Throughout my life I’ve repeatedly reflected on the sardonic nature of Providence’s intrusions into my affairs but never concluded it was mere entertainment — a trumped-up novel or wretched fable. I get it now — your presence in my house, tonight’s dinner, the youth I wasted among wild beasts. . I had been forewarned, Providence made sure of that, but only today did I realize that this is how the end would come, and by extension I now wonder whether all other mortals will have to experience something similar one day. It would be so amusing if everybody, you for starters, were to end up in the same situation and at the moment of death the erratic nature of your condition were revealed in the same contemptible way as is happening now to me. Nowadays it seems nonsensical to look to a transcendent beyond and forget the logic of the thinking that governs the social mechanisms of daily life, but in my case it hasn’t helped that I’ve hung on to life, or struggled against it in the disproportionate way you can perhaps imagine. In the end, effort and determination achieve nothing.
One could legitimately surmise I’m feeling desperate, or at least nervous, or perhaps terrified by the looming void, but you see, it’s nothing of the sort. My brother Tranquilino was never scared by the crimes he committed; he was one of those bastards without a conscience. He enjoyed hurting me, but never did so in bad faith. The ants, at least, made the most of his brains — poor critters, always hunting for food. My brother used to behead matches at the tiny entrances to anthills and set fire to them. An orangey flash suddenly exploded, filled his nostrils with the scent from the combustion, and he’d take a deep breath and relax. A holocaust for the poor critters, of the three- to four-hundred-degree variety. Then they took their revenge and snacked on the ideas rotting in his encephalic mass. Much good it would do them. Therein lies the greatness of biology, in the futile struggle for survival. Fate amuses itself at our expense and in our faces, and though its belly laughs aren’t necessarily counterproductive, they sometimes inflict real pain. That derision spits out the misery of the day-to-day grind and airs humanity’s deepest fears. It’s quite another matter if it’s done with contempt and ignoring one’s own contradictions; that’s when it ceases to be curative and acquires the sharpness of a blade.
Now nobody calls me a dwarf, at least not to my face. They used to. That was a living death — dwarf, fetch this, dwarf, do that, dwarf, come here, dwarf, go there, piece of shit dwarf, if you don’t hurry up, I’ll kick you in the face and that will teach you what’s what — but all that frightful behavior is a thing of the past, and now people greet me respectfully and congratulate me on my saint’s day almost obsequiously. The world goes round and round, the world changes, and all that remains is the hypocrisy of those who take part in each year. If you could pray, I’d be grateful if you would say a prayer in memory of my brother. A train engine clattered into him when he was on an errand for my mother to get a basketful of tomatoes from our plot next to the cemetery wall. It wasn’t a great death, but it could have been worse. Just imagine if he’d fallen down a well and drowned after desperately trying to clamber up the slimy walls, pulse racing, hysteria mounting, his life slipping away squish-squish on a dark, wet slide to death. Pray a God save you, if you know how, or a Credo, if it’s easier. He used to watch me suckling with hatred in his eyes, and my mother would tell him to beat it, but he took no notice and stayed there, still and silent, feet glued to the kitchen floor, watching me suck the marrow from my mother’s soul, the little she had left after all that romping with truck drivers.
It once hailed mollusks in La Mancha. It was the morning when my brother Tranquilino decided to put my crib under the pole of the chicken coop. I was sleeping inside, in the liquid shit in my diapers. He often did that until I learned to walk around the age of one, but that was the only day when mollusks hailed down on La Mancha’s dry lands of dung, bitterness, and death. They were as large as a man’s fist, and their shells clattered hard on the village roofs. People ran to save their skulls, and the odd animal’s back was broken.
I have other defects apart from being a dwarf; I am moved, for example, by poetry and when reading it lose all will to persevere in this world. It’s something inevitable that comes from when I fell in love as a child. It could have been worse. It can always be worse. I could have been hooked on invoking the Devil on moonless nights, deranged on barren heaths, chanting evil ditties, and leaping around as one does—Oh Prince of Darkness, oh wisest, most beautiful of angels, God deceived by fortune and denied all praise, take pity on me in my wretchedness—but it was not to be. Things are as they are and not as one dreams, wishes, or wants; besides, the Devil would have profited little from my company. My brother Tranquilino put me under the chicken coop post and left me there to help while away his time. He loved watching my body being whitewashed by the hen’s excrement, marveling perhaps at the sheer quantity of their crinkly shit. At the time, there was no television, and village life was monotonous. I can’t say it wasn’t equally so in cities, but I only speak of what I know and hold my peace about what I don’t. I understood nothing or next-to-nothing about that moisture falling from heaven like angels’ snow and was resigned to my impotence, perhaps crying the occasional futile tear and learning very early and painfully that there are times when it’s better to keep one’s mouth shut than seek pity from others. When my weary mother made it back from El Paquito’s and saw me whitewashed from head to toe, she bellowed at my brother like a woman gone mental, and if she was quick enough to grab him, she’d give him a good leathering, not because he hadn’t looked after me but because she now had to do overtime cleaning me up. However, it was a different story that day, and not because it had hailed mollusks in La Mancha, as it did, but because my evil-minded brother decided to behead his matches into my navel. His finger scoured out a hollow in the hen shit, and when he’d made a proper hole, he beheaded three boxes and set fire to them with a mischievous glint in his eye. A cloud of phosphorus rose up the coop post from the center of my belly as I howled my head off in pain. Surprised by the flash, the hens flew up in a flurry of frenzied feathers like archangels under blasphemous attack. If I’d known how, I’d have turned on my front to try to put out the flames in my midriff, but I was only a newly born dwarf, and my worldly knowledge was limited to the instinct to suckle, so I burned, and would have burned to death if my brother hadn’t had the sense to foresee the consequences of his mischief and made use of the cure closest to hand. When the flames were so fierce they were about to spread to my reed crib, he undid his fly and peed on me. His spurting liquid washed coolly over my body like holy water. He urinated copiously from my top nut to my pedal extremities, thus dowsing the flames with an opportune shower of uric acid. The misfortune didn’t spread, and the fire was put out immediately. I was left with a cavernous gully in my stomach, as if I’d been hit by a tiny mortar bomb or a miniature falla effigy from the San José fiestas had been set alight in my navel. I still have the scar. It’s not half what it was, but just take a look and you’ll get an idea of his dangerous deed. Time erases everything except for hatred and the desire for revenge. It has stopped rankling, but my memory still feels sore when a storm is due. Time heals everything except for the amputation of our extremities and the huge desire for revenge that nests in the mind like freezing birds waiting for their sharp claws to revive.