Crime of Fuencarral street
[2] On the morning of 2 July 1888, neighbors alerted the police, who discovered the body of Doña Luciana Borcino, widow of Vázquez-Varela, lying on her back, covered with wet rags that had been doused in lamp oil and set on fire.
[8] This was his third stint in this prison—the first time, for having beaten his mother, Luciana; the second, for stabbing his lover, Dolores Gutiérrez Robles, known as Lola la Billetera,[note 4] since she sold lottery tickets on the corner of Alcalá and Sevilla streets.
According to her, Pollo Varela had threatened and coerced her with force, even offering her money, and thus she had gone to buy the oil, had cleaned up the blood after the murder, burnt the body, and closed the door after her.
[12] During the statements, another name was mentioned as potentially being involved, that of Lola la Billetera who, apart from being Pollo Varela's lover, was a close friend of Higinia.
[1] It had elements that soon aroused the morbid curiosity of Madrid inhabitants: a presumably wealthy and somewhat rude victim,[16] a son with legal troubles, and a housemaid who had been working at her mistress's house for the last six months only.
[8] For the coffeehouse habitués, the housemaid Higinia represented the helplessness of the proletariat; while José Vázquez Varela was the image of a "young gentleman of leisure," spoiled, "characteristic of the bourgeoisie.
The trial started on 26 March 1889 with the first session of the oral and public proceedings at the Palace of the Supreme Court in Madrid, eight months and 25 days after the crime was perpetrated.
The first session began at one o’clock in the afternoon, at the cry of the bailiff on duty: ¡Vista de la causa seguida por homicidio, robo e incendio a Higinia Balaguer y otros!
[11] During the fourth session, the jury uncovered a connection between Higinia Balaguer and José Millán Astray [es] (interim director of the Cárcel Modelo in which José Varela was imprisoned) and established that they knew each other because of the relationship between Higinia and Evaristo Abad Mayoral (also known as El cojo Mayoral[note 7]), who had a bar in front of the Cárcel Modelo.
[20] There are those who maintain that the sentence was really the result of a certain social resentment by the bourgeoisie against a housemaid than of a true will to shed light on the facts, and that Varela escaped punishment for his actions.
[13] Years later, Pollo Varela was involved in another death under suspicious circumstances, this time related to a prostitute who fell from a high floor on Calle de la Montera.
[21] Based on volumes VI and VII of Cronicón (1886-1890), Obras Inéditas de Benito Pérez Galdós published by Argentine writer Alberto Ghiraldo [es] in 1923, Spanish novelist Rafael Reig prefaced the 2002 edition of El crimen de la calle Fuencarral from the collection of chronicles sent by Pérez Galdós to Argentine newspaper La Prensa.
According to Reig, these were comparable to the style of Dashiell Hammett and showed how Galdós led the way for the detective genre that had barely been explored in Spanish literature up until then: Hoy en día, cuando la literatura criminal parece haber descrito un círculo (probablemente vicioso), resulta refrescante esta miniatura galdosiana en la que Higinia mata por catorce mil duros, con un cuchillo de cocina y ayudada por su "compinche".
