Being peed on triggers a mysterious sense of well-being that, depending on the situation, can even prompt sexual arousal. The psychic aberrations wrought by sex have always caused a furor. Anyone who has traveled the world will attest to that. Things are what they are, and it is pointless trying to kick against the pricks. Fire frightens animals, puts their nerves on edge, and they flee in panic down the first path they find, even if it means leaving strips of flesh on thorn bushes or blinding themselves in their flight and hurtling down a ravine like animal Icaruses. Panic must have curdled my brother’s urine in his bladder, because the flood that hit me was as hard as wrought iron, so much so that to prevent me from burning, he damaged my weak, cartilaginous bones, as they necessarily were so soon after my birth. The mollusk downpour preoccupied the village for a couple of days, and nobody worried about me, not even the vet. Except my mother when she came back the next morning from El Paquito’s. She saw my feverish cheeks and realized my navel had been burnt; she was kind enough to treat it with a poultice of olive oil, dung, and rosemary flower honey. If she hadn’t, I’d probably have snuffed it. Burning to death is a bad end. My brother never did that again; obviously he took fright. From then on he stuck to anthills, and that kept him busy and amused for the rest of his life, until that train rolled into him and he was spattered to high heaven. The poor fellow didn’t die happy, but at least he never suffered. The annals don’t register any deluge of mollusks that day in La Mancha, but the storm did catch Algimiro Calatrava, the Scarface of the Chorrero mill, in wasteland, and it smashed his face in. He tried to shield himself with his hands, but the storm blasted away and it was hopeless. Ten minutes longer and he’d have met his end, as well. He’d lost consciousness when they found him. There were villagers who cooked the shellfish with onions or steamed them, and even said how tasty, though that’s hardly surprising from people living in the backcountry, with yokel brains, skin turned leathery by the blistering sun, and palates reared on chewy bacon. Algimiro Calatrava cursed the heavens because of that incident that almost blinded him. “I shit on that bastard God that dropped those creatures on me. I hope the Jews spit blood on him,” they say he kept saying. Everyone squares their accounts with fate as best they can. Some even defy it with fists held high, but in the end fate wins out and sours their good fortune. We like to waste our energies on senseless acts, and now you see the result, we simply meet our end when our time is judged to be up.
Some people I’ve dealt with have led me to intuit that the impulse driving some men to create or procreate is a kind of sublimation in their own flesh of the life-generating power of the divine. On the other hand, I’d rather think that the drive they possess is only the neurotic expression of an inability to see life from the perspectives of common sense and normality. To recreate scenes in painting or imagine the lives of others in a novel has to be a form of macabre amusement that ought to turn against those practitioners in the guise of a proper social rebuff. The specter of Faith Oxen revealed to me when she appeared in my London hotel room that she’d read to the end of my life in fate’s grimy pages. A splendid statement coming from a ghost. She didn’t say whether she’s read yours as well. If people’s lives were written in advance, they’d simply leap across all ethical boundaries in a mayhem of the flesh, and nobody could blame them for behavior not of their choosing. It’s an attractive idea, at least worthy of inclusion in a fable, although I can tell you that using the horrors experienced by human beings to spin out a yarn reveals a remarkable lack of scruples. Portrait painting, novel writing, and film making are, for the most part, despicable acts and should be treated with contempt and the full rigor of the law.
My brother Tranquilino might well have liked to paint portraits, though possibly not. He died young and didn’t have the chance to paint a picture or taste a pizza capricciosa, let alone a quattro formaggi—they weren’t the rage at the time. A train robbed him of his life one bright morning while swallows mewled hungrily above the overhead power lines. My brother might have been happy writing novels or making films, though possibly not. Who can say? The poor fellow met an early death, but at least he had the opportunity to taste mollusks. Raw, but still. A train rolled over his life on a morning when the swallows were swooping and whistling hungrily above the posts by the railroad track. Perhaps they were the very same dark, hungry swallows that returned to hang their nests from that balcony year after year, though not the ones that learned to hate our names because of the countless pebbles we catapulted their way. Apart from being a dwarf, I am unlucky enough to find poetry moving, and please do hear me out without getting offended, and I hope nobody will start malevolently misinterpreting my words.
When the civil war finished, a school was built in the poplar grove on the village outskirts. It had a huge green-painted entrance door that was bolted to the ground by a crossbeam the children jumped over when they were going in or out. Grupo Escolar Ledesma Ramos was painted on the façade in letters that stood to attention straight out of a calligraphy of victory. I didn’t attend very much, the master said I’d be better off with the animals in the fields than learning trigonometry, and besides, if I did put in an appearance, the other children only greeted me with a round of kicks. “Shall we boot him to bits?” they shouted, and right away their toecaps lofted me sky high. My brother also joined in the chase. His kicks hurt most, not because they came from his feet, but because he put the most energy into his onslaught. I clearly rankled him even though I was a dwarf.
I’d sometimes hide behind the wasteland by the threshing ground and spy on the children when they started playing soccer after school with rusty cans or round rocks wrapped in rags. That way, their kicks didn’t harm me anymore. In those days, municipal sports stadiums didn’t exist. Nor, for that matter, did sports newspapers, the ones that produce such enigmatic headlines, particularly for a non-believer like myself whose only sport in life has been the marathon of scraping by. If I left my hideout and strained to watch them having fun, they’d aim the ball at my head rather than the goalmouth and score when they hit me. The religion of the leather ball rules the West. Its disciples are dazzled by sumptuous opulence, they eye the fortunes in play, hoping a crumb might fall from some corner and bolster their own lives. Childish dreams that awake to disappointment or grief. I never owned a proper ball, though I was sometimes used as one. I tell you, I still remember what those pitiless taps felt like, I still remember those kicks, soft, pitying kicks, or kicks packed with flat-footed glee, kicks that hurt in the depths of your soul, as if those nether parts were your soul, or, vice versa, your soul were that leather object.
Those brutes bashed me whenever they felt like it, so I stopped going to school, and rather than educating myself on all that boasting about the conquest of Granada or the heroics of Guzmán el Bueno, I shut myself in the stable with a book I’d taken from the school and which, with determination and the help of Providence, I soon learned to read: the Rhymes of Gustavo Adolfo. That’s where I began to adore poetry, to be moved while I hid from the madding world and enjoyed incognito the frothy flow of his verse, a dwarf alone among animal droppings.