“Oh, how awful,” said Julieta. And Manuel went on to say that Yasmine shut herself up in her house and set to smoking opium and emptying bottles. She went out once a week to do the shopping at La Boqueria, always carrying a headless doll in her arms. And, Manuel said, the doll’s neck was made of her dead son’s skin.
“What a lovely story to finish off the night,” laughed Daniel, but he lit a cigarette a little nervously. The phrase had sounded stupid, uncomfortable.
“The building where she lived was around here, that’s why they called this place Madame Yasmine. But they knocked it down when they built the Rambla del Raval.”
“The depressing Rambla del Raval,” said Daniel.
“Tío, there’s a reason they call it Rambla Triste. They say the little boy is still wandering around here, without his head. One of Barcelona’s many ghost children…”
“Manuel, please, you know I can’t listen to that stuff,” Julieta snapped.
And then Manuel smiled at Sofía and said, “Satisfied? I have more stories, but you’ll have to have coffee with me sometime, because our little friend here can’t handle horror stories.” And then, without waiting for a reply, he asked Daniel about the dates of their next meetings to retouch a video they were working on, and the conversation turned toward names Sofía didn’t know and work disagreements she wasn’t interested in. Since the work talk also involved Julieta, Sofía could sit a while in silence, almost alone, thinking about the neck made of dead skin. Suddenly the bar, with its date salads and designer cocktails, struck her as horrible, and all she wanted was to get out of there. But she waited until her friends started to yawn.
* * *
—
The next night, Sofía and Julieta went out alone—they wanted a girls’ night. Daniel was delighted to let them go, so he could stay home and catch up on all the unwatched episodes of his favorite shows. He would rather watch TV than go out in the Barcelona night, he said, and he seemed to mean it.
When Julieta closed the door to the building, she grabbed her friend by the arm, hard. “I don’t want to go to La Concha and see drag queens,” she said. The shows weren’t what they used to be, anyway, Julieta told her; now they were full of bachelorette parties, and half the time the performers just went around greeting the brides-to-be. There were even little kids who went now. It was going downhill, it was sad. The queens used to be so splendid and ferocious, it was depressing to see them dressed as Marisa Paredes, putting on a show for all audiences. No and no. Julieta wanted to go to a bar. She wanted to talk. She wanted to tell Sofía things she never would have dared say in her emails or letters, or in their rare phone conversations. “I had a rough time of it last year,” she said, and she started to cry in her particular way, suddenly and with big, heavy tears that she’d held back for a long time. Sofía pulled her into the first open bar she saw, and handed Julieta her tissues. The same smell floated around them, stagnant and constant, but Julieta didn’t seem to notice. It wasn’t the right moment to ask her friend if she smelled it too.
They ordered coffee. Neither of them wanted to drink alcohol. Julieta calmed down a bit, and then was able to talk. She’d gone crazy, she said. Maybe from thinking so much about all the crazy people in Barcelona.
“There’s always some event going on in this city, some Biennale, some presidential meeting, a Barça game. And then there are helicopters everywhere, flying low, you can’t imagine how intense it is.”
Sofía nodded; she could imagine.
“And last year Daniel and I wanted to…well, I wanted to get pregnant. I was really crazy, seriously. Now it seems like lunacy, wanting to raise a child, no money, what a disaster. And also…well, I’ll get to that.”
Julieta looked behind her, as if she felt a presence. She breathed in relief, and went on.
“The thing is that last year, I wanted to have a baby at any cost. But when we started to try I got the idea that the helicopters were coming after me. That they were flying around up there just to watch me.”
“Oh, Julieta.”
“I know, you don’t have to say anything, I was paranoid. Just last month I stopped taking mood stabilizers. I miss them a little, but I have to get through it. So: I thought they were coming to get me, so they could take me and the baby to experiment on—some kind of science fiction delusion. Or else they wanted to steal the baby from me. They were, how can I explain it, like a kidnapping commando unit of the city of Barcelona. That’s how serious it got. Daniel only realized it much later. He was working all day back then, I don’t even remember on what, but it was an important video. I hid from the helicopters under the bed. Or I made tents with the sheets. I didn’t want to go outside. One day Daniel found me there and, well, he took me to a shrink. The poor guy was really scared.”
“Did you get pregnant?”
“No. Weird, because we went about six months without protection. Maybe one of us can’t have kids. In any case, when I started treatment I had to stop trying, because the pills aren’t recommended for pregnant women. Plus, I realized that wanting to have kids was part of my madness.”
Julieta took the last sip of her coffee, and lowered her voice.
“No one should have kids in Barcelona. You heard what Manuel told us last night? This isn’t a place for kids.”
“What did he tell us?”
“You know! You think Yasmine’s baby is the only kid wandering around Barcelona? Manuel told you.”
Julieta’s eyes were completely opaque, and her smile had frozen on her face with a rigidity that was the opposite extreme of happiness. Sofía thought her friend must still be crazy, that she’d have to have a talk with Daniel as soon as they got back to the apartment. Julieta took her hand on the table. Her fingers were cold, and she was trembling.
“You already know,” she said.
“Know what, Juli, for the love of God.”
“You’ve smelled it. The stench of the kids. I saw you wrinkling your nose.”
Sofía shivered. Julieta told her she needed to tell her everything. She said that when she and Daniel came to Raval in 1997, the neighborhood was up in arms. The biggest pedophile ring in Europe had one of its main tentacles there, and people talked about children who were sold by their prostitute mothers to be photographed in bedrooms, kids whose poverty-stricken mothers left them in the hands of a pedophile named Xavier Tamarit. Children who were hunted down by pedophiles in Plaza Negra. They shut down an orphanage, and no one knew who the kids were; the priests and nuns had shredded their records. Kids who never went to school, who carried knives, who turned tricks. One of the boys stank; he stank because his one and only set of clothes was also his mattress. That kid wanders around the city, he fills it with his stench so no one ever forgets him. They say the social workers couldn’t get the clothes off him because they were stuck to his body with dirt. They say he had lice, but also white worms in his scalp, and sores under his arms, from the dirt; no one had ever bathed him. He was a little animal, he shat himself from fear and didn’t clean it off. That’s the kid most people see, the most popular ghost, the one who touches you with his black hands, the one who brushes against the jacket slung over your chair and leaves it stinking of dead meat. But there are also kids who fell off balconies after their junkie mothers left them there. Kids who had keys hung around their necks at three, four years old. Kids who murdered taxi drivers and died of overdoses, whored themselves out, went looking for crack.
After the Tamarit case, the city started paying people forty thousand pesetas to leave their apartments. It was the most densely populated neighborhood in the world after Calcutta. Houses were falling down, there was no electricity, anyone with a bathroom was lucky, there was no running water.
Physically eradicate Barrio Chino. Operation: Illa Negra. Calles Nou, Sant Ramón, Marquès de Barberà.
On one wall someone painted the words “accumuland
o rabia”—Rage Accumulation.
The Raval prostitution case was an excuse to criminalize movement in the neighborhood, exploited by the instigators of the Old City’s reform.
Tamarit is not aggressive, my exploration with the patient demonstrates he has the capacity of inhibition, he rationalizes his pedophilia but he has received chemical castration treatments to lower his libido, anatomical penis reduction, shrinkage, fibrosis, urethral stenosis, several operations.
The case had been an ambush, Julieta explained, a fraud. They used it to expel hordes of people, to clean up the neighborhood. Some belonged to one neighborhood party, others to another, she didn’t understand it very well, but they were all problems of the Cataluñan Generalitat. A political matter.
But no one talked about the Raval case anymore. And why not? Julieta knew why. Because if it was ever discussed again, they would have to talk about the kids. Not about the raped children, because apparently there were no raped children, it was all a lie. About the other kids. The ones who were not alive.
“There’s one who always walks down Tallers saying, ‘I swear it on all my dead.’ I thought he was real, at first, but no, because he always walks at the same time and not everyone sees him. Just awful, that’s a lovely street, with all the record stores….But sometimes I can’t bring myself to go. Plus, he’s out of his territory, that’s the Gothic Quarter.”
“Girl, you’ve got to—”
“Don’t treat me like I’m crazy. Everyone in this city knows and they all act the idiot. But you already know, I can see it in your face. Which one did you see?”
Sofía looked down at her coffee, now cold. Then she raised her eyes and looked over at the other tables. Two very tall Scandinavians were drinking beer beside them, speaking a strange language full of the letter “a.” At the cigarette machine, two Catalans were sliding coins into the slot. On the walls, posters from shows at the Sidecar, exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The English were cementing their bad reputation by shouting in the street, singing some possibly classic song that was unrecognizable in their drunken rendition. It all seemed normal, a city with exclusive locales—like that one that served only fresh fruit juices and smoothies—and designer clothing stores, tourists marveling at the modernist architecture, and girls enjoying the beach at Barceloneta. Sofía was afraid she was letting herself be influenced by her friend’s paranoia, which seemed to confirm her own unease. What if her apprehension only came from a deep antipathy for proud Barcelona? What if hers was the phobia of a provincial tourist? She’d just decided to keep quiet when the smell inundated her nose like a hot pepper, like strong mint, making her eyes water; a smell that was almost palpable, black, from the crypt.
“I haven’t seen anything,” said Sofía. She was telling the truth. But she did believe Julieta. And she believed she would see before long.
Julieta seemed disappointed, frightened. But Sofía soothed her by squeezing her hand, and went on:
“But I smelled it. I smell it.”
Sofía felt like gagging. She held it back by breathing deeply and using the napkin to block the smell a little.
“You smelled it where?” murmured Julieta.
“Everywhere. Right now.”
“You know what they do? They don’t let you leave.”
“What?”
“The kids won’t let people leave. We can’t leave Raval. The kids were unhappy, they don’t want anyone to go, they want to make people suffer. They suck you in. When you try to leave, they make you lose your passport. Or miss your plane. Or the taxi crashes on the way to the airport. Or you get a job offer you can’t refuse because it’s a lot of money. They’re like the spirits in those stories, the ones that move things around in the house at night, but much worse. Anyone who says they don’t want to leave Raval is lying. They can’t leave. And they learn to live with it.”
Sofía closed her eyes. She thought she could hear the quick footsteps of children running barefoot through the refurbished apartments of Raval, and she pictured a boy who used his filthy clothes as a mattress, so angry, so unhappy. She could almost see his toothless mouth, his old misery. She didn’t want to see him for real, sitting in one of the doorways on Escudellers, using a junkie’s old blanket. She didn’t want to see the nocturnal rounds he made with his friends in Plaza Negra.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Julieta told her, serious now, and protective. “We’ll change your ticket. I’ll help you. You’re just visiting. They can’t trap visitors.”
And then, following the lights of a helicopter that was crossing the sky northward, she murmured:
“Go home. Leave us here. And don’t worry. We’ll get out someday. Someday soon.”
The Lookout
The Lady Upstairs always wanted to tell the girl, the daughter of the current owner, not to be afraid. There was nothing to fear. She was there, it was true, but the girl couldn’t sense her, didn’t see her; no one could sense her, unless, of course, she took on shape. But without shape she was denied presence. It wasn’t that the girl had any special sensitivity: she was just terrified. She went running past the stairs that led to the hotel’s lookout, imagining that there, in the tower—which for years had been the tallest building in Ostende—a crazy woman was hiding, a witch with long hair who wore a white nightgown and gazed at herself in a mirror. The girl was afraid, too, of the Italian cook who added wood to the boiler, afraid of him even after he was fired (she thought she might still come upon him in the hallways, lying in wait, and that he’d throw her on the fire along with the wood). Now that she was a grown woman, the owner’s daughter didn’t spend winters in the hotel. She said she couldn’t stand the mediocrity of the solitary resort in the freezing winters, nothing but wind, not even a movie theater open in Pinamar; she said she was also afraid the place would be robbed. But those were lies. She still felt the same fear that had paralyzed her in the hotel’s circular hallways when she was little; it was the same fear that kept her away from the practically monastic dining room on the first floor, or from the big mirror awaiting restoration in the guest room used for storage, where she was afraid of seeing something unknown reflected.
Strange. And even odder was what people said—the guests, the owner himself. There was the story of the worker who died during construction and was bricked up in the wall, as if the hotel aspired to be a Gothic cathedral. Then there was the guest who claimed to hear sounds of a party coming from the main dining room, which dissolved with a cautious hiss when she tried to approach. A cook confirmed the rumors of the celebrating ghosts. All false. The Lady Upstairs was the one tasked with finding for the hotel the thing that all those people feared or invented. And she had never managed it. Not when the Belgians abandoned the hotel to go to war. Not during the years of sand, when the building was buried up to the second floor. Not even during the summer of the whale, with all those flies that invaded the beach with their death buzz, feeding on the lifeless animal run aground. The summer no one went swimming.
Yes, desperate people stayed at the hotel. Yes, she’d heard them mutter death wishes and she’d bestowed on them dreams of terrible childhoods and forgotten pain. But none had been ready. And it was a lie that time didn’t pass for beings like her. She was tired. She longed for each summer to be the last, and she spent more and more time in the lookout tower, where she could barely hear the whisper of the living, which she knew how to imitate so well, but could not comprehend.
* * *
—
And if this damned jacket won’t fit in the suitcase, I’m going to freeze to death, it’s cold at night on the coast, thought Elina, and she couldn’t help it, she started crying again like she always did these days with every little setback. Like when the dining room lamp burned out and she didn’t have a replacement bulb, or any idea how to change it; like when she forgot to pay the electricity bill and had to cross the city to the company�
��s offices; like when she ran out of pills and went searching for an all-night pharmacy at four in the morning. She had taken leave from the university, and she’d tried to fake a certain amount of sanity with family and friends, but it was so difficult that she no longer answered the phone and barely replied to emails and they would just have to deal with it; she didn’t care how worried they were. She didn’t even inform them that she’d stopped going to therapy and was just taking the pills; she had nothing more to talk about or dig up, she just wanted that vaguely distant, chemically induced state that disconnected her but still let her live a little. Less and less, but enough.
She didn’t even really want to go to the hotel, but she’d promised herself she would months ago, before the hospital, back when she still thought that a week at the ocean could make her feel better, force her to stop thinking about Pablo. He had left and he hadn’t called her again, or written; she didn’t know if he was alive or dead and she would prefer either possibility, either of them, to this suspended life of waiting for him for a year now. As always, she sent him a message to let him know where she would be. She even included the phone number. She was going to spend her birthday at the hotel. If Pablo was alive, if he had ever loved her, he had to call.
She missed his caresses on her back, missed his laughing at her paranoia, his useless attempts to console her, the hours it took him to bathe, how he practically didn’t like to eat, the bones of his hips, his way of moving his hands when he talked; she wanted to look at his photos again and get jealous when he paid more attention to the cat than to her and to walk in the sun beside him in his ever-present sunglasses; she missed the early morning phone calls and watching him sleep and how he knew to stay quiet and how she got irritated when he stayed quiet too long and the mornings begging him not to leave and crying when he left even if he’d be back in two hours and she never, ever would have left him like that, no news, no goodbye, ungrateful, but what if he was dead because it was possible he was, no one had ever heard from him again unless they were hiding it from her, but how could they hide something like that when they’d seen her vomit blood from not eating, when they’d seen her biting her pillow until she tore the case, when they’d seen her hurting herself and drunk and waiting hours for an email with her eyes fixed on the screen until she had a headache and bloodshot eyes and was crying onto the keyboard, never going out and waiting for a phone call; they’d heard her say to hell with all that bullshit about out with the old and in with the new life goes on you have to get laid there are thousands of men out there you look great let’s go dancing I want to introduce you to someone.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Page 6
