On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  First, you mash the corn, then you add the beans and a bay leaf, heat up the stock, peel the plantains, grate the yucca. Liliana’s voice. It’s really delicious. The dog’s eyes. From the workshop, I drive along the road that skirts La Marina beach, past the apartment blocks and the gardens that peer over the walls—palm trees, bougainvilleas, jasmines, thujas, the complete catalogue of plants from the local nurseries—and on as far as the junction with Route 332. The two roads meet in a kind of suburban landscape: abandoned orchards, scrub, rubble that the autumn rains have covered in grass, the characteristic adornment of these areas that were about to be reclassified as urban in the latter years of the economic boom, but which remain in a kind of legal limbo, an apparent no-man’s land on which shacks have sprung up, doubtless built by people from Eastern Europe or by Moroccans who work as agricultural laborers and go marauding for metal, discarded household appliances, old furniture, copper, and whatever else they can find or steal: they’ll take anything, they’ll rip up pipes, irrigation hoses, cables; they’ll make off with tractors, with tons of fruit and even destroy whole orchards; it wouldn’t be the first time a farmer has arrived at his orange grove to find that every tree has been chopped down to be sold for firewood. They work as scrap dealers near their local shantytown, piling up scrap metal and strewing around them the mutilated carcasses of cars, fridges, washing machines and old air-conditioning units, and all within sight of the housing developments advertised on the huge roadside billboards as “luxury estates.” People don’t care: as long as the marauders don’t throw their garbage over the wall and the smell of putrefaction doesn’t reach their private terrace, the whole world can sink into the shit for all they care.

  At the point where the two roads cross, twenty or so prostitutes sit basking in the winter sunshine. They sit on plastic chairs next to the reedbeds or walk up and down the hard shoulder; they perch at small rickety plastic tables painting their nails, studying themselves in their powder compacts, playing solitaire or smoking; they wear G-strings that reveal their thighs and ass, and tiny unbuttoned jackets that show their tits, even though in the damp air of this muddy area between the lagoon and beach the December sun is too weak to take the edge off the chill, which definitely has its claws out on a day like today, when the wind is from the northwest. Some of the women pace nervously up and down, only a few yards back and forth, as if they were pacing not the hard shoulder of a highway but a narrow prison cell (where several of them doubtless learned this invigorating exercise). They’ll gesticulate, perform—opening their legs or crouching down and wiggling their asses at any traffic, alerted by the sound of a truck or the beep of a horn. They lift their clothes up above their tits, showing their naked bodies to the truckers, to the solitary occupants of vans bearing the logos of locksmiths, couriers, glaziers or food distributors; white thighs or yellowish breasts, pink torsos, flesh the color of milky coffee or black—or, as people used to say, the color of ebony, gleaming in the fragile morning light: a sampler of all the races (although only very rarely are there any Asian women—Chinese, Cambodian or Thai—though you can, of course, find them), but the majority are women from Eastern Europe, women with bluish, almost phosphorescent flesh, who seem to emit light rather than receive it. There are loads of African women and quite a few Latin Americans, although lately I’ve seen fewer Brazilians, who were the first to appear here. It seems that things are on an upswing in Brazil, and I imagine the girls setting up business in Rio or São Paulo, hopefully starting their own hair salons or boutiques selling clothes or shoes. Great things seem to be in the offing for Brazil, what with the Olympics being held there and everything. I drive past the women almost without looking. I know one of them, I’ve seen her here before, and another woman, a Ukrainian I fucked a few months ago, stands looking at the car as I pass, she probably recognized me, but today I drive on—a quick sideways glance and onward. I’m not on the look-out for sex. I’m on the look-out for locations, for a suitable stage. Or, rather, I’m driving to the spot I’ve already chosen, to carry out a visual inspection, as they say on the news about the police investigating a crime scene: I’m going back to the very first place I can remember, the place my uncle showed me and that my father always seemed to hanker after, somewhere he would like to have stayed, but couldn’t: a second chance. You see, Dad, this time, the postman rang more than twice. You’ve seen the film, haven’t you? Pretty dirty stuff, like everything else in this world. I remember the two main actors, covered in flour, rolling around on the kitchen table. So like life. The theme of the film: the egotism of those who betray and kill for the sake of money and pleasure, the usual tedious story. But then life, basically, is a dirty business; regardless of whether it’s pleasure or pain, we all sweat, shit and smell. My old man learned this in the best of all possible schools—war (a war between neighbors too), police stations and prison. The things you can see and smell in places and circumstances like that . . . but let’s not go there. Anyway, if I spot some bird I can shoot (and the marsh is a sure-fire place for that), I’ll do a little hunting. Small game, of course. That’s why I brought my shotgun. It deserves a role in this rehearsal. A key role. It’ll play a decisive role in the dénouement. When I say hunting, I mean hunting for birds, and not the human kind, today they’re off the menu: you want fucky-fucky I’ll suck you off without a condom or you can give it to me from behind for thirty euros—from the front, twenty. Nothing much has changed since men were men. Man—a biped buyer of cunts. Not a bad definition. In drachma in sestertius in doubloons in pounds in marks in dollars in roubles. In euros. A buyer of cunts, a hirer of asses, but I don’t want to confuse things by mixing up my expeditions; it seems right to impose a certain order on a day like today. The eve of liturgical celebrations calls for a little quiet reflection: confession of one’s sins and penance. The purpose of the emendation is irrelevant in this case. There will be no opportunity to reoffend. Before Christmas comes Advent; before Easter comes Lent. Rigorous days of meditation and abstinence that prepare us for the party. Let’s do it. Drive out desire, drive out the voices and mouths that ooze desire, the doorways that feed the oven of desire: the velvety voice, the seductive timber, the soft lips, the poisonous music. Corn pancakes made with eggs, a plantain sandwich, the creamy rice we make in Valle del Cauca. Don Esteban, you have no idea how delicious Colombian food can be. You Spaniards think we Colombians are savages. True enough, Liliana, among the country bumpkins of Olba, you don’t exactly get good press, but then they’re afraid of anything they haven’t seen born and hope to see die. And then there’s all the stuff you read in the papers, what you hear on the radio or see on TV—all that doesn’t really help: guerrillas, FARC, paramilitaries, drug clans, the cartels in Cali and Medellín, guns, trafficking of this, that and the other, all those shipments that arrive along with consignments of pineapples, canned food, timber, children’s clothes or ballet shoes. Yes, you’re right, Don Esteban, but we’re not all like that, we’re not all guerrillas or drug dealers. And anyway, aren’t there any Spanish thieves, murderers, traffickers, and terrorists? Does no one here ever shoot anyone dead? Are there no cocaine laboratories? And as for terrorism, well, look at all those people who died in the attacks in Madrid, evil is everywhere and probably good is too, although it’s harder to find, especially for women, at least you men have your friends, whereas our female friends are more like rivals. Of course there are bad people here too, Liliana. It’s her voice, and that little roll of fat between her jeans and her T-shirt, so troubling when you can’t sleep: I feel as if she were just a few feet ahead of me, reflected in the windshield, the color of her skin, the tone, the touch: her skin between my hand and the wheel. Warm, soft, deceptively honey-colored. But, I tell myself, this is neither the time nor the place for such thoughts, I have to prepare the stage for the performance. On the days when I combined hunting or fishing with paying for the company of a girl, I felt the excitement of that shared intimacy in the silence of the reedbeds; and my desire only gre
w when I’d see her getting more and more frightened as we plunged down barely discernible paths. Where are you taking me? she would ask, a tremor in her voice, while I wondered why fear always adds a little spice to sex: you start out searching for the light and end up in a dark labyrinth, you start out looking for the smooth marble of flesh and end up enmired in the mud of secretions. It’s exciting—satisfying—having sex in that dense vegetal boudoir; desire and fear all in one, the ideal combination. And yet, once it was over, I would feel dirtier and guiltier than if I’d done it somewhere else, by which I mean some pokey little room with closed windows and a dim light that was sometimes red, sometimes pink and, at others, vaguely blue; or the nocturnal, ghostly back seat of the car, trembling legs next to an open door. Sex that only intensified the postcoital sadness that seems innate in the human animal. Whenever I had sex here, by the lagoon, I was looking for a sense of freedom, and yet it seemed to me I wasn’t the only one left feeling soiled, which is how I usually feel after my venal contacts in those ill-lit rooms (I relieve it with a vigorous shower when I get home, sponging myself down with plenty of soap and finishing off with a generous sprinkling of eau de Cologne); except for one woman, it always felt as if I was soiling the place itself, which is rather paradoxical, given that the lagoon has long been a kind of neglected backyard for the neighboring towns, one where everything was permitted and where decades of garbage and filth have been allowed to accumulate. It’s only with the latest fad for conservation and ecology that the area has acquired some symbolic value, and the newspapers and the local TV station describe it as the area’s great green lung (the sea is the other great, powerful lung, the one that growls and hisses and grows angry and washes us all), and they refer to it as a refuge for indigenous species and a special place for migrating birds to nest. Until about ten years ago, Bernal, the manufacturer of asphalt roofing felt, used the lagoon as a dumping ground for any defective material. Everyone knew about it and yet it never occurred to anyone to report it. Bernal went entirely unpunished. Just like his father, although he was apparently more civilized than his father. I’m not joking. In the 1940s, his father, who owned a few fishing boats, used to get rid of the occasional awkward corpse by putting it in a boat, tying a stone around its neck and then dropping it over the side into the vast, merciful Canal de Ibiza, where the waters separating Spain from the island are at their deepest: you find the best prawns and the best red tuna there, the kind that they say is going extinct. A corpse is organic matter, nutrients. The sea washes everything clean or else drives it out or gobbles it up, purifies with iodine and saltpeter, uses and recycles: one assumes the water there is healthy, not like the lagoon, which is always viewed by the people living nearby as an unhealthy, fetid place, stagnant water that can’t be trusted, liquid that grows warm and putrid in the spring sun and is only washed clean again when the first cold drops of rain fall in the autumn. The sea cleanses and oxygenates, the lagoon rots—like wars, police stations and prisons. They rot you, don’t they, Dad? They stink. Lagoons don’t get a very good press: fever, malaria, filth. The Romans drained lakes like this for reasons of health and economy, I’ve seen it on TV documentaries: Rome was surrounded by infectious swamps, like our own dear marsh, beads in the malarial necklace of the Mediterranean, a marshy chain scattered along the coast; until very recently, farmers, with their hunger for arable land, have always systematically drained all the lakes in the area. The novelist Blasco Ibáñez described the process, which nowadays is considered highly prejudicial to the environment, but thanks to which a lot of people managed to make a living here. Anyone who hasn’t read the novel is sure to have seen the TV series. I’ve read the book: the edition my grandfather bought before the war must still be knocking around in the house somewhere (we saved half a dozen or so of the books from one of the boxes my grandmother buried, I don’t think there can be many more than that in the whole house), and I watched the series they showed a few years back. The seashore has never been a hospitable place and, apart from a few promontories, it remained deserted until a few decades ago, when they started building wherever they wanted. In Misent, for example, there are housing developments right on the beach with names like La Laguna, Las Balsas, Saladar or El Marjal, whose inhabitants all complain that their houses get flooded with the onset of the autumn rains. But what sensible person would think of buying a place in a development with a name like that? The names of the places retain the memory of what they were. Lagoons. Quagmires. Ponds. Bogs. Salt pans. My father felt a particular scorn for people who bought houses and apartments in areas reclaimed from the lagoon. In fact, he scorned all those who arrived in the area drawn by the call of the sea. Lazybones. Adventurers. Speculators. The coast is an evil place, he used to say. The sea either washes up or attracts garbage, and only the scum remains. It’s always been like that: conmen, cardsharps, thugs. Although now that the human animal has become the least protected species, the ecologists probably consider what Bernal Jr. did as less forgivable than what his father did, because the worst sin has always been to destroy the eternal (no sin committed against the Holy Spirit can ever be forgiven) and for our materialistic society the eternal is no longer God, which means that the human body doesn’t merit the respect it once enjoyed when it was deemed to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, no, now the great shrine of the divinity is nature: impregnating water and mud with asphalt roofing felt—bituminous matter, glass fiber, carcinogenic asbestos—which is what Bernal Jr. did—seems far worse than the murders his father committed. If you throw a corpse into the sea, you’re doing the environment a favor, supplying food for the fish to nibble on with their small cold mouths. The sins of the gunmen—who turned ditches into graves and peppered the walls of cemeteries with bullets, who fed the fishes out at sea—those were all absolved by the Transition, because apparently they were only venial sins, whereas the sins committed against the environment have no expiry date and no judge can absolve them. Let’s not deceive ourselves, man is nothing very special. In fact, there are so many of us that our governments don’t know what to do with us all. Six billion humans on the planet and only six or seven thousand Bengal tigers: tell me—who needs protecting most? Yes, you decide who needs most care. A dying African, Chinaman or Scotsman or a beautiful tiger killed by a hunter. A tiger with its pelt of matchless colors and its flashing eyes is far more beautiful than a varicose-veined old jerk like me. What a difference in the way it carries itself. How elegant the one and how clumsy the other. Look how they move. Put them next to each other in a cage in the zoo. The children gather round the old man’s cage and laugh as they watch him delousing himself or crouching down to defecate; outside the tiger’s cage, though, they open their eyes wide with admiration. The sleight of hand that made man the center of the universe no longer convinces. It’s true that we can recognize human animals by their gestures, faces and voices, and this arouses our sympathy, but we can also recognize the features of the domestic cat or dog we live with, we can attribute feelings to them too. Voices are another matter: Could you help me fold the sheets. No, not like that, the other way. God, those great clumsy hands of yours make me laugh, oh, sorry, I only meant that you look as if you could tear the cloth just by touching it. And when I said “clumsy,” I didn’t mean that your hands were ugly—they’re very strong, no, not ugly at all, you have lovely hands, virile hands, a man’s hands.

  We turn the sheet this way and that before we can agree on which way we’re going to fold it. Our hands touch when I hand her the folded sheet and again when she gives me the pillow to hold while she smooths the pillowcase. Do you know how many varieties of potato there are in Colombia? The pores of our skin give off the warm sweat in which we gently cook during the night.

  There are two girls (I don’t think they can even be eighteen yet) standing at the end of the road where I turn off to reach the lagoon, at a point where the reedbeds come right up to the cement embankment. They’re chatting to each other, blocking the way, standing right in front o
f my car, doubtless assuming I’m a potential customer. I stop for a moment so as not to run them over. Each one runs her tongue over her lips, smiles, strokes her crotch, and one girl reveals a brush of fair, well-trimmed pubic hair, as she elbows her friend and guffaws, pointing at me, perhaps meaning, look at that old man. That dirty old man. A disgusting old man—a lech. At least, that’s the unpleasant thought that passes through my head. I tap my horn and put my foot down on the accelerator. The car lurches forward with an aggressive roar that makes them step hurriedly aside. They wave their arms about and shout things in Russian or Romanian, and it doesn’t take much intelligence to understand that they’re telling me that for all they care I can fuck off. Despite that earlier depressing thought (of the dirty old man, so proud of his sixty-thousand-euro four-wheel drive that I saw reflected back at me in the mirror of their eyes), they’ve nevertheless managed to arouse me and I drive the rest of the way with my left hand pressed down on my fly. My cock deflates beneath the weight of my hand, at the same time as the two whores disappear from my rearview mirror—at the bend in the road, their gesticulating figures have vanished behind the vegetation. The road surface (if you can call it that) is pure mud and full of deep potholes filled with rainwater. I advance very slowly. At the first intersection, I turn left along a dirt road just before you get to the river, or whatever you want to call that stretch of water which, like another half dozen or so similar stretches of water further north, forms the system of canals through which the lagoon flows into the sea. I park the car by the water’s edge, on the grassy bank. The pleasure I get from driving down these diabolical roads comes in large measure from knowing that I won’t meet any police—no civil guards or nature preserve police or environmental police—or even other fishermen or hunters: no one ventures down these dirt roads buried in scrub (the lagoon has been declared a nature reserve, but no one keeps watch over it or guards it: there’s no budget for that), and no one else knows the complicated grid you have to reconstruct each time you visit, given that it’s used less and less, and the people who once knew every inch of the area and kept the pathways reasonably clear have also disappeared. I’ve known this place for over sixty years. I’ve come here either alone or with Francisco, Álvaro, Julio, and lately, Ahmed. I’ve been coming here ever since my Uncle Ramón started bringing me when I was a child, once or twice a week, to hunt for coots, crakes, mallards or one of those ducks that we call mute ducks and the French call Barbary ducks, creatures that added a touch of highly valued protein to our stews, along with a bit of rice—the inevitable local vegetable—some spinach, a few potatoes, a handful of beans, some chard or a few cardoon stalks, protein that was considered a luxury at the market, although most country people, instead of eating what they caught, sold it to restaurants back then or to distributors who sent it off to the butcher’s shops in Valencia. The protein gleaned from the lagoon paid for the inferior protein and fat we bought in the market: bacon, offal, chorizo and black pudding.