Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V.

  Lydia spent most of her time here, caring tenderly for her breathing things: the ivy serpents and tendrils of morning glory that had grown over and bearded the statue of a dancing faun, the purple blossoms hanging like jewels from his marble flute. Sometimes a slight wind would rustle the buds, making it seem as though the creature were dancing or playing a melody. She also grew savage herbs such as belladonna, monkshood, cinquefoil, foxglove, and herb-of-grace, or rue. A row of Japanese blood grass encircled the fertile foliage, guarding the place at the center reserved for the dusky flowers. There, only black blossoms did Lydia grow.

  Lydia would have stopped at the marble fountain on her way across the courtyard; its pool of cool water was what sustained these extraordinary botanicals. It was something she did every day, a ritual ablution of sorts: wet her hands in the gurgling water, anoint her brow, brush her throat with long, delicate fingers.

  I admit it, yes. I used to watch her obsessively, this exquisite creature perusing her private garden. My office overlooked the courtyard from the second floor and I would observe her as she indulged in unusual displays of affection, being otherwise so guarded. Every once in a while, I could almost feel the moment her finger would break the water’s skin at the fountain. I imagined myself as one of the succulents in her charge, receiving these tender affairs. Sometimes she wore delicate, homespun fabrics and I could glimpse the outline of her taut figure against the light. But I knew all too well to keep my distance.

  As I squatted in wait, I conjured a perfect picture of her in my mind’s eye: kissing the amulet she wore around her neck, a piece of black onyx carved hollow to hold a sprig of herb-of-grace. Gràcia. Whispering under her breath in tender communion with her vegetable children, she would coddle and sniff the raven blossoms: mourning bride, queen of night tulips, black pearl lilies. She caught me watching her a few times. Once, already inside the dark space of the boudoir, she leaned back again over the threshold and looked straight up at me; her face half in darkness and half in light, one blue eye holding both of mine hostage. I saw the slightest wrinkle cross her white brow, as if it bore a weight of generations. Then she went back in and closed the door behind her.

  Now I was on the inside of her threshold. She brushed by the wicker screen on her way in and I caught the whiff of a delicate perfume. Almost like a divining rod, she held a black calla lily before her, plucked from the garden; a robust blossom with a long black stamen. She set it on the bed, pulled back the curtains that hung from the canopy, and opened the domed skylight in the ceiling above. A flood of light spilled over a white Indian bedspread embroidered with small pieces of mirror and lit the room up with a burst of fiery reflections. She removed the lion brooch that held her chestnut mane in place and a rush of heavy curls tumbled freely down her back. She stood very still for a moment, her blue eyes sparkling and jaw set high, defiant. She seemed to be focusing on some spot deep inside herself; a beautiful automata.

  She began to undress. First her blouse and brassiere, then she stepped out of her shoes and sat up on the edge of the high white bed. Her delicate feet dangled over the side like a child’s. Could she not hear the pounding in my chest? It seemed impossible to me and I began to sweat profusely. Her hair glowed in the afternoon sun, the locks teasing the dimpled triangle of her lower back. She moved gracefully across the bed, rousing a flotilla of tiny incandescent motes. I could feel my own self budding in reaction despite the sweat and the heat and the cramps.

  Then she lifted her hips and pulled off her skirt, the elastic band cutting into her flesh as it rode down her thighs. She picked up the calla lily and laid her naked body back on the pillows, holding the swarthy blossom and its stamen nestled like an ink stain between her breasts. I felt a strong desire to jump out of my hiding place and stop her right then. Though I had no reason, no claim, I felt protective of her. I wanted to save her from this daily torture of having to lay with an old man.

  The clock struck the quarter hour and there was the telltale warning knock at the door. Old Señor Candau walked in right on schedule, three-fifteen, to pleasure himself with his beautiful young wife.

  Lydia had saved her father, one of the last direct descendents of an ancient Catalan family, from the embarrassment of bankruptcy by marrying a man his own age. Sr. Candau came from the deep inland countryside and had built a veritable empire in the most astonishing way: traveling from village to village gathering scrap metal on the back of a mule. A resourceful man and very ambitious, he eventually moved into textiles and shipping. But soon money was not enough.

  When he showed up in Barcelona word spread quickly. More than one paterfamilias begged him to take over their failing businesses. Times were changing and privilege was not enough to keep a family rich anymore, as it had during the Franco years. And so Sr. Candau paid Lydia’s father twice the value of his textile factory as a sort of dowry. He also bought this crumbling old palace in Gràcia to house his executive offices and keep his young wife close by at all times. It was the noise and grit of Gràcia that had attracted him, the cocktail of bohemians, anarchists, and gypsies. “Better than sharing the sidewalks with all those penniless, inbred old snots in Pedralbes,” he had said once with characteristic candor. So Lydia refurbished the interior quarters for their residence and her workshop, and the courtyard for repose.

  I have never known how willingly Lydia went along with the arrangement, but nevertheless she held herself with the dignity of her breeding. She was ostensibly compliant, distant without being entirely cold, and certainly too proud to play the part of sacrificial lamb. After all, she was now a very rich woman and he doted on her as long as she remained quiet and submissive. As time went by, though, Sr. Candau became more and more obsessed with her icy beauty, her graceful detachment. There was something in her carriage, in the way her blue eyes sparkled under that mat of chestnut lashes; it hinted of a rich inner world that could never be conquered by a peasant king.

  As for me, Sr. Candau had been a part of my life since birth, but only as a character in my father’s stories. They had been inseparable during their childhood years of penury after the civil war, and Father used to tell tall stories of their trips into the woods together, hunting and fishing. How Sr. Candau had strangled a hungry dog with his bare hands when it attacked one of their sheep, how tough he had been, full of spit and vinegar; a bully to most, but always very protective of him. How he would remember him whenever he smelled mushrooms and wet leaves. But I never found out what had happened between them, what had estranged them for the rest of their lives. Why one day my father ran away from the village and never went back.

  So when Sr. Candau called one day, I found it strange to be confronted with the fact that he was for real. He told my father that he was now a wealthy man, but could trust no one and so he wanted his childhood friend at his side. Yet my father was in fragile health by then, and suggested that I go to Barcelona instead. I was reluctant, since I had studied to become a teacher, not a businessman, but my father urged me in no uncertain terms to drop my romantic ideas and take advantage of the opportunity. He had always known that Sr. Candau would call one day, and that day had come.

  I arrived in Barcelona a few years ago and Sr. Candau treated me well in his own gruff way. Like the son he didn’t have, the son whose absence was by now a source of growing tension. His wife was his reward, but she was also expected to give him an heir; the more besotted he became with her, the more impatient he grew. Hence the daily ars amatoria in her afternoon boudoir; Sr. Candau was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. What good could possibly come from a man so obsessed with his own wife?

  One afternoon Sr. Candau walked into my office just as I happened to make an offhand comment about one of the secretaries. He asked to speak with me privately and I followed him to his rooms thinking he would berate my indiscretion, or reprimand me for being so chummy with colleagues below my rank. No, that was not the case at all. He obliged me to admit that his Lydia was more beautiful than the secretary. He w
anted to hear me say it. Out loud.

  “Lydia is the fairest of them all, sir. ” I smiled, at first thinking it was some sort of a joke.

  “Yes, she is, Guillem. But how do you really know that? You haven’t seen her finest qualities, son. You haven’t seen her, you know, naked.”

  He sat behind his desk rubbing his forehead, sizing me up from beneath bushy white eyebrows, studying me to see how I would respond. I wasn’t really sure how to respond. The conversation didn’t only seem outrageous. It seemed dangerous.

  “I don’t need to see her naked to imagine …”

  His eyebrows arched menacingly and I shut my mouth with a nervous cough. What would happen to any man who dared lay a finger on Lydia Tudó de Candau? I thought. Rue the day, sir. Sr. Candau, the dog-strangler, had the temper of a man who built an empire from scrap metal and mules.

  “Honestly, Sr. Candau, you are a very lucky man.”

  “What does luck have to do with anything, goddamnit?” Sr. Candau spit his words out as if they were embers burning his tongue. “She’s mine because I bought her from her sniveling good-for-nothing father. The rat sold her like a piece of prime real estate. But she’s my property now and I stick my flag into it every chance I get,” he said. “Now I want you, son, to learn the lay of the land.”

  “I-I-I’m not sure I understand. Um. Sir.”

  “I want to find a way for you to see her, shall we say, in all her glory.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I think it’s better if I don’t. You know, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and all that. These things always go wrong.”

  “For the love of God, shut up and stop sniveling, you sound like a parish priest. We can get away with it just fine. Go into her boudoir before she arrives and hide behind the screen there. Then when I come in, I’ll send her into the bathroom for something and you can sneak back out. She’ll never be the wiser.”

  It was the vulgar idea of a man no longer in control of himself. I knew it would lead to no good and I stated it as many times as he would hear me. But Sr. Candau would not hear me. And how could I say no? After all, he owned me too.

  That’s how I found myself crouched like an animal behind a wicker screen in a beautiful woman’s bedroom on a sweltering day in June. Lydia was holding the black lily between her perfectly truculent, pointed little breasts. And when Sr. Candau walked into the room, and saw her like that, lying in the bed like a dead woman, everything went horribly awry.

  “So you think you’re funny? Eh, puta?” He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her toward him at the edge of the bed. She yelped at the sudden violence of his gesture.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting me. The mirrors are cutting my skin.”

  He was breathing hard through flared, taurine nostrils, his mouth a corrugated scowl. He brought his arm back as though he was going to hit her.

  “After everything I’ve given you, this is how you repay me? Would you prefer to be dead, then? Because it can be arranged, you know.”

  “Please, Marcelo. It blossomed just last night under the new moon. I undressed before I thought to look for a vase, and fell asleep. Here, take off your shirt and relax, let me rub your shoulders.”

  He let her leg go, turned around, and sat on the edge of the bed, removing his shirt and pants. A grin replaced the grimace, but then it grew into a smirk, and finally a full sneer the moment his eyes found mine behind the wicker screen. He nodded at me in furtive recognition and his eyes went black as coal.

  Lydia kneeled behind him and began massaging his hairy white shoulders, letting her nipples brush lightly against his neck and arms, trying to appease his anger. Sr. Candau reached up and fondled one of her breasts, turned his head, and sucked at it. Then he pinched it hard enough that she let out a whimper.

  Everything hurt. I had been crouching for so long my feet had gone numb. My wrists ached from holding myself up and I desperately needed to move. Only a primitive old goat like Sr. Candau could come up with something as shabby as this. He kept staring at me, as if this was some act of collusion between us. My throat was dry and stung with bile, which I tried to swallow away to no avail.

  Suddenly he turned and grabbed Lydia by the hair and pulled her down to the floor in front of the screen.

  “Stand up.”

  “Marcelo, what has gotten into you today? What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”

  “Look at me and bend over.”

  “Marcelo, please. Stop it.”

  “I said, bend over, Lydia, or I will bend you over myself and I promise you, it will be a lot worse.”

  So she stood up in front of him, her back to the wicker screen, and bent over. He pulled off his underwear and grabbed the offending flower from where it lay on the bed. He began to caress his lifeless penis, hitting her lightly in the face with the lily, poking at her lips with the long black stamen.

  “We’re going to change the menu today.”

  “That’s not part of our understanding,” she growled.

  “There’s a new understanding now.”

  He grabbed her chin and brushed her hair to one side. Then he placed his palm at the back of her head and forced her face into his crotch, the whole time keeping his eyes locked on me through the slit in the screen. When she finally gave in and closed her mouth around him, he let his head fall back with a gasp, his eyes fluttering half-shut. His cracked tongue lolled over yellow teeth, poking out from time to time to suck the edges of his wrinkled lips, covering them in flecks of dry white spittle. His breath came in short gasps. He grabbed the lily again and slid the black stamen down her back. He smacked her with it a few times, moving it in and out of her thighs, which were scratched in various places and speckled with drops of blood where the mirrors had broken the surface of her white skin.

  And then it happened. He threw the black flower hard at the screen, nearly toppling it, and stood up. He bent over her slowly, following the contour of her back and hips with his hands. Then he reached down and placed a hand on either side of her buttocks and pried them apart, his fingers squeezing and kneading her flesh like worms trying to burrow into the meat of a ripe peach. He let out a wild, guttural sound and spread her buttocks wider and wider still; he stretched and he patted and he slapped and he squeezed the velvety folds, opened her up like a pomegranate with great force as he picked her up off the floor, his face contorted into a frenzy of madness and idiot glee.

  A thousand tiny spiders of panic crawled over my skin. His beautiful wife opened up in front of me like a pig. I was shocked and sickened at the violence of the scene, but I was also mesmerized by the sight of it; the primordial oceanscape of pinks and browns, the puckered maelstrom, the scalloped anemone unfolding from around a tiny coral button. I couldn’t not watch. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I watched as he split her open wider. And all I wanted to do was touch. And I grew harder despite my loathing him, despite the violence, and I ached somewhere so deep I couldn’t begin to tell you where, some place, some hole inside of me opened just a little bit wider and I throbbed, my own groin set afire, my whole body in a fever-frenzy of titillation and lament. And I touched it, myself, while I watched. I touched it because it pinched and throbbed, I touched it because it hurt, because it wanted me to touch it, because I had to, because I couldn’t not do anything else. I distinguished a tiny crimson birthmark at the point where her whitest skin turned pink; it bore the shape of a crescent moon. I glimpsed the ghostly mark only for a few seconds before the clouds of his fingers covered it again, yet the vision seared itself into my mind as if I had opened my eyes to the midday sun.

  When he finally put her down, he spun her around and mounted her from behind to finish himself off like a wheezing, rickety dog. I was spent, but he was still grunting and jerking, and by now her face was no more than a few inches from the wicker screen. The pendant with herb-of-grace dangled between her breasts and marked the rhythm of his charges. His beady black eyes were open again, staring straight at me. But I turned mine exc
lusively to her. She kept her jaw raised high, but her eyes brimmed with tears and there were signs of distress cracking her once defiant expression. Not a single sound, not a single movement did she make on her own. She just looked straight ahead, eyes staring, fixed upon nothing I could see. Toc, toc, toc … the amulet played out the rhythm of an ancient lullaby against her chest, hypnotizing the universe into slow-motion.

  I was struggling to hold myself still, but it escaped me. Something issued from that dark place that had opened when I was touching: barely audible, just a slight groan under my breath. Her pupil caught it immediately, honed in on that tiniest sound. I saw her enter into the recognition of my presence and our eyes met through the laced wicker. A single tear fell from the pool of her bluest eye. Not a tear of sorrow, don’t be fooled: it was a tear of rage.

  Just then Sr. Candau sounded, his face all purple and distorted into a grotesque expression. He finished himself off in a paroxysm of conquest emitting a feeble, ridiculous, amphibian croak and fell back onto the bed. Gasping for breath, he dropped back and patted the bed beside him.

  “Now come and lie down with me for a while. But first, get yourself cleaned up a little. There’s a good girl.”

  She walked into the bathroom on unsteady legs and closed the door behind her. He motioned at me with a wink and a tic of his head to leave the room.

  That night my dreams were haunted by dark creatures and contagion: dwarves dressed as courtesans, nymphs and imps dancing and drinking in an enchanted grotto. They led me into a cave, at the end of which was a door with a little lunar rune, an exact replica of her tiny birthmark, set aglow and pulsing. I ran my fingers along the engraved edges of the phantom mark: the door opened and the company spilled back into the courtyard garden. It was the witching hour of night and the hermanas Furest were there, standing with their backs to me, holding Lydia’s dog at bay. But their faces were those of old hags and each one dropped a gold coin into my hand, screeching and cackling and spitting spiders. The dog was digging furiously at a spot near the old fountain. They let it go and it ran a few yards to devour a piece of meat on a stick. The rope around its neck yanked a mandrake root from the ground and a shrill scream pierced the blackness of the night. A tiny bearded man ran across the courtyard and into the boudoir.