I felt the massive echo from the darkness resonate in my eardrums while a spiral of damp lined my nostrils with the reverential fear generated by the presence of the sacred or the dead. I was a mere child who hitherto had never dared complain about his fate. I was scared, but determined; an inner strength directed my footsteps, acted as my will. I reached the altar, drenched in sweat. My temples were on fire. The cross of Christ filled the place with the grand spectacle of torture. Polychrome wood pitted with crimson sores, his pale body leaked bloodcurdling spume through its ribs. Christ’s head lolled to one side, and because his gaze was fixed on an area of the floor, his presence didn’t deter me, quite the contrary; though a dwarf, I found comfort in that friendly exchange from one death mask to another and grew in strength at the sight of his fake performance — a scrap of wood and a scrap of flesh in a midnight encounter. “God doesn’t exist, mother told me so,” I parroted my brother’s words. Ineffable bliss suddenly flooded my mind. It was the same euphoria I experienced when my mother gave me that medicinal cognac; I was drunk on revenge. The key was in the tabernacle lock. The chalice was inside. An unfolded silk veil lay on top of it in a display of seamless asepsis. I grabbed the chalice, and I put it on the floor under the altar. With one swipe I removed the veil. Inside, a pile of hosts awaited the next day’s communion, the gleeful communion of the children who would feel for the first time the body of Christ on their tongues, an unleavened body of bread that would gradually slip between their teeth like an ancient rite or a pinch of salt. Without a second thought, I pulled down my trousers and, right there, crouching over the chalice, started to empty my bowels. As I remember it, I heard a cock crow three times, or more likely it was my mother’s early-morning cock-a-doodle-do proclaiming her return from El Paquito’s. When I’d relieved my guts, I put the alb back and placed it in the tabernacle, gleaming and apparently immaculate, though profaned within by the steaming blasphemy of my defecation. The stench began impregnating the stole when I locked up. It was a peculiar stench I’d never experienced before. Perhaps it had its origins in the oxidizing of the wheat by my excrement, perhaps it came straight from the pigsty of hell. I’d given myself a fright. I’d often hear men voice empty blasphemies threatening what I’d just done, but I’d never thought the feeling one experienced after actually doing it would be one of such astonishing defiance. I touched nothing, I waved my hands in the air, and, after dispersing the evidence of my presence, I fled the way I’d come — Christ’s cross, the barreled vault, Saint Roch with his doggy-woggy who’d dropped his tail, the broken sacristy window, and the retreating night sky the only witnesses to the insalubrious nature of my mischief.
I was born a dwarf, as you see me now, my legs tucked under my body, my arms that barely reach my hands, and my hands squeezed against my shoulders like little wings with fingers. I was born a dwarf, but a human being is not measured by size or by degree of beauty, but by the quantity of cash he handles; the greater the amount of cash, the bigger the size, naturally. There are no dwarves when money is at stake. I was born a dwarf, but it could have been even worse, because I could have been born a pig to be slaughtered or even a worm used for bait, one that dies half on the hook and half in the fish’s mouth. Things are what they are, and little or nothing can be done to go against their nature. Only the very brave are occasionally courageous enough to defy their destiny. The mad sometimes try, but their attempts have no merit.
Even toothless, little Santomás was radiant with joy on that Sunday morning when he was preparing for his first communion. His grandmother had been to Valencia to buy him a sailor’s suit with blue braids and a lanyard of cord plaited from gold thread that snaked across his chest and slipped into his jacket pocket in appropriate military style. He was toothless. I couldn’t take first communion and never even acceded to the grace of baptism; in terms of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, when I died, I would go to hell. Pitiful beliefs.
Little Santomás was one of those stuck-up bastards that rejoice in an unctuous blind faith in themselves, yet I expect it’s for that reason he experienced a death lit up by flames. The children were so looking forward to receiving the communion wafer that May Sunday, and, in comparison, I’d have been happy, too, if Don Vicente hadn’t gone and refused me the sacrament. I shouldn’t have bothered to tell him what I wanted, I should have anticipated his contempt, but only Providence is prescient, and sometimes our ears are deaf.
A bright sun shone that day, a pure kind of sun, the sort that fills men with hope. In the front pews, in their Sunday best, the children were anxiously waiting for the ceremony to begin. They exchanged sly smiles that spoke of the happiness in their hearts. The packed church was heaving. Coughs, clearing of throats, sweat galore, exalted hymns all fused and defined a kind of unity of destiny in the very provisional nature of those times. I peered fearfully around the corner of the doorway and waited for the drama to unfold. Through the legs of the multitude standing in front of me, I could barely see the central aisle and the altar at the end of it. Don Vicente was wearing a threadbare liturgical chasuble topped by a glorious red stole, as befitted the first Sunday in May. A beam of light illuminated his face, and seen from afar in such garb, he looked to me like a scarecrow of the faith. Christ’s cross emphasized the authority of law with its heavy-duty pay-off. Crucified Christ was still looking at the floor. His attitude had hardly changed since the previous night. A man walked into the church and stamped on me, as he hadn’t seen me. “Get out of here, titch,” he whispered loudly, manhandling me out of the way. Four old biddies in black, wrinkled their faces and their veils, turned around in unison and spat reproachful, saliva-free glances in my direction. Shamed by the huge guilt of having been born so repulsively into this world, I had no choice but to draw in my ears and hide behind a confessional, out of the way in a corner of the triforium, that was begrimed by the dust of sins. I could hardly see what was happening, but I clearly heard the big buzz, like a whoosh from hell, that swept out of the tabernacle when Don Vicente opened the door for the moment of the hypostasis. He must have noted some peculiar smell, because he leaned his head to one side before opening it, perhaps wanting to locate the source of those mephitic gases. The children at the communion stood and gaped at the bluebottles that swarmed out, glinting like Satan’s hemorrhoids, hovering in repugnant clusters above their shocked faces. That unspeakable plague immediately filled the vault, and people started clamoring in disgust. The critters comprising that transubstantiation formed a veritable multitude, milling in their thousands, so many, in fact, that their fluttering wings made the walls tremble and cracked the glass in the windows. The insects pirouetted up and down as if craving the sinful stuff the congregation harbored a-plenty in their consciences. It was as if they wanted to be part of the communion, and to die in mouths, which, of course, is what happened in those that didn’t shut in time. Many children crunched them and said they tasted juicy, like cakes soaked in wine or water sweetened with honey. People fled, panic stricken. Some jumped over me, others trampled on me, and all, quite unawares, sorely damaged my spine and brought great suffering upon me. When the church had emptied out, those insects that had blossomed in the matter deposited by my guts, as if by spontaneous combustion, began to return whence they’d perhaps come and disappeared en masse into the blue sky. Only a few were left perching on Saint Roch’s doggy, wound around his tail, thus supplying him with a new, longer wagger, for heaven knows what prosthetic purpose.