On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  Go on, then, tell me how many varieties of potato you have in your country?

  Well, they say we have over a thousand, tuquerreña, pastusa, roja nariño, mambera, criolla paisa. You hardly know anything about my country really. On television, the only time Colombia gets a mention is when there’s an item about drug-trafficking or there’s been another massacre by some guerrilla group.

  I’ve known these paths for as long as I can remember. My uncle showed me how to use a shotgun when I was only eleven or twelve: children matured much earlier then; by the age of nine or ten, we were helping in the fields, on building sites, in workshops. The first shot I fired nearly knocked me off my feet and left me with a huge bruise on my shoulder. As you can imagine, I completely missed the target and turned to my uncle, red-faced with embarrassment. I thought he would make fun of me, but he didn’t laugh as I’d feared he would, instead, he tousled my hair and said: You have just acquired the power to take away life, which is a pretty pathetic power really, because if you had real power—the power nobody has—not even God, I mean who ever believed that business with Lazarus?—you’d be able to restore life to the dead. Taking life is easy, anyone can do that. They do it every day all over the world. Just read the newspaper and you’ll see. Even you could do it, take someone’s life I mean, although obviously you’d have to improve your aim a little (and then he did smile teasingly, the corners of his lively gray eyes etched with a web of delicate lines). Mankind may have constructed vast buildings, destroyed whole mountains, built canals and bridges, but we’ve never yet succeeded in opening the eyes of a child who has just died. Sometimes it’s the biggest, heaviest things that are easiest to move. Huge stones in the back of a truck, vans laden with heavy metals. And yet everything that’s inside you—what you think, what you want—all of which apparently weighs nothing—no strong man can lift that onto his shoulder and move it somewhere else. No truck can transport it. Loving someone you despise or don’t really care for is a lot harder than flooring him with a punch. Men hit each other out of a sense of powerlessness. They think that by using force they can get what they can’t get by using tenderness or intelligence.

  He must have absorbed these ideas from my grandfather, who read them in the Russian novels he borrowed from the community library in Misent (there was no library in Olba at the time); he would cycle there wearing his best clothes, with his carefully pressed trousers folded into his bicycle clips, just as my father used to do on Friday afternoons, years later, although, by then, the community library had gone and there probably weren’t a lot of Russian novels in the municipal library. The men in my family liked those books. We kept them in the house until the war ended (and with it, my grandfather’s life), gospels of a code that was about to impose itself, the violence of the masses, the chronicle of the workers’ epic struggle. Russia came to mean the Soviet Union, the mother of all the world’s workers. Francisco and I have often remarked on how the bright light of all things Russian inspired a couple of generations of Spaniards (although Francisco’s uncles, grandparents and parents experienced it more as a blinding threat). Now, when you say “Russian,” you think the worst: extortion, mafias, the trafficking of women and of human flesh in general, flesh, which, as with herds of animals, seems so dull and undifferentiated when seen from a distance, and yet so magnificent in the one individual you have before you, in those bodies in roadside brothels that can be yours for forty or fifty euros. Soviet Russia. The class struggle. My father always refused to expand the workshop. We take on just enough work to keep us busy. And that’s that. We don’t live off other people’s work, but our own. We don’t exploit anyone. Apart from Álvaro, that is. But Álvaro, he would say, is family, his father helped me when I was in prison with him and stuck by me when I came out. For my father, Álvaro was a son, a relationship I’m not sure I could presume to claim for myself. I was take this, pick that up, carry this, assemble that. He never once called me by my name, never used any term of endearment—my dear, sweetheart, sweetie—as I so often have with Liliana: Why buy lightbulbs in the hardware store for two euros, when you can buy them in the Chinese shop for just thirty céntimos? Why buy garbage bags in the supermarket, when you can get twice as many at the Chinese shop for less? I’ll buy the bags next time, because all you’re doing is paying more for the same thing. You’re right, Liliana, you’re a much better shopper—you’re more careful with money. You notice prices, add up the céntimos, work out distances—how much you’d save or what you’d waste on gas, how much you get in a package, twelve or fifteen, you sniff out bargains, clip coupons, accumulate points on your loyalty card.

  We sometimes caught a wild boar, which we finished off with the shotgun my uncle kept hidden beneath a trap door in the workshop. My uncle could never get a gun license: he was too young to have been in the war, but was paying the price for his family’s political allegiances. When he got married and left home, he gave the gun to me (I’ve caught my deer now, I just hope she doesn’t stick a pair of antlers on me, he said, beaming and kissing his new wife) as well as his fishing tackle so that I could catch fish in the marsh, possibly easier to catch than the fish in the sea, and they were the best we could get at the time, given that we couldn’t go out to sea and cast our nets like some of our neighbors in Olba, who owned small boats that they kept moored in the nearby harbor of Misent. The marsh was like a fish farm: shrimps, mullet, frogs, tench, barbel; eels and elvers: we didn’t catch the elvers to eat, no, we didn’t eat them; the sight of that seething mass in the bucket disgusted my grandmother, who called them maggots; my uncle would hold them close to her face, laughing, and my father would watch, sitting on a bench in one corner of the kitchen, leave your mother in peace, can’t you see she doesn’t like it, his mask about to crack into the merest hint of a smile. We sold them to a dealer who had a contact in Bilbao, and we made good money like that. The price shot up just before Christmas: later, I found out just how much people were prepared to pay at that time of year for what my grandmother thought were repulsive maggots. In stormy weather or at high tide, the sea bass would swim in from the sea. Nowadays, you only find those borderline fish in the canals of the lagoon. My uncle could pinpoint them with uncanny accuracy. I used to say he had a good nose, but what he had was common sense. He kept a list in his head, a system—every freshwater species, every saltwater species, every creature: The environment is irrelevant, and that applies to birds as well, and if you push me, to human beings too—they all have a right time and a right place, and need to be caught in a particular way and using a particular bait, he would tell me, while he was baiting the hook. I didn’t initially understand what he meant: the fisherman who fails to choose the right bait does so because he doesn’t know how fish think, and a fisherman or a hunter has to become the thing he’s hunting, to think the same way. That’s why the real hunter, the real fisherman, falls in love with his victim: he’s hunting himself. And he feels sorry both for his prey and for himself. Hold the hook like this, no, we’re not going to use the dough we normally use for bait, today we’ll use this stuff. Smell it. Disgusting, isn’t it? What a stink! Well, fish love that smell. And so do crabs. Everything rots. We’ll end up rotting as well and we’ll smell quite a lot worse. Many years from now, you’ll rot too—and it’s that rotten smell that the fish like. When you get older, you’ll realize that they’re like humans in that respect. Don’t go thinking you’re not going to end up smelling like a dead fish, Esteban. Ultimately, we all end up smelling like that, and just as a doctor prescribes particular medicines for each patient, Uncle Ramón offered each creature its particular bait and taught me how to think like a fish, like an eel, like a mallard, and to think about life’s baits too. You will rot too, my boy. You will stink. Like everyone. See how beautiful the color and design of the duck’s neck feathers. But now it’s dead.

  And sixty years have passed, long enough for the web of veins to climb up the legs of that once young boy and form a network of blotches which, i
n the arch of the foot, has become a dark mass. The scaly skin on arms and chest is now the jaundiced color of old ivory, I have age spots on my face and on the back of my hands, and then there’s that old man’s smell, like sour milk, Liliana, that aura of rust and urine. The body is no longer certainty, but doubt, suspicion. You think you’ll make it through to tomorrow, but you know things won’t be getting any better. Are the blue patches on my left foot turning black? Sometimes, with old men, our feet turn gangrenous and have to be amputated.

  According to my uncle’s strict code, every creature caught dies its own death, a ritual so precise it verges on the religious: after all, neither he, my father, nor my grandfather, and none of the men in this household, ever had any other religion than that of submitting to the codes imposed on them by nature, or dictated by their profession (perhaps more than most professions, carpentry is an extension of nature: a man goes into a forest armed with an axe, and with the help of his hands and his tools, he transforms nature into some useful civilized object). They put away the other codes—lacking in civilian life (the ones promised in those old Russian books)—to which they’d aspired, and in whose stormy sea they drowned. As for nature’s codes, they managed to learn the rudiments. The civil war cut short any aspirations for justice and a harmonious life lived in common. With my grandfather, all it took was a few gunshots beside a wall outside Olba (it was only one shot, Esteban, why would they waste ammunition, he was found the following morning, along with five other men, next to the cemetery wall, right where the cemetery meets the rocks at the foot of the mountain, a buzzing of wasps announced the presence of the bodies on that spring morning, and there was a burn mark from the bullet in the back of his neck). With my father, any aspirations were frozen during his year and a bit of war and three years in prison, and by the prejudice that has pursued him ever since. Long enough to corrupt and rot any aspirations or hopes, which also die and stink once they’re dead, poisoning everything around them, like fish, like bodies. My uncle was barely an adolescent, two eyes staring in horror at this somber collection of images. My father never complained about being sidelined: he was too proud. Nor did he consider that he’d given up his aspirations (we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work: these words saved him), but he blamed us for the limitations placed on him. Decomposing, fermenting aspirations, just a hint of putrefaction: justice more like a punishment than a balm. He pretended to be above it all, crouched and waiting for these difficult times to pass, as if his own life were on hold, and the effort required to believe this was the fluid sustaining him, keeping him strong enough so that the outside world would not break him. Or so he believed. But he was already broken, he already had a deformity, a kind of monstrous hernia. And we should not dismiss the energy it takes to tell yourself a lie and maintain it. He could do that. He had that constancy of mind, the necessary willpower. After leaving prison, he grew a shell around himself on which the outside world could batter in vain. The shell protected him, sheltered his aspirations (Álvaro’s father was the only one who helped me when I left prison, and Álvaro is like a son to me, the son of my best friend, the friend who never called me “comrade,” because he thought the word, in my ears, might be demeaning), and he has probably kept those aspirations to the end, like wine turning sour in the barrel. I said he shut himself away, but that’s not true, he always had his antenna alert to a rather remote outer world: he didn’t live outside the world, but in opposition to it, and that included his wife and children, who, I suppose, he made unhappy, if it’s possible to make other people happy or unhappy.

  Yesterday, as I do every evening, I went to the bar. First, a game of dominoes, then the chance to get your revenge with a few hands of cards. My partner’s Justino—he’s an occasional associate of Pedrós, whereas I’m an associate around whose neck Pedrós has tied a very large stone, just as Bernal’s father—Bernal is partners with Francisco today—did with the corpses he threw into the Canal de Ibiza. After the game of dominoes—the losing pair pay for the coffee—we bet a couple of drinks on a few hands of tute, and that’s when Justino announces that Pedrós’s businesses—the hardware store, the domestic appliances shop, the offices—have been “intervened.”

  “‘Intervened’? Like what happens to banks or to EU member states? What does that mean? That they’ve sent in the men in black?” asks Francisco.

  And Justino says:

  “They’ve impounded the delivery vans, the trucks; they’ve confiscated all the stuff in the warehouse, they’ve sealed off the shops, they’ve even confiscated the blowtorches, and not only have they halted all work on all the sites, they’ve taken away the accounts books. Apparently, Pedrós has disappeared from Olba, vanished, and no one knows where he is. His creditors are looking for him. Some of them have sworn they’ll have him killed when they find him and I believe a few of them have clubbed together to pay some Moldavian or Ukrainian mafiosi, ready to scour the entire planet to find him.”

  “Cut the bureaucratic language, Justino. ‘Intervene’ is what the EU is doing to the PIGS, you know, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. What’s happening to Pedrós, here and elsewhere, is what we call ‘seizure of goods.’ You mean he’s bankrupt, that they’ve seized his property,” says Francisco. “Anyway, I knew about it already, we all did, didn’t we?”

  I had been convinced for some days that the subject would come up eventually—and probably because of me. But until today, not a word. And no one asks me now if Pedrós going bankrupt will affect me at all, knowing as they do, because I’ve been boasting about it for ages, that I’m responsible—or was responsible—for all the carpentry work in his developments. Fortunately, I’ve never told anyone that I’m also his partner in the construction company, that I put all my savings into his company and mortgaged my properties. It seemed so profitable and, yes, even the safest thing to do. I didn’t tell them about that, but it will leak out eventually, these things always do, Pedrós himself might have announced it at suppers, at bars, at social gatherings. They’d probably been talking about it, about me, before I arrived. Carlos, the manager of the savings bank in Olba, may have mentioned it when he came in for his post-lunch coffee and sat—as he always does—in the bar opposite the bank. Or here, over a game of cards. I don’t think he cares much about confidentiality. He’d be spilling the beans—quite openly now that the creditors have come knocking at the door: now that my account with the savings bank is no longer an account but a black hole. The only reason the people here haven’t asked me is because they already know; besides, Álvaro must have told them that the workshop isn’t just closed until further notice for renovation, as it says on the sign I pinned on the door. You don’t start renovating when you’re seventy; and the only things that are likely to give you notice at that age are your heart, your colon or your prostate. You just have to see the way the police have sealed off the building sites. It’s obvious that I’m not trotting down to the market each morning with my shopping bag because I’m retired now, having simply chosen not to take myself off to a spa or to the Mexican Riviera Maya. Of course they know, and they probably know more than I do, there’s bound to have been gossip about what Pedrós has done with my money and just where my participation in his business has landed me, namely in the garbage dump. They’ve probably known about his bankruptcy for some time and, indirectly, about mine, and in fact, they probably knew before I did. The cuckold is always the last to find out and, of course, the one who knows least about the kinky things his wife gets up to with her lover. But these bastards are perfectly capable of keeping quiet and waiting for me to be the one to give in and confess, for me to break down in tears in the arms of my childhood friend and reveal all, to open up my heart: dear Francisco, Pedrós has bankrupted me. Help me. Save me. At least console me. That’s what they want me to say. Or else I should get drunk with Justino and—stumbling and stuttering—tell him what everyone already knows: that I’m bankrupt and about to land in jail, and ask him
tearfully not to forget me, not to abandon me; not to leave me alone behind bars, but to come and visit on the odd weekend and bring me a couple of slices of tortilla and a few packs of cigarettes. Of course I will, don’t you worry, Esteban, I’ll come with my plastic bucket and the tortilla wrapped in tin foil, I’ll stand in line with the gypsy women, the criminals from Eastern Europe, the mothers of junkies from nice families who keep their faces half-covered with scarves and tell you: my husband and I are only here because of our son, poor thing. He got into bad company, and, well, you know what boys are like when they get into drugs. We’re not like these other people in the line, and I could see at once that you’re from a different class as well. And I can see it’s your first time (and I have to laugh at the thought of Justino as the innocent virgin, ha), I’ll tell you what you have to do, no, no need to thank me. And in a low voice: just take a look at them—it’s frightening. Gypsies, Romanians, Colombians, Italian mafia, Russians. Riffraff the lot of them. I could see at once that you weren’t like them. Anyway, let me explain: you have to put any clothes in one of those big black trash bags; and any food or soap or shampoo has to go in a plastic bucket. The gypsies on the corner sell them . . . Yes, that’s what the bastards in this bar are waiting for. There’s a simple reason why they’re in no hurry to get the prisoner to tell all—they’ve already passed sentence on him. But I’m a wise old dog, and over the years, I’ve learned how to deal with interrogations because, as the saying goes, it’s as easy to say a No that could save you as a Yes that could condemn you: I glance at the other card players and all three are impassively studying their hands. You’re late today, Esteban, says Francisco. We played a game of tute to pass the time until you came. And Justino: Come on, let’s finish this hand and have a game of dominoes. They all know. Word of Pedrós’s bankruptcy came out more than two weeks ago, although news of his disappearance only reached this table today, and it’s nearly two months since I put that sign up on the workshop door. The police sealed it all off ten days ago. But it’s the details they like here, they want to squeeze every bit of juice out of the orange. I can feel them squeezing me gently with their fingers to see if they can get the first drops. They know they have time to squeeze hard, to milk me properly or stick me in the juicer. No hurry, they’re not being pushy. Like Francisco said, it’s what we call “seizure of goods” (and that’s just the prologue, the easiest part to admit). Every little dart they stick into Pedrós this afternoon will hurt me too. I’m the real target. I need to give myself an epidural: I close my eyes. That’s it. The needle hurts when it goes in, but afterward you feel nice and calm. Let them say what they like. Let the birth begin. If the baby’s got a beard, we’ll call him St. Anthony and, if not, then La Purisima Concepción. Francisco smiles when he says the word “seizure.” He’s above all this: anything that doesn’t affect him directly he just brushes off, and the truth is, he doesn’t give a shit about what might affect us. As Justino says—mind you, Justino is jealous because he’s no longer the center of attention as he was for so many years—Francisco only comes to the bar in order to take notes, to pick up a bit of local color to give his books some street cred—jargon, stock phrases, gestures, atmosphere. He studies our meals and our drinks, which once were also his; our customs, our traditions: like an anthropologist, he asks us when exactly our mothers used to add the paprika to a dish of all-i-pebre, should you or should you not sauté the paella rice first? Was there a special name for those esparto shopping baskets or for the wicker baskets they used to collect the grapes in—even I don’t remember that. My friend Francisco should know, after all, his family owned a vineyard and even had shares in the winery where they made moscatel. He could have asked his father about the baskets, and also about how his family came by those vineyards and those shares in the first place, and what became of the people who owned them before the war. To reconstruct that episode of village life, he could have arranged for his father and the father of Bernal—the same Bernal who’s sitting here right now—to sit down together and get them talking. That would be a real surf-and-turf menu, as the chefs of the restaurants he frequents might call it, restaurants he may still frequent when he disappears from Olba. His father would provide the turf, Bernal’s father the surf. It’s a shame he never did that, never got them together for a good long chat, that he didn’t order them a coffee and a glass of wine and leave them to natter away, swapping anecdotes about the old days. That would have been real ethnology. But they both disappeared a long time ago. As far as Francisco is concerned, our evening get-togethers at Bar Castañer are pure anecdote, whereas for us, the bar is an indispensable part of our lives, or has been; for him, it’s an exotic landscape, and we are his own personal tristes tropiques, colorful local figures. He observes us the way anthropologists observe a Bedouin village, the desert, the pyramids, the Arab with his turban and his camel; or the potbellied, loin-clothed inhabitants of the Amazonian jungle, the cannibal with a bone through his nose or worn as an ornamental comb, a bone saved from the missionary he ate earlier. For a time, Bar Castañer stopped being my sole refuge: I had wanted to leave that village forever and perhaps only return as he has returned, like a professor with a camera, butterfly net and tape recorder; that had been my intention. When I returned, I’d been convinced I’d only stay a short time. I thought I was coming back in order to gather strength for the great leap, but, instead, I settled back onto a soft flesh mattress, and what was temporary ended up becoming permanent. I lost the mattress years ago and have been sleeping on the floor ever since. That’s what usually happens, it happens to a lot of people: they think the situation they’re in is merely temporary and that all they’re doing is living their life, the life they’ve been given or the life they wanted—Olba, until my last breath.