The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,39

it was his way of explaining why he’d married her, of showing me the only, misguided but excusable, reason. Across the years the hairstyle looked slightly ridiculous, but the face and eyes were captivating. The sensual pout still achieved the desired effect, and there was something resolute in the full curves of the body, displayed with studied nonchalance. I thought to myself that it must have been difficult to take your eyes off her. Kloster switched on a lamp and went to the window. He stood with his back to me, looking out at the deepening gloom of the garden, as if he wanted to keep away from the photo.

“Not long after we were married, before Pauli was born, I started noticing the first signs of…instability. I suggested we separate but she threatened to kill herself if I left. I believed her. We had a sort of truce and, with desperate cunning, she made sure she got pregnant. She had an appalling pregnancy with a series of complications, but I couldn’t tell if they were real or imaginary. After the birth, Mercedes was exhausted and stayed in bed for a month. She rejected the baby. She wouldn’t touch her, she wouldn’t even let me bring her near her. I had terrible trouble convincing her to hold her long enough to breastfeed. She said Pauli had drained her completely and was now sucking the remaining life out of her. It was shocking to see: she really did seem to have lost something irrevocably during the pregnancy. Her face had become bloated, her features sunk in fat, and she didn’t get her figure back. When at last she got out of bed she started eating with cold determination, like an automaton, as if she wanted to do herself as much harm as possible. And, as if it had flown off and alighted intact, all her beauty was superimposed on Pauli’s little face. I’d never seen such a close resemblance, apparent so early, in a baby. She looked exactly like her mother, like Mercedes at her most luminously beautiful, when I first met her.

“Mercedes eventually came to accept her, but in the meantime Pauli had got used to me and she cried if Mercedes tried to hold her. This didn’t help, of course. I persuaded Mercedes to see a therapist and for a time things seemed to improve. She made an effort to get close to the baby and eventually Pauli stopped crying with her. She also tried to lose weight, but didn’t manage it. After a while, she gave up: she’d decided not to go back to work anyway. In fact she was entirely absorbed by one thing only: getting Pauli away from me. I’d taken care of the baby day and night for the first months so of course she was more attached to me. I adored that little girl, with a violent, absolute love that I’d never felt for anything or anyone. Not for Mercedes, and she knew it. She couldn’t conceal her jealousy and did everything she could to keep me away from the child. The first word Pauli said was ‘Daddy’ and Mercedes accused me of teaching her to say it, secretly, behind her back, just to humiliate her. In her madness she really believed we were at war. Things got even worse because Pauli took a long time to learn to say ‘Mummy’. That’s when I noticed the first symptoms of something that terrified me so much I couldn’t even admit it to myself: Pauli was afraid of being alone with her mother. I started finding small marks on her skin: scratches, sometimes a bruise. It only happened when the two were left alone. But there was always a reasonable explanation, because in her own way Mercedes was very clever. Sometimes, before I got a chance to ask, she’d say that Pauli had had an accident, or that she’d scratched herself because her little nails were too long. She pretended to be even more worried than I was by these small injuries. But I noticed that she left hot cups of coffee within Pauli’s reach, and didn’t rush after her if she started crawling towards the stairs. She seemed to be looking for ways for Pauli to injure herself. Of course that was too horrible to contemplate, and I couldn’t think how to confront Mercedes. I felt Pauli’s life was in danger and that I could only keep her safe if I had her in sight at