No merit accrues to me in what I’m recounting, take that as read, it’s simply the spinning mill of destiny. After a whole day spent between the sheets, with a clammy mouth and drowsy head, I strolled down the streets dotted with cheap fry-ups that lead to the Plaza del Chopito, in the heart of Marbella. I amused myself by looking at the knickknacks in the souvenir shops for penny-pinching tourists: flamenco-dancer dolls; garish postcards of girls on the beach, windswept hair, bare asses; inflatable mattresses; fuchsia thongs; and a pile of cheap trash. It was seven in the evening. I’d been invited to a cocktail party in the Nautical Club at eleven, one of those ineffable soirées where the vanity of the beautiful people is venerated amid champagne toasts and trays brimming with canapés. I had plenty of time and suddenly felt like going into a movie house where they were showing the then voguish film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a charming tale of intergalactic deformity. Why so? Yet again, the invisible hand of Providence was whimsically guiding my hesitant steps. I’ve sometimes even thought that Steven Spielberg only filmed that story so I alone could watch it. Seeing that film, I was blessed by a revelation that in recent years has guided my steps along the path of plenty. Employing the mechanisms of the world for one’s own ends is an attractive concept that in no way contradicts the rigors of the established order. At the very least, conjuring up the idea affords pleasure, and just as I said that your sudden appearance in my life augurs the end point of my wanderings, I’ll also underline the benefit of the supernatural side to my sitting in that seat snowed under with popcorn, blinded by the revelation of a stunning idea that would grant me economic good health: the home-delivery pizza.
On the screen, some American children were playing a board game in a very homely kitchen scene. They were talking, joking, and airing their childish differences. Outside it was nighttime, and a UFO had just taken off, abandoning an extraterrestrial babe on the planet. Suddenly one of the kids expressed the bright idea of calling for a pizza, and they all heartily went for it. “Bring us a Papa Oom Mow Mow,” they said, and very shortly, the Papa Oom Mow Mow pizza was delivered to their door. Couldn’t I perhaps do likewise, and take pizzas to people’s doors on the basis of a telephone call?
The four seasons is the pizza that synthesizes above all others the four ages of man, from conception in the uterus to immersion in the grave; the four seasons is by far the best pizza representation of man’s wanderings across this world, soft as a cheese melt, slippery as a mushroom coulis. We devour the cycle of life in its circumference, as if communing with our own anguish. And it was a vein that had yet to be mined.
After eating dinner, I hardly care how things might end. People generally run shy from any mention of funeral matters and prefer to waste their time shutting the sphincters of transcendence rather than striving to investigate what might very well be awaiting them, hence the sidelining of poetry. It’s at such extreme moments that humanity plumbs its innermost depths and prays, and, if passionate enough, it might even get lucky and see an extraterrestrial being. E.T. the extraterrestrial, though fictitious, was a repulsive character, deformed in every way, his unsightly proportions greased in fecal hues — the crowning glory to a disgusting sight. Nonetheless, children loved him, and parents bought thousands of E.T. dolls that had been mass-marketed. His secret wasn’t novelty, or sentiment, but the mental level of the society amid which he landed. In exchange, the film recorded out-of-this-world profits. It’s a fallacy to state that people shouldn’t envy wealth, even if fraud or crime are involved. Wealth accumulation is the coat of arms that sets human beings apart from all other zoological species. It ushers them into a state worthy of flattery, adulation, honors, and all kinds of favorable treatment. Wealth is a tool Providence has in its gift to present to whoever it chooses. After my youthful years swallowing eggs to survive, after rocky times begging, and shameful years spent in petty crime and fraud, I found myself to be a privileged plutocrat, without ever going out of my way to become one, and that made me suspect something supernatural ruled my steps; in the course of time, I confirmed that, when the specter of Faith Oxen did herself proud by appearing to me in a London hotel.
Life as a businessman absorbed me in mercantile spheres of life, and for over a decade I endeavored to raise the empire that has brought me renown. I acquired the lease on a downat-heel, antiquated bakery on the outskirts of Marbella and transformed it into my alchemist’s bubbling crucible. I pulled down partitions, demolished walls, installed lighting visible from the coastline, contracted a number of employees to stir dough with poles, and imported a couple of auto-ignition Murdoch & Panelli ovens from the United States to cook the products of their sweat. The first premises of the Europizza chain had just been born. Everything else came swimmingly. It all happened very quickly: limitless amounts of money spent on nights when vulvas sprouted, my reputation as a dwarf growing by virtue of my social success, and the splendid profits from my investment in pizzas. Overnight, I became a celebrity in the catering trade, was inundated with commercial opportunities, riding high and ringing up the zeros. Everyone was vying to contact me, to suggest new projects and count on my financial support. The same guys who in other circumstances would have spat in my face now deferentially shook my hand, and I extracted a slice of profit from every squeeze. Faith Oxen would have enjoyed the rich pickings I gained from the money I’d thieved from her; she’d have had a nasty turn in the grave seeing me so rampant. I later discovered she had, because she returned from the dead to disturb my life with her pitying words. You don’t know this yet, but people go hungry in the next world, and it’s a hunger devoid of hope that nothing can ever satisfy.