Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

The analysis and study of customer prototypes is, I can tell you, an essential exercise to guarantee the survival of any enterprise. Who eats my pizzas? That’s the question we in Europizza constantly ask ourselves. Statistics give us our answers. Midweek it’s married couples with small children, and eighty percent order our more classic products, while a similar proportion of young singles of either sex eat our pizzas with the most exotically sounding toppings. The Mazzo pizza is the most popular item from our entire menu — surimi with a base of green garlic, capers, mushrooms, and a savory dressing of yogurt and basil. Weekend demand, however, is dominated by family sizes; the Half-Yard Magnus, the DeLuxe Big’un, and the Maxi-Mix with triple cheese are our star-rated specials. Thousands of families with average purchasing power just love to consume them in the privacy of their homes while watching a game of football nicely served up on the box. The added value our products bring to the well-being of society is the undeniable guarantee of our commitment to the future. Apart from securing a proper return on capital invested, we try to ensure that the communities in which we have a presence accept us as one more element in their diets and leisure pursuits. Consequently we take care to decorate our premises in step with the individual characteristics of the different places where they are sited; we make a real effort to adapt to local customs and traditions and even grant communities the social cohesion they lacked. In our outlets, customers receive a friendly, casual, attentive welcome, which at the same time is always respectful, warm, and polite; our employees look youthful and are biologically tested to avoid any possible spread of undesirable diseases. To keep abreast of the times, we take pride throughout our chain of production in a transparent commitment to the environment, so every piece of our packaging is recyclable, and all the packaging we use carries a green statement endorsing the obligations we recognize we have toward society. Solidarity guarantees our future. That’s the image we want to promote.

My brother Tranquilino, though a simpleton, understood little of such nonsense. He never tried a pizza, a train swept him up in the dawn of youth. A great pity. He never tasted a pizza, though he would have hated the flavors; he was happy setting light to ants and sucking on his fingers and nails, which were always full of dirt. He also took out snot when it was clogging up his nostrils. If I was nearby, he’d stick it on my face and laugh, though never maliciously. Once, I remember, he put a fat blob in my mouth, and it tasted of cooking salt. If he had lived, he’d have envied me my fortune, and I’d have had no choice but to pay his bills — down to what they call blood bonding. The dead sometimes yearn after the life of the living and put in an appearance in order to disturb their peace and quiet. Faith Oxen would have cursed my success if she’d lived another twenty years, but nature is wise and sensible and took her off in good time to that other shore of nothingness, where food, so it seems, is in short supply.

I know you have come to be entertained by the spectacle of my death. Night is coming to an end, and the birds’ hungry squawks are beginning to echo against the metallic dawn sky. I’ll soon lose this illusion of consciousness with which I still think I remember past time, and I will enter a territory of oblivion I should never have left. All those who saw fit to know me will participate unawares in the ritual of my destruction, and although they, like you, will end up realizing they are guilty, it will be through them that my life assumes the meaning for which it was created. That is the paradox, Providence’s sarcastic grin my way: whoever kills me also gives me life; whoever resurrects me, condemns me. I knew it would happen, but I didn’t think it would happen so ridiculously. I was forewarned. First there were the insults written in my bathroom, then the anonymous messages. I started receiving them by phone. I’d get calls at an untimely hour on private numbers that only my trusted circle had access to, and that alarmed me. “We’re going nowhere like this. I’m up to here with you. Either you keep to your own storyline, or this will turn into an endless pastiche. Do you get what I’m saying? Do you grasp what I’m after?”

“Tell me who you are, you wretch,” I rasped angrily, but nobody answered at the other end of the line.

Over time the messages began to appear in strange places that were completely inaccessible for people who didn’t belong to my entourage — words painted in lipstick on my car’s white leather upholstery, notes inserted in my billfold, missives under my pillow, and even strange voices buzzing around my head, as if, in addition to myself, a voice-over from someone else’s consciousness were shouting inside my brain. Then came the apparition, and everything began to fall into place.

Human beings find it hard to accept proof of their own precariousness, and that’s why they cling to the minutiae of day-to-day life to try to gain strength in routine; as soon as they drop their guard, however, fear surges, defeats, and annihilates them. Of the four evils that claw into man’s so-called freedom — impotence, fear, neglect, and nostalgia — nostalgia is the worst to experience at night, when consciousness is least alert and words scrape the throat as they are silenced in desperation. One can bite the jugular of fear and it will fade like the phantom of the self it is, one can fight impotence plastered on alcohol and it will be forgotten till the next restless night, and one can hold neglect at bay with the saturnine sauces of pleasures of the flesh; conversely, it is dangerous to resist nostalgia, because it returns with renewed energy and is then quite unforgiving.

If not Providence, it was perhaps nostalgia that compelled me after all those years to track down the whereabouts of little Margarita. Private eyes do their job the best they can, and given the right economic wherewithal, they can come up with astonishing results. It took hardly a week for a report to appear on my desk detailing her abode. She lived in Ciudad Real, she was a widow, childless, ran a small haberdashery stocked full with extra-large knickers for fat ladies, and on a Saturday night she liked to go to a flea-pit of a bingo hall called The Eldorado Palace, which she sometimes left on the arm of a handyman. For private eyes, life is reduced to aseptic dossiers, surreptitious photos, and brief notes, totally lacking any meat or passion. That’s their work, and that’s why they get paid. “She is a completely uninteresting woman,” that skinny, anodyne fellow told me when I handed him a check with his honorarium. “And what exactly would not being ‘completely uninteresting’ mean in your book?” I asked brusquely, annoyed by his inopportune suggestion. “I don’t know, having a secret, hidden side, some criminal intent to investigate,” he replied, his eyes glued to the scrawl of my signature. “Would you perhaps find me interesting?” I decided to enquire. “Yes, of course. You are a wealthy man.”

The flaking façades of the houses that light up the Ciudad Real ring road looked like tiny drawers in the cupboard of life. There, everyday shortages must impregnate the minds of the inhabitants with the reek of boiled greens given off by disillusion. I gave my chauffeur the address from the report, and we soon found the spot. I got out of the car and stealthily walked over. I looked dispiritedly through the shop window at the way time, that sidekick of putrefaction, had mistreated the impossible love of my childhood. The kilos tumbled off little Margarita like chewy strings of cold sausage, and the whole mass of her body came to rest on the powerful seat of her buttocks. The goddess of my dreams was only recognizable in the sneering mouth and lengthy eyelids that as an ingenuous child I’d mistaken for beautiful features. It was there, standing by that window, chagrined at being stripped so suddenly of the great white hope from my past, when, God knows why, the idea of killing her suddenly sprang to mind. It was a viscous feeling, as if excreted from the sphincter of a supreme being rather than being born within me.