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  It occurs to the sad necktie man (it’s the tie that’s sad, not the man—the tie’s sad because it’s wrapped around a neck that is inadequate to its aesthetic standing, since neckties have destinies too, like Asian elephants) to wield a new weapon that’s only recently appeared in the world. It’s a political weapon. He pulls a cell phone, a Samsung Galaxy, out of his pocket and goes to the stopwatch function. A revolutionary bit of technology.

  He measures how long his encounter with the king and queen of Spain lasts. He measures it with his stopwatch. It’s six seconds and ninety-two hundredths of a second. That is the amount of time granted to each guest.

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  Nor can he say good afternoon or good evening or good morning or hello how are you nice to meet you to the king or queen. His muteness is to be expected—it is the product of the Iberian peasantry’s stingy night of bread and meat, night of madmen and the cognitively impaired, and his genetic code contains only terror and anguish and error.

  Terror and anguish, next to light and wealth, next to the security and love emanating from the king and queen.

  Their smile, from three feet away, is one of the greatest sights a Spanish citizen can behold, since it contains the life of millions of now-dead Spaniards whose historical dignity fits within that smile. All that Spain has been able to build politically is encoded in that smile, at whose edges millions of fiery serpents nest.

  The serpents are ablaze.

  The celebrated writer, a doddering geezer, a faded man, a creature from another era, walks with the queen on his arm. Thanks to her punishing high heels, she stands two hands taller than Juan Goytisolo’s nearly bald pate. The man with the sad-knotted tie ponders the public display of torture to which the queen is subjecting her feet by placing them in those shoes (stretching and deformation of the bones, joint pain, arthritis), and he ponders what the celebrated writer might be thinking. The man is exhibiting a certain discomfort, a gruffness. It may be that few of those in attendance have read him. And even if he were widely read, it wouldn’t actually do him much good, since nobody loves him, and in that sense it’s as if he hadn’t been read at all. There is no love here, no love anywhere. And maybe he knows it and accepts it. We all know it and accept it, because literature is something that’s become irrelevant, since there’s no love in it. There’s no love in it, thinks the man in the yellow tie, and there should be, since only love has meaning, and where is his love, and what is he doing in this place when he’s not going to find love here, and he then recalls his father, whose entire life was determined by the power structure that the woman in severe heels symbolizes.

  His father would have loved to see him there, next to the king and queen. He would have loved for him to tell them some anecdote; maybe that’s why he’s come in the first place, out of love for his father.

  The writer and the queen walk the length of the table with the guests standing at attention. They walk slowly, arm in arm. The queen slows her steps to match the writer’s weary gait.

  The voice returns and tells the man with the flaming tie, “See, this is it, this is the end of the great Spanish writers, a palace stroll on a queen’s arm, a protocol—but people would kill their own mothers for the sake of that final protocol, because life is empty, quite empty in and of itself.”

  The man with the frightened tie has never seen such a large table, a table for more than a hundred people. He dreams of celebrating Christmas Eve at that table, and he dreams that the people he’s sitting with at the table are the lowborn ghosts of his ancestors: his parents, his grandparents, his great-grandparents, his great-great-grandparents.

  He’d like to talk to his great-great-grandfather, if he ever existed. There was a man who in biological terms could be considered an ancestor, and thus a great-great-grandfather according to the generational math, but it never occurred to that man that he’d be another man’s great-great-grandfather.

  There is no bond.

  There is nothing.

  But the monarchy is a bond. The king’s ancestors’ portraits hang in the Prado Museum. The king can go whenever he wants to see his great-great-grandfather and talk to him.

  Everything is yellowing, and the color of the monarchy is yellow. The royal family is the family chosen to have the yellow pomp of memory imposed on it, the memory that thousands upon thousands of Spanish families lack, that was lost in the spent days of history, that was lost to famine, war, and poverty.

  The man with the sad-knotted tie will never be able to go to a museum to be reunited with his great-great-grandparents as painted by Francisco de Goya. But if just one family can, that is enough. This is the moral mystery of monarchies. It is the symbol, the great discovery.

  The man with the humiliated necktie would like to know if he has anything in common with his great-great-grandfather: some gesture, some physical resemblance, anything that implies a need, a meaning, an explanation for this historical, biological, genetic present.

  While all the guests are watching the old man and the queen, the man with the doomed tie takes the opportunity to observe the table, now that nobody else is. The enormous table, too, serves a function, a being there as a piece of furniture; it fulfills the little-desired role in Spanish history of “being there, enduring, performing one’s role.”

  The award-winning elder has a look on his face that suggests something more than what it actually says, a nose sloping toward the very saddest cliff imaginable. It’s a savage sight, his hand clasped in the hand of the queen of Spain. A beautiful woman, inscrutable, with silent, blameless arrogance. The two ghosts walk, pacing within the so-called superstructure of Spanish democracy, which doesn’t help a person die in peace.

  A democracy doesn’t help a person die in peace.

  Nothing that is human helps a person die in peace; only drugs do that, and they’re a state-run monopoly.

  And what is the state? It’s a yellowing superimposition of exhausted intentions that no longer think, which had their last thought many decades ago, and which laziness, the mother of intelligence, perpetuates.

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  On October 1, 1991, after passing a public exam, the man who would, twenty-four years later, sit wearing a false necktie near the king of Spain was given a position as a high school teacher specializing in language and literature in a northern city, whose name the man who would, twenty-four years later, sit near the king of Spain does not wish to recall.

  It was the best thing that ever happened, financially speaking, to that man.

  I even thought God might exist after all and that he’d decided to watch over my passage through the world: I was going to be earning a guaranteed income.

  There was gladness in the heart of the man who, twenty-four years later, would sit near, but not very near, not too near, the king of Spain, wearing a depressed tie around his flushed and flustered neck.

  The man was twenty-nine back then, that man who became what I am today—which is to say, another man. A man built atop another man, or several. Being twenty-nine is the best killing machine in the world. Nobody realizes it at twenty-nine. It was the moment for enjoying life. Everybody that age longed to have a steady job back then—coming out of the democratic transition period, Spain was obsessed with steady jobs.

  The school I was assigned to was named after Pablo Serrano, a famous sculptor. I bought a car, a Ford Fiesta. And I drove that car to teach at the school, which is still standing. Luckily, it had a parking lot with trees that was reserved for the teachers. The trees shaded the cars. I would park my car in the shade. All my life I’ve been obsessed with parking in the shade. I inherited that obsession from my father. My father always tried to park in the shade. He’d get irritated if he couldn’t. We didn’t understand that obsession, not my mother, nor my brother and I, when we were younger. We used to go places according to whether there was shade to park in. When my father had a little money and used to take us to the seasi
de for summer vacation—this was in the late sixties and early seventies—we would get up early to go to the beach, because if we got there too late, he wouldn’t be able to find a spot to park the car under the eucalyptus trees. I was very young and didn’t understand why we had to get up at six in the morning when we were on vacation and didn’t have school. I tried to figure out the reason. And the reason was the shade of the eucalyptus trees. I used to stand staring at those trees, and I ended up internalizing that shade as something amazing, divine in essence. If my father didn’t park the car in the shade, he’d be unhappy, distressed. Years later they cut down those eucalyptuses and widened the esplanade. Those trees no longer exist.

  Today I understand the desire to park in the shade because that obsession is inside me, with me, in my heart. I nurture that obsession because it’s something passed down from my father. It tormented him when the car was in the sun. He was a singular man in every way.

  And so I became part of Spain’s army of educators. At the time the country still offered a vocational training program. And the shade of the trees in that parking lot in 1991 brought back memories of the eucalyptuses of 1971.

  Since I was new, I was assigned the worst groups in the school. It was my job to teach the students in the electrical trade program. They were fourteen-year-old kids whom nobody loved, kids who’d been referred for so-called vocational training by the state. I was also assigned a group of hairdressers. And a group of administrative assistants. I spent my days explaining the diacritical accent. All Spaniards who have gone to school end up learning about the difference between the pronoun tú (you) and the adjective tu (your). The tu in tú piensas (you think) is different from the tu in tu pensamiento (your thinking). In the first instance, it’s a pronoun and has an accent, while in the second it’s a determiner and doesn’t have an accent. And that was what I did. I spent twenty-three years contemplating the blasted tu versus tú distinction. That’s what they paid me to do. I spent the whole day teaching it, how tú vienes (you come) is not the same as tu venida (your coming)—it was ridiculous, especially when absolutely goddamn nobody ever came. But I did it because I’d never been paid so well in my entire life as they were paying me. I was assigned to a group of first-year students in the electrical program. Teachers in Spain’s public education system are responsible for keeping abreast of the disciplinary and pedagogical details of their students. I soon realized that was a farce. When I walked into the classroom in mid-October, the weather was still hot. A third-year management student asked about something that had just happened in the United States. I thought it was a serious question.

  On October 16, 1991, George Hennard killed twenty-three people in the city of Killeen, Texas.

  I offered a long reflection on violence, but they weren’t listening. My students weren’t listening to me. So I let them talk.

  “On TV they showed the shattered skull of one of the people he shot. The guy was carrying a semiautomatic pistol—he fired a hundred bullets, it’s freaking awesome,” said Castro, the most talkative student. “He took out twenty-three people, and he made sure each one was dead before moving on to the next.”

  The group burst out laughing. And I heard the voice, maybe one of the first times or even the very first time I did: “These kids don’t know the victims, they don’t know what it means to die, they don’t know what it is to murder, to shoot at another body, they don’t know anything, and you don’t know anything either. In fact, you don’t even know whether you care about those twenty-three bullet-riddled bodies. You have to repudiate violence because you’re broke and you’re doing this job because you get paid at the end of the month. And you’re a teacher. And you have to teach them responsible values, you have to make them see you can’t just go around killing people. But when you start moralizing about things, they tune you out. Come up with something, dumbass. You’re just thinking about your salary, but I get it. You think if you talk like them, you’ll get fired and lose your monthly paycheck. And that’ll end up killing you. People tend to be invested in their work. And that isn’t delusional in the least; it’s useful to be invested in something—it makes people’s lives better. But from the start you’ve been infected with a historical and genetic virus passed down from your mother: a dissatisfaction that spreads like an oil slick, relentlessly, over the oceans of the world.”

  The newbie teacher that I was (again the specter emerges) stood staring at Castro and then pointed his finger like a gun.

  He aimed at Castro and said, “Bang, bang, bang.”

  “I just blew your head off, Castro,” I said. And everyone went quiet.

  The class ended and I left with a sense of triumph.

  “Wow, look at you,” the voice said.

  A few weeks later, a first-year electrical student who skipped class a lot—in fact, hardly anybody remembered his face—showed up at my classroom door. The newbie teacher that I was looked at him in surprise.

  “No, I’m not here for class,” he said. “I’m here to beat the crap out of that asshole”—and he pointed at one of his classmates.

  He was pointing at Maráez, who was universally known as “Cauliflower.”

  “That jerk Cauliflower got caught shoplifting at El Corte Inglés, and the bastard told the security guard he didn’t have his ID on him but gave them an address. And he gave mine, my address and my name, and yesterday the cops came by my house looking for me, and my old man split my head open with a saucepan.” He pointed to a seeping wound on his head.

  Cauliflower laughed. Everybody laughed. The newbie teacher that I was stood staring at the wound.

  Today I still remember that wound, and it provokes in me a mixture of numb rage and somber tenderness. Today a luminous word comes to mind: mercy. We should all be more merciful. I even thought I needed to write a book called Merciful. I would have liked to plunge my fingers into that wound and open it further until the boy bled out, and then tenderly drink that blood, in a ceremony of despair.

  I’ve often felt these sensations of profound hopelessness throughout my life. I don’t know where they come from. They’re miscegenated emotions, violence and melancholy blended together. And euphoria too. I think these feelings come from my most remote ancestors. There must be something in me that has made me resistant despite my emotional warping and decline; otherwise, I wouldn’t be in this world.

  Resistant to biological bacteria and social bacteria alike.

  “Well, since you’re here, come on in,” I said.

  Horcas—that was the kid’s name—came into the classroom, saying, “I’ll eat your liver during the break, Cauliflower.”

  “You hear that?” the voice said. “He wants to eat Cauliflower’s liver. What does a fourteen-year-old kid’s liver taste like? Behold the Spanish lower class—it’s a historic show to which few people have tickets, so enjoy. These kids are like rivers of young, cheap blood, they live in crappy apartments and sleep in smelly beds, and their parents aren’t worth anything. Their mothers don’t have fortunate bodies and their fathers lack professional abilities. Not many people are lucky enough to get a ticket to see this. But you are. Look at them killing each other. You’ve got a box seat. You’re a writer, or you’ll end up one eventually. Spain is irredeemable. You get paid to explain bullshit like the diacritical accent mark and how to make sure they don’t mix up Quevedo and Góngora, even though who gives a crap who Quevedo was or who Góngora was. Definitely not the two of them, since they’re extremely dead. The only ones who care that you’re pumping out this bullshit and forcing kids to memorize it are the members of the Spanish cultural elite, who have nothing to do with you or these sad sorts that society has abandoned. But these kids should actually know who Góngora and Quevedo were, because if anybody ever offers them a leg up, it’ll be the dead. As if Góngora and Quevedo were some kind of charitable organization, because a charity will end up serving as history for those who need it most—that i
s, for those who have nothing except history. You should write a history for those who have nothing but history.”

  Years later I read about Cauliflower’s death in the paper. He’d crashed his car into a wall. An old car, but stolen. He could have stolen a new car and not an old one, but Cauliflower had style, and most of all he had a sense of humor. I’m sure the bastard stole the car from Horcas.

  Cauliflower left this world at twenty-seven.

  Poor Cauliflower, whose life spooled out so swiftly, whom nobody knew, not even him. There’s a startling purity in that too. Purity and poverty were wed in the bosom of that dumbass Cauliflower’s meager life.

  I like to remember him that way, as “that dumbass Cauliflower,” where the word dumbass signifies peace, honor, and virtue. I knew it was Cauliflower because they printed his full name in the paper: Iván Maráez.

  It was him, Cauliflower.

  He’d gained a lot of weight, poor Cauliflower. All of my students ended up gaining weight. They all got fat.

  The all-time great Spanish bastard: Cauliflower.

  And that’s even though your parents, Cauliflower, when you were born, gave you a nice name, seem to have put some effort into it. I mean, they thought about your name, and that counts for something.

  They called you Iván.

  It must have been the best day of your life, the day your parents decided you would have a name. But there’s no way you remember that day. Nobody remembers the day they receive the name their parents have chosen. It must have been the best day of your life and you didn’t know it—you didn’t savor that day, you didn’t enjoy it.

  Well, Cauliflower, I think that on the day of your baptism, you were loved. I don’t know, it seems like there’s a kind of beauty in the fact that they named you Iván, a bit of intention, a desire for you to be okay in this world.