Gurruchaga had been reported by the hooligans who came after us on Julius Caesar’s bridge when we were walking back to the circus with our load of tomatoes and oxtails. The kid whose stomach he’d pummeled with his iron fists had bled from the brain after taking flight and dropped dead in front of the Caño Gordo gate, along one of the façades of the Mosque. Apparently he collapsed suddenly and, already dead, smashed his face on Córdoba’s stony ground. A local poet would surely have praised the Roman whirls on the funeral wreaths if he’d ever gazed upon such a fine corpse. His mates carried him on their shoulders to the Civil Guard barracks and reported what had happened, taking no blame, exaggerating what had happened, creating a pantomime out of death. I tried to make an effort to come to his aid and tell those men it had been legitimate self-defense, but fear prevented me, and remorse still troubles my memory in that respect. I now know that my testimony would have served no purpose. My fate would have followed its preordained course, and I’d have reached this moment in time in exactly the same way. It was best for me to keep quiet.
Gurruchaga looked up at me from the ground. Tears glinted in his eyes, and petals of blood wreathed his forehead like carnations on a gravestone. They kicked him back on his feet and handcuffed his hands behind his back. He tried to say something to me, but cowardice made me look the other way and I couldn’t read the words on his lips. “You lot, get on with your chores. Nothing happened here,” ordered Esteruelas with the blocked flute of his nasal voice. “As for you and this absurd circus,” he told Di Battista, “we shall investigate what this is all about and who is ultimately responsible.” Before they took the prisoner away, that man scrutinized me, as if he were fascinated by my deformities, but then he walked off, and in the end I wasn’t brought to account. We met up years later, there was even a time when I did some jobs for him, but he finally got his just desserts, not that I’d been wanting that. I watched Gurruchaga walk off for the last time. Red poppies streamed down his trouser leg. It was a stream of hope, that mirage he’d never believed in.
The dead don’t speak, they simply rot away as the seasons come and go till they turn to dust or creepy-crawlies have their fill. The dead have little or no influence over their fates. They’re sometimes called upon to test out the waters of transcendence with their own hand, but it’s rarely a success. They say Jesus Christ was practiced in this kind of shadowy endeavor and that he brought Lazarus back into this world. He must have emerged from the grave pale and wan like someone returning from a catastrophe, and he surely trembled in fear and even found it difficult to control his sphincters. Resurrection did him no good — perhaps as a preamble to a fresh death, a second death, a dead man times two. For everyone else, it was perhaps a reason to cling to hope. You have invaded my home to relieve me of consciousness and snatch my life away. I knew that the second I felt your presence, and though I’d been warned about what was bound to happen, I never thought it would be like this. They do say that at the very instant of death, past time zooms past one’s eyes at the speed of lightning and one relives every moment as if they were the frames of a film rolling to its end. Perhaps that’s what’s happening right now. Perhaps the deeds I’ve done, those that shaped my feelings and justified my transit through this world, are dizzily being reproduced before I vanish into the void.
I’d been planning to fly to London tomorrow to spend Christmas with my son Edén, but now that you’re here, I realize that’s not going to be possible. The boy suffered far too much as a child and was left a mute with an out-of-joint will because of something ghastly that happened to him. The doctors treating his autism in the W&S Institution say he is improving and in time will be able to come out of isolation and integrate fully into society. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what will be worse, for him to remain an alien to this world, funneled into the unreality of his paradises, or for them to cure his illness and return him to the fold of normality. I sometimes tell him that when he’s cured, I’ll bring him back so he can take charge of my business, and he just stands and looks at me as if he doesn’t understand the meaning of my words or would rather not speak his mind about the triteness of my trade. He really does understand, but he shows no interest whatsoever and simply becomes self-engrossed and puts on a deadpan expression. He doesn’t know that I’m his father. I’ve never bothered to tell him that the corpse he saw swinging on a rope in time with the flight of the stone curlews didn’t belong to his father. Nor do I know whether he could assimilate that. I just pay the costs of the specialist treatment he receives, go to see him now and then, and take him for walks in London’s parks. I suppose that in the same way that he’s not bothered about my companionship, he won’t miss me in this grueling Christmas season. Maybe he’s only one more bit part in the cartoon fable of my existence.
After Gurruchaga disappeared, the shit detail was mine alone. Nobody missed him, not even the animals he looked after. Those beasts just went on dying when their turn came, now without anyone to register their pain and suffering. I took over his bric-a-brac, that useless pile of junk, his herculean cleaning tasks, and the duty of finding food for the animals, which required great effort and dedication. Consequently, they became first-rate consumers of dog meat and other delicacies that disease and waifing and straying had left abandoned on Spanish steppes under the cellophane veneer of carrion. Pudgy Di Battista watched me from his caravan window, shielded by the specter of alcohol that was increasingly blurring his brain and blunting his desire to live. “Molto bene, lad,” Di Battista would say, “’ard work dignify il uomo. Ma essere a divinna castigato earning ze pane with ze sudore della brow, in your case is ze case, the ‘uge jobz youvva donna.”
My silence made me an accomplice. My penance was the shame at having to remember Gurruchaga being seized and beaten. The most treasured of all that his disappearance bequeathed me was the copy of the Gypsy Ballads and its yellow pages peppered with metaphors that were completely useless in everyday circus life. I reread and reread his verse in a seething trance as soon I could dodge my duties, and all that one-track reading fired my brain and took a grip on my ideas. Knives, gypsies, and civil guards walked back into my life, and I was powerless to stop them. It was as if the resurgence of my memories took on a fresh life with that book, and I happily wallowed in the process, relishing each word as if it had in fact come from my lips. However, there was something with a degree of reality in that wealth of well-rhymed tales: the dedication that presided over the text, that For Gurru, my comrade in love and combat, with a French kiss for the moments we have shared, Mary Faith Oxen. It was tangible, oozed with life, and I found it really intriguing.
They called Dorotea Gómez “La Doris” because she gave herself Doris Day airs. She had the same bright, lively eyes and prissy hair. She seemed a spitting image even with her bronzed hips. She’d tell herself she was the one pirouetting on the trapeze when she went into the ring to swing and trigger that ebb and flow of flesh through the air in her perennial struggle against the forces of gravity. It was a pleasure to see Doris take flight, a rhythmic, musical pleasure. She’d push herself off with her legs, and when her intended flight reached its peak, she swooped into the void and spun around a few seconds until she met her partner’s hands, his fingers padlocking firmly around hers to avoid a splattering fall. Doris rounded off her routine as a lithe beauty, ever flirtatious and provocative, spontaneously so. Gelo de los Ángeles, her high-wire companion, calmly watched her gravity-defying snaking and zigzagging and, at the slightest error in her takeoff or wrong turn in her flight, leapt quickly and expertly to safeguard her act, catching her like a flesh-and-blood feather afloat plunging down from the downy trampoline in the clouds. Nonetheless, I should say that both worked with a net, which perhaps detracted from their show, but it’s true that while Doris didn’t want to stake her equally supple limbs, youth, or life on hands that could easily slip, Gelo de los Ángeles was a feverish risk-taker, always pressuring her to heighten the spectacle with the threat of disaster. His lippy, dribbling mouth challenged her to perform at least once for real, wagering both their lives on that invisible precipice in the air. Gelo was intrepid because he wanted to stand out and was committed to the deceit of the circus; he knew that to keep roaming the world without thrills was a lethal waste of dreams. Doris didn’t think of death, but whenever she couldn’t help it, she could only ever imagine a stretch of ground closing in on her eyes, and that premonition scared her stiff. She still had the supple limbs of first youth and pliant bones, so flexibility was her forte. She wasn’t afraid of heights. Though she didn’t allow herself to be duped by Gelo de los Ángeles’s old tricks, either. She wore a white leotard, and the gauze pressed tight against her body in a transparent display of her contours and sweat. It was wonderful to watch her climbing up the rope to the cusp of the tent. Her body shimmied and sashayed, and the second she reached the trapeze bar, she was transfigured into a gamboling figure of flesh, blood, and talc. The audience was dazzled by her movements through the air, their necks ached from looking up so long, their mouths gaping wide, the women incredulous and the men slavering like dogs. Fantastic pirouettes, svelte corkscrews, double and triple somersaults performed wonderfully show after show, and there was yet more to come; as the climax to her act, Doris gripped the trapeze bar between the backs of her knees and let the rest of her body hang down. Then she grasped a torch in each hand, which she lit on the small flame of a censer hanging from the mast that supported the platform. Blackish diesel-oil smoke then coiled to the top of the tent and begrimed the canvas. The ring lights went out, and she was left alone in the dome, half in shadow, half illumined by orange flames. Doris launched off, and when her zigzagging climaxed, she’d let herself fall, spinning, twizzling her own body around, keeping the torches apart on each side of her, twisting and sparking in free fall down the abyss of the ring until Gelo de los Ángeles swung his trapeze over and caught her heels in mid-descent. The spectators chorused an anxious “Ooh!” of delight and roared their applause, releasing the tension aroused by so much suspense. Doris finished her act by sliding down a thick rope into the arena, where she stood barefoot, throwing endless kisses to her audience, giving the horniest among them the opportunity to pleasure in measuring her breasts and even the soft half-moons of her buttocks, which, as one could appreciate from closeup, spilt their cream down both sides of her leotard. After the applause, after the public’s regulation inspection, Gelo de los Ángeles descended, athletic and hieratic, from the heights of his trapeze, stood behind her, and wrapped the sweaty satin of his cape around her, as if consecrating the arcane mystery of her dizzy femininity with the concealment of her body.