The Good Suicides Read Online Free Page B

before—”
    “Yeah.”
    Héctor looked at the screen. It was a message with only two words, written in capitals, with a photo attached.
    NEVER FORGET
    When he downloaded the photo, Salgado understood why Fort had called him and why that Dominican had dragged his brother by the ear to bring back the damn cell phone.
    At first he thought they were kites trapped in a tree. Then, after enlarging the photo and seeing the details properly, he realized they weren’t. There was a tree all right, with thick, solid branches. But what was hanging from them, the three shapes suspended by ropes, were animals. The rigid bodies of three hanged dogs.



3
    New year, new life … although at the moment pretty much like the one before, Leire said to herself as she looked at herself side-on in the mirror. This was another of the treacherously unprecedented components of her current existence. They’d brought it up from the shop, because from the first moment she’d wanted it to decorate the hall of the apartment she’d just moved into and couldn’t yet call home. She kept seeing herself as a whale in it.
    But she’d been very lucky. Everyone said so, and she’d ended up shutting up and agreeing. That apartment, with its high ceilings, with two spacious bedrooms and sun in the morning, was without doubt the best of those she’d visited, and the price, which had supposedly come down a lot in recent times, was in fact the maximum her income would permit. The ad promised “views of the Sagrada Familia,” and strictly speaking it didn’t lie. It could be seen from the wooden-framed window that gave access to a diminutive balcony. However, you couldn’t spend the day looking at those needles that stuck out among the buildings in front, however nice they were. What the ad didn’t say, nor did the woman from the estate agency who showed her the apartment mention, was that the pipes were a hundred years old and got blocked; that the bathroom tiles, a shocking orange color that the woman defined as “happy seventies,” tended to leap into the void because of the damp; and that the radiators were more futuristic ornaments and gave off about thesame heat as a Chinese vase. Clearly, she was to console herself about the damp, the cold and the toilet cistern, which sometimes gurgled as if an alien were about to emerge from the wastepipe, by going out onto the balcony and admiring the Sagrada Familia. A total luxury if you were Japanese.
    In any case, what made the apartment feel strange to her wasn’t its defects, and of course not its views, rather that for the first time in years it didn’t seem wholly hers. One of the two bedrooms had a cradle, a beech wardrobe and a border of yellow ducks running all around the four walls, dividing the two shades of green that her friend María had chosen as the ideal colors for a baby’s room. And not only that: in part of her wardrobe, which had always been for her alone, some masculine garments had gathered almost without warning.
    Overwhelmed, Leire Castro went toward the balcony, happy to be able to move around the apartment without boxes in the way. That was definitely a change. “The first of many, right?” she said, directing her words to the child currently living within her. Sometimes he answered with sudden movements; at other times he seemed not to take the hint. She tried to imagine the features of this baby, Abel, floating inside her, but she only managed to give him a wrinkled face, like a sleeping gnome. Would he look like her, or Tomás? Well, if he looked like him it wouldn’t be too bad, she thought with a smile. “Although best if the resemblances are just physical, hey kid? Otherwise, you and I are going to have problems …”
    Tomás had been a one-night stand that then lengthened to three, and later the odd weekend. No-strings sex. Taboo-free sex. And once, only once, although no one would believe it, sex without a condom. But accurate. Tomás’s reaction, after a plate