Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

What I experienced in my own flesh taught me to scorn those who revered me not for what I was , but for what I possessed in their eyes. The times were a-changing, and suddenly height brought vertigo, the sickly vertigo of ripe figs. I’ve known a host of bastards and always wished them a good end, not that they necessarily got one — but that’s neither here nor there. Soon pleasure became a caprice; prickly behavior quickly changed to velveteen manners. In people’s eyes I began to seem someone worthy of attention. I gradually climbed the steps of the social pyramid, till one fine day I found praise raining down on me, alongside bloodcurdling deference. Everything is written in the unknown pages of destiny and sometimes in blank verse. Everything is set in concrete, and all those sentences simmering with the semantics of individual effort, freedom, or work are but vases for the fallacies used to bedeck the suffering of the poor. My good fortune came ready-made; I did little to deserve it. I spent the jewels and money I stole from the dead woman bronzing like crazy under the sun on the Costa, well seasoned by amenable females, the kind that charge a rate for their friendship, and well oiled by the endless pampering siestas that sign off les grandes bouffes . For several years I simply did what I fancied. Marbella was in vogue, and the most select items of Mediterranean high society grazed there, doing what they willed. A dwarf can hardly pass unperceived in such a milieu, and the mounds of cash I carried meant I was soon admitted to the sumptuous fiestas and late-night bashes sponsored by idle aristocrats or bourgeois plutocrats. My free-spending ways attracted clusters of beautiful hangers-on I cultivated with profuse gratitude and purchased with the increasing acquisitive power of my bank balance. I’d put behind me the clandestine movements, the weary rallies in the shadow of the class struggle, and the vague horrors of tramping from the far-off political Spain of my misspent youth. Everything was different now; hip couturiers even came to blows over my deformed body, upon which they wanted to exhibit their extravagant creations at the gala banquets of the day. I’d become fashionable in a matter of two years, and my seed money suddenly multiplied in astonishing, if not yet boundless, ways. Helped by some of those so-called men of means, I gained entry to the world of easy, prosperous enterprise, generally of a speculative nature, which soon gave me the chance to initiate projects of my own. On the advice of one of these characters, I acquired a bakery on the cheap, and rather than selling it on at a profit, as was my wont, I had the bright idea of turning it into a fast-food sanctuary. Tourism requires food on the spot and spiced up for foreign tastes, and I managed to take advantage of the old, arthritic infrastructure of a catering industry in decline to meet the needs blown in from abroad by the winds of the free market. It was the early eighties, and the big change was going to come any minute now. Ideological Spain was giving way to economic-free-forall Spain, and no holds barred. Diego Armando Maradona had just been signed by Barcelona Football Club for almost a billion pesetas, and hardly anyone could credit such a showering of capital. The spectacle of the coup d’état performed by a lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard had been broadcast on television screens across the planet to the stupefaction of the international community. Everybody threw themselves into the street, united behind posters for peace; democracy passed the pistol-firing re-sit with top marks. The Rumasa conglomerate had just been expropriated in a political decision taken by democratic socialists, voted into power at the ballot box in the autumn of ’82, and José Luis Garci was about to show that something Spanish could, rivaling feats from other eras, attain the impossible dream of an Oscar. In Spain, in that Spain nobody would soon recognize — not even the fucking founding fathers — a world of money was beginning to dawn.

No merit accrues to me in what I’m recounting, take that as read, it’s simply the spinning mill of destiny. After a whole day spent between the sheets, with a clammy mouth and drowsy head, I strolled down the streets dotted with cheap fry-ups that lead to the Plaza del Chopito, in the heart of Marbella. I amused myself by looking at the knickknacks in the souvenir shops for penny-pinching tourists: flamenco-dancer dolls; garish postcards of girls on the beach, windswept hair, bare asses; inflatable mattresses; fuchsia thongs; and a pile of cheap trash. It was seven in the evening. I’d been invited to a cocktail party in the Nautical Club at eleven, one of those ineffable soirées where the vanity of the beautiful people is venerated amid champagne toasts and trays brimming with canapés. I had plenty of time and suddenly felt like going into a movie house where they were showing the then voguish film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , a charming tale of intergalactic deformity. Why so? Yet again, the invisible hand of Providence was whimsically guiding my hesitant steps. I’ve sometimes even thought that Steven Spielberg only filmed that story so I alone could watch it. Seeing that film, I was blessed by a revelation that in recent years has guided my steps along the path of plenty. Employing the mechanisms of the world for one’s own ends is an attractive concept that in no way contradicts the rigors of the established order. At the very least, conjuring up the idea affords pleasure, and just as I said that your sudden appearance in my life augurs the end point of my wanderings, I’ll also underline the benefit of the supernatural side to my sitting in that seat snowed under with popcorn, blinded by the revelation of a stunning idea that would grant me economic good health: the home-delivery pizza.

On the screen, some American children were playing a board game in a very homely kitchen scene. They were talking, joking, and airing their childish differences. Outside it was nighttime, and a UFO had just taken off, abandoning an extraterrestrial babe on the planet. Suddenly one of the kids expressed the bright idea of calling for a pizza, and they all heartily went for it. “Bring us a Papa Oom Mow Mow,” they said, and very shortly, the Papa Oom Mow Mow pizza was delivered to their door. Couldn’t I perhaps do likewise, and take pizzas to people’s doors on the basis of a telephone call?

The four seasons is the pizza that synthesizes above all others the four ages of man, from conception in the uterus to immersion in the grave; the four seasons is by far the best pizza representation of man’s wanderings across this world, soft as a cheese melt, slippery as a mushroom coulis. We devour the cycle of life in its circumference, as if communing with our own anguish. And it was a vein that had yet to be mined.

After eating dinner, I hardly care how things might end. People generally run shy from any mention of funeral matters and prefer to waste their time shutting the sphincters of transcendence rather than striving to investigate what might very well be awaiting them, hence the sidelining of poetry. It’s at such extreme moments that humanity plumbs its innermost depths and prays, and, if passionate enough, it might even get lucky and see an extraterrestrial being. E.T. the extraterrestrial, though fictitious, was a repulsive character, deformed in every way, his unsightly proportions greased in fecal hues — the crowning glory to a disgusting sight. Nonetheless, children loved him, and parents bought thousands of E.T. dolls that had been mass-marketed. His secret wasn’t novelty, or sentiment, but the mental level of the society amid which he landed. In exchange, the film recorded out-of-this-world profits. It’s a fallacy to state that people shouldn’t envy wealth, even if fraud or crime are involved. Wealth accumulation is the coat of arms that sets human beings apart from all other zoological species. It ushers them into a state worthy of flattery, adulation, honors, and all kinds of favorable treatment. Wealth is a tool Providence has in its gift to present to whoever it chooses. After my youthful years swallowing eggs to survive, after rocky times begging, and shameful years spent in petty crime and fraud, I found myself to be a privileged plutocrat, without ever going out of my way to become one, and that made me suspect something supernatural ruled my steps; in the course of time, I confirmed that, when the specter of Faith Oxen did herself proud by appearing to me in a London hotel.