I’ve not eaten a hardboiled egg in twenty-five years. I soon became sick of the sight of them. On the other hand, that bastard Di Battista loved them. One sopping wet morning, he summoned me very early for a parley in his caravan. I’d not even drunk my breakfast glass of water. It was evident that he was in a big hurry. “Mandarino ‘elpin’ you bene with quello della merda degli animali?” he asked. “He does his tasks,” I replied as calmly as I could. “Ascolta: I’vva pensato a nice nano like youa would bringga ze profitto megliore jumpin’ aroun’ ze ring zan pulendo la merda dell jaule. Don’ youa agree, Gregorito?” “I don’t know,” I answered, shrugging my shoulders. “Ciai fame; non hai fatto collazzione?” he asked again.
Hunger always gives bad counsel, and it can be disastrous if you let yourself be guided by an empty stomach. My belly had suffered far too much. My guts had been wiped clean as a result of all that fasting with only a few bizarre snacks to eat; a slice of melon puréed in milk, or a hunk of dry bread with some red pepper rubbed over the top were sometimes tidbits enough to assuage a day’s hunger. Nonetheless, such penury could turn to abundance overnight, and then we’d pay homage by stuffing ourselves and shaking off the harsh prescriptions of our usual wretchedness for a few hours. I’ve never been short on hunger, and perhaps that’s why Providence had the bright idea of inspiring me to set up a pizza delivery business, which is why I’m wallowing knee-deep in loot today. Pudgy Di Battista knew what he was doing and tempted me, given the starving state I was in, with the attractive prospect of having a full belly. I wasn’t black, but I was hungry. Hear me out, and the comparisons I make won’t seem gratuitous. The black children in Africa nurture a tarantula in their chests that nobody chases away, the tarantula of starvation. They eat air and die young and aren’t even buried, and the cycle of catastrophes is thus continued. These are the times we live in, times to end time.
Pudgy Di Battista stirred from the chair where he was resting his buttocks and soon returned with a trayful of boiled eggs. He placed a bottle of cognac on the table, filled a glass to the brim, stared me in the eye, and asked me how many eggs I thought I could swallow in one sitting. And being, as I say, naturally hungry and not having eaten breakfast that morning, I gazed at the tray, didn’t blink, and started chewing eggs nonstop while he gulped down his bottle just as quick. I can’t remember if I downed ten or fifteen eggs, but the truth is in the end I was stuffed and satisfied as never before. “Molto bene, nano, molto que molto bene,” said pudgy Di Battista, who was well and truly plastered. “Yourra belly nel future sera una fontana di riquezza per tutti noi. Fromma domani youlla perform in ze act with ze fratelli Culí-Culá and beforra ze pubblico youlla stuffa tutti le ‘ard-boiled eggsa you can. Per te, ‘unger ha acabatto. Go and dechirleso a elli from mi,” and he burst out laughing like a madman from hell, oozing so much wine it even colored his tears, big teardrops he wept as he laughed so pathetically.
To begin with they just chased me around the ring, me clumsy and stumbling by nature, the Culí-Culás in hot pursuit, thrilled by the possibility I might bash my nose on the ground and spill my soul out, as had almost happened when I nearly knocked myself out tripping on one of the cables securing the safety net for the trapeze act. Then came the eggs and farts. In full view of the spectators, I ended my whole-day-long fast on hard-boiled eggs, gesticulating with gusto, and a chorus of guffaws from the audience, who surely thought it hilarious to see a dwarf like me dispatching a stack of what hens had laid. What’s more, the banquet was accompanied by a concerto in C major of belches that had neither rhythm nor tune. Don’t imagine that the general public hasn’t always laughed at the same gross doings. Before, they used to do it in the big top, packed together and making the wild animals go crazy with the pong from their sweat, now they guffaw at them in their kitchen-diners, the scant three by six feet they generally inhabit, breathing in the stink of the family and greatly helped by the inestimable remote control, the real crook on which the whole woolly flock depends. The act we performed totally lacked imagination and hid no double meanings, although its cheeky barrel-scraping could have triggered the indignation of the righteous men who in every era cherish establishment thinking. That act was well below my capabilities, if only because of the silly way it was choreographed, so I had no choice but to come up with something within the range of the three of us. I pondered over it for three months and finally suggested it to Frank Culá. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled in that sly way of his and accepted right away. “You’ve a good head on you, dwarfy, and that’s why I find you interesting. You and I will do great things together, you just wait and see,” he said, rushing off to tell his partner.
The new act was an attempt to hallow, if only in show-biz style, the actual marriage of the Culí-Culás. I suggested that Juan Culí should come into the ring disguised as a woman — huge, tawdry, with lots of lace, furbelows, and face paint — and that Frank Culá should pretend to be his husband. It was the reverse of real life, which added extra spice to the simulation. Juan Culí would display a grotesque twenty-month pregnancy in the manner of a female elephant, to which end he’d hang a barrel from his waist, inside of which I’d be hidden. After the usual chases around the sides of the ring, Juan Culí would exhibit his would-be labor pains to an amazed audience and the exaggerated histrionics of Frank Culá, who, to a rocket-launch countdown bawled out in English, would activate the spring, and, expelled amid sticky sheep entrails and a shower of fake gunge, I’d clatter out in a miscarriage every show, hitting the ground headfirst. “Faif, for, zri, tchu, wan, dwarfy!” and out I’d come, ridiculous and belittled, dirty and contemptible, the impossible son of a couple of deviants in a country under the cosh of repression and orthodoxy. Once I was born, my putative parents did all they could to feed me, and that’s where the eggs came in, fed to me with the sweetest canings, loving bludgeons, pricked by knives and forks. I received all that fodder with resignation, more for the hilarity it sparked among the spectators than for the little good the eggs did me. Even so, replete and with no chance that I could increase my growth, due to the natural brake of my physique, I became heavier and happier, heavier because of what I was ingesting and happier because “laugh, and the whole world laughs with you.” Hunger and punishment are always harnessed together by the rope of history. Punishment either kills or stirs to action. Hunger jolts the will and points it to the exact place where knives are being sunk into flesh. That’s some road to get satisfaction.
I often receive invitations to go to galas, parties, launches, grand finales, homages, and other society events, but now I very rarely grace such occasions with my presence. Tonight was an exception. I’d not intended going to the dinner, then at the last minute I fancied dipping into a classy soirée that, for one reason or another, I suspected would satisfy my itch to feel in touch with the heartbeat of reality. Nobody in these circles knows anything about the circumstances of my past life, and I’ve always enjoyed the thrill of gratuitous deceit. Although I’d planned to fly to London to spend Christmas with my son Edén, closing out the social calendar by exhibiting my deformed body in an act of such a highfalutin’ nature as this suddenly seemed to be what I felt like. The glossies would bear witness to my presence among the great and the good. Off-the-cuff decisions are the ones that generally generate most joy. Ordinary folk still believe that on such occasions there is never any talk of matters essential for the common good, and if that’s true, it’s even truer that what finally gets aired is the dirty linen of absent colleagues, and even that of those present. At such gatherings, wine is drunk from brittle glasses that emphasize bouquet, the excellence of the food is chewed by palates alert to subtle flavors, but when it’s time to converse, it’s always the gossip that surfaces: personal grudges and bodily dysfunctions. The European commissioner Belinda Dixon regaled me during the whole soirée with the delights of the anti-hemorrhoid cream she uses, to the point of obscenity in the minute detail she highlighted. She initiated her game plan by asking me upfront whether a man like myself, famous for creating a fast-food empire, considered that alcohol was damaging for varicose veins or if, on the contrary, I believed wine contributed to a well-balanced state of health. I sat and stared at her, perhaps intrigued by the unusual way she spoke. Her eyes were lovely, dense, deep, and always friendly. Her gaze bewitched, and her lips whispered words as if her vocal chords were made of silk. I replied that wine is the fount of truth, that humanity requires it to know itself without subterfuge, and that it is only by possessing truth that human beings can find genuine freedom. She smiled neither scornfully nor dutifully but rather malevolently. From that moment, our exchange took on a more risqué note. We made a toast with a long, intense clink of glasses that reverberated in the shocked tympana of the other diners. A photographer took a snapshot. The mayor looked at us askance and, ever smiling, nodded in our direction, quietly deferential. The commissioner had been asking me if my body’s deformities extended to all its parts, in other words, whether my reproductive organ was affected by my dwarfishness. Simply out of curiosity, she confessed. I replied that it wasn’t. I refilled her glass to the brim, and she gulped it down. Then I busied myself squeezing tasty morsels from my cocks’ combs, far away, self-absorbed, as if that supper really was my last.