The next day, Dos Emes came to see me in my office. She was wearing her Mossos d’Esquadra police uniform and had that Colombo face she gets when she’s onto something important.
“It’s just that, it’s what I said, boss, it smelled bad to me. I’ve been investigating and what I’ve found out is quite surprising.”
“Whatever it is, Dos Emes, it’s nonsense. And you watch too much CSI.”
“No, boss, really! There’s stuff here that will make your head spin. The two women are getting married!”
“What two women?”
“The widows... the widow of the murdered lover and the widow of the guy who died on the Ronda. Their names are in the registry, the wedding’s next week. I found out by accident. I had to go to court to check all the files on a forgery case and there it was, their marriage document. Apparently, grief really did bring them together.”
Now it really stunk. This was definitely a puzzle now and the missing pieces were starting to turn up. Dos Emes has a special talent for that.
“Boss, I have a feeling they didn’t become friends after the tragedy but that they were friends before... and much more than friends. In the file there are copies of love letters that the murderer’s widow received. They’re signed with the initials R.M. The assassin’s widow and the friend of the woman you were protecting is named Rosa María. Everything fits. Imagine what it would mean to them if that guy were free. And the dead guy’s cell had a call from an unknown number, from a phone card. My theory is that someone called and asked to meet him and—”
“He had a lot of alcohol in him,” I interrupted. “The most likely scenario is that he slipped and fell.”
“Precisely — with so much alcohol in him, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to give him a little push and help him into the abyss. We’ll also never know if he was hit in the head because the truck that ran him over fractured his skull. What can I tell you? The whole thing bothers me.”
As usual, Dos Emes was right. Everything fit. In fact, the husband had suspected that his wife was cheating on him, and he was correct, but what he couldn’t imagine was that his wife’s lover was not a man but a woman. It must not have been difficult to find the rendezvous place, the little house where the couple used to live. For him, the rest held no mystery: if she was seeing someone, it had to be him, the other man, regardless of the initials on the letters; after all, clandestine lovers need to protect themselves. He went looking for the guy at the bar and blasted two shots straight into his belly. After that, the two women were set free. One dead husband, the other in jail, and a daughter in Florence; there was no obstacle to their relationship except the neighborhood itself: the people and what they’d say. They continued their love affair in secret. But the killer was going to be set free soon. Would he realize his mistake? The best plan was to eliminate him.
“But it wasn’t either of them. They both have alibis and then there’s my testimony.”
“I know,” lamented Dos Emes, and with a hint of cynicism she quickly added: “And, of course, there’s no other suspect.”
I wondered, did Diana Gallard have an alibi? Why did she hire a detective instead of letting the police know about the possible danger to her mother? Had they spoken? Had they planned it together?
“Not that I know of, and anyway, what can I tell you? Nobody’s going to ask questions. Let’s let those two enjoy the last years of their relationship in peace, don’t you think?”
Dos Emes sighed. “You said Diana Gallard returns to Italy this afternoon?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“And you don’t plan to speak with her again?”
“What for?”
She looked at me with that face of hers that says, Boss, I know you, then sighed again. “Well... to find out, for example, if she’s coming back for the wedding, although I’m certain that she won’t. It’s going to be conducted with absolute privacy. You’ll see.”
And, yes, I spoke with her, but only on the phone. I called her on her cell just before she boarded her flight. She was already at the airport. I’d returned to the patio at Catamarán and I was looking out at a serene ocean. I was trying to imagine it when it was more of a dung heap than a beach. I also tried to imagine the lives of those two women during the dictatorship, and in the post-Franco era, and through the transition. A secret kept in the deepest closet until there were no more obstacles. Their lives had changed just like their neighborhood, except that they were forty years too late. To reopen the case, interrogate Diana Gallard, and complete the puzzle would be to reimpose a black-and-white existence on the three of them.
I told her what we’d discovered (well, not me, it was Dos Emes, but I didn’t point that out). I told her the police were considering reopening the case.
“It’s possible they may want to question you,” I added, “but don’t worry — in my statement I mentioned that you were with your mother that night. They’ll probably drop it when they see that.”
“Thanks,” she said in that voice so low you almost couldn’t hear it, like she always did when she was saying something compromising.
Planes were flying low, toward the horizon, en route to the airport. It was easy to imagine tourists and other visitors looking out the windows, contemplating the towers in the Olympic village, the new buildings, the port, the beaches... I wondered how many of those eyes realized that not so long ago, the neighborhood didn’t exist in Technicolor.
In This World, and at the Time Mercedes Died[1]
by Lolita Bosch
Sant Gervasi
It wasn’t like this in Barcelona in 1959[2]: on Saturday, September 12[3], the disfigured corpse of “a very well-dressed”[4] man was found in a Mexico City canal. Not far from there, “a radio cable electrocuted a little girl who was playing with her dolls. The little girl, who was one and a half years old, sustained the shock in her neck,” ten thousand kilometers from Barcelona.
Fifty years ago, fifty years from me.
Two decades after Francisco Franco rose against the legitimate republic, won the Spanish Civil War, and imposed a fascist regime that would cover the entire country with a gray darkness that would blur everything.
On Sunday, September 13, 1959, a day before vacation started at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a Soviet rocket sped to the moon at three thousand kilometers per second. That same day, just as the patriotic celebrations to honor the Child Heroes[5] began, the newspapers proclaimed that there would not be a scarcity of tortillas during the strikes in nearby Mexico City.
The next morning, September 14, 1959, Russia confirmed its rocket landed on the moon, though the United States denied it.[6] Spain sided with the U.S., of course, because in the fascism of our youth, communism was a social cancer. And while the two countries spent the day arguing, with Barcelona’s population unable to listen in on the arguments, a literacy campaign was launched in the Mexican state of Guanajuato and three notices appeared in the papers honoring Mr. Ricardo Ochoa Faist, head of public relations for Gillette Mexico, a European business. Abroad, Indonesia’s attorney general was arrested and accused of being a communist. There were tributes to Simón Bolívar in Caracas, London observed Anti-Nuke Week, and the Brazilian army threatened to expropriate cattle if the meat supply wasn’t reestablished. In Mexico City, America’s soccer team beat Atlante 0 to 1. And in Barcelona, ten thousand kilometers from the Mexican capital, two weeks by boat, fifteen hours by plane including the layovers, forty years of dictatorship, an infinite political distance, Barça scored four goals against Bilbao’s Atlético.
2
Barcelona had already been occupied for twenty years by illegitimate Francoist forces who had usurped power from the republic after three years of civil war. The world was a gray place, and the neighborhood of Sant Gervasi, where the protagonist of this story comes from, was a repulsive place, for more than any other reason because it always stayed exactly the same. It was the same no matter what. Seemingly safe, bourgeoisie, flexible. Everything was understood. It was very similar in its warmth, its tranquility, and its silence to many other neighborhoods in other cities in the world. This is the main setting for this story, though war, exile, and fascism have expelled it very far away from itself. Now Sant Gervasi is in Mexico. At the time of the story, Barcelona was both here and there. Sant Gervasi was a place divided by those who left and those who stayed: twenty years after a war between brethren.
4
Unless it says otherwise, all the quotes are from the Mexican newspaper
5
The name given to six of the cadets who fought in defense of Chapultepec Castle during the War of Intervention against the United States (1847–1848). Their names, which we can all recite from memory, are Agustín Melgar, Fernando Montes de Oca, Francisco Márquez, Juan de la Barrera, Juan Francisco Escutia, and Vicente Suárez. The cadets’ deaths, like so many other historic events, are enveloped in all sorts of legends.
6
Both countries were right, though neither ever acknowledged this. In fact, the space satellite Lunik 2, which had left earth September 13, 1959, with the goal of landing on the moon, crashed into the Sea of Serenity. So, in a way, it did get to the moon. But it didn’t actually land.