Voices To Images

FILIPPO SCALISE

VOICES TO IMAGES

Translated by Maria Burnett

Copyright © 2020 – Filippo Scalise

An impressive neo-Baroque palace in the Montjuic district of Barcelona. A mountain in the middle of the city. Hills covered with flowers, exotic trees and large cacti, right next to the luminous fountains of Gaieta Buigas.

From the very elegant and imposing entrance, graced by a small flowered garden, the large waiting room of Deis Frémont’s notary office was accessed through a large staircase of cold gray-pink marble.

Crossing a long corridor, subdivided in sequence by three very modern crystal and steel doors, was an imposing meeting room with warm and lived ancient bookcases that filled the walls, seeming to be at odds with the remaining modern furniture pieces.

The body of an elegantly dressed man lay on his back, on a huge red and blue Persian carpet. A large amount of blood, partly clotted, soaked the carpet just behind the nape of the man.

His name was Alberto Meriva. In Barcelona he was well known, since, three years earlier, he had made headlines as the “photographer of the voices."

As many young people of his age, Alberto also led a monotonous and futile life of the small town of Torredembarra, on Costa Daurada.

Many small low houses in colored plaster piled up untidily along a narrow coastal road, which seemed to border the fine pink sand of the beach.

Hours and hours spent under the scorching summer sun, hoping to sell fresh drinks to thirsty tourists, with no desire to better himself.

At twenty-five, fed up with days that were always the same, Alberto accepted his uncle Lorente's invitation to join him in Barcelona to work at the country's Telephone Company. Neither the father nor the mother opposed that choice. Perhaps their son would have had the chance to do what they could no longer even dream of. A long embrace with the father sealed a pact of trust and love through physical contact. During the train journey from the station of Tarragona to Barcelona, Garraf Natural Park and the Hospitalet de Llobregat passed quickly before his eyes and, during those few hours of travel, he became convinced that he himself would change his own existence. Arrived at the station of Sant Estacio, he remained motionless, without speaking a word, for quite a while, mesmerized by the architectural beauties of this new city. He did not think of anything specifically, merely enjoying this new freedom while taking deep breaths.

He was quickly brought back to reality by the arrival of a large crowd of people that, like a flooding river, transported him directly to the underground train bound for the University. It was a very quick ride, less than ten minutes, to the Passeg de Gracia. From there, he reached a small white door along the Carrer de Pau Claris.

His new home: a small, nicely furnished room adjoining Lorente's house had been offered to him by the Telephone Company along with his first real salary. He felt immediately safe and neatly arranged his few clothes inside the single large brown dresser that occupied almost completely the side wall of the room, then collapsed on the bed on which someone had nicely left a bottle of Porto. Many hours had passed, and Alberto had not yet spoken to anyone. Not a greeting or a request for information, nothing. He fell asleep without taking off his clothes.

Many small square lights alternated with worn gray keyboards on the wall of the customer service telephone switchboard. It was not a difficult job, but great patience and a great ability to listen to people was required; so many questions, so many complaints, so many requests, at times very basic.

He learned quickly. Alberto had always been a very smart young man, and, in a short time, he managed to learn how to communicate with customers, as well as to solve calmly all the problems that every day seemed to bring.

Alberto had never been a diligent student, but everyone knew him for his very special gift, which he had probably inherited from his mother: drawing.

He was really good! He was able to bring back to life images of daily life with such realism and precise details, that was called amicably "the photographer.” This happened when a drawing of class 3 ^ A, completed by the end of the school year and published in the School Newspaper, was mistaken by everyone for a photograph.

Unfortunately, no one, Alberto, the teachers, or the relatives understood that natural gift could and should have been cultivated as a great opportunity, for a young man who otherwise had no future.

After drawing the hills of his village, crammed with rows of black grapes on a splendid red wine label produced by the great San Laurente winery, owned by Count Francisco Petrosa, he no longer drew.

He spent his time walking barefoot through the beaches of Torredembarra to sell cold drinks to tourists who, especially on weekends, crowded the beaches of Costa Daurada.

Now he was happy. He had a job, a salary, a room, and a new city.

Almost unaware of his new gift, on a very sunny Sunday, Alberto decided to take a walk starting from the Placa del Portal de la Pau. After a few steps, something caught his attention in the window of a small shop.

A bottle of San Laurente red wine from 1997 with "his" label.

He hurried into the wine shop and bought the bottle. A strange feeling got a hold of him. For a moment, dozens of portraits came back to his mind, landscapes "photographed" as a boy and the serenity that accompanied those moments of fertile fantasy. He experienced a great desire to try to draw again.

A little further on, past the stalls of the antique market, overflowing especially with old vinyl records and paintings of dubious beauty, he stopped to buy a large white drawing pad and a pack of ten black pencils. He slowly walked back through the short stretch of road that separated him from his neighborhood, turning that bottle of wine in his hands like an old relic, a piece of his adolescence, of his life.

Returning home, his soul pervaded by an unexpected frenzy, he reproduced that same label in about twenty minutes; perfect, identical, even better than the original.

The next morning, he took the sketch pad to the office and placed it casually on his anonymous desk next to the flashing lights of the switchboard.

CHAPTER II

Calls began unceasingly. Mr. Garrano still complained about the excessive cost of the out-of-town calls and demanded a special price, having been a customer for over twenty years. Mr. Guarrentes had decided to permanently terminate the relationship with the Telephone Company, that had delivered, without his knowledge, the telephone records to his ex-wife. Alberto listened and replied as he was doodling on the white sheet placed in front of him.

A phone call caught his attention.

It was Mrs. Ramirez who, after two weeks, complained her line still had not been activated in her new home in Plaza de Saint Jaime, near Barcelona City Hall.

Not even knowing why, as he listened to that woman's voice, he began to scribble a face on the white sheet. As the call continued, the face became more and more detailed but, as the call ended quickly, he was not able to complete the portrait. Alberto did not feel like finishing it with his imagination and abandoned it absently on his gray desk.

The next day, as soon as he arrived at his office, he called Mrs. Ramirez with the excuse of letting her know her line had been activated and also to convey to her the apologies of the Management for the misunderstanding occurred.

In the meantime, he continued the drawing, which quickly took shape before his eyes, beginning to look more and more like a photograph, because of the three-dimensionality that Alberto was able to produce with a pencil. The call ended, and the drawing was finished.

"Beautiful!" he said to himself. He was happy to have recaptured the old desire to draw and was happy to be able to express again this great and unique gift that filled him with a special and not easily explained energy.

The drawing of Mrs. Ramirez's face remained there, in a drawer, along with many other, partially incomplete faces that Alberto drew every day, as he was listening to the voices of the customers of the telephone company on the phone; young and old men, angry gentlemen, hysterical women and women with a very sensual voice. He had gathered about fifty in the drawer of his old gray metal desk. His feelings, which had developed during the prolonged listening of the voices, was linked to each drawing.

After about three months, a unique event changed his life.

The Telephone Company, every year, randomly pulled the name of a customer to offer him/her a year of free phone calls and that year, the winner was Mrs. Ramona Ramirez from Plaza Saint Jaime, in Barcelona.

That Mrs. Ramirez, the one in the first drawing, was just a coincidence thought Alberto, who was commissioned by the Management to contact her regarding the delivery of the prize she had won.

A sudden curiosity, mixed with a certain fear, convinced him to accompany the official in charge of the delivery of the prize, a certain Bernardo Benincasa, to the house of Mrs. Ramirez.

That morning, Plaza Saint Jaime, a very old square near the Palace of the Generalitat and Casa della Ciutat, a square with precise and elegant lines, was crowded with tourists and pigeons.

Crossing a long walkway, Alberto and Benincasa reached the door of Mrs. Ramirez's beautiful white house and rang the bell. A young blonde lady opened the door. Her face was pale, with very noble features. She asked them who they were. A face completely different from the one that Alberto had imagined in his drawing; but, again, why should they have looked the same?

The young woman invited them to enter and had them seated in a very large entrance, full of antique furniture and futurist paintings on the walls. After a few minutes, the young woman came back announcing the arrival of Mrs. Ramirez.

Alberto could not believe it. It was her!

It was the woman in his portrait, identical in every detail, even the mole on the right temple. He felt a hot flush, then a cold sweat and the room began to spin hard around him, until darkness overcame him.

Benincasa slapped him and woke him up. He was also woken up by the acrid scent that Mrs. Ramirez's housekeeper was making him smell. He immediately remembered everything!

His drawing perfectly represented that woman whom he had listened to more than once on the telephone, and who now looked at him surprised and worried. "His pressure must have dropped," Benincasa said embarrassedly, taking his leave from Mrs. Ramirez.

Young Alberto immediately recovered from the passing sickness and apologized over and over again to the woman who, having assured herself of the young man's health state, took her leave after a few minutes.

But how was it possible? How had he managed to imagine that woman's face, just listening to her voice?

Alberto had managed to transform the feelings conveyed by that woman's voice into a real image.

He first thought of all the other portraits he had drawn while listening to the telephone calls of the customers of the Telephone Company; they were in the top drawer of his cold desk in his gray office in Barcelona.

When he went to work the next day, he felt anguish, mixed with curiosity. He wanted to immediately open that drawer to check one by one the faces whose voice he had heard and transferred to paper.

He wanted to do it and did indeed do it.

He asked the Central Office to join Mr. Benincasa for a week, replacing a colleague who had had a bad car accident. Waiting to start this unusual test, something odd started to grow within him. He felt a life force he had never felt before. His relationships with others were positively affected.

He had never made friends in Barcelona and often spent holidays alone watching television or taking long walks along the waterfront. He began to frequent a group of colleagues from the Telephone Company, who invited him, a few evenings later, to a dinner in a beautiful restaurant in Barcelona, to celebrate the birthday of Rodrigo Mendez, the sales manager of the Commercial Division.

Rodrigo Mendez was a very charming man, who had been leading for some years a very expensive life and had surrounded himself with a series of people, more or less friendly, who took advantage of that opportunity to visit places and mix with people of a higher social status.

Rodrigo was not married, but he had many women and all his colleagues envied his refined and bold manners that made him always be at the center of attention.

Rumors had it that he was at the time having a relationship with a very rich Frenchwoman, the daughter of an arms dealer. Her name was Justine Bertelli and that evening she was there, in the middle of the room of the splendid restaurant Chez Michel.

A sophisticated setting with a few round tables for six people; steel and glass dominated the decor of the room, warmed by huge dark carpets, which delimited private areas between the various groups of tables. He sat down next to Mr. Benincasa and Mrs. Paula Perez, advertising agent for the Espana Press Agency.

It was a beautiful evening; he had a great time listening to Benincasa's dirty stories and watching the undecided reactions of beautiful Paula to the most daring jokes. She was a beautiful brunette woman with very long beautiful legs, that she unintentionally showed through the decisive slit of her black satin skirt. She beat her feet rhythmically and nervously on the floor and kept watching her cell phone, waiting for a phone call that never arrived that evening.

He exchanged a few words with her. He was not used to talking to women and, above all, beautiful women made him really uncomfortable, so Alberto devoted his attention, mainly, to Mr. Benincasa’s ridiculous jokes and the fragrant fish dishes he tasted along with several glasses of fresh wine.

At the end of the evening he walked back home, walking for over half an hour on the warm waterfront, invigorated even more than before by the puzzle of the faces he had imagined and then drawn. He would know tomorrow.

He lingered at least twenty minutes longer than usual that morning, attempting several times to tie the only decent tie he had. He arrived promptly at Benincasa's office, carrying a blue folder, containing the drawings of the four people they were supposed to meet that morning. It was an extraordinary experience. Fear was replaced by a sort of power vibe that pervaded his mind and soul.

He had in essence succeeded in photographing the voices of those people; he had managed to represent them on paper, with a perfection and a realism that left him stunned and proud like he had never been before.

He wanted to tell everyone but stopped. No one would believe him. It was too easy to draw a beautiful photographic portrait and say that he had imagined it by listening to only a few words of the subject on the phone. At noon, that day, so special to him, he decided not to have lunch. He left Mr. Benincasa and hurried to the Parc Guell gardens.

He wanted to be alone and ponder on what to do. He sat on a sunny bench, far from the voices of a group of men, who were discussing governmental fiscal matters. His attention fell on a newspaper abandoned on the bench. It was the third page of El Pais, dedicated to yet another assassination in Barcelona. It was the sixth young man who had been stabbed in the back. In all cases reported by the newspaper, they were all young men of a high social status who, after death, had their skull shaved and the tip of their tongue cut off, in a macabre ritual that had already been repeated six times.

At the office, they had talked about this distractedly. The investigators had failed to find anything useful that could relate those atrocious deaths to each other, nor did they have any clues or evidence that could be traced back to a serial murderer, with the exception of his telephone claims.

That detail caught his attention. The murderer had always claimed his crimes with a recorded message, sent, perhaps as a challenge to the police offices, twenty-four hours after the murders. A shiver ran down his back.

Would he have been able to draw the face of the murderer by listening to the few but atrocious words he had spoken in his message?

That night, he was very shaken up. All Alberto could think of was a whirlwind of faces, which turned into each other in an endless pinwheel; then he appeared, the man still without a face, the serial murderer. A cup of hot verbena lulled him to sleep, but only in the early hours of the morning.

CHAPTER III

He decided to get straight to the point. He could not afford to be laughed at or mistaken for a crazy man but, at the same time, he had to try. He asked for an urgent meeting with Kemen Garreca, the Chief of Police.

He was received the same afternoon at two pm. After going through an identity check at the entrance of the Police building, he was accompanied through a narrow corridor, with numerous very dark and bare office doors. The last door on the right led to a hallway, furnished with old prints and a dusty blue fabric sofa. He was invited to sit down, and the Chief was informed of his arrival. After only five minutes, the Chief came to meet him and greeted him coldly, giving him a once over from head to foot.

He was eager to listen as that case was becoming his nightmare, and anyone who could provide him with useful information to solve that case was welcome. Alberto introduced himself and after some preambles about his work, he came to the point. "Chief, he exclaimed, I think I can help you identify the serial killer if I could hear the recorded message." And from there he started talking about the faces he had imagined and drawn during the hours of telephone calls at the Company, meetings with people, and the surprising matching details. He opened a folder and showed the Chief his drawings.

The policeman was very skeptical. Quite a few crazy people had shown up those days at the police headquarters, to report that they had seen the serial killer, that they had dreamed about it, or even blamed themselves for those horrible crimes. This time, something told him he had to try. He had to give that young man at least the chance to do the drawing and then, to follow up. It wouldn't have cost him much in terms of lost time and waste of taxpayers’ money. He accompanied young Alberto to the basement through a wide staircase, which started about halfway along the long corridor. He slipped his identification card into a reader, and a sharp metallic click opened the armored door that led to the Police Forensic Department.

He had Alberto sit in a small room with a desk and two upholstered dark chairs.

"Major Fernando Messi, said Garreca, is the Head of the Forensic Police for this District.” The two shook hands, and the Major placed a digital reader with headphones on the desk.

"There you go, he said, these are the phone calls made by the alleged murderer." Alberto placed his earphones tight on his ears and the Major started the recording. It did not last more than three or four minutes. Alberto was upset, he could hear the voice well, but it was disguised with a digital voice filter, which made it sound like that of a laryngectomy patient. "Impossible, he said, impossible, it's not his real voice, I didn't think .... "

He stood up quickly, very embarrassed; he didn't know what to say and he regretted having gone there, why in the world, he said to himself.

Captain Garreca explained to Alberto that camouflaging the voice was a common technique, which could perhaps be partly dealt with through computer filtering techniques. The attention of the investigators had concentrated above all on the content of the phone calls and not on the timbre of the voice, as there was no chance to reply.

Major Messi thanked Alberto and promised him they would meet again after a few days.

In those days spent working absent-mindedly, Alberto couldn't think of anything else but that guttural voice he had listened to for those few minutes in the Police offices. As much as he tried to remember it, he could not even imagine how to begin to draw the unconvincing face of the killer. Perhaps he overestimated himself, perhaps he had dared too much, and now he was afraid.

That evening, he received a phone call. It was his father, whom he had not talked to for over six months. The tired voice of his elderly father filled him with nostalgia and made him think of his home in Torredembarra and his friends. He thought of the sunny beaches, the blue sea and the long days spent doing nothing, racing with Zeb, the white Labrador, who had been with him throughout his youth, and the love snatched away from an American tourist.

He received an unexpected invitation to the marriage of his cousin Pedro, who wanted him as his best man. "I will be there, Alberto told his father, it will be a great joy for me to hug my friends again."

He did not need to go to the police station, because that morning at eight o'clock, a dark car picked him up at the house and took him just outside the city.

It was a Provincial Police district. A new building of glass and concrete that did not fit well with the remaining architecture of the poor outskirts of the city. He quickly reached the sixth floor, where Major Fernando Messi was waiting for him, in a room completely covered by a layer of insulating material and a huge wall, on which the images coming from the city's television cameras alternated with geographic satellite maps.

Carmen, the Major’s assistant, was a beautiful dark-haired girl, very thin, with very sweet features and fleshy red lips. She brought him a cup of coffee and explained that he would soon hear the cleaned-up version of the killer's phone calls; he was simply mesmerized.

For a long time, his interest in women had been practically non-existent and he had limited himself to some boring evening outings with a colleague from the Telephone Company. But his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the voice of the Major, who introduced him to the filtered version of the phone calls: "Listen to it and get inspired; let's see if you wasted our time unnecessarily. " Alberto put on his large and soft black headphones and, after absently meeting beautiful Carmen’s gaze, he motioned for the recording to start.

Compared to the first version, now the voice was clear and clean, and immediately some images began to fill his mind. He interrupted the cleaned up recording and confidently opened his sketch pad.

The recording started again, and, at the same time, his hand began to move quickly on the sheet, starting to trace the features of a human face.

The people in the room approached curiously the long desk where Alberto was drawing. Someone made obvious jokes about Alberto being likely crazy, and someone else whispered that perhaps time would have been better spent doing something more productive.

As he kept drawing on the paper with decisive strokes, a man's face started rapidly appearing on the large white sheet of Albert's block. A small bald head with few white hairs left on the temples and on the nape, two small close-set eyes, partly hidden by thick curled lashes and a small nose with a rounded tip.

Every time the recording ended, Alberto stopped for a moment and then, with an automatic gesture, restarted the recording and continued with his work. Thin lips appeared and a small, regular chin that finished the oval of the face.

An anonymous face had taken shape on that sheet, and Alberto appeared very confused, despite not having had any hesitation during the completion of his work.