At dawn on November 20, 1975, the wailing of Trinitarian nuns dragged us naked from our beds, our sexes still erect, still swinging on the hinges of sleep like the mournful clappers beginning to clamor across Madrid’s bell-bottomed sky. The Generalísimo had died. The screeching nuns airing the catastrophe in the passageways blew the sleep dust from our eyes and aroused us from our slumbers. We threw our thieves’ rags on and dashed downstairs to the dining room, where breakfast was waiting. The nuns in the kitchen had prepared hot chocolate that wafted a comforting aroma up our nostrils. The paupers in the institution were already sitting at a table, with blank expressions, as if that solemn moment for the fatherland somehow involved them. Before he started devouring his breakfast, I noticed One-Eyed Slim’s right hand draw a lingering In-the-Name-of-the-Father on his chest that I felt was sincere enough, even if it was one of his stock-in-trade tricks, and that led me to reflect that, despite everything, beyond creed and circumstance, death’s august claws can make even the most wretched of this earth feel sorrow. Sister Marta came over to our table to give us the funeral chit-chat while we were busy dunking churros in our hot chocolate. “It happened in the early hours, from what they’re saying on the radio. Poor little man. He was as wizened as a raisin. He is now with God in his Glory, but what will become of us without him?” Slim soothed her with a manly gesture, assuring her that while he was alive, the Trinitarian nuns had nothing to fear. Poor innocent. They didn’t need him at all and gleefully went on with their business the day that a bad end brought him his final reckoning. A right mess — the pancakes with caramel syrup he was chewing suddenly mixed together with the gray matter in his head because of the explosion. It looked like a wasteland of limbs amputated by the wave of expansion, a higgledy-piggledy mess glazed by the fallout from the cafeteria. “Whoever they are, the dead deserve a reverence and a minute of prayer,” Slim continued, “even more so if they were hated in their lifetime. Dwarfy, the day I die, you must do what’s right and proper by my soul. Pray seven Credos, and remember how well I treated you.”
The day I discovered that bits of his flesh had been splattered through the air, my first instinct was to call him a bastard, and though I’d never wished it on him when he was alive, I must confess I was overjoyed that death, that endemic scourge, had finally swept him away.
News of Franco’s death immediately spread through the labyrinth of streets, and when the sharp cold of morning came, everyone was already joining in patriotic dirges. “Spaniards, when my time came to render my last homage to the Almighty. .” There were people who uncorked champagne bottles for breakfast, and others, driven by a sense of honor, shirts a proud sea-blue, faces to the sun, dashed into the streets, arms aloft, to bid farewell to a sun as absent as the founder of the Falange. They shouted victory cries and chorused slogans now relegated to the dustbin by the material well-being heralded by Seat 600s and washing machines, which is what the Regime had now become. Such pride goes soft and limp when chewed in the mouth, doesn’t taste the same, and when you’ve spat it out, you feel relieved and much happier. After he’d finished dunking in his hot chocolate, Slim detached the flask of anisette he carried strapped to his calf and emptied a small drop into the breakfast cups of all those present. “Let us all drink to the glory of the Caudillo,” he exhorted those gathered in the dining room as he stood to his feet. I downed mine and stayed as I was — indifferent to death’s victory and more concerned about what was going to happen from now on.
We left the Trinitarian Mansion after our toast and trotted off down the street to see what profit the day might bring us. We roamed around, keeping an eye on the situation as it developed, and rather than begging on the steps of a church or fleecing civil servants of their wallets in the metro as we usually did at that early hour, we decided to test the waters in the hotbed of rumors that was the Puerta del Sol. Midmorning news began to surface that they were going to put Franco’s body on public display in the Royal Palace, and Slim’s eye shed a tear at the mere thought of being able to go and see it. “Let’s go, dwarfy, we can’t miss this!” he said, pushing me in the back in the direction of the Calle Arenal. He was in a fantastic hurry and made me stumble, in the grip of soppy emotion that made me cringe, showing off his empty socket in classic style to emphasize his one-eyed mug, while I ran behind him like a dog under sentence rather than one following his master. People had already started queuing by the wrought-iron fence in the Plaza de la Armería in order to render tribute to the coffin in due course, sobbing, and hoarse from the “Arriba Españas” they’d been shouting. It soon became a long line that, as the clock ticked on, transformed into a vast horde of people extending round the palace perimeter and vanishing into the wastelands of the Campo del Moro, at the other end of the Plaza de Oriente. I’d not met such a crowd even on a Sunday when El Cordobés was fighting the bulls in Las Ventas; it was a crowd of loyal followers, addicts, and curious bystanders, and that’s the honest truth. It was a fantastic ruckus as beset by mournful wails as seething with expectation, and Slim, who was no fool, immediately saw the potential for extracting filthy lucre from that heaving multitude and went for it. “Dwarfy,” he ordered, “get into that line and act as if you’re trying to push in. When they start moaning, just sit tight until I get there. Don’t lose your nerve, and create a scene, if you have to, to keep your position.” And that’s just what I did. I walked over to the most packed section at the head of the line, a head combing its hair on the rusty fence round the Royal Palace where people were festering like lice. I tried to slip unnoticed under the skirts of a lady kitted out like a housewife on her way to the shops with her nylon string bag, gripping her purse tight and smelling unmistakably of vegetable broth. When she felt me around her hips, she looked down askance and in disgust but didn’t dare say a thing, keeping a close lookout in case they finally opened the gate. I got more and more up her nose, cheekier and cheekier, until she could stand it no longer and walloped me with the corner of her purse. “Don’t try to push in, dwarf,” she hissed, shrill as a night watchman, in a cry that erupted indignantly from her lungs. “Shut your trap, you boiled cabbage,” I retorted, strutting my stuff and stamping on her bunions. Then she began insulting me with phrases that simply described my appearance and started pummeling me with her clenched fists. “Deformed goblin,” rasped the poor woman. I was delighted by her pathetic tantrum and scornfully answered back, “Shut your trap, you old beggar woman,” not budging an inch from the spot I’d so cheekily squeezed into at the front of the line. People began to register what was happening and turned their nosy antennae toward the scene of the incident. “Nobody has a right to push in,” protested a bald coot behind me. “Hey, I’ve been here since last night,” I bellowed bitterly, trying to spread confusion. “You lying so-and-so,” the woman rasped again, continuing to clout my head with her purse. “Don’t hurt him, missus, can’t you see he’s handicapped?” interrupted a fellow wearing a jacket with elbow patches. “So what, handicapped he may be, but he’s pushing in all the same. He’s just trying it on.” A welter of shouts, howls, and opinions went up for or against yours truly, getting ruder and ruder. Suddenly, with that assertive touch con merchants can sometimes bring to bear, Slim put in an appearance, shoving people aside. “Aren’t you ashamed to be treating a poor dwarf like this when he only wants to offer a prayer to the Caudillo’s body as it lies in state? Don’t you have any feelings? I find it incredible that there’s such a lack of consideration for the weak of this world; I hope your family’s never unfortunate enough to have such a malformed member.” Many changed their expressions and shut up after that harangue from One-Eyed; others, however, got even more indignant as a result of his play-acting appeal to their consciences and started insulting him, as well, telling him to clear off back to where he’d come from, and now both sides locked into a flurry of flailing arms, punches, and shoves — that, of course, being the whole point of the farce. From that minute on, it was wondrous to watch Slim embark on a show of thieving that called on every trick of the trade; his hands flew over jacket lapels, his fingers slipped between pocket linings at the speed of light, with scientific precision. I gaped in awe at that master class; the guile of cunning angels was no doubt guiding that guy in his deft fingering. I was bowled over by his artfulness and threw myself into an imitation game, starting with the coin purse that lady was using to bash me on the head, though I was forced to bite it out of her hand, not at all artfully. That hustle and bustle lasted a mere four or five minutes, and in the midst of the uproar, at a wink from Slim’s good eye, we both scarpered along our own routes. We replayed that ruckus and others in similar style throughout the evening and into the long night of that wake, and much to our advantage. We walked from one end to the other of that line ever more thronged by devotees, gossips, idle bystanders, out-and-out fans, and swarms of ordinary folk drawn like flies by the political stench given off by the corpse. In this way, by the good grace of our stratagems, a host of ingenuous simpletons fell to our wiles: dental technicians, neighborhood hairdressers, apartment block concierges, Catholic lawyers, bus drivers, freelance fishermen, rank-and-file sailors, pen-pushing wimps, parsons without a post but hoping to find one, low-level civil servants, and even a black man from the Cameroons who happened to be in town trading in ivory. That disparate but single-minded social galaxy fetching up at the farewell to the Generalísimo in the incomparable setting of the Royal Palace would soon disintegrate as it adopted the democratic creed that became the rage, erasing the past at a stroke and signing up to a new account with the future. One by one, all fell foul of Slim’s thievery, and his deft artistry was such that we were astounded by our large haul, so large that he even suggested we cross ourselves in an act of thanksgiving, thus acknowledging with restraint and humility the heavenly intervention in the catch we’d netted.