Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

A drop of caramel syrup spreading over a dish of pancakes was the last thing Slim contemplated before the shock wave smashed his one-eyed view of the world. It could have been worse; his last snapshot might have been the dark circle at the end of a revolver barrel aimed at his watery eye, but that wasn’t the case. Things happen as they do, however much we struggle to change them. Destiny is the text, and happenstance the calligraphy in the book where Providence lists the circumstances of our punishment. Slim concluded his odyssey sundered into a thousand pieces that would never be put back together. He would never have survived these chaotic times at the dawn of the millennium.

Nobody tries their patience today selling books in the metro. Times slough their skins, foreign customs are homogenized, and the masses finally temper their historical role as protagonists, except in the strictly sporting realm. Worship of football has totally replaced the interest in politics that was so much in vogue in Spain. Freedom has turned into a good to be bought and sold, and the people’s anthem, the victory song of fans. It wasn’t the case then. People then went hoarse proclaiming their ideals on the street, and sporting spectacles were restricted to more out-of-the-way locations, in the pigsties of the intellect. Apart from fools and rednecks, nobody ever read the sporting press in public, for fear of a reproachful glance or an irritated gesture from a passerby; now, you know, the opposite is the case, which guarantees rich pickings for all those who know how to derive profit from the general dumbing down. When you’ve done with me, I recommend you do what I did: make the most of the ignorance of others, sell them stickers, junk, or simply air wrapped in colorful cellophane. You just see how you won’t regret it. The crux is to not worry about sabotaging human dignity and to camouflage your profits behind the drivel that is so popular about solidarity, social commitment, the sponsoring of children for a television marathon, or defense of the environment through advertising. Have yourself a ball. The grandiloquent spectacle of wealth basically stupefies the masses and predisposes them to do what they are told. Though the outlandish wealth of a minority demonstrates how shitty a social system that organizes individuals into units of consumption is, there lies the rub: it prospers, and nobody seems to be aware of the disaster. Let them eat trash and cheerfully share the incomparable experience, in the belief that they are free; let them teeter on, while others research new markets and explore unheard-of profit lines. Individual idiosyncrasies, the absurd dimension of people’s presence in this world, are rooted in financial potential. Wealth dignifies, money extends horizons; if one has some, there’s no limit to one’s caprices and they are catered to on demand. The clouds clustered over existence can perhaps only be grasped from that deepest ennui wealth brings or by the extreme vicissitudes of poverty. The enigma of time can solely be perceived from this perspective; past, present, and future are uncoupled from the immediate moment and stand out as metaphors for everything. Only death unveils the cardinal truth hidden in life, what was once ordained and never ceases can only reach culmination in death: the universal diktat of Providence.

I knew, I can tell you, that Faith Oxen hoarded the unknown riches she’d been gathering during her stint on earth in a safe embedded in one side of her bedroom cupboard. Might a watch incrusted with rubies right down to its innermost cogs be lurking in that enclosed, secretive darkness, or could a jewel of untold carats be sitting there silently, or was there a pile of American cash in wads of high-value greenbacks? That treasure was a real riddle that I spent my time trying to unpick. I’d put my ear to the other side of the wall when Faith Oxen was opening it and hang on every sound her hands triggered. There were crick-cracks and metal tinkles my brain absorbed and distilled in its sickly imagination. It all fitted perfectly. The hypocritical old girl had devoted her life to haranguing the masses while behind their backs she espoused the cause of wealth and accumulated rather than distributed. In her heart of hearts, she was afraid of being abandoned, and no social system, not even the one she advocated to the world, would have treated her old age with the reverence she required on the final straight. Mental and physical incapacity reduce a human being to a passive scrap of skin and bone in the miscellaneous hands of third parties. She never revealed to anyone the existence of her hoard — not even notionally, although in the hours of repose after our amatory larks, she’d sometimes drop the names of lovers and the contents of the presents they’d lavished on her in return for her favors. Old age, among other things, confirmed the depths of her pettiness. “You’re like me. You only believe in what you’ve suffered, and that’s why you’ll live on, Gregori. You don’t have any scruples, and one day wealth will knock on your door,” she said, her voice quivering in her throat, “but first the worms must lick my bones clean.”

I’ve known many bastards in my lifetime and wished a good end on the lot. They reaped what was coming; some had it soft, others, rough, it depends. Esteruelas was blown to bits, and his belches and farts evaporated in unison, a veritable toll of doom. I knew he always knew that handsome Bustamante didn’t kill Frank Culá, but he didn’t give a toss who did; his only duty was to shut a case down as quickly as he could and carry on with life, never very clear as to why. Violent deaths sometimes provoke pity. However, sometimes violent, unjust deaths arouse more, and nonsensical or meaningless ones that suddenly spread disarray and panic even more so, if that’s possible. They lived by plotting the deaths of others and for that reason probably didn’t worry about their own, and that was to their advantage.

Now I feel myself under your own close scrutiny, I’ve been struck by a premonition of a darkness that’s been distressing me ever since I became conscious of my tragedy. I have seen my longings, my feelings, my memories reflected one by one in your eyes and felt afraid of myself. Now I understand everything. I told psychiatrists of a bad dream I had, one that appeared to me in London when I visited my son Edén. I fooled myself into thinking it had been the fruit of the emotion I experienced on the day, that the end wasn’t going to come so soon or in the dreadful way heralded, but here you are in this present moment that draws us together, listening to me rehearse my past, your very presence proving just how little time is left.

Dog dead, rabies sorted. To her eternal shame, Sister Marta identified the corpse by the protuberant mole of a birthmark at the point where his testicles joined, or so they claimed. The attack was splashed over all the front pages, and three days after the attack on the Cafeteria California, the Far Right, which was already bleeding to death, could do nothing to stymy the solemn ceremony held in the Cortes at which the king of Spain inaugurated the first legislature of the constitutional parliament. Rabies sorted, as I said, because without Slim’s support, the chains binding me to the Trinitarians’ broth were unlocked forever. In any case, it would have been madness to stay on any longer in a place where so many bore grudges against me. I cleared off with the sister who’d had carnal dealings with One-Eyed. She left her habits, which had been of no use to her, except perhaps to mop up the semen Slim liked to spurt over her, and I left another five years of my life impaled on the walls of that ineffable charitable institution. I was alone again, with nowhere in particular to go, but this time, unlike previously, the reins of my destiny were gripped by a voluptuous hankering after prosperity. As feral as a dog without a master, roaming the streets and sniffing trash bins, gnawing at any life left on bones it’s randomly thrown, going this way or that, aimlessly, with no sense it might last another season more, baying impotently at the moon, I found myself out on a limb, scarcely imagining it was precisely in such a forlorn state that I was finally predestined to make it.