Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

The winds of early winter were beginning to blow in ‘73. We’d come to Alcalá de Henares to work Christmas hard, with two performances a day, three on Sundays and Saturdays, squeezing the most from our rickety potential. It was the nearest to the capital we’d ever been. I felt thrilled about visiting Madrid, walking its streets and riding in the metro. I’d heard about the colored lights that adorned its pavements with their garlands of kilowatts, and the consumerist ceremonials orchestrated by moneyed people in the Galerías Preciados department store. The rain washed the dirt off the caravans the whole night, and the next morning the circus encampment smelt of freezing cold. The animals were quiet, as if their nostrils had caught a sniff of the magnicide that was around the corner. These things do happen, the atmosphere turns electric with premonitions of evil, and animals inexplicably behave differently. It was Thursday. The sky was mottled by the bitter cold, and the air was so murky your lungs hurt when you breathed. There were five days to go till Christmas, and everyone was starting to enjoy all that sentimental shit in the family hearth.

Loneliness has never stopped me from doing anything. I was convinced that Madrid would quench my longing for change, and I was charged with desire. Adolescent things. It was early, very early, not yet 8:00 a.m. Some bailiffs turned up at the circus, to carry out a sentence decided in Sabadell to repossess whatever they could find. Their faces were the languid faces of men who walk the world with the foul constipation life brings. They asked for Stéfano di Battista, and I rushed over to his caravan to alert him. He was already up and awake; I expect he’d been watching over his bottle of cognac all night, the bottom of which he was stroking when I walked in. He stank of decomposing flesh. It was the stench of death. “Some guys are here from the court and want to talk to you.” He stood and stared blankly and without a word stepped out to face his destiny. The bailiffs walked here and there, indicating, without a smidgen of pity, the goods to be impounded: the frame of the big top, the cages, animals included, the fences, the junk, the booths, and even the earthenware pots decorating the windows of some caravans.

I stayed out of it, watching them from the doorway of Pudgy’s covered wagon. Everything inside was muck: the furniture, the utensils, the decorations on the walls, all throwbacks to other eras. Everything kept in place by inertia, from the toilet lid to the dining-room light, from the broken freezer buzzing beside the bed to a strong box that revealed the mortal remains of its antique trade like a profaned grave. “The safe,” I told myself. I went over and started rummaging. Inside were dog-eared documents with mere nostalgia value, letters, maybe love letters, a cartridge belt and revolver with a rusty butt, and a polished dagger of the flashy kind Italian hit men wore strapped on the hip. A few thousand pesetas in an envelope perhaps bore witness to Di Battista’s wretched luck. The rest was filth, unburied dust. I thought of grabbing that envelope as my just reward and clearing off from that circus for good without saying a word. Nothing was keeping me there now, not even the zeal of my owner. I decided it was no time to linger, and when I was about to pocket the cash, Pudgy appeared, flanked by the bailiffs. “Youa tambene hai decidido betrayya mi, nano?” he asked with a whimpering laugh as if he’d gone crazy. “Ahh, no youa, figlio mio, you belongga to mi and owa mi obedenezza. ‘ere youa stay al mio sida tilla we rotta.”

“Get out of my way, Pudgy, and out of that doorway; I’m off, and off for good,” I announced, but he took no notice, grasped me by the neck, and kicked me with all his strength, buckling me over. “Porco animale. Feedda ze crows and zey’lla peck out i tuoi occhi. Migliore end la vita tua now so zi mondo don’ havva to standda la tua compagnia,” he croaked, pulling out the Fascist machete he kept in his safe. I jumped to the back of the caravan like a baby bunny and grabbed the first thing I found in his cubbyhole of a kitchen to defend myself — a pristine bottle of cognac. “Morire non fa male. Morire é dolce whenna don’ bene; youa see,” prattled a lunatic Di Battista to the amazement of the lawmen. Wanting to return the compliment, I threw the bottle at him with all my might and imprinted it on his face. The blow felled him amid a crashing of chairs and junk. Spittle and blood trickled from the corners of his mouth, and the bastard lapped it up with the tip of his tongue. My rage mounted, and to round off my heroic deed, I took the shattered bottom of the bottle and stuffed the shards into his mouth. He laughed with a bloodcurdling leer as if that were going to solve all his problems at a stroke. “Nano digraziato, I fuckka yourra motha per niente. An’ ze shelta I gavva youa, the eggsa youa swallowed at mi expensa neither. Go if youa vuoi, but qualche giorno you’lla ‘member mi and see ‘ow tutti gli sforzi to getta on in life werra en vanno. Youa comma from niente and will rittornare to niente and I willa be waitin’.”

More worried for their own safety than out of any respect for legality, the men of the law did nothing. I left that fool like a rag doll, within an inch of death, coughing his soul out, puking blood, defeated for eternity. Before I left, I indulged myself by perching on top of his body. The world from the vantage point of his entrails looked more beautiful and optimistic. Of course, that was a day with a difference, a day destined to pass into history; Providence had decreed it thus. That very same morning, as if devils were pulling him by his hair, Don Luis Carrero Blanco, President of the Spanish Government, was blown to bits. It was all fated. “Go fry your balls in hell,” I rasped as my parting shot.

I broke the yoke and whiffed the scent of victory. Exactly like Spain’s, my luck had just turned up a new path. A lone dwarf, undocumented, destitute, I faced an uncertain future, with no choice but to go for it.

A Scalextric loomed over Atocha, an eyesore of a monument erected in the name of the kind of progress that was revered then, a concrete and asphalt figure eight that has only bequeathed a few forlorn exhaust tubes to posterity. It immediately intrigued me. It’s the first thing I ever remember when I recall that nasty morning when I shivered so much my bones rattled like the whitest icicles. I didn’t hear the explosion, it had gone off by the time I arrived, but I did see the inhabitants of Madrid in a tremendous panic, terrified by the disaster like sheep abandoned by their shepherd. The savage wolf of destabilization had taken a surprise bite. Sirens were blaring everywhere, people walked out of work as the news of the admiral’s death spread. Children were hurriedly taken out of their schools by mothers scared of rebellion; they were in a tizzy, and their little ones were overjoyed by an event that released them from the routine boredom of classes. As the morning proceeded, rumors about the terrorist attack filtered through by word of mouth. I roamed the streets going nowhere in particular, delighted by a situation that enabled me to contemplate an unusual, cowering Madrid. While rich old ladies and sanctimonious crybabies locked themselves in their air-conditioned apartments in the Salamanca district, I ambled down the backstreets happy as a sandboy, relishing the apocalyptic charms of the metropolis and finally savoring the pleasure of being able to stroll around unseen even though I was so different. It was a scenario of dire emergency and blank faces. Those crowing over that murder couldn’t, however, show their bliss and had to be content with toasting the assassination like silent rats in their clandestine hideouts. Only denizens of the backstreets remained unfazed, as if they couldn’t care a fig about what had happened — denizens of the backstreets, the fauna and flora of the ragamuffin underclass, the police apparatus summoned from the ends of the fatherland to uphold the almighty inertia of peace, and yours truly, a dwarf.