“Birds”, by Esperança Camps

I killed her, your Honor. I wasn’t desperate. I couldn’t even say I was crazy about her. She was beautiful, yeah, attractive, but she wasn’t the only girl in the world. I wasn’t desperate. I saw her every day at the factory. The office was above the central part of the warehouse and from there we can see the entire production process. The damned workers can’t see us but we keep an eye on every move they make. If they talk, if they pick their nose, or if they scratch their balls. We know how much time each worker wastes during the day. From up there, your Honor, we can see right down the women’s tops. It can get up to 95 degrees in the warehouse you know? Damn hot and damn horrible. Installing air conditioning would be really expensive and counterproductive for the products we manufacture, which need to be kept at a constant temperature and the boss says that air conditioning the factory doesn’t matter, and this way we get to enjoy the view of all that flesh on display all year round. To me that seems cruel, right? Pretty shitty thing to do. But you get used to it easily. My table’s next to the window and I hardly have to lift my head and I have the full panorama right in my eyeline. I can take my pick. But I didn’t choose, you understand? My eyes always went to the same girl. To the one in charge of packaging. She was right at the end of the production line. There’s actually four of them who do it but my eyes always went to the same one. I couldn’t help it, your Honor, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, no . . . I didn’t even raise my head, all I needed was a slight movement and I had her right there in front of me: ripe, sweaty, tanned, exhausted. I had her right there: ripe, sticky, beads of sweat trickling down her face, along her neck, and pooling between her breasts. The machinery stopped me from seeing her whole body but the sweat and the cleavage and her black curls were enough. She wore a very thin gold chain around her neck. Little gold, little money. I don’t like gold myself. Poor people wear it to seem like they’re a bit richer than they are. Twice I tried to bump into her at the factory entrance. The managers have a separate entrance but sometimes, so we don’t seem mean or affected, we go in through their door. They say hello to us, practically worship us. The majority of them are immigrants and they don’t always have the right paperwork, you get my drift, what with the way things are you can’t be quite so strict and if there’s a stamp or a visa missing, well you can bring it to me later and start when you like. It also makes it easier for us to get rid of them without having to explain why. We have to do these little tricks because of production. If we want to stay in business, the competition’s really tough, your Honor, and the Chinese make it really difficult for us, you know this already, it’s in the papers every day, and about how we need to revive manufacturing. . . . Yes, you asked me why I killed her and I’ve still not told you, it’s because I don’t really know. A couple of times I made sure I ended up walking alongside her when we clocked in. I greeted her nicely, yes, I was really friendly, I said to her, hello, how are you? And she just looked at me. She didn’t say anything to me. Hello how are you? It’s not offensive, your Honor. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. And the next day as well. A greeting, and silence. Two silences are a lot, your Honor, because I watched her from above. I knew every drop of sweat that glistened on her body and if I said good morning to her, she had to say good morning to me. So one morning, I took advantage of the boss being out in meetings, I called her on the tannoy and made her come up. She jumped when she heard her name on the speakers. The other workers stared at her. You should have seen her; she was shaking like a leaf. From fear and cold. In the office we do have air conditioning and we turn it right up. The beads of sweat froze on her face and neck. Why don’t you answer when I say good morning to you? Why don’t you look at me? And she just kept her eyes fixed on the floor. Look at me. And she lifted her head with a yes sir which wasn’t right for her, your Honor, like this, look, she lifted her head like this and she looked daggers at me and said what do you want, in a firm, powerful, warm, even voice, and she was looking at me and I was speechless. She couldn’t have that voice, your Honor. Not that voice, do you understand what I mean? That woman had a voice that hurt me. How did I not know it? And because I wasn’t answering she was insisting, what do you want sir, my friends are having to cover for me and I wouldn’t want them to be angry. And she kept on talking, vocalizing, spitting birds from her mouth, vomiting a mortal melody while saying she was in a hurry. I was no longer paralyzed, she’d got me going, your Honor. I was turned on and the air conditioning wasn’t enough for me, that right there, facing the false window I went towards her and in one quick blow to her back I pulled her towards me and the phone rang and the answerphone kicked in and she resisted and I was already kissing her because I was superior, I was stronger, I was a man on fire, me, your Honor, it was her fucking voice that got me there, so much fucking melody just to say what do you want sir, I’ve got work to do, and I was touching her breasts, which were frozen, pearly with cold sweat and I wasn’t able to stop and if you want, your Honor, I won’t finish telling you all the details which I think are already in the indictment and I don’t know if now’s the right moment to tell you the rest, here in front of the members of the jury, ’cause there are ladies here who could be offended, because a man, when he’s turned on he does things that afterwards are ugly to describe. She resisted and I couldn’t stop myself and when her shift finished her bewildered co-workers looked up at the office trying to see why she hadn’t come down but they went without waiting for her although they didn’t know she sat dead in my office chair. And she shut up but I still saw how the birds that flew from her mouth got tangled up in her black curls.