Adolfito Penouta Augalevada, alias the Buffoon, had been María Auxiliadora Porrás’ sweetheart but she left him because he was going to die.
“That fellow’s not long for this world, just mark my words, you have only to touch his hands.”
Moncho Lazybones also saw a weasel and a hare, perched on a rock on the shore, delighting, even gloating, at the sight of his cousin’s breasts.
“Animals have to be seen to be believed! Just look at the instincts they have!”
María Auxiliadora stoutly argued her case:
“That fellow’s not long for this world, you have only to see how dull his skin is, you have only to touch his hands. Georgina is welcome to him! Let her be the one to wear widow’s weeds! No dead man is going to get my virginity, I won’t have it.”
“But María Auxiliadora, are you a virgin?”
“Shut up, you idiot! What’s bitten you?”
“Get a grip on yourself, María Auxiliadora, and don’t raise your voice to me!”
Adolfito Buffoon married Georgina but he wasn’t long for this world, it was God’s will for him to last a while longer but he found being a cuckold hard to bear so he hanged himself from the bar in the wardrobe, some say his wife killed him off with a potion of herbs, who knows? When the judge opened the wardrobe door the dead body tumbled out on top of him and gave him an awful fright.
“My God, a bloody dead man! What a way to treat a judge!”
Carmelo Méndez accompanied Georgina throughout the formalities and when the judge wasn’t looking he would slip a hand up her skirts.
“Cut it out, Méndez! We can play around once the deceased is dead and buried.”
“As you wish, my love, you know that your wish is my command, I only want to please you.”
Moncho Lazybones used to speak fondly of his cousins Georgina and Adela and their mother.
“She was just like a mother to me, Aunt Micaela was always so good to me, when I was small she gave me the adventures of Dick Turpin and used to jack me off the moment we were on our own. My heart would leap when she asked me: Do you like that, you dirty little pig?”
There was a big turnout at Adolfito’s funeral, folks were very fond of him since he was a nosey-parker. Folks at the funeral talked about the local football team and how attractive and tantalizing the widow was.
“But just look at her sister!”
“There’s no call to make comparisons, they’re different but both fine-looking women.”
Moncho Lazybones was lamed on Moorish soil, he came back from Melilla with a wooden leg and splitting his sides with laughter.
“What are you laughing at, you wretch?”
“I’m laughing at how much worse it would have been if they’d given me a wooden soul!”
Knocking about for years and years in my family home there were three Carlist berets with gold tassels that belonged to Don Severino Losada, an uncle of my mother’s, who rose to the rank of colonel in the Carlist forces and went off to fight around Ordenes and Arzúa, on either side of the River Tambre, between the Dubra valley and Melide, just in the spot where at the end of the last civil war the guerrilla fighters Manuel Ponte and Benigno García Andrade got a gang together: certain landscapes lend themselves to the smell of gunpowder and the color of blood. Uncle Cleto used to sport Don Severino’s three berets during carnival until they wound up bedraggled and motheaten; in my family it was normal for things to get motheaten; in my family weariness and neglect are cultivated as fine arts.
“Jesusa.”
“Yes, Emilita?”
“Do you remember that silver rosary, blessed by Pope Leo XIII, which our dear mother brought us from Rome?”
“Goodness knows! I haven’t seen it around for ages, chances are it’s lost.”
“More than likely.”
By dint of excessive prayer, incessant gossiping, and frenzied piddling, Aunt Jesusa and Aunt Emilita have lost all hope, faith is their consolation and charity beyond their grasp. When Uncle Cleto feels bored to tears, he spends the day vomiting in his chamber pot or behind the bureau.
“What a relief that was!”
Uncle Cleto’s dog is called Hornet and she eats what her master heaves up or gently regurgitates, for Uncle Cleto has various ways of throwing up. At times Hornet acts strange and staggers and lurches drunkenly about, apparently some days Uncle Cleto’s vomit is too strong for her. Uncle Cleto is a great hand at jazz, all he needs is to be black, for this business of playing jazz, or the flute, the mandola or whatever, by ear, it’s just as well to be a widower, for it lends a certain interest to the performance.
“I don’t understand.”
“Go on! Why do you have to understand? There are many things that cannot be understood, my friend, and one has no choice but put up with it.”
“Now I get you.”
The remains of the Saintly Fernández and his seven martyred companions (there’s no need to list the names here, let their relations see to that) are interred in the Spanish convent in the Holy Land, in the Christian quarter of Bab Tuma in Damascus, nearly all the information given in the encyclopedia is erroneous but that’s the least of it for he was only a minor saint, though he’s the only one we have in our family. Father Santisteban, S.J., was a hick who took snuff and my aunts’ cascarilla tea was nearly the death of him.
“Another little cup Don Obdulio? It’ll give you strength.”
“Just to please you, my dear friends, just to please you …”
Father Santisteban, S.J., knew no pity.
“On the Day of Judgement we the righteous shall receive our just reward amidst great merriment and rejoicing while the damned shall be cast into the terrible flames where they shall burn for centuries in that unconsuming fire, will you pass me a cookie there, my dear Jesusa? God bless you! In the full knowledge of our righteousness we shall say unto them ‘Did you not taste the pleasures of the wicked world and savor the delights of sinful flesh? Here you have your reward! Burn, you wretches, and suffer, whilst we reap the rewards of eternal bliss! Will you pour me a drop of tea, my dear Emilita? Bless you!”
Father Santisteban, S.J., is not very distinguished for a Jesuit, he’s like a Christian Brother, nor does he smell too sweet either, truth to tell, he reeks with the rankness of a billy goat.
“That’s because he lives like a real saint and neglects his personal hygiene, he isn’t caught up with such worldly cares.”
“More than likely.”
“Indeed so highly likely, my dear friend! for answer me this: what shall it profit a man to scent his mortal flesh and temporal garments with myrrh and musk, if he should lose his soul?”
“True enough!”
“Indeed so very true! Let us attend to the great task of saving the soul and set aside the pomp and vanities of this vile world!”
“Jesus Christ, our Lord, humble man and yet divine …”
In 1935 there were no accidents in S.P.A.L.—Spanish Postal Air Lines—after six years of service during which they had traveled the equivalent of 126 times around the world. Mamerto Paixón invented a flying machine which he called the Swallow, it looked like a bat with pedals and fixed wings but he called it the Swallow.
“I named it so after the bird that’s best at flying, it’s a delight to watch them glide. Do you realize, Miss Jesusa, that very shortly—God willing—I shall be swooping through the air like a swallow? There’ll be nothing to beat launching myself from the belfry of the church of San Juan de Barrán for a bit of a thrust.”
“Don’t do it, Mamerto, you might hurt yourself!”
“Not at all, Miss, you just wait and see.”
After High Mass on Easter Sunday in the year 1935, Mamerto leant out of the belfry of San Juan, donned the wings of his flying machine and whoosh! leaped into the void, but instead of soaring upwards he plummetted down on to the ground of the churchyard. Crowds of people had turned out to watch, they had even come from as far off as Carballiño, from Chantada, and Lalín, from all ov
er they’d come, and when Mamerto was about to be smashed into smithereens upon the ground there was a great commotion with everyone scurrying to and fro.
“Keep calm! Just keep calm!” exhorted Father Romualdo, the priest. “He’s just been to confession and received the sacraments so he’ll go straight up to heaven, put a stone under his head as a pillow and let him breathe his last in peace and in the grace of God. Prepared for death at this moment as he’ll never be again!”
“No, Father! We’d better take him to Orense to see if they can do anything to save him at the hospital!”
“Do as you wish! But I wash my hands of all responsibility for such a rash decision!”
Father Romualdo spoke with great precision but the parishioners heard only the patter of his words. They wrapped Mamerto Paixón in a blanket and carted him off to Orense in Reboredo’s taxi which came straight away; he was at death’s door upon arrival, but an operation did the trick and within a few days he was on the mend.
“Is there anything left of the Swallow?”
“Precious little, why?”
“Nothing, I just want to get well so as to have another go, I think it was a fault in the transmission.”
“Look, quit this tomfoolery! Count yourself lucky to be alive and don’t go tempting Fate!”
Doña María Auxiliadora Mourence, Porrás’ widow—the mother of the girl who wouldn’t marry Adolfito because he wasn’t long for this world—was a very hefty lady indeed with bunions and a waddle chronometrically synchronized with her various reflexes, features, and exhalations, for a bit of order never goes amiss, like this: two paces, five heartbeats, a pen slips from her grasp, a pause, a fit of coughing, a volley of farts, a twitch of her snout, a pause, half-suppressed wind, she heaves a heavy sigh, a single hiccup, a pause, and so forth all day long, tomorrow, next month, next year, God willing. The famous Losada file painlessly removes corns, callouses, and thickened toe nails as if by magic.
Below the River Miño, to the south that is, midway between Orense and Castrelo, between the Rábeda valley and the Ribeiro, are the Trelle earthworks where dead Moors dwell. Trelle is in the district of Toén, in the parish of Santa María dos Anxos. There are still plenty of Moors living in Galicia, it’s just that you can’t see them because they’re dead and bewitched and wander below the earth. In the Trelle ruins there lives the richest Moorish colony in the whole region, ruled by the wizard Abd Alá el-Azziz ben Meruán, the Portuguese Vali, Moorish governor of Monforte, who is one-eyed, red-haired, and leprous but has the power to turn anything he pleases into gold: a pebble, a beetle, a poppy, a slave, anything at all; the Trelle ruins are littered with gold pebbles, beetles, poppies, and slaves. Basilio Ribadelo, a muleteer from Sobrado do Bispo, used to cart wine to the Moors by night so that the Christians wouldn’t see him, and in payment they gave him slabs of slate that turned into gold on his way home, the Moors made Basilio swear an oath that he would tell nobody on condition that, if he didn’t keep his word, the slabs would revert to their former wretched state. Casilda Gorgulfe, his wife, was alarmed at the sight of such riches.
“That comes from smuggling,” she told her husband. “And don’t deny it; the Civil Guard will nab you and beat the living daylights out of you, just wait and see!”
“Not at all, woman,” replied Basilio. “I earned that money by the honest sweat of my brow, but I can’t tell you how.” But Casilda insisted and insisted and begged and threatened and implored until finally, harried by her insults and wheedling, Basilio blurted out the truth.
“Don’t breathe a word to a soul for if the Moors get wind of it they won’t pay me a single cent ever again.”
But despite her better judgement, Casilda’s tongue ran away with her, the Moors got wind of it and, as a just punishment meted out to Basilio, they never again opened the doors of the earthworks to him. Basilio beat the living daylights out of his wife but his good fortune had dried up forever and years later, as fate would have it, he ended his days an impoverished carter.
“Will you pour me a brandy?”
“Of course.”
Miss Ramona’s robe is very elegant, revealing and very elegant.
“I’d like to be utterly stark naked but I feel the cold.”
“Not at all, woman.”
Miss Ramona believes that life is short and old age but a habit.
“A proper nuisance it is, too, Raimundo, mark my words. A woman is old at the age twenty-five, a man has a while longer ahead of him, a man can even go on to thirty or thirty-five years of age. Will you give me a kiss? I’m sort of depressed today, I don’t know what’s wrong with me … If you think I’m a slut, Raimundo, that’s where you’re wrong, the dog gives me at least as much pleasure as you do, the only difference is that I love you. Poor Wilde! You men are capricious creatures, and you are the most capricious of all but it’s worth giving in to as many of your whims as I can, we women are more solitary than men, that’s why there are more dykes than fairies, if I could be sure that I wouldn’t feel the cold I would get into bed stark naked and I wouldn’t get up for a whole month.”
The Casandulfe Raimundo fell silent.
“Will you pour me more brandy?”
“Of course.”
“Will you invite me to canned asparagus for supper?”
“I’m glad you ask, Raimundo.”
Everybody says that Doña Rita Freire, the proprietress of the English Biscuit cookie factory, has be-nookied her second husband but there’s not a word of truth in it. Nobody be-nookies Don Rosendo Vilar Santeiro, he’s very much his own master, even when it comes to be-nookification, what there is more truth in is that Doña Rita is bewitched, or be-dicked I should say, by Don Rosendo, and she will drain to the last drop whoever can go to bed with her twice a day. Doña Rita is a lioness always ready for a tumble, though at times she doesn’t even get as far as the hay: anywhere will do.
Luisiño Bocelo, Don Benigno’s eunuch servant, died in the war but he died of natural causes, first he went blind then he caught a dose of the flu and died. They used to call Luisiño Bocelo “Coot” but all in good fun, not from spite.
“Coot!”
“Yes, Don Benigno?”
“Hop about as long as you can!”
“Yes, sir.”
Ádega knows the story of the mountain inside out.
“They got carried away with the half-wit from Bidueiros and the poor creature was killed like a common criminal, you can’t fool about with the gallows for there’s no going back, they hanged the Bidueiros half-wit without meaning to but they hanged him all the same, and what difference does it make to him whether they meant to hang him or not? His father, the priest from San Miguel de Buciños, did his duty by him: he said three Masses for him and buried him on consecrated ground.”
They allow Eleuterio the Britches into Sprat’s brothel but they won’t let him breathe as much as a word.
“Either you mind your own business or you’re out on your ear, but you needn’t come here to talk the hind leg off a donkey.”
Tanis Gamuzo, his son-in-law, won’t even speak to him.
“My father-in-law is a turd, if it wasn’t for Rosa’s sake, I would have bust his face two years ago, you can’t trust his sort, give them an inch and they take a mile, as the saying goes.”
Portuguese Marta would sooner go hungry than hit the hay with Britches.
“I’d sooner starve or die a beggar! Eleuterio is a bastard and he turns my stomach, he’s revolting.”
Doña Rita’s first husband was a tall, stout, squashy storekeeper who did himself in with a shotgun, so fed up was he. When he was alive and kicking, Doña Rita’s first husband was named Don Clemente, Fat-of-the-Land they used to call him, Don Clemente Bariz Carballo was from the village of Monteveloso in the parish of Santas Eufemia de Piornedo, in the district of Castrelo, over Riós way south of the Nofre crags, and he made a pretty penny from wolfram, though little good did it do him. Don Clemente gradually grew sick and tired of life—th
at’s the worst—until one day he couldn’t take it any longer so he loaded his shotgun with wolf slugs, settled himself comfortably in an armchair in the parlor, placed the barrel in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and shot his head off into smithereens, the biggest piece of which was the size of a greengage plum, his brains stuck to the lamp so they had to clean it down with disinfectant. Don Clemente and Doña Rita had seven children, they were still only tiny tots at the time; when she was widowed Doña Rita would have been about thirty-two or thirty-three years of age and she longed for a bit of rough and tumble, if the flesh yearns for a tussle it’s like a parching thirst. Doña Rita found consolation from her spiritual adviser, Father Rosendo Vilar Santeiro, a priest, with whom she had been having an affair for many years.
“Why don’t you give up the cloth, Rosendo, and we’ll get properly married?”
“How could I get married when I am in holy orders? Do you not realize or what?”
“Go on! What a hoot! But you sure broke your vows of chastity with me, didn’t you?”
Father Rosendo lost his cool.
“What has a piece of ass got to do with the Ember Days, for God’s sake?”
Tanis Gamuzo’s mastiffs—Lion, Sailor, and Tsar—are obedient and brave and loyal, with those dogs you could wander about with your eyes closed and neither the wild boar nor the wolf would set a foot near you. Tanis also breeds smart, frisky, mischievous sheepdogs, not above worrying beasts up the mountain given half a chance. Tanis knows a great deal about dogs, he takes good care of them, trains them, and makes a bit on the side from them.
“There are worse vices, don’t you think?”
“Oh! Do I ever, son? Do I ever!”
In Rauco’s inn the Casandulfe Raimundo and Robín Lebozán are arguing with a Castilian gentleman flashing visiting cards emblazoned with the Calatrava cross and his name embossed in heavy lettering: Toribio de Mogrovejo y de Bustillo del Oro.
Mazurka for Two Dead Men Page 12