The Faint-hearted Bolshevik Read Free

bitch in the Chanel suit had already got into her car, one of those white convertibles that bitches like her always drive, and I had to watch as she adjusted the rearview mirror, checked her hair and fluffed it up, while the fucking cop pissed me off and gleefully earned his damn salary, that, for better or for worse, is all what we losers get, whether it’s because we’ve always been losers or because we’ve ended up being that way.
    By the time I climbed back into my car I’d wasted twenty minutes and the early start I’d made so that the traffic jam I would get stuck in wasn’t the usual eight-thirty-Monday-morning damn traffic jam. By now it was eight-thirty and not only was I stuck in the middle of the damn traffic jam but I was going to be late, which would make this Monday even more Mondayish and my soul between my balls weigh twice as much as it had done up till then. That was when I realized that the name and address of the bitch in the Chanel suit were in the folder with my insurance documents. Around me, everyone was honking their horns, taxi drivers were sneaking past me, and the traffic hadn’t moved a damn inch. I opened the folder and read the whore’s name: Sonsoles. And the first half of her surname: López-Díaz. And the second half: García-Navarro. Or, rather, Sonsoles López García, who had deemed it beneath her to be known as López García and who had rescued her grandmothers from oblivion by adding their last names to hers. Or her father had done it, or her father’s father, which would have been even worse. From the address she had written on the form, I worked out that she lived in the area around the church of Los Jerónimos, next to the Prado Museum. When I was a sensitive fool I used to like that neighborhood. It’s quiet at night and during the day the only bother, if any, are the hordes of japs taken by coach to gawp at the paintings.
    While I got on with my daily grind, I started thinking. It occurred to me that Sonsoles López García might be a possibility of avoiding a lingering death by boredom. Now, I don’t believe in fate: I think almost everything happens because one insists on making it happen, sometimes thanks to more than a little effort, it’s true, but that doesn’t make one less responsible or less of an idiot. I had crashed into that Sonsoles slut that morning in a really stupid way and certainly without the slightest intention of doing so. Yet something had put her there in front of me, and I had crashed into her. For the time being I had only dented my car, which was a shame, but who knew if I couldn’t get something good out of this episode. And by something good I was thinking of having some fun: not too much, after all, if I’d thought at the time that life could be really fun, I wouldn’t have buried Mozart as well under the blazing guitars of Judas Priest (and Kreator and 77 Fucking Bastards and Blame It On Your Dirty Sister). While my dented car clanked up the Paseo de la Castellana, an evil plan was taking shape in my head. And I laughed to myself, I swear I laughed as if someone had told me the best joke I’d ever heard in my life.
    And that is the inexplicable way that Sonsoles came into my pathetic life and how, by playing around like a fool, I managed to turn a simple traffic accident into a hell of a downfall.

Now that I come to think about it, it’s weird that everything started with the car. Modern man is totally dependent on machines, and of all the machines the one that leaves modern man drooling is the fucking car. Modern man spends hours on his car, he gets into debt to buy it, he doesn’t sleep if it makes a strange noise or if it sticks when he’s changing gear. Many men don’t spend as much time with their families as they do with their cars; they spend less money on their families than on their cars, and they don’t give a damn if one of their kids has a fever, which in the case of a child is about the same as the car breaking down,