I spied on her with pleasure and a clear conscience. I enjoyed unscrupulously scrutinizing every hour she perpetrated in this world. When someone visited her, I’d put my ear to the sitting-room door that had been shut tight, and, keeping quiet, drawing on my seven senses, I’d catch the thrust of whatever was being debated. I loved lazing around the old girl’s house, whiling away my time sniffing the sweetish aroma given off by mahogany furniture, or contemplating the paintings from every school that hung on the walls in flagrant contradiction to any claims to austerity. I put so much energy into my job, I soon found out a number of domestic matters. I discovered, for example, that the money to pay for that quite un-proletarian apartment came from a current account in a Paris bank that had been opened in the name of one Pierre Brouard, a putative son who clearly devoted himself to the real estate business and who, except for the financial side of his gratitude, displayed no emotional attachment at all, and that tore at her and creased her with sorrow for wasting those far-off maternal moments on politicking. In my guise as a cheap-jack spy, I also discovered the ins and outs of the promiscuity the old girl enjoyed in her good old days of fun in the sack, to the point that I began to see her as a class act in the crack rather than any champion of the virtues of universal communism; such was her passion for raw meat, I sometimes got the shivers when I felt the lusty breath powering her words, not because I was at all pernickety about the pleasures of the groin, rather I was afraid that if I yielded to her whims, she might pop a spring and die on the spot. I became aware of other facts that are irrelevant, which I won’t pass on, so you can while away your time trying to imagine them; they all revealed a tortured, mean personality, an example of a life misspent in sterile activity. I’d spill most of these beans to Slim, but not the lot, and so, piano piano, I slowly honored our accord, and he, in turn, passed on the goods in doses to Esteruelas to cure the ills he seemed to be suffering much more than Spain; although ultimately there was no stopping all the hot-headedness and sooner or later the end had to come. In that whirlwind of anxiety, self-interest, and contradiction, everyone was quick to profess ignorance of any blame, and although we all bore the seeds of our own penitence, the future was overtaking us in a rush and entirely unpredictably. Only Providence, with its unerring desire to ignore man’s freedom, had any previous knowledge of our sad, intense, inevitable finales: Esteruelas’s and One-Eyed’s — their brains smattered next to the whipped cream from atop a stack of pancakes in a upmarket cafeteria on the Calle Goya; that of poor Ceferino, lousily beaten to death like a dog; the demise, in great agony, at the mercy of my pleasure, of Faith Oxen; and now, suddenly, my very own, so ridiculous and small-scale, as couldn’t be otherwise for someone my size.
One morning, as I arrived almost suffocated by the load of fruit and vegetables I’d had to hump up the stairs, my bones aching because the elevator engine was out of order, I was surprised to find Faith talking behind closed doors to a group of people who’d dropped by. I slipped into the room on the pretext that I had to tell her about my troubles on the stairs, but she was annoyed by my presence, and her withering look indicated I should make myself scarce. I’d never seen many of those present, and others I only recognized because I’d seen them in a clandestine meeting or two. I opened the kitchen door and left the door to the lobby half-open so I could try to hear what they were talking about. They were asking her to support the so-called Democratic Platform established under the auspices of the Spanish Communist Party. They wanted her to commit to a united Left that could manage a political transition based on democratic reform. A tall bearded man who said he’d just come from Rome announced that Santiago Carrillo was preparing a press conference in Madrid that would be attended by leading foreign journalists like Oriana Fallaci and Marcel Niedergang. They hoped that their presence would bring forward the legalization of the Communist Party and rally international support for the political option they had chosen. He also related how Enrique Líster and La Pasionaria had formally requested the Suárez Government issue them Spanish passports through a Spanish consulate in a city behind the Iron Curtain. More than ever, the Left needed to unite all its forces behind a common strategy for the future, not a single group should remain outside the front, and neither should Faith Oxen, because of her charisma and ideological standing, and also, it had to be said, because she’d had the courage to return to the country before anyone else, so she should feel duty-bound to support the position that would usher in an irrevocable expansion of freedoms. Ear on the alert, I took note of everything. I finally had concrete information that would enable me to bring my mission to a successful conclusion. I rubbed my hands together, though with a degree of lethargy I struggled to explain; I didn’t want to fall back into the grubby ways symbolized by Slim, I’d accustomed myself too easily to my parasitic life with the old girl, and returning to life on the street didn’t appeal one bit. Perhaps it was Providence who made the decision for me about such a change, for, though I wasn’t in the know, it had lined up new territories of reality for me to explore. Faith Oxen got up from the armchair where she’d sat listening, the one where she’d stroked the curls on my skull, and, drily grandiloquent, she accused them all of being revisionists, self-interested delinquents, and traitors to the working-class. She said that the strategy for struggle could never encompass alliances with bourgeois parties or any others that weren’t bourgeois but denied that the class struggle was the determining force in history. She then ran them out of her house, and they all left with their ears down, their tails between their legs, daring to say little or nothing to change the mind of that old fruitcake who must have smashed her pot of common sense to smithereens on the barricades of ‘36.
That very night the Trinitarians served up mussels boiled in dishwater and oxtail stew smelling of turnips for dinner. I sat next to Slim. I remember he hadn’t trimmed his beard for two or three days. He’d been busy sorting out a couple of territorial disputes that, from what he said, were settled with knives in the quiet, early hours. The newspapers had blamed the murder on a Far Right that was out of control, and Esteruelas was annoyed by the unplanned complication Slim had triggered off his own bat. “I’ve got red-hot news, Slim,” I said, sucking on a disgusting mussel. “Carrillo is planning to give a press conference in Madrid. The reds want to close ranks around him and secure the legalization of the Communist Party. Everyone but the old girl seems to be in agreement, but nobody takes any notice of her anymore.” Slim stroked my skull, feigning friendship, and expressed his delight at the news I brought him rather offhandedly. “This is all very good, dwarfy, but now you must find out when and where. You can’t string Esteruelas along with tittle-tattle. Get that old whore to tell you; trick her, do what it takes, get into her bed if necessary, but tell me something really useful. Things are well and truly fucked, and our survival depends on us having our wits about us. You understand me, don’t you, dwarfy? You do know what will happen to us if we don’t get what we’re after? Just remember that you’re doing what you’re doing for your own good, and I should hardly have to add how upset I’d be if you had a mishap because you weren’t doing your job properly.” Slim went to his room early. When I walked past his door I didn’t hear the nun shouting or a pig grunting. In the dense silence of those passageways, an acidic noise froze me inside; the hinges of my life were creaking badly.