The Faint-hearted Bolshevik Read Free Page A

and decidedly more serious than any squeaking noise coming from the car’s shock absorbers.
    When his luck improves, a modern man buys himself a car. If more than four or five years have passed since he bought the last one and he hasn’t got a new one, his fellow modern men consider him a bit of a loser. One of the few reasons why a modern man might kill another is because the latter has blocked his way. One of the few reasons why a modern man under thirty years of age might stop paying into Social Security is because of a traffic accident.
    Personally, my first car was very important to me because at the time I had X pesetas and the car cost me X plus 500,000 pesetas. Also, because the motherfucker’s fuel injection system didn’t work very well and every other day you could find me at the garage struggling to put up with some idiot who insisted that gas here in Spain was very dirty, not like the stuff they had in Germany, which was what they always told me because they didn’t have the imagination to think up a more convincing piece of nonsense.
    The second car was less important to me, because by that time I had more money, and because the fuel injection system was just as God had intended fuel injection systems to be: resistant to any type of dirt contained in the fuel in the country where the car was sold.
    The third, which is the one I drove into Sonsoles’ rear end, didn’t really matter to me. Or at least that’s what I thought. If I’m not mistaken, I bought it because it was the cheapest one available that had air conditioning and enough power for me to overtake a truck without risking my life.
    However, one night when I had an upset stomach, I discovered that my bowels had something in common with my car’s, something so weird it was almost alarming: the smell of my farts under the sheets was identical to the smell of unleaded fuel once it had been burnt up by my car’s engine and had passed through its catalytic convertor. I’d only recently bought it, and I’d spent weeks trying to figure out what the stench flooding my garage every day reminded me of. Although it has nothing at all to do with this story, I think that was the night I decided to add to my list of carefully hidden personality traits that of enemy of ecology.
    I also hate pedagogy, liberal capitalism and sports. I don’t know why everything that tries, or claims to try, to improve people’s lives sooner or later ends up ruining them.

Sonsoles López García had taken a precaution she knew would not affect the paperwork needed for the repair of her hideous convertible, and the result was that I had to work a bit harder. She had merely barred with a line the box designated for the telephone number of the driver of vehicle B. And I could tell it had been done with malicious intent because the line went up quite a bit at the end. Back in the days when I used to read things other than work stuff and my utility bills, I once read a book on graphology. It said that people whose signature slants upwards at the end are either the enthusiastic sort or pretty bad-tempered. It didn’t seem to me that Sonsoles López García was easily enthused, except when she went to buy gold trinkets to put around her wrists or on her fingers or to hang between her tits. I’m not an enthusiastic person either and my signature slants up at almost thirty degrees.
    Someone should have told Sonsoles that not giving your telephone number is just fucking stupid when you give your address. Sooner or later the telephone number can be found. And in Sonsoles’ case, it was extraordinarily easy. As soon as my butt touched the chair in my office, the first thing I did was dial 003 for information.
    “Your call will be served by operator eight … four … nine,” the telephone company computer stuttered. “Good morning, Information” a human being took over. A female human being, to be more precise.
    “Good morning. I’d like the telephone number for Señorita