She’d been cut open from top to bottom, her ribs pulled apart and various organs wrenched out. As he closed in, he thought the man was holding something that pulsated rhythmically. Suddenly, he retched. It was the girl’s heart. Still beating.
The doctor didn’t even notice he was there. Beneath the tears, his gaze wandered aimlessly. The startling beauty he’d discovered inside Eugènia’s body had made him lose his reason. From that day on he’d searched every corpse that passed through his hands with the fury of a man possessed. He’d examined hearts, livers, brains, uteruses, kidneys, each of the organs capable of hoarding the secret, dazzling beauty that had emerged unexpectedly from Eugènia’s imperfect body. In his despair, he had decided to look for it in the prettiest woman he knew, only to meet with failure once again. He now knew he would never again contemplate that golden mean of harmonious proportion, that unusual and extraordinary beauty Eugènia had generously given him as a present when she’d offered him her already deceased body. And such certainty meant the solitude overwhelming him at that moment was immense and irremediable. He had embarked on a journey into the deepest darkness, a prisoner of an ancient and tragic wisdom that would never again be within his reach. A journey on a one-way ticket from which he would never return.
A High-End Neighborhod
by Jordi Sierra I Fabra
Turó Parc
Pelayo Morales Masdeu is ten years old and a bastard. Short, rather fat because of bad eating habits, blackhaired, bleary-eyed, with a small nose and mouth (a wreck of a face dominated by cheeks, chin, and forehead, four cardinal points of excess). When he smiles, his eyes shrink until they turn into horizontal slats. When he speaks, almost always shouting, he raises his eyebrows extravagantly. But the worst almost always comes when he does neither of these things. Then the whole world shakes.
Pelayo Morales Masdeu was a child once upon a time. Now he’s an old man.
A ten-year-old old man.
“I want to go to the park.”
“It’s late now, master.”
“I want to go to the park NOW,” he says calmly and emphatically.
“Don’t you think that after yesterday...?”
“Whose side are you on, you stupid cow?”
“Don’t talk like that, please.”
“Let’s go to the park then.”
“Look, come out to the balcony. The same mothers are there.”
“So what?” He begins to get angry. “I didn’t push that moron down the slide! And I didn’t throw sand in the other kid’s eye! The first kid fell and the second is an asshole!”
“The girls’ mothers are there too.”
“Why do I care if they’re all jerks? All girls are the same!” His anger grows. “If you don’t take me to the park, I’ll go by myself!”
“You know you can’t go by yourself. Your father has forbidden it.”
“Who’s going to kidnap me? I’m going, I’m going, I’m going!”
“Master...1”
“Then come with me. You’re supposed to be here to serve me, right?”
“Among other things, master.”
“You’re so stupid... Sometimes I understand why they kicked you out of your country.”
“They didn’t kick me out. I came to Spain to—”
“Oh, go to hell! Are we going or what?”
He’s already in the vestibule. Felipa doesn’t know what to do. He’s quite capable of opening the door and running downstairs. It wouldn’t be the first time. Then he’d hide and scare her to death. What he’d said about kidnapping were not just empty words. His father wants her to keep an eye on him at all times. His mother too.
“Are you coming or not, you moron?”
“Why don’t you play with your PC or with that little gadget—”
“The little gadget, the little gadget,” he says, then bursts out laughing. “The PlayStation, stupid! Now leave me alone!”
He opens the door and Felipa only has time to grab her jacket to cover her maid’s uniform. Pelayo is already one floor down, taking the steps two-by-two and three-by-three.
“I’m telling you again: don’t talk to me like that, master, please! What will the neighbors think?”
She hears his voice moving away from her: “What do I care what those old people say?”
She catches up with him on the street. It’s useless to try to take his hand. He says that she sweats, that she smells, that she’s nothing but an Indian, like all of them. And when she reminds him that in the Philippines they don’t have Indians, he says he looked it up on a map and they’re all Indians, because they can’t live that far from North America and Europe and not be Indians.
At least he looked at a map.
They get to the park and people stare at them quite blatantly. Looks of disgust, looks of rejection. Looks. A woman calls her daughter and, grabbing her hand, starts to leave the park through the gate on Pau Casals Avenue, toward Francesc Macià Plaza. Another mother tells her son to stay away from the newcomer. A third mother hesitates for a second, and it’s just enough time for Pelayo to jump the pigeons, rock in hand. She stands up, calls both her children, and makes her way to the northeast exit, the one toward San Gregorio Taumaturgo Plaza with the round church in the middle.
It’s a beautiful day to stroll down the Turó.
Pelayo goes to the swings. He doesn’t have to wait too long. One of the kids jumps off right away, scared by Pelayo’s killer look. Felipa lowers her eyes. At times she still asks herself how someone can rip the wings off a fly just to witness its suffering, or sit there and watch a pigeon with torn legs and wings struggle to rise up and take flight.
“Master, do not swing so high!”
“Shut up, you idiot, or I’ll tell Mother you didn’t let me play!”
Other nannies don’t come near her anymore. Mothers don’t talk to her. She’s alone.
Pelayo Morales Masdeu flits from one place to another.
The Turó Parc playground empties little by little.
Vanesa Morales Masdeu is seventeen years old and a slut.
Attractive, slender, almost anorexic, her black hair flows down to the middle of her back; she has light eyes, sensual lips, a pointy chin, an exuberant body, and beautiful hands. Young men, and some not so young, have been courting her like wolves for three or four years now, and she’s one of those who plays and plays well. Like a halfback on a soccer team. She plays the game and even allows herself the luxury of scoring a goal or two.
Felipa sometimes asks herself why Vanesa’s parents spoil her so much, why they allow her so much freedom.
She’s a mere girl.
A devil too.
At night, when the house is sleeping, Felipa leaves her room and walks barefoot to the enormous balcony overlooking Turó Parc. She is so tired, so exhausted, that at times she can’t get to sleep. If the weather is good, she goes out to the balcony and gazes at the dark and silent trees, so close at hand, so far from her life. People in Barcelona say Turó is the city’s most beautiful park: small, triangular, cozy, with plenty of places in which to get lost, to sit down, to read the paper, to absorb the sun in open spaces, to walk the dog, to play, or to amble about under the shadows of the tall trees and all the well-manicured shrubs. It’s a park for prosperous couples, rich old men aided by assistants with sad faces full of longing, and children with governesses and uniformed maids, all foreign, just like her.
A park in a high-end neighborhood.
She likes to look at it, especially at night.
The south end, the narrowest and most open part of the triangle, opens to Pau Casals Avenue. On the sides and north, it’s straight, barely a hundred and fifty meters long by about two hundred. The pond with the invisible fish, because they’re rarely seen, is over to the left; the playground is just down from there; a tiny beverage stand with barely half a dozen tables is located in the center. There used to be a small theater. Once upon a time. The buildings bordering and trapping the park on the north and along the sides, to the left and right, are noble, regal, from when the rich began to move in and the neighborhood blossomed. Structures with ten or twelve stories, built in the ’50s and ’60s, solid, with uniformed porters instead of old doormen and women in aprons. From the top floors, it’s possible to glimpse the sea in the distance, and also the Tibidabo, with its Luna Park, the communication antenna put up for the ’92 Olympics. But only from the top floors.