Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

I know you’re here to enjoy the spectacle of my death. I was warned from the start, but I always refused to take any notice and happily got on with making my fortune. We creatures of flesh and blood like to hide our heads in the day-to-day rather than courageously confront our awareness and the extent of chaos. Poets, fools, and dogs can intuit the worlds beyond and evoke them as best they can before the contemptuous gaze of ordinary mortals: the ones speak of fresh bouquets or funeral wreathes, the others slaver endlessly, and the poor animals howl at the moon on windswept nights until a local wakes up and hurls a stone at them to silence their whines. You may think you now understand the essential moments from my past, but you don’t know the details that betray the keys to the here-and-now or the reason for your presence in my life. You still know nothing, not even the role you are playing in this farce. You aren’t aware, say, that Providence decided on a whim to make me rich in a vulgar, if not ridiculous, manner: selling home delivery pizzas. It could have engineered my winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune from an aunt in South America, but it didn’t do either. Things happen as they do, and we can do little or nothing to change their course. Commissioner Belinda Dixon spent the whole of tonight hammering away at me with this scatological desire of hers for me to contemplate the swellings welling around her private parts. She refused to taste the cocks’ combs, on the excuse that she found the texture repulsive, and when she saw me dispatching them wholesale, she whispered about risky backstreet butchers. “Offal ruins arteries and spawns pus. Better not eat anymore,” she said, “you’ve had enough to last the rest of your life.” I told her I’d not intended to go to the dinner, that I’d been planning to fly to London to spend Christmas with my son when an irresistible urge had changed my mind at the last minute and that was why I was sitting there next to her, enjoying her company at that gala banquet offered by the Meredith Brothers Foundation. She then asked me if I believed in fate; I had no choice but to answer that I did now.

I lost my appetite after so many cocks’ combs. The wine didn’t go down too well, either. The maître d’ lost his cool when he saw course after course going by and me not taking a bite, and he came to enquire contritely whether I didn’t like the dinner. I told him I did but not anymore.

The commissioner got embroiled in a long conversation with a brawny young second-rater sitting to her right. I heard her recounting her tale of wondrous pomades and arterial lesions. The guy, out of politeness, followed her spiel, perhaps rather worried that a leery woman like Madame Dixon might get mixed up in his promising career future. She saw straightaway that he was a greenhorn who could only offer the illusion of youth and resumed her onslaught on me: “Gregorio, when you defecate, do you note the color of your stools? Do you watch out for blood?”

I reflected for a few moments on the absurdity of my situation, then acted as accommodatingly as I could; that encounter must have been arranged in advance, it all fitted perfectly — the decision to defer my trip, the dinner venue, the cocks’ combs, the commissioner and her scatological leanings. In the end I decided a good romp rewards the exercise of patience. All in all, it was my last night and my last supper. I realized that.

Though he was unaware of the significance of what he said, Gurruchaga reckoned that the meaning of transcendence was to be found in excrement. Slim, however, saw transcendence from a more commonplace point of view, with angels on the wing, heavenly clouds, and an almighty God who had undoubtedly helped us win the war. I expect you boast that you know yourself, but you do not know that you are simply one puppet more whose strings destiny is tweaking, and, immersed in the deepest darkness, you try to play at being free and imagine your life follows the dictates of your will. Perhaps you even gamble on the pools in the secret hope that chance, that euphemism for fate, will bring you a million so you can devote your life to doing whatever you please, freed from the sweat of toil. I thought along exactly the same lines until I began to receive the first anonymous messages. Then reality started to crumble around me—“We’re going nowhere like this. I’m up to here with you. Either you keep to your own story line, or this will turn into an open-ended pastiche. Do you get what I’m saying, do you grasp what I’m planning?”

I tried hard to believe my commercial triumphs were solely the result of my own efforts. I tried to cling to the idea that the blight nature had brought to my physique would find compensation in the social success brought by wealth; I plunged frantically into the world of business, worshipping risk, loving profits, and idolizing the playthings of capital to my heart’s content. This was a time when financial euphoria ran riot, aided and abetted civil-war-style economic tactics. I plunged in body and soul, scaled enviable peaks, reached magnificent glaciers on high, and settled down there. Only fleeting memories remained of Spain on its nerve edges, the Spain of protest songs and street fighting, like flatulence waiting to be expelled.

At dawn on November 20, 1975, the wailing of Trinitarian nuns dragged us naked from our beds, our sexes still erect, still swinging on the hinges of sleep like the mournful clappers beginning to clamor across Madrid’s bell-bottomed sky. The Generalísimo had died. The screeching nuns airing the catastrophe in the passageways blew the sleep dust from our eyes and aroused us from our slumbers. We threw our thieves’ rags on and dashed downstairs to the dining room, where breakfast was waiting. The nuns in the kitchen had prepared hot chocolate that wafted a comforting aroma up our nostrils. The paupers in the institution were already sitting at a table, with blank expressions, as if that solemn moment for the fatherland somehow involved them. Before he started devouring his breakfast, I noticed One-Eyed Slim’s right hand draw a lingering In-the-Name-of-the-Father on his chest that I felt was sincere enough, even if it was one of his stock-in-trade tricks, and that led me to reflect that, despite everything, beyond creed and circumstance, death’s august claws can make even the most wretched of this earth feel sorrow. Sister Marta came over to our table to give us the funeral chit-chat while we were busy dunking churros in our hot chocolate. “It happened in the early hours, from what they’re saying on the radio. Poor little man. He was as wizened as a raisin. He is now with God in his Glory, but what will become of us without him?” Slim soothed her with a manly gesture, assuring her that while he was alive, the Trinitarian nuns had nothing to fear. Poor innocent. They didn’t need him at all and gleefully went on with their business the day that a bad end brought him his final reckoning. A right mess — the pancakes with caramel syrup he was chewing suddenly mixed together with the gray matter in his head because of the explosion. It looked like a wasteland of limbs amputated by the wave of expansion, a higgledy-piggledy mess glazed by the fallout from the cafeteria. “Whoever they are, the dead deserve a reverence and a minute of prayer,” Slim continued, “even more so if they were hated in their lifetime. Dwarfy, the day I die, you must do what’s right and proper by my soul. Pray seven Credos, and remember how well I treated you.”

The day I discovered that bits of his flesh had been splattered through the air, my first instinct was to call him a bastard, and though I’d never wished it on him when he was alive, I must confess I was overjoyed that death, that endemic scourge, had finally swept him away.