In the pages of that book, I found consolation for a deformity I began to see would forever be the butt of others’ anger. There I succeeded in tasting melancholy’s iron-flecked charm—Floating silk of haze and mist, twisting ribbon of foaming white. . — and as a climax to my absurd childhood, I went and fell in love.
The Civil Guards’ barracks sported a Todo por la patria on the façade that looked down on the Plaza del Caudillo. Endless pots of geraniums, enameled with the red and yellow of the national flag, gave a fly-blown flourish to their authority. Gossip had it that Sergeant Ceballos was a coward as well as a bastard. Gossip from the camp of the defeated, naturally. People also said that during one of the attacks launched by the Nationalists on the Teruel front to cross the Tagus, Sergeant Ceballos shot his lieutenant in the back so the latter couldn’t give the order to advance into the enemy fire that was buzzing with shrapnel released from mortars on the other side of the river, from the direction of Cuenca. Then he shot himself in the foot to a frightful hullaballoo, which all earned him — surprise, surprise — a medal for his valor in battle, awarded by none other than General Mansilla y Gutiérrez de Tejares. “With brave men like yourself, victories come shining bright; may a peerless morning star always guide your glistening brow at dawn along the path of pride at having served your country with the glorious courage of a soldier who marks the flag with his blood and craves only the unrivaled badge of being called Spanish—viva Franco, arriba España.”
Sergeant Ceballos was one of those bastards exalted by the pomp of their uniform, I mean, a man greased by power. Nevertheless, he had two virtues: the length and color of his moustache, which was wondrous to behold in its wine-soaked glory when he took it for a nighttime stroll around the village bars, and the daughter he sired. “Hey, dwarf, come and clean my shoes with that pesky tongue of yours and then shine them on your mother’s hairy twat.”
Sergeant Ceballos was a decorated war hero and voiced his desires with the bellicosity his rank merited. Everyone nodded and acquiesced; otherwise, apart from me and his booze, his only entertainment was sniffing out hares in the hills, shotgun on shoulder, or disemboweling birds when practicing his aim. “If I catch you, dwarf, I’ll shave every hair off that pear-shaped skull of yours, you bonehead”; and when he saw me skedaddle, he’d guffaw, in that gruff, croaky voice he coaxed out of his larynx. I wasn’t really worried by his attitude, or by the cruel way he insulted my handicap, or if his boot caught me when I was slow on the uptake; at the end of the day, he possessed an authority conferred by the triumph of arms, which, in those days was sacred. I could have put up with all of that — his stamping on me, his slaps, his huge contempt — but not his insistence that I should keep well away from his daughter, his intolerable view that I shouldn’t see her or talk to her.
Sergeant Ceballos was a bastard invested with the right of might, though that didn’t spare him from a bad end. I fled from his path the moment I spotted him in the village, not because he was going to humiliate me with insults or aim hurtful barbs at my dignity, though that was bad enough, but because he was the father of little Margarita, the love of my life at the time, and because his mere presence drove me crazy and forced me to wonder angrily how a repulsive idiot like him could have sired such an angel. Little Margarita had the whitest skin, long eyelashes, and an aroma of flaky pastry that trailed in the air behind her, as if her tresses were scented with cake-shop essence. In the afternoon, I stationed myself by the ruined wall where the women used to pee when they walked back from doing their washing in the river (that same wall where my mother first bumped into my father), waited for her to leave school, and then followed her back to the barracks, bathed in the feminine smells wafting from her springtime. “Clear off, titch, can’t you see we want a piss? Everyday it’s the same, clear off, beat it to the hills with the goats and maybe they’ll shit on you,” they groused, gathering up their skirts at the speed demanded of them by their bladders.
Sergeant Ceballos had sternly warned me to leave his daughter alone, and he never missed an opportunity to scour my sensitive feelings with his threats. “If I catch you hovering around her, I’ll cut them off, if you have any, and stick them straight up your ass.” I had no choice but to ignore him; my heart dictated to me without an ounce of sense, and I could only wish for him death, a fine death that he never met. I was sure of one thing, if coming into this world was worth the candle, it was only to admire beautiful little Margarita.
Love between children is raw and painful, perhaps that’s why it is the truest, the one that most issues from the soul. Little Margarita would never have kissed me; she’d rather have been deflowered by a toad. Conversely, I’d have given the rest of my life to taste her lips just once, to drink from them with mine, to wallow in the double cream of her cheeks and bedeck myself in the pollen of her love. When I was older, I felt something similar, though in a more prosaic, not to say indecorous, fashion. That was with Juana, though people called her “Blondie.”
The lowering sky creaked like an old beam on the point of collapse when little Margarita left school at midday. She was the only light. She scattered her smiles and wore a mystery about her chest that my eyes devoured. The air tasted hard in her footsteps and jammed my lungs, as my short legs felt a real strain keeping up with her nimble pace, not to mention the way she was punishing my heart. I crouched behind the crumbling wall by the riverbank, just before school ended, and counted the minutes. You could still see bullet holes, like small niches in the flaking stone — orifices left by the executions ordered by Franco’s troops when they entered the village like wild animals in May of ‘36 scattering death sentences like confetti. “Clear off, dwarf, for God’s sake, we’re going to have a piss,” the women shouted bad temperedly as they walked up from the river where they’d been washing clothes, their brows streaming with sweat and bundles of sheets still wetting their hips like dripping clouds. Startled by their bawls, I leapt up on my short shanks and ran hell-for-leather to hide somewhere else, dead quiet, behind a dry, half-rotten elm tree split by lightning, behind the mule trough, or in the shadowy arches on the plaza, dead quiet, waiting for little Margarita to slice deep into my disquiet with her sharp-bladed footsteps. I’ve always found it fun to take refuge away from people and, protected by my solitude, to scrutinize the world without being seen myself. I don’t deny this may be a consequence of my handicap; you see how I’m the first to acknowledge my defects in public: a dwarf, a grizzly temper, a liking for poetry, and all the rest I’ve yet to recount.
The teacher didn’t want to see me anywhere near the school. He said my ugly looks distracted the pupils and that I stopped them from learning what they needed to become pillars of society; in other words, he reckoned I was a freak of nature, and if painters had been around now like the Goyas or Velázquezes of yore, I might have at least served as a model for the monsters they wanted to paint, but as there weren’t, I was no use at all. My brother Tranquilino did go to school. He’d rest his bonce on the window and engross himself in the spectacle of the storks flying to and fro from the belfry, while he picked his nose out of pure boredom. He’d have just loved to burn their nests with them inside, but a train killed him before he reached an age to be able to carry out such a lofty deed. Iron wheels carried him off one morning when he was on an errand to pick tomatoes from our plot of land by the cemetery. He met a really bad end; he was smashed and shredded.