Dorotea did not yet have the honor of counting la Senyora Mates among her devotees. She sent her a string of invitations, proposing impossibly low prices. She paid her several visits. Finally, Conxa received her and placed an order. Employing exquisite manners and the flourishes of a grand vedette, Dorotea won her client’s heart. Since Antoni Mates had assumed the obligation of never leaving his wife’s side, she began to win her client’s husband’s heart as well. One day, on her return from a trip to Paris, Dorotea regaled the Mates couple – on whom the barony had just been conferred – with a string of dazzling and fascinating stories. Her performance was so delightful, with just the right touch of understanding and delicacy, not to mention enthusiasm, that the couple lost all notion of space and time. Since the death of their chauffeur, life had gone dark again for the newly-minted Baron. Antoni Mates was feeling a combination of fear and remorse. He wanted to turn his back on all that. Above all it horrified him that anyone might suspect such a thing of him. Sensing from the gaze of the baron and the baronessa that she could now cast her hook into the water because the bait was irresistible, Dorotea made a few vague, extremely tenuous, gestures, as if the whole thing meant absolutely nothing to her. Among normal people, a situation like this is practically inconceivable. But Dorotea knew what kind of individuals she was dealing with, because Pere Ranalies had presented her with a textbook case and a perfect diagnosis. In the event Ranalies had slipped up, at most Dorotea might lose a client. But there was also a likely chance of gaining many more. If the Baronessa de Falset took her “under her wing” with the kind of protection she had in mind, Palau-Couture would soon reach the summit. Dorotea brought the red cape closer to the horns of the beast and waited a few seconds, during which her heart almost stopped beating. Instead of a mortal goring, she received an ovation. The barons surrendered before the stylist’s tact, talent and discretion.
At first, the Monk supplied his relative with the necessary personnel. Material of excellent quality, in very good condition, and guaranteed to be safe. With the baronessa behind her, Dorotea Palau came to serve the most select clientele of Barcelona. Realizing that she should choose an apartment that met with the needs of the baron and baronessa, Dorotea moved. One day, Dorotea learned of the existence of a certain group of more or less elegant and dissolute young men. By chance, one of these young men came from a very good family. Dorotea had met him in a seigneurial mansion when she was a young girl and he was a ten year-old boy, very cute, and very diligent, with a sailor suit and curly hair that was irresistible to ladies’ fingers. Dorotea also learned that the seigneurial family was practically in the poorhouse, that for a hundred-pesseta bill that boy was capable of doing a great many things, and she found an opportunity to bring a great lady with an excellent heart into her obligation by doing a “favor” for her son. Dorotea made a deal with the young man. She spoke clearly from the start, and the young man accepted the conditions. The readers already know the rest of the story of Dorotea, the young man and the Barons de Falset.
Up to that point, Pere Ranalies had been living off the fat of the land. However, starting with the negotations between Dorotea and Guillem de Lloberola, he began to note an inordinate negligence on the part of his relative. The Monk had become a nuisance to Dorotea, who no longer had any need for him. Not to mention that Dorotea was an absolute miser. The Monk asserted that the “she-beast” had cheated him, and demanded the money owed him. The Monk had fallen on hard times; all his savings had been wiped out in the notorious failure of a bank that had affected half of Barcelona. The Monk was ambitious by nature. He saw that he had lost, and he had a right to recover what he demanded of Dorotea. She refused, and she threatened to turn him over to the police for a whole pile of reasons. The Monk, who was smarter than Dorotea, laughed in her face and said it was “hard to believe she was such a fool.” When he saw that Dorotea wouldn’t cough up the dough, the Monk vowed that he would kill her. She took it as a joke. She thought of Ranalies as a kind of repugnant, but inoffensive, mosquito.
Pere Ranalies bought a knife to kill Dorotea Palau with. He didn’t know when or where it would happen, but he swore that his distant cousin would not get away with this. Ranalies believed in witches. A murder like the one he had in mind was a bit hard to carry off with absolute impunity. But Ranalies believed in witches. Besides, inhabited only by impotent monsters and vomitous aberrations, his brain demanded a special kind of cruelty. Ranalies had a sick mind, cold, calm, and fully conscious. He wanted to kill like a cat, without a sound, with clean hands and a smile on his face. When, and how? He was sure that luck would favor him. Dorotea would fall into his hands. He envisioned the moment, he savored the impunity of his crime, he heard the woman’s muffled scream and smelled her viscous blood … With his soft, icy fingers he would sit and caress the knife. It was a five-spring stiletto, like the ones from the days of the hoodlums, the kind that plunge delicately into a man’s body fat, like a diver with perfect style.
Luck or witchcraft did indeed watch over Ranalies the night porter. Dorotea had made a friend in France, an odd, shady guy with a blond moustache, a bowler hat, dirty fingernails, and a diamond on his pinky finger. He wore secondhand suits that had been painstakingly restored at the dyers’, filmy pochettes in pastel colors, and metallic ties, with a gold pin in the knot that had a tooth – probably from a child who had been killed for his blood – set right in the middle. He was a rascal who liked to sing, drink red wine all day long, and dine al fresco, and he made love in a roguish, gallant, and theatrical way, like a character out of Beaumarchais. Dorotea had been thoroughly diddled by that strapping fellow, who continued to write her after she left Paris. He had some wine business in Perpinyà and on occasion he would cross the border and come to Barcelona to enjoy “un dîner fin avec la belle Dorothée.”
On one of these getaways, Dorotea accompanied him to a quiet cafè near the Pla de Palau for a glass of Pernod; the Frenchman was in high spirits, and they continued on to the restaurant Can Soler on the Barceloneta. He liked the spattering of the frying oil, the slices of watermelon from the Passeig Nacional, and the whole petty trade in fishing, sailing and distilled liquor that reminded him of the port of Marseille. They dined on lobster in tomato sauce with an exhilarating allioli. “Comme ça sent bon, ma belle!” said the Frenchman, whose cheeks had gone dark, practically purple, like two veal kidneys.
The Frenchman had brought Dorotea “quelque chose de très chic”: a necklace of tiny glass seed beads that practically danced upon her fleshy neck with their peals of laughter.
Later they went to see a revue at the Teatre Còmic. The Frenchman found it dull and a little crass. Then they still found time for a drink, and the Frenchman began to think that despite Dorotea’s excess pounds, her flirty gaze was still quite nice. The Frenchman was staying in a hotel by the Boqueria Market. They couldn’t go there, and Dorotea didn’t want any compromising situations at her own house, so they adopted the most practical solution. The taxi driver pulled up to the meublé that was currently most in demand. After drawing the curtains behind them, a diminutive little man, gray and seedy, wearing the white jacket uniform of the house, opened the door for them. Dorotea was very put out, but she didn’t let on. The Monk pretended not to recognize her. He led them to the lift and deposited them in room thirty-two. At that time of night there were three people on duty. As it was a weekday, the erotic temperature was not so high as on other nights, and the work wasn’t killing them. The Monk was covering both the door and the telephone. The other two were doing their rounds on the upper floors. About two hours had gone by when the Frenchman called down and requested a taxi; in five minutes the cab was at the door. The Frenchman went downstairs and said he would be back within the half hour. When the Monk asked after the lady, the Frenchman, smiling and in the tone used by a man in his cups, responded: “Elle dort, la belle Dorothée … Dommage de la réveiller … Je reviens tout à l’heure …” What had happened to the Frenchman was quite natural. When Doro
tea, fatigued and worn out by it all, began to nod off, the man realized that he had left certain papers he didn’t want to lose in a jacket pocket in his lodgings. Since he was a distrustful type, and he, too, believed in witches, he got nervous. He dressed without a sound so as not to awaken Dorotea.
Once the Monk had closed the cab door on the Frenchman, he felt for his knife as he wondered whether the man had been so stupid as to leave the door to the chamber unlocked. He took advantage of a lull to go quickly upstairs, first ensuring that the other two were on duty and unaware of his maneuver. With great caution, he pushed on the door of room thirty-two, and it opened. Inside he found only darkness and the sound of Dorotea snoring. On tiptoe, the Monk turned on the red light. Dorotea continue to snore. He picked up a washcloth lying on the floor in case he had to muffle her voice, and gripped his knife. Dorotea let out a weak guttural groan that wouldn’t have caused the slightest alarm because, in a house like that, the origins of the “ahhhs” were harmless, and no one paid them any mind. The knife pierced her heart and the hemorrhage bubbled up as if from a spring. The Monk left the knife in the wound; earlier, he had scrubbed it down, just in case, and he was wearing the white gloves they wore when taking a meal up to one of the higher-priced rooms. He pulled the sheet up over the dead woman’s body, turned out the light, peeped out to make sure the hall was empty, and opened the door. Three minutes later he was back at the telephone. The maneuver had been perfect; there was not so much as a drop of blood on him anywhere. He looked in the mirror; he had the same gray face of an upstanding man as always.
A half or three-quarters of an hour later, the Frenchman returned. The Monk took him up to the room, and the Frenchman turned the lock on the door. He got undressed in the dark so as not to awaken Dorotea. When he got into bed, he felt the wet stickiness of the blood. The alarmed Frenchman must not have imagined that things could have reached such tragic proportions because he had the wherewithal to say, “Voyons, ma belle! Pas de blague!…” When he put his hand under her left breast he felt the knife. The excitable Frenchman squealed like a pig being pulled by the tail. He was naked, he was locked in that room with a dead woman, he was filthy with blood. Dorotea’s body was still warm. The man wasn’t so unthinking as not to realize that his situation was deeply compromised. By the time he got dressed, cried out, they would be upstairs … His mysterious errand was perhaps the only place where he could find a defense, yet in that moment he felt it simply made him look more guilty. The man felt defeated. He called downstairs, said two incomprehensible words, and dropped back down onto the bed, lacking the resolve to get dressed, staring at his hands, his chest, his stomach, his legs, his whole body, helpless and covered in blood.
Ranalies answered the phone and called for the police patrol who were just a few steps away from the meublé. A couple of guàrdies civils, always in the vicinity, also rushed right over. Ranalies called for the second servant, who was on the top floor. The third man on duty had already gone to answer the door, and he ran into Ranalies just as he came back from calling for the police. They all went up to the room. The Frenchman was screaming like a madman, crying, incapable of getting dressed, incapable of unlocking the door. The Frenchman said over and over again that he was innocent, but no one believed him. They tied him up, he went up before the judge in a state of exhaustion, and everything that happens in such cases happened …
The testimony of Ranalies and the other two servants left no room for doubt. Even worse, as the Frenchman told his story, the judge was laughing up his sleeve. Everything pointed to him, everything conspired against him. Who could doubt the staff, Ranalies in particular, who had been in service at that house for so long? What interest could any of the staff have in committing a crime like that? When the woman was identified and the newspapers said that the body belonged to Dorotea Palau, the well-known dressmaker, a great consternation spread among many ladies from the best families: “Poor Dorotea! Who could have imagined it? She seemed so decent, so utterly beyond reproach!”
The only person who breathed a bit easier on hearing of the crime was the Baró de Falset. Guillem de Lloberola wasn’t the slightest bit moved, nor did it take him by surprise: “What other end could a hag like Dorotea come to?” is what Guillem thought.
Antoni Mates thought that Dorotea’s disappearance left one less person to compromise him. Dorotea had been silenced forever more. Antoni Mates had stopped going to the Club Eqüestre. He hadn’t seen Frederic in ages, and had no desire to run into him. Frederic felt the same way. Since Frederic had been saved, he had no interest in further analysis of the details, but when he was all by himself he couldn’t help thinking that what he and his brother had done was not very clean. Frederic also did his best to avoid Guillem. Guillem, on the other hand, radiated satisfaction … A newcomer to actual fraud, he derived great pleasure from both the game and the adventure of it. He hadn’t yet reached the stage of disappointment. We won’t call it remorse because that would be excessive, but a sort of sadness of mere routine does ultimately take over, even for someone who is collecting a string of murders.
Guillem considered the Baró de Falset a repugnant and cowardly scorpion, without a drop of venom. He didn’t merit a moment of regret. Guillem believed he was doing society a favor by morally eroding a man like the Baró de Falset, squeezing money from him as if from a sponge. Guillem was wielding the most vile and criminal of weapons, but he didn’t see that, or preferred not to. He thought that high-stakes swindling put one in a brilliant position, as vivid and as human as allowing oneself to be nailed to a cross. He enjoyed the artistic voluptuosity of the game, and like a coward he accepted the venal turpitude and all the economic profit he could derive. Guillem was thirsty for fine suits and fine ties, dinners in fine restaurants, and sleeping with fine women. Once he had dared to blackmail a man of the category of the Baró de Falset, the scorn he felt for his father and for all his family’s prejudices was only exacerbated. A satanic, but still immature, flora grew within the bookish depravity of the younger Lloberola. In men’s hearts two phenomena carry tremendous sexual force: the first is the thrill of lowering oneself, of squatting like a dog, and suffering discomfort and physical pain to draw closer to divinity, the same idea of divinity and integral union with God that some mystics of monotheism have aspired to by means of these somewhat sadistic procedures. The other phenomenon, full of sensual intensity, consists of stifling within oneself any reminiscence of fear or mercy, any of the apparently irreducible religious and moral subconscious that is present even in frigid temperaments, until one has achieved the absolute absence of shame or scruples in the face of any situation. In his puerile, twisted and literary way, Guillem leaned toward the second of these phenomena.
Guillem decided to blackmail the Baró de Falset again. He formulated his plan in writing, a marvel of composition. Having the authentic letter from Antoni Mates in his possession, Guillem was able to pose the affair in such a way as to assign himself no role in the shameful events at the heart of the extortion. The document explained the carryings-on of the married couple with a third person, whose name did not appear, but whose existence Guillem could certify, as he had come to know the facts through the confession of the person in question. Moreover, in light of Antoni Mates’s social position, the third person was of very little consequence. As proof, Guillem submitted the evidence of the previous extortion, and the irrefutable testimony of the baron’s letter to his brother. In the event Antoni Mates didn’t wish to deliver the amounts requested to Guillem, he would find a way to spread the defamatory news wherever it would be most prejudicial. Still, Guillem didn’t believe he would have to go so far, and he always assumed that the baron would pay up.
Two days after hearing the news of Dorotea Palau’s murder, Guillem requested another meeting with Antoni Mates. Flustered and practically jumping out of his own skin, naturally the baron conceded it to him. Guillem was paid a considerable sum. Mates handed it over with relative dignity, considering the panic and
rage that consumed him. A short time later, Guillem turned the screws a little tighter. At that point the baron lost control, cried, groveled, threatened to kill Guillem and then begged Guillem to kill him, to free him of this torture. In the end, the baron gave in. Guillem performed magnificent demonstrations of serenity, cold-bloodedness, soullessness. After he had paid Guillem, the baron attended a very important board meeting. They were preparing for the Exposició Internacional on Montjuïc. Those were the days of the most unrestrained squandering of the dictatorship, and the Baró de Falset anticipated magnificent returns. This was where his brilliant and splendid reality lay; he hid his tortures, his fear and the secret and unutterable reality deep within his breast. The baron wondered if he was the victim of strange hallucinations. When push came to shove, the young man could say whatever he liked. What of it? Who would believe him? And if they did believe him, then what? The baron would recover his serenity for a few days but then, every so often, he would remember the letter he had written and the fear would return. It was the infamous letter that kept him up at night. He could have gone to Frederic and demanded that he return the document, throwing in his face his indelicacy in not having burned the letter, as he had requested. But he would soon desist because that would have exposed him, and muddied the waters, when what he most wanted was for the waters to stay nice and quiet, and for not a word to be breathed.
To understand the intimidation of the Baró de Falset, the acuteness of his panic and the extent of his vulnerability, one must always bear in mind the weakness and cowardice that stemmed from his abnormality. The other thing that must also be kept in mind is the kind of prestige he enjoyed and the kind of people he lived among.
Private Life Page 16
