The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,42
her as I did, drowned in the bath. She didn’t try to pull her out. She said she just wanted to kill herself when she saw her like that. She couldn’t stand the thought that it was her fault. So she went back to the bedroom and swallowed all the sleeping pills in the bottle. But there weren’t that many, at least not enough to kill her. And because Mercedes knew when I’d be arriving for my visit, she could count on me finding her in time. And that’s what happened. They pumped her stomach and she was fine.”
“But there must have been an investigation. Or did they accept her story?”
“There was an investigation and they believed her story. In the forensic analysis they found that Pauli had a haematoma on the back of her head. According to their reconstruction of events, Pauli had tried to get out of the bath on her own. She must have slipped and banged her head, losing consciousness before sliding under the water. Maybe she cried out as she fell but if you accepted that Mercedes was asleep, you could also accept that Pauli’s cry didn’t wake her. The way in which water had filled the lungs was compatible with Pauli’s having lost consciousness beforehand.”
“But you accused her?”
Kloster was silent for a moment, as if my question came from a distant dimension, or was in a foreign Ianguage. He looked at me as if I belonged to a different species.
“No. When you hold your dead child in your arms, everything changes. And I’d already seen what I could expect from the justice system. But I knew who the real culprit was. And the laws of men would never touch her. During that time I felt as if I weren’t part of the human race. Some time before, for my novel on the Cainites, I’d looked at some ideas on the law, even dictating a few notes on it to Luciana. It was a purely intellectual exercise. First I looked at the ancient law of retaliation, the lex talionis, which is part of the Code of Hammurabi: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand. A law we tend to consider cruel and primitive. But if you look at it another way, it’s on a human scale, with an element of equivalence that’s merciful: it recognises the other as an equal, and limits retribution. Because in fact the first ratio of punishment in the Bible is the one laid down by God as a warning to anyone who would kill Cain—seven to one. Of course, this might be the proportion that God reserves for himself, in his absolute power. It’s always in the interests of the powers that be for punishment to be excessive, unforgettable. Above all, to act as a warning. But also, I wondered, given its source in the highest divinity, the ‘fount of all justice’, could there be something more here than simply the will to crush? Could there even be a kernel of reason in the disproportion? The will, perhaps, to distinguish between attacker and attacked? To ensure that they’re not equal when it comes to the harm done and that the aggressor suffers more than the victim? How would one mete out punishment if one were God? I’d made the notes almost as a game, to prepare for my novel. But now my daughter was dead and the words I’d dictated suddenly made no sense. Because any idea of justice, or reparation, looks forward to the notion of a future and a community of men. But I felt that something inside me was broken for ever. That I no longer belonged to any community or any future. That I stood, howling, outside humanity. When I went over the papers, I also came across the Bible Luciana had lent me and I remembered, as if it were part of another life, someone else’s life, that I had to attend a conciliation meeting because of the letter that had set everything in motion. I called my solicitor and dispensed with his services: as I told him, I wanted nothing more to do with human justice. I attended the meeting myself and returned the Bible to Luciana. The red bookmark was at that page because that’s where I had left it after dictating my notes to her. It wasn’t meant as a threat. I just wanted her to know. Strange, everything