Fernando Royuela - A Bad End

I’d still not taken my clothes off. I was waiting for room service to bring up the selection of cinnamon and ginger cookies with the warm glass of milk I’d ordered. Although my stomach still felt upset after the day’s ups and downs, I felt like eating something sweet before going to bed and comforting my mind with a pill or two. Someone knocked on the door, and a uniformed waitress trundled in the sweets trolley and parked it under the large damask curtains framing a window that looked over Regent Street. Outside, a whispering drizzle dampened the murky streetlights. The gloom filtered through the windowpanes, and its brushstrokes darkened my spirits. I’ve always thought that extravagant bedrooms in grand hotels were pantheons to vanity; the comfort is funereal, and their ostentation shrouded in meaninglessness. The waitress withdrew from the small drawing room but not before giving a small reverential curtsey and bowing her head, though rage flashed in her eyes at having to perform such a pantomime before a dwarf; one notices such things. I remained deep in thought for a few seconds. Suddenly, an incandescent glow began to surge in a corner of the room. It was a streak of shadow tinged with a phantom gleam, a somber wraith of frozen light that gradually set into a figure with a human aspect and recognizable features. It smelled of aldehyde, asepsis, and the infinite. I didn’t budge; neither was I especially shocked when I recognized her. Before my astounded gaze, Faith Oxen had returned from the land of sepulchers. “I’m hungry, Gregori,” the dead woman told me, “there’s a lot of hunger in this novel, chew a sweet for me.” I obeyed. I put a bun in my mouth, biting into it reluctantly as I eyed the ectoplasm’s movements. The specter gave a satisfied smirk and went on talking. Its silhouette shook in the air like the blown wick of a candle, and that made it difficult to anticipate how it would move. It assured me that in the world beyond, from which it had just returned, food and drink didn’t exist, nor did any feeling that might recall the sensuous joys of conscious life; there was only equivocation. “I’m creased with hunger, give me more food before you, too, disappear,” the scarecrow droned. I swallowed and concentrated my nerves in my Adam’s apple, not daring to utter a word. “You were deceiving yourself when you said it all ended with death,” it continued. “You were deceiving yourself when you thought I’d leave you in peace if you stuffed me with sweet pastries. You wanted me to die inconsolably, and now I’ve come to ask for solace.”

Clearly, that thingy had come to criticize my behavior, wielding all the authority its supernatural dimension granted. I didn’t respond to a single one of its needling provocations; I simply tried to relax while watching what was happening. For a whole ten minutes, long as fragments of eternity, the apparition continued its speech from beyond the grave, a speech shot through with vagaries and imprecision that nevertheless contrasted with the surprising exactness with which it displayed its knowledge of certain unspeakable incidents from my past. The scarecrow laughed, and with every guffaw exhumed, it undermined my sangfroid. The hermetic nature of its language meant I didn’t grasp the entire disquisition, but at one specific moment, I thought I did see it was making fun of anything to do with my wealth and treated me as a simpleton, a puppet, a fictional being. Past, present, and future seemed to issue from its mouth, and it made no difference whether it dredged up a memory or sketched out a prediction when it came to appreciating the unreal mush permeating its words. Listening, I was reminded of forgotten incidents and learned of others that had yet to happen, like the unforgivable one here and now when you, on the other side of this book, are reading what happened and realize you are my interlocutor, the person in whose presence my existence must run its course. “We the characters don’t belong to the universe of the living, nor do we commune with the detritus of the dead. That’s our sentence, Gregori,” Faith told me. “We have no options, criteria, or will. We just play out our roles in the farce we are called to inhabit. We jump to the orders of whoever granted us this pretense to consciousness and are in debt to the imagination of those who read us. Our blight is that we’re created; our challenge is to be credible. Please chew another sweet for me, the juicy kind that can bring a tingle of pleasure back to my palate. In this life without life where I roam, one can’t even enjoy the sensation of being nibbled by insects. Man’s struggle is futile, Gregori, a dwarf’s struggle against fate; abandon them to their second-guessing and come and enjoy me while you can. Why don’t you answer me? Come on, give me the solace you denied me; I beg you, drop those trousers, I’m famished.”

I didn’t budge or say a word. I wasn’t upset and didn’t make a run for it. I didn’t shout or spit in the air to vaporize the nightmare swaying before my eyes. I picked up the sugar bowl and hurled it at the specter, hit it on the head so unluckily it went clean through its nonexistence and crashed into a genuine Chinese vase I’d placed on a marble-topped chiffonier, unleashing a calamitous din of broken porcelain that dissolved the apparition without more ado. With a dramatic flop, that entire structure of antimatter ceased to exist, leaving only traces of the disturbing odor I’ve described and the enigmatic echo of its words buzzing round my head like so many burst bubbles of unreality. Later, over time, I preferred to believe that that scarecrow wasn’t really Faith Oxen, that the apparition I’d gazed at had only existed in my imagination, that it was all the product of a bad dream, perhaps provoked by the horrific upset I suffered when I heard for the first time in the Tate Gallery the accusations leveled at me by my son Edén. However, I’ve gradually come to realize it was quite the contrary, until I finally managed to decipher the message that bastard Faith Oxen had decided to reveal from her fantastic world beyond in order to make me suffer. I’ve become increasingly convinced and demoralized as I’ve been forced to accept that it really was Providence whimsically tracing my steps across this world, which may or may not be real, where the story of my life was forged, one story locked into another, one that’s more generic but no less phantasmagoric: the general story of Spain that unites us both.

There was a knock on the gate that morning. The sun was spreading springtime, chirruping across the sky, and I was in tune, breakfasting on a pippin apple. They came to inform me. A beggar woman was down in the street shouting that she would slice open her veins if they didn’t let her see me immediately. She was accompanied by a silent child who gazed blankly at a nonexistent horizon. I ordered my butler to call the police, and he replied that he’d already taken the liberty to do so, but the situation remained extremely compromising, and the mad woman’s life was surely in danger. I peered at the security monitor that records images of the entrance and identified her at once. On that black-and-white screen, she looked like driftwood cast onto the shore of life by the tide of time. I ordered them to let her in. She’d aged, and she burst into tears when she saw me, and that made me reflect on how much she must have suffered to humiliate herself before me in that manner. My brother Tranquilino burnt ants’ nests as a form of amusement and never worried about the insects’ suffering. It wasn’t in his nature to feel or not to feel compassion; he did what he did and didn’t think about the consequences, he never regretted doing it — that, at least, was in his favor. “Why are you paying me a visit after all these years, Blondie? It doesn’t seem your enthusiasm for revolution worked for you.” Blond Juana, in rags, gripped her son’s wrist. Hard times had prematurely aged her; her flesh looked soft and puffy, as if kneaded by a bludgeon. Nobody would have been surprised to see her selling paper hankies by a traffic light. “This boy carries your blood,” she said drily, “he was your farewell present. I can’t provide for him anymore, and he needs medical attention. He’s ill.” The true victory in my life had come by surprise, like those sudden deaths that dishearten the enemy and suddenly frustrate their battle strategy.