All that mystery and big talk finally boiled down to Esteruelas having ordered One-Eyed to sniff out on street corners the movements of the leftist groups now beginning to spring up from the mud in the sewers and agitate in the shadow of the defining presence of the Spanish Communist Party. I began to understand that much as I got to grips with my spying assignment. Those at the Movement’s headquarters knew only too well that most of these little groups were involved in harmless student intrigue that was of little or no matter, perhaps sponsored by some university teacher who wanted to wreak his revenge on the poor assessment the academic powers-that-be had made of his intellectual capacities; even so, they were obsessed with keeping control and had to be up to speed with every little development. They were anxiously beginning to detect unruly activity in the industrial belt on the city outskirts that was evidently connected to unrest in the dormitory towns most impoverished by unemployment and least favored by the easy life on offer from the now-obsolete benevolent paternalist system. Getafe, Alcorcón, and Móstoles were the champions when it came to poverty, but the communist activities they’d detected amounted to little more than folkloric carnival routines, perhaps initiated on the orders of old moles blinded by cataracts, performances that never went beyond the display of confused insignia and vague banners outside first communions, weddings, and christenings every Sunday in the month of May. In his excessive drive to assert control, Esteruelas couldn’t ignore the fact that the anti-Regime rallies and demos were getting bigger and more frequent in the central areas of the city. He was afraid of street fighting and public disorder; if they weren’t nipped violently in the bud, they might spread virulently throughout Madrid. It was urgent that the poisoned limb be amputated if the body politic were to be saved, and this was now a rotten society where the cry of “freedom” was being vilely puked up, black and sweet as honey and crawling with flies. Via One-Eyed’s thousand eyes, Esteruela could keep his finger on the hidden pulse of society, anticipate movements, detect changes, and stymy agitation. The information Slim had agreed to deliver had to be a daily shot from the front line. The people really responsible for the subversive slogans spattered in acrylic on the façades of public buildings, or the political posters stuck with carpenter’s glue on tiles in metro stations, could immediately be exposed if Slim felt like it, such was his hold over these sordid territories. In exchange for privileges, back-handers, and the proverbial blind eye, Slim had pinpointed informing and betrayal as the most efficient tools of his trade. Anything went, if it led to information that then helped the police brigades to carry out their repression. He ate humble pie and toadied to those who sought his services; however, because he knew how they needed him, when he looked at them, he would curse them, and when he nodded in their direction, he would scorn them. He was a complex individual and, what was worse, an unpredictable one, and though one-eyed, he weighed up everyone else’s weak points to a tee. So in this kind of messianic project to rid the fatherland of undesirables, those of us on his payroll suddenly found ourselves working alongside others who weren’t but had been drafted into his service and were in no position to tell him quietly and politely togo and get lost.
I know you’re here to enjoy the spectacle of my death. I was warned from the start, but I always refused to take any notice and happily got on with making my fortune. We creatures of flesh and blood like to hide our heads in the day-to-day rather than courageously confront our awareness and the extent of chaos. Poets, fools, and dogs can intuit the worlds beyond and evoke them as best they can before the contemptuous gaze of ordinary mortals: the ones speak of fresh bouquets or funeral wreathes, the others slaver endlessly, and the poor animals howl at the moon on windswept nights until a local wakes up and hurls a stone at them to silence their whines. You may think you now understand the essential moments from my past, but you don’t know the details that betray the keys to the here-and-now or the reason for your presence in my life. You still know nothing, not even the role you are playing in this farce. You aren’t aware, say, that Providence decided on a whim to make me rich in a vulgar, if not ridiculous, manner: selling home delivery pizzas. It could have engineered my winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune from an aunt in South America, but it didn’t do either. Things happen as they do, and we can do little or nothing to change their course. Commissioner Belinda Dixon spent the whole of tonight hammering away at me with this scatological desire of hers for me to contemplate the swellings welling around her private parts. She refused to taste the cocks’ combs, on the excuse that she found the texture repulsive, and when she saw me dispatching them wholesale, she whispered about risky backstreet butchers. “Offal ruins arteries and spawns pus. Better not eat anymore,” she said, “you’ve had enough to last the rest of your life.” I told her I’d not intended to go to the dinner, that I’d been planning to fly to London to spend Christmas with my son when an irresistible urge had changed my mind at the last minute and that was why I was sitting there next to her, enjoying her company at that gala banquet offered by the Meredith Brothers Foundation. She then asked me if I believed in fate; I had no choice but to answer that I did now.
I lost my appetite after so many cocks’ combs. The wine didn’t go down too well, either. The maître d’ lost his cool when he saw course after course going by and me not taking a bite, and he came to enquire contritely whether I didn’t like the dinner. I told him I did but not anymore.
The commissioner got embroiled in a long conversation with a brawny young second-rater sitting to her right. I heard her recounting her tale of wondrous pomades and arterial lesions. The guy, out of politeness, followed her spiel, perhaps rather worried that a leery woman like Madame Dixon might get mixed up in his promising career future. She saw straightaway that he was a greenhorn who could only offer the illusion of youth and resumed her onslaught on me: “Gregorio, when you defecate, do you note the color of your stools? Do you watch out for blood?”
I reflected for a few moments on the absurdity of my situation, then acted as accommodatingly as I could; that encounter must have been arranged in advance, it all fitted perfectly — the decision to defer my trip, the dinner venue, the cocks’ combs, the commissioner and her scatological leanings. In the end I decided a good romp rewards the exercise of patience. All in all, it was my last night and my last supper. I realized that.
Though he was unaware of the significance of what he said, Gurruchaga reckoned that the meaning of transcendence was to be found in excrement. Slim, however, saw transcendence from a more commonplace point of view, with angels on the wing, heavenly clouds, and an almighty God who had undoubtedly helped us win the war. I expect you boast that you know yourself, but you do not know that you are simply one puppet more whose strings destiny is tweaking, and, immersed in the deepest darkness, you try to play at being free and imagine your life follows the dictates of your will. Perhaps you even gamble on the pools in the secret hope that chance, that euphemism for fate, will bring you a million so you can devote your life to doing whatever you please, freed from the sweat of toil. I thought along exactly the same lines until I began to receive the first anonymous messages. Then reality started to crumble around me—“We’re going nowhere like this. I’m up to here with you. Either you keep to your own story line, or this will turn into an open-ended pastiche. Do you get what I’m saying, do you grasp what I’m planning?”
I tried hard to believe my commercial triumphs were solely the result of my own efforts. I tried to cling to the idea that the blight nature had brought to my physique would find compensation in the social success brought by wealth; I plunged frantically into the world of business, worshipping risk, loving profits, and idolizing the playthings of capital to my heart’s content. This was a time when financial euphoria ran riot, aided and abetted civil-war-style economic tactics. I plunged in body and soul, scaled enviable peaks, reached magnificent glaciers on high, and settled down there. Only fleeting memories remained of Spain on its nerve edges, the Spain of protest songs and street fighting, like flatulence waiting to be expelled.