The Good Suicides

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“They were a lovely couple,” say the neighbors. “You didn’t see him much, but he always seemed very well-mannered; he’d be friendly and say hello. She kept her distance a little more, perhaps … But she was certainly very devoted to her daughter.” “They had a beautiful baby,” says the owner of a café close to their home, situated in the Clot district of Barcelona, where a few days before, around ten o’clock, Gaspar Ródenas, his wife Susana and their daughter, Alba, fourteen months, were having breakfast. “They came many weekends,” she adds. And without my asking she tells me what they usually had: a black coffee for him and white for her, and how beautiful the little one was. Minutiae, of course. Insignificant details and banal commentaries that now, in light of the facts, are disturbing.

Because in the early hours of September 5, while his wife slept, this “meek but friendly” father rose from the marital bed, entered the bedroom of his only child, put a pillow over her face and squeezed with all his might. We cannot know if the mother awoke, alerted perhaps by that sixth sense that has disturbed maternal sleep since time began. In any case, Gaspar Ródenas, “such a well-mannered” husband according to neighbors and colleagues, didn’t intend to leave her alive either. Susana died shortly afterward, from a single shot to the heart. Then, as the canon of the chauvinist killer decrees, Gaspar gave himself the final shot.

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