Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Read online

  Contents

  1. Milena

  2. The Blues

  3. Milena

  4. Amelia and Tomás

  5. Jaime

  6. Tomás and Claudia

  7. Milena

  8. Amelia

  9. Milena

  10. The Blues

  11. Luis and Rina

  12. Tomás and Amelia

  13. Jaime

  14. Claudia and Milena

  15. Milena

  16. Claudia, Milena, and Tomás

  17. Vidal

  18. Claudia, Tomás, and Jaime

  19. Jaime and Vidal

  20. Milena

  21. Claudia and Milena

  22. Tomás, Claudia, Jaime, and Amelia

  23. Milena

  24. Amelia

  25. Milena

  26. Jaime and Vidal

  27. Tomás and Claudia

  28. Milena, Luis, and Rina

  29. Jaime and Tomás

  30. Milena

  31. Claudia and Tomás

  32. Milena, Rina, and Luis

  33. Vidal and Luis

  34. Jaime, Claudia, Tomás, and Amelia

  35. Milena

  36. Milena, Rina, and Luis

  37. Jaime, Vidal, and Rina

  38. Claudia, Jaime, and Tomás

  39. Milena and Luis

  40. Milena

  41. Tomás and Amelia

  42. Jaime and Vidal

  43. Luis and Milena

  44. Tomás

  45. Milena

  46. Amelia and Rina

  47. Jaime

  48. Luis and Milena

  49. Tomás and Claudia

  50. Milena

  51. The Blues

  52. Rina, Vidal, Luis, and Milena

  53. Jaime

  54. Milena

  55. Vidal, Milena, and Luis

  56. Tomás and Claudia

  57. Milena

  58. Jaime

  59. Amelia

  60. Tomás

  61. Luis and Milena

  62. Jaime

  63. Milena

  64. Amelia and Milena

  65. The Blues

  66. Milena

  Epilogue – Everyone

  Author’s Note

  About the Author and Translator

  To Clara, Sergio, and Camila

  ‌1

  Milena

  Thursday, November 6, 2014, 9:30 p.m.

  He wasn’t the first man to die in Milena’s arms, but he was the first to do so from natural causes. The ones she’d murdered had left no trace, no remorse in her soul. But the death of her lover plunged her into desolation.

  Sex had always ended up imposing itself in Rosendo Franco’s life. The day he died was no different. Under the lash of the Viagra flooding through them, his coronary arteries found themselves in a troubling dilemma: either pump the blood necessary to keep up his ferocious rhythm as he penetrated Milena or take care of his other organs. Faithful to Rosendo’s past, they opted for the former.

  An image rose up in the mind of the owner of the newspaper El Mundo. The contraction in his chest thrust his hips forward, letting him penetrate deeper. He said to himself that at last he was going to come, that he would reach that point that had been eluding him for the past ten minutes, as he feverishly mounted his lover’s white hips. Rosendo had always believed his last thought would be about the newspaper that had been the object of his dreams and worries; in recent years, whenever he thought of death, he would feel a burst of frustration, imagining his great life’s work left orphaned. And yet now, his brief death throes were devoted to squeezing out a drop of semen to say goodbye to his last love.

  It took Milena a few seconds to realize the sounds the man was emitting weren’t moans of pleasure. Her lover clutched her by the waist as his death rattles heaved against her reddened back like waning waves on a stretch of shoreline. The old man pressed his forehead into the nape of the woman’s neck. From the corner of her eye, Milena saw her hair shifting softly, propelled by the dying man’s lethargic breath, then the curl was still and silence reigned in the room.

  She stayed a long time without moving, save for the copious tears that slid down her face and died on the carpet below. She cried for him, but above all for herself. She told herself she’d rather die than go back to the hell Rosendo had rescued her from. Even worse, she knew that this time the vengeance would be ruthless. She saw herself three years back, stripped naked in front of those two enormous dogs eager to tear her to pieces.

  She didn’t understand why they’d started threatening her again these past few weeks after leaving her in peace for months. Now, without the old man’s protection, she’d end up a sack of flesh and bones rotting in some ravine, and it wouldn’t matter that men had once paid twelve hundred bucks for the pleasure of dipping their wick inside her. She imagined her body being discovered later, and the surprise of the coroners as they examined the graceful femurs of her long legs. The image pulled her from her trance and made her move at last. She sat up halfway to look at the corpse’s face, clean a trail of saliva from his chin, and cover him with a sheet. She glanced at the blister pack of Viagra on the nightstand and decided to hide it in a last act of loyalty toward the proud old lion.

  She walked to the bathroom, driven by her heightened senses, with a survivor’s febrile clarity. Her mind was on the contents of the suitcase she would have to pack before she caught a plane, though the only thing that mattered was the black book hidden in the bedroom closet. Not only was it her final vengeance against those who had exploited her, but the secrets it contained also guaranteed her survival.

  She never made it to the airport, her name wasn’t Milena, nor was she Russian, as everyone believed. And she didn’t notice the drop of semen that fell on the floor tile.

  ‌2

  The Blues

  Friday, November 7, 7:00 p.m.

  If he’d been able to sit up in his coffin, Rosendo Franco would have been more than impressed with his drawing power. The funeral home had transferred the less illustrious dead to other branches in order to dedicate every available room to hosting the two thousand attendees at the viewing for the owner of El Mundo. Even Alonso Prida, the country’s president, had stayed there twenty minutes, with the better part of his cabinet in tow. Prida no longer had the majestic, imperial demeanor that had characterized him during his first year in office; too many unexpected scrape-ups, too few expectations fulfilled in what was supposed to have been a spectacular return for the PRI. Still, the presence of the Mexican leader charged the atmosphere with tension, and after his departure, the majority of those present relaxed and started to drink.

  Two hours before, at five in the afternoon, Cristóbal Murillo, Franco’s private secretary, decided coffee was an undignified beverage for the honored visitors who had come to take their leave of his employer, and ordered the funeral home to serve glasses of the finest red and white wine. In the main hall, set aside for the VIPs he had chosen, he had champagne and hors d’oeuvres passed around.

  “Death has its zip codes, too,” Amelia said to herself when she saw how the funeral home had been parceled out into little reservations, their inhabitants distinguishable not only by the cut of their apparel, but also by their ethnic traits. She wasn’t close to Rosendo Franco’s family, she had barely even known him, but her position as leader of the main party on the left made her attendance at the funeral obligatory. Once more, Amelia rued the presence of the three escorts who had accompanied her for the past two years and were now bursting like battering rams through the densely packed crowd to make way for her. Her wavy head of h
air, her eyes framed by her enormous lashes, and her olive skin were the unmistakable traits of a figure as known as she was respected in the country’s public life, thanks to her long years of activism in the defense of women and children abused by men in power. A Mother Teresa of Calcutta with the daunting beauty of a young María Félix, as a journalist had once described her.

  As she crossed through the succession of rooms, she noticed it was only in the second one, the one with the most humble guests, that cries of mourning could be heard. There were the printing-press workers and secretaries, bemoaning the death of the proprietor, whom they’d revered for so many years.

  When she reached the main hall, Amelia noticed two camps. Some thirty family members and a few close friends of the deceased surrounded the coffin like a commando unit, ready to guard that final bastion from the thick hordes of politicians elbowing their way into the room. Occasionally, a governor or minister would pull away from the rest of the functionaries and creep over slyly to offer a brief word of condolence to the widow and her daughter before going back to his colleagues to say goodbye and heading toward the exit.

  A few seconds passed before Amelia could make out Tomás, a columnist for El Mundo, leaning under a broad window on one side of the room. The mere sight of the disheveled figure, the tousled hair and the glassy eyes of her old friend, calmed her down, as it had so many times before. There was something in Tomás’s presence that soothed her warlike spirit.

  “You managed to make it through the seven chambers of purgatory,” he said, greeting her with a fleeting kiss on the lips.

  “Judging by those in attendance, I’d say this is more like hell,” she responded, looking over the guests packed into the room.

  For a moment, the two of them stared at the bands of politicians, and little by little their eyes converged on Cristóbal Murillo, the lone ambassador arbitrating between the two groups in the room. He came and went, now addressing a newly arrived secretary, now consulting with the businessman’s widow. He passed from one side to the other, confident of his usefulness to all present. He was servile when necessary and imperious when he could be. Tomás had never seen him so cocksure and expansive. Murillo even seemed to have added an inch or two to his short stature in the past few hours. After three decades of parroting his boss, he was acting like the heir to the throne. And he definitely looked the part: with the help of a number of plastic surgeries, he’d achieved a passable likeness to the newspaper owner’s visage. Not for nothing had people started calling him Déjà Vu behind his back.

  “So, since you’re on the inside, what do you know? What’s going to happen to the newspaper without Franco?” Amelia asked Tomás. “Don’t tell me that clown will be taking over management!”

  He shrugged and arched his brows, and instinctively the two of them looked at Claudia, Franco’s only daughter, who stood with her mother at the foot of the coffin, one arm draped over her shoulder. From afar, the heiress gave no sign of grief beyond the pallor of her countenance, set off by her elegant black dress. It occurred to Tomás that her head of indomitable red hair was ill-suited to any funerary apparel. Though her shoulder was touching Doña Edith’s, her wan gaze, lost in the mosaics on the floor, showed that her mind was far away. He imagined his ex-lover was absorbed in some family scene from her childhood.

  A waiter with canapés of salami and ham blocked their view of the Franco family, and Jaime’s figure rose up behind him.

  “I hope they didn’t keep that in the same fridge as the bodies,” he declared.

  Neither gave any sign of what they felt on finding themselves there with their childhood friend, but they still hadn’t forgiven Jaime for his behavior during the Pamela Dosantos case. The famous actress’s murder had shaken the country the year before; Tomás had been involved as a journalist and Jaime as a security specialist. Inseparable during their childhood and adolescence, the three friends formed part of a quartet known as the Blues, named after the color of the paintings Jaime’s father brought back from France, and they had been inseparable during their childhood and adolescence. The crisis provoked by the killing of Dosantos, lover of the secretary of the interior, had ended with mixed results: threats against Tomás had been averted, he and Amelia had struck up a relationship three decades after breaking off their adolescent forays, and Jaime became a key factor in the case’s resolution, but with methods his colleagues had found reprehensible.

  Despite his casual tone, Jaime had to force himself to address Tomás and Amelia. During their teenage and university years, the two young men had vied for their friend’s affections, both with scant success, given her attraction to more mature men. But now, at forty-three years of age, Jaime found his deep-rooted obsession with his first love stirred up by the new relationship between the journalist and the politician. He asked himself, as he had before, whether his aversion to marriage and stable relationships was related to the foiling of his desperate passion for Amelia in his youth. Seeing her now next to his old friend was no consolation. For the umpteenth time he made a mental comparison of himself and Tomás: he listed their physical attributes and professional achievements, and again, he found it inexplicable that Amelia would choose his friend. On one side, there was Jaime Lemus, ex-director of the intelligence services and owner of the county’s foremost security firm. Powerful, self-assured. Tanned, lean, and muscular body, sculpted features, hard, but harmonious. In sum, an attractive and desirable figure. His elegant demeanor and his five-foot, ten-inch frame contrasted with that of Tomás, a good four inches shorter, not fat exactly, but soft and harmless, with graying hair, a ready smile, and a warm gaze. In short, the face of a man who radiated benevolence.

  “What time did you get here?” Tomás asked in a neutral tone. He didn’t want to be gruff, but he had no desire to greet Jaime with open arms.

  Amelia, on the other hand, stiffened immediately and ignored his extended hand. Jaime clenched his jaw and tried to regain his composure.

  “A little while ago. It wasn’t so bad hearing stories about Rosendo Franco. He was a real personality.”

  “Like what?” Tomás asked.

  “One of his friends refused to sell him some land on the edge of the city, where Franco wanted to build the new printing press,” Jaime told them. “No matter how much he insisted, the guy held out, waiting on a better price. One day, Franco found out his friend was a fanatical reader of the horoscope in El Mundo; the first thing he did every morning was read it to know what lay in store for him. So Franco called the guy in charge of the section and told him what to print for Sagittarius the rest of the week. Then he invited his friend to lunch that Friday, the day when the stars would offer all those blessed by the sun in Sagittarius a unique real-estate opportunity. That day Don Rosendo got the land.”

  Tomás and Jaime laughed, but muted themselves, remembering where they were. Despite herself, Amelia smiled slightly; the force of habit from so many years together began to overcome the resentment she felt toward her old friend.

  “I think I know a better one,” Tomás said. “Two or three years ago, the main movie-theater chain decided to stop announcing their lineup in the paper, saying people were using the internet and their phones to find out the film schedules. The expense of the newspaper seemed superfluous to them. Franco didn’t bat an eye, though he stood to lose a good deal of money. He just ordered the entertainment pages to print a page with the film schedules, but with the hours wrong: instead of at seven p.m., it would say the film started at eight. The box office turned into a complaint center: at every screening, there would be five or six people furious that they’d shown up an hour late. The next week, the theaters started publishing their ads again.”

  As they laughed, Amelia looked at Jaime and Tomás and couldn’t help but be filled with nostalgia: she saw herself thirty years before, surrounded by her friends in a corner of the playground at school, where the Blues were a closed-off group, rejected but also envied by the rest of their classmates. She remembered Jaime
and his blustering defense of his karate lessons, which absorbed him in his teenage years, and the feigned disdain from Tomás, who looked down on any athletic pastime, obsessed with his books but also anxious over his own lagging muscular development.

  Fortunately for Amelia, who preferred to avoid Jaime, the arrival of the omnipresent Murillo kept her from having to interact further with him, even if he was right beside her.

  “Some setup here, right? Impressive, no?” Franco’s private secretary said, his eyes roving the room. “And tomorrow, the first section is ninety-six pages with all the letters of condolence we’re running,” he added with enthusiasm, while tugging at his shirtsleeves to show off his diamond cufflinks.

  His audience met his comment with impassive expressions.

  “The boss would have been proud,” he murmured in a low voice, full of false humility.

  “I’m sure the boss would have rather been in the offices of his newspaper today than in a casket,” Amelia replied.

  A fleeting look of rage crossed the little man’s face before a servile expression replaced it. Jaime watched him with his head tipped slightly to one side, like an anthropologist observing an extravagant ritual. Murillo looked at Amelia askance, with a prideful, defiant expression.

  “Well, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “He died like a king, right on top of a beautiful and very young little lady. That was my boss!”

  Tomás observed the man’s sexagenarian wife weeping at the side of the coffin.

  “Very young?” he asked. “Who?”

  “A Russian, top of the line, a lover of his. He was almost half a century older than her, but he kept her happy. You know what Tigre Azcárraga used to say: ‘Power takes off ten years, money another ten, and charm ten more.’ And so he swore he was only ten years older than Adriana Abascal.” The private secretary cackled, and no one else joined.

  “You knew her? How do you know he died in her arms?” Jaime pried.

  “Well, that’s the hypothesis the police are working from, after examining the body. And I met the blonde the first time I went to look at the apartment. I was the one who rented it, on Don Rosendo’s instructions. A hell of a woman!” Murillo said with a lascivious mien.