Once there was a fracas with the Movement’s provincial delegate in Zamora, who’d come to a show with his wife and seven children. The man was astounded, or so he said, to see her naked in the ring. Excitement coupled with the power of his position meant he began to clamor indignantly and proclaim like the troglodyte he was that it was outrageous and unworthy, an insult to the Christian faith and an attack on the fundamental principles of the Movement. There was no option but to suspend the show, and a writ was issued against the Stéfano circus in the person of Di Battista, whom the appalled bigwig wanted to deal with in the courts. Pudgy spent a month in offices and waiting rooms with lawyers, giving explanations, apologizing, and hyping his would-be past as a Blackshirt in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Naturally, the incident with Gurruchaga again came to light, and the matter became more complicated than it should have. While Pudgy was sorting that business out with his fatuous, patriotic verbal diarrhea that stank of cognac, the Stéfano circus was sealed off by order of the government, and in the meantime we were all left without a damned crumb to feed our bellies, apart from our worries and the vagaries about our role in the legal procedures that were underway. The ones that really came out best in the interim were the animals; apart from enjoying a rest from the exhausting paces we forced them through, they were fed in abundance on the stray dogs wandering the city, an indigenous victual that hardly rivaled the fame of local cheeses but was decent enough to placate their desperate stomachs.
Any desire Pudgy cherished to assail and sack the tasty dish of Doris’s body evaporated in the time he spent sorting out that business. In the end, with a couple of references, a bit of the old blind eye, and the occasional solemn statement before the Hispano-Olivetti of a rather dim-witted bureaucrat faithfully doing his duty, the issue was resolved with a small fine, and the Stéfano circus could continue to wander, offering hope of entertainment to the scabby towns and villages of the peninsular fatherland.
Whenever the opening of my sphincter is sore, poor Doris always comes to mind; what she was and how she ended up. Time sunders and sinks everything, and we can’t repeal the law that says we must respect the outcome. Generally people try to hide this type of ache and pain, due to a misguided sense of shame. They keep silent, then burst. Doris suffered, too. They were big and granulated in the folds of her anus. Big, purple, and granulated, like blackberries in the thick of the brambles. Hemorrhoids in women betray blood circulation problems and in men, constipation. The reverse can also happen, but the predominant rule is the one I just outlined. Constipation in women is usually frowned upon and in popular wisdom is linked to a vicious temper and a disinclination to enjoy sex. The best cure for hemorrhoids is a French pomade made from polyethylene glycol. At least that’s the view of Belinda Dixon, the European commissioner. It’s sold with a pain-free applicator. You simply have to relax before applying it. It softens the hemorrhoids and immediately reduces them to a minimal fleshly presence. It gives immediate relief and doesn’t leave sticky discharges. The commissioner spent the whole of the dinner singing the praises of that excellent pomade. In matters of protocol, affinity between guests is ultimately decided by those whose job it is to orchestrate the ceremonials; placing a dwarf is always tricky, so one can end up in any old seat. I’m not saying I attend these society bashes on a daily basis, but from time to time I’m certainly obliged to accept invitations I’m obsequiously sent by associations and public and private institutions. People generally believe that the talk at this kind of event doesn’t center on key matters affecting the well-being of the body politic, and though that’s true, it’s even truer that talk will focus on the dirty linen and skeletons in the cupboard of both absent and present colleagues. At such gatherings, wine is drunk from brittle glasses that enhance its bouquet, and one chews exquisite food with a palate alert to subtle flavors, but when the time comes to converse, it’s usually the same topics of gossip that are trotted out: personal grudges and bodily dysfunctions. Essentially, all humanity’s feet smell cheesy and flesh rots identically. Money, power, fame, and renown can window-dress biology, but the same terminus always awaits at the end of the road: the terminus of death.
At the time, Spain didn’t possess an adequate pharmaceutical product to relieve the pain of hemorrhoids. Doris had to treat them with xeroform powder. She snow-flaked the contents of a phial she kept in a cupboard in her caravan onto a piece of gauze and applied it to the crossroads of her butt by severely twisting her muscles and expertly contorting her extremities, standing up, leaning her hips forward, and raising her left hand behind her back until it brushed against the fated orifice. Such an action revealed a splendorous rump enhanced by that shifting, humiliating, erotic posture, an offering contemplated by whoever had the good fortune to be privy to such privacy. Providence granted me the opportunity, the result of a previous mishap that befell me; as popular wisdom has it, every cloud has its silver lining. Given the way I toiled in animal shit, I contracted an infectious fever that affected my brain. I was used to sleeping anywhere, anyhow, under the stars in summer months, in the winter crouching in a shelter of blankets I put up at the foot of the wild animals’ cages so their breath kept me warm like a Baby Jesus in the manger. Life had showed me how hard it can be more than once, and I quickly learnt to resign myself, to fasten my heart tight to the hungry rope of my innards and drag myself along without more ado. However, when I fell ill that time, my spirit of resistance dissolved on the tongue like toffee, and my will and energy to live departed as quickly as a couple of farts. Nobody showed any interest in looking after poor me, streaming sweat, feverish, and prostrate — nobody except for Doris, who took pity on me and carried me to the shelter of her caravan, an austere, tidy, pretty place decorated with little bottles of half-used perfume. That space was the earthly seat of a paradise I didn’t believe in. In a feverish haze, my eyes served up extraordinary, multi-scented visions that relaxed me then sent me crazy and led me into the wildest corners of my consciousness. Doris laid me on her merino wool bolster and over three days applied to my forehead cold cloths, herbal poultices, and towels soaked in therapeutic ointments until my feverish brow relented and saw off any possibility that I might perish. Delirious, half-awake, I gazed at her as I’ve just described: beautiful in her contortions, her enormous rump displaying to the whites of my sickly eyes the magnificent pomp of her private parts, crowned by the Morello cherries of her compacted arteries. Poor Doris. She was unlucky in life. Misfortune pursues some to the very threshold of the grave. I kept her secret forever, and even once it became evident, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t betray her. She showed me affection, and I thanked her with my silence; though I was well rewarded by my lurid memories of her gruesome parts.
Doris sometimes killed time by knitting sweaters for her nephews and nieces back in her village. She wove them beautifully with Ancora perlé thread, a shiny, non-shrink yarn in solid colors that had only just put in an appearance on haberdashery shelves. “Look, Gregorito,” she’d say, clasping her knitting needles under her armpits, “how do you like this? It’s for Pedrito, my nephew, whose first tooth is just peeking through,” and I nodded though I didn’t understand a word of what she was saying, being quite unable to assimilate that remote world of happy families, loving childhoods, and knitted cardigans aired in the sun, light years away from the everyday shit that made up the circus world of my existence.