Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

At the time, Spain didn’t possess an adequate pharmaceutical product to relieve the pain of hemorrhoids. Doris had to treat them with xeroform powder. She snow-flaked the contents of a phial she kept in a cupboard in her caravan onto a piece of gauze and applied it to the crossroads of her butt by severely twisting her muscles and expertly contorting her extremities, standing up, leaning her hips forward, and raising her left hand behind her back until it brushed against the fated orifice. Such an action revealed a splendorous rump enhanced by that shifting, humiliating, erotic posture, an offering contemplated by whoever had the good fortune to be privy to such privacy. Providence granted me the opportunity, the result of a previous mishap that befell me; as popular wisdom has it, every cloud has its silver lining. Given the way I toiled in animal shit, I contracted an infectious fever that affected my brain. I was used to sleeping anywhere, anyhow, under the stars in summer months, in the winter crouching in a shelter of blankets I put up at the foot of the wild animals’ cages so their breath kept me warm like a Baby Jesus in the manger. Life had showed me how hard it can be more than once, and I quickly learnt to resign myself, to fasten my heart tight to the hungry rope of my innards and drag myself along without more ado. However, when I fell ill that time, my spirit of resistance dissolved on the tongue like toffee, and my will and energy to live departed as quickly as a couple of farts. Nobody showed any interest in looking after poor me, streaming sweat, feverish, and prostrate — nobody except for Doris, who took pity on me and carried me to the shelter of her caravan, an austere, tidy, pretty place decorated with little bottles of half-used perfume. That space was the earthly seat of a paradise I didn’t believe in. In a feverish haze, my eyes served up extraordinary, multi-scented visions that relaxed me then sent me crazy and led me into the wildest corners of my consciousness. Doris laid me on her merino wool bolster and over three days applied to my forehead cold cloths, herbal poultices, and towels soaked in therapeutic ointments until my feverish brow relented and saw off any possibility that I might perish. Delirious, half-awake, I gazed at her as I’ve just described: beautiful in her contortions, her enormous rump displaying to the whites of my sickly eyes the magnificent pomp of her private parts, crowned by the Morello cherries of her compacted arteries. Poor Doris. She was unlucky in life. Misfortune pursues some to the very threshold of the grave. I kept her secret forever, and even once it became evident, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t betray her. She showed me affection, and I thanked her with my silence; though I was well rewarded by my lurid memories of her gruesome parts.

Doris sometimes killed time by knitting sweaters for her nephews and nieces back in her village. She wove them beautifully with Ancora perlé thread, a shiny, non-shrink yarn in solid colors that had only just put in an appearance on haberdashery shelves. “Look, Gregorito,” she’d say, clasping her knitting needles under her armpits, “how do you like this? It’s for Pedrito, my nephew, whose first tooth is just peeking through,” and I nodded though I didn’t understand a word of what she was saying, being quite unable to assimilate that remote world of happy families, loving childhoods, and knitted cardigans aired in the sun, light years away from the everyday shit that made up the circus world of my existence.

If it was the right kind of day, Gelo de los Ángeles paid Doris’s caravan a visit after the show to share a spot of supper. Doris invited him to a plain omelet with ham, basically so the fellow, who was clearly very poorly, didn’t have to start messing with pots and pans himself after using up all his energy holding her up on the trapeze. It was no trauma for Doris to sizzle another omelet with her own, and even an extra one for me when I hobnobbed with them late at night. Gelo de los Ángeles coughed when he chewed, drank chicory coffee, and spat out thick gobs of sputum. His illness was eating away his features to the point that they were completely glazed over with a film of mold. I took the Gypsy Ballads , that treasure which didn’t belong to me, to Doris’s caravan and after a meager supper, I’d insist on reciting aloud some of Federico’s poems. It amused them both to watch how sweetly the words flowed in my passionate reading, it shocked them to hear a power that was so at odds with the contemptible, screwed-up figure I cut, they relished the paradox: a deformed dwarf holding on his lips the tempered beauty of Federico’s verse. On the twenty-fifth of June they told the Bitter Man: You can now cut the oleanders in your patio, if you so wish. Paint a cross on the door and put your name beneath, because hemlock and nettles will rise from your ribs and needles of wet lime will sting your shoes . That array of metaphors hit the rocky ground of Gelo de los Ángeles’s mind like the sound of toads croaking. “All that word-spinning gets your tongue into a twist. Idle pursuits for females and fags,” he’d say. “That’s rich from you, a guy without the scrap of sensibility you deserve,” retorted Doris as she counter-attacked. “Poetry requires sensibility the way you require muscles.” Gelo shut up. He basically knew that was true, but at this stage in his life, he could do nothing to change the way he was. He’d continue to display muscle, and only muscle, muscle in his arms, muscle in his legs, a muscular, if sickly, scrotum that would never spill its lusting cum on Doris’s skin. On the other hand, she was so feminine you entered her through the door to her heart, and I made the most of that weakness: The moon turns in the sky over waterless lands while summer sows whispers of tigers and llamas. Sinews of metal rang out above the roofs. Woolen baa-ing curled on the breeze. The earth offers itself full of scarred wounds, or quivering with the piercing cautery of white lights . “How lovely, Gregorito, why don’t you ask Di Battista to let you read poems in the ring? They sound so beautiful when you say them. Come on, recite them again for me, you give me goose bumps,” and savoring that victory in words, I reread the poem, as proud and preening as a Jack of Clubs who’d been proclaimed a King of Spades.

I always kept that yellowish, unbound book with me. My memory will always be marked by the magical rhythm of its verse, their incredible silken yet deeply mournful beauty. My memory always felt the impact of those bitter-sweet soirées, Gelo’s gobs of spit, Doris’s innermost feelings bubbling up after dessert, and that ever-present dedication like the spittle from a forgotten curse that was the prologue to my poetry recital: “For Gurru, my comrade in love and combat, with a French kiss for the moments we have shared, Mary Faith Oxen.”

Nowadays nobody believes in circuses. In these times that augur the end of the world, when leisure is home-based and reality is reeled off in pixels, there’s no place for wild animals, clowns, Chinese jugglers, or deformed dwarves who decimate their dignity on the ring’s compacted sand to hilarious guffaws. It was different then. People came to split their sides over us, and nobody noticed the horrific poverty sustaining it all, the behind-the-stage scenes where all of us involved in that great family of freaks in the Stéfano circus struggled to survive. People applauded, exclaimed, were astonished, let out belly laughs like uncontrolled farts before returning home and continuing with the daily routines that comprised the inner workings of national unity: a job for life to sustain the family future, the vague presence of the catechism in everyone’s behavior, Sunday mass as Saturday’s still wouldn’t do, hierarchical obedience, institutional conformity, the Generalísimo’s Cup, and barbarian females from the north, those barbarians with low-slung breasts now beginning to sow seeds of fantasy or obscenity in the apocalyptic minds of Spanish machos: “Fuck, those bloody birds are what you call tasty, if only we could lay one!” and then they clicked their tongues and downed their glasses of Osborne, took a drag on their cheap cigarettes, and crossed their arms, lust prickling their skin.