Communist Manifesto Fernando Villalón was silent his eyes and broad humanity gathered in as if he were totally absentminded and at the same time found himself very far from all of you In a kind of aside while Rafael was taking pictures of María Teresa in the palace garden you asked him what was going on behind his interminable silences He placed his palm on his chest and said “Do you remember the dead dogs whose barks you heard in the grove when I summoned them? Now I hear all of them howling here in the middle of my chest” “How much longer to Víznar?” Cabezas asks Galadí his voice touched by a slight tremor “Not far We’re almost there If it weren’t so late we’d have seen the lights a while back” The Buick stops at the door of the palace Trescastro gets out and for a few moments seems to hesitate between speaking to the Assault Guards or proceeding in silence He leaves finally without opening his lips At the entrance to the building he speaks with a sentry posted there and then the large studded door closes behind him Then the Guards both turn toward you at the same time as if moved by a single spring “We aren’t volunteers and never would’ve done anything like this” murmurs the one with the musket “They forced us because we’re suspected of being for the Republic” Like Valdés his accent is from Old Castile Perhaps he’s from Logroño or maybe La Montaña The other one nods “I always pray to become a raging lunatic I’d prefer it to this” Galadí spits at his feet “A real man would shoot himself before shooting a defenseless person in the back” “Olé” Cabezas agrees “Well said and absolutely right!” “We’re both married and I have two young kids” the Guard who’s driving replies “I can’t abandon them and leave them stranded Try to understand” “I have a little girl and I’ll die at peace with my conscience because I know that one day she’ll see libertarian communism in this country” “Olé! Olé! I have a son and hope he can forgive you because you’re dogs and dogs don’t know what they’re doing” You would like to tell them that tonight nobody will kill anybody because the moment for the crime hasn’t arrived yet Perhaps it was last night and will come again tomorrow but it will never be this morning There are prescribed times for the murder of innocents and other times chosen for satanic carnivals to the greater glory of a man whose only hope is to be seen as insane in the eyes of God But your voice strangles in your throat like a river of ash Your heart beats so fiercely in your throat you’re afraid it will burst like a pomegranate or shrink into the blood that burns your soul as if it were lava (“To die or not to die. That is the question. The bullring is a theater Shakespeare would’ve understood perfectly”) said Sánchez Mejías when someone asked him to describe bullfighting precisely and succinctly To die or not to die Back when la Argentinita thought she had been abandoned by her lover she called one afternoon to ask you to her house got rid of the maid the cook and the old woman who ironed She was alone with you and stated that she didn’t want to live convinced as she was she had lost Ignacio You tried to comfort her with old lies that bored and debased you when you repeated them when suddenly she embraced you kissed you on the mouth and said she was going to bed with you my boy this afternoon That she had always desired you in a distant but persistent way like those ideas that assault you several times every year in the half sleep of a summer siesta or when you make up your eyes in the dressing-room mirror while you feel very alone far from home and outside the snow of New York or Paris is falling Yes desired since the days of the failed premiere of