Arthur slithered through the gorse with surprising ease, thrilled by the charge in his blood that summer morning. The only obstacles to his weaving descent were the irritating protuberances that had emerged when he molted in the Spring. By that mid-July morning, just before the Feast of Santiago, they’d already taken on the unmistakable appearance of wings. The giant serpent understood what was happening to him; his metamorphosis was complete. He’d become a dragon. The time had come for him to abandon the caves of Pico Sacro—the burrows that sheltered him during lethargic winters and the sunny hunting grounds rich with rodents and birds unable to meet his gaze.

He heaved his body onto a boulder warmed by the fleeting sun and readied himself to begin the first phase of his journey east, beyond the Jordan Valley to the Valhalla of the serpents. Propelled by the energetic midday sun, he beat his wings and felt the novel commotion of flight. For a creature thus far condemned to scrape his belly over the earthly crust, it was more exciting than the rise of the temperature or a succulent bite of goldfinch. He should head southeast, follow the route of the migratory birds who arrived as he emerged from his winter slumber and wrote Vs for “voyage” in the late-summer vault, which chills the blood of reptiles. But before setting out towards the crowded urbanities of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, he wanted to visit his city, the only one in the dusk-facing vicinity. He decided to trace a circle, coasting over the darkening lands and the Western ocean, before finally turning and fixing his rigid eyelids on the rising sun.

With a brief flutter, he landed atop the rust-red Mesopotamia of roofs between the Sar and Sarela rivers, discolored by many seasons of rain. He resisted the temptation to swoop down for a drink in the pasture beside the larger river, so as not to startle the brigade of parks and gardens that adorn its banks, and wove like a sparrowhawk over the Porta do Camiño Francés, marked by a column of pilgrims. Arthur half understood the force that pulsed through the walking multitude, eager for idyllic landscapes and spiritual purification, and he envied the contentment of those grunting and exhausted masses about to enter the shrine of Santiago, to cross the finish line. He was as far away from his own destination as the body of the primordial serpent is long, thousands of leagues wrapped around the tree of a very different Mesopotamia. He began his orbit.

All things considered, it was a good day to visit Compostela; the Apostle himself arrived one 25th of July, and tended to show his mild face only in that month. All the others were dominated by Boanerges, son of thunder, and his alter ego as christened by Jesus himself. It was also a pleasant time of day. Praza de Cervantes was bustling in the heat of the midday sun. Where once delinquents were exposed to public stigma on the stake, now gathered a congregation marked by more private stigmata. They waited for the methadone delivery van, always punctual with its distribution between one and two o’clock.

He flew over the gables and spires of the cathedral, admiring the pre-Columbian imagery in certain decorations. Stepped pyramids evoked the form of the ziggurat in his wistful mind. He observed the roiling of Praza do Obradoiro. The amalgam clashed with itself: tambourine music, pickpockets, street performers, all unburdening the wallets of tourists. He could only make out the broad strokes in the light muted by the granite, but even so, he thought he could discern the ash crosses on the visitors’ foreheads as they left the basilica after ritually bumping heads with the Santo dos Croques. He bitterly lamented his form, which made it impossible for him to join the devout travelers below. He would have liked to descend and contemplate the Pórtico do Paraíso, carved in the image of his true homeland, had it not been for the ancestral panic that humans feel in the presence of dragons. He’d witnessed it in encounters with tattling little girls and brave laborers, who came armed with hoes but retreated nevertheless before his challenging stare. On the eastern facade, the Porta Santa seemed to be guarded by bellicose standards of peaceful colors—white, sky blue—fluttering in Praza da Quintana. He looked upon them sympathetically, because they suggested the return of the Sefes, the primeval Celtic nation that wore a serpent as its symbol.

His flight continued parallel to Rúa do Bico and its shops, monuments, and camera film, where couples were too busy with their shopping to heed its nomenclature. Nobody ever gave Arthur a single bico, or kiss, even though the locals who lived near his lair on Pico Sacro believed in the legend of the serpent who would become a fairy if properly smooched. He abandoned the urban nucleus by Porta Faxeira and enjoyed the panoramic view of the boulevard lined with voluptuous trees dominated by a haughty roller coaster. From Paseo da Ferradura, people set off fireworks that snaked and snorted around him, throwing him off kilter, darkening the Compostelan sky. “Ce sont des villes,” Arthur murmured in a language he didn’t know, and flew towards the western sea, hoping for one final view of the end of the world—finis terrae—to comfort him during his punishing journey to Babylon, to the womb of the Great Whore, the mother of us all.

* * *

“It’s quarter to two, and we’re still with you live on The Mouth of the Wolf, open mike for creatures of the night… Yes, we’ve got a caller on the line.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Helena Rodríguez here, who am I speaking to?”

“A nocturnal beast.”

“Wanna give us a name?”

“You can call me Barabbas.”

“The floor’s all yours, Barabbas. It’s time for me to fade into silence, leaving thousands of pricked ears all trained on you.”

“This one goes out to Caritá, rotting in a cell in Pereiro de Aguiar. Are you listening, dickhead? You better watch yourself, cause you’re about to get skinned alive. What, did you think I was scared of you? You hunted those boys down like rabbits and they didn’t defend themselves because they didn’t know they were dealing with a wounded dog. Four dead. The bodies were all over the news, like something out of a movie. And the only reason you didn’t finish off Lax-a-Lot was so he could tell the tale of your little stunt with eyes wide open. Four unsuspecting junkies, holed up in their motel, flipping out and pissing the bed. You go in with your pistol, open fire, and voilà! There’s your face on the nightly news. Vigués, whoever doesn’t know you yet is gonna think you’re some third-rate Soprano. And then that police chase, and you running over pedestrians in the Old Town in your wheezing jalopy—daddy’s taxi, but that part wasn’t in the papers, now was it? Boy, what a night! Some donut-munchers from near the Portuguese border who only donned their cops’ uniforms so they wouldn’t have to soil themselves in the village muck. Some Andalusian fig-stealers who want nothing more than to go down to Morocco to smoke themselves blind on the cheap. You really let yourself get caught by apes like that? There you were in Vite, the fucking hood, surrounded, ready to shoot before the Telegaita cameras even got there. Man, how could you let that happen? Don’t you see that they’ve been rabid to put a Neapolitan shootout on TV? The viewers have had it up to their eyebrows with flamenco and bagpipes courtesy of Ourense City Hall. You felled more than one bird snoozing in the park tree branches and maybe even an old lady leaning out her window, but you couldn’t put a hole in a single uniform? Oof, and then when you ran out of bullets and came out with your hands up crying, ‘Kill me! Kill me!’ The only reason the fuzz didn’t pull the trigger is because all they care about is getting paid, getting trashed, and which lapel they’ll pin their medals on. If they need a bit more excitement, maybe they’ll beat on their wives. But don’t worry; I’m here to make your wish come true. You’re the shit when it comes to picking off junkies who aren’t even worth what they shoot into their arms, right? But they wouldn’t do business with you because I didn’t let them. It wasn’t their idea, you turkey, it was this guy right here who booted you out of the business, just like one of these days I’ll boot you off God’s green earth. Why? Because I’m sharper, more handsome, and crazier than you. You’re no better than a booger I picked out of my nose. You think I’m too scared to step in a pile of shit when it’s in my way? If I were you, I’d try to find a belt or some shoelaces to hang myself with before morning. But if you’re not brave enough, don’t worry, I’ve already hired the guy who’ll take you out when you least expect it. Properly, mind you, I didn’t leave this task to just anyone. My guy makes sure the pig doesn’t squeal, doesn’t bleed, any more than necessary. You’ll have time to say your prayers. Though they won’t do you much good, Caritá, damn you to hell!”

“Finished?”

“I’ve whistled my tune, Heleniña, but if you want to give me your personal number… I’d do you up good. Barabbas still has some tricks up his sleeve.”

“Good night.”

* * *

“When’s the girl going out?”

“Whenever she feels like it. Go with her yourself, if you’re so concerned. Teach her not to break the seal when she’s out on the piss.”

Rótolo lowers his gaze to his dirty plate, grains of white rice trapped in a loose muck, like the gunk that sticks to your shoes during the first spring rains. The remains of a Puerto Rican dish: arroz con habichuelas. He’s caught in a great torrent of thoughts that bashes him painfully against jagged rocks. Borinquén, la isla del Edén, que en su cantar el gran Gautier llamó la perla de los mares, ahora que tú te mueres con tus pesares… For a moment, humming beneath the low-hanging lamp over the kitchen table, framed by a cone of light like something out of an interrogation room, he imagines himself in the skin of a Caribbean leader liberating the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico from its colonial bondage. His wife seemed determined to burn holes in his stomach with her exotic dishes. His wife who was leaving the kitchen to survey her wardrobe and choose the outfit best suited for a night of mischief, most likely to whet her lover’s appetite.

The night’s festivities would begin with TV stars squawking from the balcony of the Pazo do Raxoi, over the square teeming with tourists and local farmers. When he was a minister on the city council, a herd of celebrities would parade across the balcony, lending their sparkle to the Feast of the Apostle and its great bacchanalia, stars who brought so much prestige to the city they made the Milky Way jealous. What a joy it had been to take out his luxury pen (his wife still remembered his birthday back then) and sign checks for two hundred thousand, three hundred, half a million pesetas to line the nests of this flock of magpies. With money that wasn’t his, that he wouldn’t miss, because Santiago is a first-class city, not some mud trap in the boonies. Money for the purse of a band of folk musicians. Ay, Rótolo, what divine parties you throw! How he’d take the air with the singer in a buggy drawn by two black-and-white horses. Won’t you buy me a bouquet of violets? They’re the first of the season!

“What are you mumbling about?” asks his wife from their bedroom.

“Nothing,” he abandons his falsetto, his lament interrupted. “I want to know when the girl is going to come out of the bathroom.”

The girl. Who he rocked in his arms as a baby. Who he swaddled in money and protected from her mother’s nagging for years. That darling girl who grew into such a hopeless idiot, throwing up in the bathroom as if possessed by a demon, hating the buttocks that store what little she keeps down.

Rótolo gets up and puts the plates in the sink. Sticking his fingers in the leftover fat makes him feel sick, and he contorts his features into a series of ugly faces, remembering how his father would smack him when he did that as a kid. “You’ll get stuck that way!” he’d shout. He should cure her of this throwing up business once and for all. He’d kick down the bathroom door and punch her in the face. “You’ll never be a model! Forget about snagging some petty count you saw in a magazine!” But instead, he just keeps washing the dishes drowsily, cursing the day he mounted his wife and conceived a top-model with a balloon belly. The more she starves it the bigger it swells, like those of the kids in Biafra he sees in the newspaper. She’s an imbecile, concerned only with the circumference of her rear hemispheres, even though the western and eastern sides of her brain could fit in a walnut shell.

The mayor had thrown him out on his ass, taken away his astronomic salary without explanation, discarded him the way he’d stamp out a cigarette butt. He, who’d been the best culture minister in the city’s history: film festivals, theater troupes, concerts that echoed through the arts inserts of Madrid. That puffed up provincial despot who pocketed commissions from art galleries when he brokered purchases of their pieces to beautify public buildings. All the small talk he had to endure, laughing at the jokes of drunk sculptors; mad, frail painters; soft, drunk, crazy critics. Mingling with personalities of unspeakable dullness who hoped for the chance to fool around with the exhibition hostesses, who launched diatribes about how the CIA promotes abstract painting, who blew their putrid breath in his face and patronized him for being a political peon. Was he meant to endure these indignities for nothing? Maintain this farce for the greater glory of the boss-man? Wasn’t it worth money? Does the little politician really think that he can’t see the whole picture? The puppets and swindlers are just the foreground. But the devil’s in the details, the artist’s touch, the careful selection of the correct PR rep for the ride from the airport to the exhibition space, her shaved nape, her dancer’s legs, her Castellano unpolluted by any Galician accent.

Despite its Ladies, its Gentlemen, and its Clergy, Compostela is no celestial Jerusalem. That was the conclusion he drew from his many years on the council. Surely he was owed payment for such a deception. At least as much as the mayor, His Highest Altruist, who was raking in a seven-digit salary on top of being guaranteed a statue in some square, the keys to the city, and a street named after him upon retirement. He didn’t even poke the wasp’s nest over their ridiculous city plan, the European Capital of Culture, and the Howevermany Anniversary? He’d insisted on being paid for his disillusionment, and paid he was, my friend. In pinches of flesh from the girls who worked under his command. Like that writer he’d invited to give a speech—sixty-eight kilos of grade A meat.

That was when his wife—heretofore satisfied with his earnings both above board and below, with his trysts—started to call him a cynic. She began to seek out lovers identical to Rótolo in their style, their passion for new cuisine, and their fetish for shaved napes. Their every shirt, meal, and caress was infused with faith in Compostela’s modernity, was convinced of the goodness of PSOE and cocaine, was bewitched by Miguel Ríos’s concert tours. Rótolo stopped calling her the Fire of His Loins and she started calling him a scarecrow.

“I don’t want you staying out until the cats start crowing,” he cautioned his daughter, who’d finally left the bathroom with the puffy face and watery eyes of a cirrhosis patient.

“I’ll come home when everyone else does.”

“But not drunk. You just keep sticking your fingers down your throat. Alcohol has calories too, you know.”

“Uff. Go fuck yourself.”

He ponders the wisdom of Old Mother Galicia, who’d stopped bearing children decades ago. It’s too bad that couples now adopt dogs instead. The front door slammed insolently once, twice, before he’d finished washing the dishes. The anorexic demon and her mother—still in good shape thanks to her seafood diet—left the apartment one after the other in search of nocturnal magic. Their stupidity worried him slightly. The daughter would have left without condoms in her bag, and the mother had surely forgotten what a shiver her vulva could put in the horns of men.

But no matter. There was a six pack of beer in the fridge, just enough to resist until midnight. Then, when the streets were full of fools, when the childish joy of oohing and ahing at the fireworks had finished, he’d go out to drink in the shadows, to chit-chat with the rabble getting loaded at the bars, thirsty from revelry. “Revelers, revelers,” he conducted an invisible orchestra with his foam-dripping beer bottle, directing his rallying cry towards the walls that echoed polyphonic, towards the denizens of Rick’s café from Casablanca.

An irritating ring interrupts the Marsellesa. He searches the whole house for the wireless phone, a model with a blue cradle that he finds parked on the bedroom night table between two enchanting photos of a lost paradise: the girl dressed up as Gene Kelly beneath the mist that washed down the staircase in Praza das Praterías; his joconde wife against the wall of the Ponte Vecchio with the docile Arno in the background and San Miniato of the Mountain in lontano.

“Hello?”

“…”

“Who is it?”

“An interested party.”

“What?”

“Your wife has been bonking my husband, so we’re equally damned.”

He lets out a hoppy burp and transports himself in his imagination to the corner bar, mid-afternoon, alone with the waiter and the television. A talk show is on, hosted by a gossipy presenter surrounded by wives with grievances of marital infidelity. “Now, tell us your story.” “Well, I’m a victim. My man’s been stepping out on me like there’s no tomorrow with some snot-nosed brat who probably doesn’t even have hair down there yet.”

“You watch too much television. I saw this program too, where they read the riot act to the husbands, but this is a decent household. My wife sleeps with me and an issue of ¡Hola! magazine.”

“I can prove it! Raida, that’s the broad’s name. The cuckold is one Rótolo and they have a daughter so skinny the wind could blow her away.”

“What floor do you live on, ma’am?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“First? Second? It’s important.”

“Third. Are you that pushover Rótolo? Stop worrying about other people’s homes. What do you care if I have an elevator or a street view? You’d better put that bitch on a shorter leash so she doesn’t ruin any more families.”

“Go out on the balcony. Cheer yourself up with a glass of anis, or whatever elixir you have in the cupboard. And then dive off head first. If your husband is treading on my toes, that’s a shame. But she changes company like she changes her socks, so you might be telling me last week’s stale love story. I admit that this house is contaminated; Raida is a Russian nuclear plant. But I’m brave enough to live with the tumors. Chernobyl hasn’t exploded just yet. You’re as bad as the adulterers, rancid rapeseed oil, wine contaminated with heavy metal. A nanny goat who calls at all hours just to poison me. Seriously, go off yourself. There’s too much chaff cluttering up the street; proper people don’t have anywhere to step. There’s no respect for the home anymore.”

He was speaking to himself. The indignant wife had hung up after his first insults. He turned on the television, waiting for the advertisements for the supernatural hotlines—Angel Tarot, Finger Pads of Destiny—and the erotic ones. Then he ran up the phone bill with five minutes of esoteric dialogue and innocuous indecencies. One perverted cherub suggested anal sex, but the proposition was a bit too abstract for him. To her vehement solicitations insisting upon violence and depth, he could only respond, “Butts beware.” Another husky voice, belonging to a woman called Sabia, read his astral chart and implored him, “Do me a favor and be happy.”

With a pressure in his ears, he went over to the vestibule, took down a light jacket from the hanger, turned off the lights, and passed over the bridge of the welcome mat that lay across the pit separating him from the night’s celebration. When he closed the door, a sigh escaped him: “Nothing is sacred anymore.”

* * *

Amador Salgado pursed his lips in defiance of the gaiety that swept down Rúa da Porta Faxeira from Alameda Park to the café terraces. The tourist pricing demanded by greedy restaurant proprietors could explain his current vexation, as could the ugly plastic chairs giving the street a tacky patina and challenging city ordinance. But it was a different distaste that made him fiddle ceaselessly with his bow tie, light cigarette after cigarette, and reorganize the pile of books filling the table before him. A disgust that put enough of a tremble in his wrist to make him drip coffee on his otherwise immaculate clothes. Its origins were older and farther away—a hundred kilometers southeast in the Ourensan back country, to be precise.

Distance—mtesis, as poeticized by the junior Cunqueiro—is a necessary condition for knowledge. Amador’s knowledge of his mother was exhaustive. “It could always be worse,” the old lady’s familiar voice was blessedly distorted by a telephone cable. “Some kids don’t give their parents a second thought or spend their lives in and out of jail cells.” He got the sense that she would rather visit him in half the prisons of Spain than make do with seeing him once in a blue moon and a sparse exchange of courteous phrases during their Sunday phone call. At least then she could be useful to him by delivering food and warm clothing. Sometimes, during their phone calls, he would offer a tiny opening for her maternal vigilance to latch on to. He’d admit that he needed to go to the podologist, for example, or change dry cleaners so his cashmere sweaters wouldn’t be ruined. These more pragmatic subjects would unleash a wave of reproaches that Amador would take in his stride, though he could feel her twisting his ear, squeezing his throat, the umbilical cord still unsevered. “You haven’t had that bunion removed yet, you half wit? If you let yourself go any farther, there’ll be no coming back. And you think you’re so smart, you empty ball sack. God forgive me!” The old lady returned to life for an instant, became a mother again, paddled above her habitual stupefying lethargy, no longer held in check by soap operas or romance novels.

But that wasn’t Amador’s life. His Santiago wasn’t the same as his mother’s would be if he were a good son and brought her to live with him. His mission was splayed out before him on the table, giving the other clients on the terrace plenty to talk about. Who takes their whole library out for a walk, anyway? An assortment of lives enthralled him—bandits, courtesans, guerillas, and pirates. The Youth of Pepa Loba; Carolina Otero, the World’s Ballerina; An Intimate Memoir of La Belle Otero; The Burla Negra; Bitter Have Been the Hours; The Buzzard of the Seas; The Pirate of Moureira; The Maquis and Their Papers. These climactic biographies elicited a yearning that consumed him entirely, and his mother was now the farthest thing from his mind. Though his disregard for her was sad, it didn’t undermine the determination that sustained him during work—taking tickets and seating spectators with a flashlight at the cinema—and helped him steel himself against the murmurs of ignorant people when he sat in a café behind a parapet of paperback books.

Amador belonged to that rare caste of men with a vocation, a vocation that fueled the light flickering in his eyes. It was his duty to rescue noble personalities from obscurity, destinies with unimpeachable purpose that needs no justification. Because, though he may dress in his finest during his free time, may adopt the disposition of the poet, a cinema ticket-taker still had to justify himself constantly, to give a thousand explanations. Did it even make sense to be Amador Salgado? Would his name ever mean anything to anyone besides the police officers who issue ID cards on Rúa de Pitelos?

Truth be told, Amador Salgado had stayed back in Ourense like an abandoned snake skin. He’d been reborn in Santiago under a variety of pseudonyms found in the bylines of student journals heading articles and profiles about great figures: the Napoleonic generals Ney and Soult after whom so many places were named during the French occupation, John Cartwright mounted on his paint horse, the dwarf in The Wild Wild West…

A still more secret writer lived within him. He too was interested in greatness, but selected from a more local pantheon. At the bar, he would write about Galician heroes in a notebook that his boss—the distributor who owns the movie theater—gave him for Christmas.

A percussion band of peasants draped in sheep skins from Vilariño de Conso was passing in front of Bar Azul, beating their drums in a deafening thunder and squeezing passersby from the narrow sidewalk against the tables. In their escape attempt, some pedestrians knocked over his books and a cup of coffee. Amador collected his treasures and yelled a few choice words at the percussionists from his native province. “Is there anything more insignificant than to be from Ourense?” he asked into the collar of his fine, sand-colored silk shirt. This question, borrowed from Borges (“Is there anything more insignificant than to be Basque?”), was at odds with his tendency to glorify Galician heroes ignored by the general public. Pepa Loba had nothing on Jesse James, Benito Soto wasn’t exactly The Black Corsair, and Carolina Otero couldn’t hold a candle to Marilyn Monroe. Why waste his talent on such small potatoes? Because he was an incorrigible dreamer. Approximately three thousand people in Santiago read the papers from Madrid and he felt that they all looked down on him. They would bathe themselves in the glow of luminaries from the capital, dismissive of the black hole where their own legends took shape. They could never understand that a black hole contains all the concentrated matter of a supernova. To them, any dream that survives in a population nucleus of less than a million is ridiculous. They, the readers of the metropolitan journals, think of their own selves as incomplete beings, exiled, left for dead in the wrong place, far from the TV studios, literary supplements, and the Champions League.

Compared with that brotherhood of exiles, Amador is a barbarian. His gang is composed of the horses from the Ponderosa ranch and that gnome from the Wild Wild West. He’s like a boy from Katanga putting on a pair of Adidas sneakers. Just a game of dress up until he makes his bid for Europe and starts ruffling imperialist feathers. The Ourensan barbarian had traveled abroad only once, to Paris, and brought back impressions not from the Louvre, the existentialist cafés, or the urban grandeur, but rather an incident in Austerlitz Station.

Somebody pushed him as he entered the metro, causing him to strike a tense and imposing Moroccan in the back of the head. “Excusez-moi,” he stuttered. The Moor seemed ill-inclined to accept his apology and shot him a look as if to say, “I’ll take care of you in due time, you demonic infidel!”

He was a hair’s breadth from setting off the Battle of Algiers. Under that sinister gaze, he felt like Millán-Astray facing off with Abd el-Krim, preparing to decimate the Riffian tribes. During the whole journey from Austerlitz to Gare du Nord, he thought disparagingly of the corpulent characters out of Conrad, mesmerized by indigenous beauty, surrendered to the exotic rabble. On the other hand, his opinion of those who read the papers from the capital was no higher. Compared to them, he saw himself as a predatory merchant on the Arabian seas, determined to humiliate unsuspecting Western vagabonds.

The other patrons of the Azul were talking about Brad Pitt’s latest film, the king’s Borbonic loyalty, and the Catalan parliament’s Civil Union Law. Meanwhile, he splashed in the muck of nineteenth-century villages with Pepa Loba, the Atlantic waters predated by Benito Soto, the ocean waves of Nice as contemplated by La Belle Otero from the Promenade des Anglais, the blood saved and spilled by anti-Franco guerillas. He was consumed by the paltry history of those who barely have a history at all when he realized that a man sitting near him was sending him furtive glances.

“What’s eating you, careca?” he asked, certain that the intruder wouldn’t recognize the Portuguese word insulting his baldness.

“You caught me. I was studying the nobility of your bust,” lied the cue ball. “It reminds me of a sculpture of a Roman patrician. Where are you from, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“From the same backwater as you,” he retorted, having already identified the accent.

“Ah, so you’re a transient. I spend a month here every summer. Ourense is unbearable in August. Plus, there are so many tourists in Compostela and I like to play the guide—just to meet people, of course, no economic motives.”

Amador examined his interlocutor: small, chubby, with a round face. He had a strange accent, mixing traces from Rabo de Galo, Ourense, and Lavapiés—a bachelor’s degree, at least. He condescended to leave the company of the icons for a minute, not without a certain superiority complex; in his sandy silk shirt and ravishing bowtie, he was dressed to kill.

“I live here permanently. I left Ourense around the time of the Miño festivals.”

“Those were the days! It was a different Ourense back then, more coquettish. Now it’s far too vulgar.”

“As I understand, it’s advanced greatly. I heard you can shoot off fireworks with boys from good families around the Alameda now. Before, those things only happened at seminary.”

The amateur guide gave a little jump in his plastic chair and swiped at the air with his hands in such a good imitation of a flamenco dance that Amador feared that he’d try to read his fortune. Then he changed the topic. His tone became grave, though his pupils conserved a light peculiar to the Ourensan night, the Alameda with its chattering transvestites.

“What’s your name? I only ask because I dabble in heraldry.”

“Amador Salgado.”

“Of the Salgados de Amoeiro. Your ancestral home has such a sweet little crest: a salt dish with a pigeon pecking at the crystals.”

“Nice try. Actually, I was born in the home of a master carpenter in Cabeza de Vaca. There will always be bastards, of course. These nobles had many so-called ‘children of the brambles.’ And what about you, who are your people?”

“Devito Frade. You’ll have seen the surname on the sides of coaches. My family has a line of buses.”

He held out a hand as humid as his lips. Amador allowed his fingers to be gripped and looked out at the street. A few steps away marched a lone Japanese taking pictures of crabs in the eatery windows.

“Look, there goes your mark. Go rope him in. You’re wasting your time with me. I prefer women. Know why?”

“They’re fairly understanding of idiosyncrasies?”

“For their incontinence.”

* * *

A headache. As if he were a ram itching to lock his worm-riddled horns, to alleviate the pain by fighting, by doing harm. He soothed himself imagining evil deeds, stealing from a fireworks shop, for example, stocking up on multi-shots. He imagined himself hopping about on his one leg in front of Bar Marcial on Avenida Rodrigo de Padrón—that kennel where sick dogs gather to shake off their fleas. He’d light a wick with a cigarette and aim at the door. In his gleeful fantasy, the patrons flee the smoke like wasps with their stingers singed. He would have loved to attack the nest of cops, but he was a cripple. He was missing a leg—sliced off by a trolley—and that’s why they felt they could push him so far. But maybe he could set fire to Mount Pedroso, light a bonfire that would burn half the province.

Ribeirao descended the mountain, clopping like the cavalry, each hop launching him meters forward, vaulting himself with his crutch, sweating out the rage that was roiling his innards and quickening his heartbeat. Because, boy, had they gone too far this time. It was unspeakable what they’d done to him—abandon a poor invalid on the slopes of Pedroso! How mean someone would have to be, mean like that macho agent, son of a cheap whore, probably tossing back shots with his buddies at Bar Marcial right this second. And butchering the story, obviously, of the peg-leg eating shit with every stumble on his way back down to the city, his wooden leg tripping over pebbles or his arthritic shoulders failing him. And they’d acted like they were doing him a favor:

“Ah, Ribeirao! What am I going to do with you?”

“You know, back in the day, I used to work for a living. Never in a million years could I have imagined humiliating myself like this. Begging. But what choice do I have if I want a crust of bread to nibble on? I’m in my sixties and only have one leg to get around on.”

“Apply for a government pension and get out of our hair.”

“The government spends all its money on dog catchers like you.”

The cop grabbed the cripple by the lapels, shook him like a tree, and let him go. Off balance, he traced a wobbly circle around his abuser with his wooden foot, as if he were a compass.

“Don’t get cocky, you pile of shit. You can’t fool me. I saw you snatch that woman’s bag, and now you’re gonna pay for it.”

Curious onlookers surrounded them to watch the theatrics: the pilgrims marveling at the Porta Santa, the clients on the café terraces, and the good-for-nothings who spent their time seated on the steps of Quintana dos Vivos. The whole square gathered around the cop and the cripple. The victim of the crime—a Portuguese tourist—screamed and gesticulated, spluttering a spittle of insults, making him out to be quite the weasel.

At first, Ribeirao had simply requested alms in the name of Our Lady of Fátima, with all due respect, but the lady averted her face and continued speaking to her husband and two frightened kids, who were wearing t-shirts printed with Luís Figo’s face. He committed the theft in full view of the two officers who oversee the foot traffic in Quintana (especially the riff-raff that gathers on the steps: junkies from Praza de Cervantes—who wander over after the gypsy’s midday dropoff—and the pied-noir nomads who hang around them).

The beggar was wise to their tricks. They did their helicopter routine, allowing the alms-collectors to importune the tourists… up to a point. Until they overstepped by hurling an insult, spitting in a coffee cup, or—as he’d done at the devil’s behest—sticking his paws into a bag forsaken on a chair. Only then would they hulk down from their watchtower at the top of the steps and stir the rats’ nest. He’d seen them beat the head of one unfortunate against a marble table at the most elegant café, under the arcade at the far end of the square.

He knew that he’d never be terribly successful as a pickpocket. His getaway vehicle had seen better days. Taking the bag from the Portuguese whore was a rookie mistake. Not even ravenous hunger would possess him to fall into that trap. It wasn’t starvation that had clouded his judgment. Two weeks had gone by since his last visit to Esperanza, and when the gap began to yawn between nights of debauchery, his eyes started to linger on the pretty transients, muddling his reason. Memories began to accost him of a time when he could pay for more luxurious indiscretions.

The abandoned pocketbook hanging on the chair’s backrest, the lusophone family chatting, excluding him, closing their ranks to escape the supplicating gazes; Esperanza’s thighs, their tremulous fat, her wizened vulva… a spurt of madness.

The bullish policeman hadn’t finished his sermon yet:

“You sure are bold, nobody can deny that. But, you know, honest begging is one thing and scavenging is something else. I’ve been watching you; when you’re not stealing, you’re annoying people, bothering the girls… long story short, you’re a piece of fly shit we need to clean up. We gotta make this city nice and pretty, you see, cause all of Europe comes through here. And they come to see the Apostle, not an unwashed bum who does nothing but stink the place up. The cleanest thing you have on is your false leg, and it looks like a stick you pried off a chicken coop.”

Ribeirao didn’t speak. He wasn’t even paying attention to the mouth breather preaching at him. He could make a retort about the rotten thieves running City Hall. Or call out the scoundrels with the poodle act in Praza do Obradoiro, the constant thrashings they used to make it perform its adorable tricks. How the cops never intervened, despite the Animal Protection Society’s objections. He didn’t do drugs, didn’t piss against the walls of Igrexa de Salomé like so many other panhandlers. But he didn’t bother to pitch a single one of these arguments, because he already knew the score. That repugnant man in uniform was cruel as a cat; he would play with his prisoner until he got tired of laughing, then take him to the clink to entertain the officers unfortunate enough to be on duty during the summer holiday.

He’d returned in tatters the last time they did that. Some glutton eating at a restaurant on Entrerrúas was blocking the path completely. He had his cane hooked between the table legs, and Ribeirao couldn’t pass. So he snacked on a langoustine, just to fortify the stomach with a slurp of seafood. The pig—who’d already picked over the shrimp and crab—had the gall to punch him. An invalid! Despite his pleas, the brute tattled to the police.

But usually, when he was thrown in the traps at the station on Rodrigo de Padrón, it wasn’t for stealing or for eating off someone else’s plate. It was mostly for having fun. Girls: his passion and perdition, his sole obsession since getting caught in the sorrowful life of a mendicant.

It’s not that he wasn’t a womanizer when he was young, but at least his attention had been split between girls and machines. Before losing his leg to a bad spill from the Ducati—he was showing off, leaning too hard into a corner—he’d had the privilege and the pleasure to blaze the pipes of a Gibson, a Montesa, and even a Vespa with a sidecar. Even after the accident, thanks to his tobacco business, he was able to keep a DKW with the controls on the handlebars. Back then, he was a bigshot and the door to Dona Carme’s house on Rapa da Folla was always open to him. They weren’t doing him any favors either; he pulled his weight by bribing the judge every time some upstart began beating the drum to close the bordello. Twenty-two thousand pesetas, which was dick sweat to him at the time. There, every girl was a perfect ten and they’d throw themselves in his line of fire. He burned through cash until he lost his shirt.

When the time suited her, Dona Carme took flight with her flock of quails. Which was something he couldn’t do himself. He’d been ripped off by his tobacco investors and ended up cycling through the pestilent berths of the prison in A Coruña. He fell in with the lowest of the low, sold tip offs to the police, got beat up by assorted parties, all to end up a gimme-gimme. His bikes were ruined; never again would he experience the security of taking to the open road or watching the world through the high windshield of the DKW, that dear window from which he could still woo a woman like a normal three-legged man.

Goodbye to the girls that the madam would line up for him, back when he could handle twenty-two fucks in a row without breaking a sweat. But the need doesn’t abandon a desirous man just like that. Sometimes he gives himself a happy. With Esperanza, there is no happiness; she treated him like a filthy cow who spends all day lying in its own shit and needs its teats washed before being milked. He craved the satisfaction of sharpening his tool where the girls could see he’s still got it. He looked for out-of-the-way places, Camiño das Hortas, Canella das Trompas, the darkness of Pelamios in the shadow of the San Francisco Convent walls. Women and girls, regardless of age, fled like sparks from his retreating foreskin. From the glorious years on Rapa da Folla—when he could go from zero to sixty in nothing flat and didn’t quit until he ran out of gas—to the furtive masturbation that was turning his pleasure into a rushing touchdown. That being said, on more than one occasion, the newts in uniform showed up before last call…

The newts weren’t in any rush that night when they put him in the van and took him to the station. They abandoned him for hours, which he spent collapsed on a cell bed, simmering in his rancor. Around midnight, the cop who arrested him came by with a bottle of beer and a stale sandwich. That joker was acting all buddy-buddy. “You know, dummy,” he chirped, “when we arrest you, it’s for your own good, to teach you a lesson.” They caught him off guard, docile. He hung his head, taking the opportunity to repent, imitating the demeanor of a naughty ne’er-do-well caught in the act, inwardly pleased that he’d be returned to the revelry of the streets full of busy, smiling people. He felt himself lifted into the air, pushed towards an unmarked vehicle—this time they spared him the bars-and-cuffs act—and driven out of town.

“On your way back, chew over my advice. Or stay gone. Either way, go in grace; give us a few hours’ worth of peace and quiet,” the cop warned him, slamming the car door violently. Ribeirao almost got his fingers torn off his hand as he tried to stop the car, hoping they’d drop the act, that it was all just a bit of drama to teach him a lesson. They deserted him at the peak of the mountain, sparks flying in their wake, with an excellent view of the nocturnal city lit up from afar, just in time to see the ritual burning of the false Mudéjar facade and the firework session that emanated from Rúa Xoán XXIII like a big bang of titillating lightning bugs.

Ribeirao stewed over his mistreatment, just as the cop had advised him to, inspired by the celestial light show to make pyrotechnic trouble. He got out his plastic lighter, shook it like a medicine bottle to free up every last drop of gas, and approached the edge of the roadside fields. They were lined with Scotch broom, which is ideal kindling.

The rural night is rich in mirages, just like the desert. A donkey bobbing its head at intervals for bites of corn dictated by its appetite can be mistaken for the shadow of Evil (a perverse witch, Cerberus of Hell) in the mind of a skittish traveler. But the vision that recoiled before the cripple left no room for fear-driven doubts. The lighter flame revealed what was quite certainly the silhouette of a fearful animal hunched in the irrigation ditch. It was a young woman, dressed in light summer clothing, phosphorescent in the darkness, torn, and hiding her face behind arms in the defensive position of a boxer fallen against the ropes.

He switched the lighter to his other hand, resolved to beat his own record and finish before the waning flame extinguished altogether. He plucked the last button clumsily with his crutch-strengthened right hand, thereby freeing his penis. He obtained an arched squirt that provoked a weak squeal when it fell upon the frightened huddle, a discreet creature more used to staying silent. The woman didn’t appreciate her shower. Upon receiving the warm, viscous mucus on her raised arms, she pulled herself together and stole away, stealing his crutch and pushing him in the gutter.

Beneath his arm, he felt a hard object digging into his waist. He’d lost the lighter in the fall and had to identify it by touch. Precise information from his fingers as they caressed the relic told him that it was a wrinkled leather boot with its shoelaces half untied, its mouth out of place, its tongue sticking out, and its toe caked in dust. And still one more entertaining morsel: the boot had a three-inch heel. The fugitive creature was small and vain.

* * *

“Are you Italian?”

“My grandfather came over from Bari in 1930 and opened a barber shop in front of the Castromil bus station. He shaved and trimmed the gentlemen getting off the buses. Their hair was always matted, rotten from their flat caps. Those things don’t breathe at all, and most people didn’t use shampoo yet. The old man knocked up my grandmother and hightailed it to Argentina, leaving us only the name di Russo, but I don’t know why my family chose to keep it. The name of a shameless fool. And then to add insult to injury, they stuck me with Rótolo at the baptismal font. The barber shop still exists and still belongs to my family.”

“So you’re a coiffeur? How interesting.”

Rótolo eyed the girl steadily, one ripe fig among the mature dames who make up the greater part of the clientele in that Old City pub. These queens of the professional class owned the historic part of the city, practitioners of law and medicine who, despite their face lifts, were said to be as rancid as the legend of the Apostle. The teachers looked very modern by contrast. They wouldn’t quite fit in with Queen Urraca in the medieval period, but they wouldn’t look out of place in a Baroque urbanity either. Methuselahs on low-cholesterol, low-sugar diets that left their bodies emaciated, ladies with the floury faces of Chinese opera singers, with lips busted from the effort of eating so little, keeping their figures. Behold the fruits of high life expectancy: entropy and decrepitude. There were many lonely people, men and women, more groups than couples.

“I see a lot of people sitting alone,” observed the girl. Her pale eyes changed depending on the distance from which you contemplated them (green, hazel, gray), like modern-day aviation signals. “Coming from where I do, I couldn’t help but notice. People pair off younger in my country.”

“My generation was decimated by the divorce epidemic. The other day I listed the couples I know; out of twenty marriages, only two or three are still with their original partners. I’m one of the exceptions. Divorce is for the weak.”

“Why? If you can’t…”

“If you can’t, then be patient. As we speak, my wife is flirting with some pretty-boy, and as for me, well, here I am sniffing around for a beauty in search of her beast.”

“Very sad. You don’t have kids?”

“One daughter, tormented by the phantom of Venus Callipyge. She’s not interested in school or charity work. She does surf the web a bit, but most of the time she spends all of her effort on sharpening her cheekbones and reducing the perimeter of her thighs.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that people take care of their figures here. They’re very elegant and tan. Where I’m from, the gut and the hams start to swell, and people go about in their light summer clothes looking like cheeses.”

“Rubenesque, right?” He winked with one eye and checked out her legs with the other. Her thighs were compact like a rooster’s. “What can I say… Here we have the Mediterranean diet and the midday sun.”

“You’ll have to give me some Mediterranean recipes,” the dove beseeched him, probably imagining some vaguely oriental delicacy, a spring of saliva welling in her fruit-pulp mouth. Such a stark contrast with her cyclist’s legs.

“What’s your favorite dish?” queried Rótolo. He was actually thinking with furious desire of the tips of her breasts, which poked through the English saying printed on her shirt, trying to guess the color of her areolae. Rose? Burgundy?

“New Zealand mussels and shrimp croquettes. I also like crepes for a snack. But I almost always settle for prepared food from the deli. They slice your tomatoes, so I don’t even know how to make a salad.”

“We’ll have to do something about that. You want some Mediterranean recipes? Well, you can make tasty pork scratchings by reducing the caul fat around a pig’s entrails to grease on the stove. Blood crepes are perfect to sweeten a night in with Murnau on TV. What else? Stewed partridge with boiled potato cubes; the secret is to add lots of onion.”

“These are Mediterranean dishes?” she asked, confused. “I thought they ate mostly vegetables.”

“Vegetarianism makes your breath stink. Plus, the Mediterranean is a thousand kilometers away from here, sweetheart. The sun only shines once every few years. Didn’t Queen Fabiola tell you about Spain-the-swamp and Spain-the-desert, the fried steak and the boiled veal, the bullfighter’s bravado and the screeching bagpipes?”

“Ah, Fabiola! A magnificent queen. Spain produces properly regal personalities, not like those customs clerks in Buckingham who sport more tonsures than crowns. What do you think of el-rei?”

“I think our rei is bárbaro, much like Bárbara Rey.”

Too local a joke for present company. The Flemish girl didn’t understand because she didn’t know anything about the circus that was Spanish cinema, and because they were communicating in French. Despite her reticence (she had an easier time with inglés) and his snafus (he was a dunce for languages), they found themselves reduced to the bounds of a lingua franca. Rótolo imagined embraces where they’d do best to go without certain untranslatable sweet-nothings: “I’m going to eat your rotten bean!” “Suckle me, calf!” And he cursed the damnation of the prideful Babylonians in the bible, deprived of their ziggurat for the lack of simultaneous interpretation.

The lights dimmed in the venue because a live concert was about to begin. The indirect spotlights fell upon his companion, creating a sort of stage trick by which she became the subject of various artistic scenes from Rubens to Paul Delvaux. Rótolo—and the worm uncoiling itself above his knees—witnessed the march of the surrealist wagons, circulating noiselessly, silent and spectral behind the carnal Flem’s appetizing profile. And beneath the skin of her feet, made ugly and elephantine during her sandal-destroying trek, he saw the phosphorescent bones of a lunar morgue.

A brown-skinned artist animated the darkness, his tropical umber glowing against the shadows. He was wearing a loose, white outfit and played music from the Venezuelan bush. He only had one instrument, a sort of cord or braided vine that he plucked to produce a sound mimicking the moan of the wind through a dense forest. “How would we live without music?” Rótolo wondered. Himself a pedantic intellectual, he often sat with his wife at night to read or knit while listening to a great Amazonian flow of eighth notes, a long river with its source in Gregorian chant and its mouth in Stockhausen. A hydrographic web complicated by humbler streams (Je ne regrette rien by Édith Piaf). Certain indigenous Venezuelans lived, or so it would seem, with no other melody than an auditory replica of the wind, the screech of monkeys and the chatter of parrots.

The Flem, who doubtless lacked Rótolo’s profound inner life, needed to pee and got up to go to the bathroom. Deprived of a fixed point of interest, her companion scanned the audience and saw just what he’d hoped not to: a couple peeking through the packed crowd and quickly abandoning the establishment in search of lower population density. Raida looked exuberant with her torn patch of a mouth, with the sharp, pine needle heel of her shoes, with her naked ankles and old woman’s boney calves descending from her shorts. A loose blouse adorned with ribbons hid her weak rib cage and deflated chest. She had an arrogant-looking man on her arm, his cool sunglasses and hairspray helmet straight out of Miami Vice. This James Crockett was the spitting image of Rótolo himself, so much so that, when he went to pick up his passport at the police station, people mistook him for the other. The hotshot worked taking tickets at a movie theater. Malicious tongues would wag about him, “He could have been mayor, and where does he end up? Making a living as an usher,” sic transit gloria mundi, and all that.

They had never exchanged a word, though Rótolo bumps into his doppelganger at every turn; he floats superfluously through the city’s cafés, laden with books and pretending to write. They ran into each other one day in a sex shop next to the movie theater and gazed at each other for a long time, fascinated by the mirrored image, Narcissus leaning over the water. They ignored the distractions that called to them—video boxes playing the dirtiest films; toys that looked like hairstyling instruments, spiked brushes for those who take pleasure in drawing blood; little balls threaded onto a string, rosary beads for painful mysteries of a different sort; pens shaped like penises, gifts to make girlfriends laugh patiently at bachelorette parties for brides who had already unfortunately sampled the real deal and ruined the surprise.

Rótolo and his reflection each fled to his own personal projection cabin, and as they slipped coins into the slot, listening to the wails that may as well have been from a hospital rheumatology wing, they used the confessional-like intimacy to ruminate over their mutual antagonism. “Why does the sight of this asshole rot my liver?” mused Rótolo; “Could we have met in a past life?” wondered his double; “Did we get trapped together in a cloth and fight to the death? Was he an ugly yellow wasp, and I a hairy spider, friend of the stale shadows?” Was Raida conscious of how little novelty her new romance could offer her? Did she enjoy repetition, like a child who wants to hear the same story every night?

“What happened? Are you sick?” asked the Belgian when she returned from the bathroom and saw Rótolo’s bedwetter expression.

“Nothing. The vibe here is too wistful. Let’s go to the Goiaba and dance.”

He turned the plump little morsel around and held her waist, rubbing it up against his, like a two-person conga line. “That’s it, slut, take me down,” he murmured in a tongue indecipherable to the girl from the most polyglot city on the planet. The dig was really directed towards his laughing wife, though, pleased with herself for having conquered a bookish usher. His version of a jealous outburst. He was determined to avenge the twin affronts from City Hall and his wife’s paramour. With tropical music, he could stay the path. He would find out if the girl would put out, once riled up by dance, caught up in the clinch of the bolero. Fortunately, she wasn’t a vegetarian, rare for one of these lost sheep from the north corrupted by the green agenda, and so he would not have to fear halitosis when the time came for them to be alone.

Text © Bieito Iglesias Araúxo

Translation © Lindsay Semel