by Selva Almada
La Condorito, a mentally disabled prostitute, was found with her throat cut, wrapped in a blanket, on a piece of wasteland in the city. She had links to the Sister Adorers congregation, which ran a scheme for getting girls off the streets and teaching them a trade. The nuns protected them, and La Condorito was an old friend of the convent. When she was murdered, the sisters Beatriz and Albeana decided they had to do something, that their congregation and the whole Villa María community had to take a stand. They founded the organisation to raise awareness and support the victims’ families.
Before La Condorito, the taxi driver Mónica Leocato was found raped and strangled in her car, on a country road, seemingly by a customer. A brutal crime that remains unpunished. And a few years later, in 2005, Mariela Bessonart disappeared. The last person who saw her, and the only suspect in her disappearance, is her ex-husband and the father of her children.
9
Raúl Favre was the Danne family doctor. He wasn’t particularly surprised when he heard knocking at his door just after one that morning. Small-town doctors are used to their patients showing up at their homes at all hours of the day or night. When he opened the door he found Eymar Danne and another man, who was introduced as a neighbour. Danne told him something was wrong with his daughter Andrea, and he had to come and see her right away. Since it was still raining, Favre decided to take the car in case he had to drive the girl to hospital or sort out anything else.
When he went into the bedroom, he saw the girl lying in bed, with a large pool of dried blood on her chest and blood on the floor by the side of the bed. Her mother was sitting on the bed next to hers, as if frozen, and barely seemed to register his arrival. Danne, meanwhile, was very agitated and asked him several times if his daughter was dead.
Is she dead? Is she dead? Is she dead?
Yes, she’s dead.
Well then, that’s fine, she’s dead now, there’s nothing more we can do, the doctor said he heard her father say.
Realising he couldn’t do anything for the girl either, the doctor offered to go and get the police. They didn’t have a phone in the house.
It was a long rest of the night in which relatives, friends and curious bystanders gathered in Andrea’s room, looking at her laid out in bed and covered in blood.
The dance at the Santa Rosa club was the point the news spread from. Fabiana Danne was there with some friends. Her brother went to find her and tell her to come home because Andrea had had an accident. Some friends went back with her, and other people she knew followed behind. Then came relatives who lived on the same block, like the grandmother, an aunt, some cousins. And soon after that, the boyfriend and the boyfriend’s parents.
All traipsing in and out of that bedroom. The more squeamish peering from the doorway.
A murder in the privacy of a family home, which had the same exposure as a death by the roadside.
At some point the house became so crowded that the police decided to remove the body. They took it to the morgue without waiting for the Grey Lion, the only photographer in town, who, as well as social occasions, stepped in to document accidents and, from time to time, corpses. There are no photos of Andrea Danne in the case file. Only pictures of the empty scene, with her body gone, and bloodstains on the floor and the mattress.
The autopsy report says:
Death occurred at approximately 1 a.m. on November 16th, 1986.
Death was caused by acute anaemia caused by a massive haemorrhage caused by a wound in the right atrium.
The wound was effected by a knife or similar object, slim, with a blade around 3 cm wide and at least 8 cm to 10 cm long, which was inserted with the blade pointing towards the distal part of the body.
When the act occurred, Miss Danne would have been asleep, in a supine position and with the attacker most likely to her right, and the weapon in the attacker’s right hand.
No further injuries or signs of external violence are recorded. No evidence was found on her hands to suggest a struggle or an attempt to defend herself upon being attacked.
It is likely that the assailant was an adult, who operated the weapon with some force and speed.
Doctor Favre was one of the first people to see Andrea’s body lying face-up, her hands by her sides, perfectly clean, her arms extended and resting on the bedspread, which covered her up to the waist. There was a lot of dried blood on her chest, dried blood in the gap between her arm and her body, and blood on the floor. Her death had been almost instantaneous, presumably occurring in the time the haemorrhage lasted, a couple of minutes or so.
When he was called to testify, they read him the autopsy report and asked if the position the girl’s body was found in was consistent with the way she was murdered. The doctor said no.
The mortal wound, as it’s described in the coroner’s report, injured the large blood vessels and the right atrium of the heart, but it’s a shallow lesion, in an area of low blood pressure, which means the haemorrhage resulting from the wound isn’t massive. The victim takes around two minutes to die. Enough time to make movements, because the blood goes on reaching the brain through the blood vessels that aren’t injured. Voluntary movements at first and then involuntary ones, when the blood pressure drops due to the haemorrhage. The body would have been partly curled up and the bed would have been in disarray. I think someone arranged the body before I got there, he said.
In the eighties, my mum worked as a nurse at a clinic in my town. Doctor Favre was on the medical team. In the downtime on their shifts, they’d often discuss Andrea’s murder. For the doctor there was one unanswered question, which he went over endlessly in his mind: how could the murderer have got into the house, killed the girl, taken the time to arrange her body so it looked like she was asleep, and then left again, without the mother or father or little brother, who slept in the next room, on the other side of the wall, with a door connecting the two rooms, hearing anything at all?
Favre died some years ago. His eternal question, unanswered.
The friends, relatives and curious bystanders in Andrea’s bedroom didn’t include sixteen-year-old Aldo Cettour, a neighbour and distant cousin of the victim, who would later become another suspect.
Aldo was late to everything that night: late to the dance at the Santa Rosa club, arriving just as Fabiana and the others were hurrying out following the news of Andrea’s accident, and too late to see his neighbour’s corpse.
When he came back from the dance in the early hours, his parents and sister were still up. The three of them had been at the Dannes’ house and they told him what they saw there. Aldo made for the front door, intending to go round too, not wanting to miss the scene people would be talking about for years to come. But his mother stopped him. She said they’d already taken the girl away and there was no reason to go, there was nothing left to see. Not even blood, because after the people from the morgue removed the body, Fabiana had started cleaning. She collected bucket after bucket of water and blood and tipped them into the yard.
A few months earlier, Aldo and some friends had snuck onto the Dannes’ patio down a little path that linked his backyard to theirs, and spied on Andrea and Fabiana through their bedroom window as they were getting ready for bed. The girls caught them and there was a bit of a row. Some of their underwear had also gone missing from the clothes line.
In my town there was an incurable peeping tom, Bochita Aguilera, a dumpy, moustached man in his fifties who lived alone with his mother. He was a master baker and in the evenings, on the way home from work, he slipped into the open yards of the houses to spy on the girls through the thin gauzy curtains people used to have. He was harmless. He just liked feasting his eyes on those beautiful young bodies moving around in the bedrooms, getting ready for bed. Every now and then, a house dog or one of the girls would spot him in flagrante and Bochita would make a run for it, before the father of the outrag
ed girl could catch him.
On the night of the crime, Aldo was playing pool with a friend in the nearby town of Colón. It was past midnight and he could see there was a storm on the way, so he decided to hitchhike back to San José. The wind and rain caught him as he waited by the roadside, out in the open. By the time a car stopped, he was soaked through. He got home and changed his clothes. It was still early for bed, so he went out again, to the dance at the club, a few blocks away. On his way in, he passed Fabiana and some of her friends, who were rushing out looking shell-shocked. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, he heard one of them say.
Not until he stepped into the hall, where the dance was still going on as the whispers of Andrea’s death began to spread, through the music, the cigarette smoke, the glasses of beer, not until that moment, did someone tell him his neighbour had been stabbed.
As well as spying on the girls, Aldo had seen a psychologist for a few months. Three decades ago, in a town like San José, seeing a therapist was practically the same as being crazy. He’d been treated because, according to the case file, he’d been feeling weird and shutting himself away. He never felt like that again afterwards.
Aldo and his mates’ teenage prank doesn’t seem like solid grounds for suspecting him of murder. But with the investigation going round in circles, and no proof to speak of, everyone, in a way, was a suspect.
Remember the kid who stole their knickers? Paula says, and bursts out laughing. Eduardo just smiles. Maybe he doesn’t think it’s funny, or maybe he doesn’t remember.
We’re sitting in a conservatory full of plants, overlooking a garden with soft green grass, even though it’s only August. It’s a sunny afternoon.
Paula is the mother of Eduardo Germanier, the boyfriend Andrea had when she was killed. She’s a talkative woman, energetic and quick to laughter. Every time she laughs her cheeks lift and her sky-blue eyes vanish behind her glasses. She’s going to leave us alone for the time it takes to get the mate from the house next door, where she lives with her husband. The house with the conservatory where we’re sitting, and the other houses built on the same land, are rented to the tourists who choose Colón as a holiday or long-weekend destination, for its river and thermal baths. As a mother of only boys, Paula is something of a mother hen and sometimes jumps in before Eduardo can open his mouth, or murmurs things to me under her breath. She’s probably overprotective of all her children, but especially this one, who ten years ago was struggling to recover from a stroke that almost killed him. The stroke took away some parts of his memory. Although Paula repeatedly tells me how well he remembers what happened with Andrea, there are obviously some stories they’ve rehearsed together before I arrived. She hovers close by, ready to prompt him when his memory fails, when he falls silent and stares out at the garden, trying to piece the memories together or searching for the right words, because the stroke also left him with a slight speech impediment. Now and then he gets flustered by his overeager mother and tells her to be patient, to let him work out what he wants to say, that we’ll come to that bit later.
The Germanier family lived for a few years in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Not long after they returned to Colón, where they’re originally from, Eduardo met Andrea at the house of some mutual friends. He had long hair and rode a motorbike. He’s always been into bikes, though he’s had several serious accidents. After the stroke he had to give them up, but he still misses them. He says now he just looks at them online.
You see me like this now, but you have no idea what I used to be like.
I don’t confess this yet, but I remember him being very handsome as a young man. He still is. I have a vague recollection of seeing his photo in the paper, on one of those marches organised at the time to demand justice for Andrea. I remember the long curly hair, and people saying he’d sworn not to cut it until his girlfriend’s murder was solved.
He liked her the moment he saw her. She was gorgeous. And two or three weeks after they met, he asked her to be his girl, as people said then. They were boyfriend and girlfriend. He tells me they had a wonderful relationship, that they got on well together, that he really loved her.
The night of the murder, they went for a ride on the motorbike and when they got back they started kissing and cuddling in the kitchen. Everyone else was in bed. At one point they heard some noises outside and he went to see what was going on. He looked out onto the patio and over at the garage where Andrea’s father kept his car, but he saw nothing. He was a bit scared. In time, he came to think those noises he heard were Andrea’s mother, spying on her daughter. It had happened once before: they’d caught her watching them through the kitchen window. Her parents’ bedroom had two doors, one leading to the girls’ bedroom and the other out to the front of the house. So she could go through that door and get into the backyard, round the side way.
He’s told me that various times, Paula backs him up.
They were silent for a while, listening hard, and when they didn’t hear anything else they kissed some more, stringing out their farewell, which would come sooner than usual that evening because Andrea had to study.
Eduardo rode home with the storm at his heels. For the last few miles, the wind was up and seemed almost about to lift him off his bike. He arrived as the first drops were falling and went straight to bed.
It was ten to midnight, I remember it well because I heard the door and looked at the time, Paula says. I was awake. I’d been in bed all day, with women’s troubles, you know, and I couldn’t sleep. I heard him come in and go to his room. A few hours later I heard knocking. The storm had subsided, but it was still raining. A knocking at the door and a woman’s voice calling: Eduardo, Eduardo, let me in, please. I thought it was Andrea, that she’d had a fight with my son and he’d left her out there. I don’t know, I didn’t understand. From my bed I shouted: Coming, Andrea, I’m coming. But what happened, my God, did Eduardo leave you outside...? When I opened the door, it wasn’t her. I saw a girl standing there who I’d never seen before. I’m Andrea’s sister, she said, Andrea’s had an accident, Eduardo has to come to my house. By then, my husband was at the door as well, all the commotion had woken him up. I went in to wake Eduardo, to tell him to get dressed because we had to go to San José. My husband carried on talking to Fabiana, and she told him Andrea had been killed. But we, Eduardo and I, had no idea. When we got there, Andrea’s father was waiting for us outside. That was the first time we’d met him, my husband and I didn’t know her parents. He introduced himself and lit the way to the house with a torch because there was water and mud everywhere. It was only once we were in the room that the penny dropped and we realised she was dead.
Eduardo’s distress when he saw his girlfriend’s lifeless body, and the room covered in blood, was terrible to see. He started yelling, punching the walls. A few people managed to restrain him and drag him into the kitchen to calm him down.
I freaked out, he says, staring into the distance. He has his mother’s sky-blue eyes.
But in the kitchen he went on sobbing and screaming.
There were several women in there, Paula remembers. I was trying to comfort him, but I was also thinking of Andrea and her mother. I was thinking of that poor woman, what she must be going through. We’d never met, remember. I assumed they’d taken her to a neighbour or something. The women there were all so calm. And then one of them comes over to Eduardo and tells him to please be quiet, to stop shouting, because he’s upsetting Andrea’s grandmother, who was an old lady. That’s when I saw red. Who did she think she was, talking to my son like that when he was going through hell. And who might this be? I asked out loud. And another of the women said: It’s Gloria, it’s Andrea’s mum. I couldn’t believe it: her daughter was dead and she was worrying about the grandmother... Honest to God!
That’s Paula’s first memory of Andrea’s mother and from that point on she couldn’t stand her. It wasn’t, s
he thought, how a woman should act when her daughter has just been killed. So calm. For that, Paula has never forgiven her.
Eduardo’s relationship with his girlfriend’s parents was fairly distant. Gloria had rarely broken her silence: that night, when she asked him to be quiet, and the odd time in the past when she asked him about his work, if he was a salaried employee, if they covered his social insurance contributions. Eduardo never understood where these questions were leading, and nor did he give it much thought. He spoke to Andrea’s father a little more, but only what was right and necessary.
Those were different times. It wasn’t the same friendly relationship kids have with adults nowadays, he says.
Meanwhile, Andrea got on very well with Eduardo’s family. Paula was extremely fond of her and approved of the relationship. Whenever Andrea came to visit, she lent a hand in the little shop they had; if there were lots of customers, she’d start serving them without having to be asked. They helped her pay for her studies. And they also helped with the funeral costs.
Paula and Eduardo’s memory of that night and the crime scene doesn’t match the recollections of the expert witnesses recorded in the case file, or of the other witnesses.
They describe the kitchen as carnage: bloodstains on the walls, the table askew, one drawer hanging open, kitchen knives all over the place. And then more blood on the bedroom walls and doors. As if there’d been a ferocious struggle across the two rooms. They think it was a fight between mother and daughter, and that, in a fit of madness, Gloria stabbed Andrea.
When I tell them that according to the autopsy report, Andrea was stabbed in her bed as she slept, and that her body showed no other signs of violence or of her having defended herself from her attacker, Paula shakes her head, indignant.
No, that’s impossible. Impossible. Andrea was killed by her mother. So what you’re saying can’t be right.
