Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

Carrero Blanco had risen toward the heavens like a saint levitating for the love of Jesus, except that he’d been elevated by plastic explosives that terrorists detonated as he drove down the Calle Claudio Coello on his way back from his usual morning mass. That was the morning I set foot in Madrid for the first time. I alighted from a down-at-heel van that had jolted its way from Alcalá de Henares, flitting through one dormitory town after another on the city periphery, where the modern life of those who’d migrated from their villages in search of a better life was fleshing out — a washing machine, a fridge, a ticket to see Atleti play in the Manzanares on Sunday, a down payment on the apartment, and a pay packet at the end of the month. They were people with tunnel vision, dazzled by the array of the latest electric goods. Over the years, they would feel disillusioned as they watched on powerlessly while the fangs of working-class unemployment sank into the carrion flesh of their children, emaciated by drugs and awakened for good from the welfare dream. I walked at random through city streets still reacting to the morning’s terror. Like a Ulysses yet to drop anchor on his perpetual journey into the void, the wailing of sirens filled me with a strange spiritual peace I was experiencing for the first time. I’d never return to the circus. I’d never again taste a hard-boiled egg, even if I was starving to death. Those two thoughts encouraged me in my wanderings. When feelings of destruction can channel their flow, hatred thickens and sets, and the emulsion produced is at once bitter and splendid.

The admiral’s car was reduced to a mass of twisted metal — a veritable potpourri of incinerated scrap. Special cranes had to be brought in to shift it from the ledge where it landed. For several months, Madrid people amused themselves by parodying the attack, and that involved folding a paper napkin of the kind you find in bars into a rectangular chimney shape. They’d stand it up on a table and set light to the top end. When the flame had burnt all the paper, ashes, as black as those of the incinerated car, spiraled through the air, reenacting the macabre trajectory of the admiral’s car until it crashed in smithereens against the Jesuit monastery on the Calle Claudio Coello. That sarcastic jape went by the name of “The Slow-Motion Death of a President.” People’s cruelty has no bounds and thus becomes the common heritage of humanity.

One-Eyed Slim demonstrated that gradual levitation of the paper napkin to me, that itinerant bum I met the day my luck changed and profited his. “Hey, dwarfy, look how Carrero Blanco’s scrap metal ascended to the heavens,” and he performed the parody on an old marble-top table in La Copa de Herrera, a low dive near Cascorro where he’d established the center for his miscreant ways. That was a month after the assassination, a month into my new life, prelude to so many others still waiting in the wings.

One-Eyed Slim begged his way through life with a rare dignity seemingly inspired by some remotely noble blood in his veins. What’s more, he prided himself on being one of the war-wounded, and that earned him the respect of the faithful who on Sunday went to the churches where he hung out. One would have readily gone along with such a ploy, if he hadn’t been so keen to act spitefully, when the feeling took him, toward those who were his vassals in the mire. The socket of his left eye was a shining pit, a scoured-out hole that was home to the grit of sleep. He deliberately didn’t wear a patch, in order to scare off men and arouse the sympathy of women so they’d dig deeper into their purses. Some reckoned it was a war wound, others, his rivals galore, said he’d been born one-eyed, and that if he didn’t cover it, it was to make believe the reds had blown it out with a bullet and to display it for commercial ends in place of the medal of bravery in battle that, quite rightly, he was never awarded. “What’s a dwarf doing scratching around underground?” he asked the first time he bumped into me.

With next to no money, no acquaintances in the city, and no means of identification to accredit my existence in that red-taped human zoo, I could really do very little to subsist in the inhospitable Madrid where I’d just fetched up. By midafternoon, the cold night air was already stirring, and the polyester sweater I’d been wearing since early morning felt totally inadequate. My bones cut into my flesh like so many nails, I was tired of wandering aimlessly, and I decided to descend into the heat of the metro. It wasn’t such a bad idea, given that it saved me from freezing to death, and squatting amongst the rubbish in the passageways, Providence sprung a trap to set up one of the most crucial encounters in my life: I collided into Slim.

After a sequence of seven nonstop trips from one end of Line One to the other, I got off at José Antonio and decided to stretch out on one of the platforms. I curled up and fell fast asleep, axed by sheer exhaustion after the day’s events. Irrational dreams invaded my head, and I began to see overripe blackberries hanging in bunches from Doris’s secret folds. Huge and crystallized in chocolate, like fruit desserts in Aragon. Wintry ice swept down the tunnels, blown by subterranean currents of air. It was a freezing cold sewer, striated by shards of solitude. I must have been shivering for some time when the hot tip of something began to meander over my cheeks. Suddenly the blackberries in my dreams seemed juicier, rising to boiling point and starting to sting my palate. I woke with a start. The bastard was drawing the blue flame of his lighter across my cheeks. “Things must be really going to the dogs if dwarfs are going underground.”

Late into the night, when the metro was finally closing its doors, One-Eyed Slim liked to wander through that network of subterranean labyrinths searching for leftovers daytime traffic had dropped. He rummaged and snuffled, and traveled hither and thither, from Atocha to Tribunal, from Palos de Moguer to Ventas, always well out of sight of the prying eyes above ground. He knew every nook and cranny in the old metro like the back of his hand and got in and out of the trapdoors in the ventilation shafts with sublime skill, like a suburban escape artist. I cuffed his lighter away; my skin smelled scorched. “What are you doing down here?” he asked. His face was frightening it was so ugly, one of nature’s bogeymen, you might say, marooned in wasteland beneath the earth. Still sleepyheaded, and at a loss for words, I decided to tell him I’d run away from a circus. He must have thought the idea was hilarious, because he started splitting his sides with guffaws that showed what a buffoon he was. “You’ll freeze to death here, dwarfy, you’ve not got a single rag to wrap round you. When the wind whistles down the tunnels in the early morning, it’s icy, and you’ll kick the bucket before very long without an overcoat. Come with me, if you like, to a place I’ve got. Outside the grises are stirring up shit, and it wouldn’t be very clever if we got picked up by those cops. Come on, I’ll get you some food and a good bed so you can have a decent night. Where I’m going to take you, the nuns will keep us warm with their farts.”

Providence continually weaves together the loose knots of destiny, and we are mercilessly subject to its whims. I followed in that man’s footsteps down pitch-black tunnels, not particularly thrilled by the idea he was guiding me, until we finally surfaced from a metal grille leading to a small garden in the Plaza de Jacinto Benavente, right opposite the Teatro Calderón. En route I did at least feel that, despite his horrific face, Slim was fashioned from rare, out-of-fashion noble stock, more akin to the proud and needy, and to noblemen without honor straight out of the selvage of some bygone century, that had little in common with the era of protest and agitprop beginning to make its presence felt in that sprawling human agglomeration Spain’s capital was becoming.