I’ve known many bastards in my lifetime and wished a good end on the lot. They reaped what was coming; some had it soft, others, rough, it depends. Esteruelas was blown to bits, and his belches and farts evaporated in unison, a veritable toll of doom. I knew he always knew that handsome Bustamante didn’t kill Frank Culá, but he didn’t give a toss who did; his only duty was to shut a case down as quickly as he could and carry on with life, never very clear as to why. Violent deaths sometimes provoke pity. However, sometimes violent, unjust deaths arouse more, and nonsensical or meaningless ones that suddenly spread disarray and panic even more so, if that’s possible. They lived by plotting the deaths of others and for that reason probably didn’t worry about their own, and that was to their advantage.
Now I feel myself under your own close scrutiny, I’ve been struck by a premonition of a darkness that’s been distressing me ever since I became conscious of my tragedy. I have seen my longings, my feelings, my memories reflected one by one in your eyes and felt afraid of myself. Now I understand everything. I told psychiatrists of a bad dream I had, one that appeared to me in London when I visited my son Edén. I fooled myself into thinking it had been the fruit of the emotion I experienced on the day, that the end wasn’t going to come so soon or in the dreadful way heralded, but here you are in this present moment that draws us together, listening to me rehearse my past, your very presence proving just how little time is left.
Dog dead, rabies sorted. To her eternal shame, Sister Marta identified the corpse by the protuberant mole of a birthmark at the point where his testicles joined, or so they claimed. The attack was splashed over all the front pages, and three days after the attack on the Cafeteria California, the Far Right, which was already bleeding to death, could do nothing to stymy the solemn ceremony held in the Cortes at which the king of Spain inaugurated the first legislature of the constitutional parliament. Rabies sorted, as I said, because without Slim’s support, the chains binding me to the Trinitarians’ broth were unlocked forever. In any case, it would have been madness to stay on any longer in a place where so many bore grudges against me. I cleared off with the sister who’d had carnal dealings with One-Eyed. She left her habits, which had been of no use to her, except perhaps to mop up the semen Slim liked to spurt over her, and I left another five years of my life impaled on the walls of that ineffable charitable institution. I was alone again, with nowhere in particular to go, but this time, unlike previously, the reins of my destiny were gripped by a voluptuous hankering after prosperity. As feral as a dog without a master, roaming the streets and sniffing trash bins, gnawing at any life left on bones it’s randomly thrown, going this way or that, aimlessly, with no sense it might last another season more, baying impotently at the moon, I found myself out on a limb, scarcely imagining it was precisely in such a forlorn state that I was finally predestined to make it.
I sought shelter in Faith’s house, and she, generous within the bounds of her tyrannical old age, let me sleep on a canvas mattress on her kitchen floor in exchange for my total slavery. I meekly accepted her offer. I woke up early, and after washing my sleep away with a couple of splashes of water, I’d go to the Maravillas market and do her shopping. I begged for alms, simply because I’d become so adept, or filched someone’s billfold to buy the food so I could cook the items the old girl liked. I never came away without a bar of fondant chocolate or a tray of cakes to sweeten the corpuscles of her blood. I never put them out but hid them away so she’d properly appreciate them. She wolfed them down, ever more removed from reality, more volatile, more outrageous, and closer to the grave. It wasn’t even worth strangling her. The exact words of Blas de Otero seemed to bring their two bits of gravel to that house’s reinforced concrete: Desolation and vertigo combine. We feel we’re going to fall, that they’re drowning us from the inside. We seem alone, and the shadow on the wall isn’t ours, is a shadow that doesn’t know, that cannot remember whose it is. Desolation and vertigo beat in our chest, wriggle away like a fish, our blood thins, we feel our feet give way. And the more I read those lines, the more the atmosphere in which Faith was rotting day by day seemed to reek of the grave.
I survived in that putrid way for a few months more, months when barely anything happened in my life that I’ve not already described to you. I was bound to that house and in its deep silences witnessed the decrepitude and decline of Faith Oxen. I fornicated with her to flatter her vanity, I fed her with my own hands and gave her succor in her solitude with the poisoned sting of my company. She mistreated me in word and deed, simply because she was aware that she depended on me, and in return I brought her lips the sugar of death. “You are my dog, Gregori, and you have to beat a dog so it will obey. You can’t hoodwink me, you dog. I know you like to watch the way I’m dying, and that’s why you don’t scarper, because of that and the marrow you’ll get from me when you chew on my bones. Do you think I don’t notice what you’re after? Come here and give my weary twat a lick,” and I barked loudly, playing up to her words, vamping my desires in a grisly celebration of the absolute truth of her spiel. Outside, the world was endlessly churning, perhaps in quite another way, one I’d never perceived before, fresh and creamy, huge and juicy, and beautiful malgré tout, when one day somebody knocked on the door.
A sleety rain was falling, coating the city pavements in sticky, slippery Christmas gunge. It was Christmas Eve, at that in-between hour when people switch on electric cookers in their domestic heartlands to roast the dinner, that twilight hour of metallic shadows when trousseau tablecloths depart locked chests to spread an eternal smell of mothballs across languid drawing rooms, that tranquil Eve stalked by a prickly silence when hearts suffer such nostalgia. I was about to boil the old girl a line-fished hake to ensure a decent lay dinner, when the doorbell suddenly rang. Faith Oxen had been resting awhile with a bad headache. These headaches attested to the brittleness of her memory and often prostrated her on the black hole of her bed. In the kitchen, on an Aiwa transistor, the rim of its loudspeaker clogged with grease, the king of Spain’s nasal voice was beginning to drone his traditional Christmas message: “The past twelve months, on the contrary, have witnessed the efforts made by all to accede to the levels of freedom and responsibility that the historical conjuncture demanded. On the matter of which, not too long ago, when I made a public evaluation of the culminating moments of the constitutional process, I expressed the opinion that the Spanish people, in an act of supreme collective freedom. .” “Gregori, somebody’s knocking on the door. Go and see who it is, and switch off that radio; all that speechifying is doing my head in, I can’t stand it!” the old girl shouted from the depths of her dark cavern. I threw the rings of the onion I was uncoiling into the boiling water, jumped down from the bench where I was forced to stand to reach the hob, and went to open up. There stood Blond Juana on the doorstep, leaning her right shoulder on one of the jambs, eyes backstitched by a thread of hashish dilating her pupils, and she stared at me, I’m not sure whether in repulsion or astonishment. “What are you doing here, dwarfy?” she enquired matter-of-factly. “Making the old girl’s supper,” I retorted. Caulked in sweat, the keel of her body furiously fired my desire, and slaver foamed down my tongue as I told her about the job I’d acquired attending to the old girl at all hours, accompanying her solitude and enlivening her tedium. “You’re a scavenger,” she responded. “You’re hoping to get something out of her.” I ignored her insult and was in no mood to argue in those circumstances. She said she’d come to bid farewell to the old crock, and I ushered her toward the drawing room. It’s strange, but just like the chauffeur in Benalmádena, she, too, reeked of boiled fish, of stagnant seawater, and from way off. Before I’d invited her to, she’d entered the drawing room and settled down on a corner of the sofa, shamelessly crossing her legs. They were packed into thick, faded lilac leotards, and as she went to sit down, she deliberately gave me an eyeful of the tasty sponge cake of her thighs. Or at least I thought she did.