Montserrat poked her head down the hallway. “Abel, I’m here.”
The apartment was quiet. A thin shaft of light escaped from underneath the door of one of the bedrooms. He must be in there.
“Abel, can you come out?”
She felt unnerved. Rather than proceeding, she stepped back and went into the kitchen. She grabbed a knife from a drawer and headed back into the hallway and stood in front of the door, taking a deep breath.
“Abel, I’m coming in, okay?” she said.
She waited a few seconds, hoping he would reply. But the only answer was a thick silence. It made her think that Abel was not home, although she had the definite sensation someone was waiting for her inside the bedroom. She turned the doorknob and walked in.
Abel’s bedroom was large, but it was full of antique furniture that crowded her view. In front of the bed there was an armoire outfitted with two mirrors, one on each door. The bed was of cast iron and piled high with blankets. A dresser was covered with boxes, two bookshelves were stuffed with more antiques and knickknacks, and there was even a chest with another chest on top.
“Abel,” Montserrat said, slowly rounding the bed.
There he lay, on the ground, belly up, one hand pressed against his stomach. His eyes were wide open. His neck had been cut from side to side and blood had seeped onto a thin, beige-and-blue Persian carpet, staining it red.
She pressed a hand against her mouth to keep herself from screaming.
From the corner of her eye Montserrat spied movement, and she turned around, knife in hand, staring at her reflection in the armoire’s doors. The apartment was still silent, but there was a strange charge in the air.
She knew silence and she knew silence. When working with tracks, any audio engineer would record a couple of minutes of silence to establish room tone. Later, that silence could be used to seamlessly bridge gaps. Dead silence, however, was a different thing. Dead silence was the absence of all sound. No room, outside of a soundproofed studio, could be dead silent. There was always the sound of traffic outside, the tick of a clock, the buzzing of an alarm in the distance.
Yet silence thick as tar enveloped her, threatened to suffocate her.
She saw herself in the mirror, frozen in the armoire’s panes of glass. She could not move. A terrible fear had gripped her heart. It was the terror of this unnatural silence, of the brightly illuminated room that nevertheless seemed to hide stark shadows, and even of the shape of the blood upon the carpet.
She thought the patterns on the rug, mixing with the spilled blood, traced strange glyphs.
And that silence…that silence was louder than a hundred decibels, louder than shouting, or a siren or firecrackers going off in the night. Yet that room, if measured with a sound level meter, could not have registered any more noise than the ticking of a watch.
In the mirror there was a spark. That silvery, shimmering second that unsettles the retina, the accidental transition as the light of a projector hits a clear frame.
A flash frame.
Fear, which had rooted her to her spot, now gave her the courage to move. Montserrat jumped toward the room’s entrance, her fingers brushing against the door jamb. It was scorching hot. She let out a yelp, which broke the terrible blanket of silence, and dropped her knife, stumbling out of the room and running back into the living room where she found a phone and picked up the receiver. She yelled for an operator even though none could answer her desperate plea because the other phone was in the bedroom, off the hook, smeared with blood.
13
Outside the police station Montserrat paused to look at a newspaper stand with its collection of magazines, newspapers, and comic books on display. The new Gloria Trevi calendar had arrived in time for the holidays, and her nakedness would soon adorn all the mechanics’ shops in the city. A tiny Christmas tree, decorated with tinsel, sat in a corner of the stand, promising cheer and good tidings. Montserrat kept perusing the headlines, looking at the papers hanging from clothespins, as if searching for the answer to a puzzle.
Tristán steered Montserrat away from the newspaper stand and toward a taxi.
“When will they have the results of the autopsy?” Montserrat asked after he’d given the driver his address.
It was the first sentence she had uttered since they’d walked out of the police station. She looked haggard, an actor rehearsing the part of a zombie, with dark circles under her eyes and the occasional grunt that served as answers to his questions.
The taxi driver eyed them through the rearview mirror, and Tristán stuffed his hands in his pockets. “We can’t discuss that now,” he muttered.
“Why not?”
“Because no,” he said.
The driver knew Tristán. It was the same casual recognition he experienced on occasion, that raising of the eyebrows, the feeling that people had seen him somewhere before. He had forgotten his sunglasses, which might have ordinarily rendered his face anonymous. The driver might not figure out who he was in the end, it might remain at that nagging level of half-acknowledged recognition, or he might put two and two together and realize it was Tristán Abascal. After all, the anniversary of Karina’s death had been in the magazines recently. They had run Tristán’s picture, too.
Or maybe the driver stared because Montserrat’s hair looked like Elsa Lanchester’s in The Bride of Frankenstein, an unruly mess of curls that stood up in every direction, and it was easy to see she wasn’t wearing a bra under her thin t-shirt with her jacket unzipped. She looked like she had both rolled out of bed and spent forty hours awake.
“I want to discuss it,” Montserrat insisted.
“We’re not alone,” Tristán practically hissed, leaning close to Montserrat’s ear.
“I’ll be getting off around the corner from here,” Montserrat said.
“What? No. Montserrat, you can’t get—”
But the driver had obediently turned the corner. Montserrat pushed the door open and jumped out of the car. She began walking away without as much as a goodbye. Tristán took out a bill and handed it to the driver, then rushed to catch up with Montserrat, who was walking at a quick pace despite her slight limp.
“Are you nuts or stupid? That driver was listening to every single word we said. I think he recognized me.”
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t. I have a major part coming up. I can’t have people tying me to anything scandalous.”
“Don’t worry, the one who was detained was me, not you.”
“Yes, but I just picked you up.”
“Where were you the night Abel died? I tried beeping you, I tried phoning, I tried knocking and you were not there,” Montserrat said. Her tone of voice was flat, so he replied in an equally flat voice although he knew this would only incense her.
“I was with someone.”
“Fucking someone,” Montserrat said, almost biting into the words.
Tristán’s masterful plan to meet Yolanda for drinks, so he could hand her the CD—to remain friends, to be adults about this breakup—had morphed into a patchy attempt at trying to give their relationship another chance. They had headed to Cuernavaca in her car for a mini-vacation, booking themselves into a cute little hotel. The first twenty-four hours had been fine, then sometime around dinner the second day Tristán had been distracted and morose. He had taken the trip, and he was trying to mend this relationship, partially because he kept thinking about the terror of loneliness and Karina’s death. Normalcy. That’s what he needed. A shot of normalcy.