A Bad End by Fernando Royuela

Author:Fernando Royuela [Fernando Royuela]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9788494426209
Publisher: Hispabooks
Published: 2016-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Slim had a very hierarchical, Manichean view of the world according to which any act or individual was judged in advance and slotted into one of the critical categories that, from his own experience, he’d stored on the shelves of his mind. This enabled him to reach decisions quickly when it was time to filch someone’s wallet or tackle a more testing task. “That guy’s a sucker, that one’s got a screw loose, the one there’s a weirdo, and the other, a prat,” were his favorite turns of phrase when it came to labeling people. This perfect, harmonious system, almost on a par with the solar one, helped me no end to straighten out my thinking and stop being dragged aimlessly through life, as had been my wont. At the time, I’d yet to realize that Providence organizes everything and that we should justify the outcomes of our behavior in the light of its designs. The established order, or at least the one established by the Movement, had helped Slim to survive, and he wasn’t prepared to let it go up in flames on any altar erected in the name of the fallacious progress of the people. Slim intuited that the Regime was near to collapse and would take his way of life with it to the drab kingdom of gray ash. He smelled it in his nostrils, savored it in his mouth. “When Franco hits the bucket, the reds will crawl out of their holes and make our balls itch with the shit from their doctrines. Just imagine a world run by workers, dwarfy. That’s the best these buggers can come up with: do the same here as they do in Russia, everyone godless, drinking from the same glass and shitting in the same pan, and then, when you die, into a mass grave so your bones can rot alongside everyone else’s,” and so he’d harangue, anisette after anisette, in an alcoholic rant that was as rambling as it was depressing.

Bit by bit, like the late blooms of a cement springtime, slogans appeared on the most down-at-heel walls of the city. They were words of struggle or desire that clearly demonstrated how, beyond officially recognized reality, other clandestine ways of thinking existed and sooner or later were bound to surface. Quite wrongly, Slim was of the view that the leftwing ideology dissidents generally espoused automatically excluded charity as a valid means to redistribute wealth and dictated hard toil and the sweat of one’s brow as the only route to perfecting humanity. He was by now of an age when he couldn’t contemplate adapting to any new crap that life hadn’t sent his way till now, so all those burgeoning freedoms made him see red. “I’d send these buggers off to another Valley of the Fallen to spend the rest of their lives breaking rocks rather than painting the walls with all that shit. The sov-er-eignty of the peo-ple comes from the strug-gle,” he exclaimed, ridiculing the graffiti syllableby syllable.

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