1) There were two different weapons used in the killings, of different sizes, and Mercedes died after she was knocked out. But not Ycilio Massine, no. That robust young man, the Michoacán-born son of Italians, fought for his life.
2) There were no signs of forced entry in the house.
But Mercedes didn’t appear to have any enemies in the family.
That’s when, empty-handed, the police and the press visited El Frontón México[23]. In search of a social explanation to take care of everything. It was a place where people went to have fun, where there were few prejudices, and where Mercedes Cassola, finally, looked like a fish floating in the stagnant lake that’s hidden under Mexico City.
And even so, in that place taken advantage of by everyone: nothing. And in spite of the raids, the back-and-forth accusations, and the different connections published in the press every day, the crime committed against Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was eventually filed away for lack of evidence. Nothing came from the chauffeur named Clemente, who’d driven the couple from El Frontón to Lucerna Street the night of September 13, 1959, nor the young men of Italian lineage detained by the police in various raids, nor Mercedes’s former lovers who might have been angry over losing the money and freedom that Mercedes had given them. Nothing.
The tips they got after the murders were useless.
And this is how occupied-Barcelona and that Mexico of another time tried to forget the 1959 crime. They buried it. Nonetheless, what happened at 84-A Lucerna Street had a deep impact on Mexican society, while the Francoist steel curtain was able to keep the story out of the press.
Now drawn to new headlines in the newspapers[24], the sad and violent deaths of the two lovers slowly disappeared from the public’s attention.
Soon after, the bodies had already been separated.
Both were far from home.
A last pause: a minute of silence for the dead.
So, after all that, there was practically nothing. Later, later meaning now, later, after the bodies were no more, after I was born in Sant Gervasi and traveled to Mexico, after Francoism, dictatorship, exile, and those huge scissors which can cut off colorful wings with bells and feathers, the 1959 double homicide was revisited in three texts[25] (four counting this one)[26], and the Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis turned it into one of those standard tales in the fight against homophobia in Mexico, a Let’s-Not-Forget-How-Things-Really-Are-Here.
It started because Güero Tellez, the Mexican investigative reporter, said, “This type of crime, as we all know, is characteristic among homosexuals, whose passions are infinitely more robust than other people.”[27] He concluded, “The answer might be the following: the killer’s body type probably resembled Massine’s, and he was prepared, with a different knife in each hand, so that it was probably easy for him to overpower Mercedes Cassola and her lover.”
Everything was left like this: in the hate felt by a powerful and oblique homosexual octopus that extended its tentacles with a knife in each fist. An inhuman apparition that, in the final act, cuts up the bodies and writes something on the walls.[28]
Like what happened, years later, to Sharon Tate[29].
Unfortunately, the death of the lovers on Lucerna Street, Pompeu’s exile, and the victim’s father’s patience, like a man who’d lost a war, were transformed into Let’s-Not-Forget-How-Things-Really-Are-Here so that we could talk about the Big World Mercedes Cassola grew up in back in Barcelona. In Sant Gervasi.
She took the city with her, flying.
Amen for Mercedes Cassola.
Amen for Ycilio Massine.
And amen for us too, because we don’t really understand what infuriated the killer(s), why the victims were judged so harshly by the authorities and the press, the pain of trying to dig out the truth that the parents of the victims had to deal with in that neighborhood where families all know each other, as was the case in Sant Gervasi, there in the heart of Barcelona. Amen because we don’t know what Charles Manson’s “family” was based on but we can follow the clues to the crime[30]. Until now. Until now, because we — those of us who are here — now know that Charles Manson was judged because of his philosophy, and that the crime committed against Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was, in turn, almost buried by prejudice.
Two prejudices: one in Mexico, the other in Barcelona.
So Mercedes Cassola lost twice.
As Carlos Monsiváis tells it, the case had so much resonance because of “the unique circumstance of a woman from Catalonian high society who lived as she pleased” during Francoist times. And so: reporters, agents, elected officials, and detectives all agreed — the victims deserved what they got. And so: amidst the thousands of murders of gay people, the public only remembers the case of this fruit fly[31] and her bisexual lover, the story told in lurid detail.”[32]
This is what the Francoist authorities would have said:
Why did she leave? She would have been safe here.
That was in 1959.
Mercedes Cassola dared to flee from the Sant Gervasi in which I was born eleven years later. In time, I too went to Mexico and then returned and wrote this story and understood that, unfortunately, time is implacable; I can’t say any more.
(Silence.)
Time doesn’t make the world a different place.
That’s why I searched the Barcelona telephone directory for some relative of Mercedes Cassola’s whose tale might make it possible for me to finish this narrative[33] in a gentler fashion: bringing flowers to the dead, writing that I did in fact return. I realized that the crime against Mercedes and Ycilio can only be summarized like this: impunity, history, judgment, homophobia, freedom, fascism.
I look for Mercedes Cassola in Barcelona so I can take her away. Again, as if she were flying. I want to take her with me back to Mexico and hang her wings on the dead who we do remember.
The dead who did in fact receive pity.
But there’s nothing, even though I did manage to find some Cassolas[34] in the city of Barcelona. And even though I visited their home in Sant Gervasi, I haven’t come across anything, yet I’ve seen everything: and everything was practically the same. The same quiet place in which I grew up, in which she grew up. And when I stood there, in front of the Past, I didn’t dare knock on the door to ask about a killing that took place more than forty years ago.
That’s why I haven’t said or written anything.
I returned home, where I went on the Internet to send this story exactly as it is[35]. Without a clear understanding of whether I had managed to open any locks to a spiraling world able to absorb everything. Without a sense of whether I had reached the exact point where the dead rest in This World and At That Time when Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine died[36]. And thinking, in my heart of secret gardens, that the world is like that sometimes, and that it stays that way in small spaces. There’s nothing I can do about it.
And as I understand it, more or less, this continues to be a world without me.
Without any of us.
Part II
Sheltered Lives, Secret Crimes
23
El Frontón México was built in 1929 and is considered one of the most beautiful buildings of the era. It’s situated on more than three thousand square meters of land and has been the site of various world championships, including Pelota Vasca, martial arts, and the national boxing title, the Golden Belt. In 1939, it was the birthplace of the Partido Acción Nacional.
El Frontón closed its doors on October 2, 1996, after the site’s operator, Miguel del Río — who owed over three million dollars for more than seven years of rent to the owner, Antonio Cosío Ariño — asked Ramón Gamez, the leader of the Sindicato de Trabajadores del Frontón México (STFM), the workers’ union, to put off a strike so he could continue operating until an eviction notice arrived.
In May of the previous year, after the union’s workers had decided to join the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos so they could rid themselves of their “charro” leader, the strike had ended and the workers symbolically gave the building back to its owner, who announced that he was going to remodel and open again. But the secretary of governance didn’t renew the owner’s sport and gaming license, a necessary requirement for El Frontón México to be able to operate. The workers begged the owner as well as those in the offices of the SEGOB (Secretaría de Gobernación) to get the license issued so El Frontón México could open its doors again. In the meantime, its facilities were ransacked and destroyed by thieves and the homeless, and water damaged its roofs, floors, and walls.
The building’s interior now resembles a trash heap: broken furniture, cut cables, random clothing, gravel, and garbage, as well as gallons of paint thinner and gasoline covering the floors, which in some places are flooded due to leaking. Humidity has weakened the walls and most of the ceilings have come loose from their moorings. The marble floors in the lobby are flooded, and the Art Deco which distinguished it is gone. (Mael Vallejo, October 23, 2005: “Agoniza el Frontón México,”
As I write this, El Frontón México is still abandoned.
24
After September 20, 1959, there was nothing published in the Mexican press about the double homicide. Following the description of the incident on the 14th, the rest were allegations: random tips, autopsy reports, interviews with those close to the deceased, and Doña Albina Solaini’s sadness. Nothing else. The murder of Mercedes Cassola and Ycilio Massine was never solved. And their bodies, loveless I suspect, finally said their farewells: they buried Ycilio in Mexico and Mercedes was repatriated to the world from which she’d been expelled.
25
José Ramón Garmabella: “Reportero de policía, ¡el Güero Téllez! ¿Quién asesinó a los amantes de Lucerna?”; Carlos Monsiváis: “La impunidad al amparo de la homofobia.”
26
Lolita Bosch: “In This World, and at the Time Mercedes Died” (“En este mundo y en aquel tiempo en el que murió Mercedes”).
28
I haven’t been able to find anything anywhere about the word, or words, that were supposedly written in blood at 84-A Lucerna Street in the early hours of September 13, 1959. Ten years later in California, Charles Manson’s gang wrote
30
Charles Manson founded
During its first few years,
31
34
Which means
36
It’s possible that if I were to look over this text again, I might include another footnote. Nonetheless, I think those in the final version are representative of its finality. So the only thing left, then, is to be grateful for your careful reading and to wish you a good day. Take care of yourself.