Enric Rosquelles:
I am used to being the object of resentful gazes
I am used to being the object of resentful gazes, but it was only that summer, my last summer in Z, that I began to notice something else in the way people were looking at me, a mixture of malice and anticipation. At first I presumed it was because of the approaching elections; there were quite a few people on the City Council who had spent the previous four years waiting to see Pilar defeated, and me with her. I was slow to realize that this time it was different; the council employees who still hadn’t gone on vacation seemed physically rather than mentally possessed by a kind of unspoken suspicion. I tried to be pleasant but it was no use; their gazes remained fixed on the windows or the tables, the washbasins or the stairs. Not one disrespectful remark or barbed joke was uttered in my presence, yet I couldn’t help feeling that I was being condemned. In the end, as always, I put it all down to stress, the crazy hours I was working and my private problems, because, after all, no one had said anything that could be construed as criticism, and the usual sycophants went on congratulating me whenever one of my undertakings came to fruition. Even the projects that withered away, to stick to botanical metaphors, met with an appreciative response, a consoling remark of some sort: the town’s governance would need to develop before such an initiative could make its mark, and so on. The fact is that I lowered my guard, and those signs, which could have saved me so much grief had I been able to read them correctly, passed me by, leaving only a vague sense of persecution, to which I was in any case accustomed. At the time Pilar had just come back from a trip to Mallorca, partly work, partly a vacation, during which one of the party’s big wheels had suggested, half in earnest, half in jest—in keeping with the dominant mood in Mallorca at the time—that she could have a significant role to play in the Catalan parliament. Pilar, needless to say, returned to Z in a state of high excitement, and was constantly on the phone to people in Barcelona, the few who had stayed in the city or had come back already from their vacations, which is to say very few indeed, but that did not prevent her from getting a head start and sounding out, as they say, a number of well-placed and influential friends. I realize now that her febrile excitement worked in my favor, but it also allowed me to relax my vigilance, and that was to cost me dearly in the long run. Some advice for beginners: never drop your guard. Pilar, my nervous indecisive Pilar, needed to talk to someone she could trust, and as usual I was the one she chose. She was facing a moral dilemma: should she stand for re-election as mayor, knowing that in a few months’ time she would have to resign? Would her supporters feel snubbed when she took up a seat in the regional parliament? Or would they understand that, in her new position, she would be better placed to defend the interests of Z? We considered the problem from various points of view, and when I had convinced her that there was in fact no moral dilemma, she felt confident about the future, as she put it. So confident that she invited a few friends from her inner circle to celebrate in advance as it were, at Z’s best restaurant, which specializes in seafood and is one of the priciest places on the Costa Brava. And that’s where I made my second mistake; it was understandable, but I will never forgive myself. I took Nuria to the dinner. What a night of dizzy joy it was! A night full of stars and tears and music strewn over the sea. I can still see the looks on their faces when they saw me turn up arm in arm with Nuria! There were four couples: the mayor and her husband, the councilors in charge of culture and tourism with their respective wives, and the surprise couple, Nuria and myself. It all went smoothly at the start. Enric, the mayor’s husband, was particularly cheerful and sparky. A cynic might have attributed his good mood to the prospect of Pilar spending a lot of time away in Barcelona. It was a pleasure to listen to him, truly it was. Normally I can’t stand a raconteur, but Enric’s an exception. Before the entrées arrived, he had us all in stitches, treating us to mischievous anecdotes about various apparently idiotic acquaintances and even friends. Enric Gibert’s reputation in Z as an intellectual and a man of the world is well deserved. Normally he’s a serious and reserved person, but a celebration is a celebration. Maybe Nuria’s presence helped to unfetter his wit, I don’t know, but faced with her beauty there were only two options: to remain silent throughout the evening or to be an intelligent, vivacious, dazzling conversationalist. I have no doubt that Pilar was glad when she saw us walk in together. Nuria’s beauty was like a prefiguration or a symbol of her triumph, but apart from that, I know that my happiness, the happiness of her faithful lieutenant, made her happy too; ingratitude is not one of Pilar’s faults, and, as I have said already, she had every good reason to be grateful to me. With the arrival of the entrée, Z’s traditional fisherman’s soup, the mayor’s husband was briefly upstaged: the owner’s nephew came over to the table with two bottles of wine from the special reserve and took the opportunity to ask Pilar how her vacation in Mallorca had gone. Pilar and he are the same age, and I think they were even at school together. The owner’s nephew is one of the most active members of the Convergencia i Unión party in Z, but that didn’t prevent him from being on frank and friendly terms with Pilar. Until recently, political rivalry was civilized in Z; after the scandal, of course, they cast aside all propriety and revealed their true, bestial natures, but at the time our social interactions were still governed by common sense. Those were, in fact, the last days of common sense. Or to be exact, the last hours . . .
Remo Morán
The days that preceded the discovery of the body
The days that preceded the discovery of the body were undeniably strange: freshly painted inside and out, and silent, as if we could somehow all sense the imminence of a calamity. I remember during my second year in Z, the body of a teenage girl, almost a child, was found in a vacant lot; she’d been killed and raped. The killer was never found. Around that time there was a series of murders, all fitting the same pattern; they began in Tarragona and moved up the coast, leaving a trail of bodies (girls killed and raped, in that order) all the way to Port Bou, as if the killer was a tourist on the way home, but a very leisurely tourist, because a whole summer season elapsed between the first and the last of the crimes. That was a good summer for business. We made money, and there still wasn’t much competition. As you would expect, the police found some of the culprits: screwed-up kids, office workers who had always led quiet, irreproachable lives, a German truck driver, and even, in the most widely publicized case, a policeman. But at least three of the crimes remained unsolved, including the one in Z. I remember that on the day the body was discovered (the girl, I mean, not the body I found), before I heard anything about it, I felt that something bad had happened in the town. The streets were luminous, as the streets of childhood sometimes seem in memory, and although we were having a hot summer the morning was cool, and had the feel of something freshly made, an impression that extended to the houses, the washed-down sidewalks, and the faint but clearly recognizable sounds. Then I heard the news and soon it was the topic of every conversation. The mystery, the sense of suspended reality, gradually dissipated. In just the same way, the four or five days before I found the body were atypical days, not a succession of fragments and hours, but solid blocks dominated by a single unrelenting light: the will to persist whatever the cost, unhearing, unseeing, without the slightest groan of protest. The feeling was no doubt intensified by Nuria’s absence, which left me dejected and anxious, and by the almost certain knowledge that, whatever I did, my relationship with her was con
demned to failure. I think it was only then that I realized how much I had come to love her. But the realization didn’t help. On the contrary. When I think of those afternoons now, it makes me laugh, but I wasn’t laughing at the time, and even now, there’s often something strained about my laughter. I listened to Loquillo, especially the sad songs, and hardly left my room or the triangle formed by my room, the hotel bar and a bar near the campground that was being run that season by a Dutch guy and a Spanish girl who were friends of Alex’s. But drinking in a seaside town buzzing with tourists isn’t really drinking. It only gives you a headache. I longed for the bars of Barcelona or Mexico City, but I knew that those places, those perfect dives, had vanished forever. And maybe that’s why, a couple of times, I went to the campground looking for Gasparín. I never found him. The second time I went, the receptionist informed me, though no one had asked her opinion, that my friend was an odd boy (a boy!), and that as far as she could tell he hadn’t slept for a couple of weeks. On more than one occasion she had gone to fetch him, so he could give them a hand, since they were short-staffed on the day shift. But his tent was always empty. She had only seen him about three times since he started work, and that wasn’t normal. I tried to reassure her by explaining that he was a poet; she replied that her boyfriend, the Peruvian, was a poet too, but he didn’t behave like that. Like a zombie. I didn’t feel like arguing with her. Especially when, examining her fingernails, she remarked that poetry was a waste of time. She was right; on the planet of happy eunuchs and zombies, poetry is a waste of time. These days she’s living with the Peruvian, and although I couldn’t make it to the wedding, I sent them a state-of-the-art pressure cooker. That was Lola’s suggestion; we sometimes go shopping together for our son, although it’s really an excuse for a coffee and a chat somewhere in downtown Gerona. In the end it was better that I didn’t find Gasparín, because my reason for wanting to see him was totally selfish: I wanted to talk, pour out my soul, and reminisce, with a little help from a friend, about the golden streets we had trodden together in the old days (the good old days), but in fact that was all just a way of skirting around what was, for me, the real issue: Nuria transformed into a series of images that had nothing to do with the girl I know. For my dark purposes a sports aficionado would have been more useful, but the only person I could think of was the barber, José, and he knew nothing about figure skating anyway. So in the end I had no one to talk to, which was just as well; it forced me to let the time go by in a more dignified manner. I think I said this already, but I’ll say it again just in case: it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a corpse. It had happened twice before. The first time was in Chile, in Concepción, the capital of the south. I was looking out the big window of the gymnasium where I was imprisoned along with about a hundred other people: it was a November night in 1973, the moon was full, and in the courtyard I saw a fat guy surrounded by a ring of police detectives. They were all beating him with their fists, their feet, and rubber truncheons. After a while, the fat guy stopped protesting. Then he fell face down on the ground and it was only then that I realized he was barefoot. One of the detectives lifted his head by the hair and examined it for a moment. Another one said he must be dead. A third remembered having heard something about the fat guy having heart problems. They dragged him away by the feet. In the gymnasium just me and one other prisoner had witnessed the scene; the rest were bundled up sleeping wherever they could find a place, and the air was so thick with snores and sighs I thought we were going to suffocate. I came across the second dead body in Mexico, on the outskirts of Nogales, a city in the north. I was traveling with two friends, in a car that belonged to one of them, and we were going to meet two girls, who in the end never turned up. Before we got to the meeting place, I got out to urinate and probably wandered too far from the highway. The body was between two humps of orange-colored earth, face up, arms outstretched, with a small hole in the forehead, just above the nose; it looked like it could have been made by a hole-punch, although it had in fact been made by a bullet, a .22. A faggot’s gun, said one of my friends. The other friend was Gasparín; he took a look at the body but didn’t say anything. Sometimes in the mornings, when I’m having breakfast on my own, I think I would have loved to be a detective. I’m pretty observant, and I can reason deductively, and I’m a keen reader of crime fiction. If that’s any use . . . which it isn’t . . . Anyway, as Hans Henny Jahn, I think, once wrote: if you find a murder victim, better brace yourself, because the bodies will soon be coming thick and fast . . .