My brother Tranquilino, though a simpleton, understood little of such nonsense. He never tried a pizza, a train swept him up in the dawn of youth. A great pity. He never tasted a pizza, though he would have hated the flavors; he was happy setting light to ants and sucking on his fingers and nails, which were always full of dirt. He also took out snot when it was clogging up his nostrils. If I was nearby, he’d stick it on my face and laugh, though never maliciously. Once, I remember, he put a fat blob in my mouth, and it tasted of cooking salt. If he had lived, he’d have envied me my fortune, and I’d have had no choice but to pay his bills — down to what they call blood bonding. The dead sometimes yearn after the life of the living and put in an appearance in order to disturb their peace and quiet. Faith Oxen would have cursed my success if she’d lived another twenty years, but nature is wise and sensible and took her off in good time to that other shore of nothingness, where food, so it seems, is in short supply.
I know you have come to be entertained by the spectacle of my death. Night is coming to an end, and the birds’ hungry squawks are beginning to echo against the metallic dawn sky. I’ll soon lose this illusion of consciousness with which I still think I remember past time, and I will enter a territory of oblivion I should never have left. All those who saw fit to know me will participate unawares in the ritual of my destruction, and although they, like you, will end up realizing they are guilty, it will be through them that my life assumes the meaning for which it was created. That is the paradox, Providence’s sarcastic grin my way: whoever kills me also gives me life; whoever resurrects me, condemns me. I knew it would happen, but I didn’t think it would happen so ridiculously. I was forewarned. First there were the insults written in my bathroom, then the anonymous messages. I started receiving them by phone. I’d get calls at an untimely hour on private numbers that only my trusted circle had access to, and that alarmed me. “We’re going nowhere like this. I’m up to here with you. Either you keep to your own storyline, or this will turn into an endless pastiche. Do you get what I’m saying? Do you grasp what I’m after?”
“Tell me who you are, you wretch,” I rasped angrily, but nobody answered at the other end of the line.
Over time the messages began to appear in strange places that were completely inaccessible for people who didn’t belong to my entourage — words painted in lipstick on my car’s white leather upholstery, notes inserted in my billfold, missives under my pillow, and even strange voices buzzing around my head, as if, in addition to myself, a voice-over from someone else’s consciousness were shouting inside my brain. Then came the apparition, and everything began to fall into place.
Human beings find it hard to accept proof of their own precariousness, and that’s why they cling to the minutiae of day-to-day life to try to gain strength in routine; as soon as they drop their guard, however, fear surges, defeats, and annihilates them. Of the four evils that claw into man’s so-called freedom — impotence, fear, neglect, and nostalgia — nostalgia is the worst to experience at night, when consciousness is least alert and words scrape the throat as they are silenced in desperation. One can bite the jugular of fear and it will fade like the phantom of the self it is, one can fight impotence plastered on alcohol and it will be forgotten till the next restless night, and one can hold neglect at bay with the saturnine sauces of pleasures of the flesh; conversely, it is dangerous to resist nostalgia, because it returns with renewed energy and is then quite unforgiving.
If not Providence, it was perhaps nostalgia that compelled me after all those years to track down the whereabouts of little Margarita. Private eyes do their job the best they can, and given the right economic wherewithal, they can come up with astonishing results. It took hardly a week for a report to appear on my desk detailing her abode. She lived in Ciudad Real, she was a widow, childless, ran a small haberdashery stocked full with extra-large knickers for fat ladies, and on a Saturday night she liked to go to a flea-pit of a bingo hall called The Eldorado Palace, which she sometimes left on the arm of a handyman. For private eyes, life is reduced to aseptic dossiers, surreptitious photos, and brief notes, totally lacking any meat or passion. That’s their work, and that’s why they get paid. “She is a completely uninteresting woman,” that skinny, anodyne fellow told me when I handed him a check with his honorarium. “And what exactly would not being ‘completely uninteresting’ mean in your book?” I asked brusquely, annoyed by his inopportune suggestion. “I don’t know, having a secret, hidden side, some criminal intent to investigate,” he replied, his eyes glued to the scrawl of my signature. “Would you perhaps find me interesting?” I decided to enquire. “Yes, of course. You are a wealthy man.”
The flaking façades of the houses that light up the Ciudad Real ring road looked like tiny drawers in the cupboard of life. There, everyday shortages must impregnate the minds of the inhabitants with the reek of boiled greens given off by disillusion. I gave my chauffeur the address from the report, and we soon found the spot. I got out of the car and stealthily walked over. I looked dispiritedly through the shop window at the way time, that sidekick of putrefaction, had mistreated the impossible love of my childhood. The kilos tumbled off little Margarita like chewy strings of cold sausage, and the whole mass of her body came to rest on the powerful seat of her buttocks. The goddess of my dreams was only recognizable in the sneering mouth and lengthy eyelids that as an ingenuous child I’d mistaken for beautiful features. It was there, standing by that window, chagrined at being stripped so suddenly of the great white hope from my past, when, God knows why, the idea of killing her suddenly sprang to mind. It was a viscous feeling, as if excreted from the sphincter of a supreme being rather than being born within me.
Ordinary people’s hands aren’t usually stained with blood. Ordinary people don’t realize they are playing bit parts in the tragicomic farce of existence. Poets often gloss the paradoxes of human drama in graphic fashion, by simply letting the ink flow freely, without subterfuges or palliatives. When ordinary people stain their hands with blood, they never think that the act they’ve committed hasn’t depended strictly on the exercise of their own individual will and that it might, on the contrary, be a decision taken by an unknowable supreme entity; they assume their guilt and at most purge it. Taking little Margarita’s life wasn’t in my hands. Nor do I think it was in yours to come here and entertain yourself with my vicissitudes. Just like me, you are part of destiny’s cunning game, and we’re both made to believe we are in control of our own decisions, when we are only bit parts in a pre-orchestrated show; some are dancers, others, actors, and most, acrobats, or the distinguished public that at best is stunningly grateful for the truce brought by the interval as they gradually realize everything is empty, hollow, and made of cardboard.