Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

Little Marisol was touring the world, singing that life was a tombola, which did her proud and got her happy little girlie smile on magazine front covers. That year, she was competing in the glossies with singer Raphael, Maricarmen Martínez Bordiú—Franco’s granddaughter — with Julio Iglesias, bullfighter El Cordobés, and actress Amparito Muñoz, but the cream on the cake undoubtedly went to little Marisol — fresh, smiley, high-pitched, fizzy, dreamy-eyed, with the ye-ye innocence that comes with water-pitchers and paso dobles . Tom-tom-tombola: “The sweet actress is coming to the end of her holidays; a European honeymoon for Jane Fonda; Prince Charles of Romania has got into trouble with Scotland Yard; Eno Fruit Salts have restored my well-being and now I feel up for this wonderful party. Thanks to Eno, I don’t have to sit out the afternoon.”

Little Marisol was belting it out on high-society stages while the rest of Spain was still waiting for the true dawn to come. In time she’d bare the floppy cups of her breasts on the cover of Interviú , and all Spanish men would have to repent for the subterranean longing — pederasty, par excellence —that surged in their hearts. Binges, guitars, dry sherry and tapas , and the jingle of coins were all the fashion in that finite universe that was the indissoluble unity of the fatherland. Swedish women were beginning to dip their toes in the still-empty sands of Benidorm and quite unawares triggered multiple erections in building workers lacking a destiny and substance that on the other hand sentenced them to perpetual unease or real estate speculation. People spoke enviously of the sumptuous splendors of the Sha of Persia and the golden beauty of Farah Diba, his wife. Sara Montiel kissed Gary Cooper on the mouth in stills of Veracruz , while middle-class kids were fed on Cola Cao hot cocoa for breakfast and afternoon snack. The flushed glow of actresses, whether homegrown or foreign, aroused admiration in the sinews of dreams in the country’s first dormitory cities; their fake monikers leapt by word of mouth from one end of the nation to the other, but when they reached mine, they slid straight off my skin, except for one: Marisol. Then one day when we were hard at it in the din and frenzy of the Costa del Sol, pudgy Di Battista came along, all sweaty and excited by the news he’d heard from Málaga that little Marisol would grace our show that evening. When I heard that, my pelvis flipped. I couldn’t credit how elated I was and started jumping around like a lunatic. A jumping dwarf would have caused a stir elsewhere, but there we knew each other and nothing seemed as strange as normality. The whole circus plunged into a welter of preparations; it was all nerves, chatter, gossip, and finally that expectation bore fruit — little Marisol did in fact come. I will never forget that damp night, the very one that Gelo de Los Ángeles slipped off the trapeze and broke his neck on the compacted sand beneath. Everyone was astonished, but he was left paraplegic. He knew very well that he was ill, but perhaps wanting to display traces of agility stymied by raucous tubercular coughing, he had decided to do so without a net, in order to heighten the spectacle and make a greater impression on little Marisol and the whole retinue of hangers-on that followed her footsteps to every corner of the peninsula. Did he manage it? You bet he did. He was doing marvelously, until he had the misfortune to slip and hit the planet with his vertebra, which snapped like dry wood. It could have been worse, but wasn’t. Things happen as things must, and there is little one can do to change their predetermined course. Little Marisol wept she was so scared, and that was my gain; my retina gathered up her tears like shards of translucent treasure, to be sipped away, secretion after secretion, in obsessive, untrammeled masturbation. The sound of a neck breaking is very peculiar, and once heard is never forgotten, like someone treading on a cockroach or cracking a dog’s skull with a stick. They are precise sounds that, depending on when and how they happen, ensure you do or don’t doubt the promised resurrection of the flesh. A bastard gremlin must have sliced Gelo de los Ángeles’s wings at the root, because he fell vertically, the topknot of his skull aiming at the hole it would open up in the ring when it made contact. We were all struck dumb by the crack, and pudgy Di Battista, sitting next to little Marisol, sobered up as if he’d suddenly caught the plague. Out of inertia, Doris went on swinging from one side of the big top to the other, now abandoned by Gelo’s muscles, while she incredulously contemplated the outcome of his fall. Some spectators shouted, and all of a sudden, someone started applauding. The clapping spread, and they all made the skin on their palms sore, not really understanding why. Some would be applauding the fall, others the catastrophe, but the truth is that the tragedy led to fun and games, which was little or no help to Gelo de los Ángeles, who lay there, transfixed on himself in a grotesque, agonizing posture, his bones shattered, anointing the sand as if he were the last drop of jam in the jar. It was a real pity the show had to be suspended; that made it impossible for me to go into the ring and pay my homage to Marisol by dedicating my act to her as I’d planned. I’d intended to put myself in the barrel around Juan Culí’s belly with a bouquet of flowers, and when the cry went up—“. . wan, dwarfy!”—I’d fall out with the bouquet, which I’d run and exchange for a kiss from Marisol. It wasn’t to be. That’s often the fate of plans — tattered dreams shredded by fallow encephalic mass. A great pity. Little Marisol left the way she came and went on chirping in the midst of the tricky tombola of life, nurturing, meanwhile, the buxom breasts she’d then show us in Interviú to set us sinning. They swept Gelo de los Ángeles off in an ambulance to an operating theater where they didn’t succeed in putting his bones back together. I never saw him again; I don’t like rituals of fear or pity. Doris paid him a visit a few years later and told me about the ruin of a man he’d become, that man who used to shoot through the air, leaving in his wake whitish vapors like Milky Ways of talcum. She did so stooping down and sobbing on my shoulders, and I made the most of her sorrowful expression to brush her nipples with my fingertips and breathe in the sadness distilled by her sweat. Then she confessed she’d suffocated him to spare him further pain.

Out of the window, in through the door. Handsome Bustamante was one of those cheeky, thieving womanizers who’re often up to their necks in fraud and filth, on the downhill slope to death. “See if you learn from me, Goyo, I’m a dab hand at doing it slowly — one hand on Paula’s tits and the other on Tina’s oyster,” and he started laughing at his own joke as if his teeth would fall out they were so chuffed. Worst of all, it was true. He was really good-looking and fantastically agile. There you see the lunacy of Providence, some are born under an unlucky star, yet others come with a halo of the most luscious of dames, handsome, arrogant, and pampered like a fairy prince on a honeymoon far from the catastrophe.

Handsome Bustamante, so simple, supple, womanizing, and gorgeous, arrived as Gelo de los Ángeles’s replacement on the trapeze, and while he was at it, he switched on a torrent of lust in the empty reservoir of the Stéfano circus. In a flash he laid any living flesh and still didn’t find enough candidates to satisfy his wayward lusts. I don’t know why he took to me, but the fact is I performed as the flag-bearer for his horny quests, scouting for his whims wherever we holed up, in the villages, steppes, or wastelands of Spain. There existed no place where I couldn’t sniff out a brothel, the red light of a bordello, or the provincial reserve of a cat house concealed on the third floor, left-hand side of a mansion, with honor and gas in each room, but no lift. “Goyo, you don’t disgust me, you make me lucky,” the bastard would say, stroking my neck as if I were an animal he was fond of or felt sorry for. Although he didn’t come with wings, he flew on the trapeze better than Gelo de los Ángeles, which was all to the good when it came to settling up with pudgy Di Battista. He coaxed Doris through the air with the Herculean strength of his hands and inspired her to try leaps, pirouettes, and corkscrews she’d never before attempted in the roof of the big top, quite self-confident with the precision afforded by her healthy new partner. At the end of their act, just like Gelo, Bustamante slid down the rope to the ring, where he’d give Doris the shivers with the black caress of his cloak as if it were the nocturnal garb of a vampire, the kind whose blood burns in eternal fire. The spectacle of that embrace was breathtaking, and, oblivious to any skullduggery, the audience clapped like crazy, as it was. The fleshy tentacles of his hands gripped the sides of her breasts till her eyelids fluttered, flirtatious and feminine, with a rush of adrenalin, and now and then even produced a gleaming bead of desire. If it was wondrous to watch them swirling through the air, it was even tastier to peer at them behind the mask of that embrace, a couple of Lucifers, or beasts from hell, slavering over each other’s bodies for the pure thrill of it. I saw the dampness welling in the forks of their thighs and was distraught by all that frenzy that didn’t involve me, simply out of envy and the desire to penetrate, once and for all, soft female places. Longing is longing and a void is a void, so it is written, and one can do nothing to overturn the enigmas of Providence. I can hardly invoke the ruins of my flesh, but I know what it’s like to struggle up a steep slope. Nonetheless, over the years I’ve done things to open up the doors of desire so I can pleasure my whims: I’ve reduced life to merchandise. Now I buy everything, I sell everything, and, apart from giving worldly prestige, it sedates.