Monster

My name is Bernardo Manzano; I am 37 years old. When I was 20 and studying engineering at university, I took a temporary job. A sheet posted in one of the faculty corridors advertised work conducting surveys in several towns, and it seemed a good way to spend the summer and earn some money. The pay was not extraordinary, but it was enough for a student; moreover, for four weeks they would send me to ten different towns to conduct the surveys, and the thought of a change of scene for a few days appealed to me. The company would arrange my lodging in inns and provide bus tickets. Each week I had to return to the city to hand in the surveys and receive instructions for the visits I would make in the following days. It was almost at the end of those four weeks that they sent me to a town called San Marcos, and that the story I am going to tell occurred.

San Marcos was a small town, with a population of around a thousand people according to the information I had been given. On a Friday morning a bus left me at the station in Santa Catarina, the larger town near San Marcos from which I was to travel to my final destination. There was no bus station in San Marcos, so they had sent me to Santa Catarina because a bus left from there and took the southern highway, passing several settlements, and could leave me in San Marcos. Because the bus I had taken since dawn was late, I missed the one that left Santa Catarina in the morning, and the next did not leave until the afternoon. I therefore had to find another way of getting to the town, about eighty kilometres to the south. I was lucky: at the town market I found a pickup that would pass through San Marcos on its way to El Vergel. At ten thirty in the morning the pickup dropped me on the edge of the road, on the street leading into the town. The region is wooded and the road in is all curves between hills, a narrow road with one lane each way. A sign bearing the town’s name marks what is its main street, which stretches rightward from the road. At the intersection there was only the half-built structure of what looked as though it would become a petrol station. As I walked along the street, a few simple buildings began to appear, and after about five hundred metres I was in the middle of town. I had been given directions to an inn where I would spend the night. The plan was to complete at least fifty surveys—which would take me all day—spend the night at the inn, and return early to Santa Catarina to take a midday bus to the city. Following the directions, I continued along the main street—the only paved street in town—for about another five hundred metres, until a cobbled street appeared on the right. I took it. On its right were several houses separated by vacant lots; on its left was a football field with more dirt than grass. After about three hundred metres, the cobbled street met an unpaved one. If I had continued straight on, I would have had to climb the very steep slope of a hill, but I had to turn right onto the dirt road to reach the inn. The little street, where two vehicles could scarcely have fit at the same time, was a mixture of dirt, rubbish, and puddles. I noticed something curious. On the left, in a small plot about forty metres long along the street and ten metres deep, were several graves. As is common in village cemeteries, the graves were decorated with flowerpots and flowers, some enclosed by grilles or adorned with statues of religious figures. People seem to visit their dead more in towns than in cities. Some graves had no decoration at all; they were neglected, with broken headstones and grass growing along their sides, surely because those dead no longer had anyone in the world who remembered them. This little cemetery beside the street was strange, so random and neglected, without a fence or wall, as though someone had simply decided to plant graves in an ordinary vacant lot for no reason at all. On one side it ended at the brick wall of a house; behind it ended at an earthen wall, a small cliff of the hill one climbed by the cobbled street. Looking up to where the cliff began, I made out crosses and headstones. I understood that the town cemetery was on top of the hill and that its grounds, despite the cliff, included the little area remaining below the hill and facing the street, which they had also used for graves. I imagined that the plots in that little space must have been cheaper than the ones up on the hill. I went on walking. The inn was another six hundred metres away. On that street there were practically only vacant lots and a few scattered houses, set back from the road and surrounded by small patches of dirt, tall grass, forgotten scrap, and the same filthy puddles from the street. The few houses had that vernacular architecture found only in small towns: some were single-storey, their façades thick with plants in improvised pots made from paint cans or buckets; others stood on very small plots but rose to three storeys, like miniature buildings. Strange combinations of garish colours, bare brick walls without plaster or half-crumbling adobe, concrete columns used as cartoonish decorative elements, improvised washing lines outside. On the balcony of a very narrow three-storey house, I caught sight of a refrigerator. I suppose there was no room for it inside.

I arrived at the inn, supposedly the town’s only accommodation. It was a two-storey house with a metal gate, the only house on that street with one, since the others had at most fences made of wooden stakes and barbed wire. The pistachio-green metal gate was the landmark I had been given for recognising the house. I knocked, and a woman’s voice shouted from inside that she was coming. A woman of about fifty opened the gate, very thin, with somewhat greying hair, brown skin, and a complexion beaten by sun and wrinkles. After looking at her for only a few seconds, I could invent her entire history in my mind. I imagined she had been very beautiful in her youth, that some years earlier she had been widowed and left alone to her fate. I assumed the grey, sad aura around her was the bitterness of losing someone she had loved deeply. Surely renting out a room in her house was one of the many things she had had to devise to survive. Going up a short flight of stairs, she showed me the room above the house, with its own entrance, a kitchenette, a small bathroom, and, in the middle, a bed with the oldest bedspread I had ever seen. With few words, she told me that she would be in the house all day, that if I needed to go out I only had to knock on the gate when I returned, that at most she would go to the shop for a moment in the afternoon but would not be long. She closed the door behind her and left me alone in the austere room.

San Marcos had no main square or bandstand. The most central part was perhaps the intersection of the main street with another street, at the corner of which stood the town’s small parish church; diagonally opposite, there was a park-like space with a couple of metal benches amid the grass. A couple of blocks along the main street, in the direction away from the highway, was the sugar mill, and almost opposite it the town hall. I would conduct the survey by knocking door to door. I supposed the best strategy was to take the main street from the mill towards the highway and work my way into the cobbled and dirt streets that crossed it. The day passed without important events. By nine at night I had completed the fifty surveys. I was tired and all I wanted was to sit down. At the off-licence I bought two cans of beer and went to the park diagonally opposite the parish church, sitting on one of the benches to drink them and rest before returning to the inn. There was not much activity in the street. That night must have been unusual, because a party was taking place at the town hall; I supposed it was the wedding that had been celebrated in the parish church that afternoon. In the distance I could hear the banda music and, although the street was relatively empty, every now and then a couple or a small group passed in their best clothes, heading for the hall, which was no more than a humble warehouse filled with tables for the party. A couple of girls passed, I imagine sixteen or seventeen, walking arm in arm and murmuring through nervous laughter, in simple dresses and high-heeled shoes that looked as though they had stolen them from their mothers. I imagined that not much happens in town and that a wedding at the hall must be a great event. After finishing the beers, I remained on that bench for a while, simply admiring the stars in the clear sky, contemplating the contrast between the party heard in the distance and the sepulchral tranquillity of the empty street at that moment. The only ones in the street were me and two stray dogs lying on the pavement opposite. I set out for the inn.

Street lighting was scarce in San Marcos. There were great distances between the few street lamps, leaving long stretches to walk in darkness. It was surprising how empty the main street was. Normally, streets in these towns are dead at night, but that evening even the houses seemed empty, their lights off. Surely half the town was at the hall and the other half asleep; it was almost eleven. The last lamp on the main street stood just at the corner of the cobbled street beside the football field. The next lamp on my way was where that street crossed the dirt road leading to the inn, so I would have to walk a long way in gloom. As I went along that street, I began to feel somewhat nervous. Accustomed to the dangers of the city, a dark street automatically put me on alert. On one side was the impenetrable darkness of the dirt football field, on the other vacant lots and a few houses with their lights off. There is not so much to fear in towns; nevertheless, a newspaper item I had read a few days earlier came to mind: a family had been killed with machetes in a hamlet called Los García, in precisely that region. As I drew near the lamp’s light, I felt relief, as though light could protect me. Thinking that only made me more nervous, suddenly aware that I was entirely unprotected on that empty street in a town I had set foot in for the first time that day. At last I turned right onto the dirt road towards the inn. Now the next lamp was roughly halfway between where I stood and the inn; it was the last lamp on the street, so the end of the way—where the inn was—lay immersed in darkness. As I advanced along the road, level with the little cemetery I described before, I glimpsed something that gave me a sudden fright. Where the graves ended, in a corner formed by the brick wall of the neighbouring house and the earthen wall of the cliff, in that corner submerged in darkness, there was someone. Without realising it, I had stopped walking, but I immediately resumed for fear that whoever was in the corner would notice I had seen them. It was strange and suspicious. What would someone be doing at this hour of the night, in the middle of darkness, standing among graves? Several ideas ran through my mind in fractions of a second: perhaps a drunk from the party, a lost homeless person, the town madwoman—every town has one—or perhaps something else. I had taken barely three steps, and still had several before I would be level with that dark corner, when I decided I had to try to see more clearly who it was, through a combination of self-preservation, curiosity, and morbid fascination. I could not turn openly because I did not want the person to know I was looking at them, so I would try to take in as much as possible through peripheral vision. I immediately regretted it. With what little I managed to distinguish, I made out the figure of a naked woman, extremely thin, with long loose hair. Dirty, as if she had rolled in dirt or mud, as if she had just emerged from one of the graves, I thought. She was somewhat hunched, leaning slightly forward, her arms extended a little in front of her, as though trying to grasp an invisible object level with her belly and a few centimetres from her body, fingers splayed like claws about to clutch something. I do not believe in ghosts or any kind of paranormal phenomenon, but I am not ashamed to admit that in such a situation the first thing I thought was that she was a ghost standing on her own grave. As I passed level with the woman, who was some twelve to fifteen metres from me, I glimpsed her head turn in my direction, as though watching me go by, while she kept exactly the same hunched position, arms a little forward like a statue, moving only her head. When I reached the house whose wall faced the cemetery plot, I could no longer see her. Ahead I could see the streetlamp, the last one before the inn, only two or three hundred metres away. Distances seemed to lose all meaning in the terror I began to feel coursing through my body, now that I could not see the woman but sensed she was behind me. I wanted to run, but something prevented me. I told myself it was so the woman would not see me flee, in the same way one must not run from an aggressive dog so it will not chase one. In truth, I think it was more a stupid sense of shame, as though I did not want someone watching from inside one of the few houses among the vacant lots to realise I was afraid—at best, of a product of my imagination made from the night’s darkness and the street’s solitude; at worst, of a naked woman. As the lamp’s light reached me, I felt some relief, as though my ghostly predator, seeing me more clearly, would abandon the idea of attacking. Was she still there? Perhaps she was simply a madwoman still at that corner of the plot, sunk in her stupor. Perhaps I really imagined her. Perhaps I had seen a statue, the kind sometimes placed on graves, an angel or a Virgin whose shape had deceived my sight in the gloom and made it look human. There was only one way to know, only one way to convince myself there was no imminent danger. As I kept walking, just as I passed under the last streetlamp, I slowly turned round, wishing to find only an empty street, afraid of seeing something else. Again I regretted it. Level with the graves, but now in the middle of the street, the woman stood there, keeping her strange pose, turned towards me, motionless in the darkness. I told shame to go to hell and began to quicken my pace, faster and faster; suddenly I was jogging, suddenly I was running. The backpack hanging from me bounced wildly against my back. I must have left the zips badly closed, as sometimes happens, because it came open and I realised things had fallen out: pencils, pens, some sheets, surely I lost some surveys or all of them. But at that moment I did not care. I would not stop to pick up what had fallen, not for all the money in the world. I was close to the inn. I could see the gate standing out faintly in the street’s darkness. I stepped in puddles and tripped over holes and stones on the dirt road, but nothing stopped me. At last I reached the gate and knocked hard enough to hurt my knuckles. My heart was beating at its utmost, a mixture of fear and agitation from the run, my lungs begging for more air, sweat beginning to run down my temples. I knocked again. I did not want to turn around, did not want to turn around, did not want to turn around, but I had to. The woman was now directly beneath the lamp. She had moved towards me, and I calculated she had covered the same distance I had just run. I could see her more clearly under the lamp now, naked and dirty. The distance and her hair kept me from seeing her face well. Suddenly an idea assailed me: could the woman in the street be the same woman from the inn? Several thoughts flashed through my mind: both were thin, both were in the same geographical area, I had assumed the innkeeper was a widow, and I had seen the woman in the street absorbed among the graves. Was what pursued me not a spectre? Could it be someone of flesh and blood? I knocked once more and, from the corner of my eye, could sense the street woman’s figure slowly coming closer. Terror became panic. Whether ghost, demon, or madwoman, I felt I had to get away from her by any means. I began looking for a way to jump the gate and get into the house. It would do no good if she were a spectral being, because the gate would not stop her; and it would do no good if she were the innkeeper, because she would have the key to enter. The woman came closer. Not knowing where to flee, I began to retreat into the darkness, walking backwards without losing sight of my pursuer. Suddenly I could go no farther: a wall of prickly pears and shrubs blocked my way. The woman came closer and closer, quickening her pace to reach me.

Gumaro Fernández, I learned later, was the rapist’s name. A day labourer who, it later became known, had been at the party in the town hall, from which he had been forced out for getting drunk and causing trouble. When the woman was a few metres from me, I realised. She had been beaten; there was blood on her belly. She had rolled in the dirt fighting a man, fighting to preserve her dignity and freedom. That night Magdalena Vázquez, the innkeeper, had left her house, as she sometimes did, to say goodnight to her late husband, who was buried in that piece of cemetery below the cliff. That was why she had sold the small farm she had outside San Marcos and built herself a little house on that street, with an independent room she could rent. After nearly thirty happy years together, her husband had died in a tragic accident, when a snake startled his horse—they suppose—and he fell, striking his head against a stone. Misfortune meant that on that very night, at that very moment, while I drank my last beer in the little park diagonally opposite the parish church, Gumaro Fernández found a woman kneeling in front of a grave and yielded to his most violent, animal instincts. I embraced her and she began to cry, a heartrending, painful cry. “Help!” I began shouting, hoping someone would come from one of the nearby houses. When Gumaro had finished doing what he wanted with her, he picked up a large stone and raised it to crush Magdalena’s head. He managed only to strike her on the side and, in his alcoholic delirium, did not realise he had left her alive. He fled. Magdalena was left naked, covered in mud, dirt, and blood in the cemetery corner, beaten, violated, stripped of all light, raped before the grave of her beloved dead husband. She got up, in pain and confused, not knowing what to do or how to react, and remained that way for a few moments until she saw someone approaching in the darkness, until she saw me go by and recognised me. She had no voice because, in subduing her, Gumaro had gripped her throat and injured her vocal cords. She could not move much because everything hurt and she felt dirty, not from the earth but from the smell of beer and sweat her rapist had left clinging to her. She tried to ask for help but did not know how. She tried to reach me while I fled in terror. That night, the only monster was the one I did not see.