Everything is written in the ineffable book of destiny, my life’s a closed chapter, and it’s your job to bring it to an end. The most hurtful violence that can be inflicted on a human being is the revelation of his lack of freedom, the predictability of his behavior, the exact outcome of his acts, even the exact date of his death. You have come here to amuse yourself with mine. You have intervened in my past purely to give it the endpoint it merits. Your presence in my story underlines how the savage reality of existence counts for naught, outplayed by the conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing, depends on individual will. We are simply spectators at our own tragedy, and we applaud and congratulate ourselves for our brilliant performances without registering the deus ex machina that guides our behavior according to a pre-established plan. The final applause is so much sarcasm or belly laughter; only when the curtain falls completely do we grasp what has happened.
Ceferino Cambrón paraded haughtily down metro passageways, hawking his trashy goods, as if by fulfilling some archangelic initiative, he’d thrive in a tramp’s miserable guise. Charitable Trinitarian broth kept him alive, and the party catechism still nourished his spiritual appetite on the false creed of working-class equality. Poor Ceferino, he didn’t ever manage to see that the earth would never become the paradise for humanity he dreamed of — not even at the moment of death. I’d spelt it out to him clearly enough just before. “Hey, Ceferino, leave me in peace with the old girl, and don’t meddle in my affairs. If you hobble my business, you’ll be the one to suffer.” “Gregorio, you’ve no sense of dignity. You’re a little swine only interested in your own gain, and I swear you’ll never do that to the detriment of our ideals. I’ll take your life first with my own hands.” “You’re a fool, Cambrón, you’ve let yourself be duped by a fantasy, you believe in things you can’t see, you’ve wasted half your life on an illusory ideal and don’t even realize that all the old girl is doing is leeching off the marrow in your bones, that you and your ilk are only of use to her as a pretext for staying alive. You chose the wrong world, and you’ll die not understanding you’re in the way here. Clear off, carry on fantasizing elsewhere, and leave me in peace. I’ll say one last thing: don’t ever threaten me again, or you’ll regret it.”
Ceferino Cambrón continued scraping a livelihood from his ideals until the night he lost his life. He met a bad end, a bad end very like what bastards get, though, if the truth be told, it might have been worse. I had no choice but to ask Slim to get rid of him. He was about to ruin my plans by telling Faith Oxen about my spurious behavior, even though I now reckon it wouldn’t have changed my relationship with her one iota; on the contrary, she’d have been turned on by the idea of figuring large in a conspiracy. Sometimes I think that if Ceferino told anybody, it must have been Blond Juana. I never got round to asking her, and over the years I had opportunities to see her in different circumstances to those when her attitude toward me was one of hatred and violence to the point that whenever we coincided at an event, the only reason she didn’t kick me in the mouth was her fear of besmirching her shoe on my sticky blood. Poor Ceferino, his poor damned life, on the ground, blood pouring everywhere and nobody coming to help. I don’t deny that in another context and era, given his lean, willowy demeanor, he could have ended up heading some autonomous government body, the sort that come with a ready-made budget for their programs, but it wasn’t to be. As I’ve said, things don’t happen exactly as one wants but as they are ordained, and thirty-odd blows to the head, torso, and extremities well and truly did for him. “Take that, you piece of red shit, that will teach you; shout arriba España! Take that, you bastard, and stop fucking with us, shout viva Franco, arriba España, viva Cristo Rey!” He never kept back a peseta for himself. The little he earned selling his escapist garbage in metro passageways, he handed over to the party kitty. Other less inhibited comrades splashed out on lottery tickets and tasty midmorning breakfasts with big, greasy churros; that was the limit of it. He’d have been better off giving in and begging for One-Eyed, but, you know, that couldn’t have worked. His corpse was so bashed to pulp, you could see through it. The trashmen found the bits next morning by some containers and almost mistook them for leftover scraps; at that time of day people are really sleepy, and it’s hard to gauge what’s in the rubbish. They took nine hours to ID him, he was so mashed up. “Ceferino’s been beaten up, the fachas have beaten him to death!” Blondie shouted as she strode into the party locale. “Let’s get after them; kill ‘em all!” It was very tense, noisy, and uncertain; frightened and upset by the situation, I kept quiet and then suddenly realized I’d been the real cause of his death. “Fascist Murderers, Murderous Cops” is what they painted on walls the whole day long and well into the night, until a new day dawned, the sky turned blue, and, their desire for revenge poorly sated, they returned to their homes slightly less worse for wear; in the end it all came to nothing.
The following day, when I went to add the sourness of his death to the Trinitarians’ broth, Slim sat down next to me, put his arm round my shoulder, stared into my eyes, and rasped, “Dwarfy, do you believe in hell?”
I collected the bundles of banned books and dirty mags that were Ceferino’s stock-in-trade and, without giving them a glance, handed them over to one of the nuns to give out to the poor, all except for the one by Blas de Otero, the one where he was so fond of rediscovering himself. Rather than selling or giving them away, the nun burnt them with the coal for the boiler, creating a hotter flame than usual, which, like frustrated desire or lingering hunger, escaped with a sigh up the Mansion’s chimneys. Nevertheless, I still read those lines when I am feeling desperate—a generation with no other fate than to shore up the ruins—and I am reminded of Cambrón’s fate and don’t feel a smidgeon of sorrow.
What’s left at the end of a life? Very little, perhaps a small corner of one’s memory to recall the pleasurable provinces of the flesh visited in one’s youth, nostalgia for the tasty dishes enjoyed with gusto and digested at leisure in the uncertain shadows of the future, or the distant relish in one’s mouth of cigar smoke smoked in the languor left by desire. (The scent of tobacco mixed with genital odors creates an unparalleled mass of morose aromas. The end result bewitches and fascinates. After copulating, nothing beats lighting up a good cigar, playing with the smoke in one’s mouth, and exhaling the rings around the dampness of the other’s sex; the heady blast curls through the air, annihilates the will, and justifies existence — and how!) What’s left at the end of a life? The little things, the gestures, the details, the awareness that everything is preordained, even the universe’s final big bang.
Santiago Carrillo didn’t smoke cigars, he lit up cigarettes endlessly, one after another, as if daisy-chaining them. He once told me he couldn’t help himself, when I asked him about it while we were waiting together before a radio chat show where, in one of those weird twists of fate, we’d coincided as guests. We discussed everything under the sun: the onset of dumbing down, the fall of the Wall, the growth of fast food, and the hunger ravaging the planet. Someone defended the impelling need to fairly distribute agro-food over-production stocks, and the rational control of waste products and emissions as perhaps the only valid ways to guarantee the sustainable survival of the species. To have fun and be polemical, I argued over the mike for the thesis that international organizations should act as vehicles to provide countries in need with fast food. Then I played the demagogue and spoke of the need to expropriate the territory of governments who were incapable of ensuring the survival of their inhabitants, and the need to exploit the riches — whether natural or otherwise — that they possessed through sales to multinational financial corporations and companies, and that provoked a flood of telephone protests that blocked the station’s switchboard.