Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

The cigar smoke stuck in my gullet. Son of a whore — that was what I’d just been called by that real son of a whore who’d been gross enough to spell out how he’d fucked my mother. He met a bad end. He had to wait a number of years, but Providence dealt him that card, and it couldn’t have turned out any differently. I never had any more news of my mother. Ages after, I went to the cemetery where her bones were rotting, the one next to the allotment where my brother was heading when the train engine sent his flesh and bone flying. I didn’t pray for her, because I couldn’t think of anything to say, and nothing struck the vocal chords of my emotions, either. I expect she’s still there, unless they’ve turned her into fertilizer.

We left the restaurant stuffed with shellfish. I was also creased by rage, or sadness; I sometimes confuse the two. Alcohol sparked my desire to revenge myself on all fronts: my own existence, my wretched state, handsome Bustamante, and even old piss-pot Providence playing those jokes on me. Mr. Handsome was walking on in front of me as cool and carefree as a teenager when spring sap is rising; his blood was seething, but though he was quite unawares, the gray feathered wings of misfortune hovered over his every step, like a bird of ill omen preparing to pounce. We reached the wasteland on the outskirts of a city where the Stéfano circus had camped down. It was a moonless night and very late in the early hours, because we stopped to spit at some ducks who were snoozing on their waterproof plumage in a lake at a park. A tremulous light was flickering in the big top, and that was unusual for that time of day. Someone must have been up to no good. We approached stealthily. The contrast between that brightness and the dense, dark sky created an atmosphere of gloom. Everybody was asleep. I sometimes think that sleep sheathes the mysteries of this world, though it does no good to advertise the fact. Owls were screeching from the overgrown tops of the poplar trees, while other beasties were silent in their burrows. Suddenly a shot rang out. The blast came from the exact spot where the light was oscillating under the roof of the big top. We ran there, Mr. Handsome nimbly and me in fits and starts, falling ass-over-tit.

All corpses are the same: cold, blue, and repulsively definitive. The huge figure of Juan Culí stood motionless in the ring, haloed by the ghostly light of a candlestick. You’d have thought he was a statue made of flesh with that profile. His blank eyes were glued to the fresh corpse of Frank Culá, faceup on the sand. A fountain of blood welled up, glug, glug, glug, from a huge hole where his heart had been. Thirty bluebottles had already landed there and were sipping his lifeless blood like mini-vampires who’d not yet eaten supper. “What have you done, you wretch!” Bustamante shouted. “You’ve killed him; you’ve shot him dead,” but Juan Culí didn’t react. Silent, as if absent, perhaps struck dumb by the tragedy of the crime that had just been committed, Juan Culí loomed like a wardrobe and stayed that way until seven policemen arrived at dawn, seven in gray uniforms, seven jumping to the orders of the inspector in charge — Esteruelas once again, recently promoted to a position at police headquarters for being good at silencing what required silence.

A pistol lay on the ground next to the corpse. It had a shiny mother-of-pearl butt, and when it glinted, its feminine elegance made it eminently desirable. Handsome Bustamante had found it the moment he kneeled down to see if the dead man was still breathing, and then he held it in the palm of his hand as if trying to work out if it had shot the bullet that had finished off Frank Culá. “You killed him out of jealousy, you bloody fag!” he shouted for a second time. Given the tension in the air, and before the first onlookers from the circus, woken by the din, showed their faces, Mr. Handsome told me to take the pistol and make it vanish somewhere so Culí wouldn’t be implicated in the death of Culá. The bastard still had a good side to him; a pity I was seething inside after the scene he’d described with my mother. I felt no mercy. I got rid of the pistol; nobody noticed. I took the barrel between two fingers and ran to the cages. The lions were waking up; the scent of blood had stirred their appetites. Mandarino was snoring, sprawled like a spineless pig, almost at their feet. The size of his member was gross even in repose. To his right, wrapped in damp rags, chunks of dog meat were queuing up to become the animals’ breakfast. Without too much forethought, I unwrapped a strip of meat and rolled it tightly round the pistol. I jumped over Mandarino and threw the meat to the lions. They fought over it for a few seconds, but, like in the jungle, the law of the strongest rules in those cages, and the healthiest of the lot, one we called Perico, gobbled it down in one mouthful. I leapt back over Mandarino, aiming a kick at his face. “Wakey, wakey, somebody’s killed Frank Culá.”

The Stéfano circus was in turmoil in a matter of minutes. Nobody could understand what had happened; people were panicking and screaming. Pudgy Di Battista was cursing God in Italian, less upset by the sight of the corpse than by the fear he might lose everything by government decree. A pitiful fellow, he didn’t realize that the most precious thing he had, his own life, was about to be thrown to the lions like the pistol that blasted the heart of Frank Culá to smithereens. Nobody ever found out it was a suicide over love, provoked by Bustamante’s scorn, nobody, that is, except for Mr. Handsome. When the police arrived at dawn with Esteruelas at the helm and started interrogating in turns, everybody was shit-scared. Nobody knew anything, and some wouldn’t even testify that the Culí-Culás were part of the staff of the Stéfano circus, maintaining that they had only just joined up in a village in Badajoz. Fear has always free-wheeled, unlike meanness, which is a question of character. When it was my turn to be questioned, I spoke up loud and clear so everyone could hear me. Esteruelas’s onion-scented questions helped me rush out my answers. “We’d just dined on shellfish,” I declared, “and when we reached the circus, we saw the dead man, who’d been waiting for the murderer to ask him for a few explanations, because of the jealousy that existed between them; they’re fags, did you know? And they behave in the way that crew does. As well as being a fag, the trapeze guy is a murderer. I stepped aside, because I didn’t want to get involved in their quarrel, and when I was walking off to get some shut-eye, I heard the shot. Then I saw Bustamante run out holding a pistol and head toward the animal cages. He wrapped it in a chunk of meat and put it in the maw of Perico the lion. That’s where it will be now, if he’s not shat it out.” They were all struck dumb by my account of events, to a man, nobody more so than Mr. Handsome. Juan Culí burst into tears.

Exercising the authority his position conferred upon him, Inspector Esteruelas ordered the lion be brought to the ring and disemboweled. “You, eyetie, don’t worry about the expense you’ll incur, police headquarters will look after that in due time,” he told Di Battista to ward off his protests. He never saw a peseta for the sacrifice of the best of his lions, but the rest of us at least enjoyed the spectacle.

Esteruelas ordered one of the police to empty the barrel of his gun into the lion’s head. A stink of sewers, rather than death, spread through the air we were breathing when Mandarino ripped open the beast with the sharp edge of his knife. It was the stench from the rottenness of an era when passions were hidden and fear of freedom floated in the silence people kept as if it were some ancient creed. Ever ready to deal with entrails, Mandarino sank his arm up to his shoulder in the animal’s guts and brought it out covered in slime, his fingers clasping the pistol that hadn’t yet been digested.