Fermín

Romero de Torres

A good name, he told himself. Musical. Operatic. On a par with the epic and harrowing existence of a lifelong stowaway. Fermín Romero de Torres, or the thin little man stuck to a very large nose who was soon to adopt that name, had remained hidden in the bowels of a merchant ship that had left Valencia two nights earlier. Miraculously, he’d managed to slip aboard, hiding in a large trunk full of old rifles that was camouflaged among all kinds of merchandise. Some of the guns were wrapped up in sealed bags with a knot that protected them from the damp, but the rest were uncovered, piled up one on top of the other, and looked more likely to explode in the face of some unfortunate militiaman—or in his own face, if he leaned where he shouldn’t—than to bring down the enemy.

Every half hour, to stretch his legs and alleviate the numbness caused by the cold and the damp oozing from the walls of the hull, Fermín would venture through the web of containers and supplies in search of something edible, or, failing that, something that would help him kill time. In one of his expeditions he’d befriended a small mouse with long experience of these circumstances. After an initial period of distrust, the mouse began to approach him timidly and, nestling snugly in the warmth of his lap, shared the bits of hard cheese that Fermín had found in one of the food crates. The cheese, or whatever that greasy, leathery substance was, tasted like soap, and as far as Fermín’s gastronomic knowledge went, there was no indication that any cow or other ruminant had had a hand or a hoof in the matter of its production. But a wise man admits there is no accounting for taste, and if there was, the abject poverty of those days clearly altered the saying, so that they both enjoyed the feast with the enthusiasm that comes only from months of accumulated hunger.

“Dear rodent friend, one of the advantages of this war business is that from one day to the next, pigswill can be considered a dish fit for the gods, and even a cleverly skewered piece of shit on a stick begins to give off an exquisite bouquet of Parisian boulangerie. This semimilitary diet of soups made with dirty water and bread crumbs mixed with sawdust hardens the spirit and heightens the sensibility of the palate to such a degree that eventually even a piece of cork can taste of serrano ham if there’s nothing better to eat.”

The mouse listened patiently to Fermín while they devoured the food stolen by the stowaway. Sometimes, feeling satisfied, the rodent would fall asleep at his feet. Fermín gazed at the little creature, guessing that they had made good friends because deep down they resembled one another.

“You and I are two of a kind, mate, enduring the scourge of the erect ape with philosophy, and finding what we can find to survive it. Let’s hope to God that in the not too distant future all primates will be extinguished in one fell swoop and sent to push up daisies with the diplodocus, the mammoth, and the dodo, so that you, hardworking, peaceful creatures who are content to eat, fornicate, and sleep, can inherit the earth, or at least share it with the cockroach and some other coleopteran.”