The Skating Rink

  Enric Rosquelles:

  I swear I didn’t kill her

  I swear I didn’t kill her. I’d only seen her a couple of times in my life; why would I want to kill her? It’s true that the old woman came to my office and I gave her money, yes, you could even say she was blackmailing me, but that’s no reason to kill anyone. I’m a Catalan and this is Catalonia, not Chicago or Colombia. And with a knife as well! I have never attacked anyone with a knife, not even in my dreams, and supposing, just supposing, that I had—can you seriously imagine me stabbing her twenty times? Sorry, thirty-four times, to be exact. Come on! And right in the middle of my skating rink! I might as well have killed myself straight away if I’d done that, because I was always going to be the prime suspect for a murder committed in the Palacio Benvingut. And what could I possibly have to gain by killing the old woman? Nothing, only grief, as if I didn’t have enough of that already. Since the day that wretched woman died my life has been a nightmare. Everyone has turned their back on me. They fired me and kicked me out of the party. No one wanted to hear my version of the story. After all the help I gave her, Pilar is saying she’d had doubts about me for some time. A barefaced lie. And the party secretary in Gerona is saying he’d always thought there was something suspicious about me. Another lie. Stupid lies, too! If it was so obvious what I was up to, and they knew, why didn’t they do something before embezzlement and murder were committed? I’m telling you: the reason they didn’t do anything is that they didn’t know or suspect what was going on; they had no idea. The best thing for them to do now would be keep their mouths shut and face up to their individual responsibilities. Yes, I used public funds to build the skating rink at the Palacio Benvingut, but I have documentation here to prove that the rink can pay for itself within seven years, if it’s well run, not to mention the benefits to the local athletic community and skaters from further afield, since there is no adequate facility for winter sports anywhere in the region. And let me point out, to those who think I’m making up excuses and justifications after the fact, that’s a proper, regulation-size rink, 184 by 85 feet, the minimum size (the maximum is 197 by 98). All we’d have to do is add a “decent and appropriate” dressing room (as the regulations specify) and simple but comfortable seating, and practically overnight Z would have a real treasure for years to come, the envy of all the neighboring towns, every bit as good as any competition rink in Europe. All right, so no one authorized me to spend public funds on a sports facility. So I did it behind everyone’s back, especially behind the backs of the communists and Convergencia i Unión. So my motivation was personal, I wanted to win the favors of a skater. Does that mean I’m a madman, a megalomaniac, and probably, though we’re still waiting for proof, a killer? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it isn’t true, I’m not a monster, just an enterprising, tenacious administrator, and I acted in good faith. For example, the plans for the rink didn’t cost a cent; I created them myself, drawing on the work of the famous engineer Harold Petersson, the designer of Rome’s first skating rink, built at the behest of Benito Mussolini in 1932. The refrigerator grille is my own invention, although it was inspired by the energy-efficient grilles used by the functionalist architects John F. Mitchell and James Brandon, who specialized in sports facilities. I didn’t have to excavate: I filled in Benvingut’s old swimming pool. I was able to buy most of the machinery at bargain prices from a friend in Barcelona, an entrepreneur bankrupted by the influx of foreign firms. To secure the services and the discretion of Z’s most notorious builder, all I had to do was apply a little pressure (and he in turn applied pressure to his laborers). No one will admit it now, but the operation was tightly run. I ask you: who else could have managed a project like that, keeping it quiet and spending so little money? People are throwing around figures of 20, 30 or even 40 million pesetas, but I can assure you that the sum I appropriated was a fraction of that. Anyway, I know that no one can honestly stand up and say: I could have done it better. Not that I’m trying to present myself as some kind of moral example. I know I did something I shouldn’t have done. I know I made a mistake. Pilar will probably lose the election because of me. I have brought the party into disrepute. Without meaning to, I set loose the pack of wolves that is after Nuria. I was the laughingstock of Spain for at least two nights, and the laughingstock of Catalonia for a whole week. The most contemptible sport shows on the airwaves have dragged my name through the mud. But to go on and call me a murderer is an enormous jump. I swear I didn’t kill her; the night of the murder I was at home, sleeping fitfully, tangled in nightmares and sheets damp with sweat. Unfortunately my poor mother is a sound sleeper, so she cannot vouch for me . . .

  Remo Morán:

  The newspapers and magazines made her famous

  The newspapers and magazines made her famous throughout the country, and they say the story even went international; her photo appeared in sensationalist weeklies across Europe. They called her The Mystery Woman of the Palacio Benvingut, The Ice Maiden, The Angel-Eyed Skater, The Spanish Object of Desire, The Beauty who Rocked the Costa Brava. Not long after the news broke, she was expelled from the Federation, which killed any hopes she might have had of returning to competition skating. A Barcelona magazine offered her two million pesetas for a naked photo shoot. Another one offered her half a million for the complete story of what had happened at the Palacio Benvingut. Some said that Enric Rosquelles was taking the rap for Nuria, but that accusation didn’t stand up: according to the pathologists, the crime took place around three in the morning, and Nuria was at home that night; her mother and sister confirmed it. If that wasn’t enough to make her alibi watertight, a friend of hers from X had spent the night at the apartment, for reasons irrelevant to the case, and they had talked until after the estimated time of death and slept in the same room. The friend stated unequivocally that Nuria stayed in bed for the rest of the night. The hardest thing of all for her was being debarred from the skating team; she wasn’t even allowed to compete in the selection trials. Suddenly, just when everything seemed to be going so well, the scholarships and the medals came to an end, along with the hopes of more to come. While the story was still fresh, and the media were still keen to interview her, especially the scandal-mongering late-night sport shows, she took every opportunity to speak out against the managers and trainers who had set themselves up as judges and arbitrarily shut her out of what was, to her, far more than a profession. She claimed it was unconstitutional and tried to defend herself, but it was futile. One night when I was in the bar with Alex and a waiter, after all the clients had gone, I heard her on the radio. That little transistor radio was like a ghost from another planet, between a box of beers and the fridge. I shouldn’t have listened, it was excruciating: the host manipulated her for twenty minutes, expertly violating her privacy, cloaking his rapacity in concern. Nuria came back to Z a week later. She was exhausted and there was something feverish in her eyes. She didn’t want to be seen in restaurants or anywhere too busy, but she didn’t want to stay home either. When I went to pick her up, I suggested we drive away from the coast, and we ended up on back roads lined with old farm buildings converted into open-air cafés. As we drove, she talked about Enric. She said she had treated him badly: while the poor guy was moldering in prison, she was running around, demanding her right to compete for a place on the Olympic team, but all she’d been doing, in the end, was making a fool of herself. She felt terribly selfish. She said she had always known that Enric was in love with her
, but she’d never really thought about it much. He never expressed his emotions; maybe if he’d asked her to sleep with him, things would have worked out differently. She told me she had been staying at a friend’s place in Barcelona and at the start she’d been utterly miserable: she cried herself to sleep every night; she had nightmares about the murdered woman; her head ached and her hands shook when visitors came. One day she ran into her old boyfriend in the corridors of the National Sports Institute, and he made a fool of himself. They slept together; she left at midnight convinced she would never see him again. He was asleep and didn’t even notice. She didn’t mention the meetings or the law suits she was preparing, and I didn’t ask. She wanted to visit Enric in prison, and she was looking for someone to go with her. I said I would, but the days went by and Nuria didn’t bring it up again. She would turn up at the hotel at the usual time, and we’d go straight up to my room and stay there until it began to get dark. In bed she always talked about the Palacio Benvingut and the old woman. One afternoon, as she was coming, she said I should buy it. I don’t have that sort of money, I said. It’s a pity, she replied. If you had lots of money we could leave this place forever. I’ve got enough money for that, I said, but by then she had stopped listening. When we made love she was mostly quiet, but as she approached her climax she’d begin to talk. The problem wasn’t so much that Nuria talked while we were having sex, but that she always talked about the same things: murder and skating. As if she was suffocating. The worst thing, though, was that it started to rub off on me, and soon, as our rhythm accelerated, we’d both launch into confessions and gruesome soliloquies full of groans and sheets of ice scattered with old women, and only orgasm could shut us up. How did I feel when I saw the old woman lying in a puddle of blood? Did I know that the blade of a skate was only three millimeters wide and could be a lethal weapon? Why had the old woman gone onto the ice? Was she fleeing from her killer? Did she think the killer wouldn’t be able to follow her? Which of them slipped first? Sometimes Nuria went on about Enric. Would he hate her? Was he thinking of her? Was he suicidal? Was he was crazy? Had he killed the old woman? One afternoon she asked me to sodomize her. As I was about to, she said that Enric would have taken it up the ass in prison for sure. Imagining the fat guy, even for an instant, was enough to put me off. One afternoon she told me she had dreamed about the old woman’s blood. The blood on the ice formed a letter that nobody had seen, not me or the police or anyone. What letter? A capital N. Another afternoon, instead of getting undressed I suggested we take the car and go see Enric in Gerona. Nuria refused and then began to cry. How could I have been so dumb, she said, why didn’t I realize? Realize what? That Enric had built the skating rink without council authorization? No, shouted Nuria, that no one has ever loved me like Enric! He was my true love and I couldn’t see it. And she kept coming up with variations on that theme until both of us were exhausted. I soon realized, and I think Nuria did too, that we were heading for a dead end. And yet we had never been so close, or wanted each other so badly . . .

  Gaspar Heredia:

  The police came to the campground twice

  The police came to the campground twice, on routine visits, and both times the Peruvian, Miriam from Senegal, Caridad and I pretended to be campers playing pétanque. For such occasions the Peruvian kept various sets of boules in a dog kennel beside the court, and he’d whip around on his bike, if necessary, past the bathrooms and my tent, urgently inviting us to come play. As time went by, we got to like pétanque, and took to playing in the evenings as the sun went down. Our games grew longer and more impassioned. The Peruvian, the receptionist and Miriam made up the day-shift team; while El Carajillo, Caridad and I represented the night-shift. Each team had its pointers, placers or precision players (we never knew what the official term was) and its shooters, knockers or blasters. We usually played under a light, just as it was starting to get dark, sometimes on the road that led into the campground rather than on the courts, or beside the bar, or next to the bathrooms if Miriam still had some cleaning to do. Caridad soon proved to be an outstanding shooter, as did Miriam, while El Carajillo and the Peruvian were born pointers. The receptionist and I just made up the numbers. Alex Bobadilla occasionally replaced the receptionist, with more enthusiasm than skill. In the end we decided to make a selection from our teams and participate in the championship that was held in the campground each year to cap off the season. El Carajillo, the Peruvian and Miriam were selected. The rest of us, including the other two cleaning ladies, who were too busy to play because of their various jobs, were happy to applaud, criticize and drink beer. Around that time, the Peruvian and the receptionist set a date for their wedding, and there was a feeling of confidence and calm in the air, as if everything was going to work out in the end, though everyone knows that nothing ever does. Our team came in third. We won a cup, which Bobadilla and El Carajillo displayed prominently on a shelf in reception. The weather started getting cooler and I began to anticipate the day when my job would come to an end. To be honest I had absolutely no idea what would happen then. Caridad said that living at the campground was like being on vacation. Indefinitely. For me it was like being back at school: I was starting from scratch. We called the tent our house, as a joke I guess, or just to be cute, or maybe because it really was our house. In the morning, when I finished work, we went down to the beach, hopping over the broken slabs of the sidewalk, Caridad still half asleep, both of us wrapped in towels because it was still cool, and then we’d swim and eat and lie in the sun till we fell asleep. We’d wake up at two or three and go back to the campground. The color soon returned to Caridad’s cheeks. All the staff, even Rosa and Azucena, grew fond of her, despite their initial misgivings, maybe because she was always ready to give them a hand, cleaning the bathrooms or doing various odd jobs, even helping out at reception during the day so that the Peruvian and the receptionist could go and have a cup of coffee. With the first signs of autumn everyone started making plans, except for us. Miriam was going to look for jobs in private homes; the sisters would be returning to El Prat; the Peruvian hoped to find work in an office or a realty agency as soon as his papers were in order, and El Carajillo would spend another winter shut up in the reception office, keeping watch over the empty campground. When they asked us what our plans were, we didn’t know what to say. The plural pronoun embarrassed us. Live in Barcelona, probably, we’d say, throwing each other sidelong glances. Or travel, or go and live in Morocco, or study, or go our separate ways. All we really knew was that we were hanging in a void. But we weren’t afraid. Sometimes at night, as I walked through the darker parts of the campground, among empty sites and family-size tents strewn with pine needles, I thought of the skating rink and then I was afraid. Afraid that I might come across something from the rink, snagged, hidden in the darkness. Sometimes the air and the rats scuttling along the branches of the trees almost made that presence visible, and without breaking into a run I’d quickly retrace my steps; I had to hear Caridad’s steady breathing on the other side of the yellow tarpaulin that protected our tent before I could calm down and continue on my rounds . . .