Red Queen (Antonia Scott, #1)

by Juan Gómez-Jurado

Antonia Scott allows herself to think of suicide no more than three minutes a day.

Antonia’s mind is more like a jungle, a jungle full of monkeys leaping at full speed from limb to limb. Many monkeys and many things, swinging past one another in midair, baring their fangs.

The three minutes when she thinks about how to kill herself are her three minutes. They’re sacred. They’re what keep her sane.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

“Have you seen an Italian team play? The Italians have a slogan: Nessuno ricorda il secondo. They don’t care how they win, provided they do. There’s no shame in faking a penalty. Kicking an opponent is part of the game. A wise man called that philosophy excrementalism.”

It’s at that moment Jon realizes she is beautiful. Not a great beauty, let’s not go overboard. At first glance, Antonia’s face is unremarkable, like a blank sheet of paper. Her cropped straight black hair doesn’t help much either. But when Antonia smiles, her face lights up like a Christmas tree. And you discover that eyes that looked brown are in fact olive green, that there are dimples on either side of her mouth, forming a perfect triangle with the one in the middle of her chin. Then she turns serious again, and the effect evaporates.

“I’m nothing more than a silly old woman,” says Grandma, the wolf already baring its teeth, “but it seems to me if you accuse yourself of the sin of not doing enough, then that would also apply to you sitting there in your attic.”

Mångata. In Swedish, this is the reflection the moon makes as it traces a path across the water. Antonia used to have a game she played with Marcos. To find impossible words, words that define beautiful, untranslatable feelings, those requiring a whole paragraph in Spanish. When either one of them found a word like that, they offered it to the other as treasure. And at this very moment—thanks to a gust of wind and a break in the clouds—one of her favorites has just materialized in front of her eyes: a tremulous, broken silver line. Mångata. A sign from the universe outside, meaning whatever Antonia wishes it to mean. Which is why the universe sends them to us, so that we can do what we want with them.

the other side of the River Nervión and fall asleep thinking you’d been to heaven. Then you see a living room like this and realize you didn’t even know what color heaven was.

No one who lives here can have the slightest contact with reality, or the remotest idea of what it means to be human.

the lips that merely brushing against gave her kilig (a Tagalog word meaning “when you get butterflies in the stomach from happiness”),

His elegant Italian virgin wool suit is so crumpled it could still be on the sheep’s back.

A cop has his subterfuges. One of the most useful is to let other people speak when the amount of sleep you’ve had in recent nights averages three and a quarter hours.

He looks like Michael Caine, but lacks any trace of humanity. It doesn’t take Jon much effort to deduce he’s the lawyer.

This should be happening to somebody else. An old person? A poor person? Someone … expendable? Carla is weeping now, out of anger and self-loathing. Because the answer is yes. Right now, she would swap anyone else for her. Any stranger.

It’s a putrid den, one cockroach away from being shut down after an inspection by Health and Safety. Kitchen Nightmares would refuse to record here, thinks Jon.

Countless pages have been written about them, dozens of movies and TV series made, until by now they’ve become stereotypes with a mythical dimension the public considers as typical: a broken childhood, torturing animals, fascination with fire, the need for sexual gratification. All these details may be present in serial killers, whereas often they are not. This simplification comes from society reacting to something it doesn’t understand, creating a caricature out of what is an everyday reality.

In Spain alone, there are more than a million psychopaths. Very few of them will ever kill; many will lead apparently normal lives. Happy in their jobs as human resources managers, ministers, bar owners, or whatever. If they do harm, it’s on a small scale, and will never warrant a movie.

The sad fact is that science is only just standing on the threshold of the human mind. A cavern that is kilometers deep.

Bruno Lejarreta, self-styled living legend of Basque journalism, enjoys the look of disgust on the other man’s face in the same way others appreciate La Gioconda or the Sistine Chapel.

After he made his impossible demand, he told me I had five days to meet it. Then he added: ‘The child shall not bear the iniquity of the father,’ and hung up.”

“If you put a bullet into that bastard’s head, neither you nor any of your family will ever want for anything.” She waits until they have left to give herself permission to cry. She doesn’t succeed.

In her collection of words, she quickly comes across one that describes exactly how she is feeling: Ajunsuaqq. Which in Inuit means “to bite into the fish and get only a mouthful of ash.”

Murr-ma. An expression in Wagiman, an indigenous Australian language fewer than ten people in the entire world can speak, a word that describes what they’ve been doing until today. Murr-ma. Searching for an object in the water with their feet. Which is tricky, because your other senses want to help you out but they only get in the way.

Murr-ma. A blind groping. But when your toe brushes against something—not before—then you can dive and rescue it. You can piece together the puzzle, things add up.

The “Africans” Grandma is referring to are the Ga, a tribe in southern Ghana who have their own language. And the word she’s referring to is in fact two words. Faayalo zweegbei. “‘Only he who goes to find water can break the pitcher.’ I know, Grandma. But tell that to the people waiting in the village dying of thirst.”

Glas wen. In Welsh, a “blue smile.” A mocking grimace in response to your worst enemy’s misfortunes.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain?

The hurt of her father’s mistrust is a glancing blow Antonia acknowledges the way someone running for their life might notice it’s starting to rain.

The creed Jon Gutiérrez is a devotee of—with candles, genuflections, and prayers—is Our Lady of Nobody Messes with My Partner. Accordingly, without a second thought, he steps on the accelerator, puts the car in gear, and launches the Audi like a rocket into the side of the Rolls.

“Congratulations, Antonia Scott.” Without knowing why, Antonia associates the voice with a friendly face. Yet when she pauses to listen, really listen, she can hear the worms wriggling underneath. Pale and fat, like a corpse’s fingers.

The woman laughs. And with that laugh, the worms crawl out from under the mask in a menacing, pulsating mass.

“We”—people like Mentor always use we when referring to things they themselves are incapable of—“redirected your SIM to make it appear you’re somewhere you’re not.

“Your father insists you know something, although the description of the woman who abducted Jorge fits several possible suspects, including Peppa Pig’s mother in a raincoat.” Logical, when your witnesses are a class of four-year-olds.

The Other Carla has shown her an inescapable truth: Life is nothing. A flash of light between two endless darknesses. Even so, she’s determined to put every last second of that light to use.

Ever since they started to play Ezekiel’s game, everything has been murr-ma. Searching for something in the water with their feet.

Then the thunderbolt struck her. “Kirk Douglas,” Antonia says aloud. “Fucking Kirk Douglas!”

The second call is to the number Mentor gave her before he hung up. They pick up after the third ring. “I know everything.” A cliché, yes. But it never fails.

Antonia understands. The human soul is made up of tiny self-contained compartments, like a Russian doll. You open one then another until you reach the last doll. But the face of the last doll never resembles that of the first. The face of the last doll can be mean and cruel.

According to the great lie of popular belief, the elderly possess more wisdom and serenity than the young. Having reached a certain age, the body is freed from its most insistent needs, its lustful desires, voracious appetites, and hotheadedness. Old people are tolerant, they prefer peace to war, they’re good listeners, and when they speak, it’s with words set in bronze from a marble plinth to which time and patience have raised them, and where they will live out their days, turned to stone, an example and reminder for generations to come. Pure bullshit, thinks Ramón Ortiz. Old people are stubborn, narrow-minded; they only know one way of doing things. It’s old people who start wars out of pride, money, or patriotism. Or a combination of all three. They have the same needs as any horny, ravenous teenager. If their bodies allowed it, they’d spend the day drinking themselves stupid, stuffing their faces, and fucking until their dicks dropped