A Shortcut to Paradise

by Teresa Solana

  “Of course I don’t. I just wanted to know what you thought…”

  “Keep quiet” was the message. Jacinto decided he’d change Cisco’s bar for Antonio’s for a few days, where they only had Sport and The Sporting World. As his brother-in-law had advised, he should forget that business and avoid the daily papers for a while. He had enough worries, apart from a criminal record, and the last thing he needed was an encounter with a shirty magistrate. So a rich woman writer had been murdered in a luxury hotel? Well, that didn’t affect him or his struggle to keep afloat. His brother-in-law was right: sooner or later they’d find someone else to confirm the fellow’s alibi and he’d be let out of the slammer. There must be a bunch of eyewitnesses. No need to worry.

  But Jacinto suspected it wouldn’t be so easy for him to forget the fear-filled eyes he’d seen in the newspaper that he now knew belonged to a man called Amadeu Cabestany. In the evening when he and Sebastià met up again at the family’s St John’s Eve party, they looked askance at each other but didn’t mention the issue again. There was nothing more to say. However, that year Jacinto let off fewer crackers than usual, drank more cava than he could handle and was less interested in the generous bosoms being displayed by his sistersin-law. The next morning, after getting up with a slight hangover and washing his face with cold water, he looked in the mirror and acknowledged that that man’s features were as sharply defined as ever in his head, as if someone had super-glued them to each and every one of his neurones.

  13

  The first St John’s Eve that Amadeu Cabestany spent in prison hardly warranted a firework display. He’d been shut up in the Model for six days, in a cell in the fifth gallery, and he was frightened to death. They’d accused him of a murder he hadn’t committed and, for the first time in his life, this great fan of Kafka found himself in a Kafkaesque situation and wasn’t at all amused. Amadeu had devoted many, many pages of his novels to cheerful themes like death, solitude and sorrow, and courageously explored in his labyrinthine prose the anguished tragedy of the human condition. Nevertheless, he now knew that nothing he’d written remotely resembled the nausea he’d been feeling from Sunday morning as a result of his imprisonment. In the Model, no less, a place that no longer harboured Republicans and Romantic anti-Franco fighters, but thieves, junkies and renowned killers belonging to merciless mafias. For the moment, none of Amadeu’s sombre reflections made captivity more tolerable or helped him confront that nightmare with a brave heart, quite the contrary. Lucid appreciation of the world as a perverse place dominated by evil – and, in the specific case of the Model, thought Amadeu, by delinquents who probably hid a sharp knife under their blankets – prevented him from grasping at any fragile straws of hope.

  With the exception of Clàudia his agent, everybody seemed convinced he was guilty, from his colleagues at the school where he taught to his wife who was threatening him with divorce. Amadeu was facing the real possibility that he might be tried for murder and sentenced to years and years in the slammer, and it was no foregone conclusion in his case that a long stay in jail would inspire a new Death of Virgil. Existence was surely an onerous burden driven by egotism and perversity, as he himself had written so often, but in the few days he’d been in prison, Amadeu had discovered it was easier to bear that particular burden in his little flat in Vic than in a filthy, grey cell that stank of disinfectant. And true enough, free will was an illusion and life was basically a swamp of misery, as he had affirmed so often, following Schopenhauer, but now, after five days of being shut up on the Carrer Entença, surrounded by delinquents towering at least half a metre above him, Amadeu was in no doubt at all it was infinitely preferable to savour the angst of existence with the help of a plate of local sausages and suffer the traumas of life with the aid of a bottle of wine from the Priorat.

  He was surrounded by gross, unhinged men, their tattooed hides toughened by experience, who regarded him with a mixture of envy and contempt. Most were foreigners, but there were a lot of locals too and they were the ones who scared the novelist the most, perhaps because, if he tried hard, he could understand a little of what they said. With that white skin of his, his smart haircut and the build of a gentleman who’d never got a hernia shifting bricks or acting criminally, Amadeu was soon the object of the mockery and insults of the other prisoners. He spent the first few days on the point of collapse, like a sleepwalker, shaking like a leaf as he waited for the moment when one of those hulks – or perhaps more than one – raped him, beat him or stuck a knife between his ribs. In fact things weren’t like that any more in the Model, but Amadeu had seen too many repeats of Midnight Express on the TV and was terrified.

  By the third day, although still in a state of shock, Amadeu realized that a change was taking place in the attitude of the other inmates, particularly among those who shared a cell with him. They’d simply stopped scorning and insulting him, and seemed clearly to be avoiding him and even looked at him with loathing. But Amadeu remained silent, shit-scared, and though his state of acute panic prevented him from thinking clearly (that wasn’t a strong point of his, by the way) he concluded that that gang of barbarians were plotting something. He felt alone and defenceless, a white explorer in the hands of a savage tribe in the middle of the jungle, unable to decipher its language or make himself understood; they’d soon do a boil-up and he’d be the prime ingredient. Yes, he reflected as he curled up in a corner of his cell, he’d ended up in the heart of darkness, except that in that prison there wasn’t one Kurtz but hundreds. On the other hand, his cellmates eyed him suspiciously and reckoned they were the ones sentenced to live cheek by jowl with a monster. Amadeu didn’t know this, but a rumour had begun to spread around the fifth gallery and the inmates had nicknamed him Hannibal.

  The rumour soon reached the ears of the prison administrators. Educated on progressive ideas about rehabilitation and faith in occupational therapies, many of them members of various NGOs in their spare time, the prison warders had initially felt sympathetic towards him and his appearance as a disoriented, radical member of the provincial bourgeoisie. However, they soon began to change their tune. It was obvious their superiors were hiding something and that the rumour circulating within the prison walls wasn’t simply the product of the devious imaginations of the inmates. The latter couldn’t fathom the presence of a person like Amadeu, the perpetrator of a particularly brutal murder, in the Model, and they unconsciously began to apply the laws of Gestalt psychology and elaborate their own explanation in order to fit the facts together and endow them with a minimal logic. First of all, after one of the inmates had made the effort to read the news item in the paper and pass it on to his friends, the story did the rounds that Amadeu had killed the woman by smashing her head in with an apple. Shortly after, maybe as the result of underachievement at school, the prisoner who read the story didn’t understand it properly and a fresh version began to circulate according to which Amadeu had taken a bite from the bloody apple after committing the crime. The day after, the story that spread throughout the Model was that the cannibal had eaten apple and scraps of raw brain.

  On Thursday morning, during their yard-break, the jail-birds argued heatedly, as if possessed by the spirit of the Lord of the Flies. Some said Amadeu had used a Golden Delicious, because one of them, an expert jewel thief, recalled that “golden” meant ” in Catalan, which is the colour of those apples. Some maintained it was Royal Gala, and others were adamant, with considerably more insight, that it was a Fuji, because it was common knowledge that Fuji apples are bigger and harder. On the other hand, they very quickly put his lack of appetite (Amadeu hardly tasted prison fodder, and when he did so, soon threw it up) to the fact that the balanced diet served in jail couldn’t satisfy his depraved culinary tastes. Amadeu didn’t know it, but Doctor Hannibal Lecter, from within the world of fiction, was saving his arse, if not his life.

  The inmates couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that Amadeu Cabestany looked like a well-educated, well-off,
cultured man, and so might be a computer hacker or corrupt politician but not a brutal murderer. The Model was home to men sent down for theft, rape, drug-trafficking and blood-curdling crimes, but none were writers and none passed through the prison gates elegantly dressed in black from head to toe. Besides, Amadeu didn’t speak Spanish, Arab, Russian or Albanian, or any of the languages one could hear in that Babel of a jail. To be sure, he hardly ever spoke, but when he did, he did so in Catalan, and that disconcerted them even more. No doubt, he was the most eccentric prisoner they’d ever seen, as, so they thought, he seemed like a normal person. And as, by chance, they’d seen The Silence of the Lambs on television in their leisure time, the figure of that revenge-seeking cannibal persuaded some of their untutored minds to add one and one together and come up with two. Amadeu Cabestany the writer was in fact a refined criminal, endowed with an intellect as exceptional and perverse as Dr Lecter’s, and consequently a cannibal, as they confused the prize trophy and the apple. And as cannibalism is an activity that is almost universally believed to be repulsive, capable of making the most hardened murderers vomit, everyone began to avoid him like the plague. What’s more, his rather frail physique supported the hypothesis that he had a twisted, evil mind, capable of tremendous deviousness. Naturally, after reaching these conclusions that everybody thought extremely reasonable, no one at the Model wanted to have any dealings with him. No one, that is, except for Knocksie, who tried to befriend him.

  Knocksie was in the same gallery as Amadeu but not in the same cell. That meant they had the same mealtimes and yard-time. He was a straightforward psychopath, but neither the health authorities nor the conservative judge that sentenced him were at all sure that he was mad enough to rate being shut up in the psychiatric ward in Can Brians. He’d been given thirty years for raping, murdering and carving up two old dears who were over eighty, and was waiting for the judiciary to pronounce their verdict on three similar crimes. Knocksie was thirty-three and had spent sixteen years in reformatory, the Model and other penitentiary establishments. Apart from the times when the psychologist was dealing with him, he spent his nights and most of his days alone, morbidly relishing his past butchery and dreaming of repeating his feats as soon as he got out. The judge had insisted, against the advice of some psychiatrists, that Knocksie perfectly recognized the difference between good and evil, and he’d ended up in the Model. The fact his junkie parents had abandoned him as a baby and that as a kid he’d been raped and mistreated by his own grandparents seemed irrelevant to the judge, although that’s where he’d got his nickname from: from childhood he’d always been knocked to bits. Those beatings had made him an incurable psychopath, deprived him of a number of teeth, and given him a coronary condition that his fondness for drugs only exacerbated.

  Knocksie had no friends in the prison, and Amadeu’s alleged cannibalism didn’t scare him, rather it intrigued him. Maybe the next time he’d try the liver or heart of the next old lady who came by, he pondered while he listened warmly to the atrocities they accused Amadeu of, who seemed to have tasted more of his victims’ organs by the hour. When they were in the yard on Friday morning, while Amadeu was silently lamenting that he’d have no cake or crackers that year, and that, on the contrary, someone might land him with Aids or lethal hepatitis, Knocksie attempted to strike up a conversation. Amadeu didn’t seem in the least bit communicative, but, when he wanted, Knocksie could be polite and pleasant, and Amadeu felt infinitely lonely. After a kind of exchange in the form of a monologue on the part of Knocksie and monosyllables on the part of Amadeu, Knocksie offered him a cigarette that he accepted with alacrity.

  The rest of the inmates weren’t at all surprised that the two basket cases had linked up in that strange way, and the warders took note of the new and dangerous friendship. Naturally, Amadeu had no idea who Knocksie was and swallowed whole the story the latter told him: he was a third-rate thief who’d unluckily harmed, quite unawares, one of his victims while burgling a chalet under the influence of drugs in order to feed his family.

  But something happened on Saturday that shocked everyone stiff and convinced inmates and administrators alike that the rumour circulating inside about Amadeu, now referred to by everyone as Hannibal, was the tip of the iceberg of the atrocities being attributed to him. When they went into the yard at about eleven that morning, Knocksie went over to Amadeu again and they started to chat. The psychopath was desperate to hear the most blood-curdling details of Marina Dolç’s death agony, but, as the writer insisted he was innocent and as Knocksie didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of his new friend, he thought it better to backtrack. Amadeu was beginning to like Knocksie, and gradually confided in him more. He told him he was married, lived in Vic and had two lovely daughters, and confirmed that he was a famous writer. Knocksie was intrigued and asked what kind of things he wrote, and Amadeu, comforted by the sight of someone taking a genuine interest in his work, told him he wrote novels and poetry. Death, grief and the slavery to sex were the main themes in his work, which unfortunately few readers knew how to appreciate. Mentally, Knocksie rubbed his hands and licked his lips. His friend was better than he’d ever imagined and a present straight from hell to satisfy his own lusts. The other inmates, who kept well away, were astounded by the pair’s animated conversation and the warders were thinking that nothing good could come from it.

  Knocksie crossed his legs and tried to hide the vigorous erection that had suddenly hit him and made an effort to ensure his nervous smile didn’t betray him. He asked his friend to tell him more about his books. Surprised and flattered, Amadeu offered to recite a poem and Knocksie was delighted. The rest of the prisoners, standing a prudent distance away, couldn’t hear what they were saying, but saw Amadeu move his lips rhythmically while Knocksie listened in a trance. Five minutes later, Knocksie collapsed to the ground, the victim of a heart attack.

  Everybody realized what had happened. Just as in the film they’d seen a few days before, their Hannibal had related something that was so scary that Knocksie hadn’t committed suicide but had had a cardiac arrest. The prison medical services could do nothing to revive him, despite trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and rushing to inject him straight in the heart. Knocksie was as dead as a doornail and everybody was staring at Amadeu.

  It was futile for the writer from Vic to try to explain he had simply recited his long poem, ‘The Exposed Entrails of the Night’, which he was particularly proud of, or for the doctor to allude to contributing factors to the inmate’s coronary condition such as his addiction to cigarettes and drugs. The incident reached the ears of the Director, who hurriedly got in touch with the judge in charge of the case and told her there was something extremely odd about that prisoner. He’d found out that the other inmates were sure – he supposed with some reason – that Amadeu Cabestany possessed cannibal instincts, and, as the warders had seen with the incident of Knocksie’s death, he was a manipulator who possessed lethally seductive powers. The judge was livid, because it was a holiday and she was on duty; she had the request for bail for Amadeu on the table in front of her and took note. She pondered for fifteen seconds, wrinkled her nose as if that case stank to high heaven and finally threw out the defence’s request. She would cover her back. Amadeu Cabestany would remain in custody in the Model until that grisly incident was cleared up.

  Fortunately, the incident of Knocksie’s death didn’t reach the press. However, given that, apart from its saints, Vic is famous for its sausages and slaughterhouses, the judge thought the case through and asked the prosecutor to send some of his officers to the capital, and, covering all possible leads, to open a new line of investigation. It wouldn’t be the first time a new crime had served to resolve cases that were on file, and if it turned out that Amadeu Cabestany was a psychotic writer who travelled the world murdering other writers and masticating Catalans, the judge, an able, right-wing, methodical woman, wanted to ensure none of that shit rubbed off on her and that any scandal forthcoming wouldn’t
catch her with her knickers down.

  14

  Deputy-Inspector Maria del Mar Alsina-Graells, of the Mossos d’Esquadra of the Generalitat, was twenty-nine and had been assigned twenty-five-year-old Marc Serra to accompany her on this mission. It was Tuesday, and as one thing always leads to another, Maria del Mar’s period had started the moment she went to get the patrol car to drive to Vic. She and Marc were the mossos charged with starting “that second line of investigations just in case”, as her boss had described it the day before while putting Maria del Mar in the picture and telling her what she was expected to do. Visibly in a foul temper at having to go to Vic and suffering that untimely onset from her female metabolism, she went to the lavatory to insert a Tampax and take an Espidifen while she was about it, which would make her slightly hazy but would at least curb the stabbing pain in her nether regions. She asked her colleague to drive, without telling him why, and spent the whole journey smouldering in a sulky silence. She found Serra intolerable, perhaps because he was a good lad but rather slow on the uptake, or perhaps because he always seemed to accompany her the day her period started and she was beginning to think the two things were related. Maria del Mar and her husband, who also a mosso, wanted to have a child, and it wasn’t going to plan. If Maria del Mar was usually in a bad mood when menstruating, for the last year she’d been extremely irritable, worryingly so, on such occasions.

  “Anything wrong, Maria del Mar? Don’t you feel well?” Serra asked, genuinely concerned to see his colleague looking so sour.

  “Concentrate on the road and don’t give me hassle. I just want us to do a good job, so don’t land us in it and don’t speak to me,” she cut him dead.

  Serra had landed them in it a couple of times, which was perfectly understandable if you considered how he’d only just joined the force and was still in his probationary period. Thanks to his well-exercised athletic physique – over one metre ninety with impressive pecs – he’d passed the physical tests with flying colours. He’d struggled, however, with the intelligence and psychometric tests. But the boy was from Badalona, from a well-connected family, and as there wasn’t much to choose from among the candidates, the examiners decided to turn a blind eye, let him pass and see what happened. The truth was he wasn’t performing so badly, except when he had to work with Deputy-Inspector Maria del Mar, because then he became stressed and did and said foolish things. Serra had no idea about the Deputy-Inspector’s maternal frustrations, and, although he knew she was married to an inspector and he himself had a steady girlfriend, he looked at her as any young heterosexual man looks at a pretty woman who deliberately mistreats him: with desire and deep admiration.