Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

Toward the end, the old girl’s palate, like her blood, turned sticky and sugary, and she recklessly stuffed it with any cake, tart, tidbit, or chocolate her gums could mash. She made me tour the city’s cake shops searching for homemade sponge cakes, crystallized flaky pastries, and fondant chocolates. At the time, it was unusual to find that kind of sweet offering, and I often had to work miracles to find any, to the point of being forced to humiliate myself in certain exclusive establishments. When they saw me walk into their hoity-toity shops with polished, gleaming windows that made them look like anterooms to paradise, they’d invite me to leave, afraid I’d scare off their clientele, and I only managed to avoid such a fate by the crude resort — being at the end of my tether — of flashing the bundles of thousand-peseta bills with which I’d pay for their products. Faith Oxen repaid these offerings with treats for me, and if I’d brought anything with merengue, cream, or icing, she’d first anoint my naked skin with a drop for me to try, just in case it had gone off; she was kinky like that, the old hag.

On balmy spring evenings when the swifts were mewling, Faith Oxen would fall asleep listening to the world go round beyond her balcony window. She snored like a trooper, and the house was filled with such a fearsome din, the walls seemed about to collapse. Gazing at her like that, as if she were the living dead, I’d get distressed and feel an ineffable wave of anguish bordering on the supernatural. At such moments of hopeless despair, I made the most of her sleep to make a stealthy exit and head to La Copa de Herrera, where I hoped I might connect with the throbbing pulse of the petty criminal underworld. “Hey, dwarfy, just been doing it with the old girl? See if you set her up so I can suck her off for once. I’m tired of all this waiting about, and you look ever dreamier-eyed, you’re not in love by any chance?” Slim would guffaw and spit on the sawdust of La Copa’s floor, which was filthy damp and on its rachitic last legs.

Every system tends toward chaos, every human being toward sclerosis. I was growing old in Madrid, and, likewise, Madrid within me. What must happen to a man in life in order for him to fall into the grip of happiness — an unexpected rush of emotion, a whim fulfilled, a dream become reality? Not any amount of gold or whatever gives the world its shine would have sufficed to bring me the beauty I might once have dreamed of. My short skull protrudes, my arms are skinny, the bones supporting my legs are tiny, yet even so I’ve survived my hostile environment and today meet with praise, congratulations, and laurels. My position is enviable, but perhaps the fact I did nothing to achieve it renders the merit null and void and the unease I can now feel is what made my village childhood miserable, what distressed my adolescence in the circus, and made my youth listless in the agitated, transitional Madrid I’m now describing to you. Nothing made life worth living, and I found no raison d’être in the feverish life of the underworld; the days still went by one after another, to-day like yesterday, to-morrow like to-day, and always the same , as Gustavo Adolfo wrote. Every system tends toward chaos — political, economic, social, biological, whatever. Chaos rules, and that’s inevitable, because Providence wanted it that way. Every human being tends toward imbalance, sclerosis, and decrepitude. All that matters is to keep the imagination on fire, and maybe ascertain how one is going to fall apart, so as not to be duped by what fate has in store.

The fall of the Regime made life in the city harder. Those in power blamed the crisis on oil prices, the balance of payments, the foreign debt, even Satan’s hairy cock, but the truth is that deprivation exhibited its suppurating sores out in the street, while working-class unemployment undermined the most vulnerable homes. Given the situation, indigence ceased to be a profession and became a way of life, pariahs spread and multiplied over the soil of public parks, and the starving legion of those bereft of welfare threw itself on charitable institutions more blatantly and wantonly than ever, as if wanting to guarantee sustenance at the expense of any remnants of personal dignity. The Trinitarian broth was reduced to a shadow of itself; the dishwater they dispensed turned into a metaphor for hot soup. Where once there’d been real chickens, now there were only lumps of chicken concentrate. Times change people’s habits and even their way of eating. Cultural practices become standardized, and culinary idiosyncrasies, relegated to museums of anthropology. Hunger ushers in equality but predisposes people for disaster. Frugal diets preserve the organism, though everything has its limits. Vegetables create flatulence, meat accelerates the rotting of the digestive system, fish provokes emotional crises, and alcohol transfixes the brain to the point of drying out any intelligence. It is vital to ward off the inevitable erosion from what you ingest. If you want to survive, not merely my disaster but your very own, eat only boiled greens seasoned with a sprinkle of olive oil, drink only fresh spring water, eat loads of fruit, cleanse your intestines on whole-grain fiber, and show solidarity toward those who are starving on the planet. You’ll feel better, you’ll feel happier, you’ll feel cleaner, and, most likely, you’ll be prettier, although, in the end, that won’t help you any, either.

Blond Juana would never have wasted a precious moment of her time beautifying an eyelash, bursting a zit in front of the mirror, or powdering her face, even with the cheap stuff. She was happy to dedicate day after day to fighting for her ideals at the cost of her health or bodily wear and tear. The spreading of her Nechayevian, dynamiting vein of revolutionary faith compelled her to do deals with the angels of her imagination, virile, brawny angels bristling with hand grenades, automatic pistols, assault rifles, and all the other tackle necessary for spreading subversion and total chaos throughout the mental breeding grounds of the bourgeoisie, the pastures of the oligarchy, and the capacious mangers of capitalism. Her intense female smell turned me on no end, and when I saw her, I swear to God I had to struggle not to scatter my seed in the immaculate shrine of her womb. To sustain the desire for devastation that was eating her alive, she combined a poorly paid job selling plastic food containers house to house with the distribution of revolutionary pamphlets and union magazines that carried grandiloquent headlines alluding to world-scale catastrophes and planetary-level disasters. She’d ask for a donation in exchange, but her lofty tone scared people, and it mostly boiled down to intimidation poorly camouflaged as buying and selling. She broadcast her material in people’s faces at the top of her voice, and the shrill, metallic tone with which she shouted herself hoarse exposed her social pretensions. In truth, only a few purchased such propaganda, and at the end of the day, the newspapers hung over her arm, covered in sweat, their ink blurred. People looked the other way at her because she acted so prickly, and finally it made no difference whether she rang a doorbell or appealed to the conscience of a passerby, everyone tried to dodge her off-putting performances and would have given alms to a dwarf rather than hand over money to her. Nonetheless I felt attracted to her figure from the moment I saw her; it wasn’t simply her ample, burly frame, the hint of flesh in her gaze, or the morbid come-on sheen of her fair locks. It’s very likely that I lusted for her merely because I aroused so much disgust and contempt in her. In terms of both things and people, the more distant they seem, the more desperate we are to have them. When we bumped into each other at the party locale or a political event, or she visited the old girl in the unscathed privacy of her house, she went out of her way to avoid addressing me, and if compelled to do so, she directed her line of vision above my head, so I wouldn’t see my reflection in the watery mirror of her eyes. What splendid twin windows they were, forever blurred by vague, impenetrable sadness, more suited to an abandoned animal than a full-blooded agitator after social justice! “Will you sell me one, Blondie?” I’d say, slavering my words out whenever I came across her in the vicinity of Tirso de Molina, on my way to La Copa de Herrera; she’d be preaching the gospel at full tilt at dusk, trying to offload her burden of libelous prose, but no way would she even deign to give me a reply. Contempt simmered on her lips, and she acted as if I were invisible. “The Voice of the People. For the Destruction of American Bases, an End to Yankee Imperialism on Spanish Soil,” and her voice faded behind me, gilded and hollow like the tinkle of false gold.