As we entered the shadows of the big top, between the animal cages and past the troupe’s covered wagons, Gurruchaga proclaimed to all and sundry the dishes he was planning to cook for lunch: Cordoban salmorejo and oxtail stew. The circus people showed their surprise at the shit man’s show of good spirits. Even the wild animals roared and grunted from the depths of their gullets. Being the prickly sod he was, his invitation to lunch sounded strange. “You’va cum troppo contenti della cittá. It’s a rare evento to see youa lika thiss,” said pudgy Di Battista, peering out of the door of his caravan, which doubled as his box office and bedroom. He was holding a glass of cognac on the rocks, and alcohol’s eloquence thickened his speech. “Youa must ‘avva known molta whora aroun’ ‘ere when youa woz an amico di la Reppublica Sppagnola. No é vero, Gurruchaga?” Di Battista threw out those insidious insinuations to sap his spirits and return him to the supine state of the oppressed. He was a dab hand at doing that and enjoyed preening over the people he humiliated. Perhaps it was his way of trying to keep his control of a domain that was in fact slipping from his hands; perhaps he did so to avoid confronting his disillusion with himself, and his evident bankruptcy. He was a posh bastard falling on hard times, a hapless fellow who finally met the bad end he was seeking. Gurruchaga looked down, frowned, and went quiet. Pudgy and his gripes had touched his Achilles heel of accounts he’d yet to settle. He still went around in fear of his life after twenty years. And with good reason, that’s for sure. He said nothing and walked off to the lions’ cage and, next to the bars daubed with excrement, started to redeem his guilt by preparing lunch. I knew nothing about Gurruchaga’s previous life and thought Di Battista’s spiel that had depressed him so was a prelude to disaster when it was simply an epilogue, an epilogue to the tremendous disaster of the war. I quickly went to sit by his side at the end of the esplanade where the circus — beautiful towers and a fantastic jumble of roofs — had been erected. The lions languorously whisked off the flies. Gurruchaga started skinning the tails. He inserted the thin point of his knife in the joint, opened a wide enough slit, and with one pull tore off strips of skin. Pink and naked, the tail now looked like a snake made of bare flesh. After a silent interlude when the only sound was of skin tearing, I plucked up the courage to speak. “I want to thank you for defending me. You are the first to do so. I don’t know what more I can say.” “Shut your trap, kid,” he retorted, “I just did what had to be done. Foul behavior really riles me; foul behavior and the quantity of idiots who rule the roost over everyone else. Don’t you ever let them harness you up. Nod and pretend if you have no choice, but the moment they’re not looking, go for their jugulars and don’t let up until they stink of death. There’s a lot to be done, but this will change one day. You’ll live to see it. I lose it every time people fucking try it on. We should have fought back better. If we’d have beaten them, they’d all be marinating six feet under and we wouldn’t have to keep quiet. Times have to change. You’ll live to see it, Goyito, you’ll see it happen.” Gurruchaga shut up, and the resentment he felt clotted in his throat again. He looked up at the sky and spat out slantways a green gob of spit to siphon off his anger. “Now go to the caravan,” he said, “look among my bits and pieces for a tomato masher, and start taking out the pips. I’m going to make such a fucking great salmorejo it will sweep all our sorrows away.” I went off to the caravan and spent a good long time rummaging for a masher among his clutter. I’d never seen one before. I’d never tried salmorejo, or oxtail, for that matter. I’d never shared hatred with anyone. I’d never tasted sweet sorrow with any other human being. It was all new to me, silent times, and new. In the bric-a-brac in the caravan, I found broken pick heads, frying pans that would fry no more, saucepans misshapen by the heat of stoves, door handles, sacks with rusty metal catches, candlesticks, lumps of marble, knives without handles, remnants of rags, lots of leftovers from demolitions and scrapyards, miserable junk collected together in a battered trunk of memories belonging to nobody in particular, odds and sods from nowhere in particular. All of a sudden while rummaging in that messy pile, I came across something quite unexpected that brought the golden glitter of surprise to my face: a book of poems, Federico’s Gypsy Ballads. I held it for a moment, weighing up the nature of my find, and then opened it at random. Stubborn guns ring shrill through the night. The Virgin heals with her starlight spittle. But the Civil Guard advances sowing bonfires where imagination, young and naked, burns. Now that is what you call poetry, poetry with that charge you extract from coal-black veins of feeling. At the time, I knew nothing about Federico. I hadn’t read his verse and wasn’t aware of the circumstances of his early demise or the fact that he possessed an incorrupt arm stuffed with olives and shards of iris that glowed in the sockets of his skull. I later discovered he’d met a bad death, bitter as freshly brewed coffee at dawn on the sandpaper countryside of Andalusia, that four yokels killed him, and that with their outrage they unknowingly established a sanctuary now venerated like an apparition of the Virgin. I was fascinated as I leafed through the pages of the Ballads, petrified by poetry like the statue of salt in the Old Testament. It was a short book with a two-tone drawing on the cover of a pitcher on a kind of red cloth in the shape of Spain’s bullskin. Three black sunflowers seemed to sway under the title like tentacles of the night. The poet’s name was written at the bottom in his own handwriting. I opened it. On the inside pages was a dedication, imprinted with old ink that looked like dry blood, signaling who the owner was: For Gurru, my comrade in love and combat, with a French kiss for the moments we have shared. Mary Faith Oxen. That book was the only thing I took with me the day I escaped from the circus. I never did find the masher.
When I left the caravan and got a whiff of the powder scattered in the skirmish, Gurruchaga the shit man had already been laid low by the Civil Guard. He was bleeding on the ground by the lion cages, his right hand on the wound from the bullet that had drilled through his thigh, his face a sorry picture of defeat. A civil guard’s boot was treading on his neck, while his colleague squirmed in the pain from the knife jabs he’d received in the fight. Behind, a man in plain clothes looked on contentedly over a prominent paunch that was beginning to emphasize his waning youth. His name was Esteruelas, and he was in charge of the detail. “Kill the fucker,” the wounded civil guard urged his colleague, “bash his face in,” but the other was more measured in matters of delivering death and merely pressed the sole of his boot down on Gurru’s Adam’s apple. Their curiosity aroused, the circus people observed with the frightened meekness of the underclass. Pudgy Di Battista, in the meanwhile, was conversing with the man orchestrating the arrest, more worried about any repercussions it all might have on his business than on the dismal fate Gurruchaga was facing.
“Non só ‘ow aquesta disgrazia canna ‘ave ‘appened, ma you ‘avva to understan’ that gentes siniestras down onnaze luck joinna the circus, that zey only ‘avva to gnaw a bone to ‘avva suficenti per soprevivere. Youa know we aren’t preocupati about people’s condizione ne do we investigari nel suo passato. Zey work ‘ard in exchange for silence, bit by bit redeemin’ zemselves con zi lavoro. Per la notte zey let off steam barkin’ alla luna e esto é tutto. States tambene need lugari come aqueste dove keeppa la merda di la soccietá,” he declared, exhaling huge amounts of breath in order to dilute as quickly as possible the impact of alcohol in his blood. I kept my distance, not daring to step forward. The vile shine of gunmetal paralyzed my will, and fear kept it that way. I was offering a master class in not giving help, but what else could I do but try and save my own skin?