Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

Slim said he didn’t have a dream, but you can bet he was lying. He was a great cynic, a Stoic of deceit encamped in the underworld. As the months went by, he got increasingly involved in politics. He was drawn in by the friendships he’d contrived in higher spheres. They had to have recourse to him, they were so at a loss confronting the changes underway. Slim traipsed the streets, knew what was cooking, and prided himself on being personally acquainted with even the pigeons in the eaves. The Regime’s backwoodsmen and their draconic drive for démodé purges channeled him into a morass of political conspiracy. In exchange for his favors, they guaranteed he could continue exploiting the economic space of poverty and benefiting unpunished from extortion and thievery in the city. Pains in the ass, clinkers for the dustbin of history, tatters from the past. That way of life couldn’t be sustained for any longer without a power structure to prop it up. I knew only too well that Esteruelas was behind this secretive maneuvering and that he was the one extracting the most from Slim’s sneaking around in such a devious, rather than effective, manner. Nonetheless, One-Eyed hardly mentioned the inspector and, after Franco’s demise, seemed to have dropped him off his radar. Public institutions were in a pickle, and everyone was waiting on the adjacent department to take up a definitive position in order to follow suit or criticize. Nobody lurking in the corridors of power dared make a move, raise a finger, or clear out files — just in case — not even those gathering dust and sleeping the sleep of the just in the Movement’s catacombs. Esteruelas was the kind who turned a blind eye to an outrage simply for a chance to climb one step up the ladder, and who prevaricated with his eyes shut. After so many years squandering his youthful ambitions, wielding a billy club from one end of the country to the other, he’d now reached the center of power from which the juicy tidbits were handed out, and he could see the whole system collapsing before his eyes; his great expectations were increasingly going down the chute, and he was more scared than ashamed that he’d lose the little prestige he’d garnered in that swamp hole. I imagine it’s possible he hoped deep down his efforts would shore up a hierarchical society whose orderliness derived from the principle of authority and respect instilled by a regime of repression that constituted the key elements in the manner of understanding society that the cane had inculcated into him from childhood. Achieving that was out of the question, and his concern for the fatherland only led him to a bad end. May God deal duly with his evil doings. As often happens in times of disarray when all that’s rotten rises to prominence, Slim fished his biggest catches from the muddy waters of the Transition. That’s why when a beggar stood up to him or an adversary wanted to pounce on a square inch of his power, a police van, at an order from on high, would turn up and the individual concerned would be beaten to pulp and invited by kicks galore to reside for a while in the Carabanchel jail for, say, endangering the domestic security of the State. Slim’s field of influence was notorious, and, as his figurehead, I spread it thick on the four winds; subsequently, those in our guild looked on me warily, never stood in my way in the slightest, and always maintained a proper distance, for fear I might teach them a lesson they most probably deserved. I went scheming and thieving through the city with a domicile established in the Trinitarian stewpot and a permanent operational base in La Copa de Herrera. As a general rule, and except for the jerks whose wallets we nicked, we dealt with few people who weren’t involved in the brotherhood, and that’s why the mass action surrounding the perfumes and the indignation my mistreatment sparked in those young enthusiasts gave me food for thought for a good long while. Perhaps the world they wanted wasn’t as bad as Slim prophesied. Perhaps the responsibility for oppression and injustice wasn’t theirs or their cause’s but rested in fact on the shoulders of those other guys who’d organized a rotten, bloated society for their own benighted benefit. Perhaps the solution would be to give Francoism the boot for good and start putting one’s trust in the generous, gloved hand offered by democratic freedoms. What I’m telling you may sound infantile and small-minded, but just remember how people at the time were naïve, ill-informed, and had only just stopped believing in God. That Spain I’m describing was very different to the one today that’s so coarse and consumerist and has pushed us into Europe for the bowl of lentils of the new welfarism. Madrid remained an insular city, stinking of miracles and ruffs. The grimy races had yet to hit its streets as Slim predicted they would. It was unusual to come across a Chinese person and even more unusual to stumble into any black people on the Avenida José Antonio. Not even the Moors showed their heads, for fear of being deported back to the mosques of their ancestors in retaliation for the episode of the Green March. The political ban on anything foreign had stopped the mafias from setting up as they had in other latitudes, but South Americans would soon be here touting their cellophane-wrapped roses by night until the Chinese brought their syringes in and sent them packing, and then the heroin trade would transform the social tissue of street life and mess up the terrain for the glorious trade of small-time crooks. In the Madrid I’ve been describing, the guild monopolized the exploitation of all that shady business. Only riffraff who occasionally beheaded a housewife with a carving knife or took a hatchet to an old geezer to steal his wallet might perhaps unsettle the natural order of things now or then; such occurrences were bygone habits from an era doomed to die, and didn’t abound. Slim claimed he had no dreams, but that’s impossible. Everybody dreams, even the dead, who dream of the life that was truncated. A few days ago I had a dream, and you can bet it was a premonition. Let me tell you about it.

It was very light and warm. I could see myself strolling through an unknown hillside city similar to those lovely Italian Renaissance towns where houses cluster one above another to create strikingly beautiful urban mosaics. I was walking on a slope shaded by the crowns of huge magnolia trees when I suddenly found myself on the edge of a small plaza, three of whose sides formed a horizon of façades sheathed in green moss. These ramshackle, noble houses seemed to speak to each other in a language forged in an era when honor, dignity, or a man’s word perhaps constituted the marks of identity of mortals. They were conversing, I imagine, about past glories or loves defeated by decrepitude brought on by the passage of time. On the side of the plaza that wasn’t lined by houses, a huge wall kept the sea at bay. Waves surged tempestuously, crashed down on that supernatural parapet, and heaving waters sent foam eddying through the air to caress the edges of the flagstones on the opposite side of the plaza. Some men were enjoying a relaxed swim under the intense blue sun warming the sea. On the other side of the waves, in shadowy arcades, a few ancient shops were opening their doors to customers. A strange man with a book under his arm stood in the entrance to an elegant café, wearing a houndstooth check jacket. He looked vaguely familiar. I lumbered down to the plaza, striding toward where the man was waiting. I said something, I don’t remember what, perhaps I asked him for the time of day, and then became fascinated by the sea extending behind me, not realizing it couldn’t possibly exist. As absorbed as I was contemplating that wonder, I did still notice the way the foam the crashing waves created reshaped itself into eddies of words that threaded together on the parapet to form astounding texts that told the story of my life. Suddenly I wanted to plunge in; I was being dragged along by an irresistible force. Dazzled by the peaceful turbulence of the blue water, I stripped off my clothes, ready to dive in straight away and feeling extremely happy about the prospect. Then that man addressed me. “Don’t swim,” he said. “These are the Stygian waters that end men’s existence, that give the final full stop to their words.” I didn’t understand his warning, or preferred to ignore him, and threw myself headfirst into the depths of the abyss. That was when I woke up. I could still taste the saltiness of that strange liquid on my tongue. Blue as ink, it nevertheless tasted of rust, like human blood.