The king and the president in Malvern Wells
After my race in the forbidden direction on the highway against all the retinue of Saudi Arabians royal family members who were nearly arriving in Marbella with the intention of spending the summer in a high life style for which they had got their petrodollars, when I got to the School in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire, England, I found out the director of the School’s car was a Seat 850, and how could not be it so, of yellow colour, same as the car with a couple and a boy inside that impeded me going ahead against the luxury cars remaining forming part of the whole retinue, once I had already put out motorcycles agents opening the retinue and a very many number of luxury cars for which the civil guard had interrupted the circulation and had obliged us to remain still in our line. Well, as I told already, the yellow SEAT 850 turned aside and nobody was injured, such as I had thought I would attain. I went on driving with my knee and put out all the remaining retinue cars, a Rolls Royce presiding the retinue, and we saw such mortal accidents of luxury cars, the Rolls Royce exploded violently even, that I had probably killed all the millionaires of the retinue. So first thing I thought on seeing Malvern Wells School’s director’s car was the director was involved in the world’s revolution against capitalism that I was completely sure I was going to lead, but I only had asked him on seeing the car why he had chosen a yellow SEAT 850. I don’t clearly remember what possibly he could have had responded.
I had been several times in England before, but was a new place and a new county this time, being Great Malvern the nearest town to the village, February 1980. The school’s residency was not too big, we should have been twenty or twenty some students, most of them boys and nearly all Arabs. I had brought with me from Madrid my riding boots I hadn’t ever worn. Someone told me I could try a horse riding lesson in a riding school. I went to the riding school. I had never till then rode on a horse and my experience was so insultingly horrible I think it was the riding school’s teacher blame for what she said to my horse to doing this or that. I do not say I will never ride on a horse again in my life, but certainly not I will say to the horse to do same things mine did at the Malvern Wells riding school. I don’t remember quite well enough about the rooms, so it was all right, and besides, I wanted to study English and mainly to take advantage of my staying in England to learn as much as possible, although my level of French, which I had studied during Baccalaureate, wasn’t any good either. I did my best during lessons and on my own. In the classroom I remember we had as book for reading, understanding and comprehending Of mice and men, by John Steinbeck, and I followed the text in my free time so that the story was learned by heart. One day Boris Pasternak's sister came to the School to recite some of her own poems. Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, about First World War and revolution and civil war in Russia; he was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
I read the English newspapers every day and watched the news on TV, News at Ten, BBC, and all nights. One day I went to the TV room and there was a guy alone watching news, I don’t know what others could be doing. He was attentive on the screen, news had started it had been one minute. I knew him, he was Lebanese, and I knew Lebanon was by then invaded by the Jewish army and there were many Lebanese people killed every day, the army was causing destruction and havoc in their neighbour’s country. The boy was I would say suffering, precisely that day things had gone worse in Lebanon and I knew he was worried for his family and friends and for his country, he had told me. Not a half a minute had gone by since I had entered the room and had seated on a chair beside the guy when we saw on the screen the images of a house in Lebanon being attacked and killing for sure the people in the house, I hope humanly with rage they had not, but we saw the bombs going off in the midst of a room crowded with people and then the house collapsing. The guy was crying helplessly like in a shock and I could not contain and I cried too. We both had stood up on seeing the images and hearing the speaker say many Lebanese people had been killed that same day. At that moment some four or five Arab guys appeared in the room and they saw we were crying, it was obvious why and yet news about Lebanon hadn’t finished and the speaker was talking while the image of a half destroyed town could be seen. One of the Arab guys asked me what was the matter and I tried to control my tears some way, so I finally dried my tears with my hand and knowing they knew what was the matter I had a very friendly way of being nearer them by touching with my clenched fist the stomach of the guy who had asked and saying don’t worry. I didn’t know then why, but the Arab guy asked the others something in Arabic, if they had seen what I had done, and to me he said that I had threatened him with a punch in his stomach. I didn’t expect what happened since then. They accused me of provoking the guy and voices were heard and reached an employee who later told the director, although nothing really serious had disturbed me, I just simply didn’t know why at that moment.
The director wanted to speak to me, he had come to the school’s building and was waiting for me at the entrance door the employee had told me when he came to my room after the event taking place in the TV room. The director took me to his house which was just beside the building. We seated in the lounge. He asked me what had happened and I told him plainly what had happened and how. He looked taken aback by what I told him. He said he had seen me reading newspapers consciously. He asked me if I had political concerns. I answered to him that although very young I wanted to be the president of Spain. Spain’s president? he asked.
He seemed almost indignant, saying he was well informed about Spain’s political situation and he didn’t see I had reasons to aspire so really high. How might you possibly reach the presidency? he asked me nearly declaring his was not place for a president. I spoke to him about a Popular Front removing from power the king and the current president. The plan he said was suicidal. I told him I was neighbour of the king of Spain’s sister. Which one? he asked. Margarita, I said. She’s blind, isn’t she? Yes, she is, I said. She likes to come by the common kitchen door to where I live to watch TV, I said later. Well, what has it to do with your possibilities of taking the power in Spain on a basis of a Popular Front? I wouldn’t quite well understand which step would be your first being Spain a new democracy only two years old and king Juan Carlos new chief of state less than five years since. Well, I said, as for that we all know democracy in the hands of both Adolfo Suárez and the dummy king were reminiscences of Dictator Franco. But, he said, everyone has agreed in a new Constitution and things have changed a lot. I know too well, moreover, I am sure they both will forget about the poor and the workers, I said then. The people have given them the chance, things cannot go so easily and promptly, he argued. Everyone knows where I am living, everyone, I said. Who do you mean? he asked. I mean by everyone the Communist Party, my family, my comrades, the secret services, the ETA and GRAPO members, the king and the president themselves. I kept silence waiting his reaction. Actually, he ignored the information I gave him. But why do you call dummy to the king of Spain? Speak Spanish if you please, said to me the director. He is famous as playboy but he is a faggot; dummy, naff and faggot Juan Carlos, I said in Spanish and was attentive at his reaction. He made a showy grimace and asked why I dedicated such epithets to the king. As far as he knew, he said, the king Juan Carlos had a democratic mood and he had never heard the king was a faggot, but rather on the contrary, the king had won a fame of being successful with women. I told him we republicans had filmed him doing things the king himself cannot see again without feeling a poignant pain or a heart attack. He took it with humour although he was looking at me stern, he couldn’t hide a half smile he tried to simulate, both knowing what I had said was going far in the circumstances given and even anywhere else. Well, I have a big concern for Spain and I know Spain’s history, he said, and I hope it will be for the good if the king sinks down by himself. The people will finish by removing him from the head of the state and calling the president Adolfo Suárez into account, I said to him. He’s been elected president in free elections, he argued. He is a faggot too, I told him. I never heard the least rumour about none of the two, the director said to me in his very good Spanish nuanced of a softened English accent.
I remembered at that moment what Manuel had told me about by that time president Adolfo Suárez, and repeated it to the director word by word, the litany: Adolfo Suárez arrived in Madrid from Cebreros without a cent and joined the Movimiento, Dictator Franco’s official henchmen organization, in 1958; he became a sneaker of the Movimiento and did a career as that; first day telling of the people of Cebreros and they paid to him a room in a grubby pension. Next day they killed the people betrayed in Cebreros. He was living in the pension and later moved to a house and began to ascend in the Movimiento’s scale; he always had bloody mentors and adhered all decisions Dictator Franco took whichever they were, fusillades, tortures and repression by brutal police forces; he reached the top when he was appointed secretary general of the Movimiento’s minister in 1975 by Dictator Franco; finally, that he had been chosen president by the dummy king Juan Carlos just to wash up the bad reputation of the old regime when he had precisely been one of the henchmen during more than 17 years and it was impossible to hide what the deeds had been like, although the president Adolfo Suárez sent two thousand policemen to make confiscations in the newspaper archives (at this the director couldn’t avoid a chuckle); and what else; well, yes, definitely, he is trying to control things do not change at all, and of course forgetting people poor and workers and working-class.
When I had finished telling him this in nearly the exact words Manuel had used with me, he kept silence while glancing at me attentively. I didn’t have to wait much. Why you mix up politics and sex tendencies? I think nobody would believe you if you tell them the king and the president are both faggots. Well, it happens that some of us republicans have got not only the king’s sexual excesses filmed as I have told you, but many people’s, I said. Why you do insist in calling them faggots? Anyway, I answered, if the king is a faggot and the president covers him up, the president is another faggot, isn’t he? I am up on the news about Spain, he said, and I see your plan unrealizable, a crazy plan I’d rather say. Some time ago the chief of protocol of the Moncloa palace, as you know presidency’s palace, invited me to visit the palace and I refused intently, of course I refused, I said to him as settling things in its place. He feigned as if he hadn’t listened. Adolfo Suárez is married to a woman I would reckon at first sight, Amparo her name, he said. I do honestly think he is not a faggot, he said after. I didn’t want to insist on it and said: Well, I don’t think he is in love with his wife, anyway.
Things didn’t go right at the school by reasons I suspected were under control but out of my hands. In the classroom and in the dining room the Arab guys were hinting to me I don’t know what exactly about my mother, saying mummy quite frequently as though I had to think in something rugged. I tried to come to good terms with them but they seemed not to accept. I got tired of the situation and packed my things and went to take the train at Great Malvern station to go to London. When it was time the train left from the station, and being I seated waiting for the train to start moving, all the group of Arab guys appeared on the platform and they all got on the train. I saw them through the window and immediately thought they would search for me in the train and would try to upset me. Yes indeed, they came into my wagon and seated all around me and began again hinting something about mummy. I was not nervous and tried to be patient, they were upsetting me although they acted like they would never be rough in earnest. I don’t remember clearly but something for me unexpected happened, I think it was a woman who made the guys be quiet and stop hinting, and I arrived in London. From Victoria station I went to Pont Street but Antonio had no bed not taken and I had to go to sleep at a Queens Gate Street's hotel I had been to before.
At the end of the month, February 29, I arrived at the Regency Hotel School in Ramsgate, Kent, where I saw in my room there being with pretty Ulrike Möller the microfilm of terrorist actions carried out by family and friends and the war sequences that so much enriched my powers. Well, so much indeed since then that I haven’t got an aura only but can multiply by millions and make people see all around the world the microfilm actions to the point of being known as the one who in fact do the movements of heavens with all they got: sun, moon, planets, satellites and stars, and of the ground wherever it is if I want to, not hurting recklessly good people ever, being able to guide people committed in Revolution, the essence and our longed goal, illuminating the road putting all my senses in it, waiting to be appointed armed president of the Communist Party of Spain, that we many knew would be some day and now all the world knows.
