I have known countless bastards in my lifetime and never wished a bad end on any; if that’s what they got, it was down to something else. Providence likes to sketch out the designs of men spitefully, that’s its sarcastic bent. Little Margarita told the police that a rook, black as the center of hell, flew cawing out of Handsome’s skull, but they didn’t believe her. Police take only facts as proof and discount any possible supernatural intervention. In my lifetime I have watched several rapid-action scenes that were preludes to death and have studied the faces of certain individuals and discerned a motive for betrayal, or at least the name of the culprit. In every case, I’ve sensed the lyrics of destiny hysterically weighing in. Poetry sometimes resolves problems of transcendence; at others, however, it makes them worse.
The judge lifted up Handsome’s still-fresh corpse, with an expression of repugnance. His head had been sliced in two by the bullet fired by little Margarita right between his temples. “It was self-defense,” she said, quite without remorse. She was telling the civil guards how he’d forced his way in and was intending to inject her with a syringe full of AIDS-infected blood. “The gun belonged to my father, and he was one of yours, you know. He threw himself at me like a wild animal. I had no choice but to shoot him. He must have been jonesing like crazy, because all he did was say that the swallows would come back and hang their nests on my balcony and other such nonsense.”
The bullet split his skull in two like an Easter egg, out of which a crow flew out cawing rather than any child’s treat. It must have been Handsome’s thoughts. “It flew out of the window, I swear to you. It was this big, a disgustingly big bird that wouldn’t stop squawking.”
I saved on the other half of my outlay, but little Margarita saved herself from a bad end and is still around wallowing in the mire; that was the source of my discontent, and now nobody will ever bring me relief on that front. There are people who swear blind about the everyday nature of paranormal events, and would never question the hypothesis that a rook had flown out of Handsome’s brain, just as little Margarita claimed. However, daily duties block our perception of what is beyond comprehension and atrophy our minds like crazy. Having a family, worrying about it, and striving to make it a success diminishes our ability to appreciate the extraordinary. Every family has its smell, just as every animal has its stench. Some conceal it under fragrances purchased at perfume shops, but even so they don’t eradicate it entirely. A good nose can be a rare nasal skill, but it helps the economic standing of its owner very little, or not at all. I sweated out my youth under the patched tent of the Stéfano circus, a veritable perfume lamp of pestilence. It was there I learned to guess an animal’s illness simply from a whiff of the vapor rising from its excrement, to calibrate a man’s fear by smelling the sweat of his brow, and to assess the appetites of a female from the aromas when she was in heat. Gurruchaga taught me. Smell reveals the identity of the species and determines individual traits. Bastards carry a dense smell of vintage semen or cerumen; you can tell their condition a long ways off. Little Margarita always smelled of rotting flesh, though I never noticed till the day Handsome didn’t deliver the goods. Gelo de los Ángeles smelled of sweaty talcum and slippery disasters. He slid off the trapeze and was confined to a wheelchair for the few years left to him in this world. “If I’d known I’d be reduced to an invertebrate, I’d have been better off killing myself when I fell.” Doris did the charitable thing and brought him death on the sly. She suffocated him by putting a dry cloth in his mouth and soaking it till she blocked his trachea. She shed one tear after another while she did so. She only ever told me. Then she paid for a couple of masses, to see whether his soul might make it up to the skies as nimbly as he used to when he was young. On the other hand, I never did find out whether they consummated the love they never confessed to. Doris smelled of a bunch of fruit, of black grapes macerated in the oblique light that’s the death rattle of a dying summer. I still remember her with her back to me, treating her swollen rectal veins with Xeroform while, prostrated by a temperature, I inhaled the spectral effluvia of the disinfectant, though quite unintentionally. I’ve only ever smelled anything like it on one other occasion. It was in a London hotel. I’d taken a few days off to visit my son Edén in the institution where he was receiving medical treatment. We went for a walk in the meadows in Kew Gardens, we lunched on cheddar and cucumber sandwiches in Fortnum and Mason’s and then paid the Tate Gallery a visit to kill time. It was showing a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon. They say that art eases the understanding of autistic children and can have surprising therapeutic outcomes. I excitedly told the doctors what had happened in the museum on our return to the sanatorium, but they gave it no clinical importance. They simply shook my hand and assured me that the cure for his illness was a slow and complex business and, as we know, what’s slow and complex is always expensive.
I’d still not taken my clothes off. I was waiting for room service to bring up the selection of cinnamon and ginger cookies with the warm glass of milk I’d ordered. Although my stomach still felt upset after the day’s ups and downs, I felt like eating something sweet before going to bed and comforting my mind with a pill or two. Someone knocked on the door, and a uniformed waitress trundled in the sweets trolley and parked it under the large damask curtains framing a window that looked over Regent Street. Outside, a whispering drizzle dampened the murky streetlights. The gloom filtered through the windowpanes, and its brushstrokes darkened my spirits. I’ve always thought that extravagant bedrooms in grand hotels were pantheons to vanity; the comfort is funereal, and their ostentation shrouded in meaninglessness. The waitress withdrew from the small drawing room but not before giving a small reverential curtsey and bowing her head, though rage flashed in her eyes at having to perform such a pantomime before a dwarf; one notices such things. I remained deep in thought for a few seconds. Suddenly, an incandescent glow began to surge in a corner of the room. It was a streak of shadow tinged with a phantom gleam, a somber wraith of frozen light that gradually set into a figure with a human aspect and recognizable features. It smelled of aldehyde, asepsis, and the infinite. I didn’t budge; neither was I especially shocked when I recognized her. Before my astounded gaze, Faith Oxen had returned from the land of sepulchers. “I’m hungry, Gregori,” the dead woman told me, “there’s a lot of hunger in this novel, chew a sweet for me.” I obeyed. I put a bun in my mouth, biting into it reluctantly as I eyed the ectoplasm’s movements. The specter gave a satisfied smirk and went on talking. Its silhouette shook in the air like the blown wick of a candle, and that made it difficult to anticipate how it would move. It assured me that in the world beyond, from which it had just returned, food and drink didn’t exist, nor did any feeling that might recall the sensuous joys of conscious life; there was only equivocation. “I’m creased with hunger, give me more food before you, too, disappear,” the scarecrow droned. I swallowed and concentrated my nerves in my Adam’s apple, not daring to utter a word. “You were deceiving yourself when you said it all ended with death,” it continued. “You were deceiving yourself when you thought I’d leave you in peace if you stuffed me with sweet pastries. You wanted me to die inconsolably, and now I’ve come to ask for solace.”