Life is an ineffable mystery, with so much baffling arcana. Those of us who are conscious can at least say that, and indeed have the moral duty to do so and to seek out, perhaps in the wonders of existence, the traces of an originating divinity. Gustavo Adolfo indicated as much in the sickly flowers of these lines: As long as science fails to discover the wellsprings of life, and in sea or heaven an abyss that resists reason resides, as long as humanity advances but knows not where it flies, as long as mysteries haunt mankind, there will be poetry!”
Little Santomás was a bastard of the illustrious, nose-in-the-air kind and crushingly able to inflict pain on the helpless. A mule kicked out his teeth when he was in his teens. It struck him because he stuck a firecracker up its anal sphincter, one of the Chinese sort, with a lengthy fuse greased with gunpowder, that were always going off in village fiestas when we were children — the Feast of the Assumption, Michaelmas, May Day, and all those. The mule’s kick landed unluckily for him and cleft his palate. Little Santomás was sent flying when the firecracker went off and spattered shit everywhere. The animal was clearly constipated. Firecrackers are usually harmless, but depending on where and how they are placed, they can do a lot of damage, though bombs do more. A bomb sent One-Eyed Slim and Inspector Esteruelas off along the road to hell. It sucked the blood from their veins. That was in Madrid, in ‘78. Providence mercifully ensured I wasn’t at the site of the carnage; I now know why. Slim said I should go, to keep him company, but I didn’t feel like meeting Esteruelas again. At the time, I was begging on the steps of the church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, right opposite the cafeteria where the artifact exploded. It was part of my commitments to One-Eyed. The Grupos Revolucionarios Antifascistas Primero de Octubre claimed responsibility for the attack. At that time, murders were often carried out in order to destabilize the transition process, but I shall tell you later how much I was involved in such thunder and lightning.
If Don Vicente had lived to a ripe old age, he’d never have stomached those turbulent times, and his heart would have burst in his chest just as the mule’s kick smashed up the face of little Santomás. He believed in divine justice, in a universe hierarchically ordered by an almighty creator, in the enemies of the faith, in the daily presence of the Devil in people’s lives, and in Machaquito anisette. “Clear off, you titchy bugger,” he shouted the day I went to ask to receive the sacrament he should have been sensible and granted; he’d have saved himself the embarrassment of having to go and explain what happened to his higher-ups. Don Vicente was a bastard whose life gradually went sour on him. The Bishop of Albacete called him to account, and he had no choice but to tell him the facts. From then on, he could only see messengers of darkness and try to avoid going to the lavatory. “The sticky vagina of the whore of Babylon has descended upon us with a stench of coriander and a stink of cashews!” he preached on Sundays and obligatory holy days. “Repent and believe in the Gospels!” He went mad. They exiled him to the diocese of Calahorra and he went mad, or perhaps he was mad already. The church had to be exorcized. Incense was burnt in every chapel, and Hail Maries, Credos, and Our Fathers were prayed; it was a lovely ceremony that revealed enormous contrition. The whole village joined the procession, everyone carried a candle, the women were veiled, the men resplendent in clean shirts and ties, and the children silent, respectful, and extremely reverential. Little Margarita was there clutching her black prayer book, as was the worthy, if toothless, Santomás, and others who kept their distance from me, and even my own brother Tranquilino, whose eyes were bewitched by the flames of so many flickering candles. I saw them parade by from the top of a steep slope on the outskirts of the village. The enigma behind their lamentations was sealed in my belly like a secret encrypted in the designs of Providence. These times are contradictory, they are times for the end of time. The world often pretends to be what it isn’t, and everyday reason tends to see through its fantasies, but in the end the mystery of life has to be fathomed by each and every individual, and each should extract the baggage that suits them. In any case, after all that nonsense, confusion, and idiocy spread by word of mouth in the village over the business of the bluebottles, I realized that rather than clinging to someone else’s dogma, one should find what matters in one’s own inner self, the stuff one learns from life itself, the real master when it comes to teaching lessons with a magisterial cane.
That year, the rebel army finished off the last centers of resistance, and Fulgencio Batista, the dictator, rather than facing defeat like a man, had no qualms about fleeing his country. That year, Federico Martín Bahamontes won the Tour de France and proudly walked onto the podium in the Parc des Princes as if his victory had been a minor feat. My mother was still beautiful, and with a lingering coquettish knack she kneaded her body with the Tokalón cream she told the truck drivers to buy in Madrid. “We’ve been married for six years, and my husband still dotes on me. He often says I’m as pretty as I was during our honeymoon. He goes too far, of course. . but he’s quite right. When I admire my skin, I see the years go by without taking their toll, ever since I’ve been caring for my skin with Tokalón cream. This is what I do at night. I apply nutritious Tokalón cream, and it tones my skin while I sleep. A light application of Tokalón day cream in the morning, and my skin is well protected for the whole day and stays white, clean, and soft,” said the advertisement for the concoction. For a few coins, my mother let the lusting hands of truck drivers wander over her on their short pleasure breaks at El Paquito’s. She didn’t overcharge, or give discounts. The establishment docked her for the use of the bed and took a commission, more than half her rate, all told, so the money she took home from frigging and cooking was no astonishing amount. “Mother, give me two pesetas for a pencil,” I’d beg her. “Don’t bother me, and use your tongue for a paintbrush,” and I’d leave not having put two words together on the blank sheet. I sometimes did so in my head, and lines came out very much in Gustavo Adolfo’s style, but they quickly slopped down the drain of oblivion and may still be swimming in the sinkholes of my memory, next to my last impressions of childhood in that village. Damned village. I would soon have to leave and never return.
It was around the feast of Saint Blaise when the storks flew back, and around Michaelmas when the musicians, an orchestra full of beat-up instruments, made their appearance and provided the village fiestas with their soundtrack. They came in a van that was ready for the junkyard, battered as it was by merciless, nonstop rumbling over the rugged fatherland. The musicians lodged in beds hired out by Aurelia La Cacharra, the owner of the bar in the plaza, and they set up the platform with their collection of instruments and sheet music next to the town hall, right in front of the rusty cross where the names of the village lads who’d died for God and Spain figured under the runny letters of the name of José Antonio, weathering the storm of oblivion. His honor the mayor also allowed a few fairground stalls, to add to the festive spirit: shooting galleries primed with leather balls stuffed full of sand whose fate was to be hurled at dummies dressed up as the enemy; churro stands shrouded in steam; and modest bingo stalls where people played for transistor radios, cookware sets, and luridly dyed propylene sponges. The orchestra played until half past midnight, and then, after the final flourishes of the national anthem, the grand finale to all that gaiety, with its da-dee-da, dee-da-dee, the bandsmen left to down a few glasses of anisette to the good health of La Cacharra, who invited them as men, musicians, and clients. “Maestro, you can really play,” she’d say, coming on to the man with baton, “you’re a fancy, filigree musician, and you should have studied in the Spanish infantry music school and not wasted your time playing all these raucous boleros in villages.” “Well, you know, my dear, I don’t know what to say. Light music is my thing — Antonio Machín and Doménico Modugno,” and he started humming the tune to Perfidy, oblivious to La Cacharra’s real intentions. Nonetheless, once glasses had been raised and spirits lifted, the musicians decided to pay a visit to El Paquito’s, where they all played their oompah-oompah symphonies on my mother, the ones best blown with mouth aligned to the thighs of the instrument. I’ve never been too keen on music, let alone the light kind. It brings back bad memories from that Michaelmas feast night that God should damn. I got my just desserts, that’s for sure, but it smelled so sweet, and I lost it — muscatel grapes, a recent storm, and clean beds — I couldn’t stop myself, and I lost it. It was the scent of disaster, sweet and juicy like the early delights of adolescence. At most, music drowns my heart in nostalgia. A maddening itch runs through me when it zings into my earholes. Music is the larynx of angels — of those in hell. Damned music, always perforating the organs of the rational mind.