The Faint-hearted Bolshevik (4 page)

I might not yet have mentioned that it was summer. This fact is relevant for various other reasons that will become clear, but also because during the summer, banking working hours are shorter and employees leave at noon. Although we cocksuckers almost never take advantage of this perk, it is more or less tolerated that three or four days each summer, on a whim, one can leave the office at the same time as the others, step outside and discover that there is a whole world out there. A world full of parks, birds, children with their mothers and heaps of babes flaunting their navels or wearing skin-tight T-shirts.

So that was exactly what I did the following Thursday: I took the afternoon off, not to go and stare at belly-buttons, but to pursue my strategy of stalking Sonsoles and bringing about her moral downfall. To be more specific, I was interested in carrying out a personal stakeout that would enlighten me as to her habits. This would lead to a series of disconcerting actions that would in turn prompt my chosen victim’s fall into disrepute. I would combine slander with several traps until that slut would regret ever meeting me. Now, as I’m writing this, I realize I can barely remember exactly what dirty tricks I had in store for her.

The fact is it doesn’t matter a jot. Because that afternoon something happened that screwed everything up and all my best laid plans went to hell. Until that afternoon I had been messing around with Sonsoles in the same way I might have grabbed a handful of silkworms and roasted them in a teaspoon over a Bunsen burner to while away the time. I don’t know if I’ve managed to explain myself. Nothing about what I was doing was essential or particularly appealed to me. And if I’d continued being a spineless motherfucker, probably nothing irreversible would have happened. But that afternoon, betraying all my principles and ignoring the overwhelming teachings of a life of disappointment and lesson-learning, I committed the insane act of allowing myself to fall passionately in love with another human being.

When I was eighteen I wrote a lucid essay entitled “In Praise of Impotence, Cowardice and Other Disqualifications from Transforming Reality”, which led to my expulsion from a Maoist literary circle I’d joined without realizing it. Now I have a lot of time on my hands and I’ve been able to re-read those pages. On one of them is forcefully stated:

In a universe of merciless symmetry, the species seeks the annihilation of the individual to improve his own lot, and the individual can only avoid his misfortune by disregarding the possible fate of the species. Anyone who deigns to pay attention to his fellow human beings, beyond the strictly necessary one to avoid colliding with them, is undoubtedly on the right path to self-destruction. And the best way to avert this danger is the absence of courage, at times supplemented by pure incompetence. In order to bless the actions of martyrs and condemn those of traitors or the weak, the gregarious spirit has created such a bizarre concept as honour. But reason draws a different conclusion, preferring to absolve anyone acting out of astuteness or necessity to celebrating a show-off’s mindless exploits
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Thales of Miletus (or was it Emmanuel from Königsberg-Kaliningrad?) used to say that there is no worse wisdom than premature learning, since this leads to the most terrible ignorance later on. Much to my chagrin, I found out the truth of this ingenious aphorism through my own experience. And I hope that up in the Olympus Zeus is giving the author exactly what he deserves for being right until his ass drops off.

Now I could give you the fact, or facts, in whatever order they come out, but for a bit more variety and a bit less work, I’m going to copy a document. This has two advantages: immediacy, since it was written on the night following the events to which it refers; and intensity, since I was still idiotically moved when I wrote it.

The document reads as follows:

And now, the question: What have I done to waste my life like this? How, of all the possible lives I could have lived, have I ended up living a life made up of nothing but shit and tunnels that don’t lead anywhere? A few hours ago I was sitting on a bench in the Retiro park rediscovering these two unanswered questions (or just one, who cares). If I’ve been carrying them around with me for years without being the least bit upset by them, it can only be because I’ve been carefully mulling over them like a pious old woman fingering her rosary, without knowing why. Today I’ve decided to face them head-on. And they’ve caused me such disgust and sadness that I don’t know how I’ve managed not to dash my brains out against the floor of the inner courtyard for the edification of all the retards who live in my apartment building
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Well, yes, I do know why I haven’t done it. Although it pains me to admit it, that is the reason why I have switched on the computer and started to write this confession. The sudden outburst that has led me to face the two damned unanswered questions is also what has kept my skull in one piece
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At the start, nobody would have said that something was going to happen. I’d spent a couple of hours waiting in my car parked opposite the house where the smart-ass slut lives and my mind was already churning up ideas. At exactly six o’clock, the garage’s automatic door opens, and Sonsoles’ convertible emerges, with her at the wheel. Just as she was a couple of days ago, looking down on everything and everyone, barricaded behind those enormous sunglasses that make her look like a cross between a weasel and an astronaut. I pull out without much enthusiasm and take up position in her wake. My cousin’s car, which I’ve borrowed while they perform plastic surgery on mine, is somewhat short on horse power and I have to put my foot down. Sonsoles drives like a taxi driver, that is, surviving half on her luck, half on the careful driving skills of other drivers and at times demonstrating a mastery at the wheel she could stuff up whatever part of her anatomy she finds most convenient. In order not to lose her, I have to play some dirty tricks on a few innocent drivers, which pisses me off and makes me want to dump her under a UVA lamp and leave her there slowly roasting for ten or twelve days
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Fortunately, the journey is short. Sonsoles leaves her car double parked, while she walks to the entrance of a posh girls’ school. A single mother? Inconceivable, given the availability of both abortion and the sacrament of penitence at the same time
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I position myself where I can see the school entrance but am least in the way and I wait. Ten minutes go by. Girls in blue and white uniforms start to come out, dozens of Sonsoles in the bud, dragging out their “s” below their incisors. It is a sight that alternately turns my stomach and awakens morbid desires in me. At last Sonsoles appears, accompanied by a girl or young lady of around fifteen years of age. My heart stops as if they’d pulled the plug on me. Then it happens
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The girl is the most extraordinary thing my sinful eyes have ever seen in all their cocksucking existence. If Sonsoles is her mother, I accept the divine plan that has placed Sonsoles on this planet, however inappropriate this celestial act may have seemed to me up until this moment. If she isn’t, the act of going to collect this girl provisionally lends a precious usefulness to her miserable existence. My heart starts beating again, at top speed. It has been centuries since something similar has happened to me and with some effort I order my thoughts, but instinct immediately compensates for lack of habit. Slowly it dawns on me that I’ve just fallen into a trap. They get into the car and I pull out after them, without resistance, without plans, without a hope
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From that moment on Sonsoles, who until then I have persecuted, becomes no more than a fuzzy blob escorting this disturbing adolescent goddess. The girl fills everything with her presence. I can even see her if I close my eyes: she is tall, her body, not yet in full bloom, long hair flowing in the wind like those stunning nymphs that rascal Botticelli used to paint, and a blue gaze so immense that distance doesn’t matter. I vaguely remember that I’ve never been attracted to blondes, but she isn’t a woman, and the effect she has on me is more than mere physical attraction. As everyone knows, the garbage cans of the spirit are overflowing with mere physical attractions
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The rest is too fleeting. I follow them as far as Calle Serrano, where they enter a store where the price of all the clothes is rounded up in multiples of ten thousand pesetas. Of course I would have liked to follow them into the changing rooms, by which I mean the girl’s changing room, but my mere presence in the shop would have been too suspicious. When they get back in the convertible, freeing a guy whose car has been blocked in by Sonsoles’ for a quarter of an hour, the girl is carrying a couple of bags and Sonsoles has about six. They don’t stow them in the trunk because it looks much better when you carelessly throw them on the back seat, over the convertible’s bodywork. Also because the trunk is a sight to behold as a result of the bash I gave it the other day. They climb in and I tail them again. When we stop at a traffic light, the girl sweeps her hair to one side and starts looking at one of the cops who go around showing off on their motorbikes and dismounting from time to time to direct the traffic at a crossroads. The local police cowboy is struck down on the spot, his whistle dangling from his lips, upright only thanks to his biker boots, mortally naked faced with his own insignificance. Five minutes later, the garage door of Sonsoles’ building opens again, and the convertible is swallowed up by the subterranean darkness. End of the apparition
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Let’s say it is quarter past seven. Day is not over and the sun is still up in the sky, but nothing makes sense anymore. There I am, sitting in a borrowed car, watching with my soul smashed to smithereens as the door closes with a clang that plunges me into deepest night. Disappointment and depressing thoughts don’t usually bother me, because my garden is overrun with all their weeds and I’ve even learned to sculpt them into hedges. But this bitterness has disarmed me and overpowered me in a way I no longer remembered possible. I think I’ve experienced this before. Perhaps the time when I went to a raffle with other children and one of them won the bicycle I yearned so much for and I got a stupid tank that fired rubber suckers instead of bullets. Perhaps when we were playing forfeits and Paloma, who had skin like porcelain, was condemned to kiss me and I felt the combination of her soft cheek and her repulsion and afterwards I saw her go away forever. Perhaps when my mother died on my nineteenth birthday and I suddenly turned a hundred years old
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I look for a parking place and head towards the Retiro. I go through the gate and hurriedly follow a path that leads me to a secluded spot in the park. I sit on a bench and stare at the trees. It is hot, I feel uncomfortable. I dodge the two questions for a while, but in the end I ask myself: What have I done to waste my life like this? How, of all the possible lives I could have lived, have I ended up living a life made up of nothing but shit and tunnels that don’t lead anywhere
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In general terms, I don’t give a damn about all the things I can’t do or have: that’s the advantage of thinking that everything you see is a piece of shit or is well on the way to becoming it. What is bad is when you see something that obviously isn’t a piece of shit, and at the same time you realize it’s beyond your reach. That is the moment of humiliation, and nobody likes to be humiliated. A poor devil, in other words me, can get through life for a long while by playing the cynic, although he doesn’t stop being a poor devil. Until you are humiliated. Then you have to run and hide where nobody will find you and burst into tears, with snot and all the works. You rediscover in yourself the fragile, disappointed child on which every adult’s personality is built, and at the same time you recover the longing to fulfil your dreams, and the impossibility of doing so. It doesn’t matter how much you run or how tall you are: this feeling shatters you. There are very brave and clever people out there, but it’s too complicated to be a tough guy when you’re sniffling away
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This afternoon I stayed there under the trees until it got really dark and I began to run the risk that some evil character might come and slash my guts open and take my credit cards (or rather the other way round, because if they slash you open first, they’ll have a helluva time finding out your pin number). Then I got the car and drove slowly under the city lights. Now here I sit, seeking solace from this stupid machine, but the machine only does what I tell it to, and can only reflect my astonishment back at me in fluorescent lines
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I must explain why I accept my fate, which is the most shameful thing of all. I squeeze my eyelids shut and I see her, moving, smiling, her amazing blue eyes darting here and there. And I think: Is it remotely possible for me to get her? I ought to know that the answer is no, or worse, that even if this did come to pass, it would all turn into dust, into shit, into nothing. I ought to accept that’s how it is and draw the consequences. But if I’m writing, and not lying on the floor of the inner courtyard with my head smashed to bits, it’s because I haven’t accepted it. When I was still able to believe it, this restlessness meant being alive. Now it is something that offends whoever has decreed I must die. May my punishment, when it comes, not be too painful
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And so, with this confession of guilt and even malice aforethought, I forgot the comfortable, petty stalking of Sonsoles and hastened my doom. To all those who, like me, find the ridiculous lyricism of the last few pages I’ve just written rather odd, all I can say in my defense is that at that time I was suffering a chemically induced melancholia which meant I was unquestionably quite vulnerable. After several years of doubt, I had ended up losing faith in psychiatrists and benzodiazepines. I don’t know if that can justify things, but perhaps it helps to explain it better. In those circumstances, and after having spent a couple of days toying with the gloomy idea of having some fun with Sonsoles, that young girl was too strong a temptation. I admit it’s possible that I’m nothing more than a pervert. But I suspect that, in my position, even Emmanuel from Königsberg-Kalininigrad himself would have said to hell with the categorical imperative and stopped telling his neighbors where to get off, in order to lie on his bed and dream of the abject delights of paedophilia.