On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  “Are you trying to convince me that you hunters are looking for some unnecessary guilt to load onto yourselves, like a belated payment for the innocence of your ancestors?”

  “To call a man innocent is an oxymoron. Is that what they call putting two contradictory words together to create a strange effect? You taught me that. Oxymoron. A thunderous silence, an innocent man. The first is good for poetry, the second for sociology, religion or politics. Our ancestors ate the putrid remains of whatever the wild beasts had hunted and left half-eaten. They had no skills, they couldn’t run or jump like their prey, they weren’t able to hurl themselves on a deer and sink their teeth into its jugular. On the other hand, they carried the seed of evil within them: they invented traps and tools. The things I still use for hunting and fishing. Up until then, they fought with dogs and vultures over scraps of food. I don’t see innocence anywhere. Cunning and duplicity, yes. What can I say, Francisco? We don’t always do what we should. There is such a thing as negative egotism, the desire for what will destroy us. Perhaps that’s the best thing about us, that uncertainty, that fragility. Humans are strange creatures, we think with a logic that is quite different from what we feel, and all too often what we feel goes against what we need—love, passion, and, yes, hatred, those are the feelings that can bring about our downfall, and we go toward that downfall knowingly, we seem to need to keep doing that, and no one can explain why.”

  I could have talked to him about that, about the magnetic attraction that drew me to Leonor—to each his own trap—but that was a secret I promised her I would keep. We met in secret. I’d left art school in Madrid and decided to work where I’d never wanted to work, in my father’s carpentry workshop, and I didn’t even want to admit to myself that she was the thing holding me there, sucking dry my ambitions. In fact, the work was purely incidental, unimportant. I hated carpentry, but that wasn’t the problem, that was by the by. I felt superior. It seemed to me stupid to spend time learning the aesthetic codes our teachers at art school were trying to drill into us—what was the point? It all seemed to me as futile as what Francisco was studying at the faculty of philosophy and letters; his political, artistic or theological debates, the search for the message contained in books and films, were mere adolescent trifles I thought, because I was involved in something real, something adult for which it was worthwhile putting up with any job, even putting up with my father: an undertaking worthy of a man seeking ways to keep a woman at his disposal, a woman who says: again, fuck me again. That was what it was about: doing a job you don’t like, just as grown-ups do; having a woman who wants you, not your sympathy, not your intelligence, but your flesh, that’s how desire works between grown-ups. At least, that’s what I thought. That was my idea of maturity. While Francisco talked about Plato, Marx or Antonioni, infantile babblings, I had a woman who obeyed me, who begged me, yes, like that, I want to feel you inside me. It wasn’t just hot air about the meaning or the truth about life. It was the truth. Possessing that flesh, defending it from other men’s desires, knowing it was there at my disposal and off limits to other men. Being a man. The call of the primordial pack.

  “But God—”

  “God arrived quite a lot later, when your ancestors had already been killing and eating each other for millennia, and sucking the marrow from the bones of their neighbor, poking fingers and tongue into their hollow bones. I think the real reason people suck each other’s cocks is because they can’t suck their bones. It’s a leftover from cannibalism. After all, we bite each other when we fuck, don’t we? And when we’re screwing, we say ‘eat me, eat me.’” I said this as a joke, secretly mocking him, enjoying the fact that he would think I was just joking, because I knew those were the words that poured from my lips into her ear. And there he was talking to me about God and about some amazing book he’d just read.

  “I say that God gives no one the right to make even the most insignificant of His creatures suffer,” Francisco insisted, more mystic than anthropologist. He believed not in the primordial pack, but in the placid primordial family circle. Papa and Mama, the puppies gamboling about in the shade of the leafy trees, the grandparents observing the scene, and a pot of stew bubbling gently away (don’t ask about the ingredients). He had become an active member of two of the Catholic youth movements in vogue at the time, the Juventud Española Católica and the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica. In his house, what with the fabric store, the grocery store (which, later, with the arrival of tourism, became a chain of supermarkets), the orange groves and the vineyards and, above all, his father’s membership of the Falangist party, which opened so many doors to the family—hence the blue shirt of the Falangists that he strutted about in once the war was over—they could allow themselves the luxury of buying the necessary protein for their meals without having to hunt for it. If money serves any purpose at all, it at least buys innocence for your descendants. Which is no small thing. It removes you from the animal kingdom and places you in the moral kingdom. It humanizes you. Thanks to money, it had completely slipped the Marsal family’s feeble memory that they had participated in the hunt for resistance fighters in the mountains and around the lagoon: the months during which his father placed his gleaming Hispania motor car at the service of the Falangists (they really were a pack of hounds, survivors of the primordial pack). The assistant at the grocery store, in his gray overalls, would polish the car before the owner, Don Gregorio Marsal, set off to act as chauffeur to the Falangist patrols swarming everywhere. They would appear suddenly, block the roads, pursue any cyclists carrying a couple of sacks of black market rice or sugar or oil. They would confiscate any goods, demand to see documentation, and hand out beatings to any black marketeers or drunks or other unfortunates unable to justify their presence on the road at that hour, or those suspected of having fought for one of the Popular Front parties who were unlucky enough to be passing by. My uncle and, quite a long time later, my father told me these stories, although I always found them rather boring. I didn’t understand the epic of resistance that they, especially my father, wanted to pass on to me. The sinister black car would circulate the streets at night, its headlights off, and park outside the door of some house, laughter wafting from the car windows left open to the hot night. The summer of 1939. Shots fired into the air was their letter of introduction, along with the crunch of plaster flaking off a wall where, the following morning, the neighbors would see the holes left by the bullets. A butcher’s car, a whiff of carrion. But those were the dark days, which, one way or another, are inevitable in what Marxists term “primitive accumulation.” For the plant to grow, you must first add manure. Those raids weren’t as youthful and carefree as the accompanying jokes, laughter and drinks might appear to indicate, they were calculated steps necessary for continued growth, rites of passage, stages in the formation of the new entrepreneurial generations: during those skirmishes, the grocer’s features began to grow rounder, his eyes took on a jovial glint, his voice a frank, manly tone, his gestures became more authoritative (don’t you try it on with me), a satisfied smile parted his plump, pink lips. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Money, among its many other virtues, has a detergent quality. And many nutritious qualities too. It puts a sparkle in your eyes, fills out your cheeks, allows you to sit in an armchair, stretch out your legs, and read the newspaper. It gives you those immaculate hands that emerge from starched white shirt cuffs. It’s no longer you prowling the night. You employ assistants and servants to trap, kill and skin the creatures from which one obtains the vital ingredients for the Sunday stew or paella. The wealthy have always enjoyed that privilege. The master of the house doesn’t deliver the mortal blow to the rabbit, the mistress of the house doesn’t slit the throat of the chicken and pluck it, holding between her legs the bowl full of breadcrumbs to soak up the blood to make the meatballs for the stew. The animals have always arrived ready-cooked, in a dish, served on a tray covered by a gleaming silver dome and so transformed as
to be unrecognizable and, for that very reason, delicious in their false innocence. That’s how it has always been and remains so today; it has taken only a few years for us to acquire that privileged status, the illusion that we are all lords and ladies of the manor, while in remote factories, workers kill and skin and carve and package the animals we eat once they’ve become acceptably aseptic: pink fillets that look more like salmon than veal thanks to the substances they add so that the meat doesn’t darken and is therefore attractive to look at (yes, attractive, the cut-up, dismembered corpse like the corpse of the victim of some deflagration): shanks, chops, steaks, entrecôtes, shoulders; chicken thighs and breasts placed in little white polyurethane containers covered in transparent Saran Wrap, as pure as it can be, given that it’s the small coffin of something that died a violent death. In the meat section of the supermarket they can’t quite get rid of all trace of blood, we sense its presence, but avoid it. We force ourselves not to decipher the signs, so that the dismembered corpse doesn’t shock us, just as we’re not shocked by what we see on television, figures lying sprawled on some dusty avenue with palm trees in the background. In the lower social orders (from which we think we have escaped in recent years), there’s no room for metaphysical discussions about what limitations can be placed on us when we exercise our right over other animals. Things are as they are. There’s no moral kingdom anywhere to be seen. You’re in the lower orders because you haven’t sufficiently de-animalized yourself. The lower orders worry more about work strategies, questions of method, ways of increasing efficiency with the least waste of energy. They exist on the technical plane, searching for more results with less effort; empiricism: how to tie together the wings of a duck so that it doesn’t struggle when you sacrifice it, how to deliver the punch to the back of the rabbit’s neck so that it dies the first time, how to stick the knife into the pig’s gullet so that the blood flows into the pot prepared by the sausage-maker, a pot containing finely chopped onion and paprika, ready to make the blood puddings. No halfway intelligent rich man commits murder. They’re not psychopaths. They have no reason to be. That’s what employees are for: to be murderers and psychopaths.

  I rejected Francisco’s opinions (God gives no one the right to make even the most insignificant of His creatures suffer). As if reason could do anything against faith. No one had yet told me about his father’s nocturnal expeditions or his strange idea of what constituted big game; I didn’t even know at the time how my grandfather had died, nor that my father had been in prison for three years and that I’d been born during his absence. Uncle Ramón filled me in on just how much the war had influenced my life.

  “Your father has always insisted that you should know nothing until you were older. ‘They,’ your father would say, meaning you and your siblings, ‘have nothing to do with it. They’ll find out soon enough. I’ll tell them how it was.’”

  Later, my father did try to talk to me, but, by then, I wasn’t very interested in his stories, the delicate thread connecting us had broken. Besides, none of that information entered my discussions with Francisco. We debated more on the level of metaphysics than of history—the history that so tormented my father—and which, to us, seemed too recent, too lacking in poetry: smelly, badly ventilated rooms; the chamberpot in which my grandfather had done his business after being given an enema; sprigs of lavender and sugar warming on the stove to disguise the stench in the patient’s room; the smell of rotting entrails in the trashcan, that was what recent history meant to us. It was what we had seen and smelled at home, what we used to be and from which we wanted to escape. Far better to be in places where words do what you want them to and where blood doesn’t smell because it’s set down in ink on the page; history traps you, forces you to follow a prearranged script, one that didn’t interest me in the least:

  “But how can you talk like that after reading the Bible? God doesn’t just grant the right to kill, he spends his time sowing discord among humans so that they end up killing each other. Right at the very beginning of beginnings, Genesis, there’s Cain. There are other examples too: Moses, the first supporter of liberation through violence, doesn’t hesitate to kill the man oppressing his people; the adulterer David, cruel Salomé, or that decapitator so beloved of feminists, Judith, who beheads the gallant Holofernes: his only crime was admiring her beauty, presenting her with his finest treasures, serving her the most succulent of dishes and, we assume, after all those hours spent alone in that luxurious tent, giving her a good seeing-to as well—and is that how you repay me after I placed in you the seed of the most glorious of Assyrian generals, something most women would consider the very best of gifts, namely, the possibility of engendering an heir to all my glory, and you repay me by cutting off my head? That woman wasn’t a hero, she was an ungrateful wretch and very rude too: that’s hardly the way to behave at supper, or to treat a host who receives you with open arms (appropriately enough). When someone invites you to supper, it’s not even acceptable to say you didn’t enjoy the food. Killing the owner of the household certainly doesn’t appear in any of the etiquette books. The Bible is the mother of bad manners.”

  “But that’s the Old Testament God . . . no, I know you, you’re just fucking with me, carrying on. Go to hell!” says Francisco, half-smiling and dismissing me with a wave of the hand.

  “The heroic story of Judith, the criminal story of Judith, the sad story of Judith, as you prefer. The adjective you choose depends on your ideology.”

  The story of Judith and Holofernes is, let’s say, a story shorn of adjectives. What do you think, Liliana? You Spaniards don’t even know what a really good potato or papa or patata is. I mean, if you go to the market here, in Olba, or in Misent, which is quite a lot bigger, or go to Eroski or to Mercadona, how many types of potato do you have to choose from? Red and white, new and old, and that’s it, but in Colombia you’ll find a whole selection of different varieties on any small street stall, and each one is perfect for a particular recipe, and there are even some recipes that call for three or four different varieties, because some are floury and good for thickening stews, while others stay firm and only give when you bite into them or prick them with a fork. I’m not saying your country isn’t a more peaceable place, because it is, although it’s rapidly getting less so, but it’s boring too, things don’t have much color, much variety, and the people, well, they’re all right, I suppose, but not all of them, they call us Colombians blacks even though we’re not, I mean there are a few blacks in Colombia, just as there are here in Spain, the guys who sell stuff on the streets, for example, but they’re from outside Colombia, and there are others who were taken there as slaves. And they did come from Africa, like the blacks here. But we Colombians are Latin Americans and yet here they call us blacks or conguitos, apparently because of some ad for sweets that was on the TV years ago, which showed little fat black coffee beans with legs, dancing about, they may even have shown them wearing Colombian hats. No, they didn’t, Liliana, they called them conguitos because they came from Africa, from the Congo, you see, chocolate sweets or coffee beans from Africa not Colombia. Be that as it may, but now they call us Colombians conguitos, I know this because my husband told me so, he says that when he worked on a building site, that’s what they used to call the Colombian workers, conguitos, panchitos, blacks, darkies. That’s just because people are ignorant, Liliana, they have no idea. Sometimes my husband would just laugh and, at others, he’d get really angry and say that the next person who called him that would get his head smashed by a bottle. Of course, he only gets angry when he’s had a few drinks, when he’s drunk too much; otherwise, he’s really quiet, but when he drinks, he shouts and shouts until he’s so tired he goes to bed without any supper and is soon fast asleep and snoring like a pig—if you’ll pardon the expression. I wish he was more like you, quiet and polite, I’m sure you’d never shout like that or threaten anyone. The trouble is that when you get married, you’re young and full of hope, you’re
not thinking clearly, because when you’re going out with someone, they only show you their best side, they might even be pretending to be good. You only really get to know the other person once you’re married. Our mothers know that and tell us it’s always been the same, exactly the same, but we young people take no notice, love blinds us and we don’t want to listen to the voice of experience because we’re stupid enough to believe we’re the very first people in the world ever to fall in love, as if we’d invented it. You’re different, though, I think that if you had got married, your wife certainly wouldn’t have been disappointed, it’s a real shame you didn’t marry, because marriage would simply have confirmed to her that she was living with a good man, why, you’re almost like a father to me, more than a father really, because my father didn’t care about us, about me and my brothers and sisters; on the contrary, he sent us out to work and got all the money he could out of us so that he could go off with his friends and spend it all on drinks in the local bar. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for three or four days, and you can imagine the state he was in when he did come home, he’d be completely out of it, his clothes in shreds, stinking of other women, high on cocaine, and with all the money gone. You’re exactly the kind of father anyone could possibly want, and the other gentleman, your father, even though he doesn’t talk now, he’s so tall and slim, he must have been very handsome as a young man, and I’m not saying that because you’re shorter and stockier, I mean everyone’s different, but he’s so distinguished-looking—there he is not saying a word, we don’t even know what he might be thinking, my sense, though, is that he must have been very kind and polite too, you can tell from his appearance, his presence, and even though the poor thing can’t speak, you can see his good thoughts in his eyes, in the way he looks at us. You can see his kindness. You must have been a lovely family. It’s just such a shame your Mama isn’t still with us, but, of course, if she were alive, she’d be as old as your father, so better to let her rest in peace, don’t you think? I’m sure she deserves it. She’s waiting up there in heaven for you all to join her.