Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

One day Slim threatened Ceferino Cambrón with death. He grabbed him by his threadbare shirt collar and threateningly clicked his tongue in his face, clicks that sounded like bones breaking. “You’re sinking deeper and deeper into that shit you keep preaching. It’s people like you who are to blame for fucking up Spain. Keep an eye out, because I’ll get you one of these days.” “Right, the one you ain’t got, you wretch,” came the defiant reply.

Slim was dead sure that by ordering me to accompany Ceferino, he’d sooner or later introduce me to his circle of contacts and I’d be able to scrutinize at will their clandestine meetings, get to know his peers, their names, jot down their addresses, and find out what they were up to, and who knows, I might also track down information essential for breaking up their conspiracies, starting with that visit by Santiago Carrillo it was so urgent to nip in the bud. That’s why he’d threatened him with grievous bodily harm; he’d hoped to arouse his ill will so he’d turn on me, a little wimp and butt of revenge he’d been handed on a tray and one entirely at his disposition. Snatching me from Slim’s circle of influence was no doubt the most precious payback Ceferino could ever imagine; making me an adept of his creed and getting me to reject One-Eyed to his face, thus setting an example to the ragamuffins who were the minions in his dominions, would strengthen him, and he’d have no need to abandon his own terrain, could retain his generous convictions, illuminated once and for all by the sovereign triumph of reason. At the very least, all that was what was running through Slim’s mind. “You take note of everything he tells you, get him to trust you, let him persuade you to renege on all of us, and we’ll settle our accounts with him when the time is ripe.” Old age rather than any diabolical spirit is what allowed One-Eyed to sniff around the stamens of the human soul and sup on their hidden pollen, just like that thug Satan is said to be.

The party locale was an old storeroom for kitchen and bathroom flooring and tiles. A bannisterless staircase connected the ground floor to the second floor of the building, a house with unrendered façades and a roof battered by the inclement weather winter inflicts on Madrid. It was situated on a side street behind Cuatro Caminos, very close to garages where the Municipal Transport Company parked its buses after midnight shutdown. In one corner of the locale, construction rubble was still gathering dust in a pile of boxes and plastic sacks; the rest was spick and span. It was lit up by various bulbs attached to cables hanging from the ceiling, and it was illumination worthy of the gallows; you’d have thought the members gathering there belonged to a creed from beyond the grave rather than any clandestine political party. Naturally warmer than that bleak waste you had to cross to reach it, the first floor was where the big names confabulated around three long tables swathed in a grimy, red cloth, its center decorated by the hammer and sickle. A dozen folding chairs scattered around were enjoyed by those attendees who managed to grab one and thus avoid standing during the interminable Friday-night meetings. Their exchanges were as dry as concrete and repeated ad nauseam by the privileged few who monopolized the right to speak. They talked of the strategy to follow to restore ownership of the means of production to the people, of revolution as the only viable method of political struggle, of the collectivization of agriculture, and the abolition of oppression through selective armed struggle — for every worker sacked, hang a boss. Then they chanted anthems, raised their fists, hugged and embraced, and off they went. I grasped little from the debates they engaged in, but, even so, one thing was clear enough: when the old crocks hogging the limelight started on about revolution, they did so full of nostalgia for their wasted youth, brows bristling in frustration that brimmed over into the wrinkles that furrowed their faces. They were simply phantoms from another era, at best lionized by a handful of ingenuous adolescents, people whose major achievement had been to survive. Another thing was clear: under that band of irascible old fogeys, Spain’s future would inevitably remain in the usual hands; I didn’t give a fuck.

I started going to the party locale, led by the hand of Cambrón, who, in his way, was happy with all that apocalyptic dissection of the way politics would be going. Demagoguery was basically his forte, stagnant thinking his bedrock, and communist doctrine his spiritual creed. All he lacked was the ability to levitate while brandishing a fist aloft. It was a different story out on the streets, where other energies were beginning to pulse, albeit slowly, with a very distinct take on the world. Past situations couldn’t be extrapolated to forge conjectures about the future, at least not right then. A new reality had to be created and not the embalmed version proposed by those charlatans deformed by the dismal darkness of clandestine life — though they didn’t realize that. Providence, meanwhile, had its own views on the matter, as we would soon see, including my future path, which is now drawing to a conclusion in your hands.

Nobody, not even those who attended the party meeting that evening, could fail to notice that the various political families sieving the dregs of power showed a latent interest in state reform. It was suspected that a deal was being done behind the backs of the people to shape the lines that would cement the framework of a new Regime that had yet to be built. Once final details had been signed, sealed, and duly orchestrated behind closed doors, the citizenry would be offered illusory powers of decision to endorse with its braying assent a process of transition that had been constituted beforehand. In fact, the government of the nation was secretly evaluating the political potential of an immediate referendum. The unknown factor was the stance the army might take when met with such a reduction in its authority, and the danger of insurgency its grievances might trigger. All in hock to the masters in Moscow, the orthodox communist groups that were then beginning to stick their snouts above the parapet of the sewer articulated a discourse around the keystone of a clean break. Their ranks openly galvanized to proclaim a third republic, this time of workers and toilers, rather than lawyers and orators like in the grisly version of ‘31 that set the stage for the definitive catastrophe of the left that was the bloodletting of the 1936 shooting party. Obscenities and trite jokes about the Bourbon proliferated, and the tricolor was advanced as a national symbol, not the red and yellow standard with the eagle nesting in the center. The supporters of the party whose mystic vision fired up Cambrón were totally opposed to reaching deals and compromises, and light years away from the good-natured pacts and other petty-bourgeois tittle-tattle one heard round and about; all they proposed was the need to arm the people so that the pariahs of this earth and the hungry legions could finally seize the opportunity to express their desires with bullets.

That night, five men and one woman sat round the table with the hammer-and-sickle cloth. Between them, they must have racked up at least five hundred years. They had a big audience, as befitted the occasion. Rather than holding the session upstairs, as they usually did, they’d opted to use the much bigger ground floor. It had been swept, the dust chased away, and the remnants of flooring and tiles heaped into one corner. To give the scenario the right atmosphere, they’d taken party emblems, symbols, and posters printed in Argentina out of the trunks. The light was as dim as ever, but the many cigarette tips being smoked lit up the dreary darkness.