Blood Crime

  Copyright © 2012 by Sebastià Alzamora

  First published in Catalan by Raval Edicions, SLU, Proa, 2012

  Published by arrangement with Cristina Mora Literary & Film Agency SL (Barcelona, Spain)

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

  All rights reserved.

  This book was translated with the help of a grant from the

  Institut Ramon Llull

  Published by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Alzamora, Sebastià, 1972–

  Tennent, Martha translator.

  Blood crime / Sebastià Alzamora

  translated from the Catalan by

  Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent.

  Crim de sang. English

  ISBN 978-1-61695-628-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-629-5

  1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

  3. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Fiction. I. Title

  PC3942.1.L83 C7513 2016 849’.9354—dc23 2016010982

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To María José Lagos

  From man’s deepest recesses emerged the monster.

  —Josep Lluís Aguiló

  Blood Crime

  He wrote:

  Often, when I am overcome by thirst, I put myself in mind of the Holy Spirit. Contrary to what superstition holds, vampires do not experience disgust when we find ourselves in a church. The sight of the symbol of the cross has never bothered me, except on one occasion, in a tract along the Hungarian border, when a pastor seized the opportunity while I lay sleeping on my litter and drove a cross into my chest. I yanked it from my body with one hand, and with the other I ripped out the pastor’s heart, squeezed the blood from it, and drank greedily. Then I impaled his body on a stake that marked the separation between two fields. Buffeted by frigid gusts of wind, he quivered like a tattered scarecrow lost in a night without reprieve or hope. I left the cross plunged in the ground at the pastor’s feet.

  No—neither the cross nor Christian temples trouble me; as a matter of fact, in another life, deep in my past, I was very devout. And now, in my present-day life, I find the thought of the Holy Spirit soothing. For finally, it too is a devil—a daemon—both of us classed among those beings whose existence is inconceivable to men. I admire the qualities ascribed to the Holy Spirit, for they are the traits best suited to the governing of one’s own nature: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, science, compassion, the fear of God. Mercy is the manifestation of a killer’s compassion; the fear of God, a euphemism for the victim’s anguish when faced with imminent death. Science to refine the method of slaughter, fortitude so as not to falter in the hunt, understanding in order to reach one’s final goal, counsel to accept the void of an existence beyond the confines of time, and wisdom to bear it. The word most frequently employed to label what I am is monster, and it does not trouble me to put it down in black and white. The Holy Spirit is also a monster. God is a monster. And it is a well-known fact that He infused monstrosity into all of creation.

  From where I stand I can hear the sound of bombs exploding, resounding in the night like a threat, like an approaching thunderstorm. Men killing men, for gain or for the pleasure of it. I have seen it again and again, and I never tire of it. Places where violence reigns suit me, for there I can hunt most easily. Countries at war, ravaged cities, blood-filled streets: in all of them I have been moved by man’s perseverance in the exercise of cruelty. There is a mathematical figure that quantifies evil—unknown even to monsters, demons and most vampires—and a war always expresses at least a decimal fraction of this figure. Perhaps even more than that here in Barcelona, where an evil of uncommon brutality thrives and has taken possession of men in the most absolute of terms. I roam with complete freedom, unnoticed by brothers who sacrifice brothers, fathers who inform on sons and sons who kill fathers or have them killed; among merchants of misery and whoremasters of death, among gossipmongers of crime and peddlers of depravation. Vile, ravaged city that takes pleasure in toying with the idea of its own extinction.

  I am sated as I write this, fully satisfied after drinking the blood of the priest I slaughtered only moments ago, though I must admit it entailed more of an effort than I had anticipated. To satisfy one’s thirst is a vampire’s only duty, and in order to fulfill it, one of the first things every vampire must learn is to single out and favor the easy prey. Men and women of faith are often precisely that, all the more so in this city, pulverized by a war that has turned them into cannon fodder. And besides, even if no one were pursuing them, a life of prayer slows one’s reflexes and weakens the muscles; devotion supposedly prepares one to accept death serenely, or at least with resignation. Supposedly, I say, because this one today made things as difficult for me as he could: he fought, struggled, scratched, and screamed as if he had gone mad; on two occasions he even uttered the most terrible blasphemies against God, whose minister he boastfully purported to be. I should mention the slight trace of incense on his clothes, for it enhanced the sweetness that filled my mouth as I greedily swallowed the blood that gushed from the ruptured vein in his neck.

  Before killing him, I paused for a moment to observe him. He was in his alcove, hunched over a desk reading the Gospel According to Saint John. He was reading in the manner of the elderly, his finger following the lines, mumbling through the text in a low voice. I was able to catch a few words. He had chosen the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, which is also the story of a monster. I have frequently asked myself: Was Jesus truly moved to see Mary Magdalene weeping? After all, she had anointed his feet and shown such veneration when she wiped them with her hair. Is it not possible, then, that by resurrecting her brother he was simply trying to please her so that she would show her gratitude by lavishing more ointments and caresses on him? Be that as it may, the evangelist recounts that, upon hearing Mary of Bethany’s weeping, Jesus asked to be led to the tomb of Lazarus, where he addressed God with solemn words and immediately thereafter ordered the sepulcher to be opened. The dead man stumbled out, his arms and legs bandaged, his face wrapped in a shroud. Jesus then instructed that he be unbound and allowed to walk. And that is what the dead man did, his intact face showing no sign of decay, not a trace of stench, his skin rosy, his limbs flexible and agile—his condition much the same as that of a vampire emerging from the tomb.

  This was most assuredly not the reading that my priest made: for him, the resurrection of Lazarus could only be seen as God’s commitment to man—set down in the Sacred Texts—granting the true life promised by His Church after earthly existence. At this very moment the priest must be ascertaining the authenticity of this commitment. If he was correct, his soul must now be tumbling down through the circles of hell, because he died offending God in thought, word, and deed, as well as by omission. An entire life of renunciation and prayer only to fail at that final moment in such a pitiful and irreversible manner. As my priest writhed and I quenched my thirst, I could sense the Holy Spirt among us: Ruach HaKodesh, as the Jews say. The voice from heaven.

  The futility of the human being reaches its maximum expression in the chill of the tomb and the putrefaction of the flesh. The ludicrous dream of great human endeavors—whether of empires, ideas, cities, or fortunes—finds resolution in the grey, repulsive color that dead things acquire. For not only men are mortal; the things they construct, clash over, and covet are similarly transient. Only mo
nsters are exempt from death, for the simple reason that we are not alive. I have known men and women who have willingly surrendered their blood to me in exchange for a false promise of immortality to which they clung as an infant clutches at its mother’s breast. The transit from human form to that of a monster is arbitrary. No will can guide it, no incantation can arouse it, no peculium can procure it. No one can save anyone from death, least of all God, who has little interest in the matter.

  These, then, are the terms of the farce, and one’s reaction depends solely on the expectation each has formed for himself. If there is, however, one thing I can affirm with certainty, it is that, of all the usual errors that plague the human adventure, expectation is without a doubt the most ridiculous. Not because everything can be attributed to chance, as is commonly believed, but because chance does not exist. There is no order, or pattern, or hierarchy. The human species is an isolated accident that occurs in the midst of chaos. There is nothing more.

  Faced with such inconsistency, I find it surprising that men have not been more inclined to supplant God and assume His functions and powers, thus committing the great sin of imposture with the loftiest, most blasphemous intention of all: to infuse life into inanimate objects. I was in Prague when an angry, deranged rabbi known as Judah Loew created the gargantuan and clumsy Golem—a vaguely anthropomorphic doll modeled from clay. The rabbi would place in Golem’s mouth a piece of papyrus with a written command, and the doll would begin to move its arms and legs and execute its master’s directive; at a later moment, Judah Loew would retrieve the papyrus from the creature’s mouth and it would fall inert, like the simple, ordinary mass of clay that it was (the rabbi liked to spread the rumor that the command written on the piece of paper was one of the secret names for God, and curiously enough, in many people’s opinion this lent veracity to the whole charade).

  I also happened to find myself in Paris when one Vaucanson gained notoriety with his Duck, an automaton that became the talk of the town. It was a copper figure that was a perfect rendering of a duck in every way, allegedly able to eat and drink, splash about, preen, and, finally, defecate into a silver basin. “Duck with digestive tract,” it was called. Of course, eventually it was revealed that the whole thing was a hoax: the grain that was supposedly fed to the duck ended up in a compartment hidden among the gears, and the animal’s defecation was nothing more than a paste stored in the lower part of the automaton, a device far more limited and naïve than Golem. As was the mechanical chess player that another visionary—Maelzel, he called himself—paraded around Europe to the enthusiastic acclaim of the crowds. No one wished to believe that the purportedly invincible dummy housed a master player inside it, a man who indeed was never defeated by any of the incautious men who challenged him, including Emperor Napoleon himself.

  All were frauds, crude attempts to imitate life, or to appear to. But the truth is that, with the same dedication expended on destroying life, men have often endeavored to understand and marshal the mechanism that makes it possible. For finally, what exactly is life? What separates it from death? Life is an enigmatic and often repulsive phenomenon: the flesh of men and animals pulsates after death, and peristaltic contractions persist in the intestines for quite a while. Even after being ripped from the body to which they belonged, muscles contract when stimulated. There is the well-known story of an English officer sentenced to death for high treason: he was slit open while still alive, his heart ripped out and tossed into the fire; the organ started bounding up and down, reaching almost a meter into the air, and continued to do so for seven or eight minutes. A similar phenomenon can also be observed in polyps, which do not simply continue to move after they have been cut into pieces—they regenerate in a matter of days and form as many new polyps as slices have been cut. And worms, caterpillars, flies, and eels all have one thing in common: their mutilated parts preserve the ability to move; and this ability is augmented when the parts are submerged in hot water. Frog hearts can beat for more than an hour after being removed from the body, especially when exposed to the sun or placed on a surface at the proper temperature. Living bodies, like those of automatons, are merely machines. Is it a certain temperature, then, that activates their spring mechanisms? Or is the temperature the effect, rather than the cause of the process? Is the breath of the Holy Spirit the original cause of life?

  I often find it difficult to distinguish men from beasts because I feed on them both and because they react with similar terror when faced with their own demise. While I was enjoying myself my priest was still writhing on the mosaic floor, spasmodic like the heart of a frog or a decapitated hen, fury and hatred in his eyes. If it is true that eternal life awaits them (not this monstrosity of a life that we vampires share with God and the Holy Spirit, but the golden, luminous redemption that people promise one another) then we can only assume that they would be capable of conducting themselves in a less disappointing fashion.

  Men abhor the idea of being murdered, yet enthusiastically embrace the possibility of becoming murderers. All of them, without exception: the human race is nothing more than a long lineage—ancient and extraordinarily populous—of assassins. This is the problem of human freedom: as soon as an individual believes he has attained it, the first thing he does is concentrate on eliminating his congeners. Order is reestablished when another person takes his life; almost without exception, order entails repressing the appetite for crime by committing another crime. That is why, more than anything else, war is the simultaneous fulfillment of the desire to kill accrued to all the individuals of a generation. A moment of collective deliverance, an enormous, devastating sigh exhaled from the depths of the souls of victims and executioners alike.

  For this reason, in the presence of a boy, I do not see a child but a potential murderer, and in some instances this potential has already been fulfilled. Once I had finished with my priest, I searched for an exit that would allow me to flee without being seen, and I slipped through a small side door and found myself in a narrow, unpaved alleyway. That is where I found him: he was playing with a spinning top on the dusty ground. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. He was wearing trousers of coarse cloth and a tattered sweater, and had snot all over his cheeks. There he stood in the soft light of morning with the toy in his hand, his wide-open, almond-shaped eyes fixed on the blood smeared across my face. I found myself again filled with that thirst that is never fully quenched.

  Part 1

  Memento Mori

  “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Go in peace, Brother Plana.”

  Kneeling on the floor, Brother Plana raised his head, grasped the stole Brother Darder was wearing around his neck, and tried to kiss it but only managed to cover it with saliva. Brother Darder gestured impatiently with his hand.

  “Please, Brother Plana, rise and take your leave now,” he grumbled.

  The priest obeyed and slowly moved away, dragging his feet as he went and murmuring words of gratitude. Gaunt and slovenly, with a small head, a hunched back and protruding belly, four straggly hairs on his scalp, and a mostly toothless mouth, Brother Plana strongly resembled a rat, a large rat, and in his presence Brother Darder was unable to control his revulsion, especially when asked to hear his confession. The litany of Brother Plana’s sins always repeated itself, and from hearing it so often Brother Darder was capable of stating them in advance. It began with a series of sins of thought or omission against the Mother of God or some saint, which Brother Plana recited quickly, grumbling almost incomprehensibly, and then it proceeded to his sinful actions, which almost always consisted in raiding the pantry to steal a bit of sugar or a head of garlic, which later, when no one could see him, he would wolf down in solitude. The mental image of Brother Plana snooping around the pantry of the pension, or hiding away gnawing on some garlic in the dark, was fused in Brother Darder’s mind with that of the plump, repulsive rats he had seen as a child
in the storage room where his father kept the grain, a memory that only increased his repulsion toward the priest and made him want to terminate the confession as quickly as possible. For Brother Plana’s insignificant sins he assigned a routine penance, and he refrained from removing his stole before the little man could take it and wipe his snout on it with an excessive show of devotion that could almost be taken for gluttony.

  On the other hand—wondered Brother Darder as the wormholed, moisture-logged door closed behind Brother Plana and he rose from his chair and could finally remove the stole and fold it carefully—who was he to administer forgiveness to anyone? In the two months since the war had begun, it had contaminated everything: the streets of Barcelona, the air one breathed, men’s words and children’s looks, the sunlight on the façades of buildings, the gleam of the moon and the stars on summer nights . . . Everything was pervaded by that putrid smell, as if the world had turned into a bloated cadaver and men and women were but parasites swirling around it. That breath of air that sweeps through human communities where people live in peace, ventilating the cities where they reside, allowing people to prosper, had been extinguished in Barcelona; the city now appeared rigid, shackled, resembling an enormous wooden stage that only vibrated with the wailing of sirens and the trembling of falling bombs. For some time now a patina of filth seemed to cling to everything, and Brother Darder’s soul was no exception.

  He stretched, sighed, and let his eyes again take in the sadness of the room where he lodged: the chipped tiles, the cracked, whitewashed walls, the ubiquitous damp patches that were like a rash on sickly skin. After contemplating it for a few moments, the sadness descended from his eyes to his mouth; he could almost taste it, as if it were a sweet potato. That was what he ate most days: boiled sweet potatoes, which he sometimes enlivened with a dusting of that same sugar Brother Plana occasionally pinched from the pantry. Sweet potatoes for lunch and for dinner. And even for that they were grateful to the landlady who secretly lodged them in Pension Capell, her boarding house on Carrer Ferran. Ever since the anarchists had driven them from the seminary (which had been seized, like the rest of the order’s property, including the Luis Vives Publishing House), the Marist Brothers had been forced to appeal to the clandestine charity of those who were brave enough to take them in. That is, the brothers like him who were fortunate to have avoided arrest or execution. Religious killings, both of priests and laymen, had commenced the first day of the war, and until then, 20 September 1936, they had shown no signs of abating. No matter what Brothers Gendrau and Lacunza might say—and even in the midst of calamity they strove to keep morale as high as possible—the anarchists’ plan was perfectly clear in the eyes of Brother Darder: their intention was to annihilate the entire order. The only thing the brothers could do was hide like frightened animals and attempt to pull whatever strings they could to obtain permission to leave Barcelona, the city that held the stench of stagnant death.