Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

I sought shelter in Faith’s house, and she, generous within the bounds of her tyrannical old age, let me sleep on a canvas mattress on her kitchen floor in exchange for my total slavery. I meekly accepted her offer. I woke up early, and after washing my sleep away with a couple of splashes of water, I’d go to the Maravillas market and do her shopping. I begged for alms, simply because I’d become so adept, or filched someone’s billfold to buy the food so I could cook the items the old girl liked. I never came away without a bar of fondant chocolate or a tray of cakes to sweeten the corpuscles of her blood. I never put them out but hid them away so she’d properly appreciate them. She wolfed them down, ever more removed from reality, more volatile, more outrageous, and closer to the grave. It wasn’t even worth strangling her. The exact words of Blas de Otero seemed to bring their two bits of gravel to that house’s reinforced concrete: Desolation and vertigo combine. We feel we’re going to fall, that they’re drowning us from the inside. We seem alone, and the shadow on the wall isn’t ours, is a shadow that doesn’t know, that cannot remember whose it is. Desolation and vertigo beat in our chest, wriggle away like a fish, our blood thins, we feel our feet give way . And the more I read those lines, the more the atmosphere in which Faith was rotting day by day seemed to reek of the grave.

I survived in that putrid way for a few months more, months when barely anything happened in my life that I’ve not already described to you. I was bound to that house and in its deep silences witnessed the decrepitude and decline of Faith Oxen. I fornicated with her to flatter her vanity, I fed her with my own hands and gave her succor in her solitude with the poisoned sting of my company. She mistreated me in word and deed, simply because she was aware that she depended on me, and in return I brought her lips the sugar of death. “You are my dog, Gregori, and you have to beat a dog so it will obey. You can’t hoodwink me, you dog. I know you like to watch the way I’m dying, and that’s why you don’t scarper, because of that and the marrow you’ll get from me when you chew on my bones. Do you think I don’t notice what you’re after? Come here and give my weary twat a lick,” and I barked loudly, playing up to her words, vamping my desires in a grisly celebration of the absolute truth of her spiel. Outside, the world was endlessly churning, perhaps in quite another way, one I’d never perceived before, fresh and creamy, huge and juicy, and beautiful malgré tout , when one day somebody knocked on the door.

A sleety rain was falling, coating the city pavements in sticky, slippery Christmas gunge. It was Christmas Eve, at that in-between hour when people switch on electric cookers in their domestic heartlands to roast the dinner, that twilight hour of metallic shadows when trousseau tablecloths depart locked chests to spread an eternal smell of mothballs across languid drawing rooms, that tranquil Eve stalked by a prickly silence when hearts suffer such nostalgia. I was about to boil the old girl a line-fished hake to ensure a decent lay dinner, when the doorbell suddenly rang. Faith Oxen had been resting awhile with a bad headache. These headaches attested to the brittleness of her memory and often prostrated her on the black hole of her bed. In the kitchen, on an Aiwa transistor, the rim of its loudspeaker clogged with grease, the king of Spain’s nasal voice was beginning to drone his traditional Christmas message: “The past twelve months, on the contrary, have witnessed the efforts made by all to accede to the levels of freedom and responsibility that the historical conjuncture demanded. On the matter of which, not too long ago, when I made a public evaluation of the culminating moments of the constitutional process, I expressed the opinion that the Spanish people, in an act of supreme collective freedom. .” “Gregori, somebody’s knocking on the door. Go and see who it is, and switch off that radio; all that speechifying is doing my head in, I can’t stand it!” the old girl shouted from the depths of her dark cavern. I threw the rings of the onion I was uncoiling into the boiling water, jumped down from the bench where I was forced to stand to reach the hob, and went to open up. There stood Blond Juana on the doorstep, leaning her right shoulder on one of the jambs, eyes backstitched by a thread of hashish dilating her pupils, and she stared at me, I’m not sure whether in repulsion or astonishment. “What are you doing here, dwarfy?” she enquired matter-of-factly. “Making the old girl’s supper,” I retorted. Caulked in sweat, the keel of her body furiously fired my desire, and slaver foamed down my tongue as I told her about the job I’d acquired attending to the old girl at all hours, accompanying her solitude and enlivening her tedium. “You’re a scavenger,” she responded. “You’re hoping to get something out of her.” I ignored her insult and was in no mood to argue in those circumstances. She said she’d come to bid farewell to the old crock, and I ushered her toward the drawing room. It’s strange, but just like the chauffeur in Benalmádena, she, too, reeked of boiled fish, of stagnant seawater, and from way off. Before I’d invited her to, she’d entered the drawing room and settled down on a corner of the sofa, shamelessly crossing her legs. They were packed into thick, faded lilac leotards, and as she went to sit down, she deliberately gave me an eyeful of the tasty sponge cake of her thighs. Or at least I thought she did.

Wanting to give that encounter short shrift, I told her Faith Oxen was in bed with a headache and that I’d pass on the news of her visit so she could call her the following day. “She’ll not get hold of me tomorrow,” she replied emphatically, “tomorrow I’m leaving this shithole of a country and going to Nicaragua.” Juana was torn between feelings of bliss and angst over the decision she’d taken, moved, she told me later, by her commitment to the revolutionary struggle. The Sandinistas were engaged in a bitter offensive against the Somoza dictatorship, and the West, with Yankee imperialism leading the way, was contemplating the country with the fear and suspicion one would expect from those who see that their own future is threatened. Blondie was convinced that the eventual triumph of the cause of freedom she was championing first had to pass through the hoop of her own self-sacrifice. That’s how it turned out. With no encouragement from me, she launched into a harangue about how the harvests of tomorrow must be irrigated by the blood of peasants and workers if they were ever going to bear fruit. She spoke of the necessity of armed combat, of the ultimate dialectic of weapons, and the annihilation of the oppressor. The words flew from her mouth in a parabola as if they were grenades launched from a mortar-pad, but when they exploded in my ears, the only effect they had was to induce skepticism, so rather than interjecting, I simply decided to imagine her naked in the middle of the jungle, festooned with cartridge belts that crisscrossed her breasts in a big X , truly enhancing her beauty, a carnivorous beauty more akin to a wild animal’s than a human being’s, and perhaps rather ragged in the tropical humidity. The splendorous fantasy I concocted was immediately betrayed by the tent pole of my cock, which was less spurred on by the details of her close presence than by the pleasurable circumstances I was imagining and that had elevated her so. She noticed what happened and was probably astounded by the prolix nature of the item, and I immediately grasped the unmistakable scent of desire in the way she looked at me. The king of Spain was pursuing the gelatinous spiel of his speech on the radio in the kitchen. The echo of his voice wafted to us on the aroma from the stew simmering in the pot. In that gesture of abandonment that comes when the thing is unstoppable, Blondie suddenly unzipped her jersey and exposed the blouse underneath. Then, silently, without pausing, she undid every button, one by one, till she’d completely laid bare a flesh-colored bra that gave firm support to the baubles of her tepid breasts. “Come here,” she ordered, not a tremor in her voice, “isn’t this what you were after? Take from me what you will,” and she bared the sweet expanse of her body, a honeycomb slurping with jelly where my member swarmed and eventually lodged. Aloof, like a red virgin set on self-sacrifice for God knows what outrageous theology, Blondie impassively yielded to my caresses. I went at it awkwardly. My tongue licked the hidden folds of her anatomy, I drank the juice from her flesh entire, and my mouth counted out the tiny moments when it was crystallizing her pleasure. She attended to my desires at every turn, was flexible, malleable, altogether consecrated to the dimension of her sacrifice, and struck dumb by the longing with which her will drove her on. “Gregori, dwarfy!” the old girl shouted from the stinking crypt of her bedroom. “What are you up to that’s stopped you switching off that radio once and for all? That drivel is smashing my head in; I can’t stand it!” I pushed Blondie a fraction of an inch away, sought confirmation in her eyes that if I left her, she’d stay riveted there, awaiting my next onslaught, that she wouldn’t beat it, ashamed by her own abasement. As I scrutinized the Yes I will, no I won’t in her pupils, those words of warning suddenly rushed to me from all those years ago, when handsome Bustamante had spat in my face: “Goyo, don’t be under any illusions, women will only give themselves to someone deformed like you out of charity, or for money.” However, times had changed, and out of the blue, a new way to accede to female flesh had emerged: the path of self-sacrificing solidarity. Concluding that my prey wouldn’t escape me, elevated by my victory, the scepter of my cock hoisted in all its majesty, I unslurped myself completely from Blondie and ran to the kitchen to switch off the radio for Faith Oxen. “The monarchy I incarnate being committed to the fundamental aim of returning sovereignty to the Spanish people, and having achieved this objective set out when my task as king of Spain was inaugurated, I pledge to ensure it continues and to deepen solidarity with all Spaniards. .” The king went on talking as the water simmered, and I don’t why, but I instinctively felt like putting the radio, rather than the hake, in the pot, but the truth is the monarch’s voice, soluble in the stock, instantly dissolved with a fish’s oily, lippy slipperiness.