Crazy Tales of Blood and Guts Read online

  I really couldn’t care less about the student, Eudald Mataplana, his sculptures or the whole damned show. All I know is that I’m out of work and that this time Daddy’s calls didn’t help because the scandal had hit the headlines and there was too much fallout. Mummy said I should forget it, that I already had my hands full with the preparations for my wedding and honeymoon in Cancún, but then she belongs to another generation and doesn’t understand it’s not the done thing any more not to work outside the home. I’m not awfully enthusiastic about having to clock in every morning, but we modern women, even if we belong to the upper bracket, have to work, or at least go through the motions. Daddy says I shouldn’t worry, that as soon as things cool down he will pick up his telephone again. I’m going to think of it as paid holidays, because I gather I have a right to unemployment benefit even though I resigned.

  As Daddy says to console me, I’m young and have a whole lifetime in front of me. When I get back from Cancún, we’ll see. For the moment, I have an appointment to have coffee with that psychiatrist, whose name is Lluís and who is awfully nice. And, you know, if I’m bored when I get back from my honeymoon and can’t find my kind of work, I can always go into politics. Become an MP or something of the sort. Who knows, I am known for my drive and might make it to chief executive. Or Minister of Culture… Yes, it would be great to be a minister. Though I’m not sure… If I were a minister, I’d have to live in Madrid. And it’s very cold in Madrid in winter and very hot in summer… And they don’t have a beach… Or a Port Olímpic. Or ski slopes nearby. And Mummy would be terribly distraught if I upped and went to live that far away…!

  A Stitch in Time

  The mossos came this morning. I’d been expecting them for days.

  When I opened the door, they were still out of breath. That’s not unusual. Visitors get to my attic flat on the seventh on their last legs, as there’s no lift. The stairs have high steps and are an effort to climb, and rather than taking it calmly, like Carmeta and me, they must have rushed at them hell-for-leather like a couple of lunatics. I expect their uniforms set the neighbours’ tongues wagging; there are a number of pensioners with nothing better to do than look through their spyholes at my stretch of stairs. I only hope the mossos don’t decide to question them, because the neighbours love to stir things. In any case, I don’t think they suspect any funny business.

  In walked a man and a woman, nice and polite they were, and she was much younger. My hair was in a mess, I wasn’t made up and I was wearing the horrible sky-blue polyester bathrobe and granny slippers I’d taken the precaution of buying a few days before at one of the stalls in the Ninot market. The bathrobe is similar to the one worn by Conxita, the eighty-year-old on the second floor, but it looked too new, so I put it through the washing machine several times the day before yesterday so it was more like an old rag, which is how I wanted it to look. The bathrobe was now frayed and flecked with little bobbles of fluff, and, to round off the effect, I spilt a cup of milky coffee I was drinking on my bust. The woman mosso tactfully scrutinized me from head to toe, dwelling on the stains and tangled hair, and it was a piece of luck that one of the police belonged to the female sex, since we ladies take much more notice of the small details than the menfolk do. She seemed very on-the-ball, and I expect she drew her own conclusions from my shabby appearance.

  Her colleague, who was fortyish with eyes like Paul Newman’s, was the one in charge. He introduced himself very nicely, asked me if I was who I am and said he just had a few questions he wanted to ask me. A routine enquiry, he added, smiling soothingly. I’d nothing to worry about. I put on the astonished expression I’d been rehearsing for days in front of the mirror and invited them into the dining room.

  As they followed me down the passage, I made sure I gave the impression I was a frail, sickly old dear, who finds it a struggle to walk and draw breath. I exaggerated, because I’m pretty sprightly for my age and, thank God, am not in bad health, although I tried to imitate the way Carmeta walks, dragging my feet at the speed of a turtle, as if every bone in my body were aching. Both homed in on the sacks of cement, the tins of paint and workmen’s tools that are still in the passage, and asked me if I was having building work done. I told them the truth: that after all that rain, the kitchen ceiling had collapsed and it had been chaos.

  “If only you’d seen it…! It was as if a bomb had dropped!” I told them with a sigh. “And lucky I was watching the telly in the dining room…!”

  The young policewoman nodded sympathetically and said that was the drawback with the flats at the top, though an attic has lots of advantages because you get a terrace and plenty of light. “What’s more,” she added shyly, “in spite of all the traffic in the Eixample, you don’t hear the noise from the cars or breathe in so many fumes.” I nodded and told her a bit about what the Eixample was like almost fifty years ago, when Andreu and I came to live here.

  Visibly on edge, her colleague interrupted to ask me if I’d had any news of my son-in-law. I adopted my slightly senile expression again and said I hadn’t.

  The policeman persisted. He wanted to know the last time I had seen Marçal and whether I’d spoken to him by phone. I told him as ingenuously as I could that I’d not heard from him for some time, and politely enquired why he wanted to know.

  “He disappeared a week ago and his family think something may have happened to him. That’s why we’re talking to everyone who knows him,” he replied softly. “I don’t suppose you know where he’s got to, do you?”

  “Who?” I said, pretending to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

  “Your son-in-law.”

  “Marçal?”

  “Yes, Marçal.”

  “Sorry… What did you just ask me?”

  Like those old people who don’t cotton on, I changed the subject and asked them if they’d like a drink – a coffee, an infusion, or something stronger. When they asked me if I knew that that fellow and my little girl were negotiating a divorce and that my son-in-law had a restraining order in force because she’d reported him for physical abuse, I simply looked at the floor and shrugged my shoulders. Reluctantly, I confessed I suspected things weren’t going too well.

  “But all married couples have problems… I didn’t want to harp on about theirs.” And added, with a shake of the head, “Nowadays women don’t have the patience. In my time…”

  I didn’t finish my sentence. There was no need. The young policewoman looked at me affectionately and gave one of those condescending smiles liberated young females of today reserve for us old wrinkly-heads with our antiquated ideas. Out of the corner of one eye, I registered she’d had a French manicure and wore a wedding ring. To judge by her pink cheeks and smiley expression, the young woman was still in the honeymoon phase.

  Before they could start grilling me about Marçal and his relationship with Marta again, I quickly began to gabble on about stuff that had nothing to do with them. An old dear who lives by herself, has nobody to talk to and spends her day sitting on her sofa in front of the telly watching programmes she doesn’t understand. My grousing made them uneasy, and the man finally glanced at his watch and said they ought to be leaving. Their visit (because it wasn’t really an interrogation) had lasted less than ten minutes. When they were saying goodbye, they repeated I shouldn’t worry. That it was probably just a misunderstanding.

  Marta, my little girl, will soon be thirty-six. I’m seventy-four, and it’s no secret Andreu and I were getting on when I got pregnant with Marta. Now it’s quite normal to have your first baby at forty, but it wasn’t in my day. If you didn’t have a bun in the oven before you were thirty, people scowled at you, as if it was a sin not to have children. The kindest comment they’d make was that you weren’t up to it. If you were married and childless, you suddenly became defective.

  Marta is an only child. As she was such a latecomer, the poor dear never had a brother or sister. She has a kind of substitute aunt and uncle in Carmeta and Ramon, but no re
al ones, or cousins. From the day we buried her father, may he rest in peace, Marta has only had Carmeta and me, as you can hardly count Ramon, Carmeta’s husband, since he had his stroke. Carmeta has to feed him a kind of purée she buys at the chemist’s and administers with a syringe through a rubber tube that goes in through the nose and down to his stomach, a torture that’s only prolonging his agony, because his doctors say he’ll never recover. They insist to Carmeta that Ramon isn’t suffering; we spend the whole blessed day with him and we’re not so sure.

  Carmeta’s my age, and though I can’t complain about my health, she’s rather the worse for wear. A cancer she can’t see the back of. She and Ramon didn’t have children, and both doted on Marta like an aunt and uncle from the day she was born. My daughter loves them and they love her. If it hadn’t been for his stroke, I’d cross my heart and swear Ramon would have given my son-in-law a facelift and things would have turned out differently.

  A pity none of us was in the know a year ago.

  We knew nothing at all.

  We sometimes said our little girl seemed to be behaving a bit strangely. Sluggishly. As if she were suffering. But we all have our bad moments, don’t we?

  Our little girl put on a brave front. Partly because she didn’t want us to worry, and partly because she was embarrassed to acknowledge that her husband beat her. If I’d not decided to buy some pastries and pay her a visit one day after accompanying Carmeta to her chemo session, I expect we’d still be in the dark and it would be life as usual.

  That morning, when Marta opened the door barricaded behind a pair of giant sunglasses, our alarm bells immediately started ringing. Something was amiss. She pretended she had conjunctivitis and that was why she was wearing dark glasses inside, but Carmeta, who’s a suspicious sort, didn’t swallow that and snatched them from her face. Our hearts missed several beats when we saw that black eye, ill-concealed under layers of make-up.

  At first she denied it. Carmeta and I are no fools and we gave her the third degree until she finally caved in. In a flood of tears she confessed her husband drank too much and occasionally beat her. A punch, a slap, a shove… He’d blame it on stress at work when he calmed down. He’d also say he would kill her if she ever told anyone.

  I saw a bruise on my little girl’s left arm and told her to strip off. The poor thing couldn’t bring herself to say no and agreed, though reluctantly. Then Carmeta and I burst into tears. Our darling Marta was black and blue all over. From that day on we never referred to him by his name again. My son-in-law became the Animal, the Son of a Bitch, or the Bastard. We got weaving. We persuaded Marta to report him and the three of us went to see a lawyer. Marta was afraid nobody would believe her and that the judge would take her child away, but the lawyer did a good job of reassuring her and, in the end, made a start on the paperwork. And it was true, with his executive suits and silk ties the Bastard did seem like a normal person.

  A cunt of a normal person who beats his wife and threatens to kill her.

  And our little girl, quite naturally, was scared.

  But now she had us on her side.

  The Bastard went to live with his sister and disappeared from our lives for months. Marta, who’d been reduced to skin and bones by all the unpleasantness, even began to put on weight. Until the evening he appeared out of the blue at her place and said he was going to kill her.

  That it was only a matter of time.

  Of being patient.

  Carmeta suddenly saw the light.

  No well-intentioned law could protect Marta. If he put his mind to it, the Bastard would sooner or later do the evil deed. As he said, it was only a matter of time. A matter of waiting until one of us lowered our guard or the judge decided there were more serious cases to see to and our little girl no longer needed protection. That she could manage on her own.

  It’s not hard to intimidate someone. Or kill them.

  And, in the meantime, the Bastard would sour her life.

  Hers and everybody else’s.

  It’s so lucky that I have an attic flat and that it’s got a terrace. The mosso woman was right. Attics can be very inconvenient, but they have lots of advantages. And if you don’t agree, just ask the Bastard.

  Andreu and I rented this flat in the Eixample just before we got married, and the only item my husband insisted on when we were partying and looking for a flat was that it should have a small terrace. My parents didn’t have a terrace because we lived on the third floor, but when the weather was good we’d go up to the flat roof and enjoy the cool of evening and gossip with the neighbours. I’d go up with my friends in the summer. We’d put our swimsuits on, lie our beach towels on the red tiles and imitate the film stars from our magazines, listening to the radio and drinking fizzy lemonade or warm Coca-Cola and pretending it was Martini. Then we’d have to fight off sunstroke with aspirins, water packs and vinegar, but it was worth it. When you’re young, there’s a solution to everything.

  It’s not that my little terrace is any great shakes. All the same, 240 square feet is enough for a pine, a lemon and an orange tree, a magnolia, a decent-sized jasmine and a bougainvillea, not to mention the dozens of pots of roses, petunias, daisies and chrysanthemums I’ve put in every cranny. When Andreu and I set foot on it for the first time, I could hardly imagine how providential this little terrace would turn out to be.

  I don’t know how I could have helped my little girl without it.

  And I reckon that’s what a mother’s for: to be around to give a helping hand to her children when they’ve got problems. Whether they like it or not.

  In fact, it was Carmeta who came up with the solution. She’s always been very imaginative. The terrace and the kitchen that the downpour had ruined gave her the idea, and no sooner was it said than done. Neither of us was prepared to stand by, our arms folded, and abandon our little girl to the vagaries of an obsolete legal system and a lunatic who wanted to bump her off. We had to do something, and do it quick, before we rued the day. As Carmeta said, a stitch in time saves nine.

  I called the Bastard on his mobile from a phone box a couple of weeks ago and told him we should have a chat. I hoodwinked him by saying I had to tell him something that would make Marta slow down with the divorce, and, as I knew he was short of cash because he was drinking over the odds and had got the sack, I threw in that I wanted to give him a present of a weekend away with Marta. Three or four days in a good hotel with a swimming pool, all expenses paid, would help them to make peace, I told him. My call and sudden interest in saving their marriage had taken him by surprise, but, as Carmeta had anticipated, the financial bait hooked him.

  Early next morning, Carmeta came to my flat carrying a sports bag. Her face looked rough and she admitted she’d had a bad night. I told her I could ring the Bastard and give him an excuse if she’d rather leave it for another day, but she’d have nothing of the sort. The tranquillizers she’d taken were beginning to take effect and she already felt slightly better, or so she said.

  “What do you reckon? Should we have a little drop of something to put us in the mood?” I suggested hesitantly.

  “No alcohol!” replied Carmeta, most professionally. “What we need are anti-stress pills. We’re far too nervy.”

  Carmeta took out the antidepressants the doctor had prescribed when he told her she had cancer, and offered me one. As Carmeta’s the expert when it comes to pills, I meekly swallowed it and said nothing. Out of the corner of an eye I registered that she took two. I went to the kitchen and made two cups of tea while Carmeta was changing in the bedroom. Carmeta had brought an old tracksuit top and slippers. I was also wearing old clothes I’d have to throw away.

  The Bastard arrived at around eleven. Grudgingly, I pecked him on both cheeks and led him into the dining room. With a studiedly senile smile I offered him a cognac, which the idiot accepted in a flash while he lolled on the sofa. I seized my opportunity to go into the kitchen.

  “Marçal!” I shouted, trying to ensure my v
oice didn’t sound rude. “Could you help me get the bottle of cognac from the top shelf? I can’t reach it…”

  I’d left the knife under a tea cloth on the kitchen top, and Carmeta was skulking behind the door, holding her breath. As soon as I heard his footsteps, I shut the window and switched on the radio.

  As soon as Marçal stepped into the kitchen, Carmeta stuck the carving knife into the small of his back. The attack took him by surprise and he started to howl. Before he had time to react, I grabbed the knife from under the tea cloth and stuck it in violently. Blood spurted from his neck and through the air like a liquid streamer splashing everywhere.

  Still screaming, the Animal lifted his hands to his neck and tried to stop the haemorrhaging, but from the way the blood was bubbling out, I knew he had no chance. I’d stuck it right in his carotid artery, and that thrust, driven by a mother’s fury, was his death sentence.

  He collapsed in under a minute. Carmeta and I left him agonizing on the kitchen floor and disappeared into the bathroom. We washed our hands and faces, changed our blood-soaked tops, then went into the dining room. We wanted the Bastard to die alone, like a dog. And he did. A Beatles song on the radio drowned out his screams.

  By the time we went back into the kitchen my son-in-law was dead. The floor had turned into a red puddle and blood was everywhere. The big son of a bitch had created a hell of a mess. We pulled on washing-up gloves, grabbed the bucket and cloth and started cleaning up. The two of us were at it for a good hour, but even so, it still wasn’t spotless.