Barcelona Shadows (9 page)

If my daughter is in jail it’s because she’s done things that no one could be proud of. And having said that, Pablo Martí banged his fist hard against the wooden kitchen table, eroded from all the
banging that Enriqueta had made him do. The breadcrumbs from breakfast (mouldy tomato and fatback, a few glasses of warm wine) scattered from the impact, and some fell onto the dish of sour milk that fed the dozen cats that came and went oblivious to their owner’s troubles. It’s curious how the ties you establish as parents also serve to blindfold you. Look at how Pablo Martí acts, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The farmhouse in Sant Feliu de Llobregat has only one human inhabitant, but he’s never alone: cockroaches, flies and moths, rats as big as cats and a pair of field mice from the garden live in the pile of crap that Pablo Martí has accumulated over the years. You can barely smell the feline scent any longer, amid the stench of rotten vegetables, old meat and damp wood that inundates the two floors that once, long ago, tried to be a home.

Pablo Martí is a corpulent man, with white hair and a face etched by traces of childhood smallpox, his nose split as if by an axe blow and sunken eyes that can no longer see into the distance but which still fix on the person he’s speaking to. He wears a shirt and trousers he hasn’t taken off in months, not even to sleep, like a second skin. And very often, when he goes out in search of someone with a coin willing to treat him to some spirits, he layers himself with more articles of clothing, one over the other, it’s never enough, until he looks like an overstuffed, Pantagruelian scarecrow.

The farmhouse is like a den, and Mr Martí the peevish, surly ferret that lives there, baring his teeth to whoever comes near. He talks through his teeth and you can scarcely understand him; he speaks little and vehemently, as if beating on each word before letting it through his lips. You can’t make out what he says and he has no intention of speaking intelligibly. But, all modesty
aside, I had no trouble striking up a conversation. Remember who I am. You think it’s hard for me to get a few words out of someone? Never.

“She doesn’t come to see me much. And I’m not saying that because she’s locked up now, I understand that. She’s very much her own girl, she’s never needed anyone else except for material things. Don’t misunderstand, it’s not that I don’t love her, she’s my daughter, but even when her mother nursed her she’d make disgusted faces. It was impossible. And if you forced her, she’d bite.”

Hoarse voice, ideas unravelling word to word, not taking any clear path.

“Those are women things, and I don’t stick my nose in, never, ever, ever, but don’t be surprised if it was her fault my wife left this world.”

Mr Martí wasn’t far off. After years of asthenia, the body of Enriqueta Ripollès shut down when her daughter was eleven. The girl’s strong personality, her repulsive face—she was disobedient, taciturn and always distant—just ate away at her.

“Poor thing,” said Pablo Martí, and he looked up towards the ceiling, where a long, blackened spider’s web hung, with no spider to tend to it.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked him. He, half dozing, half absent. He lowered his head and looked at me with those two holes that hide his eyes.

“Here?”

“Anywhere.”

“Here, here. I never leave, I never go down to Barcelona. I’m not missing anything in a city where everybody wants to rob you. Especially the politicians.”

“When was the last time she came here?” I insisted.

“What is it now… August?”

“September.”

“September… before the summer. In May, I think.” Enriqueta hadn’t visited her father since March, but that doesn’t matter. “You probably already know she doesn’t talk much. She came with that gimp she’s with now, they spent the day here and the next morning they were gone. The gimp just complained, that it’s so dirty, just burn it down, haven’t I ever thought about selling it and going to the flat they have in Hostafrancs… but no, no, no, they are the way they are and I’d be there for a week, and when they found someone to sublet the hole to I’d be out on the street. And on the street, in Barcelona, everybody wants to rob you. You’re from Barcelona, aren’t you? I can see it in your bearing. Don’t think I’m not watching you: if you try to take anything out of here I’ll bash you with my cane. I don’t like thieves. Don’t like politicians either. They all steal from you. Especially if they’re from Barcelona.”

Without saying a word, I took a drag on the cigarette I had just lit. I savoured the tobacco on my palate and felt the smoke filling my lungs. Being human allows you these small privileges and vexations that I can only mimic. Arching my eyebrows, I asked him if he wanted one.

“No, no, smoke. My lungs can’t take it.”

I knew that, when I left, he would pick up the butt and smoke it. I put it out halfway through, so he could have a few decent puffs.

“What did you talk about?”

“Who?”

“You and your daughter.”

“We don’t talk. She almost never speaks, and I don’t have much to tell her.”

“She came and that was it.”

“She came and that was it, yup.”

“She didn’t do anything.”

Pablo Martí was suspicious. He stood up with difficulty and headed to the door that leads to the garden. He put a jacket on over his shirt, and on top of that another jacket that could barely fit over all the others. It wasn’t cold. He went out and stood amid the tomato plants’ orphaned stakes.

“You are a policeman, aren’t you?”

“I get that a lot, but no.”

“You want to know things about her.”

“No. Just what she did.”

“It’s not about the money or the jewels.”

“No.”

“She brought two bags. The gimp carried them, but they were hers.”

“What was inside?”

“I don’t know.”

He was lying.

“What did she do with them?”

“This year it will rain like it hasn’t in years. Look at those clouds.” There weren’t any. “One time a bolt of lightning hit nearby and killed one of my father’s sheep. It went through her like a sword: a hole here”—he pointed to the nape of his neck—“and another in the belly. She smelt singed. Watch out for lightning.”

“What did she do with them, Mr Martí?”

When was the last time someone called him Mister?

“She threw them into that well.”

He is surprised to see I don’t head over to it.

“You never took a look?”

“No.”

“You’re not curious?”

“She’s my daughter. She’s not a good person, but she’s the only daughter I have.”

We were silent. I knew what he would say: the conversation was over.

“It’s getting late.”

“It’s cooling off.” He huddled, the sleeves of his jackets pulled taut.

When I left, the cats hid from me, as always.

“We’ll see each other again, surely?” It sounded like the cry for help of a lonely, scared man.

We always see each other one last time.

The Model Prison looks like a fortified island in the middle of nothing. The car transporting prisoners is trapped by a flock of sheep a few metres from the entrance. The shepherd doesn’t do anything to clear up the ambush as if, in a gesture of complicity towards the prisoners, he wanted to give them a few more minutes of life outside the walls. Actually, the shepherd has been there long before the panopticon, and his attitude is nothing more than stubbornness, an autistic protest in the face of the changing times.

Enriqueta hadn’t said anything since they’d fled the
level-crossing
guard’s house. Blackmouth thought he could made out a few frightened drops tracing a path down her cheeks, as if she weren’t as ironclad as he’d thought up to that point. As if deep down she were a coward incapable of facing up to anyone in the light of day, who needs company in case things go wrong so she can shift the blame onto them. And that was his role. But Blackmouth
isn’t clever enough to follow that chain of deductions and soon is back to fearing her, because he knows one thing for sure: whether he helps her or turns her in, the cards are stacked against him.

“You still haven’t asked me,” she says, and sits down in a doorway.

“Asked what?”

“Why I want the children.”

He stammers.

“I… the other day…”

The dark girl with big crying eyes, the machete sinking into her flesh, the blood dripping into the bowl under the table.

“They are life, innocence, everything adults have lost and want to get back.”

Blackmouth would rather not know anything, but he doesn’t dare say that. She uncovers her basket, which she carries covered with a rag, and shows him what’s inside: a jar filled with what looks like plum jelly. The girl’s heart, marinated in honey and white wine, and a few sprigs of rosemary. He doesn’t know, he can’t even imagine.

“Are we waiting for someone?”

“Yes.”

But no one comes out of the prison, just the car that has left the new inmates and is returning to the police station. An hour passes, the sky grows overcast and they remain sitting, without exchanging a word.

Now another car arrives, but this is a private one, somebody with money, thinks Blackmouth, with a chauffeur in a peaked cap and a metal angel on the hood. It stops in front of them. The driver comes out and opens the back door. Enriqueta gets in and when she sits down the leather crunches, brand new.

“The lad’s not coming,” says the slight man with sunken cheeks and prominent nose.

Enriqueta looks at the man and understands there is no room for negotiation. He closes the door and leaves Blackmouth on the street, alone, watching as the car starts and takes the woman up the street. Her bearing is that of a countess, or a baroness, or somebody with a lot of money. As if she weren’t the same person he would have eagerly strangled that morning.

I
N HIS ATTEMPTS TO AVOID HIS WIFE,
Moisès Corvo got used to spending the evenings in the printing press where his brother Antoni works. First he went there to circumvent conversing with Conxita or listening to her reproaches (I spend nights alone, it’s like I wasn’t married, she tells him bitterly). But one day his brother gave him a freshly bound book:

“Take this, since you’re here, at least don’t snooze in the chair, it gives a bad impression.”

“What is it?”

“Read it, see if you like it.”

Corvo had learnt to read at seventeen, but he had never really taken to it. The occasional dog-eared little novel during the Rif War, criminology manuals in the police academy and not much more. Now in his hands he holds
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
and he gradually works his way into it. Before his eyes opens up a new, limitless world. After that one, Moisès asked for more.
Carmilla
by Sheridan Le Fanu, Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories,
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley and Stoker’s vampire. Moisès Corvo, secretly, at the press (when have you ever seen a copper reading, Millán Astray often exclaims), became a devoted reader of horror and detective fiction. You read too much, is Malsano’s typical barb, and Corvo has a clever reply prepared. The last
book Antoni provided him with is
The Phantom of the Opera
, by Gaston Leroux. A mysterious being murders from the shadows… Today Moisès Corvo is unable to read a single line. He needs distraction. And when he is preoccupied, he takes shelter at the Napoleón. Moisès Corvo is sitting beside Sebastián, who is working on the projector.

“Take off this crap.” This crap is a film about a couple arguing in a park, she’s got a pram and he’s got some major-league exasperation.

“What do you want to watch?” replies Sebastián.

“Got anything with sex between vestal virgins with huge breasts?”

“Only with small breasts.”

“Then forget it. What a crap selection the owner of this place has…”

“I have the one about the hotel.”

“If there’s no melons…” And he makes a gesture with his hand as if saying go ahead, set it up. “I’ll pull a few strings to get some decent cinema”—quality here being inversely proportional to the use of clothing—“I know it’s out there.”

“Keep me posted, once we’ve got it we can really pull in the customers,” says Sebastián, a cigarette swinging from his lips as he puts the roll of film into the projector.

“We can pull on something else, too.”

On screen, the lobby of a hotel. The bellboy appears, along with a married couple. He is dressed as a ridiculous harlequin, she with loose clothes. The bellboy starts a machine in motion and all of a sudden the suitcases march on their own over to the elevator, they go up to the room and open themselves up. The man and woman arrive shortly after and while her hair and make-up are done by
brushes that float through the air, he receives an expert shoeshine. Things move as if by magic, and the clients seem satisfied. Moisès Corvo doesn’t look away from the film, which is no more than five minutes long, while the ash gains ground on his cigarette.

“Doesn’t matter how many times I watch it, I don’t know how they do it,” he thinks out loud.

“The comb can’t fly and the suitcases can’t walk. It’s a trick. They film the movement bit by bit as if they were photographs, and then they stick them together.”

“It looks real.”

See what I was saying? For Corvo, the more fantastic the fiction, the better.

“It’s an illusion. The photographs are static, it’s our brains that recreate the movement.”

“Have you been reading Freud too?” he says. He knows Freud from the magazines and because he is one of the city’s favourite conversation topics.

“What are you, barmy? I’m not saying anything that’s not true.”

“No, but every evening you sell lies.”

Sebastián shrugs his shoulders.

“They’re on screen, right? So it’s no lie. It’s happening or, at least, you believe it’s happening.”

“Two realities,” says Moisès, putting on a deep voice. He can smell the pickled lupini beans and the sawdust, despite the odour of shag tobacco. “One that’s true and one we imagine.”

“You want to see the one with the acrobats?”

“The Chinese?”

“They’re Japanese.”

“I never say no to Japanese ladies. Not the real ones and not the imitations.”

A bunch of actors dressed as Orientals swirl around and twist into impossible shapes, one atop the other, in a display of prodigious strength and agility. Moisès quickly catches on to the trick: the camera is hanging from the ceiling and frames the group dragging themselves along the floor, pretending they are standing.

“It’s better with a pianist,” Sebastián apologizes, needlessly.

But Moisès has already grabbed his jacket and is getting up. He doesn’t say goodbye, he never says goodbye, and Sebastián is left alone, thinking that he still has a lot of sweeping up to do.

There is a wrought-iron dragon on the staircase of the police station on Conde del Asalto, one of those modern things he can’t be bothered to try to understand. He greets the policeman at the door, a man who’s been watching over the same stones for 300 years, and he ascends the stairs two by two. At this time of the day there is no movement. Juan Malsano hears him coming before he enters through the door.

“Hey, man without a shadow,” calls out his somewhat dishevelled partner from his desk. “Looks like they pay a salary if you come and spend some time here.”

“I was busy working, Juan. More or less like you, but without sitting around scratching my balls.”

Malsano throws a pencil that Corvo doesn’t dodge.

“Well, then it’s my balls that had to listen to that bastard, Buenaventura.”

“Congratulations, it’s the first time in months they’ve had a visitor.”

“Quit it, Moisès, he’s been shown up again.”

“What happened?”

“The damn gangsters, up to their old tricks.”

“Don’t they know to stay home, these guys, when it starts to get cold? Anybody dead?”

“No, unfortunately not. They were shooting each other up, but only one was wounded.”

“And what does he want? Us to go and finish him off?”

“No. He wants us to go by the hospital and check in on him, ask him a few things and stay there to make sure nobody comes by to dispatch him.”

“Oh, sorry, I missed the huge red cross on the station door when I came in: I was too loaded down with chamomile and linden tea for the needy.”

“If you keep this up it’ll be Buenaventura who goes to the hospital tomorrow to make sure I don’t finish you off.”

“Is there anything else?”

“In this city? More than you can shake a stick at. Let’s see.” He opens up the notebook and brings his index finger to his lips. “…Where’d I leave the pencil? Oh, yeah. A stabbing between neighbours on Flassaders Street, but that’s all tied up; a hanging on Comtal Street, a crazy woman who tried to scald the baby of a level-crossing keeper by the Model, a—”

“Wait, stop. What was that about a baby?”

“Nothing. From what they told me, some old lady went barmy, argued with a friend of hers and threw the girl into the soup pot.”

“Did they arrest her?”

“No, she ran off, and the mother isn’t up for much explaining. They pumped her full of Agua del Carmen to control her hysterics.”

“And the aggressor… do they know her identity?”

“It’s not your kidnapping monster, Moisès. It’s some crackpot who went too far.”

“We should go and check it out.”

“No way. It’s not our district, and we have commitments, whether you like them or not.”

“If we don’t have the freedom to investigate, then tell me what we’re doing here at all.”

“Hierarchy. Every ship’s got a captain. And if there are no reports of children disappearing it’s because they’re not just vanishing into thin air.”

“Where there’s smoke…”

Juan Malsano has the statement from the gunmen in his hands, and he shows it as if it were the ten tablets of the law.

“A bird in the hand…”

Moisès Corvo furrows his brow, fed up with the proverb contest, frustrated because time and again the higher-ups are clipping his wings: office bureaucrats, the closest they’ve got to working the streets is stooping to wipe horseshit off the soles of their loafers.

“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” asks Malsano in the following days, when Moisès Corvo goes to schools and stands around in front of their doors, waiting for a hairy ogre to show up and head back to his cave with one of the more trusting students in his mouth, for his next meal.

But the children always come out shouting, running, playing and beating on each other, happy to be free after an exhausting day of numbers and letters and endless lists of dead people, of dates that seem so far away and that smell of mothballs that’s in every hall of every school. Their mothers take them by the hand, look both ways before crossing, Tomaset, and there are a few who look at the policeman suspiciously and talk to the caretaker and say who is that bloke, and the caretaker warns the municipal policeman who’s having a coffee with brandy in a café near the
school and shows up with his truncheon at the ready to mess up the strange guy ogling children on their way home. The detective pulls out his ID, half hidden under his jacket, so the circle of spying mothers about fifteen metres away doesn’t see it. He asks a few questions, all very vague, so as not to cause alarm, because then the municipal will chat with the women and we’ll have a kerfuffle on our hands. Every answer is either no or I don’t think so.

“Forget about it. So two girls got lost. That’s always happened, but you know how whores are: they spend their days crying and drinking, when they’re not taking drugs.” Malsano is the practical type, never going beyond the call of duty, working just the necessary, no more, no less. He doesn’t understand how Corvo, his partner, can waste his time off duty trying to resolve this stupid matter that has no reliable basis. “They must have been sold to some perverted kid-fucker.”

And thus Malsano achieves the opposite effect he was hoping for with his advice, and Corvo suggests that they go and look for Bernat the next day.

In a two-storey building on Tapioles Street, an old haberdashery that could fall down at any moment, hidden behind scaffolding abandoned God knows how long ago, lives Bernat Argensó, sixty years old, bearded and bald, scrawny, with very long, filthy fingernails and sulphur breath.

Moisès and Malsano come in at midnight, after having quickly taken care of the red tape that had accumulated at the station (reports, witness statements, copies for the files), and they scare Bernat Argensó when they shout out his name. He is alone, the house a nest of darkness, the silence broken by the beating of the
wings of nightingales, budgies and goldfinches locked in dozens of cages on the ground floor, where the counter was, now awoken by the detectives’ bellowing. Bernat is lying in a child’s bed on the upper floor, his fingers clasping Elisa’s blanket, surrounded by withered cardboard dolls, frayed rag bears and marionettes without strings.

“Good evening, Inspectors.” It is a powerful voice that doesn’t match the little man’s image.

“The door was open.”

“I don’t like to sleep all locked up.”

“You’re welcome,” says Malsano.

Bernat Argensó had been a model citizen, the owner of Argensó Notions, a well-known business that was beloved by the whole neighbourhood. Married and with a daughter, Bernat was sent to jail by Moisès Corvo. For years, the shopkeeper had been roaming around the Ronda de Sant Pere looking for children alone. When he found one, he would corral them up against a doorway, undo his belt and masturbate violently on them. He never went so far as to force himself on any of them, just as he never came, and he’d end up either crying or fleeing as fast as his little legs could carry him when caught red-handed. The same can’t be said of Elisa, his daughter, whom Bernat had been raping from the age of three to the age of fourteen. One Friday, Elisa tied her favourite rag doll (a greenish bear called Moss) from the ceiling with one of the strings she sold every day in the shop, and then she hanged herself with the sheet on which her father had been taking her, where he threatened to tell her mother it was her fault, and told her she had turned out dirty and a liar, and that she only wished bad upon her family and their business. The years of prison had only served to muffle Bernat’s violence, but
it hadn’t quenched his thirst.

“Whatever it is, I haven’t done anything.”

He’s right, but not for lack of wanting to as much as for lack of ability.

“How do you make your living now?” Moisès asks him.

“I sell the birds downstairs.”

“This is…” Malsano points to the blanket, and leaves the sentence hanging.

“Yes,” he hugs it to his chest.

“We want to ask you some questions.”

“Here or at the station?”

“Right here.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You have an admirer.” Moisès carries the weight of the conversation.

“What?”

“There is someone who is snatching kids.”

Bernat lowers his gaze and takes a step forward. His lower lip trembles, a mix of cold and nerves.

“The vampire.”

The detectives know they’ve hit pay dirt.

“What do you know about him?”

“The same as everybody.”

“What does everybody know?”

“What you must know too: there’s a vampire who seizes children and drinks their blood.”

That’s new. Up until then Moisès had ogres, devils and monsters, but not blood-sucking vampires.

“And what’s the reality?”

“What do you mean?”

Some birds coo in the night.

“The theory that the Transylvanian aristocrat has moved to Barcelona for some nibbles isn’t working for me. What’s really going on?”

“I don’t know. I already told you: a vampire.”

“Vampires are creatures of the night, they turn into bats and fear crucifixes. Considering the number of churches on each street of this city, and that a beast with a two-metre wingspan flying around wouldn’t be very discreet, let’s rule out that theory. Let’s imagine there’s another Bernat Argensó, for example, who doesn’t want to have to wander around the streets looking for young ’uns and so he takes them home.”