Toward the end, the old girl’s palate, like her blood, turned sticky and sugary, and she recklessly stuffed it with any cake, tart, tidbit, or chocolate her gums could mash. She made me tour the city’s cake shops searching for homemade sponge cakes, crystallized flaky pastries, and fondant chocolates. At the time, it was unusual to find that kind of sweet offering, and I often had to work miracles to find any, to the point of being forced to humiliate myself in certain exclusive establishments. When they saw me walk into their hoity-toity shops with polished, gleaming windows that made them look like anterooms to paradise, they’d invite me to leave, afraid I’d scare off their clientele, and I only managed to avoid such a fate by the crude resort — being at the end of my tether — of flashing the bundles of thousand-peseta bills with which I’d pay for their products. Faith Oxen repaid these offerings with treats for me, and if I’d brought anything with merengue, cream, or icing, she’d first anoint my naked skin with a drop for me to try, just in case it had gone off; she was kinky like that, the old hag.
On balmy spring evenings when the swifts were mewling, Faith Oxen would fall asleep listening to the world go round beyond her balcony window. She snored like a trooper, and the house was filled with such a fearsome din, the walls seemed about to collapse. Gazing at her like that, as if she were the living dead, I’d get distressed and feel an ineffable wave of anguish bordering on the supernatural. At such moments of hopeless despair, I made the most of her sleep to make a stealthy exit and head to La Copa de Herrera, where I hoped I might connect with the throbbing pulse of the petty criminal underworld. “Hey, dwarfy, just been doing it with the old girl? See if you set her up so I can suck her off for once. I’m tired of all this waiting about, and you look ever dreamier-eyed, you’re not in love by any chance?” Slim would guffaw and spit on the sawdust of La Copa’s floor, which was filthy damp and on its rachitic last legs.
Every system tends toward chaos, every human being toward sclerosis. I was growing old in Madrid, and, likewise, Madrid within me. What must happen to a man in life in order for him to fall into the grip of happiness — an unexpected rush of emotion, a whim fulfilled, a dream become reality? Not any amount of gold or whatever gives the world its shine would have sufficed to bring me the beauty I might once have dreamed of. My short skull protrudes, my arms are skinny, the bones supporting my legs are tiny, yet even so I’ve survived my hostile environment and today meet with praise, congratulations, and laurels. My position is enviable, but perhaps the fact I did nothing to achieve it renders the merit null and void and the unease I can now feel is what made my village childhood miserable, what distressed my adolescence in the circus, and made my youth listless in the agitated, transitional Madrid I’m now describing to you. Nothing made life worth living, and I found no raison d’être in the feverish life of the underworld; the days still went by one after another, to-day like yesterday, to-morrow like to-day, and always the same, as Gustavo Adolfo wrote. Every system tends toward chaos — political, economic, social, biological, whatever. Chaos rules, and that’s inevitable, because Providence wanted it that way. Every human being tends toward imbalance, sclerosis, and decrepitude. All that matters is to keep the imagination on fire, and maybe ascertain how one is going to fall apart, so as not to be duped by what fate has in store.
The fall of the Regime made life in the city harder. Those in power blamed the crisis on oil prices, the balance of payments, the foreign debt, even Satan’s hairy cock, but the truth is that deprivation exhibited its suppurating sores out in the street, while working-class unemployment undermined the most vulnerable homes. Given the situation, indigence ceased to be a profession and became a way of life, pariahs spread and multiplied over the soil of public parks, and the starving legion of those bereft of welfare threw itself on charitable institutions more blatantly and wantonly than ever, as if wanting to guarantee sustenance at the expense of any remnants of personal dignity. The Trinitarian broth was reduced to a shadow of itself; the dishwater they dispensed turned into a metaphor for hot soup. Where once there’d been real chickens, now there were only lumps of chicken concentrate. Times change people’s habits and even their way of eating. Cultural practices become standardized, and culinary idiosyncrasies, relegated to museums of anthropology. Hunger ushers in equality but predisposes people for disaster. Frugal diets preserve the organism, though everything has its limits. Vegetables create flatulence, meat accelerates the rotting of the digestive system, fish provokes emotional crises, and alcohol transfixes the brain to the point of drying out any intelligence. It is vital to ward off the inevitable erosion from what you ingest. If you want to survive, not merely my disaster but your very own, eat only boiled greens seasoned with a sprinkle of olive oil, drink only fresh spring water, eat loads of fruit, cleanse your intestines on whole-grain fiber, and show solidarity toward those who are starving on the planet. You’ll feel better, you’ll feel happier, you’ll feel cleaner, and, most likely, you’ll be prettier, although, in the end, that won’t help you any, either.