This is, no doubt, sensational speculation, as is the story that Aldapuerta was tortured andmurdered by unpaid drug traffickers. Nonetheless, he would indubitably have been pleaseby the confusion and scandal surrounding his death.In March, 987, his partly cremated body was removed from his apartment, the buildingitself saved from conflagration by the unusually rapid arrival of the emergency services.The authorities took away various unburned books, documents – including whatremained of his coded diaries, and finished and unfinished manuscripts – a small quantityof drugs, and the petrol canister that the police said was sufficient proof of self-immolation. One other curious item found in his apartment, and photographed in thehands of a smiling policia, was an intricately carved dildo fashioned from the femur of achild. Aldapuerta had told several people about this device, his hueso, and how it wasideal for perineo stimulation during intercourse or masturbation. Prior to his death,however, most believe the story to be yet another example of Aldapuerta’s deliberatelyaudacious mendacity. No foul play was suspected and the dildo was officially accepted tobe a grotesque memento picked up during one of his sojourns in South America wheresimilar human remnants are widely available. Perhaps this is an example of Aldapuerta’scunning: his allegations were so outrageous that no one believed him, facts were so hardto distinguish from fiction that many believed all his stories to be invented.What of his fiction? Was he confessing appalling sins in his writings? Again, like hisdrunken anecdotes, there was probably a fusion, or confusion, of fact and fiction, orperhaps mere embellishment and exaggeration of lesser events perhaps only experiencedat secondhand. For instance, the theme of ‘Armful’ concerns paedophilia and cannibalismtaken to a shocking extreme. Whether Aldapuerta indulged in such practices is not know,but he allegedly confided to a friend concerning the circumcised foreskin he stole fromthe hospital ‘The corona soon lost its flexibility and became tough and dry. It had nofurther practical use so I ate it.”There is no doubt that Aldapuerta had a fascination with human remains. Further to theincidents above, in 1976, he is said to have been detained at Spanish Customs whenreturning from a trip to Central America. He had $4000 cash in a hold-all, which heinsisted was payment for mercenary activities. What alarmed Customers Officers morewas the contents of a small package Aldapuerta carried under his arm. Inside were twodried human hands, which Aldapuerta said he had purchased form a trading post dealingin war trophies. The body parts were seized and Aldapuerta detained for several hours.His only regret, other then losing his trophies, was that “they didn’t poke around in myarse for contrabando, as I had contracted a dreadful stomach illness and would havegladly showered them all in the excrement they deserved.”Such was his life, or at least the stories told about it. What of his work? In the Spanish-speaking world it remains little known, and his precarious European reputation restschiefly on translations into French. This would undoubtedly have pleased him, for hisliterary idol par excellence was the Marquis de Sade, whose work indeed forms the onlysuitable comparison for much of Aldapuerta’s “vile, blasphemous and more then emetic”cannon. In English, the only work of his available to date had been a single short storycollection, Los Ojos/The Eyes, translated by Aldapuerta himself and published at his ownexpense in the year before his death: he expressed a wish that by placed some of his work in the “international idiom” he might achieve some of the success that had continuallyeluded him in Spanish. Copies of this version of The Eyes are extremely rare, and likely
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