Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

The new act was an attempt to hallow, if only in show-biz style, the actual marriage of the Culí-Culás. I suggested that Juan Culí should come into the ring disguised as a woman — huge, tawdry, with lots of lace, furbelows, and face paint — and that Frank Culá should pretend to be his husband. It was the reverse of real life, which added extra spice to the simulation. Juan Culí would display a grotesque twenty-month pregnancy in the manner of a female elephant, to which end he’d hang a barrel from his waist, inside of which I’d be hidden. After the usual chases around the sides of the ring, Juan Culí would exhibit his would-be labor pains to an amazed audience and the exaggerated histrionics of Frank Culá, who, to a rocket-launch countdown bawled out in English, would activate the spring, and, expelled amid sticky sheep entrails and a shower of fake gunge, I’d clatter out in a miscarriage every show, hitting the ground headfirst. “Faif, for, zri, tchu, wan, dwarfy!” and out I’d come, ridiculous and belittled, dirty and contemptible, the impossible son of a couple of deviants in a country under the cosh of repression and orthodoxy. Once I was born, my putative parents did all they could to feed me, and that’s where the eggs came in, fed to me with the sweetest canings, loving bludgeons, pricked by knives and forks. I received all that fodder with resignation, more for the hilarity it sparked among the spectators than for the little good the eggs did me. Even so, replete and with no chance that I could increase my growth, due to the natural brake of my physique, I became heavier and happier, heavier because of what I was ingesting and happier because “laugh, and the whole world laughs with you.” Hunger and punishment are always harnessed together by the rope of history. Punishment either kills or stirs to action. Hunger jolts the will and points it to the exact place where knives are being sunk into flesh. That’s some road to get satisfaction.

I often receive invitations to go to galas, parties, launches, grand finales, homages, and other society events, but now I very rarely grace such occasions with my presence. Tonight was an exception. I’d not intended going to the dinner, then at the last minute I fancied dipping into a classy soirée that, for one reason or another, I suspected would satisfy my itch to feel in touch with the heartbeat of reality. Nobody in these circles knows anything about the circumstances of my past life, and I’ve always enjoyed the thrill of gratuitous deceit. Although I’d planned to fly to London to spend Christmas with my son Edén, closing out the social calendar by exhibiting my deformed body in an act of such a highfalutin’ nature as this suddenly seemed to be what I felt like. The glossies would bear witness to my presence among the great and the good. Off-the-cuff decisions are the ones that generally generate most joy. Ordinary folk still believe that on such occasions there is never any talk of matters essential for the common good, and if that’s true, it’s even truer that what finally gets aired is the dirty linen of absent colleagues, and even that of those present. At such gatherings, wine is drunk from brittle glasses that emphasize bouquet, the excellence of the food is chewed by palates alert to subtle flavors, but when it’s time to converse, it’s always the gossip that surfaces: personal grudges and bodily dysfunctions. The European commissioner Belinda Dixon regaled me during the whole soirée with the delights of the anti-hemorrhoid cream she uses, to the point of obscenity in the minute detail she highlighted. She initiated her game plan by asking me upfront whether a man like myself, famous for creating a fast-food empire, considered that alcohol was damaging for varicose veins or if, on the contrary, I believed wine contributed to a well-balanced state of health. I sat and stared at her, perhaps intrigued by the unusual way she spoke. Her eyes were lovely, dense, deep, and always friendly. Her gaze bewitched, and her lips whispered words as if her vocal chords were made of silk. I replied that wine is the fount of truth, that humanity requires it to know itself without subterfuge, and that it is only by possessing truth that human beings can find genuine freedom. She smiled neither scornfully nor dutifully but rather malevolently. From that moment, our exchange took on a more risqué note. We made a toast with a long, intense clink of glasses that reverberated in the shocked tympana of the other diners. A photographer took a snapshot. The mayor looked at us askance and, ever smiling, nodded in our direction, quietly deferential. The commissioner had been asking me if my body’s deformities extended to all its parts, in other words, whether my reproductive organ was affected by my dwarfishness. Simply out of curiosity, she confessed. I replied that it wasn’t. I refilled her glass to the brim, and she gulped it down. Then I busied myself squeezing tasty morsels from my cocks’ combs, far away, self-absorbed, as if that supper really was my last.

Initially I thought that Ms. Dixon’s obscene verbal play was about probing my carnal appetites, and I can confess to you that it worked. She may very well turn up tonight, it’s still not too late, and she promised she’d come. If she does, she’ll be surprised to find a corpse, or better still, the vague shadow of a being who has ceased to exist. Although pity isn’t a value that’s much prized these days, I should recognize that I felt something similar for her this evening. That string of obscenities she unleashed on me dish after dish only hid a woman in turmoil ready to do anything to attain her stated goal, a goal she’d marked out, a victory she’d foreseen. Like so many others in this day and age who can only justify their existence through futile professional advancement, the European commissioner, if she could, would have mortgaged liters of her blood to lay her hands on an extra millimeter of power. Basically, beneath the big show of status, this kind of person hides only panic at the thought of failure, fear of themselves, and the consolation of ending it all with a single shot when the world turns against them and exposes their solitude. As pity isn’t in any way at odds with the pleasures of the flesh, I think I did the right thing by accepting her offer, even if I fear it will be a great shame not to be able to enjoy hers.

I became tired of the applause from so many blank faces, so many sweaty palms clapping wildly after I emptied the platter of eggs the Culí-Culá duo offered me every show. That mockery of marriage that could have offended the susceptible or sparked indignation was on the contrary held to be a hilarious and healthy comic act, perhaps because it recreated scenes of domestic life only too familiar in the backyards of the commonalty, scenes never aired because of the predominant sense of prudery and the prurient nature of comportment in the public eye. The innate hunger that haunted me went in a flash, it was as if a pantry brimming with provisions had been stuffed in my belly to the eternal delight of my gastric juices; however, I soon reacted against the excesses of that fetal diet that became the cracked egg of a cross I had to bear in life. I quickly learned to perform acute peristalsis in the upper and lower reaches of my stomach in order to sick up or engineer less vaulted though equally effective motions that sluiced me out after each show. You can achieve anything in this life if you try, except beauty and height, which are both the attributes of angels. I became tired of all the applause that greeted our act; the plaudits were pathetic. The circus is the supreme spectacle of the grotesque, and the belly laughs often betray the unhappiness of those so reacting, of those in attendance, of that whole republic of idiotic children, hapless adults, and freak-seekers who in the end sustained us. I stared at their blank faces, their lidless eyes and mute mouths, and stuck to swallowing those eggs in order to survive. They came every day, circled the ring, hanging on the catastrophe that might shoot up their laughter levels, and on every string pulled in the show.