You could have lent your face to the campaign, the anodyne face of any Tom, Dick, or Mary. You’d have been a success, no doubt about that, a success that would have brought you a share of the profits. A pity your presence augurs the imminent end and that what I’ve been saying is pure fantasy. In the last instance, you must decide whether it’s in your hands to imagine a formula to carry it through. Try it out, test your luck, have a go, and discover once and for all that you’re no equal player with Providence, but a mere facilitator of its caprices, one puppet more.
I could lie and tell you about the importance of will in the development of individuals. I could deceive you and tell you I am a self-made man, that I’ve come from nothing, that with all my physical defects, I decided one day to buckle down and prosper, that everything I have is down to graft, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. The accepted dogma that every human being has success within his grasp and that it depends exclusively on the efforts each individual exerts is one of the fallacies propping up the foundations of society. Freedom of choice is another such. Fate rules the roost, and every one of our acts takes place in function of the measure of our own limitations. When humans sacrificed their gods, they thought they were sovereign subjects and set out to build their own paradise on earth, but it turned out to be a dung heap where they cheerfully still wallow, refusing to accept the real source of their contradictions. I could lie and indoctrinate you, in the spirit of the times, with some rigmarole identifying progress with the smug stats from the end-of-year figures, but you have come to witness my demise, and denying your rag-doll status isn’t worth the candle, either. You’ll see for yourself when it all runs its course.
Once, when Faith was alive, I went to buy a tray of honey-glazed pastries from one of those fancy cake shops that fascinated her so, and I chanced upon a terrible incident. A little girl was pressing her nose against the shop window. She was six or seven, a ragamuffin, and her fragile gaze led one to imagine the ravages of poverty she’d yet to accept. Someone took pity on her, went into the shop, and bought her one of those pastries she was coveting, a cream doughnut sprinkled with icing sugar. The girl was distraughtly happy, couldn’t credit what she was holding between her hands, hardly dared to, but she did run her lips over the white surface, even caressed it with her tongue. “A pastry just for me,” she hummed contentedly. I stood and watched in amazement, annoyed by the momentary reprieve such a gift had given her from her wretchedness, then walked over with a view to teaching her a lesson and grabbing the cake from her. She misread my intentions, thinking I envied her snack, and with all her childish tenderness she offered to share it with me, but I scorned her offer and angrily threw it to the ground. When I did that, she burst into tears.
It’s blatantly obvious that the world is plagued with contradictions that make one appreciate the need for a pre-established order to fix them in a righteous harmony. Wealth, poverty, love, and suffering are only aspects of that ferocious whole driving us on and swallowing us up; and if free will doesn’t exist, nor does there exist any guilt to excuse. Unlike animals, the only grandeur human beings can cherish is the ability to acknowledge the extent of their own disaster; all else is deceit, a soporific fug deadening thought.
Little Margarita never let herself show a scrap of pity toward me, and didn’t even show any warmth when she eyed up my handicaps. Her arrogance made her powerful, though it’s true they were different, more iron-clad, times when people often acted brutishly. Fools, dogs, poets, the deformed, and pure bastards were generally denigrated, that being our daily bread.
Although One-Eyed Slim was a poor wretch, he idolized order held in place by discipline. Once when walking down the Cuesta de la Vega, I remember we came across the corpse of a dog that had been run over. It stank to high heaven, and its guts made ours turn over. He waxed serious and began telling me how members of US army elite units used to be given a newborn pup each to feed and look after until it grew into an adult. Once they were fully grown, they had to grab them by the snout and cut their throats on the sharp blades of their machetes. The aim of the exercise was to eradicate compassion from their behavior. They had to face the enemy with mercilessness etched on their muscles if they wanted to emerge with their limbs intact and their vital organs unscathed. Those were the rules of survival. He seemed to enjoy relating the details of such a practice, but I was shocked, not by the sacrifice of the animal as such, but by the ability to bend and shape people’s feelings that way.
Little Margarita lacked compassion toward the weak and enjoyed seeing others suffer. She didn’t even cry when her father was hacked to pieces. I’ve often recalled her from the loneliness of my office and tried to imagine what must have become of her, always with a residue of bitter memories in the pit of my stomach. The callous of this world always get their just desserts. That’s the way it has to be, otherwise the social order would collapse and paradoxes would infect the collective consciousness. However, the people are not in control of their fate, that’s why hunger and injustice sometimes wield the allure of power exemplified by history. What do you expect me to say? I’m proud I don’t believe in the norms of society. It’s some time since I suffered hunger or justice placated my thirst for revenge. Power, luxury, wealth, and social status hoist one onto an ivory tower of pride from which one observes the passing of time with surprising lucidity, almost on a par with what humiliation and poverty foster. Basically, maturity has enabled me to understand intolerance and fanaticism, which is why they don’t frighten me. I’ve never got used to the excrescences of this world, perhaps because I’ve never been anything but a runt, a puppet whimsically fashioned by Providence. What saves me now in the eyes of others is my wealth, just as my poverty or belly laughs did previously, and that’s the only difference. Intolerance is simply the boundless assertion of one’s own self, something that is very obvious in children and that, nonetheless, is tempered by the hypocritical way society is organized. The humble fawn before the powerful, the weak before the strong, the ignorant before the cultured, and that’s our way of sharing the supernatural fact of existence with each other.
What I experienced in my own flesh taught me to scorn those who revered me not for what I was, but for what I possessed in their eyes. The times were a-changing, and suddenly height brought vertigo, the sickly vertigo of ripe figs. I’ve known a host of bastards and always wished them a good end, not that they necessarily got one — but that’s neither here nor there. Soon pleasure became a caprice; prickly behavior quickly changed to velveteen manners. In people’s eyes I began to seem someone worthy of attention. I gradually climbed the steps of the social pyramid, till one fine day I found praise raining down on me, alongside bloodcurdling deference. Everything is written in the unknown pages of destiny and sometimes in blank verse. Everything is set in concrete, and all those sentences simmering with the semantics of individual effort, freedom, or work are but vases for the fallacies used to bedeck the suffering of the poor. My good fortune came ready-made; I did little to deserve it. I spent the jewels and money I stole from the dead woman bronzing like crazy under the sun on the Costa, well seasoned by amenable females, the kind that charge a rate for their friendship, and well oiled by the endless pampering siestas that sign off les grandes bouffes. For several years I simply did what I fancied. Marbella was in vogue, and the most select items of Mediterranean high society grazed there, doing what they willed. A dwarf can hardly pass unperceived in such a milieu, and the mounds of cash I carried meant I was soon admitted to the sumptuous fiestas and late-night bashes sponsored by idle aristocrats or bourgeois plutocrats. My free-spending ways attracted clusters of beautiful hangers-on I cultivated with profuse gratitude and purchased with the increasing acquisitive power of my bank balance. I’d put behind me the clandestine movements, the weary rallies in the shadow of the class struggle, and the vague horrors of tramping from the far-off political Spain of my misspent youth. Everything was different now; hip couturiers even came to blows over my deformed body, upon which they wanted to exhibit their extravagant creations at the gala banquets of the day. I’d become fashionable in a matter of two years, and my seed money suddenly multiplied in astonishing, if not yet boundless, ways. Helped by some of those so-called men of means, I gained entry to the world of easy, prosperous enterprise, generally of a speculative nature, which soon gave me the chance to initiate projects of my own. On the advice of one of these characters, I acquired a bakery on the cheap, and rather than selling it on at a profit, as was my wont, I had the bright idea of turning it into a fast-food sanctuary. Tourism requires food on the spot and spiced up for foreign tastes, and I managed to take advantage of the old, arthritic infrastructure of a catering industry in decline to meet the needs blown in from abroad by the winds of the free market. It was the early eighties, and the big change was going to come any minute now. Ideological Spain was giving way to economic-free-forall Spain, and no holds barred. Diego Armando Maradona had just been signed by Barcelona Football Club for almost a billion pesetas, and hardly anyone could credit such a showering of capital. The spectacle of the coup d’état performed by a lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard had been broadcast on television screens across the planet to the stupefaction of the international community. Everybody threw themselves into the street, united behind posters for peace; democracy passed the pistol-firing re-sit with top marks. The Rumasa conglomerate had just been expropriated in a political decision taken by democratic socialists, voted into power at the ballot box in the autumn of ’82, and José Luis Garci was about to show that something Spanish could, rivaling feats from other eras, attain the impossible dream of an Oscar. In Spain, in that Spain nobody would soon recognize — not even the fucking founding fathers — a world of money was beginning to dawn.