“I awoke at six and went to the mistress’s bedroom. I saw the light was on. I found it odd and thought she’d already gotten up. But when I went in the room, she was stretched out on the bed and covered in blood. I screamed in terror and Amelia came running. I told her I couldn’t look anymore and we went out together. Amelia, who is braver, is the one who found the lifeless bodies.”
Mercedes Cassola had been planning to travel that very day to the United States[17]. Her brother Pompilio[18] had agreed to pick her up at seven p.m. to take her to Benito Juaréz International Airport in Mexico City, although he later told the authorities he had no idea his sister intended to fly with a companion that day.
They didn’t know each other well. They were siblings, but different. Yes, they’d left Barcelona together, but for different reasons. Yes, they both missed the war. But Pompeu went to Mexico because he thought he could continue living his life there exactly the same way he had in Sant Gervasi. As if everything could be the same and he could be safe that way. Mercedes, too, but not in the same way. Mercedes left, not just by lifting her city by a corner and packing it all up, but because she wanted to shake things up. To discover the empty spaces she’d missed. To win back the destiny she’d lost in the war. To build a world. To make plans, with her wings spread over Mexico, feathery and accessorized with bells. To draw Sant Gervasi from the sky and take refuge in it. Yet in America — here, she, it — all was different. More free. That’s why, among the many things strewn across the house on Lucerna Street, there were two passports with American visas and this other information:
Mercedes Cassola Meler, 39, Barcelona, Spain, naturalized Mexican citizen, divorced, living at 84-A Lucerna Street.
Ycilio Massine Solaini, 23, Uruapan, Michoacán, single, businessman.[19]
The rest was a chaotic and incomprehensible mess, like so many other things: the phone line was cut, “various curiosity seekers managed to get in,” a bag of jewels disappeared during the investigation, ashes were found on the dining room floor, “two open suitcases and all their contents thrown about the floor.” And in the main bedroom — furnished with European wood like their native Barcelona home, although painted in tropical colors typical to Mexico’s south — two lifeless bodies.[20] Far from everything.
María Luisa Monroy and Amelia Martínez Pulido, both twenty years old, had worked for a long time in Mercedes Cassola’s home, and when they discovered the murders, they called a neighbor and then the police. Nobody wanted to touch the dead. Not without permission. Ycilio Massine had forty-seven stab wounds, almost all from the shoulders up, with three on the right arm and another on his belly. Mercedes Cassola was still in her negligee on the bed and had two rings on her fingers which the killer(s) apparently hadn’t been able to remove. That’s how the bodies were when they were transferred to the police department and then to Juaréz Hospital for an autopsy.
The bodies were transferred together.
Supervising the investigation was attorney Ana Virginia Rodríguez Miró[21] and her secretary, Armando Zamora Negrete. Only one suspect could be considered responsible for the murder at 84-A Lucerna Street: the victim’s ex-husband, Felix Herrero Recalde. He was also Catalonian, also from Sant Gervasi, also a resident of Mexico, also far from home.
Also because of a lost war.
He was a man with whom Mercedes Cassola shared origins, codes, wings.
But it was just a theory. And Pompeu Cassola himself rejected it that very morning, after he went to the police when he got to his sister’s house and saw the bodies and the authorities and the two maids and the neighbor who didn’t want to touch anything.
After a few days, Felix Herrera Recalde himself proved the theory wrong, since he had been visiting in Catalonia when Mercedes Cassola was killed and returned to Mexico to make a statement to the police.
He declared he had returned to Mexico of his own accord.
He said he hadn’t killed anybody.
He said he had returned to his native city for the first time with a reentry permit and now had to leave again.
After their separation, Mercedes and Félix had not hated or resented each other, or felt anything close to that. They’d simply divorced ten years before and he’d moved to the port of Veracruz. They both had great fortunes and neither of them had any desire to kill anyone.
They’d both fled from death.
When Mexico opened the door of exile to them, together, Mercedes and Félix made a great deal of money in construction. And though they divorced later, they divided everything equally and remained friends.
Friends who led different lives.
Nothing more.
There was nothing else to it.
And now another pause, but without tea and cookies.
Another pause because the police really don’t have a clue.
Negligence? Desperation? Indifference? Prejudice?
Later, they performed autopsies on the two corpses, together, at Juárez Hospital.
Then Mercedes Cassola’s father went to Mexico to reclaim his daughter’s body[22]. He was a gentleman from Sant Gervasi, who looked like those men who walk their dogs in private parks in the afternoons, who live quietly waiting for the world not to darken completely all of a sudden, for the Mary Poppins Time to turn into a burst of light, to turn silent again, to turn away again from this absolute fear that anything can happen. He was a man who never managed to distinguish with any exactitude the Sant Gervasi that stayed behind from the Sant Gervasi that left, and which the government had allowed him to visit with a special permit so he could retrieve his daughter. Mercedes Cassola’s father arrived in Mexico City a confused stranger, and waited for the autopsy report with the patience of a man who’d lost a war. Later, he sent his daughter home in a sealed coffin and buried her in the cemetery in her native city, our native city. The real neighborhood.
This was eleven years before me.
The discreet funeral consigned Mercedes Cassola to the orchard, the forest, the world, the garden from which it was a scandal to escape without seeming different.
The dead woman returned in silence: she was already home.
No obituary in her hometown paper, in our hometown paper. Not a word about Mercedes Cassola’s death in America, nor in Barcelona. The daughter of the Cassolas died far away because she had business there with her husband; she was buried in Sant Gervasi because that was the place where she grew up, where she lived, and from which — in spite of the flexible wings with which she wanted to fly to Mexico with, taking her city with her, folded up and held by a corner — she couldn’t leave. She couldn’t escape from it.
And, now everything stops. Just like that, without a pause.
So that in spite of the time, this story, and her colorful wings, feathers, and bells, Mercedes Cassola ended up inheriting a tainted city, a wounded city, that same old neighborhood.
Alone.
this is enough to judge these two unsolved crimes, you’re obviously within your right to do so. But as the narrator, I’d suggest that Pompeu’s pain not be forgotten. And that stories without contradictions are incomplete.
There’s practically nothing to add. The autopsy performed the morning after the murder — when they were finally able to get the two rings off Mercedes Cassola’s right hand so they could give them to her father — only yielded two facts:
17
A country that borders the Mexican Republic on the south and that bicultural space called Canada on the north. And whose president, Ike Eisenhower, visited the Francoist dictator, Francisco Franco, when only the Peronist authorities from Argentina, Salazar from Portugal, and, a little later, the Holy See, had done so. With this visit Eisenhower influenced the international community, which didn’t take long to surrender, almost completely, before Franco’s government. He was treated to a tribute during his visit to Madrid that included sixty thousand flags, twenty thousand posters in which he was shown alongside Franco, one million bulbs and 360 lights illuminating Madrid, and many wreaths of glory. They also made him honorary mayor of Marbella, and an honorable member of the Spanish Baseball Federation. Ike Eisenhower stayed at Moncloa Palace and dined with the dictator at the Palacio de Oriente, where Franco dared to say, “Our two countries are together at the front of peace and freedom.”
18
Pompilio is the translation of the Catalan name Pompeu, which is rarely used in Spanish. A fairly common name among Catalonians (in honor of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 1868, exiled to Prada in 1948, an industrial engineer, the linguistic normalizer of Catalan and author of the reference dictionary
19
Ycilio Massine was the son of Doña Albina Solaini, who had been widowed a couple of years before when her husband went to Italy because of an illness and died on the operating table. Ycilio lived with his mother at 31 General Cano de Tacubaya Street; he’d dropped out of school and led a life that his relatives described as “not too decent.” Although he claimed to be a carpet salesman, he was in fact unemployed. It was his mother who maintained the household, thanks to her job at a boarding house that primarily served Italian immigrants who came to this part of the Americas looking for work.
20
Death: cessation or end of life. In traditional thinking, the separation of body and soul. (
21
When it comes to the murder of a Catalonian, it’s hard for the surname of the chief of investigation not to remind us of Joan Miró (Barcelona, 1893–Palma de Mallorca, 1983), painter, sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist. Considered a master of surrealism. According to André Breton, “the most surrealist among us.” His work, according to Miró himself, was about “killing, assassinating, erasing” the formal approaches to painting in order to find a new, contemporary form of expression.
22
Although there’s no clear link between the two incidents, I’ll add here that almost two years after the death of Mercedes Cassola, on May 2, 1962, somebody pushed her father at the corner of Insurgentes and Bajío, in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, at the very moment a truck was passing by. So it was that Mr. Cassola died in Mexico, run over by a truck, though I have no idea why he was there and what he was doing. In the end, Pompeu inherited all the family money. If any of you think.