Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

What won’t a man do for money — swindle the innocent, defecate in public, renege on his religious convictions? Money is the measure of all things in this world, those that are what they are, and those that aren’t what they aren’t. Money relaxes the sphincters and relieves stress; whoever’s got some knows so, whoever handles the stuff guesses it’s so. What wouldn’t you do for money — bear false witness, eat worms straight from a corpse, murder whoever you were told to? I was telling handsome Bustamante about my plan to end little Margarita’s life, and he thought it a wonderful idea, provided the reward was substantial. “You name the price you want. Half now, the rest when you’ve done.” Handsome Bustamante accepted the deal; one death in exchange for another wasn’t a bad fix if rich pickings were on offer — for the two more days of life the syndrome would have granted him, that is. I insisted on only one thing: that before ending little Margarita’s life, he should recite to her on my behalf a few lines from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, so she could be under no doubt that however much we struggle on, the past always comes back to defeat us. I wrote them on a piece of paper while we waited for a small suitcase to arrive with half of the amount in cash Handsome had agreed to as his price. “Is everything all right, Don Gregorio?” asked the security guard who’d been told to bring the money when he saw that hoodlum by my side. “Yes, Jimmy, everything’s fine, leave us alone, please.” (Security men are yet another symbol of the uncertain times we live in — if you can pay for them, that is, if not, you’ll simply be on the receiving end.) When Handsome finally left my office, he looked and stared at me as if something strange were troubling him inside. “What did I ever do to hurt you, Goyo?” he asked. “Nothing you’d ever accept as an explanation.” “Why did you pin the death on me, you bastard?” he asked again nervously. Nobody had insulted me like that in a long time, and coming from Handsome on this occasion, it inevitably reminded me of the night when Frank Culá died for love. “I don’t remember, Handsome,” I lied, “time erases everything. The only thing I can say in my defense is that it wasn’t me, it was the justice system that clapped a life sentence on you. What’s more, you already had problems with the law. Blame Lady Justice and not me, take it out on her apparatus if you’re still so angry, and if you do, remove the blindfold over her eyes for me, will you, and stuff it up her cunt, like a sanitary towel, so when it blows up it doesn’t spatter the world. I’ve just bought you oblivion. Now, in exchange, try doing what I’ve paid you to do. When you’re done, we’ll be quits. Nothing else matters, Handsome; can’t you see nothing else matters anymore?”

I have known countless bastards in my lifetime and never wished a bad end on any; if that’s what they got, it was down to something else. Providence likes to sketch out the designs of men spitefully, that’s its sarcastic bent. Little Margarita told the police that a rook, black as the center of hell, flew cawing out of Handsome’s skull, but they didn’t believe her. Police take only facts as proof and discount any possible supernatural intervention. In my lifetime I have watched several rapid-action scenes that were preludes to death and have studied the faces of certain individuals and discerned a motive for betrayal, or at least the name of the culprit. In every case, I’ve sensed the lyrics of destiny hysterically weighing in. Poetry sometimes resolves problems of transcendence; at others, however, it makes them worse.

The judge lifted up Handsome’s still-fresh corpse, with an expression of repugnance. His head had been sliced in two by the bullet fired by little Margarita right between his temples. “It was self-defense,” she said, quite without remorse. She was telling the civil guards how he’d forced his way in and was intending to inject her with a syringe full of AIDS-infected blood. “The gun belonged to my father, and he was one of yours, you know. He threw himself at me like a wild animal. I had no choice but to shoot him. He must have been jonesing like crazy, because all he did was say that the swallows would come back and hang their nests on my balcony and other such nonsense.”

The bullet split his skull in two like an Easter egg, out of which a crow flew out cawing rather than any child’s treat. It must have been Handsome’s thoughts. “It flew out of the window, I swear to you. It was this big, a disgustingly big bird that wouldn’t stop squawking.”

I saved on the other half of my outlay, but little Margarita saved herself from a bad end and is still around wallowing in the mire; that was the source of my discontent, and now nobody will ever bring me relief on that front. There are people who swear blind about the everyday nature of paranormal events, and would never question the hypothesis that a rook had flown out of Handsome’s brain, just as little Margarita claimed. However, daily duties block our perception of what is beyond comprehension and atrophy our minds like crazy. Having a family, worrying about it, and striving to make it a success diminishes our ability to appreciate the extraordinary. Every family has its smell, just as every animal has its stench. Some conceal it under fragrances purchased at perfume shops, but even so they don’t eradicate it entirely. A good nose can be a rare nasal skill, but it helps the economic standing of its owner very little, or not at all. I sweated out my youth under the patched tent of the Stéfano circus, a veritable perfume lamp of pestilence. It was there I learned to guess an animal’s illness simply from a whiff of the vapor rising from its excrement, to calibrate a man’s fear by smelling the sweat of his brow, and to assess the appetites of a female from the aromas when she was in heat. Gurruchaga taught me. Smell reveals the identity of the species and determines individual traits. Bastards carry a dense smell of vintage semen or cerumen; you can tell their condition a long ways off. Little Margarita always smelled of rotting flesh, though I never noticed till the day Handsome didn’t deliver the goods. Gelo de los Ángeles smelled of sweaty talcum and slippery disasters. He slid off the trapeze and was confined to a wheelchair for the few years left to him in this world. “If I’d known I’d be reduced to an invertebrate, I’d have been better off killing myself when I fell.” Doris did the charitable thing and brought him death on the sly. She suffocated him by putting a dry cloth in his mouth and soaking it till she blocked his trachea. She shed one tear after another while she did so. She only ever told me. Then she paid for a couple of masses, to see whether his soul might make it up to the skies as nimbly as he used to when he was young. On the other hand, I never did find out whether they consummated the love they never confessed to. Doris smelled of a bunch of fruit, of black grapes macerated in the oblique light that’s the death rattle of a dying summer. I still remember her with her back to me, treating her swollen rectal veins with Xeroform while, prostrated by a temperature, I inhaled the spectral effluvia of the disinfectant, though quite unintentionally. I’ve only ever smelled anything like it on one other occasion. It was in a London hotel. I’d taken a few days off to visit my son Edén in the institution where he was receiving medical treatment. We went for a walk in the meadows in Kew Gardens, we lunched on cheddar and cucumber sandwiches in Fortnum and Mason’s and then paid the Tate Gallery a visit to kill time. It was showing a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon. They say that art eases the understanding of autistic children and can have surprising therapeutic outcomes. I excitedly told the doctors what had happened in the museum on our return to the sanatorium, but they gave it no clinical importance. They simply shook my hand and assured me that the cure for his illness was a slow and complex business and, as we know, what’s slow and complex is always expensive.