Now and then, rather than patiently waiting for these hallowed ceremonies in all weathers, I’d nip into the nearby Prado Museum, a famous warehouse for paintings like few others in the world, as I’d later discover, and wander through its rooms, marveling at portraits of saints and virgins, looking lingeringly at the food contained in still lives, and ecstatically enjoying landscapes imagined three centuries ago by the lunatic brush of an artist by the name of Bosch: cuddling pigs in nuns’ wimples, stark naked men on all fours being sodomized with flageolets, amatory threesomes caught in the act behind the transparent cellophane of budding flowers, women practicing love with strange fauna, and a whole series of madcap acts the artistic beauty of which brought on my biggest ever erections. When I could stand it no longer, I shut myself in the gents, sat in the stench of those stalls, and jerked off joyfully, masturbations worthy of being put forth as irrefutable evidence at the Last Judgement. Much more so than Las Meninas or Las Lanzas, I loved to be riveted by Hieronymus’s triptychs, savoring the art of that genius among the geniuses the Prado was so well stocked with, and I equally loved to while away my time staring incredulously at the portraits of dwarves and jesters. I was dazzled by the sly yet innocent expression on the mouth of El niño de Vallecas, a moron with the contented countenance of a mental defective, like a dog that’s just been kicked up the backside and is thrown a bone to chew; I went on a high when I gazed at the gentlemanly aplomb of Don Diego de Acedo, the court jester, alias The Cousin, a high-placed functionary in Philip IV’s castle whose job it was to imprint the monarch’s signature on pages in books of state, an exalted task for one so ridiculously small and repellently misshapen. Why couldn’t I be like that, in another epoch, in another monarchy? I asked myself disconsolately, and although the answer was self-evident, Providence deliberately kept quiet to ensure I ranted and raged. But of all the paintings of dwarves, freaks, and monsters hoarded in the Prado, the one I preferred, perhaps because of a striking physical similarity to me, was the Portrait of Sebastián de Morra, so beautiful in his crimsons and golds, in a smart green tunic worthy of a prince, a real Don Dwarf, who served Cardinal Infante in Flanders and immediately on his return to Spain, on the highest recommendation, entered the service of Prince Baltasar Carlos, whom he accompanied on hunting trips and whose will bequeathed him a silver dress sword on a leather strap, with matching sabre and dagger, together with another knife and two scallops with fleurs-de-lis. Deceased in 1649, that man gazed out at me from the painting, sitting just as I sat, sprawling woefully on the floor, bandy-legged, with an identically sad, cunning look, with that glint bad habits lends your eyes and necessity places on your lips. His breathing felt so close it seemed to escape from the depths of the canvas and crystallize in words within my inner ear, almost to the point of a whisper, and at some stage he may have even uttered in this vein: “I am you, learn to be dignified like me, establish your dominion in this world, arise and command, you oaf, or you’ll never be more than an idealized version of yourself fashioned at your own expense by a word merchant.” I didn’t understand why that man’s pose and aura seemed so strangely familiar. The intensity of his presence made me reflect on my own life and random, roaming condition, and also evoked in some way that visceral portrait of me painted in Benalmádena, as if such a paradox were a kind of gift I’d inherited from the past, a threatening specter of myself that never again abandoned me. Over time I discovered why. Providence was playing a joke on me. It was ever thus with geniuses; they immediately know where to find the inspiration they need to give material form to their own neurotic obsessions.
Events seemed to unfold at a headlong pace. Madrid dawned plastered in posters publicizing the imminent referendum in which the people were to be consulted about their longing for freedom; the Cortes had just passed a draft law for political reform. Summer had been a turbulent affair, with manifold ups and downs in the pigsties of power. Unable to keep pulling the rotten, ramshackle chariot of Francoism, Arias Navarro refused to continue, and the king of Spain, filling a gap with sly sleight of hand, had appointed Adolfo Suárez, an obscure bureaucrat with pretensions to fairness, to preside over the Council of Ministers. Every second, rumors of a military coup swamped the city center’s gossip mill, simmering more than ever, from the hot air of so many vipers licking their lips in the hope of provoking destabilization. Even so, gambling with Spanish history in cavalier style, Suárez had used the summer months to prepare a draft law that, once approved by the Cortes, would precipitate the collective suicide of Francoism. The hara-kiri nature of the proposed reform stood out a mile, but only patriots of the old stripe displayed their dignity at such an insult and proudly exercised their right to resign. The Vice-President for Defense made angry public declarations in which he revealed that the government was preparing measures to authorize free trade unions, which, in his view, would lead to the legalization of the CNT and UGT tradeunion organizations that had sparked the upheaval in the red zones during the Civil War. Then, pride smitten, he abandoned his post to the providential fate of the times. In the end, one September 19, the intrigues bore fruit, and the draft law was passed by 425 votes with 59 abstentions. Madrid dawned disguised in posters that hundreds of volunteers for freedom had stuck up overnight, cock-a-hoop with their buckets of paste, puerile patter, and packets of Ducados. “Speak, People, Speak,” they said, “Seize The Time, Don’t Let Them Decide For You,” and all those who only a year ago had looked on, their hearts stricken, as the Caudillo entered the territory of Charon, people who’d never been perturbed by their own silences or the eager eloquence of others keen to decide on their behalf, suddenly emerged from their cubbyholes and dashed into the streets to participate feverishly in that novel puppet show they were being offered by the powers-that-be.
Such aspirations for freedom, expressed without anger, might seem banal or at the very least frivolous in the confusion at the twilight of a millennium when human beings are fully aware that they belong to a global tribe that worships statistics, monothematic thought, market profitability, and football the redeemer. Not then, when vehemence, spontaneous passion, verbal diarrhea, and inflammatory harangues were the craze. They wanted sovereignty to reside in the people, and the Spanish people, so they said, had come of age; they should express themselves, and so they did, just as they were asked to do. Not everybody wanted the same things, naturally, and while many hadn’t a clue as to what was looming around the corner, others, the champions of wealth, longed to stake out positions, do deals, and weld minds together in order to seal the foundations of a new Spain that, apart from expounding freedom, equality, and political pluralism as the supreme values of its legal system, would also guarantee — and how! — their very own survival and perpetuation.