California Cafeterias

            I was working for a marketing company at Alcalá Street, in the neighbours house where Federico García Lorca lived in Madrid, just where Alcalá and Goya streets converge. Every day I used to leave work at 5 p.m. and I walked down Goya’s street from the office up to GESA fuel station where as employee worked, wearing an overall, my quarter’s friend Enrique Martín, Remache, with whom I have always laughed much. We all felt admiration for Quique. He had a racing motorcycle and sometimes he accelerated full in the highway to Andalucía for the gang to see him pass by it at full speed.

            I walked down Goya Street with the newspaper to the fuel station every day and Quique payed to me friendly attention while he worked putting gasoline, inflating pneumatic wheels or having a look to engines and repairing what he was capable of.

            We usually began to speak at once with an ironic bias, sarcastic or sardonic, yes indeed, and we had a big time.

            In the building beside the fuel station there was the Fuerza Nueva’s headquarters, fascist organization adept to dictator Franco. We saw their party’s henchmen coming in coming out constantly. Opposite to the fuel station, in the same Goya Street, there was California 47 cafeteria, at 47 Street’s number. Just beside the cafeteria’s entrance door the plumbers had their stall where they sold basebol bats, brass knuckles, flags and more rubbish.

            Quique used to throw hurtful hints when some Fuerza Nueva’s members passed by near to us, above all if they were wearing like plumbers, and now and then he shouted aloud for everybody to hear. He said things like ‘Spain is different’, ‘The street is mine’ and ‘My cock is long’.

            One day he was more spirited and resolute. I was explaining to him about some business that appeared on the newspaper and he got fired up for the insulting that seemed things, a deplorable injustice, that he went to the angle of the fuel station, corner with Goya Street and shouted with powerful loud voice: One day we are going to kill eight old dames!

            I told him to feign, that they must have felt provoked. Quique asked me if I was scared. I told him I was not, but I was worried about him, because he was there always. To me all them, he said pointing them out, suck me off.

            Well then, Quique almost get it right as for genre and number, because six years later there was a terrorist action vindicated by GRAPO in California 47 in which nine people died, most of them old dames. Therefore when it happened I realised what Quique had guessed and how the business was like. Quique was in advantage and contagiated me in the plan I might make out.

            Actually, when the action took place, 26 May 1979 and was vindicated by GRAPO, I knew already that that fact was connected with the rebellion of the people against the dummy king of Spain and the fascist sneak president Adolfo Suárez, with my friends Alfonso, Pablo and Jorge beside me, to carry out terrorist actions, assaults to power centers supported by revolutionary soldiers of the Revolutionary Militar Comittee.

            Well then, the month of May finished and June passed. There was more terrorist actions. Reading a special edition of El País newspaper in California 21, at 21 Goya Street, and having just come out from a cinema where I had seen Our man in Moscow, I knew I had always had the certainty of meeting my three friends and they would appoint me president.

            That was how I run the risk driving in the opposite direction in the highway to Marbella in the first days of July, getting a score of five chiefs of state of Arab regimes, four princes direct descendants of Muhammad, sultans, emirs and sheiks… No one escaped hell. It was a lightning visit: coming, sail on a yacht in open sea, dine, sleep, breakfast reading El Diario de Málaga, know who were coming that day, decide to come back to Madrid, appropriate car, a black Renault 5 Copa and the nerve of the fact of the nearness of both cafeterias to Manuel’s that made me stronger.

            Like it was impossible not to know something, months later I watched Pablo placing the bomb, how Pablo came out from there before the bomb went off, how it went off full in the lounge.

            When I meet up Pablo again I will know if he had time to throw away the Fuerza Nueva’s pumblers’ stall. I am sure before escaping the explosion something happened between Pablo and the fascists, whatever it happened. Let’s wait to hear from Pablo. I wish he had had time to host everyone he saw.

’That’s what I did’, says Pablo to me now by telepathy. Quique, by telepathy too, says to me: ‘Assassins… You will see how you will enjoy it…’