Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

I don’t know whether the harangue is a genuine literary genre of the kind classified by academics in the black and white of their erudition, or if it is merely a fevered offshoot of oratory, but I can vouch for the fact that when it’s born in the belly and blossoms virgin on the lips of the person spouting without deadening rhetorical frills or nonsense that could send it off track, a harangue can scare anyone, more because of the cataclysms predicted than any vehemence of tone. Even so, I assure you that political harangues have never disturbed me, and even less so in the period I’m now describing to you when the specter of done deals hovering over our heads meant that all that saliva expended in revolutionary-style pantomimes — as dead as the proverbial doornail the moment they were spat forth — was wasted. I don’t remember a word of the harangue delivered by Faith Oxen that night. All I retain from that first encounter is the faded purple of an old woman’s eyes embedded like raisins among her face’s rococo wrinkles, and the resonant tone of her cavernous voice. After fists were raised — a forest of flesh and bone — and the seraphic lyrics of the Communist International chorused by that whole gathering, the event was concluded, naturally only after those assembled had been encouraged to continue demanding a revolutionary general strike and to maintain their cast-iron commitment to struggle against and defeat that species of “Francoist monarchy” imposed by the tyrant’s urge to continue forever.

Almost all those present, their hearts fired up by that hot air, noisily began to leave the building, without a care in the world, as if it had been a nephew’s christening party. A cold supper had been laid out on the upper floor for the speakers and bigger fish from party ranks. Those who’d been on the platform were already heading upstairs. At the end of the meeting, the people milling around Faith Oxen made it impossible to get near her, so I insisted to Ceferino that I must speak to her. Cambrón grabbed my shoulder and pulled me along until we reached the second floor. On the last step of the stairs, someone stopped us and refused us access, on the pretext that it was a closed-door meeting. Cambrón raised an arm and gestured to an individual who seemed to be bossing others around, whom he must have known, because we were immediately granted entry.

Generally people find dwarves to be repulsive. They immediately associate them with the world of the circus and a wretched life on the road; although there is some truth in that, the fact they may be right doesn’t give them carte blanche to act with contempt. Faith Oxen stood and looked at me in amazement when I started telling her about Gurruchaga, about the dedication in the book of poems, his arrest in Córdoba, and as a diabetic tear sweetened the whites of her eyes, she came over and patted me on the head, not without a certain degree of reserve, as if she wanted to alleviate my suffering with her laying on of hands. That night, she told me how Gurruchaga had been executed after being taken to a northern prison and given a summary trial for high treason carried out under military jurisdiction. She’d found out, so she told me, from a British historian she’d hobnobbed with in Havana, one who’d been collecting eyewitness accounts of political executions in order to write a book about repression in Fascist Spain. I was really upset and deeply moved when I heard her repeat the last words he uttered before the execution squad: “More worms will eat your leftovers, you motherfuckers,” a sentence of extraordinary beauty coming from a man who was usually so spare in what he said. It has to be a bad end when you see the bullet whizzing straight toward you to drill through your heart; it must be even worse when you don’t see it because you’re so terrified of dying. The tables were littered with Spanish omelets, chorizo and ham canapés, and plates of Manchego cheese and jamón serrano sliced into small morsels. Wine was a large demijohn of Valdepeñas whose only virtue was its high alcohol content. Some twenty or twenty-five people of those at the meeting must have stayed on and were now jabbering away with mouths full. I was struck by the huge array of political posters on the walls, with helmeted workers in overalls and peasants carrying scythes scandalously hogging the show as if they’d just finished an apocalyptic harvest. Perhaps in the end Esteruelas was right when he declared that everything now happening was the fruit of an international communist conspiracy against the unity of Spain. Cambrón was chomping on his food as I’d never seen him do with any meal at the Trinitarians’, and it was obvious he placated his hunger here with his fellow believers, and I can tell you that the way the expression on his face changed indicated it was a blissful communion more than a mere meal. When I saw him crunching with such panache, as if he’d never enjoyed the vanities of this world so wholeheartedly, I was reminded of the lines by Blas he used to recite when he played the bereft victim in the metro— like a wretched shipwrecked sailor moaning and swallowing sea as he swam —and I silently laughed myself silly, realizing that the foolish side of humanity isn’t necessarily betrayed by bodily expression but by what is said or thought, and even felt or suffered. I don’t know what moved her to do so, but Faith Oxen then introduced me to the rest of her party comrades as a companion skilled in the struggle against man’s exploitation of man, interpreting my life story as she thought fit, recounting how I’d suffered humiliation, persecution, and ostracism galore, and she asked those present to show solidarity toward me as she tenderly patted my undersized skull as one might treat a dog that’s been injured, a fool’s ideas, or a poet’s verses. For the first time in my life, apart from feeling humiliated, I felt exposed to people’s hypocritical sympathy, and hatred burnished with a veneer of pride that went to my brain, and that’s why when Blond Juana, coming on to me in public, loudly asked what my line of work might be, so everybody could hear, I brazenly retorted that I had two main lines, begging for alms in church doorways, and spending my earnings on whores, the pricey kind one finds on the Calle Doctor Fleming.

For months I attended classes on “theory” imparted in the party locale, not because I was hooked, as you’ll see from what I’m telling you, but hoping that such close contact would give me leads that might be useful to One-Eyed in his campaign to cleanse the nation. I learned about their ideas, sniffed through the ashes of their lives, and ran their errands, too, whatever I was bid — from buying toilet paper in a drugstore to delivering messages, from finding a pharmacist on late-night duty in order to purchase sanitary towels for a disciple in a tizzy because she’d run out, to giving out leaflets, stickers, and pamphlets — even at some personal risk. Madrid was simmering in an amazing way not even Esteruelas could have anticipated a short time ago. Agitation was rife on the streets; workers, students, and motley activists were daubing sidewalks with anti-Fascist slogans in favor of freedom. Clandestine plotting, instability, and terrorist actions by Basques or far-right extremists meant the people remained silent, because they weren’t sure what to say, rather than from any well-founded fear about losing their well-being. The people were ignorant, were used to being sidelined, cherished caution and mediocrity. A people sustained by a homely odor of fireside belches, a people with no critical awareness, no historical perspective, happy to slumber on in a frivolous life of routine and gossip. Their cowardly fear prevented them from seeing how the financial oligarchy and multinational capitalism, dismissing any decisions they might want to take and mocking any so-called popular sovereignty, had decided in advance how Spain would emerge as a democracy. I discovered things, heard rumors, mined nuggets of information I quickly passed on to One-Eyed when we agreed to meet in La Copa for a few shots of firewater before filling our gullets with the ever more dish-watery broth served up by the Trinitarians. “Dwarfy, you’re doing a good job, keep it up, I’ve got it from a good source that one of ours, by the name of Suárez, is going to lead the government, and you just watch how we’ll get rid of all this scum in one fell swoop,” and then, each bunny ran back to its burrow in the oasis of the Mansion, he bedded down with his nun, and I between the sheets with my obsessions, dwelling on all kinds of rude thoughts stirred by none other than Blond Juana.