In all the time he’d been a forensic it had never entered his head before. Was he perhaps hoping to find a clue to why Eugènia had committed suicide? With those unprepossessing looks that life’s lottery had awarded her, it wasn’t difficult to imagine her leading a lonely life, being chronically depressed, or not feeling she belonged to a world where beauty and the attributes of youth seemed to determine the rules of the game. Eugènia must have tired of looking at herself in the mirror every morning and seeing only a reflection of her ugliness. She must have given up the struggle. And as she had been working at the morgue long enough to know that suicides always pass through the Clinical Hospital, she must have thought it preferable for the autopsy to be performed by the doctor she’d had least to do with. It was all a question of tact. Yes, that explained the message she had sent him. It couldn’t mean anything else.
The flat was light and strangely tidy, like her work desk. Not a speck of dust to be seen. It was a small flat, barely sixty square meters all told, but Eugènia had good taste. The few pieces of furniture she owned were solid and made of fine wood and the décor was sober without seeming characterless. There were rugs on the floor and plants by the windows, and books as well. Hundreds of books. Bookcases galore. Eugènia was a well-read girl, then. She was no ignoramus.
The kitchen was also tidy and the fridge was completely empty. Somebody had unplugged it. Nor was there any rubbish in the bin. Eugènia had had the forethought to empty the fridge and take the trash down to avoid leftover food rotting and stinking the house out: farsighted to the bitter end. He entered her bedroom apprehensively. The curtains were open and sunlight was pouring in. The forensic police must have taken the glass, bottle of water, and boxes of Valium because they were nowhere to be seen, but there was a slim volume on her bedside table. The book was open and a postcard marked the page. It looked vaguely familiar.
He took the postcard and turned it over to see who had sent it. A shiver ran down his spine. It was the postcard he himself had sent his colleagues at the hospital a couple of summers ago, when he was on holiday. He remembered it now. He’d spent three weeks touring the Balkans with a colleague who was an orthopedic surgeon, although their relationship had been short-lived. All the women he got close to did their best to take over his life, but he wasn’t ready to make commitments and in the end they all left him. He glanced at the postcard rather nervously. It was one of those typical cards that tourists like to send to friends or relatives, a landscape of the region of Thracia with a few ancient ruins in the background. The image meant nothing special. In fact, he could have sent that card or a dozen others. It had been a polite gesture. He put it down and picked up the book. It was a modern edition of Phaedrus, a translation. He dug into his memory and tried to disinter texts he’d read and forgotten in high school. Wasn’t Phaedrus the dialogue about beauty? Or was that Phaedon?
He was forced to sit down when the room started to spin. His body was drenched in sweat, a cold, unpleasant sweat. He was a doctor, and though his special interest was forensic medicine, he could still recognize when two symptoms were connected. That Eugènia had used this postcard to mark the page in the book on her bedside table the moment she committed suicide, and that she’d sent him the unusual request, couldn’t be two isolated acts. Perhaps the book indicated something as well. Had Eugènia chosen it to kill time while she waited for the pills to take effect, or had she decided to commit suicide as a result of reading it? If he recalled aright and Phaedrus spoke of beauty, the book reinforced his first hypothesis. Yes, that must be it. Eugènia had committed suicide because her ugliness made her tremendously unhappy.
He picked up the book and went off to the dining room. When he finished reading it was six p.m. He was right. The book was about what Eugènia wasn’t. Or maybe was, because right now he couldn’t be so sure. Wasn’t Plato really saying that beauty is independent of the physical world, a quality of the nonsensory world that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the one captured by our senses? The thought was highly disturbing. Reading the book, you could hardly say the philosopher was pouring scorn on ugly people; rather, he was warning of the error of trusting in appearances. On the other hand, Socrates’s ugliness was proverbial. The old philosopher was no Adonis. So what if there was beauty after all in Eugènia’s misshapen body? But what kind of beauty? An inner, purely intellectual beauty, like the one Alcibiades had praised in Socrates in The Symposium and the one Eugènia cultivated with all her sophisticated reading matter? Yet if that was so, why had she committed suicide?
When he walked into the hospital the next morning, Eugènia was already on the autopsy table. Her body still gave off a flowery scent. They’d followed his instructions and taken off her ring and the ribbon with which she’d tied back her hair. They’d washed her face, her makeup was no longer visible, and she was now a pallid white. Her lips and nails had acquired the blue tone poisoning that diazepam brings, and she no longer looked if as she was asleep. She was frankly very ugly. He unhurriedly pulled on his gloves and put on a plastic apron, and cheerfully asked the assistant he’d been assigned for the day to proceed to open the back part of the skull while he took his scalpel and prepared to extract her other organs. He wasn’t expecting any surprises. Experience told him that they were dealing with a conventional suicide and that all they would find would be a general collapse provoked by the overdose of tranquilizers.
Normally, when he was working in the dissection room, he did so to music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Madonna... Some of his colleagues preferred to listen to classical music, but he’d rather his head be filled with upbeat melodies and songs that invited you to hum along and not think. On this occasion, he said he wanted silence and was in no mood for jokes or chitchat. A little solemnity was the least he owed that ugly girl who’d remained a stranger while they worked together for six years. His assistant nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and started to saw bone.
He had slept badly that night with one nightmare after another. He’d woken up exhausted and soaked in sweat. In one of those dreams, the only one he could remember, Eugènia, dressed like a bride, had smiled at him with her chubby, spot-infested face. Her hair was tied back with that blue ribbon and she was holding a hand out beckoning him to follow. He resisted.
On his way to work, he thought how in essence there’d been nothing in the dream to justify the unpleasant, anguished feeling he’d woken up with. Standing in the morgue, preparing to stick his nose inside Eugènia’s body, the memory of that nightmare upset him again and made his pulse race. He took a deep breath and tried to regain his composure. He was a professional who had performed thousands of necropsies. He must chase off those ridiculous images and concentrate on the task. While he was cutting the skin on her trunk and proceeding to detach her thorax, he suddenly realized where he’d gone wrong. His scalpel fell to the ground and for a few moments it was as if he’d turned to stone while his brain strove to come to terms with the consequences of the discovery he’d just made. It was too sinister, too twisted. His assistant observed the scene in silence and retrieved the scalpel without opening his mouth, but he could see the doctor’s face was as white as the corpse he had just opened.
He’d got it completely wrong. Eugènia’s request had nothing to do with any sense of tact, or with the fact they’d barely interacted. It was quite the opposite. Eugènia had died because she wanted him to look at her and touch her, as he’d never have done when she was alive. The girl was offering him her body the only way she knew he’d be prepared to receive it: stiff and cold. After all, she’d decked herself out with the attributes of a bride. She had understood that ending her life was the only way to be intimate with him, the man whose polite silences had slapped her ugliness in her face every day. That’s why she’d kept that postcard and sent him the strange message disguised behind such prosaic words. Had she also foreseen he’d visit her flat, or wasn’t that part of the script she’d written?