Initially I thought that Ms. Dixon’s obscene verbal play was about probing my carnal appetites, and I can confess to you that it worked. She may very well turn up tonight, it’s still not too late, and she promised she’d come. If she does, she’ll be surprised to find a corpse, or better still, the vague shadow of a being who has ceased to exist. Although pity isn’t a value that’s much prized these days, I should recognize that I felt something similar for her this evening. That string of obscenities she unleashed on me dish after dish only hid a woman in turmoil ready to do anything to attain her stated goal, a goal she’d marked out, a victory she’d foreseen. Like so many others in this day and age who can only justify their existence through futile professional advancement, the European commissioner, if she could, would have mortgaged liters of her blood to lay her hands on an extra millimeter of power. Basically, beneath the big show of status, this kind of person hides only panic at the thought of failure, fear of themselves, and the consolation of ending it all with a single shot when the world turns against them and exposes their solitude. As pity isn’t in any way at odds with the pleasures of the flesh, I think I did the right thing by accepting her offer, even if I fear it will be a great shame not to be able to enjoy hers.
I became tired of the applause from so many blank faces, so many sweaty palms clapping wildly after I emptied the platter of eggs the Culí-Culá duo offered me every show. That mockery of marriage that could have offended the susceptible or sparked indignation was on the contrary held to be a hilarious and healthy comic act, perhaps because it recreated scenes of domestic life only too familiar in the backyards of the commonalty, scenes never aired because of the predominant sense of prudery and the prurient nature of comportment in the public eye. The innate hunger that haunted me went in a flash, it was as if a pantry brimming with provisions had been stuffed in my belly to the eternal delight of my gastric juices; however, I soon reacted against the excesses of that fetal diet that became the cracked egg of a cross I had to bear in life. I quickly learned to perform acute peristalsis in the upper and lower reaches of my stomach in order to sick up or engineer less vaulted though equally effective motions that sluiced me out after each show. You can achieve anything in this life if you try, except beauty and height, which are both the attributes of angels. I became tired of all the applause that greeted our act; the plaudits were pathetic. The circus is the supreme spectacle of the grotesque, and the belly laughs often betray the unhappiness of those so reacting, of those in attendance, of that whole republic of idiotic children, hapless adults, and freak-seekers who in the end sustained us. I stared at their blank faces, their lidless eyes and mute mouths, and stuck to swallowing those eggs in order to survive. They came every day, circled the ring, hanging on the catastrophe that might shoot up their laughter levels, and on every string pulled in the show.
One afternoon, when we were performing on the Costa del Sol, I spotted a circular face amid the anodyne crowd that was scrutinizing me from the front row of the stalls. That mug had a pinkish hue, as if it belonged to a seventeenth-century English empiricist who was perhaps speculating over a translucent balloon of brandy about the planetary mechanics of heavenly bodies across the crepe of the firmament. His eyes watched our routine with a sense of ecstasy I found frightening. He returned the next day, the one after, and even the one after that. I used each performance to dissect the features of that individual. His gaze seemed at once balanced and tortured, conferring on his face a sorrow it wore lightly, like that of a child who has grown up prematurely and is fat to bursting he’s been so indulged. He was broad, though not deformed, and plump, though not obese. On the fourth day of his presence, I spotted him in conversation with pudgy Di Battista. That very same night, after I’d had supper in Doris’s caravan (lentils without insects or earth that peppered my belly with bubbles of gas), Stéfano di Battista came to speak to me. There was a starry sky, and the stars twinkled blue in the distance as if they’d escaped from a poem by Neruda. Poetry can sometimes be redeeming in the disastrous depths of daily life, but it was different that night. Pudgy Di Battista was well tipsy, and I don’t say that because of the way he was tottering but because of his fermenting breath. He grabbed my shoulder and said that early the following morning, a car would come to pick me up, and I would spend the day in the house of a man who was interested in painting me. He insinuated he was an oddball who was filthy rich and that there was nothing to worry about; at the very worst, he might decide to give my bum a stroke. Then he handed me three thousand pesetas, the advance he claimed he’d received from that fellow for my services. Pudgy Di Battista was a posh bastard fallen on hard times, and death was his only cure, the one that duly wasted his insides.
I’d never seen the like of it. It was a Dodge Dart, and hearselike it was so black, and so huge. The chauffeur was a guy they’d hired by the hour for the job and whose mouth sank into his cheeks; he didn’t say a word on the whole journey. He drove me to the outskirts of Benalmádena, a built-up area with towering palm trees and houses with magnificent façades that ran down the slope of a cliff. We stopped outside one, the most precipitously poised of all. A man who’d just got up opened the door in a white cotton dressing gown. He asked me to accompany him, in a language with strange phonetics that occasionally sounded like Spanish. He ushered me into an immense lounge with a view of the steep cliff through a wall that was entirely glass. The rest of the room was built of stone ashlars that culminated in a lofty ceiling with two different heights, both furrowed by the veins in delicately carved wood that had surely survived from another century. Good taste and tranquility oozed everywhere in that silent lounge I felt to be inhospitable, a silence broken only by the lethargic crackle of a tree trunk that had been burning through the night and was now crumbling in the hearth. I inhaled the aroma of timber and opened my eyes wide, trying to anticipate what was about to happen. Dank with sweat, an unmade bed in the middle of the room displayed an epic range of sheets and bare pillows. Nearby, sitting on a plastic stool, the pinkish man I’d seen in the circus was waiting for me to come. He gripped a paintbrush in one hand, and the uneven outline of his face projected itself, black on white, onto the surface of a canvas, mounted on an easel, that brought a white sheen to his back. “Lie back and relax. I’m going to capture your best side for eternity, to my greater glory. In the meantime, would you like something to drink, Coca-Cola, perhaps?” he enquired in English, and using intuition rather than intellect, I went and reclined on the rippling sheets and spent the whole damned day there while he skillfully reproduced my portrait on canvas. He said not another word; nor did I. Neither did he stop for a bite to eat or to wet his lips. All he did was look at me, scrutinize my face, measure out the deformity of my body with his brush, and add color nonstop. Now and then, the man who opened the garden gate in the morning came and from the top of the stairs took a look at how the picture was progressing. He did so now stripped of his dressing gown, in no clothes at all; his soft, pappy flesh gave him an unusual air that made me avoid the glances he sent my way, deep, languid, wandering eyes I immediately put down to some incurable disease. I don’t know if his sex was threatening or challenging, provocative or derisory, drooping heavily down his groin as it did, amid folds of flesh, like a clapped-out clapper. At the hour of the Angelus, another man, likewise naked, walked into the lounge. He embraced the first; they cuddled as they spent a while watching the representation of my image flower on the canvas. Generally speaking, artists are frantic people who spit out their arrogance with precision and beauty, beings fertilized by the accursed seed of sensibility, who like to cultivate the bloom of their own egotism. Impenetrable profiles characterize them, doubtful masks betray them; they are but false idealizations of themselves that, once understood, reveal their total defenselessness before the nagging round of existence. That man was no exception, save perhaps for his pinkish skin. As evening fell — twilight was sinking its twinkles into the sea — he decided he’d finished the task, and at last I could jump off the bed. I noted how numb my body was, like an ancient statue suddenly regaining movement. I bent and flexed, and yawned to stretch my ligaments. Prompted more by curiosity than by real interest, I walked over to the canvas to see what part of me had been recreated in oils, and I won’t lie if I say that it wasn’t surprise, admiration, or fear that dictated a squint-eyed reaction that must have made my slavering mouth snarl. It wasn’t me in the picture, though I couldn’t say it wasn’t me on the inside, or that I might not be like that on the outside in a not-too-distant future. He’d pained my guts. There was no sense of shame in that painting; a series of thick, tempestuous brushstrokes had turned the most monstrous side of me into a magma of molten flesh. The end product of that painter’s contemplation of my person now transcribed on canvas was simply a putrid effervescence of flesh transubstantiated into a bone structure in almost liturgical fashion. He’d painted me erect, like an untouchable idol, on the shameful pedestal of that bed, a deliberately disfigured idol sliding into the sewer of reality. I’d never have imagined anything like that could enter someone’s head. That painting was a manifesto on the precarious nature of human existence, an extreme representation of the tragedy of life, as powerful and intriguing as that could be. They offered me another Coca-Cola and sent me back to the circus; I returned in time for the nighttime show. My chauffeur was as mute as ever. He now reeked of sardines and had an indefinable lump on his neck I’d not noticed in the morning. “I’d stay in bed every day for three thousand pesetas, what a great way to earn a living,” I remarked. He looked in the rearview mirror and, without needing to open his mouth, I think he indicated that someone must have pocketed the difference, because twenty-five thousand had been paid for my pose. Some bastard, no doubt. I can’t think why, but I started to think my chauffeur was a fish, a stinking fish that had escaped from a foul harbor, one equipped to drive, a smelly backbone of a fish, the kind hungry cats eat from trash cans. I took a closer look, and indeed he did have a protuberance on his neck that I felt looked like a gill. It’s the first time a fish had given me a lead. Di Battista was the bastard; he spent the difference on cognac and left me howling at the moon. That very night, while the public split their sides and the Culí-Culá duo chased me wildly around the ring, I understood for the first time in my life that as in almost everything else, there were social classes even when it came to affectation, and that mine was way beneath the mediocre average that’s the norm for most mortals.