The Stéfano circus was increasingly dampening my energies with its fake routines. Stumbling alongside, I began to wonder what my life had turned into. It was a prison of wispy smoke where the bars only existed in the imaginations of the inmates, a prison in the form of a circus ring where wills were tamed by the lash of applause and the eruption of belly laughs. For how long would I have to purge my hapless deformity there? Would the rest of my life suffice to redeem the original sin of being born like that, or would I still toil at making the devils laugh in the great beyond misfortune would send my way after death? Handsome Bustamante, meanwhile, showed me that beauty — that illusion of the mind — can be accessed by fingers burning with desire, or the come on of a wad of notes. “Hey, Goyo, to go to bed with a woman, one of two things: you either spend your money or appeal to charity. That will be the cross you’ll bear throughout life, so you just listen to what I say and start wheeler-dealing to get some dough if you want to get a bit of hole.”
There are women who open the petals of their belly simply out of pity and give themselves up willingly like true martyrs. Others, however, use their secret crack as a piggy bank, and you put money in and they start working, the more notes, the better, until vice ravages them or they wither with age. I’d go on ahead to village brothels to announce that handsome Bustamante was on his way with his body in full bloom and his proud, gorgeous face. Doors swung open, and in I’d prance, and the limp folk in these whore houses laughed and applauded my strange embassy until Mr. Handsome arrived and stirred up the fug in the knocking shop with his cocky smile before selecting his women and stuffing them in bedrooms two at a time, as was his wont. Thanks to him, and often at his expense, on a more modest scale, I would bed a whore who entertained my rummaging, generally the ugliest and fullest at the hip, and exploring their flesh, my voracious lust sometimes had its way, but more usually it was a mere fancy of the moment. I’d never remember my mother, who was no doubt buried by oblivion in some crevice in my memory. A pity; later I regretted that. Handsome Bustamante was magnificent in those knocking shops, and then to work off his lust, he’d ride through the air with Doris, executing his routine with strict precision, and pleasuring in his own performance. I slavered pools of boundless admiration. I showed him respect and obedience, because he embodied what I could never hope to be, given the hand nature had dealt me. For his part, he cultivated my servility to suit himself and rewarded me with the crumbs I liked most, so he had me in his pocket. “Hey, Goyo, you should leave the circus at some point and seek out a life more in keeping with your ability. Here they’ve worn you down, and you’ll never prosper. This world of ours is going to the dogs. The circus is dead. People want less in-your-face entertainment and find what we do boring. If you stay here, you’ll melt down like those little candles old dears light for their dead.” I nodded, though I didn’t get his message, because all I knew was that world of wild animals and transhumance, and at best the lost world of my childhood buried under a mass of scar tissue. It’s better forgotten. It’s better not to know how to think and just climb into the lifeboat of Providence and drift with the tide. We’d go whoring, and he’d treat me; I got that from his generous side. The accounts pudgy Di Battista settled with me once in a blue moon didn’t even cover the rags I wore or the few vices I indulged. “Molto moni mi paia la tua mamma forra youa. It was a badda deal, mi non sorri per que I luvva you como un figlio que sempere stara at mi side,” said that bastard, tweaking my face, marinating his liver in cognac more by the day. He met a bad end, though I never wished one on him. Deformed, feeling sorry for myself, without papers, with a sick stomach, increasingly resenting my lot in life, my future certainly seemed less than secure. The only solace I could rely on in the circus was the applause I got, like communion wafers past their sell-by date. That still hurts when I recall it; that’s my real patrimony, the memories of what I’ve been and my awareness of the fact that in life you can cry, just as easily as you can die, survive, and even laugh, and that’s why it’s important people never read your thoughts or penetrate your real state of mind.
During that season, the Stéfano circus performed in various places in Old Castile. Castilian folk are generally slow to laugh and never belly laugh unless it’s over someone else’s bad luck. We worked hard on our performances in Burgos, but the show never really took off. Perhaps the wild animals scared them, or maybe they recognized us for the bunch of idiots we really were. We didn’t get a single clap in the ring, and a meager scattering of yawns hung in the air. We were down in the dumps, and my egg swallowing turned out badly; worryingly, my vomit started to trickle blood. Pudgy Di Battista, hard hit by the sullen audiences, shut himself up with his bottle in his covered wagon. Through the window, you could hear the sad songs from his land that he intoned with a slurp and a grieving heart, as if he were invoking the apocalypse. It was a dire night, and the bitter, bone-cold air slipped invisibly between our ribs. It’s no fun contemplating failure, but the show we had on the road was out of sync with a changing Spain that was opening its legs to its own future. Handsome Bustamante, his back to the big top, was washing his armpits in icy water and generously splashing his naked torso in a battered tub he’d positioned on some stones. A few yards away, from the lit doorway of his caravan, Frank Culá was watching him, simmering with the kind of desire that really turned him on. Handsome Bustamante had been registering for some time Frank’s rather morose looks in his direction. Now and then he’d give him rope, simply to spin his hopes along and get a free laugh from watching him suffer. To this end, he was now camping up his toilette and soaping with gestures that verged on the very vulgar. He rubbed his bare chest with eau de cologne and stretched his arms licentiously as if coming on to him unawares. Frank Culá had fallen into the trap and didn’t know whether to go over or simply present a low profile and sneak away into his caravan. That was when I walked by, simply wanting to take shelter in my cot and sink into the hidden pleasures of a dream the nighttime might be so kind as to bring. “Goyo, where are you going so down in the mouth?” shouted Bustamante, only to trigger Frank Culá’s burning jealousy. “This is no night to be alone in bed; come on, let’s go whoring and see if that can stir our blood.” I eagerly accepted his offer as I brought him his towel. Frank Culá gave us one last sly, resentful glance and shut himself in his caravan. He may have very well been looking forward to canoodling with Mr. Handsome, but then again perhaps he wasn’t. Poor wretch, he only brought on the bad end that was lurking around the corner.
The whores of Burgos have ice-cold nipples, and their butts ooze the hoar frost they have to endure. It’s no trade for that kind of terrain. Winds of death furrow their steppes, and their bones transfix the souls of their clients as if serrated by sorrow. We walked into the knocking shop on the Calle de San Juan that had been recommended to Mr. Handsome. A fat woman dressed in black and passing herself off as a respectable widow opened up. Her breath stank of garlic and the whiff of sweat she left in her wake, of curdled milk, as she ushered us into the small lounge where women waited in thick cardigans. Handsome Bustamente cloistered himself in a boudoir with two who claimed they were sisters, and a languid girl fell to me, the skinniest nude I’d ever seen. They called her Micaela, but her real Christian name was Angustias, which suited her much better. Her chest tasted of lard and her groin of dirty sheets. Penetrating her was painful and, like a piece of furniture, she didn’t even whimper when I possessed her like an animal. She’d been properly broken in, that’s for sure. My memories of her give me the shivers. We finished early, and Mr. Handsome handed Madame the stipulated rate and gave the girls a similar tip to spend on whatever they fancied. He liked to show off like that, and they thanked him from the bottom of their hearts while Madame merely scowled. “Fuck fatty,” was his parting shot. When we got out into the street, a sharp, clean breeze rattled our lungs. “Cheer up, Goyo,” chided Mr. Handsome, “shows are tricky things, one day they applaud, and the next they spit on the same spectacle. Stop turning that over and take a few deep breaths of this cold air that does you good; by the way, didn’t your whore do you a bit of good, too?” In fact, I felt out of sorts. The cold always sets me thinking, and if I think, I explode. We were strolling down to the Plaza del Generalísimo when we suddenly walked by the crustacean windows of a seafood restaurant. The establishment went by the name of El Borde del Cantábrico, which was written in white paint and exquisite calligraphy on the window. Looking at us from the other side lay crayfish, small crabs, and lobsters, all lined up on a soft bed of ice and bay leaves. A pleasant light shone out that was perhaps too warm for the pernickety climate inside. “There are two kinds of oysters,” Bustamante announced solemnly, “those you swallow and those you suck. As we’ve sucked, it’s time we tried a little bit of the other, don’t you reckon, Goyo? Have you ever eaten shellfish? Let’s go inside. This is on me.” Thanks to God, I’d already spewed up blood-flecked eggs and everything else, because if I hadn’t, what was on the cards wouldn’t have gone down well. The bastard maître d’ didn’t want to give us a table; he could clearly smell our class. I cowered there, crouching behind the legs of Mr. Handsome, who was arguing at the top of his voice with that shitty fellow. I mentally split my sides when I spotted a lobster with two disparate pincers, one tiny and the other gigantic, behind the aquarium’s magnifying glass. The beast reminded me of the grotesque sight Mr. Handsome and I must have presented at that moment. Lording it around the restaurant, over-fifties with pencil mustaches, in gray suits, garnished by their tawdry wives — constipated to a woman judging by the stiffness of their perms — were gawping incredulously at the racket handsome Bustamante was creating on the small matter of whether his money wasn’t worth as much as the loot paid by that pack of imbeciles who’d parked their buttocks there and were now stuffing their snouts with shellfish. Finally, in a gesture redolent of savoir faire and nous, Mr. Handsome solved the problem via a one-thousand-peseta tip he handed the maître d’, all prickly and powerful. Humiliated, but resigned to the dosh, the latter bowed his head like a donkey and without a whisper calmly led us to a table for two reserved in the best part of the restaurant. As we walked by, the other diners wanted to stare, but their good breeding deterred them. Such worthy politeness is cultivated by privileged social classes as if their very survival depended on it. They had to bring three big cushions so I could sit level with my knife and fork, and I settled down as best I could on my soft perch. Mr. Handsome ordered glasses of white wine to kick off, which they served in super-thin cut-crystal that looked as if our saliva would crack it. I noted the old woman at the next table was giving me the evil eye with her left. I registered that perfectly; such things often happen and cause untold personal damage. To ward off the spell, it’s best to cut it dead with a quick belch, which is what I did, the loudest I could summon from my guts. The old woman repented when she heard it, had a spasm, and dropped her dentures in her shellfish soup where she’d been dipping her mustache; the rest of the restaurant quietly looked my way, and an extremely indignant gentleman in the corner had to soothe his good lady, who wanted to get up and go. There were no further incidents with the other guests, and dinner proceeded succulently. I engrossed myself in the crayfish, sucking the juice from their heads; I applied pincers to crack the necks of the small crabs, I pulled the legs off spider crabs, and used my teeth to extract the warmish slithers of meat from the goose barnacles. I chewed fistfuls of shrimps, diligently sucked the pink flesh of prawns like you suck a pink female body, and finally, keeping to his word, Mr. Handsome ordered a large tray of raw oysters — the briny kind, not the others — which we swallowed with lemon juice. We devoured that sumptuous holocaust transubstantiated into crustaceans and with our dessert enjoyed the delicious smoke of Montecristo cigars apparently rolled by revolutionary women workers. For the first time, I took a deep drag on that miraculous tobacco, and my lungs expanded, relishing my new vice. “Dinner tastes better after a good fuck than when a hard-on is teasing your balls, right, Goyo?” Bustamante asked, a cigar stuffed in his mouth. I went on inhaling and said nothing. “What’s wrong,” continued Mr. Handsome, “did you have a bad lay with that rake of a whore?” “She was an icicle,” I replied, “an icicle made of pumice stone.” Handsome Bustamente guffawed like a flatulent cow and chattered on. “Whores are a world unto themselves, my lad, you never know what you’re going to get. Some are long-faced but writhe like snakes in the sack, and others, who look every inch a whore, are a dead loss even in the dark, and the moment you touch them, they squeak. This life is all about luck; sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. Don’t you worry about the whores, they know what they’re up to. You just choose wisely and have fun while you can, ’cause the Grim Reaper is always lurking round the corner. Besides, you’re a dwarf, they’re bound to like you for your oddity value if you give them a hard sell on your deformity, if not, you’ll have to put up with the dregs in the whorehouse or will be condemned to rub off like that nitwit hornball Mandarino. I’m telling you what’s what, and just take note, ‘cause I know what I’m talking about; if you want to fuck, you’ve two choices: either you pay them plenty, or they’ll do it out of charity ‘cause they’re sorry you’re in such a rubbish state. Whores are a world unto themselves, and when you’re least expecting it, they go all lovey-dovey, though I don’t recommend trying it. I once went with a whore who pissed herself with pleasure if I chomped on her nipples. I was on my way to Valencia and had hitched a lift with a trucker, and we stopped off in a place where he’d heard you ate and fucked divinely for a good price. That woman’s butt was like a mule’s, without the flies or tail, and she offered it doggy style the second you were in bed. You should have seen her shaking it. The trucker and I laid her at the same time, and the more we went for it, the more the filthy bitch swung it, until she’d drained us dry after we’d done her from every angle. We had a great time, but just as we were leaving, she started to blubber big-time and asked us to take her a long way from there ‘cause she couldn’t stand life any longer in that spot. Then when she’d calmed down, she told us she’d given birth to an idiot and a dwarf and that was why she was a whore and would be till the day she cocked her toes up. As she’d been such a pain, she refused to charge us; I’d have gone for gratis, but the stupid trucker felt sorry and paid for both of us plus a tip — what a bloody waste of money. I thought her story about the idiot and dwarf sons was a hoot, but I didn’t believe a word of it. You see how cunning women are, so clever at relieving you of your cash. There aren’t that many dwarves, but even if it was true, she’d have been better served making up a more believable tale. Don’t ever trust a whore or listen to their patter; now that is a good piece of advice.”