As so often, I was stationed at the pissing wall, waiting for the bell to ring at the end of the school day so I could lap up little Margarita’s footsteps. I remember how I was trembling more than usual that day, perhaps because I so wanted to recite to her at the top of my voice, out in the open, some of Gustavo Adolfo’s lines that perfectly captured my feelings: I know the reason for your sighs; I know the source of your secret sweet lethargy. When she walked out, I hopped after her down a street called Caídos de la División Azul to the village plaza, a shabby plaza with a drinking trough for mules in its center that pretended to be a fountain. Little Margarita occasionally turned around to look at me, perhaps shocked by the way I stumbled along, far too clumsily that day, or perhaps worried my proximity might do her some physical harm. She glanced back on the sly and sped up. The harshness in her angry eyes was no doubt reflected in the balloons of spit bubbling from my mouth because the slope was so steep. Gustavo Adolfo was simmering in my brain, but my panting and puffing led her to misread my intentions. By what strange, untimely means do feelings flood our bodies? How could I fall in love with that fleshand-blood monster? The discharge from such sweet charms is evil, and it’s best to steer clear. However, being such a dullard and coward, I sank into that sticky mire like a fly in honey a bear’s about to eat, flickering with desire and ready to die. Little Margarita flashed a devious grin in my direction when she saw her father in the plaza heading toward me. The lines I should have declaimed clotted in my throat at the sight of him. “Why are you slavering after my daughter, dwarf? Didn’t I tell you not even to whiff her? Come here, you titchy critter, and let me teach you what’s what.” I didn’t have time to say that I was only hoping to recite a few lines of poetry I’d been learning by heart, because he grabbed me by the gizzard, lifted me up level with his eyes, and after impregnating my nose with the stink from his breath or tickling it with the scimitar of his moustache, he hurled me at the mule trough, and so unluckily that I cracked my skull on the water spout. “If I find you within five miles of my daughter, dwarf, I’ll cut them off, you little bugger, I’ve told you that more than once, and I won’t tell you again,” threatened Sergeant Ceballos, full of himself and shaking my snot off his uniform with a grimace of disgust. Scared to death, skull cracked, the water red with my blood, I made a supreme effort to remain dignified, so as to at least impress little Margarita, but the pain was such that I couldn’t contain myself, and I started blubbering. Tears of unrequited love, of hurt pride, of battered dignity streamed down there in the presence of deadpan little Margarita. I even wept blood. That was the only time I ever did. In other circumstances I’ve wept bile, semen, and even whisky, but I’ve never again shed a tear of blood. I cried so much, it all got mixed up with the water, and the whites of the eyes of the mules that drank there over the next few days were striated with blood. Seen from a trough, the world seems large and alien. Little Margarita smiled a sick rabbit smile, laughed at my peculiar baptism, and had no pity or compassion for me in that state. The clapper in my brain banged against my skull, and humiliation coursed through my veins until it swamped my heart. I stayed there awhile, broken and bewildered; dogs came to sniff out the extent of the damage, which was considerable even though I was only a dwarf, and showed me their weary tongues as if trying to deaden my pain with the balsam of their saliva or at best taste my humors and thus satiate their own appetites.
Sergeant Ceballos was a coward of the old school, a man who was ill served by his own limitations and only lost his temper with weaklings, but think on this, in the end he got it wrong and paid for his arrogance with his life. He was probably drunk when he caught the gypsies stealing pears, if not, there’s no accounting for his deed, or perhaps he just underestimated the race; that night he received his just desserts in stab wounds. He met a bad end, though it could have been worse if the wolves had come and gorged on his corpse, still clad in the Civil Guard uniform, as indeed it was, but that was not to be. Things happen the way they do, and not as people might want them to. My forehead emerged badly from the lesson he taught me, and learning Gustavo Adolfo’s poetry by heart did me no good. The pain went deep, and though it flowered from my head, its shoots actually sprang from my soul. I left the trough battered and limp and walked to my mother’s house with my head split open. Despite the pain, I kept imagining a thousand kinds of revenge that were all quite fantastic and impossible. It’s incredible what the human mind can spawn. Over the years I have learned to classify my emotions; initially I was helped by the regular kicks that came my way, but later, particularly after the designs of Providence led me to the ranks of the great and the good, I met with scorn the smiles of hypocrites, faced out with aloofness the mellifluous tones of flatterers, ranted with anger against the pettiness of the wretched, and sought revenge to soothe wounds that hadn’t healed and were still sore. “Whatever can have become of little Margarita?” I wondered one night a long ways off from my childhood when malt whisky was clouding my memory with nostalgia’s tawny gold. Could she still be living in the village, or might she have moved off to a dormitory town where she now lived a life of disillusion in the barren wastes of menopause? Would she still remember the disabled dwarf who never had the courage to love her after that? Without giving it too much thought, I decided to clear up my doubts and contract the services of a detective agency to investigate where she’d holed up. I was curious to find out what the rough edges of time had done to my childhood’s most sublime desire, ineffable dreams that turn to ash when you wake up an adult, ash or mud, because the stuff of dreams is unstable and can be lethal, out of necessity. The detective they sent, a skinny, cadaverous fellow seemingly reared on lettuce leaves, didn’t flinch when I revealed his task: “I want you to find little Margarita Ceballos.” And he didn’t hesitate to charge me an exorbitant fee when he found her in Ciudad Real in a matter of days. As far as ordinary folk are concerned, dwarves are excrescences that must have sprouted like warts on an old woman’s face, and they cannot conceive how we can fall in love. Money, nevertheless, puts everything right. In his report, he wrote that little Margarita Ceballos had been driven into impoverished widowhood by the unpaid fines handed out to her cabdriver husband and now ran a tiny haberdashery where the most sold items were extraordinary knickers for fat women and bras like saucepans. Hers was a simple life, and she misspent the scant earnings from her shop on slot machines in bars or the Eldorado Bingo Palace, a haunt suitable for pensioners chastened by necessity. I jettisoned all the commitments in my diary, told my chauffeur in confidence of my destination, and arrived the following day. I’d not been to Ciudad Real for many years, probably since the last time I performed there with the Stéfano circus in ‘66, and the city seemed as anodyne as so many others across that Spain I visited in my youth, led by the hand of Stéfano di Battista. We reached the address in the report. I got out of the car and went over to the haberdashery. Before deciding to go inside, I took a look in the window. Through glass covered in squashed flies, I glimpsed a messy array of unfashionable lace and lingerie that hung from two racks that had faded in the yellow sun. Her back to me, on a ladder, little Margarita was putting boxes of stockings on metal shelves, and wasn’t I astonished when I registered the big-bang of her hips expanding before my eyes and what one might dub a Taj Mahal of a bum, gross buttocks, an extraordinary mass of flesh, such was the effect the passage of time had inflicted on my childhood love. After my initial shock, I started to laugh and heave with guffaws that blocked my windpipe. I opted not to go in. I would plot something that would adequately respond to my plans for her. Death, perhaps.