On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  The slave-trader continues:

  “No one wants to lead a life like everyone else’s, no one wants his obituary to read: He was born, he lived, he worked, he reproduced and he died—and so people try to attract attention. They do absurd, tedious, painful things they’d refuse to do if they were required to by their work contract—it’s been the same since the world began. Tomás Pedrós thought he could grow as big as El Corte Inglés, Inditex, or Mercadona, or like that Bañuelos guy—making his fortune here and now building like mad in Brazil apparently.”

  And then there’s Pedrós, growing like a malignant tumor, yes, and Justino has been a malignant tumor himself: and like all tumors, he grows in darkness and in silence. We laugh, yes, so do I, although I’m afraid they might notice that my laughter is somewhat forced, because I feel utterly wretched.

  “Well, yes, he always had to cause a stir, and have a finger in every pie,” Bernal comments mildly, and it seems to me that he looks at me out of the corner of his eye when he says this, or is that just my paranoia?

  Justino returns to the charge:

  “Exactly, the self-made man. All those films from the 1950s and 1960s—or even today—all contain that same poisonous hidden message. The Kennedy saga, the Obama story. Pedrós was always so keen on all that freedom of the individual crap, about will power and hard work, the winner burning his excess energy at the gym or on the tennis court, and he encountering other alpha-males, who help him make his way thanks to a spider’s web of influences they call synergies. Sure, he was very ambitious, but there was that touch of the mythomaniac, the fantasist: he was just too much in love with himself, the butterfly, the show-off.”

  “And the times were ripe for men like him,” says Bernal sagely.

  “Yes,” says Justino, “but not everyone fell into the trap.”

  Of course they didn’t, and our Hannibal Lecter is no show-off. Justino’s no butterfly—more of a moth. He moves among the shadows of the night, where evil lurks and where his succubi have their beds, the laborers who stoke our nightmares with filthy coal. Justino covers up, dissembles, hides. His life is a mystery, you have to decipher the meaning slithering about beneath his words, he’s the oracle of all things murky, the sibyl of the unsavory: he conceals the truth with lies and conceals lies with half-truths. You always have the feeling that he’s deceiving you; if he says it’s a nice day and points up at the sun, you can be sure this is merely a diversionary tactic so that you won’t notice what’s going on down below. And he takes every precaution and successfully fends off the tax people—he’s a past master at hiding any so-called “signs of ostentatious living”—but we all know that he leads a secret life and that, in the shadows, he lives far beyond his theoretical means. I’m not talking about the watches and chains he wears, or the fact that his wife looks like a walking jewelry shop: those are mere trinkets, the equivalent of the finger pointing at the sun; I’m talking about land transactions, property transfers, estates registered in the name of nephews, brothers- and sisters-in-law, his retired mother- and father-in-law who both have Alzheimer’s or senile dementia, poor defenseless stooges whose signatures he has forged and who, even in their wildest meanderings, would never dream they were the owners of apartments, business premises, import-export companies, orange groves and building sites like the ones they possess thanks to Justino: underhand deals that you hear others mention only obliquely and sotto voce. And then there are the occasional disappearances, the mysterious periods spent in limbo, trips you know nothing about but which—as I said—you imagine to be to some spa to cure his arthritis or to an exclusive clinic to control his hyperglicemia or his high triglyceride levels, trips that his enemies say are time spent in prison or on journeys to some dangerously borderline country (Thailand, Colombia, Mexico) to coordinate the transport of illegal substances and about which his vanity will eventually lead him to spill the beans one night when he’s had a couple of drinks and you’re alone with him and he’s telling you about a wife-swapping club in Paris (you didn’t take your wife, did you, I asked, and he replied: Don’t be an idiot, where she’s concerned I have exclusive rights), or a place in Miami (ah, wonderful, chaotic Miami, so popular with wheeler-dealers up to no good) where at the reception desk, you have to leave not just the money for the ticket, but all your clothes (yes, even your underpants, he laughs, adding with a touch of vulgar humor, and your jockstrap: your wallet and your watch are put in a safe with a secret code), and only then can you go over to the bar and order a whisky or a glass of champagne and, finally, enter the spa, the main room with its sofas, swimming pools, jacuzzis and saunas, and the tortuous labyrinth of small rooms with beds of various sizes. He can’t resist telling these secrets—out of sheer boastfulness and egotism, he can’t help it: they make him seem different, more interesting, more mysterious, in the eyes of the person he’s talking to, in my eyes too, me, the bored carpenter who, for the last four decades, has barely gone any further than back and forth to the marsh or to some small room at the Lovely Ladies Club, but who, in his now distant youth, did his fair share of globe-trotting too and can, therefore, be of use as a confidante (you know what I’m talking about, Esteban, you’ve been around a bit, you traveled when you were a young man, although you rarely leave the house now, I mean, would you ever even go to the local pick-up joint if I didn’t drag you there?—and you’re single, for heaven’s sake, you don’t have to account to anyone), and these confidences make him grow in his own eyes too, because among us prestige is consolidated by such anecdotes, which seem to slip out as unexpectedly as farts, but which he has learned to ration out, knowing that such stories are as easily transmitted as flu, and are vague enough not to get him into any trouble with the authorities. In order to make sure that everyone finds out, he only has to use the words: This is just between you and me, in confidence.

  “I told you that? I certainly didn’t mean to. Had we had too much to drink that night? I’ve really got to drink less and be more careful and watch what I say when I leave the house. Please, not a word to anyone else.”

  Even though he was supposedly as drunk as a lord, he still couldn’t resist whispering to me—his mouth pressed to my ear—about the oysters in champagne that he ate in Monte Carlo (I won’t tell you why I went there, he says, adding further to the mystery, while I yelp: ugh, you’re sticking your tongue in my ear, and wipe away the saliva). He boasts about the luck he had at roulette that night, the Russian bitch I was with seemed to have seriously lucky nipples—she kept sticking her roulette chips down her front and rubbing them on her tits before putting them down, and the ball stopped on her number every time; then he tells me about the journey from Monte Carlo to Paris in her convertible BMW (la douce brise de la Provence sur mes joues, la huître au vent: needless to say, she wasn’t wearing any panties, and while she drove, my hands roamed around) and about the half pound of caviar that they bought in Kaspia—on the Place de la Madeleine, next door to Fauchon—and ate in their room in the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail. Actually, the hotel’s a real disappointment. The furniture, the bathroom fittings, the room with its dusty corners, all very shabby and dated, hotels in Spain are much better maintained and a much better deal too—it really needs a complete overhaul, he says. He probably suggested to the manager that he could carry out the renovation himself (his architects, his teams of bricklayers, his decorators, leaving the Lutetia like new), he probably left his card on the desk and, in exchange, got a free bottle of champagne, although it’s hard to get anything out of the French—stingy bastards. But—oh, and the champagne I drank out of that Russian oyster was Krug Millésimé, so rich, so nutty, so strong, have you never tried it? Ask your friend Francisco about it. He’ll tell you. Ask his opinion as an expert, as a connoisseur. It’s certainly my favorite, and I know more about champagne than you might think, in fact, I know a lot. Krug champagne is, now how would your friend Francisco describe it?—serious, elegant, noble. Justino continues to al
low himself to be carried away by details: do you know that French painting called The Origin of the World? Do you know the one I mean? With that great furry hole in the foreground. Well, that was the scene I had before me, the original black hole—albeit pink and fair in this case—from which everything emerges and through which everything enters, I caressed it with my teeth, with the tip of my tongue, I stuck my whole tongue into that dense jungle and touched the genesis, no, it wasn’t shaven, but a good dense mat of hair, neat and trimmed, but furry, I like pubic hair, the fair, silky kind, which makes the thing itself look like a shy, delicate little animal, it makes you want to caress it, bite it, eat it, we Spaniards call it el conejo, the rabbit, while the French call it la chatte: well, I gobbled up the first day of creation along with a sip of champagne. And I ate the end of the world, I ate the world from beginning to end, I stuck my tongue into that other retractile, slightly brownish hole where everything ends, but through which one can begin the excavation in reverse, traveling from darkness to light. I dug my tongue into that sweet, dark well, and then I plunged my steam hammer into that place where, it must be said, hélas, others had fervently dug before. She was, after all, a high-class whore. But that night, I voyaged from alpha to omega. I penetrated the very beginning and the very end.

  He prattles on, he laughs, he grabs you by the lapels with his great mitts and pulls you toward him, splattering your shirtfront and your face with spit, which you wipe away, not that he notices, of course. You feel like asking: When was that? Why didn’t you tell me at the time? But you don’t, because his hairy hand is now on your shoulder and his face is now resting between his hand and the bit of your throat that his hand isn’t touching, the place where a vampire would bite, and you feel on your neck the warmth of his breath, the tickling of his mobile tongue, your neck sticky with saliva, and the girls at the bar have started looking at us, thinking that, tonight, one of them will be making up a threesome.

  The watching birds who fly up at the first morning light, the waiting wild boar who come down at dawn from the nearby mountains to drink in the ponds, the murmur of the reeds that bend or break as they advance. For nearly half a century, the shed in the backyard has been filled with all the necessary tackle and tools for fishing and hunting: rifles, ramrods, straps and cartridge belts, rubber waders, Wellington boots, rods, nets and baskets of various shapes and with various uses, and which, locally, are given different names according to their shape and purpose. To every animal its own death, to every tool its own name: ralls, mornells, gamberes and tresmalls. It’s like a small collection ready to be exhibited on one of those TV programs about hunting, with titles like Rod and Gun, Forest and Stream, or the other kind—which are the opposite really—that you get on those cute little local TV stations or the no less cute national ones, with titles like Environment, Blue Planet, Territories or Our Traditions, which show, with reverential sanctimoniousness, the landscapes that mankind has supposedly not yet destroyed; they talk about old rural customs, visit some ethnological museum where they keep tools once used for cultivating, threshing, pruning, as well as millstones, oil presses and wagons, programs that try to make a near-paradise or a precious natural park out of the place I knew as a child. On the road leading out of Olba, the sewers flowing into the dried-up riverbed transmitted infections to the neighboring houses, which were built in areas regularly flooded by the torrential autumn rains. As children we used to play among garbage piles, would plunge up to our knees in quagmires plagued with mosquitoes and rats, among the remains of dead animals, old clothing, dry excrement, filthy mattresses and blood-stained bandages and gauze nibbled by vermin. We were looking for comics, cigarette cards showing soccer stars or movie idols, pages torn from illustrated magazines, movie posters, scraps of old film strips, discarded tools that we could use as toys, a spinning top, a broken doll, a mutilated cardboard horse, a punctured ball that could be mended with a rubber patch of the sort used by the man in the bicycle repair shop or that we would simply kick around half-inflated. We particularly liked the little penicillin bottles, widely used as the recently discovered remedy for tuberculosis and venereal diseases, and which we would adopt as containers for our tiny treasures. My mother would fly into a rage whenever she discovered, hidden in my pencil case or my satchel, one of those glass bottles with the rubber stopper still bearing the scar left by the syringe, and now with an insect for my collection. She thought those bottles would bring into the house the very diseases they were supposed to cure. Who knows who might have touched it, people with TB or some other infectious disease, throw it away right now. She would make me get rid of them however much I protested and explained how useful they were and how I had washed them thoroughly (which wasn’t always true), and I would cry whenever she, with an abrupt movement of her arm, tossed one of them over the wall. The river and the pools around the marsh were full of all kinds of detritus—old furniture, the sweepings from backyards, dead animals—the assumption being that the mud would swallow it all up, that the next flood would carry it off or that vermin would eat whatever was edible. This hobby of mine, which would now be described as ethnological, has led to me preserving and adding to my uncle’s collection of tackle and tools. Francisco often accompanied us on our trips to the marsh and, despite never wanting to fire a shot, he actively helped in casting the nets and would hold the rod and get excited when he felt a fish tugging near the shore. However, he would contemplate all this equipment as if it were part of some museum of torture. He would say to me:

  “I don’t know how you can bring yourself to shoot an inoffensive animal.”

  “Fishing is just as cruel. A fish seems to me more helpless than a wild boar, and more worthy of compassion.”

  “But fishing seems less aggressive somehow.”

  “How can you say that? They’re caught on a hook that pierces their jaw. They die slowly from asphyxia in the net, those innocent little creatures,” I would say mockingly.

  “But fish are cold-blooded things that you can’t really feel much empathy for, but if you see a mammal dying, soaked in blood, you have a sense that a creature like you is dying, and when you skin one, the body is disconcertingly like a human body, like our body.”

  “Try observing the death of an insect through a magnifying glass. You’ll see the same frightening convulsions, the same contortions, the desperate opening and closing of the mouth, the frantically waving legs. It’s really awful.”

  At the time, neither of us had seen anyone die, although I had caught glimpses of my grandmother on her deathbed.

  Francisco used the word “human”—a human being—whenever he wanted to describe something worthy of pity, perhaps the soul he imagines we carry inside us; “human” is a word with a powerful emotive impact. He knew how to use it. Now, when we’ve witnessed several deaths, the resemblance strikes us as even more troubling. And I say “us,” even though I haven’t stopped hunting and even though he no longer finds it repugnant. With age, we become more knowledgeable about the unpleasant side of life and, doubtless as a way of making it slightly more bearable, we become less sensitive too. Wars and massacres are usually topics of conversation for hardened old men, the young are mere pawns moved by arthritic fingers. What they see in war sweeps away their innocence, prepares them to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. Turning, turning, turning, that’s what this world has been doing for millennia. It makes the young suddenly old, and they become those fingers capable of moving the pawns. Gira, il mondo, gira, nello spazio senza fine, Jimmy Fontana used to sing. I watched my grandmother dying (in secret, through a crack in the door, a disfigured creature, railing and moaning, I was six or seven), I’ve seen my mother die, my mother’s brothers, Uncle Ramón, my brother Germán, defenseless hares trembling in their beds, I’ve seen them gasping and flailing just like the various dogs who have died on me, the same struggle, the same harsh, intermittent breathing. Francisco watched Leonor dying for months, an animal gradually be
ing consumed despite all the stratagems of doctors and family members, her dying must have cost them a fortune, what with trips to Houston, treatments in private hospitals here and there. Right now, I’m watching the endless dying of my father who, at this point, could easily be hunted and dispatched without too many ethical qualms.

  But we were only twenty-something then, and I would say:

  “My father has always hated hunting, which is understandable after what he saw during the war, but Uncle Ramón and my grandfather had to hunt in order to eat.”

  They finally managed to hunt down my grandfather (with a bullet in the back of the neck), a fruitless, cruel bit of hunting, we never used to talk about those things, we didn’t even know about them, I thought my grandfather had died in an accident. “It’s just the food chain, so why go digging around for any deeper meaning, it’s cruelty without the guilt. It was simply a matter of staying alive. Now that need has disappeared, we’ve become corrupted, sophisticated, and nothing has that same necessary, urgent character that carries within it its own absolution. We argue about whether hunting, since it’s no longer a matter of survival, is a pleasure or a hobby, a pastime or a vice, or if we simply carry in our genes a death impulse, some mechanism in our system that drives us to want to continue freeing ourselves from those who are not like us . . .”

  “Unfortunately, there are far too many instances of people viciously freeing themselves from those who are all too like them.”

  “Of course, and you free yourself from yourself precisely because you are too like yourself. No, don’t laugh, Francisco. You commit suicide because you are who you are and not the person you’d like to be, you put a bullet through your head because you can’t bear yourself. Out of pure hatred. To resist that, to remain alive, you need a good dose of idealism. The ability to lie to yourself. The only people who survive are those who manage to believe that they are what they are not.”