The body of a man whose face is distorted and who is missing the index finger of his right hand is found in the Polloe cemetery, in San Sebastián. He is a homeless man who sleeps each night inside a tomb. Emilia Castro Urrutia, a deputy commissioner of the Ertzaintza, is tasked with investigating a case that grows ever more intricate and will take her to different corners of Spain, as soon another set of corpses appears bearing a baffling pattern: every victim is missing a finger.
Luisa Etxenike —who writes this novel under the pen name Antonia Lassa— points out in Zenda some of the keys to Un dedo menos (Nocturna).
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Un dedo menos opens with the discovery of the body of a disfigured man outside a pantheon in the Polloe cemetery in San Sebastián. He is a homeless man who has installed, inside that tomb, which has been empty since its owners obtained the concession, a singular refuge to spend the nights. The pantheon’s door is wrought iron, and, in the words of the Ertzaintza’s deputy commissioner, Emilia Castro Urrutia, who oversees the crime investigation, it lets light pass through but not the gaze. Consequently, that man could leave during the day with all his belongings neatly arranged inside the tomb. That order is fundamental to the construction of the novel, which will move throughout the plot between the civilized and the savage. “That faceless victim seemed to want to continue giving his life, even in that radical deprivation, a form of ‘civilized’ quality. And yet his death was savage.” That is what the deputy commissioner thinks, and it was, for me as well, one of the novel’s opening thoughts.
Thus, Un dedo menos had to begin in a cemetery. I am fond of cemeteries; I frequently visit the Polloe cemetery, where, among other luminaries, lies one of my literary mentors: Luis Martín Santos. If I have the opportunity, I visit the cemeteries of the cities I travel to. I often say that cemeteries are to me what Altamira caves are—a testament to civilization; because burying and honoring the dead was probably one of the earliest traits, one of the first awakenings, of our humanity.
These then are, in my mind, the first setting and the first image of the novel: a man brutally murdered in front of a pantheon/refuge.
Besides slitting her throat, the killer has also skilfully severed the index finger of the right hand of the victim. The decision to amputate the fingers, and the order in which the fingers of successive victims would be cut, was made very early. Because the novel would feature multiple murders, each driven by the same initial act in which all the victims, to varying extents, had collaborated. And the killer would cut the fingers following an ascending order, from lesser to greater responsibility in what happened. Fingers do not all carry the same weight (I consulted a friend trauma surgeon to document this point). The first finger the killer severs is the index finger, “the most mobile finger —as the forensic expert Agustín Arriola notes— the one that rotates the most, the one that allows both delicacy and strength in grasp… and yet, paradoxically, if you must lose a finger, it should be that one… because if there is a loss of a finger, the brain most easily assimilates the loss of the index finger, since the middle finger adapts to the functions that have been lost.”
Afterwards come the ring finger, the middle finger, the little finger, and, finally, the thumb, “the most valuable of the fingers —the forensic expert adds— the finger capable of opposing the others, the one that enables seizing objects or anything else; in other words, the king of the hand.” But the situation becomes more complicated with the thumb, and around it the plot’s tension will reach its peak.
The motive behind the crimes remains vengeance, and the killer’s mark is the slitting and the amputation of the victims’ fingers. These are extreme marks on the body designed to reproduce other marks: those left on another body years earlier by another savage act for which, to a greater or lesser extent, the current victims bear some responsibility. In revenge there are always two times: its birth —the moment the desire to avenge arises— and its execution. And I also decided early on that the novel should advance by weaving both times together; and from two different perspectives: the police investigation, and the killer’s own point of view. Listening to the killer’s voice would allow me to develop the second main tension of the novel: the movement between guilt and innocence, which in Un dedo menos sways interrogatively between victims and executioners. It is not about exonerating the killer, a person fully responsible for the crimes, but about introducing a motivation with emotional complexity that makes us walk with him, on alert, the disturbing path from an ordinary person to a killer.
Nor is it, of course, about blaming the victims for their crimes, but rather, as we come to know them more intimately as the police investigation progresses, to uncover hidden areas in their lives, morally questionable behaviors, through which they and the society they live in, and we live in, are depicted. And the setting of that shadow is family relationships. Un dedo menos is a novel that presents, alongside grisly crimes, other acts of a more “discreet” nature that nevertheless wreak havoc: a whole series of betrayals, abandonment, and private neglect, and forms—more or less explicit—of domination and violence.
Yet I also knew early on that this form of domestic darkness would be countered by intimate, luminous strokes. Therefore Un dedo menos is also a novel about love, and about duels that some characters do not have to face alone, because there is someone who loves them, respects them, and accompanies them. It is, in short, a noir novel, sometimes “savage,” but it also makes space for a civilised quality in human relationships. And thus the settings where it unfolds are not only crime scenes but landscapes where beauty can express itself and affirm itself as a counter to suffering and despair.
The deputy commissioner Emilia Castro Urrutia walks one afternoon along the La Concha promenade in San Sebastián toward her home and thinks: “Crimes and pain, and yet, before their eyes, in the bay, one of those orange-hued twilights is taking place, signaling a splendid day ahead. Does nature express indifference toward humans? Or is it, on the contrary, its way of offering them a hand? The consolation of beauty.” The consolation and the strength of beauty to change everything.
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Author: Antonia Lassa. Title: Un dedo menos. Publisher: Nocturna. Sales: Todos tus libros.