It had been the night before Antoni’s seventh birthday when his father disappeared. He and Rafael were the same age (forty-six), had been born in the same neighbourhood on the right of the Eixample, and had studied at the same Catholic school run by Claretian priests on Carrer Pare Claret. Antoni’s parents had run a small grocery shop near the Passeig de Sant Joan, very close to where Rafael lived, and as kids, when they came out of school, Rafael often went there and stayed to play in the back of the shop until his mother came to fetch him. Over the years, their lives had followed different paths – Antoni would become a writer and Rafael followed in his father’s footsteps as a builder – but, one way or another, they had always kept in contact. As Rafael now owned one of those small construction companies that had proliferated before the crisis, when Antoni decided to sell the mansion he immediately thought of his friend as the best one to take a look and give him advice on the work to be done before they put it on the market.
The mansion had been shut up for at least ten years, and had never been refurbished. Health problems had forced Antoni’s mother to stop going there in the summer, and Vero and Eulàlia, Antoni’s wife and daughter, preferred to holiday in the flat Vero had inherited from her parents in Cadaqués, where the majority of their friends spent the summer. The mansion only generated expenses because it was in such a state of disrepair it was impossible to rent and make money out of. The plastic and Formica that were fashionable at the time and which they’d used to embellish the bathrooms had fallen apart and the stippling Antoni’s father had insisted on using everywhere gave the place a faux rustic, tawdry look. The electrical fittings and plumbing were also a problem, and, like the roof, were responsible for the damp and mildew on the walls and ceilings.
“It looks decrepit,” was Rafael’s verdict. “If you really want to make money, you’ll have to refurbish it from top to bottom.”
Rafael persuaded Antoni it was worthwhile investing money in a proper revamp before putting the house on the market. He himself had sketched out a plan to convert the modest late-sixties construction into a desirable luxurious summer residence with open spaces and minimalist design of the kind featured in glossy interior design and architecture magazines. As Antoni wasn’t in a position to take on the necessary investment, they had come to an agreement: Rafael would advance the money to buy materials and would expect to be paid when Antoni managed to sell the mansion. They would both make money and what’s more, Rafael could use the project for promotional purposes, after the crisis had almost bankrupted him.
Rafael was startled by the cries of a famished seagull passing overhead. His gaze instinctively sought refuge in the expanse of salt water and his eyes were filled with an insipid haze of greys and blues, the colours of the day’s dawn. He zipped up his jacket and stuffed his hands into his pockets, trying to warm himself up. Why the hell had he ever asked Ahmed to knock down that wall? How could he be so unlucky?
He covered the ditch with a sheet of plastic in case it rained and went back into the house. He wasn’t one to drink – only the odd drop at parties or with friends – but he now decided that a whisky or cognac would help him find the courage to handle the two calls he had to make, to the mossos and to Antoni, so he rummaged in the kitchen cupboards hoping he’d find a bottle. He didn’t. The only option was to drive to Tamariu, the nearest town, where he could buy a packet of Marlboros and smoke that cigarette he’d been dreaming of for over five years.
As soon as he reached Tamariu he went to the Passeig, where he recalled seeing the only bar on the promenade that was open out of season. After parking his car, he went in, bought a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and ordered a beer – at that time of day, with an empty stomach, he was afraid a whisky or cognac might upset him – and told the waitress, a girl whose accent and looks seemed eastern European, that he would smoke his cigarette on the terrace.
Helped by the beer, the cigarette unleashed an avalanche of forgotten sensations and made him feel slightly queasy, but he lit up a second right away. He couldn’t stop thinking how different things would be if he hadn’t asked Ahmed to knock down the brick wall to replace it with railings and his spade hadn’t hit those remains. Antoni wouldn’t have to suffer the torment of discovering that his mother was a murderer who had been deceiving him for a lifetime, and he wouldn’t be about to lose out on the investment he had made when paying for the materials for the house refurbishment out of his own pocket.
All in all, a fucking disaster.
Subdued by alcohol and nicotine, Rafael calculated that he’d not seen Antoni’s mother for fifteen years. He knew she still lived by herself in the flat where she had lived forever, above the grocery shop, but lately his friend had told him her health was rather delicate and she’d been forced to employ a young woman to help with the housework. She didn’t get on with Vero, her daughter-in-law, but Antoni still worshipped his mother, who had brought him up as a single parent at a time when the servile values inculcated by the Feminine Section of the Falange were still in vogue and women were the first to criticize or find failings in wives who were mistreated or abandoned by their husbands.
The knife he had seen next to the skeleton indicated that the man had been stabbed to death. What on earth could have happened? Had it been an attack in a moment of passion, or a premeditated crime? Whatever the case, if she had killed him, somebody must have helped her, thought Rafael, because Antoni’s mother was on the small side and clearly didn’t have the strength to drag a corpse the size and weight of Antoni’s father the length of the garden. Rafael recalled that there had been an uncle, Antoni’s mother’s brother, who sometimes fetched him from school. Was he the one who had helped? Or perhaps there had been another man, a lover nobody knew about? However, Antoni’s mother had never remarried or had any other relationship, at least as far as he knew. A female lover, perhaps, in those times when women rarely came out of the closet? He didn’t think so.
Rafael lit a third cigarette. Antoni’s mother was the only one who could answer all these questions. Would they put her in prison, at her age? And how would Antoni react when he realized that the man he had hated all his life wasn’t a good-for-nothing who had abandoned him but the victim of a crime? Rafael was worried by the turmoil the find would plunge his friend into, but he also fretted over the impact it would have on his own family. If the refurbishments were stopped, he wouldn’t be able to pay his suppliers and would have to file for bankruptcy. He would lose his company. And, at his age, with the crisis the building industry had suffered, he would find it difficult to find work anywhere.
Besides, he was dreading communicating the find to the mossos. A couple of months ago, the foreign woman with whom he had enjoyed the only extramarital affair he’d had in twenty years of married life had committed suicide in the bathtub he had just installed in her flat in Sarrià and he’d had to answer loads of questions. Of course, he’d had nothing to do with the death of that idiotic Englishwoman and nobody had suggested any such thing, but what would happen if the police found it suspicious when another corpse appeared linked to his name and, one way or another, his wife found out that he had cheated on her?
There was another option. To do nothing. Or rather, to pretend that none of it had happened. Take the bones, hide them somewhere else and not tell anybody.
In fact, he knew the perfect place to hide them.
After so many years …
There was a village not far from Olot that went by the name of Campfredor, the birthplace of Rafael’s mother, where he and his siblings had spent their childhood Easter and summer holidays. Located in one of the inaccessible valleys of the Alta Garrotxa, Campfredor had been spared the pressure of tourism thanks to a road that was more like a mountain track and which, when it snowed in winter, left the inhabitants of the village isolated from the rest of civilization and, most importantly, from the ski resorts. Campfredor hardly figured on maps, and Rafael reckoned it would take him a couple of hours to get there. He’d better get
a move on if he didn’t want night to fall first.
He paid for his beer, went to get his car and drove back to the house. Ahmed and Hassan kept all the tools and building materials on the ground floor, and he soon found the black plastic sacks they used for rubbish. He grabbed a couple, and some work gloves, and headed to the grave. Fortunately, the mansion was separated from the road by a pine copse, and, as it was a weekday, there were no summer holidaymakers in the neighbouring houses who might be tempted to pry.
Helped by the gloves and spade, he lifted the bones into one of the sacks and the suitcase and knife into the other. The next morning, he would tell Ahmed he had dug up the dog himself and dumped the remains in a rubbish container. He was sure that Ahmed and Hassan wouldn’t swallow any of that, but neither would they ask any questions or think of telling the police. Even though their papers were in order, they were still third-category foreigners, below immigrants from Europe and people who professed a religion other than Islam. Rafael knew they wouldn’t create problems for themselves by notifying the police about the discovery of an old skeleton on the building site where they were working.
He put the sacks, gloves and spade in the car boot and headed off to Campfredor. The place he was looking for was on the outskirts of the village, in a spinney that was difficult to reach, which he had discovered years ago by pure chance. The track there was narrow and sloping, and he had to walk the last stretch. When it became too narrow, Rafael got out of his car, grabbed the sacks, spade and torch, and started walking along a stony, overgrown path. At most he reckoned he had half an hour of light left. When he reached the wood, he carried on till he found what he was looking for: a huge oak tree with tangled branches that stood out from the other trees because of its thick trunk.
Rafael moved slightly away from the tree and started digging. It must have rained recently, because the ground was soft. Even so, the operation to dig a big enough hole took longer than he had anticipated, and, when he’d finished the job, the sky was already a dark shade of twilight and the wood had been transformed into a series of hostile shadows. Rafael stuck the sacks in the hole, next to each other, and then refilled the hole with earth. Just in case, he scattered several spadefuls of dry leaves on top to hide his excavations.
Before going back to his car, he walked as far as the oak tree that had been his point of reference and leaned back against the south-facing side of the trunk. He took twenty paces, stopped, and by the light of his torch cleared away the undergrowth until he found three rocks the size of footballs half-hidden amid the ferns. They were still there, in a row, covered in moss, after all those years. It didn’t look as if a soul had touched them.
Desirée was buried under those stones, an eighteen-year-old French hitchhiker he had given a lift to on the road from Olot to Campfredor. Rafael had invited her to get into his car, and, when he stuck his hand between her thighs, searching for her sex, the little whore had moved away, said no and told him to stop the car and let her get out. He had chased her into the wood, grappled with her and thrown her to the ground. During the struggle, while he held her by the wrists, unzipped her shorts and tried to pull her knickers down, the girl’s head had struck a rock and she’d stopped breathing. She’d died there and then. And he could do nothing, except bury her in those woods.
He wasn’t to blame. It had been an accident. And, at the end of the day, she had been the one who’d asked him to stop the car and had provoked him with her hot pants and plunging neckline. As if he hadn’t known what she really wanted …
Because he was no rapist.
That was one thing he was sure of.
He listened to the radio on the way back. When he reached home, it was almost nine o’clock and had just started to rain. His wife was in the kitchen getting dinner ready, and his son was shut in his bedroom, as he was every night, watching videos, listening to music or playing with his tablet. There was still time.
It was time to celebrate, yet again, that everything had turned out fine.
And with an easy conscience induced by the feeling of a job well done, Rafael went into the dining room, sat on their sofa and slowly smoked the last cigarette in the packet.
I Detest Mozart
I detest Mozart. His music seriously gets on my nerves. Naturally I also don’t like Verdi, Rossini, Handel, Monteverdi, Puccini or Bellini or Wagner … In a nutshell, I can’t stand opera. Even though I undoubtedly belong to the select band of old-timers who have watched the most performances at the Liceu.
I was born in 1924 and have been going to that opera house since I was eighteen. I am now ninety-two. I don’t think I have missed a single premiere in all those years or that there is a single divo or diva I haven’t heard sing. You will probably regard this as a privilege, but I can tell you, as far as I’m concerned, going to the Liceu has always been a torture. And then you will ask: if she doesn’t like opera, why has this good lady spent half her life going to the Liceu? Well, you know, once upon a time things weren’t that easy.
I’m referring to people of our social standing.
The first time I went to the opera, it was with my parents. I had just had my eighteenth birthday and had celebrated my coming out at a big party in the house where we then lived on Passeig de la Bonanova, and Mama thought I was now of an age to go to the Liceu to see an adult performance. I had never been, and naturally enough I was thrilled at the idea of going out at night and dressing up for the theatre. In those days when almost everything was banned, there was very little in the way of entertainment, and the only distractions on hand were going to mass or the dressmaker’s, or doing charity work.
Mama, who was very clever, didn’t choose any ordinary day to take me; she decided on a night at the end of January when a gala performance was planned in honour of the Generalísimo that would bring together the city’s great and good. In those days, our family belonged to an exclusive circle of politicians, military, bankers and businessmen, and, as the daughter of one of the country’s most important Catalan industrialists, I had to experience the rite of initiation of a night at the Liceu and being paraded in all my finery before my peers. You can’t imagine how excited I was! I had never attended a big society event or seen Franco in the flesh – Papa was full of praise for the man – and I was so nervous I lost my appetite. We’re talking about the year 1942. The war that had forced us to leave Barcelona and set up home in Camprodon to escape the anarchist gunmen had only finished three years ago.
The programme to pay homage to the Caudillo comprised the first and second acts of Madame Butterfly and the second act of Lohengrin. Mama was passionate about Wagner, whom she believed to be much superior to Verdi, and was of the opinion that Lohengrin was an excellent choice. Wagner’s music was epic and patriotic, she said, like the decimation of the reds that Franco had pursued to protect us from communism and the “Jewish–Masonic conspiracy”. I think I had heard the occasional piece by Puccini and Wagner on the radio at home, but never a whole opera (I don’t even recall whether they broadcast operas in those days), and, whenever I had the choice, I preferred piano concertos by Beethoven or Schubert that were more in tune with the state of mind of the young girl I was at the time: an eighteen-year-old innocent who went to mass in the morning and enjoyed secret fantasies of Errol Flynn by night.
That evening the Liceu looked splendid, so brightly lit and bedecked with flowers. The façade had been covered in small lights, as if it were Christmas, and the entrance had been decorated with plants and bay trees. I too looked gorgeous, in a full-length sky-blue satin dress Mama had had made specially, with sparkling jewels and gauze ruffs that covered my thin arms. I was a skinny young thing – Mama was always complaining food never seemed to fill me out – and in those post-war times with so many sick and starving, spindly girls weren’t fashionable as they are now and we were forced to hide the scant flesh on our bones to avoid people jumping to the conclusion that we were suffering from tuberculosis.
The performance began at a qua
rter past nine. Even though it was the usual damp cold January on the Rambla and at the front of the Boqueria market, the crowds were packed tight behind the barriers the police had erected around the theatre and were fervently shouting out the name of the Generalísimo and the traditional “Viva España!” The Liceu’s lobby was also full of people and quite a spectacle with men in their tuxedos and glittering, bejewelled women who, like us, added a touch of colour with their brand-new gala outfits. The audience also contained lots of military in dress uniforms resplendent with medals, and one of them, a colonel who was a friend of Papa, told me it was a soldier, the Marquis of Mina, who had brought opera to Barcelona in the last century and turned it into the city’s favourite musical form. I already knew that, because the teacher who egregiously failed to teach me to play the piano had told me; however, I was polite, said nothing and simply smiled sweetly as I listened to his lengthy explanations.
Our seats gave us a magnificent view of the presidential box located in the centre of the dress circle. They had adorned it with flowers and a big tapestry, and, as the moment when the performance was to start drew near, all eyes focused on that part of the theatre expecting Franco to appear, but he didn’t. To my astonishment, the curtain went up and the orchestra began although neither the Generalísimo nor his wife were present. I was totally flummoxed. How could Franco arrive late to a function that had been organized in his honour? What could have happened?
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories Page 11
