The mystery of the enlightened forces

For a member of the Spanish nobility, Alfredo Pérez Corbacho Chaves María de los Remedios Cipriano is a surprisingly modest man. So modest is he that he occupies a home not far from the Barcelona sea front with no more than eight bedrooms and five reception rooms. His modesty is such that he has remained unwilling to burden anyone with having to crowd into such incommodious accommodation with him and, accordingly, lives by himself; save for a small team of servants who attend to his quotidian requirements. These requirements are modestly few: if his meals are cooked, his rooms cleaned, his clothes laundered and his transportation seen to, he is happy. A simple man is Señor Cipriano. A man of regular habits who seldom deviates from a set order of doing things each day.

Take for example Monday this week. Cipriano sat down to luncheon in his modest dining room at 13:00 as usual. To start, he had a whole sea bass, salad and rice. This was washed down by a Santiago Ruiz 2010. Next, he had a T-bone steak with cabbage, mushrooms and new potatoes. This he chose to wash down with a good Rioja. Finally, he finished his modest luncheon with a tart of dried fruit and nuts accompanied by a little jug of the delicious sweet dessert wine, moscatel.

In keeping with habit, when he had finished his luncheon, Cipriano stepped into the siesta room, conveniently located adjacent to his dining room and gently laid himself on a chaisse longue. Above the chaisse longue was a copy of Francisco Goya’s famous etching,The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.




Cipriano was often asked why he chose to have a picture depicting ghastly images in the room in which he lay down each day for his siesta. His response was invariably the same: “My siesta is an opportunity for my body to unburden itself while my mind labours feverishly. Goya inspires me – the creatures you see in the etching are evil characters of the night which represent mindless stupidity. The enlightened forces I am able to command pay heed to my mind’s unparallelled ability to produce profound effects. I cannot allow my reason to go to sleep if I am to perform the services which I carry out through magic and the dramatic arts for the betterment of mankind.

As soon as Cipriano’s great head hit the chaise longue, he was fast asleep and snoring. It was while he was thus engaged that a much agitated servant crept into his siesta room and, withconsiderable trepidation, gently shook Cipriano awake.

 “Curses befall you!” bellowed Cipriano. “May women shun you! May your manhood shrivel and drop like a dead twig! May you never know the taste of food or the flavour of wine, you heartless, evil scoundrel!”

The servant fell to his knees sweating and quivering.“I swear to God that the last thing I wanted to do was wake you up, my lord,” pleaded the servant,“but Señor Alonso is on the telephone and he swears he will do himself harm if he is not allowed to speak to you.”

 Cipriano raised his upper body and swung his legs to the floor. He extracted a large handkerchief and ran it over his huge face.

 “In that case, present the speaking device to me.”

 The servant returned bearing an old fashioned gold-plated telephone on a silver salver.

“My inestimable friend,” Cipriano said soothingly down the receiver, “I am enchanted and thrilled that you should take time out of your crowded day not only to spare a thought for little old me but also to telephone to enquire after my wellbeing.”

 Alonso’s words came out in a torrent of fury. He was so angry, you could almost hear the steam coming out of his ears. “Alfredo, things are not working. They are getting worse. Did you see what happened in Canada? I was humiliated by that chico poco de Inglés (little English boy) again!”

 “Fernando, Fernando, my dear friend. Please permit yourself to calm down. A tranquil breast is a happy breast. You have no reason to doubt me.”

 “But you said I had nothing to worry about” screamed Alonso. “Your words were ‘leave it to me’, weren’t they?”

“So they were, my most admirable young friend, so they were,” Cipriano replied gently. “But you must never try and understand the means by which the enlightened forces will work. Hell and damnation follow those who dare to do this. I hasten to add that I have come to terms with my ultímate fate and my soul is untormented. But, as I assured you in Fonda Gaig, I assure you now: leave everything to me.”

“I have to trust you, Alfredo, but Ferrari are going to give me a heart attack. If the team was able to think on its feet like it used to, I wouldn’t be in the shape I’m in. I lost the Montreal Grand Prix because the team chose a stupid strategy and decided to stick to it no matter what – even when los hijos de puta en inglés (the English bastards) had changed theirs midway through the race!”

 Cipriano remained silent for a moment. At length he spoke. “I will make you a further assurance, my young friend. I will be present at each race until the end of the season.”

Alonso, his voice audibly more relaxed, whispered “thank you” and rang off.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in a suite on the top floor of an expensive hotel in downtown Montreal, a furious row was raging.





“I fly my ass all around the world to be there for you. I cry when your team lets you down – I really suffer internally when things go wrong for you. I have to cover my eyes in shades all the time so people can’t see how much I cry. And what thanks do I get? What’s the first thing you want to do when you finally win a race? You want to hug your fucking team-mates! I literally had to grab hold of your head and kiss your helmet for you to notice that I was there waiting for you to win! Did you even notice how sexy I looked? Why should I fucking bother, huh? Why the fuck should I?”

Lewis Hamilton was sitting on a sofa with his head in his hands. He looked like a man who had spent twelve rounds in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson. “If we’ve been over this once, we’ve been over it a hundred times, Nicole,” he sighed. “For the last time, I belong to the McLaren team. Every part of the team is important. We win as a team and lose as a team. That has nothing to do with my feelings for you. You..”

“Hogwash, Lewis!” interrupted Nicole. “You ain’t running that shit past me no more! I have had it up to my ass with it. Do you wanna fuck your team-mates? Do they give you a blow-job? I ain’t putting…”

Not waiting to hear the end of the tirade, Lewis quietly stood up and left the room.

Gitau
13 June 2012