Crazy Tales of Blood and Guts Read online

  According to the preliminary report, she had been dead ten or twelve hours. If she’d not been as pale as marble from the neck downwards, you’d have said she was asleep. He looked at her card again. Twenty-nine, when he’d have guessed thirty-five or thirty-six. Yes, now that he looked at her closely, that girl hadn’t passed the thirty mark. It was really strange: she looked younger now that she was dead. The report said they’d found her in her bedroom at home, stretched out on her bed in a supine position, stark naked but covered by a blanket. Next to her they’d found a white summer dress yet to be worn, and, on her bedside table, three empty boxes of Valium, a glass and a bottle of mineral water. She had gone to the trouble of sending her neighbour a note so she’d find her early on and ring 061, and had also had the forethought to leave the door on the latch so the firemen wouldn’t have to force it. Everything indicated that before swallowing the pills, Eugènia had seen to every last detail. Even to the point of choosing the dress she wanted to be buried in. You didn’t find many young suicides with such sangfroid.

  Of course, he had never autopsied anyone he’d known. Forensics, like surgeons, never open family or friends. They leave that to someone else. In Eugènia’s case, the girl had been working at the hospital since she was twenty and everyone knew her, even if the two of them had never hit it off. Anyway, he knew next to nothing about her. Whether she had a boyfriend (he figured she didn’t), or friends or was happy at work. As far as he was concerned, Eugènia was merely the secretary he greeted politely when he went in and out of the clinic and to whom, every so often, he handed the reports to be sent to court. In the six years they had worked in that department, they’d never had coffee together, shared a joke or commiserated over some setback in their lives. The truth was, Eugènia was a completely unknown quantity.

  Even so, it felt strange to think that tomorrow he’d have her naked and defenceless on the autopsy table. He wished the case had been assigned to someone else. He did remember one thing about her: she was very shy and quick to blush. Whenever he poked his nose into the secretaries’ office, Eugènia would immediately turn red and hide her less-than-attractive face behind hair that was as rough and black as coal. Poor girl, he thought, genuinely moved, she was so ugly no man can ever have given her a second glance. Of course he never had. He had just treated her like a piece of the furniture and avoided sitting at the same table when they were both in the cafeteria. As far as he could remember, he’d never paid her a compliment or smiled at her beyond the call of politeness. And he’d never done so because she was ugly and her ugliness made him feel uncomfortable. He regretted that now.

  He shut the door to the cold store and decided to put her out of his mind. He must concentrate on the paperwork. He went upstairs and straight to his office, determined to bury himself in his private backlog of bureaucracy. However, before doing so, he switched on his computer to take a look at his emails, as he always did mid-morning. And saw it. A message addressed to him from someone he wasn’t expecting to hear from at all. Name of sender: Eugènia Grau. His heart missed a beat.

  It was a short message, barely two lines. It started Dear Doctor and signed off with Sincerely yours. In a neutral, polite tone, Eugènia asked one thing of him: that he personally should carry out the autopsy on her when she was brought to the morgue. Nothing else. That was it. Taken aback, he read her concise text several times, trying to decipher a possible hidden meaning. Eugènia had left no suicide note, but for some reason that escaped him she had taken the trouble to perfume herself, make her face up and email him that highly unusual request before ending it all. His stomach lurched. He didn’t know what to think.

  He decided not to say a word and spent the rest of the morning sitting in his office pretending to work. Just before two o’clock, he informed his colleagues that he had a headache and was going home. It was true; his head was pounding. He was on his way, walking past the secretaries’ office, when he stopped in his tracks. He had a hunch. In a flash he went inside and started rummaging through Eugènia’s desk drawers. He soon found them. There they were. A set of her house keys, with her address attached. Yes, it was the address that was also on her medical record. After thinking about it for a few seconds, he put the keys in his pocket and rushed out. As soon as he hit the sidewalk, the afternoon sun dazzled him and he had to shut his eyes. A motorcyclist almost knocked him down. What the hell was he up to? There he was, in a complete fog in a taxi, asking the driver to take him to the address on the keyring. His heart was racing and he found it hard to breathe, let alone think. The girl lived alone, on Floridablanca Street, very close to where they worked. The taxi arrived in just a couple of minutes.

  Eugènia’s flat was near the Sant Antoni market, in a district to the left of the Eixample that had never lost its noisy working-class character. The market had been the first to be built outside the old city walls when those were demolished near the end of the nineteenth century, and it retained its spectacular iron structure and bustling atmosphere. It was still the centre of the busy commercial activity that characterized the neighbourhood where Eugènia’s family had lived for nigh on a century. At the end of May 1909 Eugènia’s great-great-grandparents had moved there with their burden of children, belongings and debts, and the expectation that they would find home comforts there that were impossible to find in the tiny dismal flats in the old part of the city. Little did they imagine that the streets of their new neighbourhood would very soon be transformed into scenes of violent conflict between workers and troops in the Setmana Tràgica, or that smoke from burning churches would blacken the sky over their new start in life. It had been a short journey from where they used to live, a brief twenty-minute exodus on foot, but far enough to leave behind that labyrinth of damp, narrow streets prey to overcrowding, dirt and poverty. Unlike the well-off middle classes who had migrated further, to the distinguished buildings the architects had erected on the right of Balmes Street, more modest families like Eugènia’s were forced to settle for those humbler flats on the borders of their old district. Now, together with El Raval, it was one of the most densely populated parts of Barcelona, and home to most of the city’s immigrants. You only had to look at the headscarves worn by the Arab women, or listen to the melancholy voices of the men huddled on street corners or sitting on benches, conversing in distant, incomprehensible tongues. The frantic Babel of streets in Eugènia’s neighbourhood was awash, as it had always been, with hope and rage, honest folk and hoodlums, next-door neighbours from way back and newcomers. With tenements and pavements that harboured resigned prostitutes and old dears going to their daily mass, pimps and shopkeepers, informers and plain-clothes police. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper and car fumes polluted the air. There were few tourists strolling thereabouts. They preferred to go to the beach or enjoy the air conditioning in the museums.

  The tenement where Eugènia had lived didn’t have a concierge. It must have had one once because it still had the old bolt-hole, but at some point the neighbours had clearly decided to save money by installing an automatic entry system. Concierges are expensive, and it remained a modest neighbourhood however much the prices of apartments had rocketed in recent years. He didn’t find it difficult to find the front-door key, because there were only three on the keyring, one no doubt for the mailbox, and two bigger ones.

  There was a narrow, gloomy staircase, which at that time of the day reeked of boiled cabbage. As it was summer and the windows were open, he could hear mothers shouting at their children to come and eat, and impatient, grumbling men demanding their dinner. Eugènia lived on the fourth floor (which was really the fifth) and there was no elevator. He gritted his teeth and started on the steep ascent.

  Once he was at the top he opened the door and went into the girl’s flat, trying not to make any noise that would alert the neighbours. What he was doing was probably not altogether illegal, but at the very least it was rather unorthodox. Forensic pathologists don’t visit the scene of the crime when the coroner has removed t
he corpse. It’s not one of their duties. Why was he doing it, then? What was he hoping to find?

  In all the time he’d been a forensic, he’d never thought of doing such a thing. It would also be the first time he’d carry out an autopsy on someone he had known. Was he perhaps hoping to find a clue to why Eugènia had committed suicide? With the unprepossessing looks life’s lottery had granted her, it wasn’t difficult to imagine her leading a lonely life, being chronically depressed or not feeling as if she belonged to a world where beauty and the attributes of youth seemed to determine the rules of the game. Eugènia must have grown tired of looking at herself in the mirror every morning and seeing only a reflection of her ugliness. She must have given up the struggle. And she had been working at the morgue long enough to know that suicides always pass through the Clinical Hospital. Under the circumstances, she must have preferred the autopsy to be performed by the doctor she’d had least to do with. It was all a question of tact. Yes, that explained the message she had sent him. It couldn’t mean anything else.

  The flat was light and strangely tidy, like her work desk. Not a speck of dust to be seen. It was a small flat, barely seven hundred square feet, but Eugènia had good taste. The few pieces of furniture she owned were solid and made of fine wood, and the decor was subdued without seeming characterless. There were rugs on the floor and plants by the windows, and books as well. Hundreds of books. Bookcases galore. Eugènia was clearly a well-read girl. She was no simpleton.

  The kitchen was also tidy and the fridge was completely empty. Somebody had unplugged it. Nor was there anything in the bin. Eugènia had had the forethought to empty the fridge and take the rubbish out to avoid leftover food rotting and stinking up the house: far-sighted to the bitter end. He entered her bedroom apprehensively. The curtains were open and sunlight was pouring in. The forensics unit must have taken away the glass, bottle of water and boxes of Valium because they were nowhere to be seen, but there was a slim volume on her bedside table. The book was open and a postcard was marking the page. It looked vaguely familiar.

  He picked up the postcard and turned it over to see who had sent it. A shiver ran down his spine. It was the postcard he had sent his colleagues at the hospital a couple of summers ago, when he was on holiday. He’d spent three weeks touring the Balkans with an orthopaedic-surgeon colleague of his, although their relationship had been short-lived. All the women he got close to did their best to take over his life, but he wasn’t ready to make commitments, and in the end they all left him. He glanced back at the postcard rather nervously. It was one of those typical postcards that tourists like to send to friends or relatives, a landscape of the region of Thrace with a few ancient ruins in the background. The image meant nothing special. In fact, he could have sent that card or a dozen others. It had simply been a polite gesture. He put the postcard down and picked up the book. It was a modern edition of Phaedrus, a translation. He dug into his memory and tried to disinter texts he’d read and forgotten from high school. Wasn’t Phaedrus the dialogue about beauty? Or was that Phaedon?

  He was forced to sit down when the room started to spin. His body was drenched in sweat, a cold, unpleasant sweat. He was a doctor, and, though his special interest was forensic medicine, he could still recognize when two symptoms were connected. That Eugènia had used this postcard to mark the page in the book on her bedside table the moment she committed suicide and that she’d sent him that unusual request couldn’t be two isolated acts. Perhaps the book indicated something as well. Had Eugènia chosen it to kill time while she waited for the pills to take effect, or had she decided to commit suicide as a result of reading it? If he recalled correctly and Phaedrus spoke of beauty, the book reinforced his first hypothesis. Yes, that must be it. Eugènia had committed suicide because her ugliness made her feel tremendously unhappy.

  He picked up the book and went off to the dining room. When he finished reading, it was six o’clock. He had been right. The book was about what Eugènia wasn’t. Or maybe was, because right now he couldn’t be so sure. Wasn’t Plato really saying that beauty is independent of the physical world, a quality of the non-sensory world that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the one captured by our senses? The thought was highly disturbing. Reading the book, you could hardly say the philosopher was pouring scorn on ugly people; rather, he was warning of the error of trusting in appearances. On the other hand, Socrates’ ugliness was proverbial. The old philosopher was no Adonis. So what if there was beauty after all in Eugènia’s misshapen body? But what kind of beauty? An inner, purely intellectual beauty, like the one Alcibiades had praised in Socrates in the Symposium? One that Eugènia cultivated with all her sophisticated reading matter? But if that was so, why had she committed suicide?

  When he walked into the hospital the next morning, Eugènia was already on the autopsy table. Her body still gave off a flowery scent. They’d followed his instructions and taken off her ring and the ribbon with which she’d tied back her hair. They’d washed her face, her make-up had gone, and she was now a pallid white. Her lips and nails had acquired the blue tone that diazepam poisoning brings on, and she no longer looked if as she was asleep. She was, frankly, very ugly. He unhurriedly pulled on his gloves and put on a plastic apron, and cheerfully asked the assistant he’d been assigned for the day to open the back part of the skull while he took his scalpel and prepared routinely to extract her other organs. He wasn’t expecting any surprises. Experience told him that they were dealing with a conventional suicide and that all they would find would be a general collapse provoked by the overdose of tranquillizers.

  Normally, when he was working in the dissection room, he did so to music by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson or Madonna. Some of his colleagues preferred to listen to classical music, but he’d rather his head was filled with upbeat melodies and songs that invited you to hum along and not think. On that occasion, he said he wanted silence and was in no mood for jokes or chit-chat. A little solemnity was the least he owed that ugly girl who had remained a stranger while they worked together for six years. His assistant nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and started to saw bone.

  He had slept badly that night, with one nightmare after another. He’d woken up exhausted and soaked in sweat. In one of those dreams, the only one he could remember, Eugènia, dressed like a bride, had smiled at him with her chubby, spot-infested face. Her hair was tied back with that blue ribbon and one of her hands stretched out, beckoning him to follow her. He resisted.

  On his way to work, he’d thought how in essence there’d been nothing in the dream to justify the unpleasant, anguished feeling he’d woken up with. Standing in the morgue, preparing to stick his nose inside Eugènia’s body, the memory of that disturbing nightmare upset him again and made his pulse race. He took a deep breath and tried to regain his composure. He was a professional who had performed thousands of necropsies. He must chase off those ridiculous images and concentrate on the task. While he was cutting the skin of her trunk and proceeding to detach her thorax, he suddenly realized where he’d gone wrong. His scalpel fell to the ground, and for a few moments it was as if he’d turned to stone while his brain strived to come to terms with the consequences of the discovery he’d just made. It was too sinister, too twisted. His assistant observed the scene in silence and retrieved the scalpel without opening his mouth; he could see the doctor’s face was as white as the corpse he had just opened.

  He’d got it completely wrong. Eugènia’s request had nothing to do with any sense of tact, or with the fact they’d barely interacted. It was quite the opposite. Eugènia had died because she wanted him to look at her and touch her, as he would never have done when she was alive. She was offering him her body the only way she knew he’d be prepared to receive it: stiff and cold. After all, she’d primped herself out with the attributes of a bride. She had understood that ending her life was the only way to be intimate with him, with the man whose polite silences had slapped her in the face with her
own ugliness day after day. That’s why she’d kept that postcard and sent him that strange message disguised behind such prosaic words. Had she also foreseen that he’d visit her flat, or wasn’t that part of the script she’d written?

  He tried to control himself. He set her organs down one by one on the table until he had gutted her. First he examined her brain. It weighed exactly two pounds and twelve ounces. It was entirely symmetrical and flawless. In fact, one of the most perfect brains he’d ever seen. There was no bruising, no minor haemorrhage, no imperfection, and it possessed the uncanny beauty of harmonious proportion and unusual refinement. That was what caught his attention. In all the years he had been working as a forensic, he’d never seen such a well-formed brain as the one he’d just extracted from Eugènia. It was entrancing: a prodigy of undulating tissue that very few eyes can have been privileged to contemplate over the centuries. He then went on to examine her remaining organs. They were all intact. No sign of oedemas or blocked arteries, as if Eugènia had never swallowed the pills or the passage of time had left no trace on her insides. Each of her viscera was exquisitely proportioned in a way it was impossible to find in any human body.

  Eugènia’s immaculate organs were the repositories of such sublime, extraordinary beauty that he was continually forced to catch his breath. Her entrails irradiated a hypnotic, luminous quality, and the smell they gave off wasn’t at all unpleasant. There were no signs of putrefaction. In some way, it was as if Eugènia’s body allowed him to contemplate the great secret, the primordial model of absolute perfection. Once again, that thought paralysed him.

  He stayed still for a long time. Ecstatic. Astonished. Silent. However much he tried, he couldn’t take his eyes off that pure, unanticipated beauty, the existence of which he’d just discovered. His assistant was frightened to see him in such a state and offered to accompany him outside, but he refused and vigorously ordered him to leave. The assistant was used to obeying and left the room without protesting, but he was sure he’d soon be back with one of his colleagues.