I still find it very odd that at the gala dinner organized by a charitable foundation they should serve cocks’ combs in batter, and even odder, if that’s possible, that the whole evening, someone should be recommending fellow diners an anti-hemorrhoid cream. As you can imagine, affinity between guests in terms of protocol is ultimately decided by those whose job it is to orchestrate the ceremonials, and it’s always a tricky business deciding where to place a dwarf. Besides, the organizers weren’t expecting me (I’d not confirmed I’d go), and they’d had to find me a niche at top speed and under pressure. In the end, I was parked next to the commissioner and across the table from the mayor, thus in a place where I was equidistant from the diplomats. I reckoned it was a decent spot. The photographers thought so, too.
I should add that I’m not trying to suggest I make a habit of rushing to the tables of this country’s pillars of public life, though I am often duty-bound to respectfully accept the invitations sent to me by the most diverse entities. People generally continue to believe that nobody at this type of event talks about issues that are vital for the common good, and though that’s true enough, it’s even truer that at the end of the day what they do air is the dirty linen of those present and absent. On such occasions, wine is drunk from brittle glasses that enhance its bouquet, and people chew excellent food while paying close attention to subtle shades of flavor, but in the accompanying chitchat, it’s the gossip that’s prized: personal grudges and bodily malfunctions. Tonight Commissioner Belinda Dixon decided either to provoke or defer to me by revealing the cure she’d been using for her intimate hygiene problems. She didn’t try the cocks’ combs, for moral reasons, she alleged, yet she had no compunction when coming on to me repeatedly in the course of the evening. I acted politely and kept trying to stop her rehearsing out loud the details of how to apply the pomade. Some women’s libidos make their brains simmer most strangely, and they’d happily lose a limb for a night between the sheets with whoever takes their fancy. She left me no alternative than to try to dissuade her by talking about a different kind of scatology, though she didn’t desist, and I had to join in her game. Basically, a uterine rage of the kind suffered by Ms. Dixon either points to emotional deprivation or is evidence of Providence’s intervention in the day-to-day of life, which doesn’t dampen my libido at all; on the contrary, it stimulates it. Besides, I’ve come from the mire and have learned to keep up appearances. Cynicism is a beautiful creature, a way of relating to people that finds its most majestic manifestation in contempt. It’s an exhilarating activity, and to acknowledge that is bliss. The state in which one anticipates darkness is similar to the perception of lucidity; opposites rub their opposite sides, and that’s why pleasure only gives way to restlessness. Poetry is an instrument of transcendence, a system of signs through which men construct their intuitions of the supernatural. I decided to speak about all that during the dinner, but the commissioner hardly let me get a word in edgewise, she was so busy pestering me with the ins and outs of her anal bulbs. The fact is we formed a pairing as extreme as it was eccentric, as admirable as it was divergent; perhaps that explains why we were the center of attention that night. Everybody was watching us suspiciously; it was obvious from the watery glint in people’s eyes. Cocks’ combs don’t crackle when chewed; the cartilage comes apart in the mouth like communion wafers. A pizza made with cocks’ combs might be very original, but it wouldn’t appeal to the mass market. Man is a market to other men, a market ruled by the blind hand of fate. On a piece of paper where I’d hastily scrawled during the desserts, I jotted down my address for the commissioner in a rounded hand that replicated the circumferences of her breasts; she’s an exuberant woman, but her skin looks sad, like a woman who cries every night when she gets into bed. She assured me she would immediately dispatch a previous engagement and then rush to my place to give me a private viewing of the miraculous results of the pomade. And here I am, still waiting.
Something unexpected happened before I got home. My chauffeur was chatting to the valet by the restaurant entrance. They were leaning against the trunk of a magnolia and smoking. It was cold, and hot air melded into the smoke. Their body sizes were different. My chauffeur isn’t exactly small, but the other guy was an example of a body that seemed simply huge by his side. He was wearing a peaked hat, as if trying to invest himself with an authoritarian style that was past its shelf life or had been ill served by history. When that guy saw me walk out, he stood and stared quite rudely, then threw himself upon me with open arms as if he’d had an attack of cramp, smiling limply, a smile I immediately recognized—“Goyito, Goyito, it can’t possibly be.” It was Juan Culí, or his specter returning from the shadows of the past disguised as a scarecrow, with a whistle and bargain-counter uniform that betrayed his precarious lifestyle. “Goyito, for God’s sake, it is you, let me give you a hug.” Standing in the background, my chauffeur was astonished by this peculiar encounter. I extricated myself as best I could from Juan Culí’s embrace. “Don’t lick me, please, can’t you see you’re slavering all over me?” I pleaded, knocking drops of his saliva off my suit. “I can’t believe it, Goyito,” he went on, quite beside himself, “you look really great, you even look like a VIP. Don’t tell me you were inside with all those big names,” and he waved the palm of his hand in the direction of the restaurant. “You were always special; I knew that from the very first day you worked with us. Do you remember? You don’t know how much I miss the good times we had in the circus.”
Juan Culí continued graphically recalling the past, while I, given the situation, had no choice but to stand and listen. Could I have possibly experienced all that, had we really shared freezing nights in the towns of Spain, the fetid breath of wild animals, the relief their panting brought when we were out of sorts, the modest meals by moonlight, or the despair on the road when the silt of love sometimes bore fruit?
The world is in itself an unnerving spectacle where one performance follows another. Enjoyment comes with a price that’s almost always high. I felt no sympathy toward Juan Culí. I could have rescued him from wretched poverty, but I didn’t. I could have made him a lucky man, he could have been fired by love of the flesh if that was what he craved, all that and much more one word from my lips could have granted him, but they didn’t. Sentiment doesn’t change the direction of fate. I told him I was in a hurry, we could meet up some other time; I got into the car. He opened the door servilely, drooping his eyes in farewell. Then I remembered pudgy Di Battista and that morning when I splattered him on the floor of his trailer, giving him a whiff of the disaster that would be his eventual demise. “What happened to Pudgy?” I asked before he shut the car door. At that point the commissioner left the restaurant on the arm of a bodyguard. She gestured to me, clenching the fingers of her left hand as if wanting to ratify our agreed rendezvous. I winked back in accord. “It was dreadful, he went mad soon after you left.” Juan Culí told me the banks cleaned out the little he had; they left him sod all and even confiscated his passport photo. His face went blank, then alcohol soaked his chops and left him with a lunatic rictus. He began proclaiming that the Virgin of Fátima had appeared to him: “We shoudda coronata the imagine de la nostra signora,” he kept ranting, totally out of his mind, “we shoudda makka eet to il Carmelo de Coimbra and wash zee feet of sorella Lucia, we shoudda tell of the terzo of the message, we shoudda holify les festes.” His body was disintegrating internally, and his breath stank. It was impossible to look him in the face. One morning he swigged Conejo-brand bleach instead of cognac and disinfected his guts for good. His was a bad end: he bled and convulsed, writhed round like the severed tail of a lizard. “He didn’t deserve that,” concluded Juan Culí, “we’d had a happy life with him, they were basically good times, weren’t they, Goyito? Good times. Now we suffer other pains.”