The Faint-hearted Bolshevik (3 page)

I woke up at the crack of dawn in a sweat and with my heart pounding. I tried to calm down and go back to sleep, but it was impossible. I got up and made myself a cup of lime blossom tea. Although this made me feel better, it wasn’t enough. I put on my tracksuit and went out in the car. I drove along the M-30 motorway for a while. The M-40 has better bends and you can drive faster, but it has the disadvantage of being kept under surveillance by the Guardia Civil. Try any funny business and a guy on a motorcycle trained to hunt down hot rods starts breathing down your neck and they give you a fine that leaves you speechless. The M-30 is monitored by the Local Police, and either they don’t have such good bikers or they only show them off during special events. The worst that can happen is they take your picture and send a fine to your house. I’ve got a hundred and seventy eight fines from the Local Police at home, all expired after they failed to deal with my objections appropriately. It’s so easy to avoid paying fines that I ought to set up a consultancy service. Obviously one of these days they’ll either learn or change the law, and then I’ll have to buy a Scalextric.

When I got tired of putting the pedal to the metal I took the next exit and looked for a phone booth. I dialled Sonsoles’ number. It rang six times, then after an impressive crack as if whoever had picked up the receiver had immediately dropped it, I heard Armando say, “Yes? Who is this?”

“Sonsoles,” I whispered.

“Who is it?”

“Sonsoles,” I whispered again.

“Go fuck yourself, you son of a bitch,” and he hung up.

I repeated the process.

“Who the hell are you?” It was Armando again.

“Sonsoles,” I whispered again.

He hung up. I waited ten minutes and rang again. This time it only rang twice.

“Who are you, you bastard?” trilled Sonsoles’ unmistakeable voice.

I panted at some length. She remained silent until I stopped.

“Oooh, how dirty. Am I supposed to be scared?” she laughed.

She was right. That was a bit unoriginal. I took out a handkerchief and covered the mouthpiece. I put on a deep voice.

“Hello, Sonsoles. You don’t know me, but I see you every day. I’ve been obsessed with you for weeks.”

“Of course. And you want to ask me out on a date, or for me to tell you whether or not I’m wearing panties.”

“I’m not that kind of man.”

“So you think you’re a man, do you?”

“More or less.”

“More or less?”

“Do you know what I really want, Sonsoles?”

“I’m dying to find out.”

“I want to tear out your liver and eat it fried. I’ll feed your heart to my dog and I’ll preserve the rest of you so that my monkey can have some fun with that and stops jerking off. In the meanwhile, I’ll always be there, sweetie. Watch your back.”

“I’m going to call the police right now.” Sonsoles had stopped laughing.

“And what’re you going to tell them? You don’t have anything on me. I’m in a phone booth and you don’t know who I am. Do you have any idea how many cases like this they file away every day? They’ll wait until I really do something to you.”

“I know who you are.”

“Don’t waste your time.”

“You’re a piece of shit.”

“Of course I am. By the way, my monkey sends his love. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”

I hung up on her. That was more than enough for one night. What I’d done made me feel slightly disgusted with myself, of course, but I noticed that I’d relaxed considerably. There was a time when I hardly ever did that sort of sick prank, and thought that those who did were slimy buggers in a state of permanent anxiety and who wanted to kill themselves after every misdeed. However, now that I’ve become a pervert I’ve realized that when you give vent to your basic instincts you don’t feel guilty, but empty, which is the only way a pervert can feel at peace with himself. When you go and do something disgusting, it’s over and done with. The problem is when you stop halfway, because then the itch becomes unbearable.

That night, for example, I got home, went to bed and slept like a log. When I woke up, I saw that I had dribbled all over the pillow. Although Freud may not have written about it, preferring to waste his time on debatable subtleties, a dribble-filled sleep can only be a happy sleep.

The fucking office. Impressions of a victim:

At present, due to the inevitable upheavals as the millennium draws to a close, three very different castes coexist within the world of work.

First there are those, about thirty per cent or more of the workforce, who have been there forever and have stable positions in a well-established company and therefore, subsidised in some way or another. These companies are more common than you might think and no doubt also more common than suits those who don’t enjoy their benefits. Thanks to their influential and seconded trade-union officials, these people haven’t yet left the golden days when labor contracts were awesome. The days when they gave you a bonus after you’d spent X number of years with the company, when you went out for lunch at noon, you could have a leisurely cup of coffee in the morning, and when September came round everyone would get a bonus that was juicy enough to buy everything the kids needed to go back to school and with the rest you could go out for a night on the town, and finish off with a cigar and after dinner drinks. Naturally, the new model of labor relations tries to discourage such employees, but it would take an earthquake to unsettle them, and even then I’m not convinced they wouldn’t think that earthquakes only upset staff on temporary contracts. They know that the worst that can happen to them is to get a golden handshake at the expense of young people’s salaries, and then, nicely fattened up and pockets full of cash, they’ll be sent home to wallow in all kinds of vices. This proceeding is what is most commonly known as early retirement. While they wait for the appropriate birthday or their turn, these buddhas while away their clearly defined eight hours a day ticking off days on the calendar and boxes on their betting slips or lottery tickets. They regularly suffer from all sorts of illnesses and injuries: flu (a fortnight off), hay fever in the spring (ten days off), a summer cold (eight days at home) and they always fracture a minor bone out jogging on the last day of their summer holidays (another three weeks off). Every couple of years they have to have a sebaceous cyst removed (a month off) and break a major bone skiing (two months off). And as all this still leaves more time in the office than is desirable, they won’t give up a single long weekend.

Truth be told, among those who enjoy this blessed impunity, there are a few morons who work because they either have principles or because they feel a sort of religious calling to do so well. Of course they are everybody’s laughing stock. Bear in mind that you have to be fool to have principles when no one else does (if ministers steal, they shouldn’t expect anything different of me, according to ninety-five per cent of people participating in the latest surveys). And those with a vocation are by far the most ridiculed (more than ninety-nine per cent of respondents categorically declared that a vocation should only be expected from the motherfuckers who reap the benefits from it). So please forgive me if in this brief analysis I omit any further mention of this anomalous group so categorically condemned by popular wisdom.

Of the remaining seventy per cent,four fifths are crummy two-bit temps. Let’s get this straight: I don’t mean they have short-term contracts, but rather that they can be fired according to their employer’s whims. In such incidences, the firing of a permanent employee is nothing more than a tacitly agreed failure to renew a contract. Crummy two-bit temps can be characterised in the first place by the fact that they were hired after proper employment contracts went to hell. As is always the case when things go to hell, this was done with dire consequences for those who came afterwards, and the utmost delicacy for those who came before, in this case or rather, the buddhas. Regardless of their employment sector, these temps’ union representatives, when they exist, have practically zero influence and act a bit like kamikazes. Another characteristic of crummy two-bit temps is their chronological age, on average well below that of the buddhas. They make up for this with a pretty poor appearance because they barely have enough money to buy themselves designer clothes (let alone to go on summer holidays or skiing), and because twelve hours a day of actual work are much more damaging to your health than eight hours of simply being present in the office. If a buddha crosses paths with a crummy two-bit temp in the corridor and deigns to look at him, he can relish the fact that, although the crummy two-bit temp may be twenty years his junior, the latter is less tanned, has bags under his eyes so heavy they’re literally weighing them down, and has many more gray hairs that he hasn’t had time to dye.

According to the most recent figures, the life of a crummy two-bit temp is worth slightly less than that of a woodlouse. If they get sick more than once or twice a year, their contracts are not renewed. If you should happen to tell them at midnight that they have to re-do everything they did that day and they make a face, their contracts are not renewed. If they don’t stir the coffee properly, their contracts are not renewed. If the crummy two-bit temp happens to be a secretary and wears trousers rather than a skirt, her contract is not renewed. If they don’t smile all the time (in spite of how pathetic it is to smile with bags like that under your eyes) their contracts are not renewed. If they dare to ask what a long weekend is, their contracts are not renewed. There is a catalogue which sets out two hundred and fifty thousand other reasons why a crummy two-bit temp’s contract is not open to renewal. They stopped listing further reasons not because there aren’t any more, but because they’re unnecessary. There is not a single crummy two-bit temp who couldn’t be fired three thousand or so times a day on the basis of the reasons already contained in the catalogue.

It might seem that no situation can be worse than that of the crummy two-bit temps. There aren’t enough of them and they have to do all the work while the buddhas gleefully cross their way through their betting slips. They aren’t well paid, because if they were, how else could their employers afford to pay the buddhas’ amazing pensions? They don’t have any kind of perks because if they were to have them, the buddhas wouldn’t be able to benefit from the generous private medical insurance that allows them to recover so miraculously and completely from their multiple ailments. Furthermore, when they get to a ripe old age (I mean the few who last that long) every cent of their social security contributions will have been spent on guaranteeing the long lives of the buddhas; the only thing they’ll get is a kick in the ass.

However, there are those who inspire even more pity. These are the remaining fifth of the seventy per cent of workers who never knew a decent employment contract: the cocksuckers (me, for example). You can find them in what are known as “front-line” professional jobs (not front-line hierarchically speaking, but more like front line as in beachfront, or rather, the landing beach), in commercial banks, stockbrokers, multinational corporations of every description, even, sometimes, in the same companies where the buddhas happily convalesce. The cocksuckers are not crummy two-bit temps: they earn good salaries, in fact, higher than the buddhas themselves. With this alibi, union activity among them is partly inconceivable and partly a show of poor taste. Cocksuckers are young, well-dressed, and they try to be well groomed all the time, which they achieve by various means, some more insane than others. They’re allowed to take a long weekend once in a while, they go skiing and on summer holidays they travel abroad. Throughout the rest of the year, they do miserable penance for their sins.

According to the latest figures, the life of a cocksucker is worth slightly less than that of a woodlouse that’s had all its little legs torn off. To start with, they work even longer hours than the crummy two-bit temps do. They can’t get sick because there’s always something urgent they have to do. As a result of this they develop addictions to every kind of medication available in order to stay on their feet come rain or shine. While they soldier on in spite of a fever or choke back the vomit, they may well find themselves having to sign off one of the buddhas who wants to go home to recover more readily from a slight headache. Although officially they are all heads of something, they know how to use the computer, the photocopier, the fax machine and the binding machine, because by the time they’ve finished their tasks, even the crummy two-bit temps have already gone home (by then, the buddhas who still have children at school have helped them with their homework and put them to bed and are enjoying a whisky in front of the TV). If this wasn’t enough, any mistake the cocksuckers make is liable to be punished with violent personal humiliation to which they have no possibility of responding.

Some cocksuckers think this is better than being thrown out on the street, an extreme situation to which they are not subjected as often as the crummy two-bit temps, so they smile while their superiors spit in their faces, thankful for the fact that they are cocksuckers and not crummy two-bit temps. Anyone with half a brain might realize that at least the crummy two-bit temp can look himself in the eye in the mirror. And although they will both die without retirement pension, crummy two-bit temps can foster the hope that their children love them and will take care of them if the worst should happen. But the cocksucker is not only undeserving of his children’s respect, but he can’t even nurse the hope that they recognize the guy who sometimes showed up at home on weekends and public holidays (but not all of them).

It’s hard to explain how so many nice, or good guys and even some relatively worthy individuals, end up weighed down by the curse of being a cocksucker for years and years. Some allow themselves to be blinded by greed or by a meaningless title on a business card. There is always someone who thinks that being a coordinator or earning eighty grand a year places another person who is a mere deputy-coordinator or earns only seventy-nine grand a year a level below them in the food chain. These numbskulls constitute a significant proportion of the population of cocksuckers swarming around the world, and the worrying thing about the world we live in is that there is such an enormous stock of numbskulls that, if necessary, it could more than fill the demand for cocksuckers.

However, a portion of those cocksuckers don’t love money (or having thicker business cards than other’s) above all else. Those are the cocksuckers whose cocksucking career choice is most surprising, and who are perhaps the most to blame for and the most deserving of their wretched luck, because if they had only decided to get themselves a pair of balls, they could have spared themselves from being so insignificant. However surprising it may seem, these guys are where they are out of vanity. They leapt into the lions’ den without considering their actions, or they did so reluctantly, or thinking that they would never want or allow themselves to be swept along by the filthy mainstream. Then they were led into temptation: let’s see if you’re capable of this and that. They knew they were capable of this and that, and they did it to prove it so that nobody would question their ability ever again. Then one thing led to another, and after that something else, and they were also able to do that too and they proved it once more … And so on and so on.

When they finally stopped and looked back, they realized they had done a whole heap of things of which they were capable and none of which, however difficult they were, were worth a toss. On the contrary, there was another heap of things that were worth a bit more than a couple of tosses, and which they would have been capable of doing then as well, but after wasting so much time with things that weren’t worth a toss, they had become incapable of doing anything else. And the most shameful thing is that instead of taking their car and driving peacefully off a cliff, most of them find consolation by forgetting all about it and continuing to apply themselves diligently to things that aren’t worth a toss. They even laugh when they receive pats on the back, desperate for approval, like a poodle being rewarded with a stale biscuit for performing a cute trick.

And this is where the aforementioned pair of balls I was talking about earlier is greatly missed. We’re all vain, and everyone likes to be praised for every little thing we do. But it takes a pair of balls to say to the lion tamer asking you to jump through a ring of fire that his fucking mother can do the jumping and he’d better start cracking his whip. The first time you leap through a burning ring of fire you leave your balls hanging there and you can never get them back. For anyone who doesn’t already know it, balls are highly flammable.

There was a time when I resisted becoming a cocksucker. I never worshipped money, nor business cards, and I refused to base my pride on other people admiring my ability to turn somersaults. Those were the days when I had a pair of balls. Then it occurred to me that it’s not good for man to live alone, and I asked myself whether it was right to stay on the margins of what the rest of the world, or at least all those who could, were doing. And I felt as capable as anyone else. I gave myself permission to jump through that fucking flaming ring so as not to end up in the gutter and without benefits. I accepted it as a temporary solution until the outlook brightened and I could get my act together. Ten years have passed, give or take. Now I am a cocksucker and I’m more alone than ever.

When I think about these things I always remember Friedrich Nietzsche. I had a religious studies teacher who always took great delight whenever he managed to mention that this atheist had died mad. I was never a fan of good old Friedrich, except when he got his hammer out, but it doesn’t seem fair to me that the prize for advocating pride in being a man is having your brains turn to mush and a hundred years later an anthropoid in a dog collar laughs himself silly at your expense in front of a handful of doomed brats.