Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

The world is in itself an unnerving spectacle where one performance follows another. Enjoyment comes with a price that’s almost always high. I felt no sympathy toward Juan Culí. I could have rescued him from wretched poverty, but I didn’t. I could have made him a lucky man, he could have been fired by love of the flesh if that was what he craved, all that and much more one word from my lips could have granted him, but they didn’t. Sentiment doesn’t change the direction of fate. I told him I was in a hurry, we could meet up some other time; I got into the car. He opened the door servilely, drooping his eyes in farewell. Then I remembered pudgy Di Battista and that morning when I splattered him on the floor of his trailer, giving him a whiff of the disaster that would be his eventual demise. “What happened to Pudgy?” I asked before he shut the car door. At that point the commissioner left the restaurant on the arm of a bodyguard. She gestured to me, clenching the fingers of her left hand as if wanting to ratify our agreed rendezvous. I winked back in accord. “It was dreadful, he went mad soon after you left.” Juan Culí told me the banks cleaned out the little he had; they left him sod all and even confiscated his passport photo. His face went blank, then alcohol soaked his chops and left him with a lunatic rictus. He began proclaiming that the Virgin of Fátima had appeared to him: “ We shoudda coronata the imagine de la nostra signora ,” he kept ranting, totally out of his mind, “ we shoudda makka eet to il Carmelo de Coimbra and wash zee feet of sorella Lucia, we shoudda tell of the terzo of the message, we shoudda holify les festes .” His body was disintegrating internally, and his breath stank. It was impossible to look him in the face. One morning he swigged Conejo-brand bleach instead of cognac and disinfected his guts for good. His was a bad end: he bled and convulsed, writhed round like the severed tail of a lizard. “He didn’t deserve that,” concluded Juan Culí, “we’d had a happy life with him, they were basically good times, weren’t they, Goyito? Good times. Now we suffer other pains.”

A past can be constructed to fit the exact needs of the person involved. Fakery is, after all, one of the best-loved tools of humankind. Right then I’d have preferred to have no past to remember, but that was impossible, and Juan Culí was living proof of that. “Do you still like getting it doggy style?” I asked him obscenely before I drove off. He didn’t reply. I took my billfold out of my jacket, commiserated, and gave him a tip, “Here you are, get yourself a good time.” The note fell crisply between his hands in a symbolic farewell. As I returned home, my spirits were dowsed in sorrow, or nostalgia. As I sank into the firm leather of the car’s rear seat, the hand Pudgy placed on my forehead the day he purchased me from my mother started to sear my memory. I tried not to remember but couldn’t stop myself, until I suddenly realized I wasn’t that youngster anymore and that all I had in common with my former self was the embittered circumstance of my solitude.

Beetles that have four knuckles on the tarsi of their back pair of legs and five on all the others, like the dung beetle, are a kind of scarab and cram their natural filth in holes dug out of the mud. Providence could have gifted them a life in a luxury mansion, like the one I own here, isolated from prying eyes, closely guarded by complex electronic systems, with lovely lawns and beautiful architecture, but it wasn’t to be, and that’s why they spend every cycle of their lives frolicking in the mud. Insects don’t protest about their filthy environment, and that’s really virtuous of them. Then something stamps on them unawares, and their senseless lives are squelched flat. Everybody should have the right to a reasonable abode, a decent roof beneath which to drop dead, a roof of their own and not the universal one of the stars, but it’s not the case, and that’s the difference that ensures that we who do have one delight in the pleasure of possession.

My brother Tranquilino, may he rest in peace, set fire to the ants’ homes with no malice aforethought. The flashes of light given off by burning phosphorus illuminated their tragedy, and they were singed in a second. The iron express swept my brother Tranquilino off. He met a bad end, but had he survived, you bet he’d have threatened the whole Spanish ant population with extinction. Those who pass away early find that the exercise of their will, assuming they ever had such a thing, is axed at a stroke, and if not, no matter, they can just fertilize history. The bathroom where I defecate every morning has a set of mirrors with a hanging shelf where fifteen bottles of scent give the utmost joy to my sense of smell. I sit on the pan, look at myself, and wallow in the teratology that gives me substance. Then I open the bottles one by one and breathe in the perfume. Apart from calming my anxious brow, I register the fact that contradiction is the foundation stone of the universe, and perhaps that’s why harmony can only arise from antagonism. My truncated silhouette stands out against the wall of mirrors and reflects a chimera of myself that’s the real me. If you could smell my insides, you’d be surprised that far from stinking, my aroma is simply expectorant. If one could sniff people’s pristine insides, Western civilization as we know it would, however, choke to death on its own vomit.

Early one morning I was having a shower and witnessed an extraordinary event that shocked me to whatever marrow is in my bones. Water was splashing off my body, and the steam it generated gradually coalesced on the bathroom mirrors. Some drops liquefied on the surface, and instead of dripping down onto the perfume shelf, I could see they were scrawling signs that were initially undecipherable. I stared at the spectacle and noticed that the steam was changing into a written word. I stayed stock still until it finished. An emphatic bastard appeared in perfectly shaped letters on the mirror. That happening stayed with me for a considerable time. Initially, I thought a member of my domestic staff, a maid or my butler, must have inscribed the word on the mirror so it would stand out when dampened by the steam, and although I concluded it was not at all likely, I sacked the lot. I felt it was intolerable that someone could, on the sly, profane the holy of holies of my defecations. Normality was restored, until a few months later a new message materialized before my eyes, and this time without recourse to steam. No doubt about it — my life was under threat.

The pizzas produced in my premises are aromatized with fragrances that consumers immediately recognize. They are elemental smells, capable of transporting them to a would-be childhood of wood fires, freshly reaped corn, and damp grass at dawn. One has to exploit everything in the free enterprise jungle, from recourse to clichés to the cultivation of customers’ trite sentimentality. Profit is the goal; a good return, the way to go. Wealth expansion can only be assured through sustained growth. It’s no use having a sales boom if tastes move on and one is unable to keep up with society and adapt one’s products to the volatile whims of the people’s palate. A hundred years ago, chicken was a dish reserved for the jaws of the rich, and look how that’s changed. If one wants the sustained development of fast food, there’s no choice but to respond to consumer preferences at every turn. Quality levels and excellent products can only be achieved by paying close attention to the idiosyncrasies of the people destined to eat them. A proper monitoring of products underpins launches of other riskier, more innovative items that guarantee our brands remain the consuming public’s favorites. The business context in which my Europizza outlets strive to trade is framed by aggression and originality that outdoes the competition. These are free-market times in which man is but a customer to man, and that, it seems, is how it is written that it should be. That’s the gift with which Providence regales men on the make, those whose true stature thrives on big challenges, those whose brilliant drive and energy shape societal behavior, and also those who quantify morality in statistics.