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