Barcelona Shadows (13 page)

“No, go on, please.”

“With what?”

“When did she go to the store?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I didn’t mean to say it. I made a mistake. She didn’t go there much and that’s it.”

“And why were they arresting her, the police?”

“For a million reasons. Once they came to the house, with Pepitu, asking me if the boy was mine. Turns out that someone had accused Enriqueta of panhandling with him. A few days later they brought me some other boy, saying that they had arrested her again for the same thing, and that I should keep an eye on my children. I told them that he wasn’t mine, and it turned out his mother was a neighbourhood woman who regularly bought herbs from her for infusions, and it seems she was a bundle of nerves and she would leave her son in Enriqueta’s care while she shopped for groceries at the Boqueria.”

“But did Enriqueta need to beg?”

“No! Not at all. We always had money coming in, and she would buy dresses and jewellery she never even wore.”

“Then I don’t understand why she did it.”

“Out of greed. Because she likes money, and she likes hoodwinking people.”

“And do you know where the money came from?”

“I spent all day lying in bed, eating gruel. You think I knew anything?”

She seems sincere, but she’s not. She knows full well what that woman had her hands into. But she is incapable of admitting it. It’s too painful for her. I have to ask her about Angelina again, before she changes the subject.

“The money coming in wasn’t legal.”

“She was wicked. It must have been money from her evil deeds.”

“Before you said that Enriqueta had Angelina when you had just lost a child.”

“Yes.” Her voice trembles.

“But you are a widow.”

She lowers her eyes again.

“Enriqueta told me that in order to get over that half-dead state I was in, the best thing to do would be to have another child. She told me that she knew people from good families who would be thrilled to knock me up.”

“And she brought them to the house.”

“For six months. Sometimes three or four in a single day, sometimes weeks would pass without anybody showing up. Enriqueta would dress me up elegant, real pretty, with crêpe and bright colours, and she’d paint my face and put shiny earrings on me. I was like a doll. Today you have a visitor, she’d say, and she’d get
me ready. Then the man, or men, would come in and—well, you can imagine. This way you’ll have a child of good lineage, healthy and strong and with money on the horizon, she would repeat at the end of every visit. But I had my doubts, because I was so weak that I didn’t get my periods, and I couldn’t get pregnant. I felt dirty, fouled, like a whore, but I couldn’t resist because I had no strength, and because Enriqueta frightened me more and more.”

“Did she threaten you?”

“She would hit me. She would yell at me, saying she’d kill me if I didn’t show more effort, she’d already had one of the men complain that doing it with me was like doing it with a corpse.”

“But you got pregnant.”

“Yes.” Her eyes filled with tears. “But it went wrong from the very beginning. She forced me to stay at home, because in my fragile state I could lose the child at any moment. Luckily the visits stopped, but the following months were a nightmare. She had me tied up at home and she wouldn’t let me see a doctor. I was alone, and Juanitu did his own thing, and I only had Enriqueta, who was the one who woke me up, fed me and took care of me when I had fever, vomits or dizziness, and I had a lot. I was like a dog, and Enriqueta said she wasn’t sure, that the pregnancy was very complicated because there were too many evil spirits in that house And after a few weeks she got pregnant too.”

“Enriqueta?”

“Yes. And I thought she wasn’t able to, that that was why she always sought out others’ children, because she was like a piece of dry land that had been sown with salt. She said that Juanitu had given her a child, and that we would have two babies in the house at the same time, that fortune was smiling on us. But you could see she didn’t believe all that, that she was just lying so I
would hold on to the baby and not lose it. She was afraid that I might make myself abort: she hid the parsley and knitting needles from me. She was controlling me. She had me locked up.”

“And you lost the baby.”

“No, not until the birth. Enriqueta gave me all kinds of drugs to have a quick delivery. But it was so painful that I lost consciousness. When I came to, Enriqueta sat by my side, her hands bloody. The room was silent and she stared at me. It was born dead, she said. The cord was wrapped around its neck and it came out bluish, not breathing, poor thing. My boy. My baby. Enriqueta had already buried him before I woke up. She assured me it was better that way, that in my state I couldn’t stand the pain and I could die. But I already wanted to die. I wanted to die.”

“You never saw him, the boy?”

“No. When I asked where she had buried him she told me that it was in a well in the flat on Tallers Street. I never had the courage to go over there.”

“And Angelina?”

“Angelina was born a few weeks later.”

Maria Pujaló has spent the last two years suspecting that the girl is her daughter. That Enriqueta tricked her about her pregnancy and the birth. When she looked at the baby’s face, she saw her reflection. But something inside her has helped to keep up the lie, as if it were necessary to survive, as if she had to forget to go on living.

“And what did Enriqueta do?”

“What do you mean?”

“With Angelina, with Juanitu, with you. How did she act?”

“She blamed me for what happened. Said that if I hadn’t been such a bad omen my boy would be alive now. That I wasn’t
as strong as she was, she who had a beautiful girl. And then she pushed me aside.”

“How?”

“She ignored me. And she spoke ill of me to Juanitu, who would then come and give me a tongue-lashing because I was making Enriqueta nervous. He said that I had no consideration, that now that they were parents I was making their life impossible, that I was envious, that I was covetous. He went so far as to say that I shouldn’t go near Angelina, that he was afraid I would hurt her. Me!”

“And you left.” “Yes. I left, far from them, with Pepitu. And I found a shelter

here in Vilassar. And over time I met a good man, a widower as well, with three young ’uns, and he asked for my hand.”

“And you haven’t seen Enriqueta again.”

“I don’t want to know a thing about her. I already told you that I haven’t spoken to my brother for some time.”

Maria Pujaló squeezes her handkerchief hard when Pepitu comes running through the door, his face all dirty. She grabs him under the chin with one hand and spits into the handkerchief, which she uses to clean him. The boy looks at me and stares, as if hypnotized, as always happens with children when they see me.

“Pepitu, don’t look at the man that way, it’s rude.”

In the nights, Maria dreams that Enriqueta enters her room, in the darkness, ties her to the bed and sucks the life out of her. When she wakes up, she is never sure it was just a nightmare.

But it’s best she doesn’t know that now Blackmouth, when he knocks on Enriqueta’s door, finds Angelina opening it. Enormous eyes, very short, badly cut hair, with a fabric band around her head. Her little dress is in rags and she’s barefoot.

“Your mama’s not here?”

The girl shakes her head no.

Blackmouth doesn’t hear any noise from inside the flat. Angelina turns and goes back to playing in her room.

The boy enters and closes the door with the bolt. He moves slowly, afraid he’ll be caught, but also aroused. The kitchen is empty and orderly, with no sign that anyone cooks there. There is no smell of broth, or meat or fish or anything. He passes quickly through the room with burgundy velvet walls, expensive furnishings and mirrors on every wall, trying not to leave footprints in the thick carpet. Enriqueta’s bedroom is empty, as is the walk-in closet where she hides the youngsters she collects off the streets, which locks with a sliding door. Angelina is sitting in her room, playing dolls with sticks. Blackmouth realizes that they are small bones, like tiny phalanges. They must have been boiled because there is no trace of flesh or tendons or blood.

“What are you playing?”

“Dead little brothers and sisters,” she says, her focus still on her game.

“And how do you play?”

“This is my daughter.” She lifts one of the bones. “And she plays with the other brothers and sisters.”

“The other ones aren’t your children?”

“No.” She hits one against the other. “They are other people’s children. And when she’s hungry, she eats them.”

Blackmouth is so scared that he gets an erection.

“Can I play?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to play with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mama says I shouldn’t pay you no mind.”

The boy caresses the girl’s nape, and looks for the button to undo her clothes.

“And what do you think?”

The girl stops playing and looks outside the room, as if she had heard something. Blackmouth gets frightened and stops short, but he doesn’t take his hand away. With the other, he touches himself inside his trousers, grabbing his member.

“Mama says you’re repulsive.”

Blackmouth has pulled his penis out and approaches Angelina, who is in her own world, drumming with the finger bones again.

“You and I could be good friends, you know?”

“And she told me that if I play with you she’ll kill ya.”

K
EEPING WATCH
over the Xalet del Moro isn’t easy. In fact, it’s not easy keeping watch over any place. It’s a question of waiting and waiting and waiting some more, of not getting discouraged, of giving yourself a goal that you may never reach, always with the idea that you are exposed, that everyone can see you, because it is so obvious that you are watching, that the roles are switched and there you are, like a zoo animal munching on grass as rivers of visitors flow by.

I am Patience itself. I wait, I observe and I only act when intervention is necessary, with surgical precision. I’m not innocent, I don’t need to tell you that. But neither am I guilty. I’m just another person and at the same time I’m everything, because, in the end,
everything
reverts to me.

Moisès Corvo has spent four afternoons on Escudellers Street, feeling that he was being watched when he was the one spying, alternating between the lamp posts, the doorways and the café in front of the brothel, which is the best spot for vigilance but also where you get identified as police the quickest. And he’s sick of it.

He saw the girls enter punctually at six through a side door, covered in cloaks and protected by a huge man, as wide as he was tall, who was also waiting for them. Here everyone waits, everyone is on the lookout, but nothing happens. Not a trace of
the gimp or the monster or their goddamn mother. It seems this is all just something out of the imagination of whores, another one of those rumours that get under the skin of the poor because they want to think somebody gives a fig for them, even if it’s just a made-up creature from hell.

The Xalet del Moro is named for its arabesque architectural style, an exotic combination of mosaics, arches and filigree work on white stone. Even though it’s known that the building serves as a knocking shop, or at least that’s the popular suspicion, few people have entered. You should see how the clients begin to show up, in dribs and drabs, starting at nine in the evening, in carriages with windows hidden by curtains or in cars that stop right in front of the door. Moisès Corvo hasn’t recognized anyone, because they enter too covered up and too quickly. They’ll have plenty of time to shed their layers and take things slowly once they’re inside.

I like you. I wouldn’t want to be one of you, sorry; I didn’t mean it that way. I like you because sometimes, notwithstanding all the years I’ve been with you, you still manage to surprise me. As I said before, I’m the one waiting for you. Occasionally, though, it happens the other way round, and it is one of you who receives me after a wait. Today, 20th December, I met the poet Joan Maragall. I knew you’d come, he told me. And we chatted for a while, since neither of us was in a rush. I enjoy coming for poets. They aren’t so different from each other, they’re always searching for the less common gaze, the hidden side of life, they are always observing, like me. Like everyone, sure, but they do it expressly, wilfully. And will is the part of your souls that I most envy. Maragall, who had been sick for months, if not years, had prepared himself for our meeting. He had accepted it with both lucidity and fear, and he had collected questions that he asked me
one by one, with a serenity I appreciated. It’s nice to find that, among millions and millions of “why mes”, there is someone who asks me “why you”. Please, when I come to meet you, don’t ask me why it’s your turn. It’s like questioning the queue at the market stall, and no one does that. Listen to his verses and tell me they’re not thrilling, if only I were capable of being thrilled:

I was very sorry not to be able to answer all the poet’s questions, but I don’t have answers, merely some consolations.

The day I met Joan Maragall, Moisès Corvo had gone to see Makarov. The inspector needs to go into the brothel right now, he’s been waiting too long, he’s choked with urgency, the sense of an imminent attack from his particular monster. And he’s not too far off, because Enriqueta is about to kill another child.

It’s not that there hasn’t been work recently, anyhow. There have been steady, violent deaths in Barcelona, almost every day. It’s just that Moisès Corvo and Juan Malsano (but especially the former) haven’t really worried too much about them. There are suicides every single day, too: workers who stay in the factory when it closes and hang themselves from one of the beams; a spurned banker threw himself from the terrace of the Hotel Colón; more than one person—more than two or three—unable to rebound from despondency have let themselves be decapitated by the train, lying down on the tracks… and like that there is a long list of etceteras. But both for the police and for me, we don’t fool ourselves, it’s routine, a series of procedures in single file that
must be completed: the removal of the cadaver, the identification, the autopsy report and the case file. Red tape. I don’t even look at them, poor people, in such a rush to the finish line as if there were anything better on the other side. Or as if there were anything at all. In the case of the banker, the chief pressured them a bit, as usually happens when the dead person is important or wealthy (or both), but he didn’t take them off the case that was really weighing them down.

Malsano had been questioning the nightwatchmen of the district. If anyone knows who is active at night it’s them. But this time he had no luck there either. There are dozens of gimps in the neighbourhood, but none of the watchmen had seen any of them with children.

“You’re looking for the bogeyman,” says Severiano, one of the most veteran. His face is marked by smallpox and his eyes are so sunken they look like two black holes.

Malsano nods and releases the smoke from his lungs slowly. A cigarette burns down between his fingers.

“You aren’t the only one,” continues Severiano. He grabs his bunch of keys and lifts them to the height of his face; they are on an iron ring with all the keys hanging from the lower end. “You’ll have to hurry up and find him, because if the others find him first”—he starts to lift keys, one by one, three by three—“you’ll have to pick him up in pieces.” Now all the keys are on the upper part, gathered in a ball by the watchman’s big, scaly hand.

“What do people know about him?”

“Same as you. And they’re livid. They don’t trust the police.”

“We’re doing all we can.”

“You don’t have to tell me. But people think that what you aren’t doing, they have to do themselves.”

On the way to Escudellers Street, Vladimir Makarov doesn’t hide like the rest of the Xalet del Moro clients. The Tyrolean hat, the bison coat and a lacquered cane with a handle in the shape of an ant head isn’t the best outfit for passing incognito.

Moisès Corvo doesn’t get why they let the illusionist into the elite bordello, even though his claim that he’s a distant relative of the tsars has opened a lot of doors for him. That must be why he doesn’t hide: he likes to be seen going in, for people to think he has possibilities, that he’s a dandy, a moneyed bohemian, and he makes himself as noticeable as a turkey surrounded by ducks.

“Now, when you go in, don’t make me look bad. The Xalet del Moro is different from all the other brothels. The girls are prettier and have more sophisticated vices.”

“What do you want me to say? I’ve been in more brothels than a confessor.”

“I can assure you that what you’ll see inside here, though, you’ve never tried.”

“Mr Makarov… I’ve seen too much deviance to be surprised now.”

“Man, I wouldn’t call it deviance exactly…”

They chat animatedly as they cross the Rambla in the darkness. A pickpocket recognizes the inspector and greets him with a false smile that Corvo doesn’t return.

“Once destroyed pots started showing up on the street.”

“Pots?”

“Yes, with geraniums and flowers. All the pots of every plant on the lower storeys…”

“Lower storeys in your lower stories, you’re being redundant.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Corvo was discovering that Makarov is a bit scattered, and that he has trouble following a conversation without
putting in his two cents’ worth. “…The pots on Ample Street were broken first thing in the morning. If it wasn’t the wind, it must have been someone with a terrible botanical phobia who went around breaking them at night.”

“A difficult case, no doubt.”

The policeman pulls a face, and here we go again.

“We decided to wait. Around midnight a guy showed up, about your height, dark skin, not badly dressed, not particularly well dressed, walking down Serra Street.”

“Dragging his balls through the dirt.”

“Are you a magician or a comedian?”

“A master of the vanishing act and an artist of the mind.”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Yes, sorry. Go on, please, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of police work.”

“It was obvious he was guilty. He was scouting around,
suspiciously
, and looking at the geraniums that were still standing in a… libidinous way.”

“Is it possible to look at a geranium in a libidinous way?”

“Just like you can cover a mouth with homicidal intent. If you want me to demonstrate, just ask.”

“And what happened?”

“The bloke pulled out his willy and stuck it into the soil.”

“What?”

“Yup. And he moved his hips around to penetrate it. Pretty well, actually, you could tell he had experience.”

“And you arrested him.”

“No! It was too amusing to interrupt. We let him do it, and he got more and more excited. By the fourth screw he had his trousers at his ankles, and his legs covered in dirt and leaves.
When he tired of one, he threw it to the floor and went for the next. He left the street filled with crap.”

“People are sick.”

“I told you. We called him the geranium-fucker. We scared him a little and he took off. We haven’t seen him since.”

“He wasn’t a gimp?”

“If only.”

“Inspector, take this card.” The magician gives him a two of coins. “When they show you the king of clubs, hold it up.”

Makarov advances and knocks on the door with his cane. The policeman fears that the doorman who opens it will recognize him from the last few days, but he breathes a sigh of relief when he sees that his eyes are too close together and his head too small to fit even a little brain in there. The bouncer has them enter a small arabesque foyer and begins the ceremony. He shows him a seven of swords and the magician doesn’t even move. Then he lifts up the king of swords, and his response comes in the form of an ace of coins. The small man moves aside and opens a door of fine wood. For a few seconds the scent of cinnamon seeps between Moisès Corvo and the hellhound. Like an automaton, he shows him a king of cups, and Corvo holds back his desire to lift his card. He feels stupid, but he consoles himself thinking that the other chap doesn’t feel stupid: he is stupid. In his eyes, however, he sees distrust, which has never had a falling-out with stupidity, they more often go hand in hand. The doorman puts the card away in a cigarette case he carries in the inner pocket of his jacket and pulls out the king of clubs. Now Corvo proudly shows his two of coins and is invited inside.

He opens his eyes like a little boy discovering the magic of Christmas. Makarov stands waiting for him in a covered patio lit
by oil lamps and with a fountain in the centre protected by thirsty stone lions. The ground around it is white marble sliced through with rosy tones, and the ceiling is a labyrinth of ornamental borders and whimsical geometric figures, half in the penumbra of the oil lamps that hang from the pillars coming up on either side. At the back, an arch opens onto the vestibules; to the sides, three staircases ascend to the upper floors.

“What do you think?” asks Makarov, as if it were his house.

“No geraniums here.”

They cross the patio and once they are in the vestibule they are received by a woman wrapped in a single piece of sky-blue silk, the whites of her eyes like two sea urchins split in half, and her generous breasts free beneath the fabric.

“Good evening, Mr M.” She lowers her eyes. A real professional, the madam.

“Good evening.” Makarov bows.

She turns towards the inspector, and Corvo kisses the back of her hand, gallantly.

“You brought company!” She is pleased, or it seems like it. “What an honour, such a handsome boy.”

It had been years since anyone had called him a boy. Son of a bitch, sure, bastard, as well: crap copper, more often. But boy, lately, no.

“The honour is mine, ma’am.” He deepens his voice, pretending he knows how to act in this setting, but it’s clear he’s out of place.

“Miss… You can call me Miss Lulú.” She looks him up and down. “You’re not related to?…”

The king, as usual.

“No, no, ma’am… Miss Lulú.”

“Well, you’re like two peas in a pod.”

“In this case we’d be like two pearls.”

“I’ll tell Alfonso, when I see him, that he has a double, and that his name is…”

“Lestrade, at your service.”

“French?”

“On my grandparents’ side.”

“We french very well here, Mr Lestrade. I hope you enjoy yourself to the utmost.”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt I will.”

“Where are the girls?” Makarov is growing impatient, he’s no longer the centre of attention and he doesn’t like it.

“I’ll have them come in right now. Sit down, please.”

The woman disappears behind some curtains and Moisès Corvo realizes that there is soft music playing but he can’t identify it. A gramophone out of sight grinds out notes by Ravel and Debussy.

“Above all be discreet,” requests Makarov. “I like this place and I want to come back.”

From the curtain where Madame Lulú vanished emerge six girls in disciplined formation. In silence, without even looking at each other, they make a wall in front of the two clients, who are now lying on two sofas with baroque upholstery. A Botticelli, an Ingres, two Romero de Torres, a small Gauguin and a lovely Negress no one ever dared to paint.