I took away the hand she was gripping so tight; at the cost of a nasty scratch, I prized myself free. I went over to the wardrobe, and, replaying in my memory the sounds of the safe’s combination that I’d registered so often behind the wall, I opened it effortlessly. Inside, pearls and rings shared a shelf with watches and the bundles of bills that I’d imagined. I took out the contents, slipped on necklaces, put rings on my fingers, and spread the rest of the jewels on Faith Oxen’s deathbed, so cool and casual, enjoying the spectacle of her gaze that was disappearing inexorably into nothingness. She expired in under ten minutes. Before doing so, she regained some of her waning strength, and was kind enough to grace me with the death rattle of a promise: “Your time will come, dwarfy”. Then her hand flopped, her eyelids drooped, her nostrils closed, and it was over.
I stayed quiet for a moment, contemplating her corpse, not particularly wanting to surrender to the absurdity of the spectacle. I was absorbed by the coldness of the scene, engrossed by the heap of flesh being emptied of life before my very eyes, until gases erupted from the dead woman’s mouth and hit me flush in the face. Then the penny dropped: if a world beyond existed, it, too, must be an abject place.
FIVE
Time passes at a dizzy rate, and we don’t notice it eroding our expectations in the process. Fashions change, thinking diverges, and alliances break up and re-form behind the same scenes, ever marked by the movable feast of progress. The past recedes, the future looms, and nothing we represent endures. Look at me if you want proof; even I wonder at the way I have risen to the top — awash in an ocean of cash, treated obsequiously, buoyant in business, cossetted by life to the point of caressing immortality. Time flies, but in time kills.
The years of hunger are now distant memories, like the horrible cruelty I suffered in childhood, the hardships experienced in the Stéfano circus, the scavenging in a Madrid riding high on freedom. Who then would ever have believed I’d achieve what surrounds me now, the luxury, power, social standing, and public recognition?
For Ceferino Cambrón the meaning of life was forged in an impossible struggle for dignity. Gurruchaga reacted to life as a simple matter of survival. Conversely, pudgy Di Battista lived to drink, life being a bottle to swig until it was emptied. And what’s life been for me apart from rambling memories and confused emotions? I feel it is all fantasy, a mere game, that I’ve been a puppet whose strings were brusquely pulled by Providence, a plaything in its hands. Can it be true that it’s all a fraud — my name, my consciousness, my past? Can it be true its only purpose was to entertain you for a while, a while when my story achieved its one real dimension?
Philosophy is wrong when it tries to find meaning in human life. Philosophers only exist to get it wrong. Hobbes was wrong, though not because he was English or a liberal. He was wrong, though not like that pigeon in the poem which was so ingenuous it went soft in the head. Man wasn’t a wolf to other men, but a market. “Man is a market to other men,” Hobbes would have declared had he witnessed this era of ours. The pigeon is a trite creature of poetic convention; it would, of course, be much more interesting to use the image of a vulture or a bone crusher, birds of prey, to construct metaphors for high-flying humanity. The market. This is the calling that justifies man’s presence in the world: the market as the single creed, profit as the supreme raison d’être. The market, I tell you. The market now stripped of pigeons and festering with hungry wolves. The market where dwarves jump and fight to consecrate their growth points.
I know you have come to be entertained by the spectacle of my death, if death is the word for what you’ve prepared as my end. My own story, the memories that weave the patchwork of my identity, my experiences, my most vital, least embittered hours, my emotions have been served up to you shamelessly, brazenly, for your amusement and delight. I am born again in your eyes, through you I endure and perhaps exemplify the paradoxes of the species, even the most terrible of all, an end that is a rendezvous with nothingness. Look at me. I’m still the fairground freak mercilessly displayed inside a circus tent, surviving on belly laughs. I can never escape myself. That is my sentence: to dance over an open grave above the slippery slope of the void. Gurruchaga didn’t do transcendence but very wisely linked survival to excrement, even to the very last moment of death. He taught me to learn from my sense of smell. “Fear smells, so does anxiety,” he’d say, “don’t look into men’s faces, first smell what they are about.” You smell of nothing, not even of a drop of sweat. It’s as if you don’t exist, as if your presence were fake, as if you weren’t there observing me, hanging on my every word. No matter. Your smell would never have changed the course of events.
Life became kinder after the death of Faith Oxen. I went off for a spot of sun, and success fed me the freshly baked bread of well-being. First I speculated on real estate; I bought, I sold, and I pocketed, though I soon switched to the hotel trade. There, Providence raised my stakes in life with an offering of fruit that went rotten before it was tasted. Anonymous messages followed, voices inside my head, doubts, anguished words, a string of random events, and finally now you’re here to round off the disaster.
In other circumstances I’d have been happy to thank you for the interest you showed, by allowing you to share in all that is beautiful around me, but I’m afraid that’s a caprice that can never be realized. Man isn’t what he thinks, what he says, or even the projects he undertakes. Man is what he consumes.
In the advertising campaign we were planning to unleash on the market next month, we were going to use different notions extracted from various philosophical concepts to spotlight the attractiveness of my products: “You pizza, therefore you are. You are yourself and your pizzas. To pizza or not to pizza, that is the question. Nothing pizza-ish is alien to me,” and so on.