A Sweet Scent of Death

by Guillermo Arriaga

  ‘They’re yours,’ repeated Natalio, noting the boy’s reluctance. ‘She used to write them to you at night, when she thought we were asleep.’

  Ramón kept the bundle. Though he found it hard to believe them, he did not think they were trying to deceive him.

  He said goodbye, but before he could depart Natalio stopped him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’ asked Ramón hesitantly.

  ‘For loving my daughter and sparing me the burden of killing a man.’

  Ramón put as much distance as he could between himself and Loma Grande, running with long strides through the scrub with the letters under his arm. Looking for shade where he could sit peacefully and read them, he found a rock engulfed by the trunk of a mesquite. The letters, close to fifty of them, were in unsealed envelopes and all, without exception, were fragrant with attar of roses.

  He began to leaf through them at random. Most of them were addressed to an anonymous ‘My love’. The rest, not even that. Drawings of flowers and hearts with the legend ‘You and I’ headed the pages. Some of them were written in a careful studied hand, others scribbled with unintelligible corrections. The syntax was uneven and chaotic, a jungle of disconnected sentences. Ramón soon realized why. Adela had combined her own thoughts with the words of popular songs copied from the series of song books entitled Notitas Musicales. So much confusion suggested coded messages for a lover who might well be the Gypsy. And Ramón might have believed that, if he had not found five lines that erased all doubt from his mind:

  Today I met you in the store. You are the man of my daybreak. I like you a lot. I’ll return to the store a hundred times just to see you. I want to be the only one on the horizon of your love.

  That paragraph was enough for Ramón to change the careless way he was reading the letters. From then on, he found any number of hidden references that coincided with the three times they had met face to face. In them, Adela alluded to details known only to the two of them. He no longer had the slightest doubt: Adela had secretly loved him. Now it was his turn to return that love.

  4

  Clotilde Aranda and Natalio Figueroa awoke from the bottomless stupor of their siesta to a knocking at the door. Natalio pulled back the curtain to reveal Ramón’s face at the window.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  Ramón leaned forward, the bundle of letters still in his hand. He was sweaty and looked upset.

  ‘I’ve come to ask you a favor,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He leaned closer, silhouetted against the sunlight and took a deep breath. ‘Give me a picture of Adela.’

  The old man, dazzled by the five-o’clock blaze behind Ramón, shook his head. ‘The ones I showed you are all I have.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t have any,’ objected Ramón.

  Natalio hesitated. He had no wish to give up a single one of the eight photographs he still had of his daughter: they were the most vivid memento that remained of her. ‘No,’ he declared firmly.

  Clotilde joined them, holding up the eight photos fan-wise in her hand, and Natalio turned to look at her reproachfully.

  ‘I’ll lend you one,’ she said, heedless of her husband.

  Ramón looked them over, one by one: Adela at three, in an old woman’s lap; at five, with other kids; at ten, greeting her godfather; at eleven, at her first communion, and afterward outside the church with the priest and her parents; at fourteen, looking out the window of a bus; at fifteen, at a school ceremony; on her fifteenth birthday, sitting on a cast-iron bench. Natalio had told him the story of each one: where it was taken, by whom, the date, the circumstances.

  Clotilde spread the fan. ‘Choose,’ she said.

  Ramón looked them over again, from left to right and back.

  ‘I don’t want any of these.’

  Clotilde shrugged. ‘Then which?’ she asked, confused. ‘These are all we have.’

  Still dazzled by the sun behind Ramón, they missed his gesture towards the box, which was still on the table.

  ‘That one,’ he said.

  Clotilde looked around the room.

  ‘Which one?’ she asked, puzzled.

  ‘The one on the report card.’

  Clotilde went to get it, removed the staples carefully so as not to damage it, and handed it to Ramón, repeating, ‘It’s just a loan.’

  ‘You have to bring it back,’ added Natalio.

  Ramón went home, greeted his mother with a laconic ‘Hi’, and dropped on his bed. Tired as he was, he reread all the letters. They were all undated, but he tried to put them into some chronological order, adding his own hearts in pencil; and, to dispel any doubt about who they were addressed to, endlessly filled in ‘Ramón and Adela’. Taking the ID photo out of the left pocket of Pedro’s borrowed shirt, he lay there admiring it for a long time. He forgot for the moment that Adela was no more than inert flesh underground. He forgot because he could see her seated next to him on the bed, her hair pulled back, caressing him with a smile. He forgot because he was sound asleep and dreaming.

  Chapter XI

  One Span and Three Fingers

  1

  Justino Téllez woke up, startled by the thunder of one of his own snores.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted.

  He rose and meticulously searched the whole room. Finding no one, he decided it must have been a cat. When he ran his fingers through his hair, they came away wet. The whole house was impregnated with a palpable greasy heat, like oil in the air.

  ‘Shit!’ he murmured.

  He had slept in his clothes, as he always did, and, as always, he swore at the stench of old age it left on him. Taking off his shirt, he soaked a sponge in a basin of water and freshened his arms, neck and armpits. He wanted to change his gray, sodden undershirt, but the others he had were dirtier yet. He decided to leave it on: nobody cared what he wore any more, anyway.

  He spat out the sour taste of a long night and stale beer, gargled with tepid water and pushed the door open to air the room. Sunlight still reverberated furiously in the street. He looked at his watch.

  ‘Four,’ he confirmed, ‘and no end to this fucking heat.’

  He turned back to light the stove. The flame flickered uncertainly, indicating he was almost out of gas. He’d have to go to Mante soon, to exchange the tank. He put a frying pan on the burner containing leftovers of armadillo crackling, a present from his compadre Hector Montonaro. He let it sizzle for several minutes, in anticipation of the bitter taste of almost carbonized meat.

  He ate slowly, the more to enjoy it, sucking each little bone clean, then opened a lukewarm Coke and downed it without stopping. He remembered the murderer’s footprints, thinking he’d have to return to the scene to measure them again. Then he’d look for Rutilio Buenaventura to ask if he knew the Gypsy’s shoe size.

  Justino left the house with a bag of scraps. Two skinny, mangy strays pranced up, wagging their tails; but when he threw them the scraps, they pounced, snarling at each other.

  The afternoon waned as he followed the dirt track to the river, but not the heat, which seemed rooted in the dirt. A handful of male blackbirds perched in the branches of a mesquite squawked noisily. Jack rabbits flashed from among the nopal cactuses as he passed. He picked up a stone to throw at their heads before they took off, the way he had as a kid. He used to daze them with a stone and then break their necks with the edge of his palm. It had been a long time since he’d got one that way, but it didn’t stop him trying, whenever he had the chance.

  Reaching the sorghum field, he was overcome by the peace of the afternoon. Quail filled the stand with their song, and white-winged doves pecked at the ears of grain. He walked to the exact spot where Adela had fallen. All that was left of the crime was a brown patch of dried blood and stalks of sorghum cane flattened by the weight of the corpse. It looked like any other planted field, though not for long: Victor Vargas, who cultivated it, had sworn the previous night, before witness
es, never to plow it again. ‘Because it will never stop reeking of death,’ he explained.

  The field was condemned to be swallowed by weeds and scrub; no one would rent it, or seek it as an abandoned land concession.

  2

  Justino scrutinized the area. Adela’s and the murderer’s footprints were still clearly visible. He squatted and measured them: a span for hers, a span and three fingers for the killer’s. He repeated the procedure to make sure. Out of curiosity, he measured his own footprint: a span, three fingers and a bit. The killer probably wore size nine-and-a-half, as he did.

  He followed the imprints to see where they came from. Sometimes he lost them, but he went around in circles until he found them again. The loose earth around the prints indicated that both of them had been running and that Adela had not stopped until she was killed. The trail led into a field of high, thickly matted grass, which Justino did not venture to cross. At that hour of the afternoon, this was the favored territory of the fer-de-lance, a pit viper that made his skin crawl. He had seen the effect of its venom on cattle. They bellowed uncontrollably, kicking furiously until they collapsed, strangled by their own spasms. He skirted the expanse of grass until he reached the river bank. Estimating the point at which he had left their trail and following imaginary coordinates, he examined the marshy banks of the river. All he found was deer and coati tracks, but by chance he discovered a narrow cattle path trampled through the brush bordering the river. He pushed his way into it with great difficulty, ducking continually to avoid being scratched by the lower stalks. Passage became almost impossible, but by the time he decided he was ready to give up and turn back, it was too late: he had covered more than two hundred meters; the way back was as daunting as the way forward. He decided to push on. At each step he raised clouds of mosquitoes, which riddled him with bites, though he squashed a few, flailing his arms and hands. Inside his green tunnel, the heat intensified brutally, humidity and mud coating his skin with slime. Sweat soaked his clothes and his back creaked with every step at half-crouch. ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ he groaned out loud.

  He kept on for another two hundred meters, practically on his hands and knees, before suddenly he burst into a huge clearing hidden by a stand of trees. Justino stumbled out of the crawlway and sat down to rest on an abandoned anthill, while a flock of brown jays screeched at his intrusion. He threw a lump of dirt to frighten them off and they headed towards the river, where they continued their ruckus.

  In spite of his exhaustion, Justino decided on one last effort in his search to unravel the crime.

  The area was unfamiliar to him, but everything pointed to the field of tall grass he had avoided, ending at this clearing. Only here, the grass was shorter and sparser, a natural pasture for the cattle that had discovered it. The looseness of the earth, because of its proximity to the river, recorded every mark; but the confusion of hoofprints made it well-nigh impossible to find the trail. He would have failed, had he not found, near a palm tree, a patch of grass cut down by machete, in the center of which lay, neatly folded by a white sheet, a black skirt and a blue blouse.

  3

  She had not been stripped with violence. Neither garment was torn or split. On the contrary, they were both carefully folded without a wrinkle or a stain. Under the blouse lay a pair of shoes, panties and a brassiere, and around them the couple’s footprints. Justino examined them one by one. They came from the river bank and proved beyond doubt that killer and victim had arrived together, their footprints side by side. At intervals, they stopped tip to tip, as if the couple had kissed or embraced. At first the trail consisted of shoe prints: his in high-heeled western boots, hers in the shoes lying under the blouse. Then they were delinquently bare around the sheet. The rest was confusion: the man’s footsteps back and forth, first bare, then shod, which finally led away, fifty steps westward. Adela’s steps exploded from the sheet in frenzied flight, his behind hers, covering the fifty steps and throwing up mud at every stride. The chase continued towards the thick, high grass, and from there to the corner of the sorghum field where the ferocious pursuit was consummated.

  Justino felt confused. He could not explain the murderer’s sudden motivation to stick a knife into Adela, minutes after making love to her. Compliantly and tenderly, Adela had prepared for her own death. Her clothes carefully folded on the loving sheet, her dawn nudity in the secluded clearing, all convulsed in terrified flight and a knife to the heart. Why?

  Justino picked up the rose-scented skirt and blouse, testimony to the fact that Adela was involved with her killer and had not been forcibly stripped. At the very least, they contradicted Ranulfo Quirarte’s version that he had seen her with her blouse torn.

  He opened his pocket knife and ripped the clothes and the sheet to shreds. With a palm frond, he obliterated his footsteps, then walked to the river and threw in the shreds of cloth and the shoes. What was left of the evidence swirled briefly in the current, amid leaves and stalks, and then sank below the surface, downstream.

  To have taken it into the village would have been useless, changing no one’s conviction that the Gypsy was the killer. The only outcome would have been the real killer trying to wipe out both the evidence and its finder. Nor was he about to show up with the news that Adela was an oversexed little girl with an itch, struck down with half an ejaculation still smeared on her corpse. Why mortify her parents? Best not embroil things more than they were and hope that the Gypsy, if he were really innocent, might never return to Loma Grande; and if he did, pray they didn’t kill him.

  It began to get dark. Justino left the clearing the same way the lovers had come to their final tryst. It was a faint trail, hard to follow, hidden by patches of spurge nettle and cat-claw, that met the dirt road leading from Loma Grande to Ejido Pastores.

  Amid lengthening shadows, Justino took his bearings and headed south, toward Rutilio Buenaventura’s house.

  4

  Rutilio was listening to a Tigres del Norte cassette on the Walkman the Gypsy had given him. Along with another of a fictitious interview with Caro Quintero, the drug lord in jail, it was one of his favorites. He had more than seventy. The Gypsy brought him five or six every time he came to Loma Grande, buying them in gas stations or trailer stops. He tried to vary the selection: cumbias, mambos, rock, polkas, dirty jokes, even radio recordings of the best soccer games played by the Roadrunners of the University of Tamaulipas.

  Rutilio relieved his endless afternoons of sightlessness listening to his Walkman. He had lost his eyesight eight years before and blamed it on the months he had worked in an insecticide warehouse. In any event, trachoma had left him in the dark. The infection had been so severe that the doctor who had taken care of him had removed both eyeballs and replaced them with two crude, inexpensive glass prostheses.

  Justino saw the old man through a window slumped in a chair, with his headphones on, his eyelids shut, surrounded by a dozen or so chickens. Rutilio kept them in the house to protect them from raccoons and their ring-tailed cat cousins. He survived on their eggs and the fifty dollars a month sent him by a daughter working in a 7-Eleven in Harlingen, Texas.

  ‘G’afternoon,’ yelled Justino from the window.

  One of the hens flapped upward, squawking, over the old man’s head, but Rutilio didn’t react. Except for the slight drumming of his fingers to the rhythm of his tape, he could have been asleep.

  ‘Afternoon,’ repeated Justino, getting no more reaction from the old man than before. He pushed the door open and went in.

  At a soft touch on the shoulder, Rutilio shot out of his chair, opening his agate eyes. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, removing the earphones.

  ‘It’s me, Justino.’

  ‘Hi, long time,’ said Rutilio. ‘Saddle up anywhere you like.’

  Justino sat down next to him. It was the old man’s custom to light an oil lamp at nightfall, a polite gesture towards would-be visitors, though few if any ever came any more. His artificial gaze bothered Justino, wh
o otherwise liked him and enjoyed his conversation.

  ‘One of my hens died,’ said Rutilio. ‘I think it was the heat that done her in.’

  There were feathers and droppings in every corner, an acrid odor in the whole place.

  ‘I found out she’d died when the room got full of flies. Trouble is, now the goddam flies won’t go away.’

  Justino looked up at the fly-spotted ceiling. He was on the point of suggesting DDT, but remembered Rutilio’s aversion to pesticides.

  ‘Put up flypaper,’ he advised.

  The old man smiled. ‘No, because I forget where I put it, and then it’s me that gets stuck.’

  Justino smiled back.

  ‘I won’t offer you coffee, because I don’t have any,’ apologized Rutilio, ‘but there’s yucca flower boiled with egg in the pot if you want some.’

  ‘No, thanks; I just ate,’ answered Justino.

  One by one, the hens settled into the nests the old man had made for them under his bed. The cooing of the hens as they tucked their heads under their wings soothed the atmosphere.

  The old man showed no sign of knowing about the crime, and Justino didn’t know how to ask him about the Gypsy.

  Rutilio sensed anxiety in the delegate and turned towards him, his glass eyes flashing in the lamplight.

  Justino shuddered. ‘They’re going to share out more land to the newcomers,’ he remarked nervously, trying to cover his confusion.

  ‘How’re they going to do that? There are more of them than there are parcels of land,’ pointed out Rutilio, waiting, from the silent Justino, for an answer that didn’t come.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ asked Rutilio straight out.

  ‘I came to ask you something,’ said Justino, avoiding the glass eyes.

  Rutilio pushed back in his chair. ‘Whatever you want, just don’t beat around the bush.’