My monstrous appetite terrified my mother, and I expect she thought I was going to suck her guts out, because she’d go spare and pinch my nostrils so I gasped for breath, opened my mouth, and dropped from her nipple. She didn’t love me. That was fair enough, but at the time, I lacked the acumen to grasp why. Her husband threw a coughing fit simply watching my birth and was struck speechless. I tell you, he died three weeks later. A third gob of spit complete with a blood clot stuck in his soft palate like a posthumous stalactite of snot.
By now, my real father must be offering up his flesh to the worms if that’s what Providence decreed. I never met him. I never knew who he was, and that dearth of knowledge was the little I had in common with my mother. She effortlessly turned her back on me to devote herself diligently to El Paquito’s clientele. She perfected her beans with pig’s ear and became a dab hand at preparing other dishes from La Mancha, like greasy fried breadcrumbs, and bacon soup, which swamps the stomach and thickens the intellect. She took great pains waiting on tables, polishing saucepans, and making and unmaking beds, whether drowsy after a relaxing siesta or in a vinous, nighttime haze. She was a real boon to the owner, a yokel from Motilla del Palancar whose business she eventually propped up with the loot deriving from her servile habits.
The milk she gave me tasted of velvety petals, hidden juices, and still seems warm in memories driven by the white venom of nostalgia. If I clung to her and bit her, it was because I sensed that the next ration might be a long way off or might never come at all. I didn’t do so out of spite, I assure you, but from hunger, that hunger that I tell you is part and parcel of me. A man is the hunger he has suffered — whatever the hunger, whoever the man. My brother Tranquilino watched me suckle with the high hopes that flush the faces of fools and sully their looks with a crystalline flow of dribble. The poor lad met his end in the first flower of life, when he was on the threshold of youth, with his semen just beginning to seep. A goods train rolled him over. Bits of his brain fed ants over a whole winter, those same ants he brutally set light to and morbidly watched squirm in the fire, spark in the flames, and in the process perfume his nostrils with the acrid smell of their scorching holocaust. He’d now be sixty-one if he’d not been splattered through the air when he crossed the track on his way to our orchard by the cemetery wall. Of course, there are more horrific deaths, but that was the one my brother copped, and there’s no changing that now.
Though your presence in this house fills me with anxious foreboding, it confirms my decision to believe in nothing and accept that destiny is irrevocable and beyond my control. I guessed your intentions the moment I saw your nose peer around the corner, the moment I felt your fascinated fingers exploring the slopes of my deformities and stroking the pages of my soul. There’s no need to reveal why you’ve come; it’s obvious from your eyes, your silences, the almost invisible, secret way you strive to listen to me. I sensed the end was nigh, I was at least forewarned, but I never imagined it would be such a hole-in-the-corner affair.
You’ve come not knowing what brings you or what kind of place this is. I’ll tell you. You are in my house, we arrived almost at the same time, you from God knows where, and I from attending my last supper. Providence decided I should finally accept the invitation to the charity Christmas dinner the Meredith Brothers Foundation traditionally puts on year after year, so that’s where I’ve just been. Public figures currently in the limelight love to attend this banquet, celebrated politicians, fashionable actors, preening intellectuals, wealthy entrepreneurs, and socialites in general, all fond of seeing their photos in the glossies. I sent the organization the generous gift it was so kind as to seek from me, and in exchange they desired my presence; you can imagine how people perform to the gallery on these charity evenings: everything is stagey, flashing smiles, and designer vanity. I’ve barely had time to take off my tie, shower, and pour out that glass of scotch to relax my muscles while waiting for Ms. Dixon to arrive; I’m sure you will have seen her in the media.
When they first make my acquaintance, it’s quite usual for people to be wary, mainly the result of their own limitations when it comes to having different kinds of folk than themselves in conversation rather than from any repulsion I might actually be generating. I’m used to that. The fact one is a dwarf means one’s already frail frame must develop an extra layer of thick skin. First they can’t think what to say, then they tense their muscles, some are rude, but in the end most manage to make a huge effort and produce a couple of polite sentences or clichés: “It’s a wonderful night”; “I imagined you were older”; “It’s a real honor to shake your hand.” Then they clam up, move away, and sink into self-justification of their own shortcomings. Tonight was no different. To my right at the dining table it was all smiles and eyes trying not to look my way, behind, the waiters ignored me except when they served me, with all due attention. Opposite me, the mayor held forth endlessly, addressing nobody in particular. When his eyes met mine, a pleasant, understanding smile blossomed on his cheeks. To my left, however, Commissioner Dixon seemed to be warming to a much riskier gambit, more suited to a lunatic or imbecile than a woman of her standing. However unlikely it might seem, Belinda Dixon, the European commissioner, had been coming on to me quite outrageously throughout the dinner, and I naturally found that rather worrying. Look at me, so old and deformed, yet sparking a woman’s desire! No doubt she wanted to use me to act out some kind of unsatisfied perversion. In truth, I felt only pity for her at first. I thought she was a woman in turmoil, someone who was quite unbalanced and capable of committing any act of madness while preserving that smile on her lips. I’ve always been attracted by extreme personalities, especially those lodged in powerful bodies. Gradually, nevertheless, I’d begun to realize that her presence in that place was no mere coincidence. That it all formed part of a premeditated scenario. Everything had been thought through: her words, her gestures, her risqué comments. I jotted my address on a scrap of paper, and she assured me she’d back out of a previous after-dinner commitment and rush, as soon as humanly possible, to indulge herself in my delightful company. I came home as quickly as I could, and here I am, waiting. When I heard you arrive, I assumed you must be her, that she’d most likely slipped in through the servants’ entrance which the maid had opened to take out the trash; I’d heard the roar of the truck and concluded that must be it, but the moment I saw you appear, I finally realized what it was all about.