Woes of the True Policeman

Padilla’s reply was slow in coming and it seemed to have been written in a state of trance. Right off the bat he confessed that he had AIDS. I got the package, he said between jokes. Immediately after that he told Amalfitano to get tested. You might have it, he said, but if you do I promise that you didn’t get it from me. For a year now he had known that he was HIV-positive. Now he had developed the disease. That was all. Soon he would be dead. As far as everything else was concerned, he was no longer working and he had moved back in with his father, who had guessed or gotten some inkling of his son’s illness. Poor old man, said Padilla, he’s had to watch all the people he loves die. Here he rambled on about people like jinxes or dark clouds. The good news was that he had run into the baker from Gracia who used to come to the soirées at the studio near the university. Without asking for anything in return, the baker, having heard that Padilla was sick, had given him a bimonthly allowance, which was what he called it. It wasn’t enough for Padilla to rent an apartment and live alone, but it did cover most of his costs: books, drugs, rooms by the night, dinners at neighborhood restaurants. His prescriptions were paid for by social security. Paradise, as you can see, he said.

He had already been hospitalized once, two weeks in the contagious-disease ward where he shared a room with three junkies, down-and-out kids who hated faggots though they were all dying by giant steps. But I changed their minds, he said. He promised details in the next letter.

With The God of Homosexuals, he said, he was proceeding at a snail’s pace. The baker—“my dear Raguenau,” Padilla called him — is my only reader, a dubious privilege that fills him with joy. He had a new lover, a sixteen-year-old rent boy, infected with AIDS and marvelously oblivious, oh, to be him, sighed Padilla as the letter shook in Amalfitano’s hands. Not working for the publishing house was a fascinating feeling that he’d thought he’d lost. Living like a loafer again, I who was put on this earth solely to amuse myself. To amuse myself and make a nuisance of myself every once in a while.

The Barcelona days were glorious. The Mediterranean shone. Padilla was writing from the terrace of a bar on the Ramblas. People stroll by, he said, and here I sit drinking a double whiskey and I’m happy.

12

Near an assembly plant on the edge of town belonging to Don Gabriel Salazar, on a plot designated as a future industrial park, though it had yet to attract a tenant, another girl was found dead.

She was seventeen, a year older than Edelmira Sánchez. Her name was Alejandra Rosales and she was the mother of an infant son. The cause of death was the same. Her throat had been cut with a large knife, though no trace of blood was found at the scene (as in Parque México), which meant that there was no question that the crime had been committed elsewhere.

The body of Edelmira Sánchez had turned up on a Monday and her parents had reported her disappearance on Sunday morning. The last time she was seen was Saturday at dinnertime. The body of Alejandra Rosales turned up a week later, but the last time she was seen alive was on Saturday, just before Edelmira said goodbye to her parents. The only one who might have reported her disappearance was her mother-in-law, with whom she lived, but her mother-in-law thought that Alejandra had run off with a man and she had enough on her hands already taking care of her late son’s baby without trying to get to the police station to report the disappearance of a woman she hated and whom she wouldn’t have minded seeing dead.

According to the medical examiner, both were raped multiple times, presenting slight lacerations to the legs and back, bruising around the wrists (leading to the conclusion that both women had at some point been bound), a fatal slash or two to the neck (severing the carotid artery; in Alejandra’s case the cut was so deep that it almost decapitated her), contusions to the chest and arms, light bruising about the face. No traces of semen were found in either case.

In Chucho Peguero’s report it said that Alejandra occasionally worked as a prostitute and that on Saturday nights she often frequented La Hélice, a nightclub on Calle Amado Nervo. The night that she disappeared she was seen there by a witness, her friend Guadalupe Guillén. According to the latter, at about 8:00 p.m. Alejandra was on La Hélice’s dance floor, dancing a merengue. Guadalupe Guillén didn’t see her again for the rest of the night. No one saw her leave the club. Edelmira Sánchez, meanwhile, spent her Saturday nights at the New York, a club mainly for teenagers on Avenida Escandón, where she arrived at around 7:30 p.m. By midnight she was usually already on her way home with her boyfriend or her friends, because Edelmira didn’t have her own car. That Saturday night, Alejandra wasn’t seen at the New York, nor was Edelmira seen at La Hélice.