The teacher was a fuddy-duddy who was proud of the Latin he’d memorized in his youth and now, on the last straight of his career, grimly hissed at his pupils. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori sed omnia vulnerant postuma necat, as Brutus said when he enacted his parricide, meaning, in plain language, that penitence always accompanies sin,” and he’d slaver over his witless wit. Then, at home, he purged his aches and pains by revisiting the glories of Hernán Cortés as recounted by Bernal Díaz del Castillo or wallowing in the historical melodramas penned by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch.
I thieved a book from the school, the Rhymes by Gustavo Adolfo. The teacher didn’t notice then, but he did once catch me reading it behind the pissing wall. It was evident that he’d gone out to nose around the piss after ordering his pupils to copy out five hundred times José Antonio enlightened the fatherland with his wisdom and sowed the dawn of Spain with his blood. “Who the hell taught you to read? Let me have a look; this isn’t your book, you’ve stolen it. You’re a thief as well as a freak,” he rasped angrily, no doubt because our unexpected encounter had highlighted his own perversions. “People who read poetry aren’t real men. Besides, those who read Bécquer tempt those who are with love’s silly notions. You never will be a man, that’s patently obvious, but at least have an animal’s dignity and don’t aspire to feelings that are inappropriate to your nature.” I didn’t understand what he meant. I simply snatched my book from his hands and ran off. Poor fellow. He met a bad end, the end that awaits all those men who like to wallow in their loneliness, a cold and miserable death that dragged out over two winters.
I’ve always liked to escape from people, to shelter out of the way, to gaze at whatever without being seen, and darn the gaping holes in the cloth of reality with the eager thread of my thoughts. Reading was one way, but not the only one; fasting and masturbation also brought their grain of wisdom. Ninety years ago, Gustavo Adolfo had puked the aesthetics of melancholy all over his Rhymes. Now I picked up the baton and replaced him in the amorous anxiety stakes with my utopian adoration of little Margarita. I would seek out a pigsty, a stable, a dung heap, and in its darkest corner sink into a mire of sighs and self-pity, a smooth-cheeked innocent, unaware that it was, in fact, animal excrement. Over your breast you bow a brow so melancholy, to me you’re like a snapped Madonna lily. Gradually, quite unawares, I was inching up the slippery steps that, irrevocably, sluice into the bewilderment of love. With each poem I read, little Margarita Ceballos’s mother-of-pearl face increasingly seemed to belong to the deity of bliss, the one whose kisses could redeem me from my original defects. I wasn’t any less despicable than I am now, but I was trying to squeeze heaven dry with that blessed meekness that brings submission to the weak and destiny to fools; that was the stuff my dreams were made of. Experience is the great saboteur, time the spoiler, and at the end of the road, there’s only that sediment of unease that settles after the orgasm with which Providence conceives us. I was sired by one bastard of a tramp who stopped at El Paquito’s to relieve three things at once: his bladder, his belly, and his knob; then he disappeared whence he came, on his way to the east coast, to load boxes of fish that finished up as mildewed merchandise in Madrid.
Sergeant Ceballos used to say my mother was a bitch in heat who’d let herself be licked clean for a plate of fly-ridden meat. Sergeant Ceballos was one of those bastards in uniform, though it didn’t stop him from meeting a bad end. The thick, wine-soaked moustache that bristled threateningly from his nostrils couldn’t save him when his time came, what’s more, it contributed to his suffering, because the three gypsy grasshoppers who did him to death used them to string him up from the fruit tree where he atoned for his sins, a maverick apple tree hidden in the mayor’s pear orchard; and then people reckon gypsies don’t have bright ideas. The grocer, whose concubine was Blondie, experienced a similar contretemps years later that taught him a lesson for leaking positions to the Sandinista army. Sergeant Ceballos was knifed simply because he brought it upon himself. If he hadn’t raced after them in their orgy of thievery in the orchard, surely nothing untoward would have happened, but he had to swagger in his fine uniform and take two potshots at the gypsies. He must have been plastered on plonk, otherwise he’d never have dared challenge them. They held nice masses for him, full of candles and Madonna lilies, though they did nothing to resurrect him, and little Margarita became an orphan, juicy and ripe like the mayor’s pears, which her father gave his life to save. They’d loaded up three quarters of the cart when tragedy struck. It was nighttime, the stars were scintillating on the lime deposits in and around the river, and the blades of their knives were exhilarated by that explosion of light. He shot twice. It’s very likely he pulled the trigger four times, but the men in the village said only two actually fired. The gypsies weren’t frightened; on the contrary, they went for him, pummeled the back of his neck, punched him in the stomach, buckled him over, threw him to the ground, and sunk their knives into his guts, then strung him up, still alive, by his moustache from the maverick apple tree that happened to be at hand. That was their bright idea. They could have bashed his skull in or ruthlessly cut through his jugular, but things being what they are and not what we might like them to be, the gypsies strung Sergeant Ceballos up one silvery night after entertaining him with a display of knives, as if they’d just escaped from a poem by Federico. His cheeks turned to rigor mortis leather; the next morning they glistened with hoar frost. The following week the gypsy grasshoppers were caught trying to cross the border into Portugal and were all garroted, first because it was the current fashion and second because that was the judges’ sentence, but by the time they meted out their punishment, Sergeant Ceballos lay half-rotten in the village cemetery, the welcoming little cemetery by the orchard where my brother was heading to pick tomatoes the day the train rolled him over.
Previously, priests were the only ones privy to the details of the stories their parishioners were so good as to tell them in the secrecy of the confessional. When they’d heard them, they imposed some form of penitence and absolved them with a two-fingered gesture. Today, nobody listens. I only had to see you to realize that you’d come to carry out the designs of Providence, that you were here to terminate my life. Providence has its cruel side, and facilitating my meeting with the European commissioner tonight is redolent with unforgiveable sarcasm. These are strange times, and not even you can escape the turmoil, peculiar times when everyone is a prophet in his own land. Sergeant Ceballos, with his dark-purple moustache, his veteran’s honor and cheap swagger, could never have adapted to them. It was just as well he died when he did. By the time they found him that morning, one of the knots stringing him up by his moustache had worked loose and his corpse was swinging with a macabre tick-tock. Magpies, those birds of ill omen, were croaking on his shoulder, and now and then they stuck their beaks into his ear-holes to savor the wax. Smaller beasties and native insects skated over the pool of frozen blood on his shadow. The men from the village scared them off with their cries. “They’ve hung the sergeant by his moustache, they’ve hung the sergeant by his moustache, his belly is slit and one eye is dangling down his cheek!” He was a fresh corpse that swaggered no more. I ran over to have a look. They didn’t let the boys get close, but they weren’t that worried about me. Naturally, swaying on one end of his moustache, his guts hanging out, it hardly seemed possible that not so long ago he’d taught me a lesson that had cracked my skull and ravaged my soul.