair and, just before picking up a fashion magazine, closes her eyes for a few seconds and relaxes.

José María Morales Moreno is fifty-five years old and a son of a bitch. He combs back his increasingly thinning hair, which is shiny and somewhat out of control around the back of the neck, where there are black cowlicks that make it seem just a touch trendy. Tanned complexion, the eyes of a lynx, straight lips, an incipient double chin that will soon vanish with surgery, a big body, the body of an entrepreneur, a powerful body. After he was mugged by some Moroccans, in the very center of Barcelona, and they took his gold Rolex and two rings — one, to his relief, his wedding ring — he never wears anything ostentatious. It’s not necessary, either. His mere presence sets off the staff’s neurons wherever he goes, from a restaurant to the hairdresser’s where they take care of his image. That and the armored car do the rest.

The world has gone crazy.

And sometimes, like this afternoon, especially so.

“Damnit, fuck! What are you talking about?”

Felipa stops in the middle of the stairs at the upper part of the duplex. Her boss’s voice comes through the half-open door like a gale-force wind. She hesitates and rubs her hands. They are sweaty from fear, from what she’s daring to do, from everything. She thought this was the best moment and now, suddenly, she hesitates.

She’s about to go back down the stairs.

But a hint of anger stops her. It’s taken her so long to make up her mind...

The voice is loud and clear again: “Then give him half a million, goddamnit! With everything we’ve got on the line, we’re going to get caught up with details now? I know he’s not fit to be seen and he’s a pig, but what do you expect? Calm down, we’ll get rid of him in less than a year, I’m telling you! Now we have no choice but to put up with it. Just make him sign the receipt, okay? And careful on the phone, damnit. Everything’s taped now. Idiot judges and their fucking mothers!”

Felipa is on the other side of the door, trembling, wondering for the second time whether to come back later or wait. The problem is that if he leaves the office and goes downstairs, it’ll be difficult to get him alone. It’s not that there’s much interaction between the people in the house, but if Master Pelayo, Miss Vanesa, or Mrs. Laia show up in the middle of her request...

Through the door’s small opening she sees him, red with anger, furious, incensed. The force of his power is clear from here.

If her need didn’t outweigh her fear...

“And that other one wants a hundred thousand?” José María Morales Moreno’s voice intensifies. “Fuck him! Why is it that in this fucking country nobody lets you lay a brick without asking for something? Tell him fifty, Eloy, and make it work! We’re not going to just throw money away like that! At this rate, we won’t even have ten million!”

This isn’t the first time she overhears him on the phone. Last time it was with Gemma. Gemma has been to dinner with them a couple of times. She’s very good looking, younger than Mrs. Laia. José María’s sweet nothings left no doubt about what was going on between them.

But that’s none of her business.

Perhaps that’s part of the game among the rich.

Besides, Gemma is not the only one.

Her boss’s trousers are a well of surprises, a stream of secrets. His audacity is astonishing. The week before, she’d found a pink card with a woman’s peculiar name, perhaps French. The card described the many things she could do with a man in bed. A month before that, she had found a receipt from a no less conspicuous club.

Felipa isn’t clever, but neither was she born yesterday.

Sometimes she thinks about the four of them and doesn’t understand a thing.

“Look, you know what? A couple of our guys will break their legs for four euros, okay? Then it’ll be fine to can half the staff, to throw all of them out on the fucking street!”

The phone conversation ends.

Felipa counts to ten and rubs her hands on the apron again. She takes a breath and slows down her heartbeat. Now. Now or never.

Then she knocks on the office door.

“What do you want?” roars the voice of the owner of the house.

“Excuse me, sir...” She puts her head through the opening.

“Oh, it’s you. What is it?”

“Sir...”

“Come in, come in. I don’t have all day.”

She has to jump right into the issue, heart on her sleeve.

“Sir, it’s just that... well, the last time you gave me a raise was... more than a year ago, you know? And now...”

“What do you want? More money?” His eyes are big as saucers now. “Are you out of your mind or what? Do you think they just give me money, like a present? We’re in a recession, do you understand? Yeah, I know you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about, but that’s the way it is. And what do you want money for, Felipa? For the love of God, you have everything you could want here.”

“I want to visit my family for Christmas and—”

“For Christmas? This year? Are you thinking of leaving precisely when there’s the most work, with all the dinner parties and...? C’mon, c’mon, Felipa, don’t mess with me, okay? Leave me alone; just take it up with my wife.”

“But your wife—”

“Felipa.” He looks at her sternly and his dry gesture signals the end of the conversation.

She lowers her head and leaves the office.

For some time now, she has stopped crying when she feels worse than a rat, but this time she shuts herself in her room and weeps until she’s called and has to run out to see what her masters want. Any one of her masters.

Felipa Quijano Quilez is thirty-five years old but looks more like fifty. She’s short, with olive skin, eyes painfully tired, a sad expression on her face, worn-out hands, worn-out hopes.

This day, this afternoon, she calls home from a telephone center.

“I’m coming back,” she declares.

Then she holds back her tears, talks with her mother, with her children. She says the same thing to all of them.

“I was lucky. I won the Spanish lottery.”

At night, she makes dinner.

Cool. Feeling nothing.

She doesn’t sweat now, she feels no fear. She’s worked everything out. Now her will is firm. She cautiously distributes the rat poison she bought at a drugstore downtown, not overdoing it, so they won’t notice its bad taste. The exact amount in the soup, and a little more in the wine and the meat sauce. She found out what she needed to know about it. She had asked the druggist what would happen if people imbibed it by mistake and the man was graphic and generous in his explanations. A person will notice the flavor unless the soup is strong and salted, unless the wine is dark, unless the sauce has mustard. A human being can’t eat it without detecting its bitterness, but a little at a time in soup, wine, sauce... The druggist said that more than one writer of detective novels has asked him about this and he’s become an expert.

But she wants it to kill rats, right?

This is the first night in over a month that the four of them are eating together at home. Generally it’s the husband who’s missing, but the wife also has her dinners with friends, and Miss Vanesa sometimes “studies” at a classmate’s house. This is her chance, after so much patience these final weeks. A royal dinner. She’s a good cook, although they hardly value her work and at times they even get angry or laugh at her. She consults the wife, but she just shrugs and tells her not to make her dizzy with details, to do whatever she wants.

Whatever she wants.

The only negative comment comes from the head of the family.

“This wine seems sour,” he says.

But Miss Vanesa is somewhat kind. “The sauce is very good today, Felipa. It was high time you learned to cook. It’s rather strong...”

She goes back to her room after doing the dishes and clearing the table.

Then she packs her bag.

That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

So close to freedom.

She doesn’t want to sleep. She believes it’s better to be awake, to keep the tension calmly within her, but she drifts off. She doesn’t know exactly when her eyes close. Well, that’s the proof she’s relaxed. Very relaxed. So relaxed she dreams of happy things, her house, her children. No agitation. Nothing startling. More than surprising, this is all extraordinary. When she wakes up, she finds the first light of day entering her window.

She goes to the master bedroom first.

The wife, Mrs. Laia, is there just like always, lying on her back, with her face mask and one of her silk robes covering her cold body. Her husband, however, must have felt sick because his body is half on the bed, half on the floor, as if he tried to get down or crawl after the life that was escaping from him. His expression is bitter.

Painful.

Felipa looks at him for a while without moving a muscle.

She doesn’t feel a thing.

Nothing.

She goes back to the wife and spits on her. Oh yes.

Then she goes to Miss Vanesa’s room.

And then to Master Pelayo’s.

The girl evidently felt the pain too. She lies on the floor, on her stomach, her hand hooked, a nail chipped. But the boy, just like his mother, seems to be sleeping, seraphic, innocent.

An innocent devil.

Convinced she’s got nothing to fear now, she goes back to the master bedroom and takes some clothes suitable for herself and her mother. She leaves the jewels. She prefers money, the large sum of dirty money hidden in the office. And she doesn’t even grab it all. She doesn’t want to arouse suspicion at the airport. She takes just what she needs to start anew. With the clothes in a bag belonging to the couple, she returns to the children’s rooms and picks through their closets.

The last thing she does before leaving is look out at Turó Parc, the poet Eduard Marquina’s gardens.

This she will miss.

It’s undoubtedly the prettiest park in Barcelona.

She exits the building without anyone seeing her, not even Tomás, the superintendent, who at that time of the day is having his sandwich, away from prying eyes, down in his hideout in the basement. She hails a cab and the driver helps her with her three bags. Destination: the airport.

Felipa Quijano Quilez looks for the last time at the park, at the city to which she’ll only come back if God, in his infinite goodness, wills it. Her face shows no emotion. She doesn’t feel guilty either. In her country, they kill pigs in less pious ways. The only thing she knows, and this certainty increases by the minute, is that she is free.

Free.

For the first time in a long while, there’s a hint of a smile on her face when she sees the airport in the distance.

There’s no problem buying the ticket. There never is if you’re traveling first class. Like a lady. She waits in a comfortable VIP lounge where there’s no lack of anything. And in no time, she’ll be flying back home, to her mother and children.

At long last.

Life isn’t always unfair.

Fucked, yes. Unfair, no. It depends on the person.

She finally laughs when the plane takes off, almost two hours later.

She doesn’t know whether the Philippines has an extradition treaty with Spain, but she doubts very much that they’ll find her in the mountains west of Kabugao, no matter how hard they look.

The Customer Is Always Right by Imma Monsó

L’Eixample

Translated from Catalan by Valerie Miles

Don’t you ever just let your mind wander?” her husband had asked when they first met. “Wander? Where to?” she said, surprised. He fell in love with her that very instant. He had been married for years to a perennially dissatisfied woman and had come to think it was a trait shared by all females. When he met Onia, it was hard for him to believe he had been wrong. Onia never said things like If only we would do such and such, and even less: If only we had done such and such. He could count on his fingers the times that Onia had begun a sentence with the words if or maybe.

They’d never had any children because she couldn’t imagine herself as a mother. And because most of the things attached to childhood seemed to her both foolish and silly. She had never believed for a moment that the three Kings came from the East bearing gifts. She had only ever cared to watch the feet of the Gegants[37], and from a very early age she had wondered how much they paid someone to wear them and how heavy they were. When she was asked to write things at school she found it an impossible task. Reading stories with even the slightest dose of fantasy was like torture for her.

“I’ll tell stories to the children myself,” her husband would say, since he had wanted to become a father. “But I just can’t imagine what a child of ours would be like,” she’d respond. He was a silver importer; every two years he travelled to Zacatecas, Mexico, and came back overwhelmed by the poverty and the orphaned children there. A friend of his had taken a few of them in so they wouldn’t die of hunger. It was 1980, during the time when Cervantes Corona couldn’t finish his gubernatorial acceptance speech because his voice had broken with emotion at the state of desolation in which his predecessor had left the region. His friend’s wife told him the children needed a family. They were able to provide food and shelter, as if the kids were abandoned kittens, but that wasn’t enough. And so one day, when they were already well into their forties, he said to Onia: “If you can’t imagine a child of our own, then you no longer need to. She already exists.” He told her about the children of Zacatecas, the mining orphans: “Any one of them, or more than one.” Each time he came back from one of his trips to Mexico he told her about the starving children. She had a hard time getting her head around the idea, but since she had no real imagination, she couldn’t find a pretext to oppose it. So she acquiesced. Living with her was easy, everything was so overwhelmingly logical.

They lived in L’Eixample and so they thought they should look for a quieter neighborhood for a child — or even better, a house in the country near Lleida, where Onia was born. But the task of finding the house of their dreams fell to her husband, as she didn’t do such a thing as have dreams. In Sitges: “It has an enormous rooftop terrace with views of both the sea and a pine forest.” When they went to see it together, the art nouveau details weren’t much to her liking. But the views were very nice and it was basically fine with her. They put their apartment in L’Eixample up for sale.

The week they were supposed to sign the mortgage contract, she found a job that allowed her to put her accounting studies to good use. It was a well-paid job near their home, for a pest control company. It put a stop to their plans: they couldn’t go live in Sitges if her job was in Barcelona. At that time it was still a long commute. So they put off their plans to move indefinitely. As time went by, they also dropped the subject of adopting. So they stayed in L’Eixample and didn’t act on the one and only big decision that could have changed the course of their lives.

It took him a long time to give up the dreams he had built around the house and child. For the first time, he was seriously bothered by the fact that she didn’t have any dreams of her own, that her feet were so firmly planted on the ground. But when he would reflect on the horrible life he had shared with his ex-wife, he would go back to admiring Onia. What incredible common sense she has, he often thought. One time he asked her: “I already know that you never daydream, but what about when you sleep?” She told him that she rarely remembered a dream. And when she remembered anything, it was entirely uninteresting; fumigating fleas, adding up invoices, retying her scarf. To her, not dreaming at all and dreaming such things were one and the same.

Thirty years went by after the decision that was never made. This year Onia would turn seventy-nine. She had no regrets and thought very little about the past. She had just remodeled her dining room, which opened out on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Passatge de la Concepció. It had previously remained closed. Now she spent her days there, as she could no longer walk around without help and so tended to go out very little. Despite the fact that she’d just bought herself a brand-new wheelchair. “The Ferrari of wheelchairs!” the salesman exclaimed. “Just imagine all the things you can do now!” She shot him a stern look and replied, “Why, imagine it yourself, young man.”

One afternoon, and quite unexpectedly, Onia felt as though there was something missing inside of her, like there was a great big hole in her life. She had never really noticed this empty space before, and if she hadn’t lived for so many years, she would have died without ever feeling it. But that afternoon, all of a sudden, perhaps because she now had unlimited free time (she couldn’t imagine that she’d actually die one day), she decided for the first time ever to follow her teacher’s advice, the one who had made her write about trees with secret doorways and daisies that zoomed away from their flowerpots on rollerskates. She was never able to just come up with these sorts of things, and so the teacher used to tell her: “Start with reality and then go beyond it. Change it, distort it, don’t write things as they are, but as they could be, or as they could have been.”

So she started that very afternoon. She sat down in front of the window that looked out over Passatge de la Concepció, not over Passeig de Gràcia, which she loathed because it was so lit up and conspicuous. Luxury stores, tourists, colors, everything en masse and uncontrolled. In the Passatge, however, things were less hectic. There were only a few stores. From her window she saw the corner façade of Santa Eulalia; customers went in through the doors that open onto Passeig de Gràcia, so there wasn’t much of interest to observe there. She could also see the restaurant Tragaluz, where celebrities often showed up with their court of paparazzi. But Onia didn’t think this would do much to stimulate her thoughts and set them wandering. In any case, the restaurant was closed in the afternoon, which was when Onia spent time looking out her window. There was a small store between Tragaluz and Santa Eulalia which sold sweaters. It had belonged to her husband until he passed away six years earlier and she had decided to sell it. Shortly afterward they opened Tot Cashmere, which is still there today.

She sat down at three o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t move from her spot. The method consisted in watching any person who entered the Passatge and trying to imagine their name, their job, their family, their origin, and their future. She tried with more than twenty people but nothing occurred to her. It’s supposed to be quite easy, something a five-year-old can do. But no, not for her. She just couldn’t see herself doing these asinine things. At five-thirty she decided to give herself one last shot. A tall woman with a long black braid and sunglasses turned the corner from Passeig de Gràcia and entered the Passatge. Onia tried to imagine which one of the stores the braided woman would enter. She had stopped in front of the show window of Santa Eulalia: Onia had a few extra moments to call up her fantasy, but the woman walked into the sweater shop. Onia didn’t give up hope. Since the woman would be in the shop for a bit, she had some time to make up her story: Who is she? Where does she live? When will she come out? What will she buy? Why? Where will she go when she comes out?

Twenty minutes went by and Onia still couldn’t find any answers to these questions... She searched for a way to open her mind with visions of this unknown woman’s immediate future, but she couldn’t do it... When over an hour had passed, the woman with the braid had still not come back out. This fact alone would have given anyone else plenty to imagine. But Onia simply felt surprised. She had stopped trying to stimulate her imagination twenty minutes earlier. She didn’t feel like fantasizing: now all she wanted was for the woman to come out.

Cristina’s voice called from the kitchen: “It’s eight-thirty, do you want me to make supper now or wait until later?” Onia didn’t answer her, she was suddenly feeling extremely curious. She knew the shop space very well — it was tiny and there was no other exit. The sales clerk had turned out the lights and was preparing to leave, alone, peering at herself in the window. Cristina walked into the dining room to ask the question again. “I’ll have supper later,” Onia said distractedly. But then she turned to the girl and asked, “Could you do me a small favor, dear? Would you go down to Tot Cashmere and see if there is a woman with a black braid inside? Go quickly because the sales clerk is closing up.” Cristina, who immediately imagined a dozen motives for such a strange request, hurried down the stairs two-by-two, crossed the Passatge as fast as she could, and reached the store just as the sales clerk began lowering the metal security grille. Onia saw the two women talking, and the clerk immediately raised the grille again, opened the door, and they both went into the store. Ten minutes later, the two of them came back out and closed up the shop.

“There was nobody inside,” Cristina said.

“Then how did you convince her to open the door again after she had already closed it?” Onia asked.

“We used to greet each other when I was working in the café next to the store... so I told her that I needed a green sweater to match a purple skirt with green trim to wear to a party tonight where I’ll see some old school friends—”

Onia interrupted her: “You could simply have told her that I asked you to check something for me, you didn’t have to go into so much detail.”

“But it isn’t true, I don’t have a purple skirt with green trim or anything like it, I just thought it would be more believable than if I told her that you had asked me to go running down and stick my nose into her business.”

Onia grew impatient: “Did you check to see if there was another door? Maybe they remodeled the interior...”

“I checked everything,” Cristina said. “I didn’t see a single door. Why?”

Onia took a deep breath and told her the truth: “A woman went in two hours ago and never came out.”

Cristina’s face went blank. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think your imagination is playing tricks on you,” she said. Onia didn’t take it the wrong way. But neither did she take it well. She’d clearly never had an imagination. Her sight or her memory could trick her, yes... she was seventy-eight years old. But no doctor had ever mentioned any such problem, and since nobody had ever mentioned one, she couldn’t imagine there being one. The next day she continued watching the store and she saw two more disappearances. After a few more days, she was absolutely sure there were some people who had walked into the store and never walked out.

“What do you know about the sales clerk in Tot Cashmere?” she asked Cristina.

“Not very much. I know she works during the day, and then in the evening she takes care of her son who is in a wheelchair and who doesn’t like to leave the house. She came from Mexico years ago and began working in the store when she finally got her papers. The son is seventeen, I think. He didn’t come around very often when I worked in the café. She complained often about having problems paying her bills.”

Onia didn’t know what to think. She didn’t have the resources to judge the story: she never went to see thrillers or read mystery novels. She never read science fiction, didn’t believe in ghosts, and had never been interested in people who disappeared, except for the real cases she heard on the news. It was still very hard for her to believe what she had seen. So one afternoon she grabbed a paper and pencil: she counted the people going in, and when they came out she crossed them off the list. By evening she realized that there was something still stranger yet: not only did some of the people who went in never come back out, but some of the people who came out had never entered in the first place. Contrary to what she had suspected, more shoppers had come out than had gone in.

Since she had no fictional references to help her unravel the strings of the story, the next day she decided to go see the sales clerk herself and ask questions point-blank. She went straight into the store and without beating around the bush declared: “I am an old woman who is overwhelmed with curiosity.”

The store attendant said: “What do you need?”

Onia explained everything she had seen through the window, and for reasons she couldn’t quite understand, the clerk was effusively kind and attentive in a way that seemed entirely out of place.

Finally, she responded: “I know you will keep my secret.”

And Onia answered: “You can be sure of it. I am as silent as a grave.” The young woman pushed the wheelchair to a spot behind a stack of pashminas. Onia could see into the dressing room through a tear in the curtain. Not even a minute later, she heard the happy sound of a door opening and her heart began to beat quickly.

A middle-aged woman with red hair asked for a cobaltblue cashmere sweater. The clerk went straight to the shelf and took down a very large green garment.

The customer said: “I think it’s too small.” The clerk looked her straight in the eyes and said: “No.”

But the woman responded: “Don’t you know that the customer is always right?”

Then the clerk grabbed a cobalt-blue sweater from another shelf. It was very silky, with a high neck, and was as ample as the first one. The woman brought it to the dressing room while the clerk locked the front door. Through the tear, Onia saw her arms search out the sleeves with a little difficulty, and for a minute that felt like an eternity, she watched as the woman appeared to be choking inside the sweater. From behind the pashminas, Onia could hear her breathing hard and saw that her head still hadn’t appeared through the collar. So that’s it. They suffocate to death inside the clothing. But then what happens? she thought.

Finally, a shock of red hair shot through the wool neck. The hair was dry and discolored. Then a piece of yellowed parchment emerged, which turned out to be an ear. Suddenly the whole head emerged, an aged head, followed by a second one. Two heads. And two bodies. Twins. Old twins.

The two women finished removing the sweater and smiled at the clerk. One of them approached the cash register and signed a check. The clerk put the check in the register but kept the sweater. Onia watched as one old woman put her checkbook away, while her twin left the store, moving aside for a young man coming in to buy a scarf. When the young man exited the store, Onia came out of her hiding place.

The clerk took her time explaining to Onia that she had a son who never left their house. “His whole life revolves around looking out at the sea and the pine trees from the rooftop terrace... But a year ago, they put the land in front of the house up for sale to build an apartment building. I’ve been afraid of this happening for years. Moving to another house would be his death. I felt helpless, desperate... Then one Christmas an angel visited me. A stranger came into the store and asked me for a blue sweater. I had a cobalt-blue cashmere sweater that was two sizes too big, but she took it anyway. She came back the next day. ‘It’s not my size.’ ‘I told you it was too big for you.’ ‘You’re wrong. It’s too small. Lately, everything is too small for me,’ she said. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, because she followed with, ‘Yes, it’s true, don’t look at me with that expression on your face: the customer is always right.’ I processed her return and she left. That very afternoon, another woman came in and asked for a cobaltblue sweater. When I showed it to her, she said: ‘It’s too small for me.’ I argued with her until she finally said: ‘Don’t insist: the customer is always right.’ I thought it was so strange, but what came next was far stranger. I saw three heads coming out through the neck of the sweater, each one about twenty years older than the girl who had pulled it over her head... While signing a check, one of the triplets said: ‘Am I the first customer who is always right?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The first person to come here to split?’ I nodded my head yes, then I asked: ‘What... what does that mean?’ ‘It’s something they offer on board,’ she said, as the other customer put the sweater back on the shelf. And that’s all. I think nearly all the customers come from luxury cruises. They offer to exchange the average number of years that one has left to live in a linear life into multiple lives, two or three or whatever. Like a road that forks... all you have to do is pass through the sweater.”

Impressed, Onia asked: “And... have you ever felt curious to try it yourself?”

“No! If you value yourself in a certain way, it’s impossible to want to change your life for another, no matter how horrible it might be,” the clerk said sternly.

“How peculiar. I’ve never valued anything in that way... Of course, I can’t imagine what it must be like, so I guess I don’t really care one way or the other,” Onia said.

The clerk folded the sweater, sighed, and said: “I can’t sleep at night. What if someone tries the sweater on by mistake? What if the store owner finds out what I’m doing? That’s why as soon as I finish paying for the piece of land, I won’t let anyone else try it on anymore.”

“Don’t you have a telephone number or some other way to contact the woman who gave the sweater these strange properties?”

“Angels don’t have telephone numbers. Have you never seen one of those movies with angels in them that air at Christmastime? Like the one where James Stewart is going to commit suicide...?”

“I don’t like fiction stories. Anyway, I think what your customers do is closer to the devil than the angels.”

“You think these millionaires have sold their souls to the devil? I don’t see it that way... they only change the way they live: less time but in a variety of lives. Choice is no longer a problem for them. Haven’t you ever thought: I have to decide whether to do this or that, but if I had more than one life I could do both and I would never have to regret anything? Haven’t you ever regretted anything?”

Although she’d never felt anything like regret, Onia remembered that she had once prepared to embark on another life. She could have easily figured out that the clerk had a similar background and age as the children her husband had wanted to adopt. For however small an imagination, it was clear that the boy’s terrace could have been the one they never bought. But Onia didn’t speculate about any of this, and she didn’t ask if the house was in Sitges or if the terrace had art nouveau details. It didn’t even occur to her.

So she asked: “And... your son... you don’t think he would be interested in putting his head into the sweater?”

“He doesn’t know anything about it,” the woman said defensively. She lit a cigarette and shrunk into herself. “Of course he would like to... He’s like you. And like all the customers who are always right: incapable of glimpsing things his eyes don’t see. That’s precisely why it’s so important to save the view of the sea and the pine forest. Having a building blocking the views wouldn’t be such a bad thing for me... I can imagine marvelous things from nothing more than a slice of wall. From a crack in the ceiling or a spot of humidity I can imagine roads, caves, and lakes... But not him, no. For him, a wall is a wall. Nothing else can be borne from his walls. That’s why he can’t live walled in, do you understand?”

Onia listened in silence. She wasn’t disturbed by not seeing flowers where there weren’t any, she didn’t consider this tragic.

As she pressed the doorbell for Cristina to let her in, she suddenly thought: Black market money! How is she going to be able to buy the land with all that black market money? But then she realized that the girl was very clever and would find a solution. Onia could now forget about this bizarre episode.

The clerk saw her enter her house. She regretted having explained everything. Even though she was convinced the old woman wouldn’t say a word. She herself confessed that she was as silent as a grave.