“You don’t have a choice, Don Manolo. If our restaurants go empty, you’ll be the next one in the freezer. Consider yourself lucky to be alive and go get us some good meat. If not, you might wind up as chop suey.”
Since that day, my life hasn’t been the same. It’s true that that demonic Fu Manchu lookalike paid me very generously for the arms, heads, and ribs I still had in the freezer. But I was overcome with fear, and now my days aspiring to be a star chef are over. Where am I going to find my next victim? How long until the cops get their hands on me? I suspect that, sooner or later, Mr. Jintao will be true to his word and I’ll be eaten like some vulgar duck l’orange. But this week, I intend to survive: I’ve been hanging around El Bulli again and I’ve noticed that Ferran Adrià likes to stroll on the beach every day at sunset. It’ll be easy to take him from behind by surprise, slice his neck, and stuff him in the Panda’s trunk. I’m also going to try to get the Chinese to include my delicious liquid croquettes on their menu, since I’m the one who copies them best. Adrià is chubby and well-formed, he’s going to have a lot of meat: we’ll prepare him in soy sauce and a serving of Three Delicacies rice. Then it’ll be Santi Santamaria’s turn. They’ll all be licking their fingers when they taste my star chef râble.
[Editors’ Note: all characters and places in this story — even those based on real people and restaurants — are fictional or used in a fictional context.]
The Offering
by Teresa Solana
Sant Antoni
Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush
That morning when he got to the Clinical Hospital and saw the medical record for the body that had just come in, he didn’t give the name a second thought. Eugènia Grau Sallent. Twenty-nine years old. Circumstances surrounding death: possible suicide caused by an overdose of diazepam, no signs of violence. The victim hadn’t left a note. The autopsy was timetabled for the following day and he was the forensic scheduled to perform. As one half of the staff was on holiday and the other hadn’t a spare moment, it was only reasonable for him to be assigned the case, though he was hardly idling. Fortune had it that no corpses had been admitted for a couple of days and he’d been able to spend some time on his backlog of paperwork. But the party was over. Experience showed that when one dead body came in more would soon follow.
The name of the woman whose autopsy he’d have to perform made him think of another Eugènia and the bunch of reports he had promised to take her that morning. Eugènia was one of the secretaries who worked for the forensic pathology department and she’d been expecting that batch of overdue files for weeks. He glanced at the dossiers piling up on his desk and sighed. The bureaucratic procedures of the judiciary never failed to put him in a foul mood, but he decided he might as well complete the files that were almost finished. At the very least, he’d give Eugènia something to be getting on with. A couple of hours later, feeling pleased he’d dispatched some of those tedious reports, he hummed his way to her office with a sheaf of files under his arm.
Marta, the other secretary, was on holiday and nobody was around. Eugènia’s computer was switched off and her table was neat and tidy, as if she’d not come into work that morning. It was strange because in the six years he’d worked as a forensic doctor at the Clinical Hospital in Barcelona he couldn’t recall that girl ever missing a day. Had she perhaps also gone on holiday? Not likely, the secretaries took it in turns and one couldn’t go off until the other was back. Besides, he’d seen her the previous afternoon behind her desk, as quiet and efficient as ever, and she’d said goodbye with a barely audible “see you tomorrow” when he nodded in her direction. She’d not mentioned any holidays, so she must be ill. He left the reports on her table and walked glumly back to his windowless cubbyhole. With a little luck, nobody would bother him and he’d be done by midday.
How old was Eugènia? About his age? He reckoned she was well past thirty, although he’d never actually asked her. In fact, the two of them couldn’t be said ever to do small talk. Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you. Here are those papers... and that was as far as it went. Eugènia was dour and introverted, and they had very little in common. And she was ugly, incredibly so. Her unusual structural ugliness derived from a range of small blemishes that weren’t easily sorted. In her case, genes had dealt her a bad hand and made her the repository of all the physical flaws of her ancestors. Poor Eugènia had simply been very unlucky. She was short and stout with stumpy legs propping up an overlong torso. Her breasts were massive in relation to her height, and she was round-shouldered. She was dark-haired and swarthy, but in a coarse dingy mode, not to mention extraordinarily hairy. When she depilated, her legs and arms were a mass of tiny red scars that only disappeared when her hair started to grow back. A real mess. As for her facial features, she hadn’t been let off lightly there either. Flabby cheeks, large bulbous nose, bulging eyes, and greasy spotty skin she tried to conceal beneath a thick layer of face cream. She dressed unpretentiously, normally in dark colors, but nothing she wore did her any favors. Though she’d never worried about her appearance, she’d long ago given up trying to look pretty and now merely tried to pass unnoticed.
He had found Eugènia off-putting from day one. When he had to go to the secretaries’ office to return a file, he always tried to deal with Marta, because her colleague’s unsightly appearance put him on edge. He couldn’t help it.
“Hasn’t Eugènia come in today?” he asked one of his colleagues.
“Eugènia? The poor thing’s downstairs. Didn’t you see her record?”
“Record? Which one? You mean the one for the woman admitted this morning?”
So secretary Eugènia, nature’s joke in poor taste, whom he’d been working with for six years, was the woman who’d committed suicide currently going cold in the basement. He put on his gown and went down to the room where they kept the corpses to take a look. According to her record, Eugènia was in cooler number ten. When he opened it, he came up against her misshapen body and familiar acne-splattered face. Yes, there she was, as white as marble except for her face that had a good color to it. How odd. The girl had felt spirited enough to make herself up before taking her own life. Powdered nose, rouge on cheeks, liner on eyes, red lipstick... She wasn’t wearing earrings or any other jewel, except for a small, apparently antique ring on the ring finger of her right hand, and she had gathered her hair up with a blue ribbon. One thing in particular caught his attention: the sweet scent given off by her body. A fresh, strong flowery fragrance, though he couldn’t say which flowers. All he was able to distinguish was the smell of roses and violets. But the odor emanating from Eugènia’s body wasn’t one of violets or roses, or perhaps it was but mixed up with others. All in all, it was extremely pleasant. He sniffed her legs, her belly, her breasts, her arms, her neck and hair. No doubt about it. She had splashed perfume all over herself, every fold and cranny, as if she’d wanted to ensure she would smell sweetly after death.
According to the preliminary report, she had been dead ten or twelve hours. If she’d not been pale as marble from the neck downward, you’d have said she was asleep. He glanced at her card again. Twenty-nine when he’d have guessed thirty-five or — six. Yes, after looking at her close up, that girl wasn’t over thirty. It was really strange: she looked younger now that she was dead. The report said they’d found her at home, stretched out on her bed in a supine position, stark naked but covered by a blanket. Next to her they’d found a white summer dress yet to be worn and, on her bedside table, three empty boxes of Valium, a glass, and a bottle of mineral water. She had taken the trouble to send her neighbor a note so she’d find her early on and ring 061, and she’d also had the forethought to leave the door unlocked so the firemen wouldn’t have to force it open. Everything indicated that before swallowing the pills, Eugènia had seen to every last detail. Even to the point of choosing the dress she wanted to be buried in. You didn’t find many young suicides with such sangfroid.