After a disconcerting morning when the habitués of Los Jerónimos gave fewer alms than usual, perhaps because of the unease felt by their purses after the announcing of the referendum, I met up with Ceferino, and we wended our way to the party locale. The dizzy pace of events probably meant there were new positions and opinions it was my duty to investigate. We’d not eaten, and my guts were in funeral-march mode. When we arrived, they treated us to a few shots of Anís del Mono, and after we’d knocked those back, a crowd began to assemble, desperate to receive the new party lines and slogans to fit the fresh circumstances. Faith Oxen arrived in midafternoon, looking well fed and digested after a siesta, though her manner reflected a good deal of despair. “There can be no voting without freedom,” she clamored from the podium of her prestige. “Don’t let’s be deceived by this plebiscite fraud, by this insult to the people. Many comrades are still in exile, and others are risking their skins daily in clandestine activities; political parties are banned, the police persecute us, intent on repressing and jailing us, and now they summon you to a referendum. They’re laughing in your faces. Their proposals are an insult. Say no to them, at the tops of your voices, tell them there can be no voting without freedom, no freedom without struggle, take to the streets, promote abstention, and call for a workers’ republic where there’ll be no place for them.” The crowd gathered there applauded her diatribe, took good note of what had to be done, and left, looking forward to doing what was necessary. The few of us who stayed behind were invited to a snack at Faith Oxen’s place so we could follow developments from there. “Gregori,” which was how she addressed me now in her insufferable Russo-Caribbean accent, “go and buy some Cantimpalo chorizos and a few bottles of beer so the comrades have something to drink,” she instructed me before I left the locale, and, of course, all of a piece with her proverbial meanness, she didn’t give me a single five-peseta coin to pay for it.
From that day on, Faith Oxen decided to make me her errand boy and put me under her orders; I’m not sure whether she wanted to demean me even further, or take advantage of my meek, biddable disposition. I reacted angelically, as I was interested in being in close contact with her; I ran to obey her and adopted a submissive, humble attitude when it was time to get fruit for dessert, bread for lunch, or toilet paper for her backside, so we soon established a sickly relationship based on subservience, servitude, and deference. “Gregori,” she’d say, “just realize you are a pariah on this earth, and rejoice, because soon you will have to rise up and topple the tyrants of this world,” and I’d stand, look at her, and unsuccessfully try to detect a touch of conscious irony in her drift. Behind the façade of political commitment and the militant tenor of her past, she was simply someone who’d emancipated herself from humanity, a robotic offshoot she’d spawned to defend the monopoly of her own self-interest. One could have defined her attitude when I got to know her as senile and selfish; when she participated in the rallies or committee meetings she attended, the aura of her prestige convincingly fazed all those idiots who mistook revolution for arteriosclerosis and manic depression for the struggle. “We’ll never accept a Spain whose flag isn’t the tricolor, whose symbols aren’t those of the workers and peasants. We’ll never tolerate a nation of serfs who have to bow before a king. We’ll never cease to battle until the wealth of the country is taken from the hands of the exploiters, and we’ll never take a step backwards — not even to take a breather.” And so she rattled on in a way she had learned in her youth, flourishing her cape in the most packed arenas of the nation’s Left, where a few Stalinist geniuses and a similar clutch of geriatric internal exiles hung on her every word as if their lives depended on it, or at the very least the survival of their own memories. After the speeches, it was my job to accompany her home — a comfortable, bourgeois house rented for her in Alonso Martínez — and there I helped her undress, put on her slippers, and cooked any dish she asked for to cope with her hunger. Then I’d give Slim the list of names I jotted down and tell him in hushed whispers the things that happened both in the party meetings and the old girl’s house. I sometimes exaggerated in order to keep him happy and continue as a spy, thus sparing myself the need to beg, an activity that was really starting to irk me now I was soaking up all that communist doctrine. He’d set up a meeting with Esteruelas to pass on my news, and he’d inflate what I’d told him, inciting the inspector to order beatings or shoot-outs performed by the wild men of the Far Right.
Faith Oxen, that fine female whose lips swelled when she spoke of the equality of human beings, treated her peers with an intolerable haughtiness worthy of medieval times. Generally she reserved her blatant displays of arrogance for when she was humiliating an opponent or someone who simply dared to uphold contrary ideas. What’s more, she would appeal straight away to the lives of those who had died defending the ideals she preached, and she made their self-sacrifice her irrefutable argument, which she systematically used to demolish the conflicting opinions of those who dared disagree. “Get up and be gone from this room, and remember, if you dare, those who fell in combat defending our ideas. They’re the ones to whom you should be showing the respect you don’t show me.” Everybody went silent and looked remorseful, and nobody spoke again to contradict her. Her kingdom belonged to another world, and as times switched to a democratic path, she was gradually relegated to the junk room, kept well out of sight with other pains in the neck, and was only let out to be exhibited in party jamborees as a quaint relic from Spanish history. However, she preferred to ignore her new role as an occasional extra and turned up to rallies with her dignity wrapped in astrakhan, her greasy hair sleek against her skull, her nostrils thin and aquiline, and a contemptuous glint in her hazy eyes, as if she were plotting evil. I played the part of the obedient servant, and whenever the opportunity presented itself, I’d accompany her and flatter her ego by listening silently to the worn-out tales of struggle she told with all the digressions that come with old age. She’d sit in an armchair, and I’d curl up at her feet on the parquet. Propelled by the distant lilt of her verbal diarrhea into the ether of time, she liked to run her fingers through my curly hair. I’ve never been able to stand caresses received from a height different to mine. I sensed the hypocrisy in her gestures and her vital fluids calcifying in her whines. An old has-been. I can tell you I got used to running her errands and bringing her shopping home, and as I unpacked the bags, I could gauge the extent of the dementia leaking from her outsize ego. “Gregori, put the fruit in the fridge or it will get covered in moths. Fruit isn’t what it used to be, there are no melons like the ones we got from Villaconejos before the war. My mother used to put them in the pantry, and our house would be flooded with sugar. The Fascists bombed them to smithereens.”
I found myself a comfy corner in her house and wheedled from her tortuous chatter information I could pass on to One-Eyed in order to perpetuate my period of leave. Sometimes she’d go doe-eyed and nostalgic and talk about Gurruchaga and the many other lovers she proudly confessed to. She did so coldly, distantly, as if love for her were only the crystallization of desire. She detailed the stalactites and stalagmites of her amorous whims and languidly dwelt on the lost moments of her youth with that “oh, if I were only thirty years younger” you hear so often from individuals who find they’ve missed the train to the future. My impression was of someone with truncated emotions whose only links to humanity were her memories and her contempt. Apart from that, I can only point to how I began to cultivate an interest in delving into people’s wily ways, how that shaped my attitude from then on, and how I liked to serve her faithfully as a dog does its master. She was a communist, but I was a beggar and as such awash with trash, remnants, and gifts that weren’t helping me to prosper in life. I was sick of having to endure life in the Trinitarian Mansion, of tolerating the nuns’ stinking boiled greens and the bad breath that always accompanied the fake goodness of their smiles. Living in Faith’s plush pile at least comforted me with the thought that I was under a different roof, away from God’s charity and safe from the fleas harbored by all the bereft tramps now holed up in the city.