I waited until the next day and eagerly leafed through the paper, but there wasn't a line about my man. Nor the next day. I think after ten days nobody even remembered what had happened between Escobedo and Garcia Streets.
But I began to get obsessed. Everywhere I went I was pursued by the hilarious phrase: A man kicked to death! And all the letters danced before my eyes so joyfully that I resolved to reconstruct this street scene or at least penetrate the mystery of why they killed a man in such a ridiculous way.
Caramba, how I would have wanted to do an experimental study, but I've seen in books that such studies only investigate the “how” of things, and between my first idea, which was that of reconstruction, and that of seeking the motives for why certain individuals would attack and kick another, the second seemed to me more original and beneficial for humanity. Well, the “why” of things is something they say is the domain of philosophy, and in truth I never imagined that my investigation would contain anything philosophical, and besides anything that even sounds like that word that annoys me. So, half fearful and half discouraged, I lit my pipe.—That is essential, very essential.
The first question that comes up before all the others that muck up these investigations is that of method. All university students, training-college and high school students, and in general all people who want to better themselves, have this information at their fingertips. There are two methods: deduction and induction (See Aristotle and Bacon).
The first, deduction, didn't interest me. I've been told that deduction is a mode of investigation that goes from the best known to the least known. A good method: I confess. But I knew very little about the event and so I had to skip it.
Now, induction is something marvelous. It goes from the least known to the best known ... (How does it work? I don't remember ... Well, who knows about these things anyway?) But as I said, this is the method par excellence. When you know a little, you have to induce. So induce, kiddo.
Thus resolved, I lit my pipe and with that formidable inductive weapon in my hands, I remained irresolute, not knowing what to do.
All right: And how to apply this marvelous method? I asked myself.
If only I had studied logic! I was going to remain ignorant of the famous events of Escobedo and Garcia Streets all because of the damn idleness of my early years.
Discouraged, I picked up the Diario de la Tarde of January 13—the unlucky paper had never left my desk—and taking vigorous puffs on my fired-up, big-assed pipe, I reread the bit of sensational journalism reproduced above. I had to wrinkle my brow like all studious men—a deep line between the eyebrows is the unequivocal sign of attention!
I read and I read, until I was struck by something almost dazzling.
The penultimate paragraph, the one that said, “By this morning, the captain of the 6th...” was the one that especially amazed me. The last sentence made my eyes sparkle: “The only information known, by chance, was that the deceased had one or two vices.” And I, by means of a secret power that you wouldn't understand, read it like this: HAD ONE OR TWO VICES, in prodigiously large letters.
I believe it was a revelation from the goddess Astarte. From then on the only point that interested me was to verify what class of weakness the dead Ramirez had. Intuitively I discovered that he was ... No, I won't say it so as not to ruin his memory with women...
And what I had to do was verify through reasoning, and if possible, with proof, what I knew intuitively.
For that, I went down to see the captain of the 6th, who would be able to give me the revealing data. The police authority hadn't cleared up anything. He even had trouble figuring out what I wanted. After my lengthy explanations he said to me, scratching his forehead:
"Oh! Yes ... That Ramirez business ... You see how we've already given up ... It was such a weird turn of events! But, sit down; why don't you sit down, señor ... As you perhaps know already, they brought him in about one o'clock and he died a few hours later ... Poor guy. We took two photos, just in case ... some relative ... Are you related to señor Ramirez? You have my sympathy ... my most sincere..."
"No, señor,” I said indignantly, “I didn't even know him. I'm a man who is interested in justice and nothing else."
And I smiled deep down inside. What a well-chosen phrase! Huh? “I'm a man who is interested in justice and nothing else.” How it tormented the captain! In order not to embarrass him more, I quickly added: “You said you have two photos. If I might see them..."
The dignified civil servant pulled open a drawer of his desk and turned over some papers. Then he opened another and turned over some other papers. In a third, already growing heated, he finally found them.
And he was very proper about it:
"You are interested in this affair. You may have them, sir.... That is, as long as you return them,” he said, nodding his head up and down as he said these last words, taking pleasure in showing me his yellow teeth...
I thanked him profusely, and kept the photos.
"And tell me, señor Captain, you wouldn't be able to remember something special about the deceased, some piece of information that might be revealing?"
"Something special ... some piece of information ... No, no. Well, he was a completely ordinary man. More or less my height—” The captain was a bit on the tall side."—thick, with flabby flesh. But something special ... no ... at least as far as I can remember..."
Since the captain couldn't tell me any more I left, thanking him again.
I hurried home; I shut myself in my study; I lit my pipe and took out the photos, which along with the newspaper article were precious documents.
I was sure of not being able to find any others and I resolved to work with what fate had placed within my grasp.
The first thing to do is to study the man, I told myself. And I went to work.
I examined and re-examined the photos, one by one, making a complete study of them. I brought them close to my eyes; I separated them, stretching out my arm; I tried to discover their secrets.
Until, having them in front of me for so long, I managed to memorize every hidden feature.
That protuberance from his face; that large and strange nose—it looked so much like the crystal stopper in the water carafe in my cheap little diner!—those large and limp whiskers, that little pointed beard; that straight, messy hair.
I took a piece of paper and traced the lines that make up the dead Ramirez's face. Later, when the drawing was finished, I noticed that something was missing because what I was looking at wasn't him; that some completing and indispensable detail had escaped me ... Yes! I picked up the pen and finished his chest, a magnificent chest, which if it had been made of plaster would have fit right in, in some academy. A chest whose breasts have something womanly about them.
Then ... then I treated him with savage cruelty. I put a halo on him! A halo that you nail to the cranium, just like they nail them to the effigies of saints in churches.
The dead Ramirez had a magnificent face!
But, Why did this happen? I tried ... I tried to learn why they killed him; yes, why they killed him...
Then I concocted the following logical conclusions:
The deceased Ramirez was named Octavio Ramirez (anyone with a nose like that couldn't have had another name);
Octavio Ramirez was forty-two years old.
Octavio Ramirez had very little money.
Octavio Ramirez was poorly dressed; and, finally, our deceased was a foreigner.
With these precious data, his personality was totally reconstructed.
The only thing that was missing, then, was this business of a motive, which for me gradually began to take on the quality of hard evidence. Intuition revealed everything to me. The only thing I had to do, as a small point of honor, was to eliminate all the other possibilities. The first, his own declaration, this issue of the cigarette, wasn't even worth considering. It's absolutely absurd that someone should be victimized in such a vile way for such a tri
vial thing. He had lied, he had hidden the truth; I would even say he had murdered the truth, and he had done so because he didn't, he couldn't speak it.
Was the dead Ramirez drunk? No, that couldn't be because the police would have noticed that immediately and the newspaper story would have confirmed it, without a doubt, or if it wasn't on record because of the reporter's incompetence, the police captain would have revealed it to me without any hesitation.
What other weaknesses could our unhappy victim have had? Because he certainly had one, nobody could convince me otherwise. The proof of that was his stubborn refusal to state the reasons for the assault. Any other reason could have been explained without embarrassment. For example, what shame would there be in the following confessions:
"Some guy tricked my daughter; I found him tonight in the street; I went blind with rage, treated him like the scum he is; I grabbed him by the throat, and he, helped by his friends, did this to me” or
"My wife cheated on me with a man whom I tried to kill, but he was stronger than me, and started to kick me furiously” or
"I had an affair with a woman whose husband took revenge by cowardly attacking me with his friends"?
If he had said something like that no one would have thought it strange.
It also would have been very easy to say:
"We had a fight."
But I'm wasting time, these hypotheses are untenable: In the first two cases, the family of the unfortunate man would have said something; in the third his confession would have been inevitable, because the first two would have still been honorable deaths; and the fourth we would already know because, wanting vengeance, he would surely have given the names of his assailants.
Nothing, which had caused my brow to wrinkle with so much thinking, was obvious. I had no more room in my head for more reasoning. So, gathering up all my conclusions, I reconstructed, in brief, the tragic events that occurred between Escobedo and Garcia Streets, in the following way:
Octavio Ramirez, an individual of unknown nationality, forty-two years old, of mediocre build, lived in a modest, lower-class hotel until the 12th of January of this year.
It seems that this Ramirez had some income, certainly very little; he did not allow himself excessive expenses, much less extravagant ones, especially with women. Ever since childhood he had a small misdirection of his instincts, which soon degenerated to the point that, by a fatal impulse, they had to end with the tragic results that concern us.
For better clarity, it is on record that the individual had arrived only a few days before in the city that was to be the theater of these events.
The night of January 12th, while he ate in a cheap, filthy diner, he felt a familiar urge that bothered him more and more. At eight o'clock, when he left the diner, he was agitated by all the torments of this desire. In a strange city, the difficulty of satisfying it, because of his unfamiliarity with the area, urged him on powerfully. He wandered almost desperately, for two hours, through the central streets, anxiously fixing his sparkling eyes on the backs of the men he encountered; he followed them closely, hoping to take advantage of any opportunity, but afraid of being turned down.
By about eleven p.m. it became an immense torture. His body trembled and there was a painful emptiness in his eyes.
Deciding that it was pointless walking from street to street, he turned toward the slums, always looking twice at the passersby, saying hello with a trembling voice, stopping now and then not knowing what to do, like a beggar.
When he got to Escobedo Street he couldn't take it anymore. He wanted to throw himself at the first man who passed by. To whimper, to tearfully tell him about his tortures...
He heard, far off, quiet, measured footsteps; his heart beat violently. He stood against the wall of a house and waited. In a few moments the hard body of a worker filled the sidewalk. Ramirez went pale; when the other came close, he reached out and touched his elbow. The worker quickly turned and looked at him. Ramirez tried a sweet smile, a hungry message abandoned in the gutter: The other let out a guffaw and a dirty word; then he kept on walking, slowly, making the heels of his shoes ring out loudly against the stones. After a half hour another man appeared. Our unfortunate man, shaking all over, risked a flirtatious comment that the passerby answered with a vigorous shove. Ramirez got scared and left quickly.
Then, after walking two blocks, he found himself in Garcia Street. Ready to collapse, his mouth dry, he looked from one side of the street to the other. A short distance away a fourteen-year-old boy was hurrying along. He followed him.
"Psst! Psst!"
The boy stopped.
"Hey, cutie. What are you doing out this late?"
"I'm going home. What do you want?"
"Nothing, nothing ... But don't go so soon, pretty one...” And he took the boy's arm.
The boy tried to pull away.
"Let go! I already told you I'm going home."
He wanted to run. But Ramirez gave a lunge and hugged him. Then the frightened street-boy started screaming:
"Papa! Papa!"
Almost immediately, a few feet away, a door opened, suddenly throwing some light into the street. A tall man appeared. It was the worker who had passed by before on Escobedo Street.
Seeing Ramirez he threw himself on him. Our poor man stood there staring back at him, with eyes as big and fixed as plates, trembling and silent.
"What do you want, you dirty bastard?"
And he gave him a furious kick in the stomach. Octavio Ramirez collapsed, with a long painful gasp of desire.
Epaminondas, which must be the worker's name, seeing the prick on the ground, considered that one kick was too little punishment, and gave him two more, splendid and marvelous ones, in that large nose that provoked him like a sausage.
How those marvelous kicks must have sounded!
Like the splattering of an orange, vigorously thrown against a wall; like the collapse of an umbrella whose ribs smack and shiver; like a nut cracked between two fingers; or better like the encounter of another firm sole of a shoe against another nose!
Like this:
Whack!
with a delicious space between.
Whack!
And then: How Epaminondas became greedy for flesh, driven by the instinct of perversity that makes murderers riddle their victims with stab wounds! That same instinct that pushes some innocent fingers, just for fun, to squeeze harder and harder around friends’ throats until they turn purple and their eyes blaze!
How the sole of Epaminondas's shoe slammed against Octavio Ramirez's nose!
Whack!
Whack!
dizzyingly,
Whack! until a thousand points of light like needles pierced the darkness.
* * * *
Translator's note: Some of Palacio's textual ambiguity is inevitably lost in translation. For example, the police officer describes the victim as “un hombre vulgar,” which means both “ordinary” and “vulgar,” depending on the context; and the newspaper report mentions that the victim was “vicioso,” which covers a range of meanings from self-indulgent and spoiled to vicious and vice ridden. I opted for “ordinary” and “had some vices,” which are probably what the officer and the reporter had in mind, but in each case, much darker connotations are present in the original. (And yes, “bien culotada pipa" really means “big-assed pipe.")—K.W.
Copyright © 1927, and reprinted in Obras Completas, Editorial El Conejo, 1986. Used with permission of the estate. Translation © 2009 by Kenneth Wishnia.
* * * *
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[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: INDEX: VOLUME FIFTY-FOUR 2009
Alexander, Gary
Charlie and the Pirates ... Jan/Feb 49
Allyn, Doug
Flashback! ... Jun 26
Atkins, Joseph B.
Pickup on Route 66 ... Sep 86
Boland, John C.
200 Big Ones ... Mar 56
Out of Her Depth ... Dec 28
Brooks, Jay
Oil Slick ... Mar 27
Brown, Fredric
Fugitive Imposter ... Jun 101
Burns, Rex
Constable Smith and the Bone Pointer ... Oct 4
Campbell, Melodie
Santa Baby ... Jan/Feb 62
Chapman, Tim
A Closer Walk with Thee ... Oct 86
Chesbro, George C.
Home Inversion ... Jun 62
Cleland, Jane K.
Designed to Kill ... Jun 36
Culpepper, Mike
How Aunt Pud, Aunt Margaret, and the Family Retainers Kept Me from Hanging ... Jul/Aug 90
The Icicle Judgment ... Jan/Feb 160
The Necklace of Glass ... Nov 26
The Trollfarm Killing ... Dec 16
De Noux, O'Neil
Price Tag Attached ... Apr 26
Deverell, Diana
Silicon Valley Tango ... Jul/Aug 22
Dirckx, John H.
Death inside the Box ... Apr 68
Eliminate the Middleman ... Jan/Feb 110
Real Men Die ... Sep 26
Dobson, Joanne
A Good Cuppa Joe ... Oct 18
DuBois, Brendan
The High House Writer ... Jul/Aug 39
Egan, K. J.
A Small Circle ... Jan/Feb 30
Emerson, Kathy Lynn
Any Means Short of Murder ... Jan/Feb 140
Estleman, Loren D.
Fletcher Flora Introduction ... Apr 101
Rumble Strip ... Nov 38
Soft Lights and Sabotage ... July/Aug 6
Faherty, Terence
The Caretaker ... Dec 75
Fisher, Eve
Death of a Good Man ... Nov 15
The Mound Builders ... Oct 40
The Porcupine Tree ... Jan/Feb 178
Flora, Fletcher
Insurance ... Apr 102
Floyd, John M.
The Powder Room ... Jul/Aug 128
Remembering Tally ... Jan/Feb 102
Franklin, S. L.
Deadline Edition ... Apr 78
AHMM, December 2009 Page 14
