Barcelona Noir

Epiphany by Eric Taylor-Aragón

Barceloneta

There’s something that’s been troubling me, a gaze that won’t go away, and when I close my eyes I see this gaze, and sometimes I think I’ll only be able to escape it by moving to a different country or continent or solar system, to some parallel universe where what happened didn’t happen. I’m still not sure what I should have done or whether I did the right thing — but I did it and now it’s done. And now that it’s done, I’m actually glad it’s done. Am I making sense?

I’ll make this quick. It was right after I broke up with La Princesa, a crazy Spanish girl. I was busted up, in a bad way, moping about, drinking and feeling like life was worthless.

We all know that the end of love is like wartime. It’s like being bombarded. People who can’t take it throw themselves off bridges, shoot themselves in the mouth. You look for a bunker, you look for shelter, refuge, solace, distraction. And then, just when you think it’s safe to come out, you see or hear something — it might be something as innocuous as a bird — or a cell phone ringtone, or a TV show, or a piece of music, and the memories come flooding back and suddenly you hear the whistle blast of bombs, the crack of sniper rifles, the drone of drones. Anyway, there was a TV in the corner of this bar, and when I glanced up at it I saw an ad for dish soap. Our dish soap. The dish soap we used to use when we lived together. Nina, mi Princesa, I thought... My breath got jagged, I felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. I held onto the bar to keep from falling down.

I was sitting on an old rickety stool in l’Electricitat, an old-school bodega in Barceloneta, drinking vermouth after vermouth, spending the last of my meager savings. This is a fisherman’s bar, mostly locals. The people leave you alone. That’s why I like it. Every now and then I looked in the hazy mirror behind the bar. I looked bad. Dark circles under the eyes. Stubble. Disheveled hair. A wild, hunted look. I think I had my little notebook out and maybe every now and then I’d scribble something down, something foolish, something I’d come across in a couple of years and be terribly embarrassed by... I was probably writing to La Princesa about how much I loved her and how I’d change if she took me back. I was probably writing to myself, telling myself to get a grip, to ride it out, to try and be normal and content and full of loving kindness (which is the hardest thing of all).

Looking back, I think the final straw was when I threw a typewriter through the café window in Borne. I mean, who the hell walks around with a typewriter these days? So then I spent the night in jail and I called her afterward and she said, “You did what with the typewriter?” and I told her again, “I threw it out the window,” and then she started to laugh and replied in English, “You’re joking!” and I said, “Who’s Joe King?” This is one of our little jokes, but suddenly she wasn’t laughing anymore. She said, “I think we need to take a little break...” Her name was Nina and I loved her and she’d put up with a lot, even supported me financially for a time, and now she wasn’t up for it anymore. I apologized, I groveled and told her I would reform and be a better human being, and she said, “That’s what you said last time, and the time before that.” Nina is beautiful, with a remarkable bosom and a little birthmark in the shape of an upside-down teardrop just below her right eye, as if she’s crying in reverse. Anyway, that night I was thinking about all this and was feeling depressed in l’Electricitat and being devastated by dish soap ads. That was when I met Luca.

He was slight of build, with thick eyebrows perched over big, sensitive eyes, the kind of eyes that a dog flashes at you just after you’ve kicked it. There was a soccer match on, and a few other people in the bar, but we were the only non-Catalans. He asked me for a cigarette and I told him I didn’t smoke and he asked me where I was from and I said, “Peru,” and he said, “Ah, Peru,” and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve always felt a deep connection with the Incas,” he declared then, looking at me keenly.

The things you have to put up with from Europeans. He told me he was Italian, from Rome, and then later, out of nowhere, he said, “You must like perica,” and truth be told, I haven’t done much cocaine in my life, just enough to know it would be dangerous for someone of my personality type — and given that I’m having enough problems with this existence thing, I generally stay away. I shrugged and he told me, “Tonight we will do perica together,” as if this were a major step forward, as if he were proposing some sort of vision quest.

And then Luca told me that I seemed sad.

“A broken heart?”

I nodded.

“I thought so,” he said. “So maybe you can understand my problem.”

And then he told me he was in love too, and that it had all exploded in his face. That it was all ruined, a mess. I was a bit surprised to have someone open up to me like this. In fact, I almost felt as if I’d met my analogue, my doppelgänger, my mirror image. I listened attentively, hoping for clues that could help me out of my abyss.

But before I go on, I’d like to describe him a bit more. His laugh was sharp, almost a bark, and his face was intelligent and he had bright white teeth with, if I remember correctly, rather pronounced canines. His eyes were hazel-colored, and this I’m sure of, because when he died, I tried to close them, you know, like in the movies, but they just wouldn’t close, they kept popping open. This much I remember, in fact I can’t forget it.

He wore a wrinkled dark blue linen jacket (what they call an “Americana” around here) and blue jeans, and while we were drinking, I knocked over his beer by mistake and he caught the bottle in midair, just before it hit the floor, and then he went on talking like nothing had happened. He was the sort of person who didn’t move across the street, he darted; he didn’t look over at someone, he shot them a glance; he didn’t get up from a chair, he sprang to his feet. That was his energy, which I felt immediately — and this is what made what happened later so shocking.

After a while he told me he wasn’t from Rome but from Naples. He talked about Naples and his family and he called himself an exile, saying, “I can’t go back,” with a tone of finality. And when I asked him why, he ordered another round and told me it was a “problema d’ amore,” very, very complicated, and then he looked down at the bar and seemed to sink a little and then he held his head in his hands like a watermelon and then set his head on the bar and said, “CamillaCamillaCamilla.” And then he looked up and laughed. “You see, I fell in love with the wrong woman, like a stronzo, like an idiota. The daughter of a capo, my boss — and what’s even worse is that she fell in love with me too.”

He’d been a low-level front man for the Camorra’s real estate business in Naples. A crooked nobody. A white-collar foot soldier in the di Lauro clan. One day he’d received a call to show a flat to one of the capo’s lieutenants. The man showed up with a beautiful young woman. It was Camilla. She was small-boned and had short, curly hair and eyes that were shy and curious at the same time. The man was her bodyguard. In the middle of the tour, the man received a call on his cell phone and rushed away, telling Luca not to let her out of his sight, and to stay in the apartment. The Neapolitan mafia had been in a civil war for the last year and things were tense.

“The bodyguard was only gone for about an hour and a half,” he said, “but it was enough for me and Camilla to fall in love. We talked as if we’d known each other our entire lives. I know it sounds like a cliché, but what can I do? It’s there. I lived it. She was sublime. Perfect. We arranged to meet a few days later. And then, over the next couple of weeks, we made all sorts of crazy romantic promises, exchanged e-mails and text messages, met quickly and in secret. We said we’d die for each other, that nothing would stop us, that we would find a way, even if we had to leave Naples. It really seemed real. We convinced ourselves that it was going to happen. That it would all turn out alright. We’d have children, make a family, grow old — all the stupid things you promise when you’re young and in love and from the south of Italy. And we kissed only once, in a little bar by the port. But someone saw us.”

He banged the bar with his fist. My empty vermouth glass gave a little hop. He had big hands, long pianist fingers, and flat broad nails, bitten to the quick.

“What it comes down to is that I’m a coward. When I had my chance I failed. Or maybe it was doomed from the start. A month after we met, I was leaving the office when I was grabbed by three men and thrown in the back of a car. They took me to an abandoned building, and beat and kicked me until I just lay there bleeding and broken, half dead. And then they said, ‘You had better leave Naples, the boss doesn’t like you seeing his daughter.’ I had over thirty stitches” — here he pointed to some scars on the back of his head, his brow — “and two broken ribs, two black eyes, and a broken jaw. They told me the only reason they didn’t kill me was because Camilla had threatened to kill herself if anything happened to me. She told me this later, that she’d threatened her father with suicide, slashed at her wrists. After my beating I stayed in the house of a cousin in the country and then my family bought me a ticket here. Here, I’m like a ghost. I have no friends, no family. We managed to communicate by e-mail for a while, but not anymore. And today I found out why. She’s getting married to Giovanni Malatesta, another mafiosi. I am now officially nothing. It’s over. And I’m too much of a coward to do anything about it. I’m not a ninja, I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger — I’m not even Woody Allen. This is not a movie. They would kill me. And I’m a coward and don’t want to die.”

Suddenly he let loose his barking laugh, “Ha ha ha!” He laughed for a long time, as if he’d just come to a realization, as if something had finally become clear to him, and then he stood up and said, “I must make a phone call.” He went outside, teetering a bit. There were a few old grizzled men standing at the bar, one was leaning against a slot machine. He was stout with large forearms and was smoking a stub of a cigar, while his potbelly pressed against the formidable stomach of another man and their heads were at least a meter apart. They were arguing about soccer and spoke in grunts and deep, aquatic bellows, like foghorns or something. It was as if these hard-living ex-fishermen had sprung from the floor of the bar itself, as if they were intrinsic to the place, like barnacles on a whale. A man came in with an empty plastic Coke bottle, handed it without a word to the barman who then went to a huge wood barrel on the left side of the bar, near the back, turned the spigot, and filled it up with a deep red wine. The man dug around in his pocket, stuck two coins on the table with a loud ringing sound, and then he took his Coke bottle and walked away. There was an ad on TV for Burger King. Luca came back in, he smiled. He sat. We continued hanging out. Luca was no longer talking about his girlfriend and I no longer talked about mine. The mood had changed. In fact, he seemed quite cheerful all of a sudden. We got the bartender to fill us up a bottle of wine, paid the bill, and strolled toward his house.

A breeze had picked up and all the clothes hanging in the balconies fluttered and danced in the wind and a dog ran by, almost got hit by a little red Renault which swerved and honked and did not slow.

“Damn,” Luca said, “that’s one lucky dog,” and we continued walking — quickly, with purpose. The façade of his building was covered in old blue tiles and some had fallen off and showed the crumbling tan stucco underneath. We walked up the five flights of stairs. He opened the door and waved his hand toward the tumbledown couch in the living room and then went into the kitchen and started looking for something. I sat down and glanced around. The white paint was peeling off in places and there was a large ocher stain on the ceiling near the window. A single lightbulb hung from the middle of the ceiling, a fading light washed the left side of the room. A clay pot on the windowsill held yellow daffodils, insolent in their brightness. I could hear voices coming off the street, distant cries of children playing on the beach, so faint as to almost be imperceptible.

His phone rang. Two rings before going silent. He walked over to the coffee table, looked at the number, and picked it up.

“He’s here,” he said, and he stood, went to the bookshelf, took out a book, and opened it. There was a thick sheaf of bills inside. He took out a fifty, put the book back on the shelf, and said, “Give me twenty euros, the cocaine is here.”

I gave him my last twenty euros, and I’m not sure why I trusted him and often wish I hadn’t because of what happened later, but I gave it to him. The worst-spent twenty euros of my life. And I’m sure that if I hadn’t been so busted up I wouldn’t have given it to him, I wouldn’t have been in that rathole of a flat, but we were brothers, both of us with broken hearts. His story, it’s true, was a bit more romantic, but a broken heart is a broken heart, right?

He left the apartment. I walked out onto the balcony, looked down. I could see someone on a moped parked in front. His dark helmet like the head of an ant. Luca exited the building, approached him. A quick transaction ensued. The ant started up the moped and putt-putted away. Luca wheeled around and reentered the building.

I turned around, sat back on the couch. I closed my eyes briefly and felt the moist breeze wending its way, swirling around the room, licking at the cheap dingy white polyester curtains on either side of the window. I looked around the room at the empty cigarette packs, the little inlaid wood box on the table, and the books, lots of books — many books on love, I noticed, many love stories, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabo, On Love by Stendhal, even this American book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and there, splayed in the corner, César Vallejo, my favorite Peruvian poet, who foretold his own death in a poem and died “of exhaustion” in Paris.

I couldn’t help but feel that there was something almost quaint about being so heartbroken and reading love stories and discourses on love and mooning over a capo’s daughter named Camilla who you kissed once. As if there was a solution to any of this. As if closure existed. I mean, we all know that the only cure for a broken heart is time, another lover, or death.

I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs two at a time. The balcony door slammed shut, bang, and Luca came back in with a rattle, windblown and wild-haired. He brought with him a hard-edged street scent with traces of the damp, almost churchlike smell of the stairwell — but most of all, that languorous funky Mediterranean sea air. A warm breeze was blowing in bursts, capricious little European zephyrs; refined, old world. My new friend spun around the room, quite happy to have scored. But there was something else he brought in with him, though I didn’t understand what it was until it was all over.

He sat down, set a little folded piece of tinfoil on the table.

“So did you learn anything?” I asked.

“About what?”

“Did all these books about love teach you anything?”

“Yes, I did, in fact, I did learn something.” He was concentrated, bending over the table, carefully unfolding the foil.

“What did you learn?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s have some cocaine.”

He opened the tinfoil, revealing a little pile of tan powder. It did not glisten. He shot me a glance.

“That doesn’t look like cocaine,” I said, and he looked up at me and smiled.

“You don’t think?”

“No, I don’t. It’s brown.” I dipped the tip of my pinkie in the powder and tasted it and it tasted strange. “I’m not taking that. You bought heroin, compadre.”

“You think?”

He went to the fridge and came back with a lemon. He set it on the table. He carefully poured a bit of powder on the spoon, then a little more, and he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“Yes.” I was a bit put off by the whole thing. I looked around the room, at the pile of books, at the picture taped to the bookshelf of Luca and his girlfriend (I assumed). She was not how I imagined, she had short hair, little rectangular glasses, a dimple in her chin, mischievous, intellectual... She looked like what I imagined Marcello Mastroianni’s longsuffering wife in 8½ must have looked like when she was younger... beautiful but not bodacious.

I suddenly wanted to get out of there, to go mingle with the tourists and stroll down Las Ramblas and watch the street performers, the mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and pickpockets do their silly tricks, to lose myself in the generalized idiocy, to go down to the beach and watch the Nordic women baring their pale, impeccable breasts slowly get sunburned. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to call Nina and beg forgiveness again, just hear her voice...

He poured the rest of the powder in the spoon, set it back on the coffee table, picked up a knife, cut the lemon in half, then squeezed juice into the spoon. It flowed down the sides of the little pile of powder, then he started to heat it up with a lighter, and I could see the attraction of it, the ritual of it, the grand tradition, but wanted no part of it, so I just watched him. When the solution started to bubble, he took out a needle from a carved wooden box and set it gently on the coffee table.

“We must let it cool,” he said. “I need your help.”

“Yeah? What do you need?”

“I need you to hold the mirror.” He went to the bathroom and came back with a small round mirror, about as big as my hand, and said, “I’ll tell you where to hold it,” and then he put a little piece of cotton in the spoon and it quickly turned brown, absorbing all the heroin, and then he stuck his needle in the cotton and put it in the spoon and sucked up all the fluid and gave it a couple of flicks with his middle finger and turned to me and said, “Hold up the mirror.”

I did. It was at face level.

“Angle it down a little. There. To the right. No, the right edge toward me. Yes, that’s it.”

With total concentration, he turned his head and looked upward and left, his eyes trained on the mirror. He brought the syringe to his throat, to his jugular. Carefully, slowly brought the tip to his neck, traced it down, paused, his neck muscles tense, and then sank it in. I winced. And he said, “Hold still!” And I did. Then he pulled back on the plunger of the syringe and said, “Shit. Missed it.” He withdrew the needle, grabbed a T-shirt off the couch, dabbed at the blood on his neck.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Help me out,” he repeated, “I need you to help me out.”

I stayed put. He looked up again, held his breath to try and make the vein stick out more, exhaled, said “Higher,” and I moved the mirror, tilted it up slightly, and then he sank the needle in and pulled back the plunger and the needle filled with a rich, slow-moving scarlet that swirled around and was beautiful in its way, and then he said, “Ahhhh,” and pushed down the plunger and moaned. I set down the mirror and he sat back on the couch and his eyes rolled around in his head, and then he blinked, and opened his eyes, an expression of sweet shock on his face. And then he fell off the couch, the needle still in his neck, and I said, “Luca? Luca?”

Let me be honest here. I let him lay there for a bit.

“Luca?”

Everything started moving in slow-motion. I stood over him and bent down. I put three fingers just beneath the needle. I was afraid to take it out for fear that blood would spurt everywhere. His eyes stared up, far away as if at wheeling falcons, as if he saw a blue Neapolitan sky, a single cloud, a sparkling world, a sea breeze, a woman standing over him saying, What? What’s wrong, Luca? Are you okay?

It was too much, those hazel eyes. I peered at them closer and saw the curved reflection of the fan’s lazy orbit, the curtains twisting gently against the wall, blowing out onto the balcony, the silhouettes of buildings against the dark blue sky. I heard the tinfoil skitter across the table, drop to the floor. I touched the top of his head. I felt beneath his ear, traced down his jaw, and found his vein. I did not feel a pulse. I put my ear next to his mouth. Nothing. Not even a wisp of breath. I placed my ear on his chest. Not even the faintest of heartbeats. I pulled him away from the couch; lay him flat on his back. I went to the bedroom, took the dirty orange sheet off the bed. Standing over his body, a sheet corner in each hand, I raised my arms, flicked my wrists, and the sheet ballooned up, suspended for a second, then billowed a last time, rippling, settling over his body. He was covered now.

“Luca?” I said. “You there?”

I knelt beside him again. I didn’t want to see his face, those eyes. I set my ear to his chest. I listened in vain for his heartbeat. I pulled the sheet away from his face, put my ear to his mouth, listened for breathing. Heard nothing. A beatific look on his face, a happy look.

Five minutes. Five minutes had passed. I took the mirror and wiped down the edges with the hem of my T-shirt (I don’t know why). I put the César Vallejo book on the shelf. I went to the kitchen, washed my wine glass. Then I went back to the bookshelf, got the Stendhal book (On Love), took out the wad of euros, stuck it in my pocket, put the book back on the shelf, walked out the front door, closed it softly, made sure it was locked. My heart was pounding and there was a tingling feeling that went from my chest to my balls. I wound around the spiral staircase, passed through the narrow foyer, and ended up on the street. I started to walk. Children played soccer, shouted, but I heard nothing. A ball rolled by, rolled under a beat-up Citroen. A slender curly haired boy darted in front of me, crouched next to the car, looking beneath it. Then he got on his belly and wriggled under the chassis until all that could be seen were his skinny, kicking brown legs. I paused, turned around, and stared up at Luca’s balcony, saw a smear of yellow flowers in the window, the curtains trembling in the wind.

That night I put Luca’s money to good use and went to a very high-end restaurant and ate a most excellent dinner. And as the waiter uncorked my second bottle of wine, I had a realization. Nothing, I thought, matters so much to me as love, and yet, right now, as I enjoy this tremendous meal, love suddenly seems almost insignificant. How can this be? Am I that superficial? I felt euphoric for some reason, but couldn’t understand why. I felt filled with life. Overflowing. There was no doubt about it. So without further ado, I opened my legs, reached down, took out my penis, and pinned my scrotum to the chair with a steak knife. An ecstatic, almost sensual feeling washed over me. That, I thought triumphantly, is love. After all these years of heartbreak, I have finally figured it out.

The Story of a Scar by Cristina Fallarás

Nou Barris

This isn’t something she’ll like, you figure. She’s never been too motherly, and she gets anxious when work gets tangled up with the other thing. I love this story; but it was a waste of time. And you’re right: the scar’s absolutely beautiful; she’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t she? But I’d better tell you the story of the scar and then you can forget it, okay? She doesn’t like it.

It all began on a sultry August morning filled with portent. Why not? It was impossible to sleep, one of those nights when you dream you’re a goat on a spit and you turn, turn, turn, until your soul is dripping — and then she showed up with rings under her eyes that reached her knees, already swaying slightly in a way typical of her state. She was cute, sour-faced, dressed all in black, decked out with glass beads, and that belly and the same motherfucking moves as always. Damn, one stormy beauty.

“Nothing, right?”

This had been her greeting for more than a month. And my answer, a shrug, my eyes nailed on the damned fan. Yes indeed, nothing was going on in Barcelona, no one came by the office, and recently she’d developed a resistance to air-conditioning; she was totally against air-conditioning. She was slacking and this upset her more than what the lack of clients was doing to her bank account, something that had me worried too. You know, if she doesn’t eat, I don’t eat either. Well, someone would eventually step up, Victoria already had an established name, and there aren’t that many women detectives; hard to deny there’s some morbid fascination in that, right? An established name, but some folks step back when they see her belly, of course. And besides, August has never been a good month, it’s a shitty month. Oh, but we’re also against normal vacations, you know, and air-conditioning, credit cards, checks, and investigating women’s infidelities. Add to this gloom a six-month pregnancy, thirty-eight degrees Celsius at dawn, and a humidity that liquefies the air... Get the idea? Okay, now add the severed hand of an aging rocker to the mix. Beautiful! Isn’t it?

“Look at the paper. At the concert at the Forum the day before yesterday, someone sliced off that old American’s hand, the one who used to play with those other two, the hippy and the doped-up guy; now he only plays with his band when he’s not too boozed up.”

I told her that to entertain her, because the news was rather amusing, and, I don’t know, maybe her expression would change a little and her kid wouldn’t be born already sour. Who would pay for that, huh? Yours truly. Who else was going to put up with the kid? I had no doubt at all about that. Me. Well, the old gringo was blinder than the black guy who moved his head to get the mic right, and when he saw himself surrounded by a crowd the size of which he couldn’t remember seeing in years, the dumbass threw himself into the audience, just like he used to do, to be received by a sea of arms, he would say, that returned him to the stage, as if gliding on air. He could have cracked his head open; I’m not saying that wouldn’t have been a good ending, to be squashed like a ripe fig against the floor of the Forum. But no, his audience — and who knows where they had come from, a bunch of haggard dudes of every color like we only see during summer in this city — held him up in the air for a few minutes and then put him back on the stage... Up to that point, everything was going just fine, except for a small detail, a gruesome detail, my friend. When the old man stepped on the dais, he noticed that... whoa!... his right hand was missing, the one of the mythic guitar solos that had earned him the name Magic Hand in the ’70s. The motherfucker didn’t notice immediately, the paper said, the big motherfucker had to hear the screaming from the first rows, see how they pointed at the bloody disaster, all of them spattered too, and then follow the direction their fingers were pointing to see that, beyond his wrist, there was nothing. Tourniquet, screams, someone fainting, and then off to Bellvitge Hospital.

The story left her silent for quite a while and me up in the air, because when Vicky isn’t swearing, she’s plotting something or is about to break your heart. They have to go for the kill because of their anger, I say, and who’s always there? That’s right. She grabbed the newspaper, read it, left it on the table, speechless and self-absorbed for about half an hour, then read it once more and threw it on the floor, as usual. By now you’ll have noticed my ability to remain forever in dreamland, not bothering anyone, right? That’s how I was brought up, it’s from my childhood. This chameleon-like quality saved me from more than fifty spankings. When the storm of insults would erupt, I became a rocking chair, or a living room corner; yeah, I could become a fucking living room corner, limestone, and nobody is stupid enough to smash a wall, right? Well, that’s what I did the better part of that morning while sweat began to create blacker black spots on her T-shirt, her forehead shone, and she boiled in her own foul juices.

“Right now that hand is in formaldehyde. Motherfuckers. That hand... Magic’s divine hand, the hand from my favorite memories; it was mine, ours. We don’t matter one fuck now. Motherfuckers. It’s not enough to destroy everything, to torture us with stupid music, to ban breathing, eating, fucking, living; no, they had to tear it out by the roots. Motherfuckers. They have it in formaldehyde, wanna bet?”

And thus began the story of the precious scar, I tell you, which is a waste of time.

Back then, it was called the Bronx. But the splendorous mall had now turned the area into something else. Into what? Basically, into the Bronx with a splendorous mall. The junkies from those days, most of them anyway, were dead now, and shovels of cocaine, mall-brand cocaine with slummy neon lights, had replaced heroin. I staked out a place between the few remaining gypsies who hadn’t been absorbed by the Cult yet and the large colony of Colombians, Dominicans, Moroccans, and so on.

I was going through a bad time, with no clients, in the red, pregnant, and with good ol’ Jesús waiting for me every morning at the office, right on time, so that I would appear and come up with some solution to his life. To his fucking life as a former deadbeat, former drunk, former pusher. Rootless and dirty — the poor wretch was really dirty.

“Looking for something?”

Junkie, I thought. A junkie with money problems and hunting for saps. I looked at her and touched my belly. The gesture didn’t mean anything. Not in that place, and we both knew it. I looked the woman straight in the eye, pitiless. Thirty, I thought, and not looking good for your age at all, girl, with those gloomy rings under your eyes and two teeth fewer than what’s needed for a smile to smile.

I waited, I knew silence was a language.

“I’ve got coke, hashish, and pastis, what do you want? It’s all very legal, sister, I’m very legal. Everything’s okay, sister, you hear me?”

She still had an Andalusian lilt, probably from her parents, and they got theirs from before, from the grandparents, a lilt that came from hauling bags and long train rides. In her family’s case, of course, exodus had not ended in generational success.

“Coke, one gram,” I answered without thinking, and handed her a fifty-dollar bill while I changed my tourist-in-Apache-territory look for an obvious murderous warning. It’s habit. Your gestures, your habits, they stick to you. I had put one foot in Nou Barris and gone right to the Renfe-Meridiana area, to the junkie blocks from days gone by. Well, to one of the many clusters of dwellings scattered in those neighborhoods, where life went on between sale and consumption, yesterday’s heroin, today’s coke and pastis. Habit, my habit: Nou Barris, dealers, blow. Precisely because of that habit, I followed her and was treated to the dazzling mall that had not changed the feel of those blocks, though there was a certain something missing that had nothing to do with the surrounding innovations. The throbbing bundles I remembered huddled in the corners had been swept away by death. I thought, damnitshit, there’s nothing left. I didn’t feel sorry for them — they were already cadavers back then — what hurt me was the shadow of the shopping mastodon next to this desert of city blocks, albeit with its big public swimming pool. And Magic Hand’s hand was part of my memory, the time gone by, the scooter and the delirium; I had been a stupid and feverish youngster back then, keeping time with that hand that seemed like an essential soundtrack. I felt the silence. I felt old.

Just a second before the woman rang the bell for the eighth floor, I whispered into her neck: “Give me my stuff and take me to the dealer. And shut up!”

That’s how it was. Everything was okay, as it always is. There was something left over from the old times. I figured the junkie would get a good beating, because she was gullible and dumb, and the creep who would beat her would know she had it coming, and I wondered why I’d done that. Nostalgia? Probably. Partly, I had a nauseous feeling and the ephemeral happiness that comes from shady deals sewn in the memories of a risky and delicious youth. That’s what they called it: risky. And I also had anger.

It was obvious that, with my belly, I wasn’t going to put that gram in my body, that poison that was actually less expensive now than twenty years ago, the only consumer item whose price hadn’t gone up in that time. It was cheaper now. But who knows what that white powder I had put in my back pocket was actually made of: paracetamol, laxative, amphetamine, lime from the bathroom wall... I didn’t want poison, I had no real need to meet that fucking dealer, what a face, what pain; I had no intention of getting that poor toothless girl into any more trouble. Let her fuck herself. I only wanted to test the strings, to prove something to myself. There was no soundtrack. Fucking thieves, old-time rats. I’d had a rough time in Nou Barris but I still knew how to get around. It was just that I was checking things out... for nostalgia’s sake.

“I can’t believe it! The queen visiting my humble abode...”

It was Santo, still in his flat. Río de Janeiro Avenue, next to the sign reading Goodbye, Barcelona right on the outskirts, next to Meridiana Avenue, waving goodbye to the city with the stink of an immigrant buried in poverty and oilcloth. Nou Barris was the sad fringe of the city. It had been the workers’ bastion, solidarity with Cuba, oh Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, until victory forever and lunch for the poor, but now nobody remembers any of that. Shovelfuls, millions of bags later, and he was still there, skinny, with his dark hide covered in thick gold chains, stooped like an awning over a passerby, a visitor, the one footing the bill, the solicitor.

“Hi, Go-Getter.”

That was him now, the Go-Getter. I noticed my tone of voice. A bit more seductive than required. A bit nicer. I could admit to being nice, but not seductive, damnit, not with that belly.

“Come on in, my queen. Enter my humble abode. You will find something to your liking... I’m sure.”

But I didn’t go in. It took me a few minutes to recognize the smell, the same smell from those other times, of disinfectant and rancid smoke. The smell of a closed bar seems rather sinister in a house. I remembered the nights, so many visits at such a wrong time, without clocks, Santo’s bed — he was still Santo — and Magic Hand’s solo marking the beat of everything that was going on in that house, with fifty-hour days full of insomnia and crappy poker. He was looking at me from the arch his head formed at the top of the marquise, at the end of his too-long neck; a bird’s neck. He smiled, because he knew, and he looked at my belly. His fingernails were yellowed by cigars. His eyes were yellowed by vice. His brown skin was smooth and brilliant on his bones. Short straight hair, brown, soft, a girl’s hair.

I went in. “I’m not staying long.” I touched my belly: It’s just a moment, little one, a couple of minutes.

“My queen, even the day you show up here legless, dragging yourself, dry like an empty wineskin, I’ll still want you. You know that.”

But the Go-Getter didn’t want anything. He had it. He had started back in the day, in Santo’s day, buying and selling what drugs he could find and even those he couldn’t. He was the only opium dealer in Barcelona. He was flexible, and that worked in his favor. When the girls didn’t have money, he accepted payment in long, complicated fucks. They were anxious. Barely wet, just sex machines. Then he started to make tapes. Later he set up the mirrored room. Only the dirtiest couples and the men knew about that. They could stay behind the glass in the next room and watch feats with hi-tech dildos and latex costumes in which young girls, who were new to the needle, faked contortions while getting fucked, and generally let anything be done to them. He managed to get quite a clientele. The rest came later, and by then he was already the Go-Getter. Everything, everything you couldn’t find through legal channels, everything you could imagine — unmentionable whims were sold in that flat in the slums.

“I want a hand. The hand of an aging rocker who’s dying.”

He laughed. He always knew.

“I don’t have any hands, my queen. I don’t deal in them... I don’t know anything about that business.”

“How can you cut a hand so cleanly, so quickly, in the middle of a crowd?”

“You’ve always been a romantic—”

“How?”

“Look for a reap hook. And above all, a really fucking first-class specialist.”

“Where?”

“At the aviary, the old civic center in the Cañellas area... And come back.”

A reap hook, no less. Do you know what a reap hook is? One of those fucking knives shaped like a sickle, like Arabs have, the blade on the outside, painful just to look at, infallible, zaz! She came into the office out of breath, swinging twenty necklaces over those two juglike tits; yum, I swear, yum, yum! She told me we were going to Cañellas to look for a reap hook. Cañellas, no less. That’s how it is with her. And why? Don’t ask.

Located on the fucking outskirts of town, it’s well known that the only outskirts that are any good are the ones with swimming pools. But people in Cañellas hadn’t seen any pools other than the puddles made by their own piss walking back from dives in the middle of the night. It was next to the woods, close to the foot of the Collserola range, where Barcelona ends, but on top, on the upper part. Cañellas was so far out on the fringe that they hadn’t even been able to put up a shitty mall, if that gives you an idea. And the worst of the worst were the small barracks — that’s what they called them, barracks — that the socialist city council had set up when there were still placard-carrying neighbors around. She loved that, the placard-carrying neighbors, but now there were no more neighbors and no more placards, there were only unemployed fuckers, and the children of the bitterly unemployed with their stupid graffiti.

We went to what had been a youth center and was now... how can I explain it to you? It was at the foot of a hill that, if I took a picture and showed it to you, telling you it was Barcelona, you’d burst out laughing. There appeared to be a hen coming out of it... it was full of bums. Shit, Moorish bums, you know, in case you wanted a rug or some couscous.

They were waiting for us.

“Everything’s fine here. You don’t want anything here.”

They were talking to me, of course, because you can imagine that a woman like Vicky, and with that belly to top it off, would surely make the hair on their asses stand on end. She wouldn’t say a word to them. And so, well, I had to talk.

“Go-Getter sent us. He says perhaps you might be able to help us with what happened with the rocker’s hand...”

The fucking rocker’s rotten hand, what the hell did we care about the stupid hand, it was only going to cause us problems and not make us a cent. You can’t understand women and, besides, when they’re pregnant, they’re fit to be tied, fit to be tied... Of course, I was the one who had to talk, she couldn’t; the last thing we needed was to piss off the Moors... But she talked, of course she did. I think that as soon as she saw it was going to happen, she couldn’t not talk. She started, and that’s when things got bad for us — because as soon as Vicky opened her mouth, another five Moors came out, all very serious, bearded, barefoot. And I said to her, Victoria, you’re fucking us up. Vicky, cut it out, these guys aren’t kidding around, what the fuck?

“I’m here to find out who contacted you to cut the poor old man’s hand off. I’m not interested in anything else. You know who I am. I couldn’t care less about the old man. I couldn’t care less about the guy who did it either. And I don’t care about you. What I want to know is who has the hand? Who paid for the hand, the collector?”

I still wonder what got into her about the rocker’s hand. I swear, I still don’t know why, or who the collector was, or what the hell, but the fucking hand almost cost us big time, you understand? You get my meaning? It was just a scar but it could’ve been a prayer for the dead, right?

There we were, me shitting in my pants and her with a flashiness that already smelled like a run through the woods, surrounded by guys murmuring the way they do, which no god other than their god can understand. Then, in an attempt to warm up to them, she tells them it’s okay, and she takes a bag out of her back pocket. Why don’t they offer her some tea while she lays out some lines? Tea! Lines! I swear, I couldn’t believe it. The chick was out of her mind. She thought she was in our neighborhood, because we all know the Moroccans in the corner shops are Moroccans, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing ever does in those places, but everywhere else, with those beards, they’re another kind of Moroccan, you understand what I’m saying? They looked at each other and whispered amongst themselves again, and yes, she can go with them, but I have to stay outside.

“The ugly dude can’t come in.”

It was the spokesman who said this, and you had to see him, the guy thought he was Omar Sharif. Do you think my objections had any weight? Oh, it would be better if she paid attention to me sometimes. I’ve been around the block a few times but she’s a know-it-all, she does everything on her own, and whatever she gets, she earns unassisted. Unassisted. I stood there like a jerk, looking at the sign on the door where you could still see Centre de Joventut de Canyelles. I had no time to come up with a plan because my lovely eyes were still on the sign when I heard her scream and saw her rush out, her hand covering her bleeding face. God, I ran after her as fast as fear allowed; it didn’t even cross my mind to go in and ask who the fuck had hurt my boss. I didn’t even consider it. If those Saracens already thought my face was so ugly, I sure didn’t need a scar. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them they were wrong, no fucking way.

The Go-Getter had sent me to the slaughterhouse. Why? They could have hurt me even worse, but the cut on my nose would leave a mark. I didn’t want to think about it. They almost sliced it off, damn them, eight stitches. And my pride. Nou Barris was built on the backs of Andalusian, Extremaduran, Galician immigrants, with strikes, demonstrations, and civil guards, but now there was only shit left, nothing of that area from the ’70s full of small struggles and early drug usage, all to the tune of long-haired guitars. There was nothing worthwhile left of old Magic Hand. There were two zeros left in my checking account, sort of like my possibilities. I cursed the moment in which fucking nostalgia gave way to that fit of passion.

“I saw the reap hook, Go-Getter. Very funny. We could say I even tried it.”

Once more at the door. I was back, like he’d asked, and I was furious.

“Touché. You look at me like that one more time and you’ll kill me, my queen.”

“Why?”

“Do you expect me to talk in the doorway? If you say yes, I will bring a couple of chairs to the landing—”

“Why did you have me cut?”

“Oh my Queen, my queen, I would never do anything to alter your tremendous beauty.”

I went in. I got to the living room, grabbed a beer bottle on top of the TV, and threw it against the glass shelves. A storm of raining, cascading glass. A glass jar remained untouched and I threw it against that horrific stained-glass door to the kitchen. I had always found it threatening. Only the lead molding was left.

“Don’t stop now, darling.”

The Go-Getter opened a small built-in compartment in the bar. Cups, tall glasses, short glasses, fat glasses, and miniatures. I looked at him with a raving hunger to hurt. My blood pressure made the patch on my nose burn. I bit down.

“Why?”

“My angry queen, you are the only one to blame for that cut, though I have no doubt it has a delicate and glorious future on your face. You alone are to blame.”

“Who has the hand?”

“Are all your cravings like this?”

“I want the hand.”

“My nostalgic empress... What do you think you’re looking for, Victoria? A queen doesn’t rummage about in the garbage. I fear your treasure is now in some dump outside of town, rotten, devoured by rats.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Santo.”

But he was no longer Santo, just the Go-Getter. There was no reason for him to fuck with me. I was being ridiculous. I felt ridiculous, my legs, my belly, the boobs about to blow up. I had to sit down. Stupid. The memory of the night when Magic Hand played for us, for Santo and me — or only for me, because that was how I remembered it — that magic summer night in which I decided to be who I was during the course of a concert aglow with bonfires and the smell of Sant Joan gunpowder; to be who I used to be — that memory played a dirty trick on me. You can’t have your soundtrack ripped off like that, you can’t be thrown off like that, all the time, by things as strange as a mall. That hand had worked my patience so hard; I had turned it into a symbol, a personal aggression that had now become pure, hard shame in front of this guy, the Go-Getter, no longer Santo.

It was getting dark and the multicolored lights from the expansive mall surprised us through the large window like a balm. The inside of that dirty cave wasn’t the same either. Pink, lilac, blue, yellow neon lights. I let enough time pass so that my Santo’s explanation, the old Santo, wouldn’t embarrass me too much.

“Give me some of that whiskey, dude.” I touched my belly. It’s all good, little one. Just a drink.

“Have you heard of Dubai?”

I’d heard of Dubai, of course. Who hadn’t? “Do you have clients on that fake palm-tree island, Go-Getter?”

“No, but if I did, I’d try to comply with my commitments. If you stick your nose in other people’s business, they’ll chop it off. Look at yourself. That’s a warning, you owe me for that. If you make a commitment to do a concert, you play your fucking music, whether your name is Magic Hand or Manolo, and if Magic had a hangover, or if he was lazy or had a prima donna attack, it would have been better for him to swallow it, because these guys don’t put up with nonsense, my queen, these guys pay, and if they don’t get what they want, they get it back the only way they know. So if you say you’ll give a concert for them, you play. At least I would. The punishment for stealing from them is rather gruesome, isn’t it?”

It was a good thing he didn’t turn the light on. The tower from the mall was surrounded by blinking neon lights: pink, lilac, blue, yellow.

Pink, lilac, blue, yellow.

Bringing Down the Moon by Valerie Miles

Gràcia

He split her open like a pomegranate, and I knew then I had made a big mistake.

That late-June day had been airless and hot and caused tears of sweat to trickle down the valley of muscle that cupped my spine. I was hiding, crouched in a tiny space behind an unsteady dressing screen in her boudoir. Heel bones dug hard into my rump to keep balance, wary to make the slightest move lest I upset the wicker screen safeguarding my intrusion.

The bell tower of the Rius i Taulet plaza tolled three p.m. I knew she would be coming. My body tensed at the sound of the third chime and sent a hard cramp through my thigh. It felt as though someone were pulling a ribbon of red muscle straight out of my leg. I grunted through the pain. Even the slightest move echoed in wicker-speak and wobbled the delicate screen. I had been compelled to the dirty enterprise, but it would soon be over, I told myself, trying to relieve my conscience.

I heard Lydia open and close the door of the workshop where she spent her mornings with the hermanas Furest. They were expert weavers, the three of them, and she oversaw their work on fabric designs, sewing splendid patterns. Her light staccato steps tapped over the old stones of the courtyard as she crossed the open-air garden, which was encircled by a gallery of arches and intricately carved stone columns. The tic, tic, tic... punctuated the soporific murmurs of the plants growing there. This was all that remained of an edifice that at one time must have belonged to an opulent family. The rest of the palace, now located in Vila de Gràcia, was built around this ancient spot over a hundred years ago, before the city of Barcelona swallowed the village in its thirst for expansion. Now, one could hardly imagine such a lush and centuried interior — always still, so very still — existing among the boom and bangle of daily life in this rough and tumble part of the city.

Lydia spent most of her time here, caring tenderly for her breathing things: the ivy serpents and tendrils of morning glory that had grown over and bearded the statue of a dancing faun, the purple blossoms hanging like jewels from his marble flute. Sometimes a slight wind would rustle the buds, making it seem as though the creature were dancing or playing a melody. She also grew savage herbs such as belladonna, monkshood, cinquefoil, foxglove, and herb-of-grace, or rue. A row of Japanese blood grass encircled the fertile foliage, guarding the place at the center reserved for the dusky flowers. There, only black blossoms did Lydia grow.

Lydia would have stopped at the marble fountain on her way across the courtyard; its pool of cool water was what sustained these extraordinary botanicals. It was something she did every day, a ritual ablution of sorts: wet her hands in the gurgling water, anoint her brow, brush her throat with long, delicate fingers.

I admit it, yes. I used to watch her obsessively, this exquisite creature perusing her private garden. My office overlooked the courtyard from the second floor and I would observe her as she indulged in unusual displays of affection, being otherwise so guarded. Every once in a while, I could almost feel the moment her finger would break the water’s skin at the fountain. I imagined myself as one of the succulents in her charge, receiving these tender affairs. Sometimes she wore delicate, homespun fabrics and I could glimpse the outline of her taut figure against the light. But I knew all too well to keep my distance.

As I squatted in wait, I conjured a perfect picture of her in my mind’s eye: kissing the amulet she wore around her neck, a piece of black onyx carved hollow to hold a sprig of herb-of-grace. Gràcia. Whispering under her breath in tender communion with her vegetable children, she would coddle and sniff the raven blossoms: mourning bride, queen of night tulips, black pearl lilies. She caught me watching her a few times. Once, already inside the dark space of the boudoir, she leaned back again over the threshold and looked straight up at me; her face half in darkness and half in light, one blue eye holding both of mine hostage. I saw the slightest wrinkle cross her white brow, as if it bore a weight of generations. Then she went back in and closed the door behind her.

Now I was on the inside of her threshold. She brushed by the wicker screen on her way in and I caught the whiff of a delicate perfume. Almost like a divining rod, she held a black calla lily before her, plucked from the garden; a robust blossom with a long black stamen. She set it on the bed, pulled back the curtains that hung from the canopy, and opened the domed skylight in the ceiling above. A flood of light spilled over a white Indian bedspread embroidered with small pieces of mirror and lit the room up with a burst of fiery reflections. She removed the lion brooch that held her chestnut mane in place and a rush of heavy curls tumbled freely down her back. She stood very still for a moment, her blue eyes sparkling and jaw set high, defiant. She seemed to be focusing on some spot deep inside herself; a beautiful automata.

She began to undress. First her blouse and brassiere, then she stepped out of her shoes and sat up on the edge of the high white bed. Her delicate feet dangled over the side like a child’s. Could she not hear the pounding in my chest? It seemed impossible to me and I began to sweat profusely. Her hair glowed in the afternoon sun, the locks teasing the dimpled triangle of her lower back. She moved gracefully across the bed, rousing a flotilla of tiny incandescent motes. I could feel my own self budding in reaction despite the sweat and the heat and the cramps.

Then she lifted her hips and pulled off her skirt, the elastic band cutting into her flesh as it rode down her thighs. She picked up the calla lily and laid her naked body back on the pillows, holding the swarthy blossom and its stamen nestled like an ink stain between her breasts. I felt a strong desire to jump out of my hiding place and stop her right then. Though I had no reason, no claim, I felt protective of her. I wanted to save her from this daily torture of having to lay with an old man.

The clock struck the quarter hour and there was the telltale warning knock at the door. Old Señor Candau walked in right on schedule, three-fifteen, to pleasure himself with his beautiful young wife.

Lydia had saved her father, one of the last direct descendents of an ancient Catalan family, from the embarrassment of bankruptcy by marrying a man his own age. Sr. Candau came from the deep inland countryside and had built a veritable empire in the most astonishing way: traveling from village to village gathering scrap metal on the back of a mule. A resourceful man and very ambitious, he eventually moved into textiles and shipping. But soon money was not enough.

When he showed up in Barcelona word spread quickly. More than one paterfamilias begged him to take over their failing businesses. Times were changing and privilege was not enough to keep a family rich anymore, as it had during the Franco years. And so Sr. Candau paid Lydia’s father twice the value of his textile factory as a sort of dowry. He also bought this crumbling old palace in Gràcia to house his executive offices and keep his young wife close by at all times. It was the noise and grit of Gràcia that had attracted him, the cocktail of bohemians, anarchists, and gypsies. “Better than sharing the sidewalks with all those penniless, inbred old snots in Pedralbes,” he had said once with characteristic candor. So Lydia refurbished the interior quarters for their residence and her workshop, and the courtyard for repose.

I have never known how willingly Lydia went along with the arrangement, but nevertheless she held herself with the dignity of her breeding. She was ostensibly compliant, distant without being entirely cold, and certainly too proud to play the part of sacrificial lamb. After all, she was now a very rich woman and he doted on her as long as she remained quiet and submissive. As time went by, though, Sr. Candau became more and more obsessed with her icy beauty, her graceful detachment. There was something in her carriage, in the way her blue eyes sparkled under that mat of chestnut lashes; it hinted of a rich inner world that could never be conquered by a peasant king.

As for me, Sr. Candau had been a part of my life since birth, but only as a character in my father’s stories. They had been inseparable during their childhood years of penury after the civil war, and Father used to tell tall stories of their trips into the woods together, hunting and fishing. How Sr. Candau had strangled a hungry dog with his bare hands when it attacked one of their sheep, how tough he had been, full of spit and vinegar; a bully to most, but always very protective of him. How he would remember him whenever he smelled mushrooms and wet leaves. But I never found out what had happened between them, what had estranged them for the rest of their lives. Why one day my father ran away from the village and never went back.

So when Sr. Candau called one day, I found it strange to be confronted with the fact that he was for real. He told my father that he was now a wealthy man, but could trust no one and so he wanted his childhood friend at his side. Yet my father was in fragile health by then, and suggested that I go to Barcelona instead. I was reluctant, since I had studied to become a teacher, not a businessman, but my father urged me in no uncertain terms to drop my romantic ideas and take advantage of the opportunity. He had always known that Sr. Candau would call one day, and that day had come.

I arrived in Barcelona a few years ago and Sr. Candau treated me well in his own gruff way. Like the son he didn’t have, the son whose absence was by now a source of growing tension. His wife was his reward, but she was also expected to give him an heir; the more besotted he became with her, the more impatient he grew. Hence the daily ars amatoria in her afternoon boudoir; Sr. Candau was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. What good could possibly come from a man so obsessed with his own wife?

One afternoon Sr. Candau walked into my office just as I happened to make an offhand comment about one of the secretaries. He asked to speak with me privately and I followed him to his rooms thinking he would berate my indiscretion, or reprimand me for being so chummy with colleagues below my rank. No, that was not the case at all. He obliged me to admit that his Lydia was more beautiful than the secretary. He wanted to hear me say it. Out loud.

“Lydia is the fairest of them all, sir. ” I smiled, at first thinking it was some sort of a joke.

“Yes, she is, Guillem. But how do you really know that? You haven’t seen her finest qualities, son. You haven’t seen her, you know, naked.”

He sat behind his desk rubbing his forehead, sizing me up from beneath bushy white eyebrows, studying me to see how I would respond. I wasn’t really sure how to respond. The conversation didn’t only seem outrageous. It seemed dangerous.

“I don’t need to see her naked to imagine...”

His eyebrows arched menacingly and I shut my mouth with a nervous cough. What would happen to any man who dared lay a finger on Lydia Tudó de Candau? I thought. Rue the day, sir. Sr. Candau, the dog-strangler, had the temper of a man who built an empire from scrap metal and mules.

“Honestly, Sr. Candau, you are a very lucky man.”

“What does luck have to do with anything, goddamnit?” Sr. Candau spit his words out as if they were embers burning his tongue. “She’s mine because I bought her from her sniveling good-for-nothing father. The rat sold her like a piece of prime real estate. But she’s my property now and I stick my flag into it every chance I get,” he said. “Now I want you, son, to learn the lay of the land.”

“I–I-I’m not sure I understand. Um. Sir.”

“I want to find a way for you to see her, shall we say, in all her glory.”

“With all due respect, sir, I think it’s better if I don’t. You know, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and all that. These things always go wrong.”

“For the love of God, shut up and stop sniveling, you sound like a parish priest. We can get away with it just fine. Go into her boudoir before she arrives and hide behind the screen there. Then when I come in, I’ll send her into the bathroom for something and you can sneak back out. She’ll never be the wiser.”

It was the vulgar idea of a man no longer in control of himself. I knew it would lead to no good and I stated it as many times as he would hear me. But Sr. Candau would not hear me. And how could I say no? After all, he owned me too.

That’s how I found myself crouched like an animal behind a wicker screen in a beautiful woman’s bedroom on a sweltering day in June. Lydia was holding the black lily between her perfectly truculent, pointed little breasts. And when Sr. Candau walked into the room, and saw her like that, lying in the bed like a dead woman, everything went horribly awry.

“So you think you’re funny? Eh, puta?” He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her toward him at the edge of the bed. She yelped at the sudden violence of his gesture.

“Stop it! You’re hurting me. The mirrors are cutting my skin.”

He was breathing hard through flared, taurine nostrils, his mouth a corrugated scowl. He brought his arm back as though he was going to hit her.

“After everything I’ve given you, this is how you repay me? Would you prefer to be dead, then? Because it can be arranged, you know.”

“Please, Marcelo. It blossomed just last night under the new moon. I undressed before I thought to look for a vase, and fell asleep. Here, take off your shirt and relax, let me rub your shoulders.”

He let her leg go, turned around, and sat on the edge of the bed, removing his shirt and pants. A grin replaced the grimace, but then it grew into a smirk, and finally a full sneer the moment his eyes found mine behind the wicker screen. He nodded at me in furtive recognition and his eyes went black as coal.

Lydia kneeled behind him and began massaging his hairy white shoulders, letting her nipples brush lightly against his neck and arms, trying to appease his anger. Sr. Candau reached up and fondled one of her breasts, turned his head, and sucked at it. Then he pinched it hard enough that she let out a whimper.

Everything hurt. I had been crouching for so long my feet had gone numb. My wrists ached from holding myself up and I desperately needed to move. Only a primitive old goat like Sr. Candau could come up with something as shabby as this. He kept staring at me, as if this was some act of collusion between us. My throat was dry and stung with bile, which I tried to swallow away to no avail.

Suddenly he turned and grabbed Lydia by the hair and pulled her down to the floor in front of the screen.

“Stand up.”

“Marcelo, what has gotten into you today? What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”

“Look at me and bend over.”

“Marcelo, please. Stop it.”

“I said, bend over, Lydia, or I will bend you over myself and I promise you, it will be a lot worse.”

So she stood up in front of him, her back to the wicker screen, and bent over. He pulled off his underwear and grabbed the offending flower from where it lay on the bed. He began to caress his lifeless penis, hitting her lightly in the face with the lily, poking at her lips with the long black stamen.

“We’re going to change the menu today.”

“That’s not part of our understanding,” she growled.

“There’s a new understanding now.”

He grabbed her chin and brushed her hair to one side. Then he placed his palm at the back of her head and forced her face into his crotch, the whole time keeping his eyes locked on me through the slit in the screen. When she finally gave in and closed her mouth around him, he let his head fall back with a gasp, his eyes fluttering half-shut. His cracked tongue lolled over yellow teeth, poking out from time to time to suck the edges of his wrinkled lips, covering them in flecks of dry white spittle. His breath came in short gasps. He grabbed the lily again and slid the black stamen down her back. He smacked her with it a few times, moving it in and out of her thighs, which were scratched in various places and speckled with drops of blood where the mirrors had broken the surface of her white skin.

And then it happened. He threw the black flower hard at the screen, nearly toppling it, and stood up. He bent over her slowly, following the contour of her back and hips with his hands. Then he reached down and placed a hand on either side of her buttocks and pried them apart, his fingers squeezing and kneading her flesh like worms trying to burrow into the meat of a ripe peach. He let out a wild, guttural sound and spread her buttocks wider and wider still; he stretched and he patted and he slapped and he squeezed the velvety folds, opened her up like a pomegranate with great force as he picked her up off the floor, his face contorted into a frenzy of madness and idiot glee.

A thousand tiny spiders of panic crawled over my skin. His beautiful wife opened up in front of me like a pig. I was shocked and sickened at the violence of the scene, but I was also mesmerized by the sight of it; the primordial oceanscape of pinks and browns, the puckered maelstrom, the scalloped anemone unfolding from around a tiny coral button. I couldn’t not watch. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I watched as he split her open wider. And all I wanted to do was touch. And I grew harder despite my loathing him, despite the violence, and I ached somewhere so deep I couldn’t begin to tell you where, some place, some hole inside of me opened just a little bit wider and I throbbed, my own groin set afire, my whole body in a fever-frenzy of titillation and lament. And I touched it, myself, while I watched. I touched it because it pinched and throbbed, I touched it because it hurt, because it wanted me to touch it, because I had to, because I couldn’t not do anything else. I distinguished a tiny crimson birthmark at the point where her whitest skin turned pink; it bore the shape of a crescent moon. I glimpsed the ghostly mark only for a few seconds before the clouds of his fingers covered it again, yet the vision seared itself into my mind as if I had opened my eyes to the midday sun.

When he finally put her down, he spun her around and mounted her from behind to finish himself off like a wheezing, rickety dog. I was spent, but he was still grunting and jerking, and by now her face was no more than a few inches from the wicker screen. The pendant with herb-of-grace dangled between her breasts and marked the rhythm of his charges. His beady black eyes were open again, staring straight at me. But I turned mine exclusively to her. She kept her jaw raised high, but her eyes brimmed with tears and there were signs of distress cracking her once defiant expression. Not a single sound, not a single movement did she make on her own. She just looked straight ahead, eyes staring, fixed upon nothing I could see. Toc, toc, toc... the amulet played out the rhythm of an ancient lullaby against her chest, hypnotizing the universe into slow-motion.

I was struggling to hold myself still, but it escaped me. Something issued from that dark place that had opened when I was touching: barely audible, just a slight groan under my breath. Her pupil caught it immediately, honed in on that tiniest sound. I saw her enter into the recognition of my presence and our eyes met through the laced wicker. A single tear fell from the pool of her bluest eye. Not a tear of sorrow, don’t be fooled: it was a tear of rage.

Just then Sr. Candau sounded, his face all purple and distorted into a grotesque expression. He finished himself off in a paroxysm of conquest emitting a feeble, ridiculous, amphibian croak and fell back onto the bed. Gasping for breath, he dropped back and patted the bed beside him.

“Now come and lie down with me for a while. But first, get yourself cleaned up a little. There’s a good girl.”

She walked into the bathroom on unsteady legs and closed the door behind her. He motioned at me with a wink and a tic of his head to leave the room.

That night my dreams were haunted by dark creatures and contagion: dwarves dressed as courtesans, nymphs and imps dancing and drinking in an enchanted grotto. They led me into a cave, at the end of which was a door with a little lunar rune, an exact replica of her tiny birthmark, set aglow and pulsing. I ran my fingers along the engraved edges of the phantom mark: the door opened and the company spilled back into the courtyard garden. It was the witching hour of night and the hermanas Furest were there, standing with their backs to me, holding Lydia’s dog at bay. But their faces were those of old hags and each one dropped a gold coin into my hand, screeching and cackling and spitting spiders. The dog was digging furiously at a spot near the old fountain. They let it go and it ran a few yards to devour a piece of meat on a stick. The rope around its neck yanked a mandrake root from the ground and a shrill scream pierced the blackness of the night. A tiny bearded man ran across the courtyard and into the boudoir.

Something had shifted in me that day and an incipient darkness infected my dreams. I went at my colleagues in fits of rage and the only way I could calm my nerves was by drinking myself to oblivion. I was tortured by the vision of his putrid flesh hammering into her, the toc, toc, toc, of her talisman; that unnatural rhythm followed me like the hallucinatory pounding of a telltale heart. The scene had bored itself into my psyche and laid its devil eggs, spawning all manner of sinister reveries. I gave in to fits of hot need like spells of thirst that had no earthly quenching.

I avoided Sr. Candau, couldn’t bear when he looked at me with his lecherous wink, poking out the purple raisin of his tongue and oozing complicity. I did what business I could in the confines of my office, avoiding contact with anyone else, and continued to watch her in the garden. I ached to have her, to help her, to protect her. But not once did she ever look up or acknowledge me. Never the slightest show of curiosity to know if I was still there.

On the fourth day, early on the eve of Saint John’s holiday, which pagans call midsummer, one of the hermanas Furest appeared in my office. “From the señora,” she said, handing me a black calla lily. I was expected to join the Candaus for the Verbena de Sant Joan that evening in the courtyard. “La Señora has asked that you come early to help her prepare the garden for the festivities. Sr. Candau had to step out.”

My throat constricted at the thought of being alone with her and my head throbbed from the previous night’s binge. I sniffed at the black flower and tried to get ahold of myself, but the musty perfume only intensified my state and revived the sordid images in my head. I went to the bathroom and threw cold water on my face before going downstairs. When I arrived she was smoothing some loose soil near the fountain. Without turning around she motioned for me to follow her into the boudoir. She closed the door and motioned me to sit down on the bed. She was more beautiful now in this subtle, dusky light than I had ever seen her before.

“I know my husband put you up to it, and he made it impossible for you to say no. He can be a very persuasive man. But you have witnessed something that was not yours to see and you will have to pay for it.”

She parted my legs and moved in close. I reacted immediately to her smell but didn’t dare move to hide it. She came in a little closer and brushed her hip against my thigh and touched me. She smiled at the strength of my response. “I like tall men,” she said, blue eyes twinkling. She brought her fingers to my mouth and kissed me, nibbling my lip till I could taste blood.

“Alright then, I have a proposition to make. I will give you a choice.”

Dusk was diffusing the shadows and the moon appeared ghostly at the courtyard’s horizon. We hung lighted dragonfly garlands and set candles around the gallery and built a tower of twigs and branches for the bonfire inside the circle of blood grass. We dressed the marble fountain with bowls of herbs and incense, coca de forner pastries and cava for toasting. The leaves in the garden seemed to sway in communion, following some sort of organic rhythm, and the garden looked richer and more lush than usual. Every so often a black blossom would set off into a shiver like a cat’s tail, and the ferns rattled their deep green, spider-lace leaves. A slight breeze flickered the candle light and jostled the blossoms that covered the garden’s faun. I was sure I saw his merry flute closer to his mouth than ever.

Sr. Candau came up behind me and slapped me so hard on the back that it sent me into a coughing fit. The shadows seemed to suddenly deepen and panic burned the pit of my stomach.

“Lighten up, son. Let’s have a drink. Look like you could use one.”

“Here, Marcelo,” Lydia said. “It’s an infusion I made especially for the verbena. And here’s a little something for you too, Guillem. I know you are going to like it.”

“Lydia, dear, you know I don’t like those concoctions you are always making me drink. I want some real spirits. It’s been a very long day.”

“And spirits you shall have, darling. But first, humor me. Let’s celebrate this midsummer moon. It’s when the beekeepers harvest, you know. Poor bees, they work so hard then the keepers just come in and take it all away.”

I was nervous to drink her brew, but I knew I had no other choice. My fate had been sealed when I agreed to witness things I wasn’t supposed to see. So I drank it down in one long draught, resignedly. It started as a mere suggestion of something tickling the base of my spine. It felt good. I was content and relaxed. Something warm had entered my bloodstream and was spreading slowly through my veins and capillaries. My ears began to hum and everything took on a kind of dreamscape quality. I was so light, as if my skull could no longer hold me inside, and I was going up and up and floating over the moon. I watched myself from above, quite at peace with being freed of this mortal coil; my body a shell, an automata way down there in the garden below.

I saw in Sr. Candau’s eyes the shock of realizing that something was terribly wrong. He was losing control over his body, becoming paralyzed little by little. He fell to his knees, then to the ground, writhing, fighting. But eventually he lay still, looking upward at the glittering freckles of the nocturnal sky. In a last act of sheer will, he raised his hand as if to grab at the crescent moon above, to gain purchase. But then his face froze into an expression of terror like some theatrical death mask and his hand dropped to his side, useless.

Lydia and the hermanas Furest waited for the shadows to swallow the rest of the courtyard. The snaps of children’s firecrackers outside gave way to an orgy of pyrotechnics — Roman candles and cracking girandoles — announcing the adult veneration had begun. The night air burst with whips and whistles and thunderous explosions, sending clouds of acrid smoke into the atmosphere. Lydia called her dog into the courtyard so it wouldn’t be spooked by the tumult and it ran straight to Sr. Candau, lying inert upon the garden floor. It sniffed at his fingers and nipped at his crotch.

“It’s time. First the left hand, like I told you,” Lydia said as she handed me a silver stiletto.

From above, I watched myself slice his wrist open in one clean stroke as I had been shown by the hermanas. It was so very easy. They bled him and poured the liquid into the fountain, which gurgled and tinted the water with a deep ruby cloud. I sliced the other wrist and repeated the ritual as instructed.

The night was hot and my scalp tingled with the agitation of our deeds. And yet I was deeply at peace, as if my life had always been leading me right here. I cleaned my hands in the fountain and didn’t recognize my own reflection; it seemed as if some other man was looking back at me. I smiled at this shade of me and took a deep breath to prepare myself. Then I turned right around, picked up the axe, and chopped Marcelo’s left hand off in a single blow.

I have yet in my life to see a bonfire like the one we set ablaze that night. Its lips snapped hungrily all the way to the second floor of the palace. The five of us kept to our task throughout the evening, cutting Marcelo up and feeding the pieces to the flames, perfuming the night air with sprigs of herbs, until there was nothing left of him but ashes. A little past midnight I began to feel the weight of myself once again, the blood rushing into every extremity, engorging my fingers, my toes, my lips. My groin tingled and came to life. Lydia had been watching me and waiting. When she saw my expression she sent the hermanas away and initiated me into the ways of her garden.

Now, when I am called by the treble chimes of Rius i Taulet to lie with my wife, I make it a point to stop and linger for a moment near the fountain. I stand in contemplation of the black lily that grows ever stronger, nourished by the ashes of that midsummer’s fire. I water it with excessive care and remove any weeds that threaten the health of the dusky token. And bow my head in a moment of silence to thank him for all that he has given me.

The Slender Charm of Chinese Women by Raúl ArgemÍ

Montjuic

The secret of any great city — let’s say, Barcelona — is that it comprises many cities juxtaposed one over the other, breathing side by side but with few actual points of contact.

You can be yourself in any of those parallel worlds and then cross the street and become someone else, completely different and free of your previous identity.

But there are people who are born distinct and so the residents of each of these worlds recognize them with the same name, alias, or nickname, without realizing that at other times, with other people, they’re the same, but different.

That’s what happened with Delgado. He had an inadvertent talent, almost animal-like, to transform himself so that in each city he was perceived as one of the locals.

Delgado’s story only took up about a week’s worth of police bulletins, each time more brief, until it got lost in the whirl of those humid and suffocating summer days. But I wasn’t the only one who thought that the Barcelona of brothels, of Japanese tourists, South American waiters, and junkies from all over the place — to name a few Barcelonas — could be stalking grounds in which hunter and prey would kill each other without impediment.

Naturally, there are three professions that facilitate jumping from city to city: cop, musician, and journalist. My excuse is that I’m a reporter. “Freelance” — in other words, like a pirate searching for the treasure that will save me; most of the time I just have to be satisfied with leftovers from the lions.

I first found out about Delgado, or El Delgado, on a Monday.

It was early, or late, a relativity that’s typical of juxtaposed realities, and I’d arrived alone at Clavié, because Paty, my longtime girlfriend, had left me at some point, perhaps tempted by a better offer. She also has the excuse of being a journalist.

I had to wait awhile. Like everywhere else, Clavié, an afterhours joint, pretends to be closed, so they took their time in responding to my rapping on the door. Patience. When all the bars are closed, your last resort to get away from a bed filled with failed dreams is an afterhours place, and this piano bar didn’t smell bad and wasn’t full of drunks.

Inside, time seemed to stand still. The fresh air from the AC, the low lights, and the sound of the piano accompanying the movement of the waiters made the world seem far away. The customers were the same as always, or looked the same as always. They were the appropriate mix for an afterhours spot, dressed uniformly, with drinks in hand, chatting or singing along with popular classics, anything to avoid going home.

And, well, because fate can be this way, that Monday was the first time I ever saw Delgado. It was impossible not to see him, since he was almost as big as the piano on which he rested an elbow; he was wearing a yellow shirt. He smiled and bopped along to the music.

Cavalcanti, who’s there every night with the religiosity of a sinner, was singing a schmaltzy tango in the company of two older, and perhaps temporary, gal pals. Cavalcanti saw me as I came in and, just as he was letting his throat warble to produce a sheep-like “vibrato,” he winked my way and nodded toward the tables that were a couple of steps down from the piano and the singers.

He’d taken a liking to me since he’d found out I’m a reporter and had begun to gather material, characters from Barcelona nights, for a future book. To be honest, he didn’t have a job and mostly got by on his utopian disposition.

The old tango singer landed at the table and ordered whiskey. With a wave, he brought Delgado over and let his two gal pals join us as well. They looked me over, we looked each other over, and then we all ruled each other out.

The man extended his hand, as big as an oar, but didn’t break my fingers, and then sat down in a crimson armchair, muttering a greeting I didn’t quite understand.

As usual, Cavalcanti was high on coke. That was his biggest charm with women: he always had a lot of coke, and he was generous with it. But his gal pals had decided to switch gears, now that they were at a table, and to light up a hashish joint.

Cavalcanti gave me a lopsided smile, like Gardel. “We have to forgive them,” he said. “They still allow themselves childish things, hippie things.”

I had enough time to nod and sip the whiskey before Cavalcanti spoke up again in his Argentine and Iberian — fused Spanish: “This guy here, just look at him — he has quite the past, my friend.”

I glanced at Delgado and couldn’t imagine anything but Wrestlemania. Of course, I understood that Delgado was his surname.

Later, when I saw him pop up in the papers, one of the messier points was, in fact, his name. What’s important now, what matters, is that everyone called him Delgado, and when he wasn’t around, El Delgado, the Slender Man.

As so often happens, his nickname had nothing to do with his physical presence. He was a huge mound of a man, tall and wide, with as much muscle as fat. A mound with slow, deliberate movements that framed his constant smile, no matter what was going on, and dry hair like hay that stuck up and crowned his head. Between the smile and hair there were two tiny eyes, blue pinpoints that looked like they belonged to someone else — someone who was spying from inside his body, waiting to figure out who knew what.

That was Delgado. At first sight, he was laughable. A clumsy giant, a guy who could stand there all night, not drinking or smoking, just laughing at everybody else’s stories, even when everybody else was pretty sure he didn’t understand a thing.

He was inoffensive.

Inoffensive until silence fell, and then he’d say something to save himself, in a chewed-up Spanish filled with weird echoes that some thought were Bosnian or Moldavian or Danish or Bulgarian gypsy, or maybe some mixed argot from a shipless sailor.

He widened his smile a little more, looked at the ceiling with the blue pinpoints, and said, “Ah, the slender charm of Chinese women.”

That’s why they called him Delgado. Because then he’d lower his eyes and the psycho crouched inside him would look at us from under his fleshy lids until the silence thickened and someone would try, clumsily, to start a conversation or suggest we sing.

That’s what happened the first time I met him. For a few minutes, we passed the joint around and laughed haplessly, as if we were in a hurry.

Over the next hour, Cavalcanti tried to convince me the man was a Vietnam vet, one of the gal pals tried to get close to Delgado, and the other downed four whiskeys without showing it. The women who end their night at that bar are real women. They can be drunk off their asses but you’d never know it. They’re such ladies that if they have to puke, they do it in private.

“This guy you see here is a war hero, my friend.”

Cavalcanti called everybody “my friend,” or used the Argentine pibe, because he couldn’t remember anyone’s name.

“Cavalcanti, that’s impossible. This man wasn’t even born during the Vietnam War, or if he was, he was in diapers.”

“Are you nuts, pibe? That was practically yesterday! I’d left the orchestra; I was hanging out with some Colombians. Miami, Las Vegas, Cali, Medellín... We partied our asses off!”

“Were you dealing drugs?”

“No, pibe, no! What are you thinking? Music! We imported tropical stars, we opened for them. I want to die whenever I remember all the women. Drugs weren’t part of the deal, they were just for pleasure. Here, take a drag...” He casually slipped a diamond-fold of coke in front of me.

“Cavalcanti,” I said before heading to the restroom, “it’s been more than thirty years since Vietnam. If you weren’t so out of your mind, you’d realize that.”

When I came back, pissed at anybody who cuts coke with plaster because it burns your nose, the old singer was looking at three of his fingers as if they belonged to someone else; the drunken gal pal continued in her elegant catatonia, and the other was whispering who-knows-what into Delgado’s ear while he just smiled.

When I tried to give the coke back to Cavalcanti, he showed me his fingers and his generosity. “You can keep it,” he said. “I have more. I’m getting old, my friend. Three decades. Do you realize what that means? It makes me want to die...”

“Not tonight, Cavalcanti. I’m not in the mood for a wake.”

Cavalcanti’s laugh was purely operatic. He dried a tear and, with the effects of his last whiskey in plain view, made his way to the restroom.

It was late. I know this because after a while I started to see everything as if it were underwater, through a submarine porthole. At that hour, exhausted and sleepy, I knew — and that’s why I would never try it — that if I stretched my hand to touch somebody, my fingers would just bump up against the porthole.

Cavalcanti returned rejuvenated, his nostrils smudged with white powder.

“You’re right,” he said emphatically. “It was the Gulf War.”

“What?”

“Delgado was decorated in the Gulf War.”

“I don’t believe you, it doesn’t make sense. El Delgado isn’t even American. What the fuck was he doing in the Gulf?”

He didn’t respond, just drank his shot of whiskey and raised various fingers to order another round for everyone.

“Hey, buddy... big guy... I’m talking to you, deaf dude... show your arms to this piece-of-shit Uruguayan who doesn’t believe me.”

El Delgado hesitated before grasping what he was being asked, then finally rolled up his sleeve and stretched his arms out, both hands on the table. They were full of scars too small to be smallpox.

“They used needles, wooden splinters, and who knows what other shit,” Cavalcanti explained. “The Turks tortured him.”

Delgado stayed in the same position for a long minute, raising his little blue eyes at me as if he was waiting for something — maybe congratulations, or a word of support — until he eventually rolled down his sleeves and took cover again behind his smile.

I didn’t say anything because at that moment I saw Cavalcanti making faces like he was at death’s door and I thought perhaps this was the big one and that it had all come to pass thanks to his dedication to cocaine. But I was wrong. Delgado then widened his smile and took bites at the air as if he were a shark in a Disney cartoon. He had false teeth, and the upper dentures hit the bottom ones like castanets, revealing bright blue gums smeared with spit.

“They kicked his teeth out. What do you think of that?”

I couldn’t tell him what I thought because, just then, the night’s drinks and tobacco turned my stomach and a cold nausea indicated I had to leave unless I wanted to roll around on the ground like a poisoned dog.

I left Clavié with the shakes. The sun was shining outside, promising to cook us all.

A few days later, Paty, my sporadic lover when she’s got nothing better going on, asked me to accompany her somewhere. One of those sources who can’t be revealed had told her they had some ugly info for her, and the place to confirm it was ugly too. Knowing Paty’s nature, I prepared for the worst.

The meeting was set at a “piso patera,” one of those spaces shared by workers on rotating schedules, in Poble Nou, a longtime manufacturing neighborhood whose factories were now only empty shells. As illegal immigrants from all over the world arrived, the old buildings were recycled into housing for eight or ten people per room. It was good business for a few.

Most pisos pateras aren’t mixed, and this one housed black people. It smelled just like Chester Himes would have wanted for one of his Harlem novels: a hot and swampy mix of rotting food, dirty laundry, and life at its most primal. The windows, overlooking an interior courtyard, were covered with cardboard.

It’s tasteless to say it’s hard to see a black person in the dark, but that was the problem. When we arrived, a man greeted us with a nod and a slight gesture, which provoked an African parade to file out the door; he spoke in a low, expressionless voice. It was nearly impossible to tell if he was lying.

“Ma’am,” he said, “they tried to kill one of our sisters. They raped her, they tortured her, and they choked her. They wanted to kill her but she survived. It’s a hate crime and you have to help us.”

“Can I speak with the girl?” asked Paty.

The man took his time to consider this. I lit a cigarette so I could get a look at his face in the light of the flame. He was over thirty and he stared at us with cold, disdainful eyes. Sweat made his skin shiny.

“Maybe you’ll get her to talk. She hasn’t talked to anyone.”

He opened another door inside the apartment. I managed to see a small shadow on one of the mattresses on the floor before my friend went in and closed the door behind her.

“Where did they attack her?” I asked, just to say something.

“Near Parallel, in the plaza with the three chimneys.”

“Those streets are always packed with people.”

He moved away, irritated, as if talking to me was a waste of his time, but I trudged on. My relationship with Paty had cooled recently and I needed to score a few points.

“I don’t know why but I think you know who attacked her.”

“Maybe.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

Silence followed that idiotic question. An illegal immigrant never goes to the cops.

“Why don’t you give me a clue? I promise I’ll leave you out of whatever investigation follows.”

“There’s a guy who sleeps in the back of the electric company, next to the plaza with the three chimneys. Do you know the place?”

“There are a few guys who sleep back there.”

“White trash,” he said venomously, and he was right: there were no blacks among the homeless who hung out there. “It was one of them. The one who seems German. The big one. The one who sleeps in a camouflage sleeping bag.”

“His name?”

“Ask for El Delgado. I’m not saying any more.”

He kept his word, and I shut my trap. I lit another cigarette because in that darkness the red tip was something to hold on to, and I drowned myself in the stink of crocodiles and resentment. I kept to myself the fact that I might know the Delgado he was talking about. I kept it to myself because Cavalcanti’s friend, the decorated hero from whatever war, might have simply provoked this black man’s paranoia. He had all the key elements to do that: he was an animal with a crazy look, and white too. I would see what I could find out.

Then Paty stepped out of the room and, after a very brief exchange of promises and phone numbers, we went back out to the street.

She was walking like she wanted to break a speed record.

“The black guy says they attacked her near the three chimneys, around Parallel. That’s still Montjuic, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“What? What did you find out?”

“That guy’s a fucking liar!”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because he’s covering his own ass! Because he’s a pimp!”

“Ah... the girl’s a prostitute.”

“Oh, you Argentines are so kitschy, of course you had to say prostitute.”

“First, I’m Uruguayan, and second, don’t start with me. I actually got him talking and I think I might have something.”

She looked at me like she wanted to kill me, and then told me the story as if speaking to someone mentally challenged.

The girl had been attacked by two men because she’d gone into Russian territory, just outside the Fútbol Club Barcelona Stadium; they’d grabbed her and thrown her in a car. It had been easy because the girl didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds and couldn’t put up much of a fight.

“Do you know how old she is? Fourteen! That fucking asshole, or his buddies, brought her over from Guinea with fake papers and put her out on the streets!”

“So why did he tell me it happened at the plaza with three chimneys?”

“Why do I give a fuck what he said? Why don’t you go back and ask him why he’s lying? Fucker! They raped her, they choked her, and they left her for dead... and you’re asking why that piece of shit is lying? Mother of God!”

“But—”

“She’s just a girl! Do you get that? A little girl!”

I wanted to argue with her but Paty raised her hand, opened the door of a taxi, and left me gazing at it as it disappeared up the street. I have no idea how she does it; I never have any luck with taxis.

Later that week, there was an anonymous call. A body had been found in the trash at a building in Poble Nou. It was a girl.

She was Chinese, very young. They’d tortured her before strangling her. Her torn vagina and anus indicated a vicious sex crime but the police actually thought it might be worse, and they’d shut down the block. They didn’t even want to think about the possibility that it was gangland revenge.

The ghosts of Eastern European immigration nourished the fears. Russians, Chechens, Serbians, and Bosnians all arrived marked by war, and their methods were especially brutal. They weren’t afraid of anything and only the Chinese competed with them, except when it came to exploiting the homeless, which was dominated by the Romanians. It’s possible that in Europe no one would have taken a Chinese beggar seriously.

But I’d already added two plus two and I’d come up with El Delgado’s massive figure.

The dead girl had been found not too far from where the black pimp had told me the suspect was. That the girl was Asian also reminded me of the night at Clavié when, with that crazy expression, he’d muttered the cryptic phrase about the slender charm of Chinese women.

There was something to what that black guy had told me. It would turn into an article I could sell for a good price, or information with which I could barter.

As the morning wore on, I neared the plaza with the three chimneys, which is situated in a neighborhood that extends from the edge of Montjuic and blurs into Parallel, with its porno theaters and its ancient memories of sin.

Not even fascist bombers who used to aim at the three chimneys during the civil war could have recognized this place now. Each day, it got more and more crowded with skateboarders from all over Europe. If one were to go missing, nobody would even notice.

As if to compensate for all the skating noise and hot speed, the plaza was also packed with Pakistanis with their cricket sticks.

But the ones I was interested in were the homeless, the guys who slept up against the electric company building.

There were only two still around. A toothless drunken woman who laughed a lot and a tiny man, almost a dwarf, as dirty as she was, who was trying to win her favor with beer.

There wasn’t a trace of the so-called German. He could have been the nighttime tenant of any one of the folded cardboard sructures between buildings that served as precarious beds. Those two were the only ones around to question.

As I approached, the man puffed out a tubercular chest, just in case I wanted to challenge him for Julieta’s fleas. They lowered their guard a bit when I gave them some money. She grabbed the bills with a fierce look directed at her suitor and shoved them in her bra.

I couldn’t get much out of them while they tried lie after lie to see which one could loosen more euros. The description of the so-called German coincided quite a bit with Delgado, but they hadn’t seen him in a while.

I didn’t have to be anywhere and the spectacle of the Pakistanis playing so British a game was a good enough excuse to sit in the shade for a bit.

I’d been there for some time, getting bored watching the formerly colonized swinging their bats, when a thin Moor with several bottles of beer in a sweaty bag approached me. I bought one and he immediately offered me hashish and coke.

I said no, because I never buy on the street, but he didn’t leave, he stuck around, smiling with just his lips.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might have it.”

I was about to tell him to go to hell when it occurred to me this skinny guy might have seen me talking to the couple and might have a certain take on the neighborhood.

“El Delgado. What do you know about El Delgado?”

“A beer?”

I understood and passed him a few bucks, enough for five beers.

He made a vague head movement. “They say he went up,” he said, then turned his back and left, happily searching out other customers.

At that moment, I was certain he was pulling my leg. He was telling me Delgado was up in heaven with the angels. It took me awhile to realize I was wrong.

For a couple of weeks I did some media outreach for an ethnic music festival and I forgot about Delgado. I didn’t even think of him when the news hit about the Russian girl.

She wasn’t young but very small, with a body like a little girl, and they’d found her on the beach at Barceloneta. Her corpse had been left out in the open. Like a message for somebody. Raped and strangled. It was impossible to identify her, but her features suggested she was from the former Soviet Union, where they’re as much Slav as Mongolian: blond hair, high cheekbones, gray eyes that seemed vaguely Asian.

I didn’t think about Delgado again until early one morning when inertia took me to Clavié.

There were a couple of people at the piano, straining themselves singing “... estranyer indenai!” and Paty, who I hadn’t expected to find there, was tearfully killing her fourth gin and tonic.

“You men are all sons of bitches,” she said, warmly gesturing for me to sit with her.

She was in a stormy mood. That afternoon she’d interviewed the father and brothers of a girl who’d recently disappeared. Muslim Algerians with strict traditions, they struggled without news of the girl and became angrier and angrier with every passing hour.

“You must have seen the photos, the fliers. They’re on the lampposts,” she said.

“Maybe she ran off with somebody.”

“Or at this very moment, she’s being raped by twenty shitass machos,” she replied, pronouncing each syllable so as to pound it into my head. “Do you know what will happen if they find out who did it?”

“They’re going to cut him into little pieces?”

“Sweetheart...” she said, her eyes blurry from liquor, tears, and disdain, “he’s gonna hate his mother for ever having given birth to him.”

I was ordering a rum and Coke, which helps recharge the batteries at that hour, when I felt a hug and heard Cavalcanti’s voice.

“You’re exactly who I want to see,” he said. “I’ll buy you whatever you want; let’s talk business.”

“C’mon, man, I’m with my girlfriend. Why don’t we leave it for another day?”

The tango singer wrinkled his nose and, with a smile from golden times, bowed toward Paty.

“My dear lady, darling of Cupid and all gods with good taste, may I steal your intended for just a few minutes?”

Paty grinned from ear to ear because, curiously enough, she and Cavalcanti always got along quite well.

“Oh, noble gentleman,” she answered, “if you take him and lose him in some battle, this lady will be forever grateful.”

Since I had no choice, I followed him to a corner and drank his whiskey while acting like I wasn’t really listening.

“What a woman, pibe, what a woman! You know what I’m saying? You don’t deserve her.”

“Cavalcanti, don’t mess with me. What do you want now?”

“Remember Delgado?”

“The Vietnam War hero who was tortured in the Gulf War?”

For a moment, the nocturnal tango clown disappeared and I felt I was caught in the gaze of a man who perhaps had a couple of corpses to his credit.

“Pibe, you’re never going to learn. You mustn’t believe everything you hear at night. The ones trying to figure things out are cops, or worse. Don’t be fooled by appearances. I come off like a fool because wise guys always lose. But don’t tell me you’re the fool and you haven’t heard yet.”

“If you’re going to make me listen to your philosophy lessons, then at least buy me another whiskey.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and with a wave of the hand he conjured a couple of double shots. “I don’t know if you’ve bumped into El Delgado lately...”

“Why would I?”

“Why would — No, you wouldn’t. But, since your girlfriend told me you’d been to an African ‘holding cell,’ I thought you might have run into him. Delgado is like God, he can show up anywhere, whether among junkies or barefoot Carmelites.”

“I’ve noticed. A black guy told me he sleeps up by the three chimneys and a Moor told me he’s gone to heaven... Why are you interested in Delgado?”

“If you come with me, I’ll tell you.” He took off, with his canine gait, toward the bathroom.

He carved three lines on the sink and after he sucked up two, he was more explicit.

“The Russians have it in for him, and I have to get along with the Russians. You follow me?”

I shrugged as I leaned on the sink.

“It seems he worked as a heavy in some whorehouse. Sometimes the customers... you know, they get out of line and have to be set straight.”

“I figured he worked with his hands somewhere.”

“Something like that. The problem is, he fell in love with the Russians’ little star. Some girl who had been an Olympic champion on the parallel bars. You know, one of those girls who spins in the air as if she doesn’t give a shit about the laws of gravity.”

“So?”

“Nothing. Except the girl was older, though she was so small she looked like a schoolgirl. So what can I tell you, some guys will pay a fortune to get into bed with a schoolgirl.”

“Right, and that animal surrendered to her slender charm—”

“It’s worse than that. The Russians are fuming, they say the idiot stole her from them.”

I don’t know if it was the coke or instinct, but I had a sudden illumination. “Cavalcanti, you’re talking in circles. It’s clear from your description that it’s the little Russian girl who was found on the beach, raped and strangled.”

He stared at me hard. “And what if it is? The Russians are looking for Delgado, and I’m going to hand him over.”

“The big guy killed her?”

“The big guy is obsessed with skinny women with Asian eyes.”

“That doesn’t mean much.”

“Since when are you judge and jury?”

“What am I getting out of this?”

“Now you’re talking,” he said, and mentioned a sum that, for my drooping pockets, was simply exorbitant.

“I’m going to be honest with you, Cavalcanti: I’ll look for him, but I don’t want anything to do with the Russians.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“I’ll look for him, but once I find him, what do you want me to do?”

He must have known how our conversation was going to go because he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a card with a phone number.

“I’ll be there anytime you need me. You tell me where he is and then forget about it. We never had this conversation.”

“And they’re gonna pay just for that?”

“I swear on my blessed little mother. Moreover, and so you won’t think I’m messing with you, I’ll put up the money myself. I have business with the Russians and I don’t want to fuck up the relationship. You have to be generous with investments in order to make the little coins multiply.”

“Cavalcanti...” I said sincerely, “you’ve never seemed as suspicious to me as you do now.”

“Young man,” he said sympathetically, “anybody who lives to be old is suspicious. I thought you already knew that.”

We had to interrupt the conversation because Paty came in all of a sudden and, before heading back out to the streets, handed me a napkin with a phone number scribbled on it and a flier surely taken down from a wall somewhere.

“The Algerians with the missing girl have offered a reward. I wouldn’t turn anybody in but you guys are cut from a different cloth. They’re looking for a big guy with a stupid face who sounds like a friend of yours. If you know where he is... I don’t want to know.”

The girl on the flier also had almond-shaped eyes.

I took the napkin, only to see Cavalcanti wink my way and shake his head with his index finger pointed at his own chest. “You call me first,” he said.

That’s when I remembered the skinny vendor with beer, hashish, and coke at the three chimneys. And that’s why, the next morning, I went back to the plaza where half of Europe’s skaters could be found; the skinny guy didn’t take long to make his appearance.

I repeated my question, doubled my bribe, and got the same answer and a gesture toward Montjuic. That’s when I understood he didn’t mean heaven when he said Delgado “went up,” and I gazed over at the rolling green that, indeed, went up behind the buildings.

The Montjuic has a military fort at the top where tourists have their pictures taken; its paths are crowded with trees and bushes. Those paths have always been the refuge of drug addicts and immigrants who are poorer than dirt. Every now and again, the cops raid and disperse them, but they come back like mushrooms after a rainfall.

I left civilization behind and climbed up to test my luck. I’d never been there before, and a part of me warned that I was headed toward anger’s nesting ground.

I was breathing hard and my knees were buckling when I ran into a tent made of plastic bags, garments rescued from the trash, and clumsily crossed branches.

I don’t know how many people were housed under that roof, but the smell of old dirt and bodies in need of washing was overwhelming.

They barely spoke Spanish and, after their initial surprise, offered me, for very little money, the favors of a girl who was, at most, twelve years old. When I said no they pulled down the pants of an eight-year-old boy, but as soon as they saw my disgust they simply asked me for cigarettes.

As lost as I was, I continued up. How would I ever find Delgado if I couldn’t even figure out how many of these settlements there might be? Trees and all sorts of surprises in the landscape hid them from me, and I ran into them without warning. I soon realized that if I didn’t stop, somebody would probably knife me.

And I wouldn’t have made it at all if it hadn’t been for the calm man.

I named him that because, from the moment he appeared in the midst of the weeds, he gave me the impression that he was beyond good and evil.

“Can I help you?” he asked. “This place can be very inhospitable to unexpected guests.”

I looked him over, which he allowed. He didn’t smile but his eyes permitted my inspection and sought trust. So I went along; I decided to trust him.

“I’m looking for a man in a lot of trouble. If I find him in time, it might do him some good.”

The calm man had thin lips, like a monk, and a slightly foreign accent, which I couldn’t quite place.

“Do you know his name?”

“They call him Delgado, or El Delgado.”

The man nodded. “I know who he is. I know pretty much everybody here... and I make sure that nobody’s problems take us all down. But you still haven’t told me anything that would make me help you.”

“There’s a little girl, an Algerian, who ran away from home and may have been seen with him. The family is Algerian, Muslim, you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean... Our buddy has gotten into a lot of trouble.”

“And you are...?”

“Let’s say I’m from somewhere in the Balkans, one of those places that changes names from time to time. Follow me,” he said as he started up the path. He moved quickly, with the economy of a tiger, or a soldier.

I tried asking him a few questions but both his silence and the panting of my lungs made me shut up right away.

Delgado’s refuge was a green tent, a military leftover.

The calm man approached as if it wasn’t necessary for him to knock, and we entered lowering our heads.

The girl — the little Moor — was preparing tea on a burner and looked scared to death when she saw us enter.

Delgado didn’t make a move; he was sitting on a camouflage sleeping bag. It was clear he trusted the calm man, and that he could only fit in the tent if he was sitting or lying down.

Then the calm man squatted and began to talk in a language that was unintelligible to me, in the sleep-inducing cadence of an animal trainer.

He talked for a long time, and I could see Delgado’s face registering shame. As his tiny eyes filled with tears, he made an attempt to explain himself by wearily gesturing toward the girl. He uttered only two or three phrases but they were enough for the calm man to lower his head as if he needed a minute to think things through.

Then the calm man spoke again, but this time it was with a different tone. It was an order. The kind of order that can’t be disobeyed. “Get your things and go. Your family is waiting for you,” he said to the girl.

“They don’t want me,” she responded, on the verge of tears.

She made a move toward Delgado for protection, but the big guy pushed her away and whispered something that must have been definitive, because she simply lowered her head and left, without taking anything, and without looking back.

“We’re finished here,” said the calm man. “I’ll go back with you, so you don’t get lost.”

When we were almost at the end of the path, I twisted my foot and he let me rest for a moment. I decided to take advantage of the stop to ask him a question: “Can you tell me what the fuck that little girl was doing with Delgado?”

“She’s pregnant, and she’s afraid of her family.”

“Right. Delgado likes skinny little Asian girls.”

“You’re wrong. Delgado, as you call him, is medically incapable of having sex.”

“What are you saying?”

“The truth,” he said. And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he unveiled the story of the big scary guy who, out of the blue, liked to say, “Ah, the slender charm of Chinese women.”

He’d been a soldier — though now I’m not sure if he was Serb, Croatian, or something else — when the people in that part of the world all turned on each other. He was a combatant in one of the many battles in that senseless war, in which the enemy had been a good neighbor until the day before.

In one skirmish, they’d massacred some Muslim families and, as was the custom at the time, they’d raped a young woman — practically a girl, really — until she died. To fight and drink were the only rules in that killing game.

And soon those who fought and drank died in an ambush of which the only survivor was El Delgado. And then a woman — perhaps the dead girl’s sister or mother, a woman thin as a reed, with slanted eyes — took her revenge on Delgado.

Two days later they left him for dead. They had used needles and wooden splinters to make a porcupine of his body. Pincers and boots did away with his teeth. And with a pair of pliers, or a nutcracker, the woman tore off his genitals. Never again would the guy known as Delgado be a whole man.

“You see... he survived so he could carry his cross in this world,” said the calm man. “You can go the rest of the way by yourself.” Then he turned his back on me and disappeared into the thicket.

I only really believed half of what he told me. He didn’t quite convince me and I wasn’t going to let him screw up my little business deal. That’s why I made both calls, to Cavalcanti and to the Algerians. With my information, it wouldn’t be hard for them to find the tent.

A few minutes later I got scared, and I began running down the hillside, out to the streets, to that other city, with a couple of tears in my clothes and some scratches on my hands.

It was like arriving in a foreign country. I had a moment of disorientation when I saw three blondes — English or German — showing off their young flesh with short skirts. And I confirmed my border crossing when I saw a group of Chinese or Japanese stopped at a corner with their bird steps and avid tourist eyes.

The Russians arrived first. It was in all the papers. A photo of the Russian gymnast was found in the battered giant’s pockets, making it easy for the police to close the case. The guy was crazy, so they attributed the rape and murder of the Chinese girl to him; he carried this blame to his grave.

Everyone was pleased, myself included, although I still had some doubts.

Had El Delgado been connected to the Russian girl? Maybe. He was crazy, he’d had his balls cut off, and he’d given refuge to a pregnant little Moor — this all made him seem like a delirious savior of whores and injured women.

Had he been the victim of a crossfire, a settling of scores which would have been best avoided at any cost? I don’t know, I don’t want to know. What probably happened was that he was killed because of his gift for ubiquity: he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe what killed him was his obsession and his disturbing mantra about the slender charm of Chinese women. In any case, he’d been dead a long time, he just didn’t know it.

Everyone was pleased, myself included. Sometimes a lack of ambition can save your ass. It’s best to be content with the leftovers from the lions.

The Police Inspector Who Loved Books by Francisco González Ledesma

El Raval

Everybody knows that Méndez is an old cop who lives (badly) on the streets of Barcelona. Just like everybody knows Méndez eats cheaply in the city’s worst restaurants; every now and then, the owners invite him for a free meal so he’ll recommend them to the Michelin Guide. One time, to support his friends, he took a TV crew to one of those places so they’d give it some publicity, but after they ate, the cameraman couldn’t make it to the door.

As everybody suspects (although they don’t know for sure), Méndez will never get anywhere because he doesn’t believe in a single law except the law of the streets. Plus, he feels sorry for petty delinquents and rarely arrests them. Nonetheless, they say he once detained a fellow with a limp. As everybody suspects, Méndez was watching from the balcony at the station on Nou de la Rambla Street, which was the most sordid in all of Barcelona; it was so bad that sometimes not even the cops would go in at night for fear that they’d be assaulted in the doorway. From that balcony, Méndez could see all the neighborhood’s thefts, assaults, fights, and philandering.

There are other things the whole world knows about Méndez, the old cop: for instance, that his apartment is full of books and that he always carries one in his pocket, which on is why the lapels his uniform are always out of shape. There’s a great antiquarian book fair in Barcelona each year and Méndez is a loyal customer because he loves stories by dead novelists. In fact, he has more books than he can possibly read in what’s left of his life.

That’s not so uncommon. There was a great writer from Barcelona, Néstor Luján, who kept books even in the bathroom, and there’s a true story about a bourgeois man who had so many books that his wife got fed up and told him, “Me or the books.” And the bourgeois man said, “The books.”

Well, I’ve already mentioned that Méndez had more books than he could possibly read in what he has left of life, and that it’s not so unusual — in spite of the fact that Barcelona’s climate is usually better for taking a stroll than staying at home with a book. One time, Méndez met another man, a senior, who suffered the same problem.

“I’m obsessed with books, I love them,” Méndez’s friend told him one day. “I’ve spent my life collecting them and taking care of them. But I’m desperate, because I now have more books than I can possibly read in a lifetime. To make matters worse, I’m going blind.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Méndez.

“The day I realize I can no longer read, I’ll kill myself, because then my life will be useless.”

Méndez understood all too well.

And this is where we arrive on terrain that nobody’s too sure about, but that we suspect. We suspect two things: first, that Méndez owns more than one illegal gun — well, the man’s spent half his life in the company of thieves; second, that he’s bitter, but keeps it secret. Though others will say he’s never lost faith in humanity.

So Méndez replied to the old man, but it’s unclear whether he did so with ill intentions, or because he thought nothing would come of it: “Here, I’m going to give you this antique pistol, which is worth quite a bit. I’m giving it to you so you can kill yourself whenever you want.”

The bibliophile must have been pretty determined because he took it without hestitation. “Thank you,” he said.

Six months went by and Méndez didn’t see the old man again, although he imagined he probably couldn’t even pick up a book anymore.

So Méndez went looking for him in Las Ramblas, in the old bookstores, in the city libraries, in the few parks left in Barcelona, trapped between blocks of apartments.

He came across many book lovers, but not his friend. Until one day he finally found him. He was wearing very thick glasses.

“Did you make it through your whole collection?” Méndez gasped.

“Absolutely not!” said the man. “You should see what I still have left!”

“Then what did you do with the gun? You didn’t kill yourself...”

“No way! I sold the gun to buy another book.”

About the Contributors

Eric Taylor-Aragón is half-Peruvian and half-British, and graduated with a degree in literature from UC Berkeley. He’s currently at work on his second novel, Pocketman. He lived in Barcelona (Barri Gòtic and El Raval) for three happy, wine-drenched years, and currently lives a nomadic existence between the United States and Spain.

Raúl Argemí is the author of seven novels that have been translated into various languages: El Gordo, el Francés y el Ratón Pérez, Los muertos siempre pierden los zapatos, Penúltimo nombre de guerra, Patagonia Chú Chú, Siempre la misma música, Retrato de familia con muerta, and La última caravana. His work has been awarded several prizes, such as the Dashiell Hammett 2005 as well as the Luis Berenguer, Brigada 21, and Novelpol awards. He was born in Argentina and lives in Barcelona.

David Barba, born in Barcelona in 1973, is a writer, cultural journalist, and professor of journalism and humanities at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, where he also teaches meditation. He published the official biography of Spanish porn star Nacho Vidal and is an expert in pornography. He lives in Barcelona.

Lolita Bosch was born in Barcelona in 1970, but has lived in Albons, Spain, India, the United States, and, for ten years, Mexico City. She writes in both Spanish and Catalan, directs a literary collective, and lives in Barcelona with her dog. For more information, visit www.lolitabosch.com.

Antonia Cortijos was born in Barcelona in 1948. She graduated from the Escuela Massana de Barcelona, where she studied design and painting, two passions she still dedicates time to when she isn’t writing. Cortijos is the author of the highly acclaimed thriller El diario de tapas rojas, as well as Ruido de agua and the story collection Isla Plana. Her fouth novel, Atlántidas, will be published in 2011 and she is at work on a fifth book.

Jordi Sierra I Fabra was born in Barcelona in 1947. He has published hundreds of books and received dozens of literary awards from both sides of the Atlantic, among them Spain’s National Literature Prize, and is that country’s most widely read children’s and young adult author — his books have sold more than ten million copies. He is the founder of the Fundaciò Jordi Sierra i Fabra in Barcelona and the Fundación Taller de Letras Jordi Sierra i Fabra for Latin America.

Cristina Fallarás is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in El Mundo newspaper and several Spanish television and radio programs. She is the author of the novels La otra Enciclopedia Catalana, Rupturas, No acaba la noche, and Así murió el poeta Guadalupe, which was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett prize in literary crime fiction in 2010. She was born in Zaragoza and has lived in Barcelona since 1986.

Isabel Franc was born in Barcelona and is the author of the celebrated Lola Van Guardia trilogy featuring Emma García, the first lesbian female detective in Spanish literature. She is the editor for the new Spanish version of Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes and was awarded Spain’s Premio Shangay for No me llames cariño. In 2010 Franc published a graphic novel about breast cancer, Alicia en un mundo real, with the illustrator Susan Martín.

Francisco González Ledesma was born in Barcelona in 1927. He won the Premio Internacional de Novela for Tiempo de venganza, a novel originally banned by Franco, when he was twenty-one. In 1984, he received the Premio Planeta for Crónica sentimental en rojo, which featured his most well-known protagonist, Detective Méndez. The Detective Méndez series soon became an international success. He was awarded the Premio Pepe Carvalho in 2005.

Adriana V. López is the founding editor of Críticas magazine and edited the story collection Fifteen Candles. López’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times and the Washington Post, and her essays and fiction have been published in anthologies such as Border-Line Personalities, Colonize This! and Juicy Mangoes. Currently, she is translating Susana Fortes’s novel Waiting for Robert Capa, and she divides her time between New York and Madrid.

Andreu Martín is the author of various novels, including Prótesis (made into a film directed by Vicente Aranda) and El hombre de la navaja, which have both won numerous prizes including the Premio Círculo del Crimen and the Premio Hammet. He also creates screenplays, television scripts, plays, and children’s literature. A regular contributor to El Periódico and La Vanguardia, his most recent novel, Bellísimas personas, won the Premio Ateneo de Sevilla in 2000. He lives in Barcelona.

Valerie Miles is an American writer, translator, and publisher who has been living in Spain for over twenty years. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, La Vanguardia, and Granta en español. After directing the imprint Emecé for some years and then the Madrid-based Alfaguara, she has recently launched a new publishing house, Duomo Ediciones, for the Italian group Mauri Spagnol. She lives in Barcelona.

Imma Monsó was born in the western Catalonian city of Lleida. Her novels and stories, originally written in Catalan, have been translated into various languages and awarded prizes such as Premi Ciutat de Barcelona, Premi de l’Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana, and the Premi Prudenci Bertrana, among others. She lives in Barcelona.

Achy Obejas is the translator (into Spanish) for Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize — winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. She is also the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed novels Ruins and Days of Awe; and editor of Havana Noir. Obejas is currently the Sor Juana Writer in Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana.

Carmen Ospina directs the digital program at Random House Mondadori in Barcelona. Born and raised in Colombia, she lived in New York for eight years where she co-edited Críticas magazine and worked as an editor at Umbrage Editions and a freelance journalist for World Press Review and NY1 Noticias. She has lived in Barcelona since 2006 and rides her bike every day.

Santiago Roncagliolo, born in Lima, Peru, in 1975, is the author of the political thriller Abril rojo, which won Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize in 2006. His first novel, Pudor, was adapted to the big screen in 2007. His most recent offering is the sci-fi novel Tan cerca de la vida. His books have sold more than 150,000 copies in the Spanish-speaking world and have been translated into more than thirteen languages. He lives in Barcelona.

Teresa Solana was born in Barcelona in 1962 and published her first novel, Un crim imperfecte, winner of the Brigada 21 award, in 2006. She subsequently published the novel Drecera al paradís and the story collection Set casos de sang i fetge i una història d’amor. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Her latest novel, Negres tempestes, recently received the Crims de Tinta prize for the best noir novel in Catalan.