A Sweet Scent of Death

by Guillermo Arriaga

  He dressed and walked to the pick-up. Opening the door on the driver’s side, he switched the radio on and scanned for a station, stopping at one that broadcast from Tampico, one he remembered from childhood. He turned up the volume and walked around to the back of the truck. Rummaging in a box he found a can of tuna, another of peas and a jar of mayonnaise, some chiles and a loaf of bread. He wolfed a sandwich made with four slices of bread, took the cap off a grapefruit Squeeze and climbed onto the hood to drink it. The station was broadcasting its ‘Heartbreak Hour’. It occurred to him that real men were never left by a woman, and that the ‘heartbroken’ were a bunch of jerks, incapable of understanding a woman’s desires. The announcer, who was of the opposite opinion, never stopped praising that ‘class of noble and generous men who, no matter how they suffer, let their women go their own way’.

  While the announcer preached ‘the exquisite pain of lost love’, the Gypsy recalled the previous night. Every night with Gabriela was more intense, and every intense night Gabriela felt more guilty and begged the Gypsy to leave her in peace; and he left Loma Grande and left Gabriela Bautista in peace, tangled in her peace, choking on her peace, avidly awaiting the night the Gypsy would return and tear it away from her.

  ‘It is two-fifty p.m. and here is “I won’t go near that gal again” by the Rio Grande Hurricanes,’ oozed the announcer.

  The Gypsy jumped off the hood, drank the rest of his soda and took the wheel. It was later than he thought. He had to drive to San Fernando to pick up a load of smuggled tape recorders. If he didn’t hurry, he would arrive after nightfall and no longer find the dealer. It would then be hard to make the contact again.

  He switched the radio off and the motor on. As he turned the wheel to the right, he suddenly stopped. Gabriela’s kisses had not yet dissolved in his mouth. No woman had ever turned him on to that extent; he thought of her daily and often, her flesh calling him to her.

  Slowly he turned the wheel to the left, towards the road which, in a straight line, entered Loma Grande’s main street. As he accelerated, his mind was only on making off with Gabriela Bautista and holing up with her in Tampico. He gunned the pick-up decisively; after no more than a kilometer he suddenly braked to a stop. He looked fixedly at the horizon, took a deep breath, shifted into reverse and, turning the pick-up around, went back the way he had come.

  5

  Pedro Salgado slipped through the door into his house. Gabriela Bautista watched him intently, sheer terror straining her eyes. Her husband was a man capable of slow brutality and she knew it. If he was going to kill her, it would be without fuss or excitement. Like the time when a single discrete motion with a scythe slashed the throat of a boy from another village who could not stop looking hungrily at Gabriela, and who survived thanks to the miracle performed by a rural doctor who, lacking surgical instruments, had sewn him up with a fishhook. No, there was no remorse in Pedro Salgado; he had demonstrated it on that and many other occasions. Even so, Gabriela considered him a good husband: affectionate, hard-working, responsible, and drunk only on weekends. He had never laid a hand on her, even though he had threatened to cut her to pieces if he ever discovered her to be unfaithful, a threat she knew he would fulfill to the letter.

  Pedro saw his wife kneeling behind the bed and let loose a loud ‘What the hell are you doing there?’, which Gabriela interpreted as the preamble to a savage beating.

  ‘I’m looking for my socks,’ she managed to answer.

  ‘And have you found them?’

  All Gabriela could answer was a faint ‘No’.

  Pedro walked to the table and sat on a wooden bench.

  ‘Make me some eggs and coffee, I’m hungry.’

  Gabriela looked fearfully at Pedro, got up, poured the coffee into a cup and handed it to him. Pedro sweetened it with four spoons of sugar and began to drink slowly.

  ‘Where were you all day?’ he asked flatly.

  Gabriela spilled cooking oil from the bottle in her hand and turned to her husband. She looked for a trace of restrained fury in his eyes, but found only the dullness of a two-day, non-stop binge. With eyebrows raised and mouth open, Pedro waited for the answer.

  ‘I haven’t left the house since last night,’ said Gabriela with a poise inspired out of nowhere.

  Pedro looked his wife up and down.

  ‘Then you don’t know?’ he asked with a note of disbelief.

  Gabriela again felt afraid. She could not tell if Pedro was leading her into a lie, or really asking her in all innocence. The doubt terrified her.

  ‘Know what?’ she asked unsteadily.

  Had Pedro been sober he would have noticed his wife’s nerves immediately, but his languid alcoholic stupor allowed for nothing more than: ‘Somebody killed my cousin Ramón’s girlfriend.’

  Gabriela felt her fear dissipate little by little, so that she could speak without a tremor in her voice: ‘Which Ramón? The one with the store?’

  Pedro nodded. Relieved, Gabriela turned her back and began to cook the eggs. Pedro was so tired he began to sag onto the table until he was almost lying on it. Gabriela finished frying the eggs, put them on a plate and the plate in front of her husband. The aroma made him rub his face with both hands to wake himself up.

  ‘Give me a roll,’ he said.

  Gabriela took one from a bag and handed it to him. Pedro broke it up and popped the yolk with one of the pieces. Gabriela noticed that he was wearing only a T-shirt.

  ‘What happened to your shirt?’

  Pedro’s hand with the piece of bread stopped halfway to his mouth.

  ‘I lent it to my cousin,’ he answered after a pause. ‘He needed one for the wake.’

  ‘What was her name?’ asked Gabriela innocently.

  ‘Adela,’ answered Pedro.

  Gabriela pondered the name. ‘Adela?’

  ‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t know her. She was one of the newcomers.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know her.’

  Pedro returned to dipping bread into the yolk and eating it with evident gusto.

  Gabriela watched every movement in search of a sign of hidden jealousy, but found none. Completely calm, she asked the last question: ‘Do they know who killed her?’

  Pedro downed a mouthful of coffee so that he could answer promptly and sputtered: ‘Yes…the Gypsy…’

  Gabriela Bautista was stunned and again felt herself sweating inside.

  Chapter IX

  Other People’s Night

  1

  Astrid Monge was unable to shake the chill from her eyes for the rest of the night, nor rid them of the silhouette of her friend’s corpse. She wanted no supper, upset by the odor of rancid leather that spilled from Adela. Seeing her so upset, her mother tried to give her some relief by applying nightshade compresses to her temples. They were useless: her daughter was overcome by the acid sensation of death.

  Adela disappeared from one moment to the next and Astrid, had she not dressed her and felt her turning cold under her hands, would still not have believed it. Adela’s death created a hole in her life. Even though they had known each other for a short time, a complicitous friendship had taken hold of them. They told each other things that neither imagined they could talk about among women. It was Astrid who had begun the exchange of confidences, talking about what she considered most intimate: rebellious dreams, unexpected desires. Soon, her trivial adolescent secrets were surpassed by Adela’s insatiable stories. With her reserved manners of a reticent outsider, she was able to conceal the hot blood coursing through her veins. Little by little she had revealed the amorous desires eating away at her to Astrid, though never the name of the one who left the marks of what she called ‘traces of passion’ on her body: scratches, bites, purple circles beneath her nipples, in the folds of her abdomen, between her thighs, on the nape of her neck, hidden by her hair—all of which Astrid contemplated in amazement when Adela showed them to her with the pride of a satisfied female.

  ‘I’m in love. Helplessly in
love,’ repeated Adela, time after time, without giving away the identity of her lover. It had taken Astrid a while to realize that Adela was involved with a married man with whom she curled up every day just before dawn, in the thick vegetation along the river bank.

  Adela’s parents had guessed at their daughter’s romance. It was evident not only in her changes of mood and a lively joy, but because her mother often read the letters Adela wrote to her lover and innocently hid under the mattress on her cot. Devout Catholics who warned their children of the dangers and evils of sin, they never suspected the delighted orgasms with which Adela began her early mornings. The letters gave no hint of such a possibility. Written in a confused style, they seemed to refer to a relationship with a formal and straightforward boyfriend whose identity their daughter was hiding.

  One night they decided to question her about the reasons for her secrecy. Adela answered their questions with composure, telling them that her boyfriend was from the village, of her own age, that he respected her completely, that his intentions were serious and that she would introduce him to them the very Sunday she was killed.

  To sidestep the mess into which she had gotten herself, Adela had decided to ask Astrid’s brother to act as her boyfriend for a couple of days. Whether out of prudence, embarrassment or shame, she could not bring herself to do it.

  Her parents had swallowed Adela’s fairy tale. Only Astrid shared with her the secrets of her wild love story and was the only one who knew that Adela was planning to run away with her nameless lover to the nameless wastes of the Tamaulipas Sierra. She did not insist on finding out the name, losing interest in it, in the face of Adela’s stubborn refusal to reveal it. Her curiosity had not returned until the moment she heard of the murder and a string of possibilities crossed her mind. One by one, she discarded them all. None of them fitted the description Adela gave her of her man. The fact was that Adela had not described him with such basic adjectives as tall, light-skinned, handsome, swarthy, slim, heavy, but with far more substantial ones: rough, tough and a great lay—three qualities that would be hard for just any man to merit.

  Astrid supposed that Ramón Castaños must have been the one who finally supplied Adela with her alibi. He fitted the description of the timid boyfriend she had sketched. Evidently her parents had fallen for the ploy and that was why they were so attentive to him, treating him as if he were one of the closest mourners.

  Astrid stopped her mental pursuit of suspects when her brother came home in the early morning. He had come back from the store bearing the urgent news that the Gypsy had murdered Adela. For a moment, Astrid was confused. She couldn’t see the Gypsy as her friend’s possible lover and therefore her most likely killer. The Gypsy was neither married, nor lived in Loma Grande, and Adela always bragged that her man made love to her every day. But it surely must be he, the only one around who fitted the fleeting portrait Adela had painted.

  2

  The widow Castaños tried to move as little as possible, to prevent those outside from noticing the creaking of the rocking chair she had pulled up to the wall so that she could hear the conversation on the other side. Most of what she heard that Sunday night repeated the Gypsy’s guilt, until one sentence stood out among the rest in that beery atmosphere: ‘You have to avenge her…kill him,’ declared a blurred voice, belonging to Torcuato Garduño. The widow figured it was directed at her son and put her ear to the crack through which she was peeping.

  First she heard Ramón’s silence and then a chorus of laughter. At first she couldn’t guess what was happening but inferred that Torcuato was joking and that the others were making fun of Ramón’s pallor. She was right; it seemed impossible that Ramón would have the courage to take on the Gypsy. Ramón knew it and so did the others, for the simple reason that few, if any of them, had it either. By showing off his eight mortal scars, the five machete slashes and the three bullet holes, the Gypsy had created a myth of invulnerability. ‘He has a double-thick skin,’ it was said; ‘that’s why he can take so much.’ Further vague and remote rumors credited him with the deaths of four men. But, above all, Loma Grande was, in the final analysis, a law-abiding village where no one had taken justice into his own hands for a long time.

  ‘Carmelo Lozano will take care of that bastard,’ declared Justino Téllez.

  The widow Castaños heard the murmured approval of the listeners. She was pleased, not wanting to see her son mixed up in a lost cause. She had pulled her ear away from the crack, satisfied with Justino’s solution, when Marcelino Huitrón’s grave voice brought it back to the wall.

  ‘Don’t be a wimp,’ he growled at Ramón; ‘you kill that son of a bitch, because Carmelo Lozano won’t lay a finger on him.’

  This time there was neither laughter nor jokes. Marcelino’s son had been run over and Carmelo had let the driver go in exchange for a thousand-peso bribe. He had kept him locked up for barely half a day.

  ‘Carmelo and that son of a bitch are partners,’ insisted Marcelino, which was true. The Gypsy paid the police commander a monthly retainer so that he could smuggle contraband into southern Tamaulipas.

  ‘He won’t do a thing to him,’ he repeated; ‘Lozano won’t wring the neck of one of his own chickens.’

  Justino Téllez tried to interrupt. He had always argued that crimes should not be resolved by violence. He had witnessed the feud between the Jiménez and Duarte families and knew that vengeance never pacified such enmity—quite the contrary. Both families had been exterminated without ever solving their differences. He was convinced that jail was better than bloodshed.

  When Téllez tried to speak, Marcelino shut him up.

  ‘Don’t start whining, Justino,’ he said, shoving his face into the other’s. ‘Some things have to be put right between machos.’

  He turned his back on Téllez and stared at Ramón. ‘And if you’re not man enough to kill him, I will,’ he said without hesitating.

  ‘Don’t get all worked up, Lino; this is none of your business,’ broke in Justino Téllez, ‘and if it’s a man’s job, let Ramón take care of it his way.’

  Marcelino nodded his head heavily. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll shut up. I just have one more question.’ The others eyed him expectantly. Marcelino was staring at Ramón again. ‘So, what the fuck are you going to do?’ he asked straight out. There was a deep silence. From her rocking chair, the widow wanted to scream ‘Leave my boy alone,’ but was just able to murmur an inaudible ‘Lord save us.’

  Ramón’s stomach palpitated at the question. He had no way out. There was only one answer to that question. He swallowed hard: either he was a man for ever or would never be one again.

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ he answered, the bile burning his throat; ‘I’ll kill him as soon as I see him.’

  Marcelino raised the beer bottle in his hand. ‘Salud,’ he mumbled.

  Justino Téllez patted Ramón on the shoulder. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  Blood had won out and he would do nothing to stop it flowing. Ramón would have to take care of it himself.

  3

  A mouse flashed across the table, grabbed a piece of tortilla from a dirty plate and fled over the bench. Natalio Figueroa watched it all the way into a crack under the wardrobe. It was 3 a.m. and Natalio was waiting for the news that might identify his daughter’s killer.

  As a child, his mother had told him that bad news came at night. By now Natalio had discarded that statement. He had received all his bad news in broad daylight: at eleven o’clock of a Sunday morning in June he had been advised that his son Erasmo was gasping his last, stretched out in a muddy street with his skull holed by a random shot fired by a mindless drunk celebrating the end of an all-night binge with aimless gunfire; at eight o’clock of a Saturday morning in April the news had reached his front door that his son Marcos had been thrown into a pile of rock from the back of a spooked horse, pulverizing the fragile string of bones connecting his neck to his head; and yesterday, at three in the afternoon, just to corrobora
te the fact that bad news came in daylight, Evelia had informed them that their daughter’s body lay like a discarded rag at the edge of a sorghum field.

  He took a sip of cold, watery coffee. His wife lay drowsily mumbling nightmares. Natalio watched her without emotion. He no longer had the strength to console her, nor the desire to live. His only comfort was the chance to know the identity of the murderer, so that he could shove a knife into his chest.

  Natalio perceived a barely audible but incessant tapping in the room. He peered at the table and found a moth frantically beating its wings against the cover of an enameled pot. Natalio picked it up between finger and thumb, pulled off its wings and dropped it. The moth staggered a few centimeters over the floor and was lost in the shadows.

  Natalio blew away the dust its wings had left on his fingers. The neighbor’s dogs began barking. Natalio stood up and looked out the window. In the dark, he could not see who was approaching, but assumed that someone was coming to tell him about the murderer.

  He stood behind the door, expecting a knock, and nervously awakened Clotilde with a whistle. Alarmed, the woman sat up on the bed.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked dully, still half asleep.

  Natalio pointed to the door. Without understanding what was going on, his wife put on her scuffs and joined him.

  ‘Good evening,’ said a voice on the other side of the door. Natalio opened the door and found himself face to face with two strangers he could not remember having seen at the funeral. He examined them before responding.

  ‘Evening,’ he said shortly.

  One of the men held up a plastic bag and offered it to him. ‘We’ve brought you some supper.’

  The visitors’ unexpected cordiality upset him. He took the bag, whispering his thanks, then stood in silence, as did the other two. From inside the house Clotilde asked them in.