The Whispering City (3 page)

She remembered the rat. A dead rat lying swollen on the steps, its pink tail hanging almost all the way down to the stair below. No one had bothered to move it aside: not the police, not the undertakers, nor any of the curious bystanders who came to take a look. Someone would eventually end up stepping on it.

The dead woman she supposedly had to write about was on the first floor of an abandoned building on Arco del Teatro, a street that led into the lower Paralelo and the filthiest part of the Barrio Chino, Barcelona’s red light district. Some children had discovered the body wrapped in an old blanket.

She didn’t get to see it, but she didn’t need to. She had seen the space where the woman had tried to take shelter from the cold, a wooden box, part of what had once been a wardrobe. It was as if she’d been buried alive.

‘Was she elderly?’ Ana had asked one of the officers she’d met in the building.

‘About forty, but she’d packed a lot of living into those years.’

The case turned out to be a dirty trick. Belda knew this type of news wasn’t usually published, that a piece about one of the corpses the police removed each week from abandoned buildings and the shelters where the hundreds of indigents swarming the city took refuge for the night wouldn’t pass the censors. It had all been for nothing. The stench of piss and putrefaction on the street, in the building, in the flat. The impoverished faces of some, the bloated features of others, the dogs that ran terrified along the pavements, fleeing grubby, feral children.

The mere fact that Belda had been the one who’d offered her the chance to go to the scene had put her on her guard. Her humiliation over having fallen so naively into his trap hurt more than her frustration when she realised she wasn’t going to be able to write a word about it.

Belda was waiting for her in the offices of
La Vanguardia
like a boy on All Fools’ Day who can barely stifle his laughter when he sees the paper figure stuck to his victim’s back. No one on the staff had opposed her joining the newspaper as vehemently. That was more than a year ago, but he still hadn’t accepted her.

To get to her desk, Ana had to pass Belda’s. That day, when she returned to the office, he waited until she was close enough, looked up, took the cigarette from between his lips and, with feigned disappointment, said, ‘Oh, so you missed the stiff? Well, maybe you can write a feature on the latest fashions the whores in the Barrio Chino are wearing.’

He let out a laugh and looked around him, seeking the applause of his colleagues, who were following the scene more or less willingly.

He raised a few chuckles, which turned into cackles when they heard Ana’s retort.

‘I’m sure you’re much better informed on their underwear.’

She turned on her heel and left him first with his mouth agape and then spewing a torrent of insults that only stopped when Mateo Sanvisens came within earshot.

So her first case had been a death with no body, the only record of it some court archives filed away along with those of the other nameless souls found dead that week.

But this time, the corpse waiting for her was a dead woman with a name – a very prominent name.

3

‘Look, I got Ruiz to buy that silver piece from me. You should be glad to be rid of it, it was only gathering dust.’

Encarni put the shopping basket down on the table. She was pleased. Ruiz, the pawn shop guy, had paid her well for the centrepiece, and she had been able to buy plenty of groceries. The basket was overflowing. She was sure the missus would say she could take something to her mother.

‘Good,’ answered her employer, but Encarni could tell she hadn’t been paying attention. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her, and her hand held a holder with the nub of a cigarette in it. The coffee and cigarette must have been her breakfast, and it was already noon.

She started to pull things out of the basket, making as much noise as possible: she crushed the newsprint so that it would crunch, she clinked together two bottles before placing them heavily on the ground. She liked things to make noise: the tinkling of the silverware when she put it in the drawer, the creaking of the drawers of the many cupboards when she opened them, the lids banging onto the pots.

The noise was practical, too, when Encarni wanted to attract Señora Beatriz’s attention.

She turned towards Encarni, pulling her gaze from the distance and focusing it on her. ‘How much did Ruiz pay you for it?’

‘He gave me ninety pesetas.’

‘Good.’ Then she smiled. ‘That’s a lot.’

Encarni grinned with satisfaction. She was proud of her negotiating skills, but she thought it more elegant to accept the compliment without comment, to downplay it, so she changed the subject. ‘Do you know what? Up in Tibidabo, they found a dead woman.’

Was Señora Beatriz still listening to her? There was no way of knowing. If she was thinking about the dusty papers and the yellow cards she had in the desk, there was no point telling her anything. It would be like talking to a wall or a hatstand. But she lifted her head; it seemed she wanted to know more. Encarni continued, ‘A rich widow. Horrible thing. The chicken guy told me that it was real butchery. Everything covered in blood. How awful!’

She turned to put the half-pound of butter she’d bought into the fridge. Before putting it away, she took it out of its paper, sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t rancid and placed the stick on a porcelain butter dish.

‘The maid found her. Poor thing. She had a day off, came back and there was the widow. Stiff as a board. Thank goodness I’m not in her shoes.’

‘Yes, what luck! Especially for me.’

Señora Beatriz sounded amused. She was still wearing her dressing gown. Her blonde hair was wrapped in a turban, a damp lock escaping on one side. Another night that she had stayed up into the wee hours with her books.

Encarni smiled.

‘Forgive me, Professor, ma’am. But imagine, Fermín the fishmonger said the poor girl almost died of a heart attack.’ Encarni paused for dramatic effect. ‘But the worst thing is the eye…’

The missus leaned forward and shook some ash from her sleeve. Encarni sighed. She was going to make another hole in her dressing gown. She didn’t seem to care much, though it must have cost a bob or two. She had to have bought it before the war; you couldn’t find those designs these days. If she wanted to, the missus could be very elegant, but no; in the end she just put on whatever she pulled out of her huge wardrobes. There was even a cassock in one of them.

‘It was my Uncle Lázaro’s,’ Señora Beatriz had told her when she’d asked about it.

‘And what’s it doing here?’

‘I don’t even remember.’

‘The priest in my town would have sold his soul for a cassock of such quality.’

‘Encarni!’ Señora Beatriz pretended to be scandalised. ‘Well, if you’d like, we’ll send it to him.’

‘That’s expensive. Forget about it.’

She’d responded evasively, instead of telling her that she still remembered with shame how the priest of her town – El Padul, in Granada – had called her a ‘bitch in heat’, pointing at her during a sermon in church, because he had seen her kissing her boyfriend the previous afternoon. If it weren’t a cassock and made of such good fabric, she would have used it to make dust rags. Encarni knew about clothes. She and her sister used to study the display windows on the Paseo de Gracia on Sunday afternoons.

‘They ripped out one of her eyes and it was rolling around on the floor.’

Encarni bent and picked up an orange that had fallen and rolled along the kitchen tiles. She placed it in the fruit bowl.

‘Her eye was rolling on the floor?’

‘That’s what she told me in the greengrocer’s and while she did, nothing to it, she slipped me an overripe apple.’

She produced the apple and put it on the table in front of the missus. It seemed that the apple was about to begin rolling too, but Encarni stopped it with her hand and placed it firmly beside the coffee cup.

‘Look, all four of them are perfect,’ she said. ‘“Let me see,” I said to the produce lady, “because last time there was one that was overripe.” “Please, for the love of God,” she told me, “don’t be like that. It’s just that this murder’s got me all
a-frit
.”’ Encarni imitated the fruit seller’s accent and way of speaking. ‘What nonsense! She only tells her stories so her customers are distracted and she can sell them rotten apples and disgusting oranges.’

‘Can you say that again?’

‘What?’

‘The
disgusting
part.’

‘Ay, ma’am! Don’t start again with my zeds,’ lamented Encarni, but with little conviction.

She hadn’t forgotten that her zeds were what had got her the job in the first place.

She had been working at Señora Beatriz’s house for almost two years, ever since one afternoon when she’d sat down, exhausted, on one of the circular benches along the Paseo de Gracia. She had been going from house to house looking for work since the early morning. She was so tired that she didn’t notice the woman sitting to her left until she pulled out a box of matches from her handbag and lit a cigarette fitted into a long black holder. A woman smoking in the street. But she wasn’t a whore: she was elegant, even if her clothing was a bit dated; Encarni had guessed she was over forty, but forty in rich women’s years, which take less of a toll than a poor woman’s forty. She had a book on her lap. After lighting the cigarette, she held the holder with her free hand and continued reading. A woman smoking and reading; Encarni couldn’t contain her curiosity.

‘Is it good?’

The woman turned towards her in surprise.

‘Pardon?’

‘No, nothing, just wondering if the book you’re reading is good.’

‘Very. It’s Dauzat’s
Introduction to French Dialects
.’

‘Gosh… Well, it sounds good,’ she said, intimidated by the obscurity of the title.

She was expecting the woman to turn back to her reading, but she didn’t, instead asking, ‘You’re from Andalusia, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘From Granada, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Yes. From a town that…’

‘I knew it had to be Granada! From the capital or its surrounding areas, right?’

‘Near the capital, from a town, El Padul, that… How did you know?’

‘From your s’s. Or, I should say, from the s’s you don’t pronounce, from your lisp.’

The woman then told her that her way of pronouncing the letter ‘s’ was peculiar to Granada. She spoke with such enthusiasm that it occurred to Encarni that the woman wasn’t exactly normal, but she still responded gamely to her next question.

‘Have you been in Barcelona long?’

‘Only a couple of years. I live in
Monchuí
.’ That was her pronunciation of Montjüic.

She didn’t want to tell her that she lived in a shanty town, but that thought reminded her of why she was there: to get out of that slum once and for all.

‘Listen, you wouldn’t happen to need a girl to help around the house?’

The woman looked her up and down. Encarni permitted the scrutiny, but lifted her chin proudly. She was clean, and although her clothes were mended, they were at least well mended.

‘The truth is, I could do with someone because I have a lot of work, but I can’t pay much.’

‘Room, board and what you can spare. I’ll settle for that.’

‘When can you start?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

The address the woman gave her was in a good part of the city, on the Rambla de Cataluña. Encarni was pleased to find out that there was no man of the house, but sad there were no children.

The next day she turned up at the home of Señora Beatriz Noguer and learned that she was a professor who wasn’t teaching, for some political reason, but she wrote books. Books about how people around the world pronounced different words.

Yes, she owed a lot to her zeds, which was why she picked up one of the apples, held it aloft and said to the missus, ‘
Dizguzting orangez
.’

Her ‘s’ sounds always came out like zeds, and vice versa. The missus laughed.

Encarni unwrapped the chicken. It was a bit lean, but she had haggled a good price. And she had made sure they gave her all the leavings.

‘The man in the chicken shop says they were Masons. They need eyes for their rituals. They dry them on a low flame, like prunes or mushrooms. Then they cut them into slices. They prefer blue eyes, says the chicken man.’

‘Then we’re safe,’ responded the missus.

‘Yup. Unless the Masons change their mind and all of a sudden start collecting brown eyes.’

It seemed the Masons were to blame for everything. They probably didn’t even exist. Just like the bogeyman, who supposedly snatched away naughty children. If they did exist and needed eyes, then they wouldn’t leave them rolling around on the floor. The chicken man was talking rubbish.

She looked around. All the shopping had been put away, everything was in its place. The missus was distracted again, lost in contemplation of the smoke rising from her cigarette. Encarni wondered whether it was the right moment to talk to her about the refrigerator. She seemed to be in a good mood.

Señora Beatriz’s voice pulled her from her thoughts.

‘Encarni, was there any post for me?’

No, there were no letters in the postbox. Yes, the postman had been and had left a thick envelope for Ramírez, on the second floor. No, nothing had come for her.

The missus got up. She seemed displeased. Goodbye, good mood. She had been waiting for some letter for several days. Encarni sighed and started to peel the potatoes.

4

Beatriz watched the street from the window of her study. A dense layer of darkening cloud had covered the entire city. It was starting to rain, and along the Rambla de Cataluña people had opened their umbrellas and quickened their step.