On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  He moves off as fast as he can, although he can’t resist the temptation to turn round a couple of times and look back at that piece of putrid meat, at the tendons and bones with which the black dog is busily playing, beneath the gaze of the Alsatian, which has returned from its brief absence and is again watching from a couple of yards away. Ahmed looks, above all, at the dark shapes half-buried in the mud. Despite his haste, he still has time to see, behind one of the dunes and hidden in the undergrowth, the burnt-out carcass of a car, whose presence only increases the sinister air the place has suddenly taken on. He stops breathing. He can’t breathe, he can feel a rapid pulse beating in his chest, his temples, his wrists, a buzzing in his head. Esteban told him once that criminals used to throw incriminating weapons into the thick waters of the lagoon. He keeps walking and keeps looking, but can’t seem to control the movements of his eyes, which appear to have acquired a life of their own and move at will: they shift from side to side, forcing him to turn his head. He doesn’t want to look, but can’t help himself, although now he’s less concerned about those shapes or about the dogs than about the shadows he thinks he can glimpse behind the reeds or around each bend in the path or in the dips and folds of the dunes. With each step he takes, he grows more confused by the shifting shadows and silhouettes, which take on seemingly human forms. He feels he’s being watched. He has a sense that people are observing him from the dunes, from the road, from the reedbeds on the far side of the lagoon, even from the slopes of the distant mountains. He suspects that this morning, as he was walking along by the main road, he became an object of interest to passing drivers, to the prostitutes who saw him setting off along the path to the marsh, to the children who were playing by the shacks he passed at the end of Avenida de La Marina, and at that moment, wishing he could erase himself from their memories, he remembers that, in his haste, he has left behind his fishing rod secured between two boulders, his net in the water and his basket on the shore, on the grass. He can’t just abandon his belongings there, it would be so easy for a detective to identify both rod and net; especially the fishing rod, which probably still bears the tag from the sports shop in Misent where he bought it seven or eight months ago when he first started coming with Esteban to go fishing, and so he runs back to the place he has just left (now he really is frightened, his whole body trembling), the reeds cut his face, his cheeks, his eyelids. When he pushes them aside, he feels their sharp edges cutting the palm of his hand. As soon as he has retrieved his fishing rod, he must return to the point on the road where he arranged to meet his friend, but it would be stupid to stay there sitting by the curb, waiting as he usually does where the path meets the road—he’d be leaving all kinds of clues, because that’s already the way his mind is working, as if he were one of the guilty parties. No, he can’t possibly wait there, but neither can he just leave and have his friend set off down the path looking for him, because when the inevitable investigations begin (no, no, calm down, he tells himself, months and months could pass before anyone else goes to that hidden corner) someone might recognize the car and identify Rachid’s clunker, that rusty fifteen-year-old Ford Mondeo, with its dented doors and its back bumper held on with wire. Besides, there’s that burnt-out car in the dunes, and someone is sure to report the disappearances; they’ll start dredging the lagoon, although who knows who those bodies might be. Probably immigrants like him, people just passing through, or maybe mafiosi fallen victim to some settling of scores: Moroccans, Colombians, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians. Perhaps a couple of prostitutes, their throats cut by their pimps, women nobody will take the trouble to look for.

  He decides to start walking along the main road, back to La Marina, and trust that Rachid will spot him from his car. Much as he would like to, he can’t stay still. He sets off toward Misent, then immediately retraces his steps, watching the passing cars, waiting anxiously for Rachid to appear, as if getting into his friend’s car would be like entering a refuge where he could disappear as soon as he sits down, arms hanging loose, breathing under control, head against the headrest, one cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window, relaxing and vanishing completely: the same psychological mechanism that allows children to believe they’re invisible when they cover their eyes with their hands: if you can’t see, then you can’t be seen. Sitting beside the driver of the Mondeo would be proof that he had nothing to do with that putrefying hand, with the stinking shapes buried in the mud, with that burnt-out car; once he has relaxed enough to disappear into the passenger seat of Rachid’s Mondeo, when they reach the intersection at the Avenida de La Marina a few miles further on, he will roll down the window and lean out to feel the cool evening air on his face, convincing himself that he saw nothing. He will be just another passenger among the thousands of others who travel along Route 332 every day, people filling that over-populated area for a few seconds and then lost again along the capillaries of the traffic heading for one of the small towns nearby or continuing on to some other part of Europe. At that point, his only thought is that he must tell no one what he’s seen (not even Rachid, who will know from his face that something has happened? Why didn’t you wait for me by the roadside? You seem worried, has something happened?), and yet he needs to tell someone as soon as possible, because he won’t be able to rest until he does; only by sharing the fear will he be able to detach it from himself. He approaches the junction and slows his pace to something approaching normal. He stops for a moment to open his basket and throw the fish into the gutter, the fish he caught and that now disgust him. He imagines the crows or the foxes biting greedily into them. He feels like throwing up. The lagoon, which was the color of cast steel when he arrived, is now smooth and delicate, like old gold, with coppery tints on the waves whipped up by the breeze.

  II

  External Locations

  December 14, 2010

  I’VE SAT my father down in front of the TV to watch his morning Western, whichever one was on the pay-per-view that day. He sits there amazed at the galloping horses, the neighing, the Indians, and the noise of gunfire: I know he won’t move until I come back. After the Western, they’ll put on some movie about terrorists, with scowling Arabs speaking a guttural language, translated into subtitles too small to decipher on the TV screen; or one about policemen chasing drug-traffickers, Latinos or blacks, with lots of cars screeching round corners, crashing into each other and, finally, hurtling off a high metal bridge. He’ll stay there, eyes glued to the screen or, more likely, he’ll doze off, eyes closed—it comes to the same thing. In fact, he stares with equal interest at the bathroom wall when I’m washing him or at the ceiling when I put him to bed. The important thing is that he doesn’t try to get up and risk hurting himself. To avoid this, I put him in a big armchair that he couldn’t get out of even if he wanted to, because it’s too deep and too low—not, of course, that he’d have the strength to stand up anyway, but just to make sure he won’t fall out, I roll up a sheet, wrap it round his chest and tie it to the chair back, taking care not to tie it too tightly. I check that he can move his body back and forth. Is that all right, not too tight? I ask simply to say something, simply to ask something, because he hasn’t spoken for months now, and I can’t even tell if he can actually see. That is, he can see, because he closes his eyes if I shine a bright light in his face or if I make him turn his head toward a lightbulb, and his eyes follow my hand if I move it slowly from side to side in front of him; and he can hear too, although it isn’t clear whether he understands me or not; he jumps and looks frightened if I shout at him or if he hears a loud noise immediately behind him. He hasn’t spoken since they removed the tumor from his trachea. He doesn’t speak, but he could write and ask for things in writing, he could express himself through gestures, but he doesn’t—he doesn’t show the least interest in communicating. The doctors have run all kinds of tests and scans and tell me that since there’s no damage to his brain, they can’t understand what’s wrong with him. Age. He’s over nine
ty now. He’s become a shop-window mannequin. Not that I’m particularly interested in anything he might have to say, although now that Liliana doesn’t come any more and I’ve closed the workshop, I do spend more time observing him. I watch him, study him, learning useless lessons with no practical application. Human life is nature’s biggest waste of time and energy: just when it seems that you’re beginning to make the most of what you know, you die, and those who come after you have to start all over again from scratch. Helping a child learn how to walk, taking him to school and teaching him to tell a circle from a square, yellow from red, solid from liquid, hard from soft. That’s what he taught me. Life—a waste of time. Get used to it. He’s always been very bright, the old man, bright and a real bastard too. But that’s what he taught me and what I repeated to Liliana, perhaps simply because I wanted to make her feel sorry for me. I’m packing things away: it’s time to shut up shop, I told her. And she said: Well, it’s never too late to learn something new. One day, I’m going to cook you both a really good sancocho, which is like a stew, except that we add vegetables you Spaniards hardly ever use or don’t even know about—vegetables like arracacha, corn cob, yucca, green plantain, and we season it with coriander, that herb I used to miss so much here until they started selling it in the Colombian shop and in the Muslim shops. A sort of fragrant parsley. We Latin Americans eat it and so do the Arabs. Because it’s on my way, I usually buy coriander in that Arab greengrocer’s next to the halal butcher. I would never buy meat from that butcher, of course. God knows where they get their lamb and their beef. I saw a TV program once that said Spain’s full of illegal slaughterhouses supplying Muslim shops. Apparently, they have to kill the animal while facing Mecca, well, we all have our little ways, I suppose. In the same program, they showed you how Chinese restaurants store ducks, dear God, apparently their fridges smell worse than a dead dog, it’s enough to make your hair stand on end, and you don’t even want to know what else they said they found there. But I was talking about coriander, which you don’t use here, or even know about, just as you don’t know about real fruit: mangos, papayas, soursops, guayabas, uchovías, passion fruit, custard apples, pitayas and ahuyama, which you call squash. You’re getting more familiar with some of those fruits now, because the supermarkets sell them, but as far as I know, you’ve only ever eaten tasteless things like bananas, apples, pears, oranges, and that’s about it, oh, and those awful pineapples that arrive from Costa Rica and taste of nothing at all and go rotten if you leave them in the fridge for a few days. No, don’t laugh, it’s true. I bet you’ve never eaten a decent pineapple in your life. A perfectly ripe pineapple, just picked, with that lovely sweet, honeyed flavor. Her voice, every evening, while I sit him down at the table laid with a plastic table cloth and on which I will place the larger plate with the vegetables and the smaller plate with the omelette, just as she used to do up until a few days ago. Even in his present helpless state, he’s still ruling my life, setting me tasks, imposing a timetable, more or less as he’s always done, yes, my diary is still dependent on him. Before, he achieved this by imposing his authority; now he does so through his silence and ineptitude. He is the powerless patient: he’s swapped authority for a demand for compassion; and I have become his servant, because I feel sorry for him. On the other hand, we have all been subject to his mood swings for as long as I can remember. His life, on the other hand, has been his property alone. He has behaved much as a king behaves—depending on the constitution—or a certain sort of artist—taking no responsibility for his actions: today I protest and complain, tomorrow I won’t utter a word, the day after that I’ll be an attention-seeker, the next I won’t even be able to bear anyone looking at me. Now that I think about it, he did have an artist’s mentality. In his youth, he wanted to be an artist. He loved to read novels, as well as books about history, art and politics. He would borrow them from the local library. On Friday afternoons, he’d get cleaned up, put on a white shirt and a jacket, and go and change his library books. On Sunday afternoons, in other people’s houses, when soccer matches were blaring out from radios, utter silence reigned in ours: my father would be sitting by the window, reading, taking advantage of the afternoon light; then he would lower the blind and turn on the standard lamp next to the only armchair in the house, and remain immersed in his book until supper time, after which he would return to the armchair and resume his reading. The soul of an artist. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor, which is what he wanted me to be as well, but the chaos of the civil war put an end to his ambitions. I managed to put an end to my own ambitions all by myself. I was never interested in the skill he’d chosen for me. I lasted only a few months at art school. He and my grandfather made some of the bits of furniture for the house, furniture decorated in a style that was old-fashioned even then, around the time of the Republic and in the years immediately preceding, because, by then, in the late 1920s and early 30s, people were choosing designs that were vaguely art deco, while they, those staunch revolutionaries, adopted a Renaissance style, with carving reminiscent of certain façades that tend to feature in TV documentaries about Salamanca: full of grottesche, medallions and acanthus leaves. Obsolete from the day they were born, but no one could deny their excellent quality. They lent a dignity to our house at a time when we had barely enough to eat. More a matter of professional pride than extravagance.

  Once I’ve settled my father in front of the TV, I go down to the shed in the yard to fetch my Sarasqueta shotgun, my cartridge belt and my Wellingtons, and I call to the dog in a tone of voice that he understands to mean: Get in the car. I hold open the door of my four-wheel drive and in he jumps and curls up in the back, still watching my every move. He’s a very docile creature, a good hunter, but, above all, a good companion. He lies down beside me in the workshop and stays there for hours, and if I sit in the armchair in the living room, he comes over and rests his head on my thigh, as if to say that he’s there if I need him, that I can count on him. I’ve never seen him be aggressive with anyone, far less try to bite them. He does growl if someone—usually the neighbor’s cat—goes anywhere near his bowl. Greed is his only defect, but that’s more a sign of a healthy dog really. Wherever I sit, he lies down next to me and watches me, but he’s always very still, apart from when he wags his tail or comes over to rub against my leg or to stand on his back legs, resting his front paws on my chest (easy does it, you’re going to push me over), staring up at me and barking, which is his way of speaking to me, of demanding my attention. He barks, too, when he sees me talking to someone or hears me on my cell phone, and then his barking becomes more insistent. He’s jealous. If I take him out hunting, he runs a few feet ahead of me, turning round now and then, so as not to lose that contact between man and dog. Sometimes, he runs so fast that his agility (such harmony of movement between legs and back) still fills me with admiration. He returns, panting, sometimes carrying in his mouth the creature I’ve just brought down.

  With the dog sprawled in the backseat, I turn on the engine, which starts on the first try, even though it’s been a few days since I’ve driven it. Tom’s a good dog, the Toyota is a good car. We’ve had some unforgettable times up at the lagoon, plunging into the mud, into the water and the shifting sands of the marshy areas; during the winter, I love driving along the beach, right on the very edge of the sea, where the waves break on the shore. And I’ve emerged from all those situations unscathed, it’s never once let me down. I feel something very special when I take the wheel. The moment I open the door, I enjoy the car and smell the leather of its seats. I enjoy driving; I stroke the wheel and am filled with sadness, already missing that contact, thinking that soon yet another pleasure will be gone. And knowing this causes a wave of melancholy to rise up from my chest into my eyes. Life’s a waste of time, my father used to say. Well, yes, you old bastard, yours at the moment is a waste of time several times over, dragging our lives down with you. Before setting off, I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught sight of the d
og’s alert eyes and thought how sad that the wisdom they express will vanish along with us, will just end up amid the detritus of our own personal garbage can. The lives of pets don’t seem to be compatible with economic returns either. Despite everything you know, dog, despite everything you’ve learned, despite the supple movements of your back when you run, despite the skill with which you sniff out your prey and diligently bring it back to me, you, too, are going to have to say goodbye to all this. What’s to be done? I think, and only then, with the ignition key between my fingers, my eyes fixed on the dog’s eyes, only then do I hesitate and feel like crying. The damn dog.