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If I’d felt like it that day, I might have confessed to Carrillo that I’d participated in the plot cooked up at the end of 1976 that led to his arrest on December 22, seven days after the voice of the people backed with a massive yes vote the referendum for political reform in which it had been summoned to participate. I might have spelt out how it happened, chapter and verse, how, in the old girl’s apartment, I’d found out when and where he was to put in an appearance and hold a clandestine press conference to announce his party’s conciliatory positions, and that I rushed to the Interior Ministry to betray him. I might have told him about One-Eyed Slim, Inspector Esteruelas, and the snooping that went on at the time in Madrid, but Providence decided it didn’t want me to. I might have let on about my sickly relationship with Faith, the way I discovered he was round and about in the Spanish capital sporting a wig, but he’d have stared at me, not really believing a word, in that sardonic manner that comes with maturity, and no doubt he’d have discounted the importance of my betrayal by declaring that half Madrid knew what he was up to, and that a return to normality for the Communist Party, and, likewise, for himself, was the only possible outcome Spanish history would have tolerated.

We shook hands when we said goodbye. I don’t know if he liked what I said, or not. He was probably struck by the fact that such extremely free-market opinions about international relations should come from the mouth of a dwarf. I opted to tell him nothing about what I knew about the past; at the end of the day, amnesia was one of the cornerstones of national reconciliation. Besides, had I done so, I’m sure he’d have asked me what I’d earned from my squealing, and I’d then have confronted the moral dilemma of whether or not to answer a night out with whores, which wasn’t totally untrue, given that One-Eyed turned up that day with a bunch of the pricey sort.

Because of Slim’s daily exposure to the elements, a bout of pneumonia that wasn’t properly treated penetrated his skin and bones, leaving his fingers limp, his mind twisted, and his pick-pocketing skills laid to waste, which meant his professional activities rather bit the dust. Already undermined by the quantity of ex-jailbirds now on the scene, his prestige hit rock bottom. Times called for a change of tactics, and the tricks that had always worked in the day-to-day flow were now consigned to the museum of has-beens, whilst delinquents and petty criminals sought fresh dubious practices. Slim finally had to resort to snooping for the police, a line that would die a death with the advent of democracy. The subterranean world of the opposition was starting to spring from the silt where it had been sidelined; over forty peaceful years, it had hawked its civil-war baggage through the network of sewers and other, possibly less pestilent, underground channels. Some of his perennial payers continued to pass on to Slim the tithe he collected for permitting them to beg in hallowed places or thieve in crowded spots, whether at bull fights or soccer matches, but they did so more out of tradition than respect and didn’t realize there was no longer any reason to do so. The tenor of the era, with its networks of well-organized international mafias without cultural affiliations, beliefs, or eccentricities that could bring to the pursuit of their activities a touch of honor or a spot of gentlemanly courtesy, was all about chasing a fast buck. That Madrid of bygone days, a uniform city with a single voice, where a foreigner would always stick out, was gradually filling up on different races, and overnight, the murky cosmopolitan style of the business they plied became what people smoked and injected.

“Blacks would be the last straw, dwarfy, I told you so some time ago,” Slim grumbled at the start of 1978, still lolling back and languidly savoring firewater in the backrooms of La Copa de Herrera. “Fucking blacks, fucking our daughters and tainting our bloodlines,” and Señor Antonio, oblivious to the maelstrom that would very soon convert his own establishment into a cheerful hamburger outlet, poured out at most a cold Coca-Cola to whoever ordered one, accompanied, naturally, by a small dish of roasted chickpeas or lupin beans.

In the mornings, I’d got into the habit of taking Faith Oxen a basket with the day’s purchases — bread, fresh milk, meat, fish, cold sausage, and pastries — filling her pantry with my efforts in return for her caresses and crumbs. She had a crazy sweet tooth and shed tears galore when she poked the tip of her tongue into Chantilly cream or chewed one of the nuns’ cakes. I left my cot in the Trinitarians’ well before the dawn so I could beg for alms at the early morning masses at San Ginés and las Calatravas before I went shopping. With the money I got, I bought the supplies that I then charged up to Faith, in an endless flow of bills unpaid on the excuse that they corresponded to the kind of victuals I was actually taking her: always the best, naturally.

I wasn’t Divine Providence. I was no Saint Francis of Assisi disguised as a dwarf. I did everything out of self-interest, to extract from the old girl the slice of loot she no doubt kept in some hidden spot on her person, to make the most of what her companionship might bring me in the mid-term, which was what happened, though I was forced to put up with a lot from her, certainly much more than what any human being should have to stoop to.

She ordered me to put the fruit on a porcelain tray on a sideboard, so it would perfume the house and prettify the air with its jolly, jesting colors — apple green, mandarin orange, strawberry pink, and peach flesh; though by this time, fruit was straight from cold storage, quickly rotted, and was soon crawling with flies and larvae — a real allegory to putrefaction. “Gregori, make me a cup of coffee and bring it to my bedroom with a croissant and an aspirin,” she’d shout when she heard me come in. “Have you bought the cakes I ordered?” And Gregori obediently brought to her bed the breakfast she longed for, in the hope that the neurosis powering her headaches would prostrate her for the day and give me carte blanche to pilfer at my pleasure.

The old girl’s bedroom stank of dirty clothes and leather parchment. I opened the shutters on purpose, and the polluted Madrid sunlight flooded in through the window and exposed to my eyes the stiff nightdress clinging to the wizened fruit of what were once her charms. My sympathetic smile brought solace to her decrepit old age, and, in exchange, she generously regaled me with words bathed in bad breath and with that look of somebody fresh from the cesspit she always wore when she got up. It was then most of all that I’d recall the moments in Doris’s caravan when I started reading the magnificent verse from Federico’s book that she, possibly in honor of an extraordinary lay, had decided to give to Gurruchaga, endorsed with her grateful dedication. I imagined him quickly and coarsely mapping her flesh with his tongue, and the hieratic, proud Faith letting herself give pleasure, if only out of a capricious wish to feel dominated for a few seconds. “I have never loved a man,” she selfishly confessed, “though they’d come to blows over me, and more than one went crazy,” and, waxing nostalgic, she’d slip down her nightdress until it was completely off. “Look at me, am I still desirable?” she’d ask, rubbing her jaded fingertips on the wrinkled parchment of her nipples. “Come here and lick them, tell me what they taste of,” and, like a doltish donkey, I lay on the sheets and cooled her body with my saliva, behind and front, up and down, lingering with insane restraint until my phallus was on fire, burning for immediate release, then I’d use a hidden hump on her skeleton to come all over her. Old flesh brings to mind the antediluvian taste of tallow, makes the mouth sticky, and benumbs the palate. When I’d spent my desire on her, puking was the only way I could later unburden my conscience. By entering her flesh, I brought solace to her old bones, and she’d caress me warmly and let herself be served by my well-endowed size. As the months went by, my close scrutiny and charitable scrotum sank us into symbiosis. As the reform process gathered momentum on track to the creation of a lasting constitution and every sort of political tendency became as legal as another, her influence on party activists waned to the point of extinction. Now almost nobody counted on her to tease out strategies or reach agreements on common interests; she was only called upon when a figurehead was needed at some jamboree to vamp up the symbolism on behalf of the festive politics of the day. If it hadn’t been for a bunch of youngsters led by Blondie who were swimming against the tide, emphatically pressing for a Nechayevian line, by virtue of which they visited her in order to share their legitimate aspirations as street-fighters, guerrilleros on behalf of the dictatorship of the proletariat, she’d have been relegated to sepia photographs, by far the best tint for the antechamber to oblivion. The occasional rookie journalist, one of those who were all for recovering unofficial historical memory, also dropped by from time to time and recorded conversations on a tape recorder, asking her about the behavior of the famous deceased comrades with who she’d shared communion in the faith. One in particular said he was called Señor Cherry or Señor Tree, or something of the sort, and he simply snooped obsessively into her culinary memories, as if the only interesting things to find out about the past were what Durruti had for breakfast or Stalin for afternoon tea; I wonder whatever became of that lad. Faith was still alive but was already imbued with the spectral dimension of a mausoleum.