Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

Blue on white, his shirt cuffs spilt out onto a marble-topped table in La Copa de Herrera, covering hands that Esteruelas rubbed together against the cold while he waited for One-Eyed to come. I wasn’t expecting to find him there; Slim hadn’t tipped me off about his possible presence. It was an evening, one of those very nocturnal January evenings when the moon is so white it looks like pure ice. As ordained by habit, I’d dropped by La Copa to review the day’s takings with Slim and to down a few shots of rough anisette before heading off to eat Trinitarian stew. When he saw me walk in, Esteruelas gave me an intrigued glance, as if dredging from the sewer of his memory a distant, lingering reminiscence of me. I went up to the bar and asked after Slim. “He’s not come yet,” Señor Antonio whispered in that hoarse tone cigarettes give a voice. “That fellow there has been waiting for him for at least half an hour and has smoked almost a whole packet of Ducados.” Esteruelas was still rudely staring at me, nastily focusing on my misshapen protuberances, dwelling on them with relish; he kept that up a good while, until he couldn’t resist it any longer and summoned me to his table with a contemptuous wave of his index finger, “Hey, dwarf, come here.” I went over, not really afraid but wary of any danger proximity to him might put me in. “Don’t I know you, Snow White?” he asked, arching his eyebrows in an unpleasant, know-all fashion. “I do know you, but you must tell me the wherefore and when.” “I worked as a dwarf in the Stéfano circus,” I answered honestly, my voice shaking in fear like a man who knows he is trapped, “you interrogated me seven or eight years ago in Burgos, but we’d met before that.” Esteruelas snarled obtusely and took a last drag on his cigarette through a gap between his teeth. The smoke poured out from deep in his nostrils. Then he started remembering. He recalled aloud the far-off arrest of Gurruchaga, made special mention of how he stank like a pig, and didn’t dally there but immediately went on to the more scabrous case of handsome Bustamente. Perhaps from the tone of his comments, I surmised that Esteruelas had known from the onset my betrayal was a fake, yet that hadn’t prevented him from taking an innocent man prisoner. What’s more, he’d derived great pleasure from not giving him the help he was due, because it allowed him to close down that murder case there and then, a feat you can bet brought him substantial kudos, and because he also enjoyed seeing others suffer unjustly. “It was brave of you to inform on him, Snow White, because that faggot swore he’d get you. He spent the whole night screaming at the cell walls that he’d live to see the day he’d kill you. It took a good beating to cool him down.” He went on to tell me he’d got twenty years and had refused to say anything in self-defense. Esteruelas’s statement was enough to ensure he was put away. He was abandoned to his fate, and that sounded strange, knowing Mr. Handsome, though it’s true some people change their attitude as life repeatedly mistreats them, or he might have had some other good reason to keep quiet. “Twenty years is no proper sentence for a self-confessed murderer. In other times, they’d have slammed him up against a wall and peppered him with bullets. Twenty years pass quickly enough. The judges took into consideration the dead man’s perversions, and that’s why they reduced his time inside as much as they could. There’s no God that can stop time, right, Snow White? It would have been better for you if they’d made a sieve out of him, because if twenty years fly by fast to begin with, you just wait and see what happens if they get the general amnesty everyone is calling for; as far as I’m concerned, the street will be flooded with rabble, and your skull will get the revenge bashing that faggot swore he’d give it.”

I’m not sure whether Esteruelas was trying to have fun or scare me, but his words didn’t dampen my spirits. Mr. Handsome was a distant memory, and I felt protected from any threats by the shadow of Slim. Esteruelas’s lips dictated silence, he put a hand on his stomach, swallowed air, and, all of a sudden, let out a thunderous belch that echoed off the walls of La Copa before slipping up my nose. “Time simply flies,” he resumed philosophically, “and I’m not as healthy as I was, or as nimble. I digest food slowly, and any upset builds up gases.” He paused to think for a moment. “That other circus character, that hoity-toity bugger, who smelled sky high of shit, he was a friend of yours, too, wasn’t he?” I can’t think why, but the dedication to the book of poetry suddenly passed through my mind and I couldn’t think what to say. Then I swallowed and said he wasn’t.

That man, who’d spent his whole life sinisterly licking the backsides of the powerful, when he believed he’d finally seated his own butt on the best can in town, at the top of the political-social brigade, found himself threatened by times that were unstoppably a-changing. That bastard had never been very flexible; even as a youngster he’d been rocked by huge belches that left leaden dregs putrefying in the hollows of his mind. He was a piece of shit with a paunch who liked to generate unhappiness, a man who crippled himself and was forever dissatisfied because he thought himself better than everyone else; he buttered up the great and the good, played the tame poodle, went toadying and regaled their ears with praise, simply knee-jerking in his post, when in reality he hated their guts and would have royally stuffed them down the loo he’d just used and rubbed their faces in the feces they deserved. All people of that ilk are the same. Señor Antonio came over to the table with a fresh jug of wine he held by the neck. “Did anybody ask you for a drink, old man?” Esteruelas spat in his face in a ridiculous vaunting of authority. “No,” replied Señor Antonio. “So get back to where you came from and leave us in peace.” Señor Antonio cowered, turned round, didn’t stand up for himself, walked back behind the bar, and busied himself with his chores. Once he was there, Esteruelas raised an insidious hand, snapped his fingers three times, and shouted to him to bring us a drink. The old guy obeyed without saying a word. The air one chewed in La Copa tasted staler and staler; outside it began to rain. Esteruelas enjoyed watching the old guy pour his drink out. Of course, a single stubborn man can sustain the structure of a political regime; on the other hand, his disappearance guarantees its collapse. When the admiral was blown sky-high, it was impossible the regime could continue. Nobody of any standing dared pick up the baton, and Franco was now a corpse. Perhaps the specter of old age or some figureheads’ desire for a quiet life weighed heavily in the minds of those riding in the chariot of power. Never before had thrombophlebitis decapitated a state so definitively. People whose brains had stagnated, like Esteruelas himself, now drifted aimlessly down the byways of the bureaucracy, groping with their blind men’s sticks, and they never grasped that the times were dancing to another tune. They sniffed the air like wild animals, then began to retch and didn’t realize their own stench was the cause. In any case, Esteruelas hid all that under the strong smell of the black tobacco he chain-smoked, and rather than expelling the miasmas generated by his own putrefaction, he puffed out a potent, sweetish smoke that energized the brain. The bell over the door announcing customers tinkled. Slim had just walked in. Sopping wet, he was cursing under his breath the downpour that had caught him in the waste ground near Francisco el Grande. Initially, as he shook the water off, he didn’t notice our presence, though he soon stopped scowling when he noticed Esteruelas sitting at one of the tables. “What a surprise to see you here, Señor Inspector, we weren’t expecting you. Antonio, pour this gentleman a drop of the hard stuff.” “Forget it, I’ve got all I require,” retorted the other man. “Come and sit down, I need to speak to you, and don’t call me Inspector again in public, you idiot.” “Yes, Señor Inspector, whatever you command; it’s force of habit that betrays me,” replied Slim, flaunting the deferential bows with which he flattered those he reckoned were above him in rank. “Do you know him ?” asked Esteruelas, pointing his fingertip at my face. “Yes,” came back Slim, “Goyo works for me; he can be trusted. Goyo, say hello to Señor Inspector, Señor Inspector is a very important person in the Ministry of the Interior; I’ve mentioned him to you before.” Seeing how irritated Esteruelas was at Señor Inspector being shoved in his face, I simply looked down and shut up. He said nothing about our past encounters and ignored me until almost the end of the meeting. He was a past master at the game these bastards carry in their blood: hiding what the left hand does from the right and vice versa; I expect that’s why he met a bad end. They talked for a quarter of an hour.