The Infatuations (4 page)

That night, I typed in ‘Deverne Murder’ on my computer and the item came up at once, drawn from the local news sections of two or three Madrid papers. His real surname was Desvern, and it occurred to me that perhaps his family had changed it at some point for business purposes, to make it easier to pronounce for speakers of Castilian and possibly so that Catalan speakers would not immediately associate them with the town of Sant Just Desvern, a place I happened to know because several Barcelona publishing houses have their warehouses there. And perhaps also to give the appearance of being a French film distributor, because when the company was founded – in the 1960s or even earlier – everyone would still have been familiar with Jules Verne, and everything French was considered chic, not like now with that President who looks like Louis de Funès with hair. I learned, too, that the Deverne family used to own several large cinemas in the centre of Madrid and that, perhaps because such cinemas have been gradually disappearing, to be replaced by shopping malls, the company had diversified and now specialized in property development, not just in Madrid, but elsewhere too. So Miguel Desvern must have been even richer than I thought. I found it even more incomprehensible that he should have breakfasted nearly every morning in a café that was well within my more modest means. The incident had occurred on the last day that I saw him there, which is how I knew that his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only. In a further cruelly ironic touch, it was his birthday; he had thus died a year older than he had been the day before, at fifty.

The versions in the press differed in some details (it doubtless depended on which neighbours or passers-by the reporters had spoken
to), but they all agreed on the main facts. Deverne had parked his car, as, it seems, he always did, in a side street off Paseo de la Castellana at around two in the afternoon – he was probably going to meet Luisa for lunch at the restaurant – quite close to their house and even closer to a small car park belonging to the Technical College for Industrial Engineers. When he got out, he was accosted by a homeless guy who used to park cars in the area in exchange for tips from drivers – what we call a
gorrilla
– and who had then started berating Desvern, making incoherent, outrageous accusations. According to one witness – although none of them really understood what the man was talking about – he accused Deverne of having got his daughters involved in some international prostitution ring. According to others, he gave vent to a stream of unintelligible invective, of which they could make out only two phrases: ‘You’re trying to take my inheritance away from me!’ and ‘You’re stealing the bread from my children’s mouths!’ Desvern tried to shake the man off and reason with him for a few seconds, telling him that he had nothing to do with his daughters, whom he didn’t even know, and that he had clearly mistaken him for someone else. However, the
gorrilla
, Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella according to the reports, thirty-nine years old, very tall and heavily bearded, had grown even angrier and continued to hurl abuse at Desvern and heap him with incomprehensible curses. The porter of one house had heard him screaming hysterically: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have forgotten you!’ Another newspaper reported a still more wounding version: ‘You’re going to die today and, by tomorrow, your wife will have found another man!’ Deverne had made a dismissive gesture as if giving up on the fellow, and was about to set off towards Paseo de la Castellana, abandoning any further attempt to calm the man down, but then the
gorrilla
, as if he had decided to wait no longer for his
curse to take effect, but to become, instead, its artificer, had produced a butterfly knife with a seven-centimetre blade and launched himself on Deverne from behind, stabbing him repeatedly, in the chest and side according to one newspaper, in the back and abdomen according to another, in the back, the chest and the side of the chest according to a third. The reports also disagreed on the number of stab wounds: nine, ten and sixteen, but the reporter who gave that last figure – and who was possibly the most reliable because he mentioned ‘autopsy results’ – added that ‘every blow struck a vital organ’ and that ‘according to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy, five proved fatal’.

Desvern had initially tried to get away from the man and escape, but the blows had been so fast and furious and brutal – and, apparently, so accurate – that there had been no way he could evade them and he soon collapsed and fell to the ground. Only then did the murderer stop. A security guard at a nearby company ‘saw what was happening and managed to detain the man until the police arrived, saying: “You’re not leaving here until the police arrive!”’ There was no explanation as to how, with mere words, he had managed to immobilize an armed man, who was completely out of control and who had just spilled a great deal of blood – perhaps he did so at gunpoint, but none of the articles mentioned a gun or that he had got a gun out and pointed it at the assailant – because various sources stated that the
gorrilla
was still holding the knife when the police arrived, and that they had been the ones who ordered him to drop it. The man then threw it down on the ground, was handcuffed and taken to the local police station. ‘According to Madrid’s chief of police’ – these or similar words appeared in all the newspapers – ‘the alleged murderer was brought before a court, but refused to make a statement.’

Luis Felipe Vázquez Canella had been living for some time in the
area in an abandoned car, and here again the testimony of neighbours differed, as always happens when one asks or tells a story to more than one person. For some, he was a very calm, polite individual who never caused any trouble: he spent his time earning a little money by looking for parking spaces and guiding drivers to them with the usual imperious, obliging gestures that go with the job – his services were sometimes unnecessary or unwanted, but that is how all
gorrillas
work. He would arrive at about midday, leave his two blue rucksacks at the foot of a tree, and set about his intermittent task. Other residents, however, said that they had become fed up with ‘his violent outbursts and evident insanity’, and had often tried to get him thrown out of his static mobile home and have him removed from the neighbourhood, but without success. Although Vázquez Canella had no previous police record, Deverne’s chauffeur had been the victim of one of his outbursts only a month before. The beggar had addressed him very rudely and, taking advantage of the fact that the chauffeur had his window wound down, had punched him in the face. The police were duly informed and arrested him briefly for assault, but, in the end, the chauffeur, although ‘injured’, had taken pity on the man and decided not to make a formal complaint. And on the eve of Desvern’s death, victim and executioner had had their first argument. The
gorrilla
had made his usual wild allegations. According to one of the more talkative concierges in the street where the stabbing took place, ‘He talked about his daughters and about his money, saying that “they” wanted to take his money away from him.’ Another version described how: ‘The victim explained to him that he had got the wrong person and that he had nothing to do with his affairs. The bewildered beggar then wandered off, muttering to himself.’ Somewhat embellishing the narrative and taking a few liberties with the people actually involved, it added: ‘Miguel could never have imagined
that, twenty-four hours later, Luis Felipe’s delusions would cost him his life. The script written for him had begun to take shape a month earlier’ – this was a reference to the incident with the chauffeur, who some neighbours saw as the real object of the beggar’s rage: ‘Who knows, perhaps he had it in for the chauffeur,’ one of them was reported to have said, ‘and got him mixed up with his boss.’ It was suggested that the
gorrilla
had been in a foul mood for a month or more, because, with the installation of parking meters in the area, he could no longer earn any money with his already sporadic work. One of the newspapers mentioned in passing a disconcerting fact that none of the others had picked up: ‘The alleged murderer refused to make a statement, and so we have been unable to confirm whether or not he and his victim were related by marriage, as some people in the neighbourhood believed.’

An ambulance had sped to the scene of the crime. The ambulance men had given Desvern first aid, but because he was so gravely injured, all they could do was ‘stabilize’ him and drive him immediately to the Hospital de La Luz – or, according to a couple of newspapers, to the Hospital de La Princesa; they couldn’t even agree on that – where he was rushed into the operating room with cardiac arrest and in a critical condition. He hovered on the brink of life and death for five hours, during which time he never recovered consciousness; he finally ‘succumbed late that evening, with the doctors unable to do anything more to save him’.

All this information was published over a period of two days, the two days following the murder. Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don’t want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, of dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our careless
fellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don’t want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people’s misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: ‘How dreadful. But what’s next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we’ve worn out yesterday’s already.’

Oddly enough, during those two days, little was said about the man who had died, only that he was the son of one of the founders of the well-known film distributors and that he worked for the family firm, which was now almost an empire that had been growing for decades and constantly adding to its many ramifications, currently even including low-cost airlines. In the days that followed, there was no sign of any obituary for Deverne anywhere, no memoir or evocation written by a friend or colleague or comrade, no biographical sketch that spoke of his character and his personal achievements, and that was strange. Any wealthy businessman, especially if he has links with the cinema, and even if he isn’t famous, has contacts in the press or friends with contacts, and it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade one of those contacts to place a heartfelt note of homage and praise in some newspaper, as if that might compensate the dead person in some way for being dead or as if the lack of an obituary were an added insult (so often we only find out that someone has existed once they have ceased to do so, in fact,
because
they have ceased to exist).

And so the only available photo was the one snapped by some quick-witted reporter while Deverne was lying on the ground, before
he was taken away, when he was still receiving treatment there in the street. Fortunately, it was hard to see the image on the Internet – a very small, rather bad reproduction – because that seemed to me a truly vile thing to do to a man like him, who, in life, had always been so cheerful, so impeccable. I barely looked at it, I didn’t want to, and I had already thrown away the newspaper where I had first glimpsed the photo in its larger version without realizing who it was and not wishing to spend time over it. Had I known then that he was not a complete stranger, but a person I used to see every day with a sense of pleasure and almost gratitude, the temptation to look would have been too hard to resist, but then I would have averted my gaze, feeling even more indignant and horrified than I had when I failed to recognize him. Not only do you get killed in the street in the cruellest way possible and completely out of the blue, without so much as an inkling that such a thing could happen, but also, precisely because it did happen in the street – ‘in a public place’ as people reverentially and stupidly say – it is deemed permissible to exhibit to the world the humiliating havoc wrought on you. In the smaller photo on the Internet, I would barely have recognized him, and then only because the text assured me that the dead or soon-to-be-dead man was Desvern. He, at any rate, would have been horrified to see or know himself to have been thus exposed, without a jacket or tie or even a shirt, or with his shirt open – you couldn’t quite tell, and where would his cufflinks have gone if his shirt had been removed? – full of tubes and surrounded by ambulance staff manhandling him, with his wounds on display, unconscious and lying sprawled in the middle of the street in a pool of blood, watched by passers-by and drivers alike. His wife would have been equally horrified by this image, if she had seen it, although she would probably have had neither the time nor the desire to read the newspapers the following day. While you weep
for and watch over and bury the dead, all uncomprehending, and when you have children to tell as well, you’re in no fit state for anything else, the rest does not exist. But she might have seen it afterwards, perhaps prompted by the same curiosity I felt a week later, and have gone on to the Internet to find out what other people had known at the time, not just close friends and family, but strangers like me. What effect would that have had on her? Her more distant friends would have found out via the press, from that local Madrid newspaper or from a death notice, one or even several must have appeared in various papers, as usually happens when someone wealthy dies. That photo, above all else that photo – as well as the manner of his death, foul and absurd and, how can I put it, tinged with misfortune – was what allowed Beatriz to refer to him as ‘the poor man’. No one would ever have called him that while he was alive, not even one minute before he got out of his car in that charming, peaceful part of town, next to the small garden surrounding the college, where there are trees and a drinks kiosk with a few tables and chairs, and where I’ve often sat with my young nephews. No, not even a second before Vázquez Canella opened his butterfly knife; apparently, you have to be quite skilled to open one of those double-handled things, which are, I believe, not available to buy and may even be banned. And now, there were no two ways about it, he would be that for ever: poor, unfortunate Miguel Deverne. Poor man.