Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Isabel Allende
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Short Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
A night watchman found the lovers sleeping in a knot of arms,
legs, and tulle, enveloped in the foam of a ruined wedding gown
in one of the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
He discovered them directly in front of a vast mural named Rising Sea,
which Detective Aitor Larramendi took for a wrinkled curtain. He didn’t get
modern art; he preferred bucolic landscapes with cows. The guards reported
that the couple had first been discovered by one of the cleaning ladies at
five o’clock in the morning, before the museum doors were opened to the
public. The woman was not surprised to see them, initially thinking they
were another one of the art pieces. She had only raised the alarm when she
hit them with her broom and realized they were human. She was scared
stiff.
Aitor Larramendi recorded the testimonies of the guards and the
cleaning lady, an immigrant from North Africa, who was still terrified. The
last thing she wanted was to deal with the police.
“I had nothing to do with it!” she said, sobbing.
“Calm down, ma’am. You are not being accused of anything. Just tell
me what you saw,” said the inspector, handing her the box of tissues he
always kept in his office.
“I thought they were dead, that they had committed suicide,” she
stuttered, bathed in tears.
“Was there blood?”
“I didn’t see blood anywhere. Since they didn’t move, I thought they
had done it like Michael Jackson. Remember?”
“That was not suicide. It was an overdose,” the detective clarified.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Continue. Tell me what happened.”
“It was the end of my shift. I was sweeping the last room when I saw a
disheveled girl lying on the floor, tangled in white veils. There was a guy
next to her with a leg and an arm over her and his nose against her neck. He
was just as God put him into this world, without even so much as a rag to
cover his privates. That’s why I thought it was one of those things in the
museum. What are they called?”
“Installations,” replied the detective.
“What are they for?” she asked.
Aitor Larramendi couldn’t answer that. He wrote her statement in his
report and added that the crime scene showed obvious signs of a
bacchanalia. Although he had never attended a bacchanalia—something he
secretly lamented—his long experience as a detective allowed him to find
the most insignificant sign of a misdeed and follow it with fierce
determination until he caught the culprit, be it male or female. In the
training sessions he conducted at the police academy, he always emphasized
that the female gender was just as prone to vice, if not more so.
Inspector Larramendi, appropriately nicknamed “the hound of Bilbao,”
was a man who induced fear with his five-foot-two frame, lizard-like and
skeletal, and a huge mustache stamped across his face like a barber’s
practical joke.
When they were arrested, the boy and the girl claimed that they had
spent the night inside, but the indignant guards swore that such a thing was
impossible because they patrolled the premises tirelessly.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB