He tried to control himself. He set her different organs down one by one on the table until he had gutted her. First he examined her brain. It weighed exactly 1,270 grams. It was entirely symmetrical and flawless. In fact, one of the most perfect brains he’d ever seen. There was no bruising, no minor hemorrhage, no imperfection, and it possessed the uncanny beauty of harmonious proportion and unusual refinement. That was what caught his attention. In all the years he had been working as a forensic, he’d never seen such a well-formed brain. It was riveting, a prodigy of undulating tissue that few eyes could have been privileged to contemplate over the centuries. He then went on to examine her remaining organs. They were all intact. No sign of edemas or blocked arteries, as if Eugènia had never swallowed the pills or the passage of time had left no trace in her insides. Each of her viscera was exquisitely proportioned in a way that was rare to find in a human body.
Eugènia’s immaculate organs were the repositories of such extraordinarily sublime beauty that he was continually forced to catch his breath. Her entrails irradiated a hypnotic, luminous quality and the smell they gave off was in no way unpleasant. There were no signs of putrefaction. In some sense, it was as if Eugènia’s body allowed him to contemplate the great secret, the primordial model of absolute perfection. Once more, the thought paralyzed him.
He stayed like that for a long time. Ecstatic. Astonished. Silent. However much he tried, he couldn’t take his eyes off that pure, unanticipated beauty. His assistant was frightened to see him in such a state and offered to accompany him outside, but he refused and vigorously ordered him to leave. The assistant was used to obeying and left the room without protesting, but he was sure the young man would soon be back with one of his colleagues. He barely had time. He now thought the body wasn’t at all deformed or monstrous, but a prodigy of beauty and perfection. He picked up the needle and thread and lovingly began to sew up Eugènia’s empty body. He personally wanted to look after it. He then put the ring back on her finger and the ribbon in her hair. Blue brings brides good luck. Finally, he put his lips next to the girl’s cold lips and kissed her.
When they eventually found him unconscious on the ground, he said he had just fainted.
In the months to come everyone noticed something was wrong with him. He hardly slept or ate, and the purple circles now established around his eyes made the pallor of his face even more alarming. He’d grown thinner and his hair had turned gray from one day to the next. Now it was almost white. He drank coffee all the time, and his left eye twitched nervously and forced him to blink compulsively. His pulse trembled and stuttered. His head of department was worried and repeatedly begged him to take sick leave or go on holiday but he refused, laconically asserting that he was fine. Despite his gradual, quite visible deterioration, despite his sickly, aged appearance, he continued to arrive punctually and nobody had any complaints. After all, he worked more hours than ever, as if he never had enough to do, and he engineered it so he was always on call. For the last few months he’d been a silent presence at every autopsy and always volunteered to give a helping hand to the less experienced forensics. Everyone avoided his company and few dared say a word to him.
One night he was left all alone. The other doctor on duty was forced to go home suffering from a bad bout of summer flu. The rest of the staff had finished their shifts. The security guard was dozing as he did every night sitting in his cubbyhole with his radio blaring, and now and then he’d glance at the monitors that kept a watch on the entrance and sides of the building. Despite the apprehension the man had felt initially, when he’d been assigned to the old site of the Institute for Forensic Anatomy, experience taught him that problems always came from outside. He didn’t like the dead, but at least they never gave him any headaches.
Recently there’d been a constant stream of bodies. Suicides, accidents, drug overdoses, bodies stabbed to pieces, anonymous faces no one could identify... The coolers in the basement were crammed with corpses patiently waiting their turn before they could be sent to the cemetery or medical students’ lectures, and the staff was complaining. If that rate were maintained, they’d have to do overtime. They didn’t even know what to do with the bodies. And couldn’t cope with the workload.
There’d been no incidents that night. No calls, no emergencies. The next morning, shortly before eight, the head of service arrived. He liked to be the first and used that period of quiet to organize the day’s schedule and shifts before the phone started ringing. He wasn’t surprised not to see his colleague, because if it was a quiet night the forensics on duty got bored and often joined the nurses for coffee. He was probably upstairs in the library taking a nap or had gone to the cafeteria for breakfast. While he was rummaging in his pockets for his keys, he thought he heard a noise in the basement. It was a kind of feeble, barely audible moan, like a continuous sobbing. No doubt somebody had left the radio on. He sighed, put his coat and briefcase down, and took the stairs to the basement where the dead were stored. The door was just pulled to. As he opened it, he instinctively gave a start. The panorama in the autopsy room chilled him to the bone.
He tried to shout but was unable to articulate a single sound. For a fraction of a second he thought it might possibly be a hallucination caused by the shadows in the morgue, a sly trick played on his brain by stress, but then he understood immediately that what he could see was for real.
Decomposing bodies piled up on tables, on the floor, anyhow, open down the middle, with viscera chucked all over the room. It was impossible to take a step without treading on livers, encephalic matter, kidneys, or poorly dissected hearts. There were also intestines tossed in every corner, like macabre streamers decorating a lugubrious party where the guests were dismembered bodies and heads severed from their torsos. The stench was unbearable, as if hell itself had thrown its gates open. The only spotlight in the room barely lit the central table where they placed the bodies when they were performing necropsies, but the phantasmagoric skin of the mutilated corpses absorbed that light and projected a sad, sinister set of shadows. The moans were faint but could still be heard. They came from a man crying facedown on one of those disemboweled corpses, his gown dripping blood. No doubt about it. It was one of his doctors. He seemed to be holding something. And there was lots of blood. Lots. But the dead don’t bleed.
He suddenly recognized her. She was one of their pediatric nurses, a particularly pretty girl with wonderfully blond hair. It was difficult not to notice that svelte well-proportioned girl and her bright cheerful eyes. It was less than a fortnight since she’d come to tell him how worried she was by the state of health of the man who at that moment was sobbing over her bloody, opened body. Now she was naked and completely still, somehow strapped to the table with plasters and bandages. The ball of cotton in her mouth must have suppressed her screams, but not asphyxiated her. She had undoubtedly resisted. Her blue eyes were wide open, but no longer smiling. Her vacant expression was one of panic.