To end the day, in keeping with the solemnity the occasion demanded, we finally took our place in the line and waited for it to move forward until we emerged in the Palace’s columned room of state, where the spectacle of the Caudillo’s corpse on its bier was there for all to see. Dressed in a spanking new uniform, the cadaver revealed a rigor mortis that made one distinctly suspect his demise hadn’t been as recent as we’d been made to believe. Could what someone had told Slim be true, that they’d wanted his death to coincide with Primo de Rivera’s? It sounded quite esoteric, but anything is possible in the designs of Providence, and even politics needs it spot of goety. When it was our turn to walk past the coffin, Slim stopped abruptly, struggled to hold back a tear shed who knows whether from sorrow at the loss or gratitude for our takings, then stood to attention with a click of the heels, raised his right arm with renewed vigor, and, trembling with emotion, shouted a “Viva Franco! Arriba España!” that echoed dramatically round the palace vaults, to which those present responded with the inevitable “Vivas” and “Arribas,” bringing yet one more chapter in the history of Spain to a lovely, single-minded conclusion.
Sometimes smells help transport emotions through time and space. Haven’t you ever been reminded of an unrequited love or scene from your past by a scent in the air or a piquant aroma? My sense of smell has always been as keen as that of a dog wandering the streets in search of a bone to gnaw. I expect it’s because of my contact with those animals. When lions or tigers aren’t washed or deloused, you can smell them a mile away, but once the smell has settled in your nostrils, you don’t notice it, and happily coexist with the stench. Doris hoarded little flasks of eau de cologne in her caravan. She’d give them me to smell, and I’d shut my eyes tight in ecstasy and take a deep breath, as if trying to purge the fetid pit of my existence. Perhaps as a throwback to that habit, I now began to visit the perfume sections in the department stores in Madrid on Carretas and Carmen, where I’d go for free squirts of the colognes the manufacturers brought out every season. I’d go down Callao and into the Galerías Preciados, where they’d be lined up on the counters in small bottles. Aguasdeselvas, Floids, and Varondandis were practically a daily pleasure, but I didn’t simply linger over male offerings, I often squirted the ones advertised for women. The shop assistants had me in their sights, but apart from the oddity of this custom I’d adopted, the times they were a-changing, and that sense of the absurd, which in another era would have been banned as a danger to public morality, was now something to relish, because it was so eccentric, quaint, and even grotesque. The structures that had sustained the Regime for so long suffered from the aluminosis brought on by longevity, and were beginning to implode as the mercury of a new politics ravaged arthritic joints. The people as such had yet to firm themselves up into trade unions or wondrous neighborhood associations, but they were now daring to stick their snouts out of the burrow of their new would-be freedom. “The people united will never be defeated,” went up the anonymous cry in still-fearful streets, tempered by memories of tragedy. Outbursts of leafleting and fly-posting erupted in different spots in the city center like ephemeral gusts from a whirlwind struggle that was still being squashed by the brute force of the police. I’d see university students come up the Calle Preciados with their ideologies strapped on their backs, bent under the weight of leaflets carrying the fashionable slogans of the day—“Amnesty,” “Freedom,” “Release the Prisoners”—their clenched fists punching the swirling winds, long-haired with messy ideas, flared pants, and side-burns, and I wondered in my skeptical gray matter what that turmoil would ever come to. In the name of freedom, they were working the streets, airing the immemorial filth of the proletariat, oblivious to the fact that in other more plush confines, plans were being hatched for a less traumatic way forward for Spain within a conventionally bourgeois frame. They scattered their sputum and leaflets on the ground, to equal social effect, and both were swept up at nightfall by the municipal street cleaners. There was talk of people in high places being defenestrated, and the call for a general amnesty was gaining in strength. Time, not street fighting, was the name of the game.
One morning I was returning early from begging twenty-five peseta coins from pious old dears, tottering into the Barefoot Trinitarians’, when I felt a sudden urge to dip into the perfume section of the Galerías Preciados. Very little time had passed since Franco’s death, yet spring seemed to be smiling again — with the rictus of a corpse. The air smelt clean, and the morning was joyously slanting its sunbeams, apparently wanting to spotlight the detritus in the city. I took a shortcut down the Calle de Tudescos to the Plaza de Callao. Shops were opening their doors to passersby with brisk, business-like efficiency as late-rising shop assistants watched their sleep reflected in display windows. By the Callao cinema, a large group of youths was already making its presence felt, intent on demonstrating for their rights. One could discern placards sticking out from under their blousons, like tattered flags rescued from some imponderable defeat. Some had slung military-duty rucksacks over their shoulders, which were surely about to deliver up posters, pamphlets, leaflets, and other subversive material to be handed out at any minute. I glanced at them askance as I walked by but was much keener to give my nose the dose of scents it was craving than to inspect their behavior; I took little notice and pressed on toward the Galerías Preciados. As I was an avid visitor, they knew how I liked to squirt and sniff perfumes and, generally, let me get on with it, but that day, when a counter assistant saw me approaching, one suffering a bad bout of PMS, she dashed hysterically off to the floor security guard to inform him of my presence. I was in seventh heaven, trying a lemon-scented cologne that had just hit the market. Experienced in his job, the security guard crept up behind me, undeniably bent on doing me damage, and while I was swooning on that scent, he dealt me a cowardly blow that jolted me, with such bad luck that the bottle slipped from my grasp and smashed to smithereens on the floor. I lost my footing completely when he shoved me a second time, and I fell flat on my face and impregnated my cheeks with bits of glass. “Clear off, dwarf, and don’t show your nose around here ever again,” the guy dictated. Upset at my expulsion from paradise, and leaking blood like a slaughtered pig, I ran into the street, hiding my face in my hands. Blood is a spectacular red. Those who see it are either entranced or throw up. I felt really ashamed and let rip a series of curses against those stores and the lackey who’d attacked me so savagely though I’d not interfered with him or his floor; perhaps he was absurdly jealous because he was holding down such a mediocre job.