Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

In the matter of shelter and sustenance, I’ve already mentioned that we bedded down in the rambling old “Mansion” for the needy run by the Trinitarians, a place that was extraordinarily clean and exceptionally well ventilated where the broth ran like liquid gold. Slim signed me up the night we met, and with the paid agreement of the nuns, I set up in a nave on the upper floor where One-Eyed had a comfy boudoir for his own private use. When the rigors of icy winter turned the street into a freezer or the sun’s brazier melted it down, the Trinitarian Mansion gave our carcasses the right shelter to keep our bones shipshape. True enough, the nuns saw to the elemental wants of the needy out of Christian charity, but it would be more to the point if we added that the princely treatment Slim and his supporters received from the Trinitarians was down to an accord of the flesh Slim had entered into with Sister Marta, the nun who was the one really shepherding that motley crew of chancers. For a bit of this and that on the side, she moved Rome and Santiago and even went to her hierarchy to soften attitudes, shape wills, and argue our corner way beyond the call of rules and regs that certainly made a case for giving shelter, though with the necessary restraint to ensure it didn’t turn into a five-star hostelry for three hundred and sixty-five nights of the year. Apart from cultivating the joys of her vagina, Sister Marta extracted from Slim sufficient dosh for the good running of the institution, and, naturally, as the delicious food and spick-and-span shine of everything was there for all to see, the nun’s mother superiors felt it wondrous she could offer such splendors for so little outlay, and they let her get on with it without poking their noses in too much, else they might have smelled something fishy, or worse still, the whiff of sperm emanating from her fake holiness. Like Slim, I loved the fact the place was comfy, but also that it was so central — four minutes from the Puerta del Sol, three from the Rastro, two from plazas Benavente and Tirso de Molina, and a mere gob of spit away from that hotbed of whoredom by the name of the Calle Espoz y Mina. I made that Mansion my home, and the respect I began to be shown there perhaps partly healed the sores suppurating within my sense of dignity, though it was true enough that the reverence I was held in wasn’t prompted by myself but by fear of what Slim’s fury might unleash, because, as everybody knew, apart from practicing the trades of fraudster, pickpocket, and bag-snatcher, he’d cemented profitable relationships with leading figures in several ministries, and thus, so it was said, he’d managed to cloak in silence his various operations in exchange for money or favors, and, consequently, if he wanted, he only had to ask to get a hit man to snuff out an enemy, a request that would be granted on the spot, via an “accident,” bad luck, or police pressure. “We’ll feel the pinch the day people stop offering Christian charity,” sighed Slim. “The way the wind’s blowing bodes no good for us, dwarfy, and it’s a sure thing that all this is a dead duck. It’s a real shame, because in the end we kept everything in the family. God knows who’s going to take our place and what rules they’ll make; look what they’re already saying,” and he pointed to the front of a house where a Communist groupuscule had daubed a slogan on the wall—“The people’s sovereignty is born in the struggle.”

Slim had a very hierarchical, Manichean view of the world according to which any act or individual was judged in advance and slotted into one of the critical categories that, from his own experience, he’d stored on the shelves of his mind. This enabled him to reach decisions quickly when it was time to filch someone’s wallet or tackle a more testing task. “That guy’s a sucker, that one’s got a screw loose, the one there’s a weirdo, and the other, a prat,” were his favorite turns of phrase when it came to labeling people. This perfect, harmonious system, almost on a par with the solar one, helped me no end to straighten out my thinking and stop being dragged aimlessly through life, as had been my wont. At the time, I’d yet to realize that Providence organizes everything and that we should justify the outcomes of our behavior in the light of its designs. The established order, or at least the one established by the Movement, had helped Slim to survive, and he wasn’t prepared to let it go up in flames on any altar erected in the name of the fallacious progress of the people. Slim intuited that the Regime was near to collapse and would take his way of life with it to the drab kingdom of gray ash. He smelled it in his nostrils, savored it in his mouth. “When Franco hits the bucket, the reds will crawl out of their holes and make our balls itch with the shit from their doctrines. Just imagine a world run by workers, dwarfy. That’s the best these buggers can come up with: do the same here as they do in Russia, everyone godless, drinking from the same glass and shitting in the same pan, and then, when you die, into a mass grave so your bones can rot alongside everyone else’s,” and so he’d harangue, anisette after anisette, in an alcoholic rant that was as rambling as it was depressing.

Bit by bit, like the late blooms of a cement springtime, slogans appeared on the most down-at-heel walls of the city. They were words of struggle or desire that clearly demonstrated how, beyond officially recognized reality, other clandestine ways of thinking existed and sooner or later were bound to surface. Quite wrongly, Slim was of the view that the leftwing ideology dissidents generally espoused automatically excluded charity as a valid means to redistribute wealth and dictated hard toil and the sweat of one’s brow as the only route to perfecting humanity. He was by now of an age when he couldn’t contemplate adapting to any new crap that life hadn’t sent his way till now, so all those burgeoning freedoms made him see red. “I’d send these buggers off to another Valley of the Fallen to spend the rest of their lives breaking rocks rather than painting the walls with all that shit. The sov-er-eignty of the peo-ple comes from the strug-gle,” he exclaimed, ridiculing the graffiti syllableby syllable. “Fuck you, the only sovereignty they’re getting are the bullets that’ll do them to death, and that’s what we should be doing to that rabble now,” and he’d spit at the wall in a real fury, and whenever he did so, the green gob would hit his target of the sickle, in the middle of the hammer. But the day-to-day side of our life wasn’t simply sustained by charity. It was also about pickpocketing, taking loot from workers, or snatching stuff in big, mass public gatherings. It was a real joy to see One-Eyed snaffling wallets in the full light of day. With his guile and the luck that always came his way, I’d have sworn he’d never meet the bad end he did, but things happen as Providence decides, and one can do little or nothing to keep its whims at bay. We went to other pagan shrines for such ends: to the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, where people worshipped a ball in a distinctive display of white magic; to the Atocha station, a genuine sanctuary for the hapless flock from Hispanic territories; or to the Las Ventas bullring, cathedral par excellence of toreros and an exceptional place for thievery and other jiggery-pokery. There, when I’d slipped in through the dead bulls’ corral, I saw Paco Camino cross himself on some of his best afternoons — fantastic flourishes with the first cape, rock-firm mettle at the moment of truth, the red cape to the fore to meet his fate, despondent as a god feeling sorry for himself, until he slowly completed the task with a single, pristine thrust of his sword. Any rally swarming with people, any flux of humanity sufficed for our presence to be felt: rush hour in the metro, the Three Kings Day parade, sales weeks in department stores, and later in the decade, when the transition — still not described as such — was creeping into the consciousness of the citizenry like a stupid, catchy hymn (freedom, freedom, no fury, keep your fear and fury to yourself, because now we’ve got freedom, and if not, we soon will have), political rallies and demonstrations authorized by the civil government. And no doubt there was, at least for me — just hear me out — not the cardboard, flimsy freedom that’s so vaunted and that the man on the street mistakes for the line to the ballot box, but that other, absolute freedom, the one granted by that fine perennial truth known as money. Deny me that now with death, if you like.