On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  What do these people want, what do they expect a man to do when the fridge is empty? In day-to-day living, you’re constrained by your kids, by your wife; if it wasn’t for them, you’d do all kinds of crazy things, but when you’re in really deep trouble, when you reach that final tipping point, the very opposite happens: it’s precisely your wife and kids who make you do the crazy thing that, before, they seemed to be stopping you from doing. The same people who saved you become your downfall. You ruin your life because of them. You’re capable of taking a rifle and stealing the day’s cash from the local butcher just to be able to put some chicken breasts in the fridge, have a few chicken bones to make stock and a bit of blood pudding for the stew; sausages, hamburgers, cheese triangles, yogurt. To get a packet of Ariel for the washing machine, diapers for the baby. I don’t know exactly what I would be capable of doing to you people—to you, the ones who’ve got everything—but I do have a rifle at home. I have the right licenses, so the crime of illegal possession of weapons wouldn’t appear on the sentence; homicide, murder, premeditation, execution, they might appear, but not illegal possession, because I do have a gun license. Legal possession. It was my cousin who persuaded me to take out a license, he wanted me to go hunting with him at some game reserve he’s a member of in La Mancha, near Badajoz, near Luciana and Arroba de los Montes (no, you won’t know where they are, they’re tiny villages, barely visible on the map), and at the time I could afford it, I could afford to go on little trips like that, just head off with my rifle to shoot a few partridges, the odd hare, a wild boar even. Sometimes we went hunting for boar and deer on an estate you could have spent three or four days roaming and still not have seen it all. I used to like coming back in his van, smelling of mud, grass and damp hair, of animal blood and our own sweat, smelling of wild boar during the whole journey on cold, clear winter days or on misty, drizzly days, the smell of bitter coffee, brandy, or coffee with a dash of rum (we always used to make three or four stops en route); sometimes, too, we’d come back stinking of whores, because we’d call in at a cathouse along the way, near Albacete, then, when you got home, you’d take off your shoes, take what you’d caught out of your game bag, and have a good long shower so that your wife wouldn’t smell the whore’s lipstick and make-up on your neck or between your legs, or that really penetrating cologne they always wear, never taking account of the fact that most of us have wives, and that a wife can smell a whore at fifty paces. What more could you ask for? Well, Esteban has taken me with him to the marsh now and then: come on, Julio, we’ll spend the morning there, have lunch, and with a bit of luck, we’ll bring back an eel or a duck, but it’s not the same, the marsh is so confined, and muddy and smelly, whereas out in the open, with fields disappearing off into the distance, one hill after another, you can breathe freely. We could manage then. I could cope. We never imagined the shit we’d be in now, when you don’t know who to borrow money from next, and it’s so embarrassing walking around and seeing the look of alarm on the face of any acquaintance when he sees you coming and crosses the road pretending he hasn’t seen you, because he’s sure you’re going to touch him for a loan the way you did a couple of weeks before. It really gets to you, spending all day plotting, going over and over things in your head, wondering how you’re going to get by on your 400 euros of family assistance and the 600 euros your wife earns, and doing endless calculations that never work out, always more debits than credits, however you juggle the figures, how are you going to pay for the books and the other things for the kids’ school, which went up to 700 euros this year, then there’s the new uniform, because last year’s is too small and, besides, it’s worn out, shoes, car insurance, mortgage, municipal taxes, it all feeds into the same nightmare, a nightmare you never suspected when things were going well, but which, as soon as everything goes pear-shaped, becomes your sole preoccupation: how to fill the fridge. It’s only when you’ve lost everything that you realize you have to eat every day, isn’t that ridiculous? Of course you have to eat. Everyone knows that. When conditions are normal, you don’t even notice, but when you haven’t so much as a euro in your pocket, it becomes your one great obsession: you have to eat every single day. You have to put food on the table, and the children have to take their little carton of juice to school as well as a sandwich filled with mortadella or with tuna, out of that small round metal tin containing just a few scraps, barely enough; and this isn’t just today, it’s every day, because every day they have to have their afternoon snack and every day they have to eat supper. And the little one has to have her diaper changed every morning. I go to bed and dream that I’m drowning, then sit bolt upright, scrabbling for air and screaming. My wife gets frightened. Whatever’s wrong? I thought I heard a burglar, I say, but that’s not it, I take the anxiety to bed with me, because what used not to be a problem at all has turned into four daily problems that I have to find some way of solving one after the other: breakfast, lunch, snacks and supper. Could you spare a bit of money (addressed to one of the acquaintances who didn’t have time to cross the road when he saw me). I can’t afford to buy a loaf of bread or the children’s juice. They can’t go to school with nothing. It breaks my heart when I hear them say to my wife: Mama, there’s no more yogurt, no more cookies, no more cakes. I tiptoe out of the house, close the door behind me as quietly as I can, get into the car (don’t waste gas now, the tank’s almost empty, and how am I going to fill it up), drive to the first bit of wasteland I come to and weep. I sit there on my own, weeping. About the children asking for juice and my wife shouting at me and telling me to do something, because she can’t stand it any more; I can’t perform miracles, that cruel cow says to me—encouragingly—as if this was all my fault. Get your ass off the sofa. The other little girl: Mama, look, my brother’s eaten all the bread and you can’t make me my snack. And they take to school a little bottle of tap water with strict instructions not to remove the label, so that it looks as if they’re drinking mineral water, because it’s healthier, when the other kids have all got their pineapple juice or orange juice or multi-fruit juice with added vitamins and calcium and who knows what else, every enriched juice box costs one euro at the supermarket. How do I pay for that, if there isn’t even enough money to buy potatoes? It’s three months since Esteban stopped paying us, and when I pick up my unemployment benefit, I can accept that my family will only be able to buy the cheaper juice, but there are many days when there isn’t even enough money for that: tap water with a posh label on the bottle or a few drops of squeezed orange juice if it’s in a bottle bearing the label Zumosol.

  And you pounce unscrupulously on the person who didn’t have time to cross the road when he saw you: just give me whatever you can, you know I wouldn’t ask if things weren’t really tight, and I’ve always paid back any money you’ve lent me before, it’s just that now . . . The victim feels nervously in his pocket as if he had a knife in his back. He does. I’m holding the knife. Sorry, I can’t, I haven’t got anything on me, it’s just that . . . And I know what he means: this is a kind of mugging, but I pretend not to understand. The man produces a crumpled five-euro note and holds it out to me. That’s all I have, he says and quickly moves off, as if any further contact might infect him with the leprosy of poverty. He leaves without waiting for my proffered thank you, thanks a lot. He doesn’t stop to listen when I say that I fully intend to pay back those five euros. Thank you, I say more loudly, I’ll pay you back as soon as I can, and he, from a safe distance away, explains: Look, I’m broke too. I really haven’t any more to give you, we’re all getting by on the skin of our teeth. Then he averts his face, turns beet red: he feels more ashamed than I do, and I, on the other hand, feel not the slightest gratitude—bastard, I think, even though the man was under no obligation to give me that crumpled note. Bastard, I say again under my breath, and I say it because he’s alive, because he can afford to give me that surplus bill, because he doubtless has more bills, whether many or few, in the wallet he hurriedly put back in
his pocket (he covered it with his hand, so that I couldn’t see how much was in it), not to mention the money he’ll have at home, and what he certainly has in the bank. The rotten bastard, I think to myself. But, Julio, where is the feeling that priests, teachers and all good parents call gratitude and which they taught you when you were a child? No, I feel no gratitude at all. I don’t feel it in myself, and I don’t think it’s out there in the world either. I never thought I would ever experience something like this—no one told us, no one prepared us for this. Now I miss what I probably didn’t appreciate enough at the time: the chilly mornings with the gradually lifting mist: it would float like a piece of cloth among the trees, above the streams, above the river, the sickly smell of rock roses, the after-taste of aniseed on your tongue as you advance through the scrub, the dry cold that cleanses your mouth, lungs, nose. I’ve taken part in retraining courses for the long-term unemployed, for people who have exhausted the family assistance, courses that, instead of actually teaching you something, are intended to be incentives to take your mind off this particular stretch of the journey as you blunder on into the black space of that non-future, and they’re an expression of profound pessimism: they teach you how to write a CV and how to sell yourself to people taking on staff; or how to optimize the use of your cell phone when it comes to asking for work (that’s what they say, optimize); how to save on public transportation when you go out and about delivering your CV to different companies, and how to make the best use of your time by drawing up your route beforehand; they even explain—plumbing the very depths of despondency—how to have a balanced diet based on the food they give you at food banks, the little packet of pasta or rice or chickpeas, the tin of passata, the sugar, and how to use those few ingredients to prepare a varied and imaginative menu. A healthy Mediterranean diet. I looked for work in other local carpentry businesses, saying that I’ve already worked in a carpentry workshop, but are you a trained carpenter, they ask me, and I explain that I’ve spent the last few months working with Esteban, but illegally, because I’m not getting unemployment benefits any more, only family assistance, but how can anyone live on 425 euros? How exactly did you help Esteban, in what way, they ask, did you draw plans, did you use a saw, a plane, a lathe, a milling cutter, a drill, a sander, do you know how to put together a miter joint, or a tongue-and-groove joint or how to use dowels? Did Esteban actually let you use any of the tools? Or work the machines? No, he didn’t, did he? You were just the driver, you used to help that Moroccan guy load and unload, you delivered the tools Esteban asked you to bring him and sometimes you didn’t even know what they were called and you’d bring him the wrong ones, and then he’d shout at you and call you an idiot. Everyone knows everything in a village. So why are you trying to pull the wool over my eyes—you’re not a carpenter. Anyone could do what you did. You were just Esteban’s errand boy. Yes, everyone knows everything here. It’s a village. But at least ask him if he had any complaints about me, if I was a good worker. Oh, I’m sure you were, but if I needed to take on anyone new, it would be a qualified carpenter. I’ve got plenty of people to load and unload. And he’s right, there was no need to tell him all that stuff about unemployment benefits and family assistance—everyone in Olba knows that I asked Esteban to take me on illegally because I was still getting unemployment benefits and didn’t want to lose it, because on the wages he was offering, I couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage or the car loan, and then I stopped getting unemployment benefits and now all I have is the family allowance, and how, with only those 425 euros and the 600 euros my wife earns, how am I supposed to pay the mortgage, pay for the children’s books and clothes, the electricity and water and gas bills and the gas, at least I managed to pay off the car, because, otherwise, they would have impounded it, and if I go elsewhere and say I’ve been employed in a carpentry workshop for the last few months, I haven’t even got a reference to prove it, and it wouldn’t be any good anyway, because they know, everyone I speak to knows, because here in Olba, we all know each other, like I say, it’s a village, but they think I deserve what’s happened to me, because I chose to work illegally, and they don’t realize that the reason I had done that was because what Esteban was paying me wasn’t enough to survive on, but people are naturally envious, and they’d say to me: you’re getting paid twice, as if I was earning millions, they get a kick out of seeing you down and out and they don’t like it if you try to lift your head and, instead, they push you under again, give you a shove so that you fall back into the pond you were only just crawling out of.

  As I leave the workshop where I’d gone looking for a job, I wonder how people can be so cruel, so rude. You have to be pretty hard-nosed to say such things to a married man with three children, without even knowing him. They throw all your limitations in your face. How do they expect a man, a worker, to recover his pride? What right do they have, these people you don’t even know, to call you useless, to play with you, the way a cat plays with a frightened mouse. They stand in the doorway to watch you leave, a cigarette between their lips, hands in their pockets, lips twisted into a half-smile. They don’t have to look for work, they don’t have to humble themselves or borrow money. They have plenty of bread on the table, and the haves have always acted cruelly toward the have-nots. Their power comes from knowing that they can decide whether other people’s mouths are empty or full, that’s the origin of that half-smile, that cigarette clamped between the lips. During military service, the mess sergeants wore the same disgustingly smug smile, the smile of someone who has what others need and want. My father often used to say the same.

  The biggest treat my grandfather gave my uncle was to sit him on his knee and allow him to lick the stamp for the letter he’d written to a supplier ordering something for the workshop. He would let him stick on the stamp, then walk with him, hand-in-hand, to the post office, where he would lift him up so that he could reach the open mouth of the bronze lion that served as the letter box and slip the envelope into his mouth. This became a kind of hereditary game, because my uncle went on to have the same ritual with me. When I came home from nursery school, he would sit me on his knee and place before me a few envelopes and a diminishing sheet of stamps. I would then tear along the perforated edge, taking great care not to damage the stamps, and once I’d removed a single stamp, I would lick it very carefully, stick it on the top right-hand corner of the envelope, and thump it hard several times with my fist. On this bright morning, I can still remember that sickly glue taste on the tip of my tongue and the sadness I felt at letting go of those little bits of colored paper when I posted them in the post box. Why don’t you make a stamp collection from the letters you receive at home, my grandfather suggested, but we didn’t receive enough letters at the carpentry workshop to make a collection, and the few that did arrive, from suppliers or from the savings bank, had stamps all stained by the postmark.

  “But,” he insisted, “those are the stamps some collectors value most, the post-marked ones, showing the date the letter was sent and where it came from.”

  It was my Uncle Ramón who let me stick the stamps on, who gave me a little wooden cart and a real bird tied by a thread to a perch, the person who took me to the fair and won me a tin truck at the shooting gallery. If I look up now, I can see—through the sharp leaves of the reeds—the bare, blue, rocky mountains on which a small clump of pine trees somehow manages to grow, and the lower slopes, their terraces dotted with olive trees and the occasional dense green stain of a carob tree. It’s the same landscape I used to look at with him. On this cold morning, I can still feel the sickly taste of glue on my tongue.

  When he came back from the war, my father considered hiding in the reedbeds near the lagoon until the worst was over, but my mother persuaded him to go to the town hall and turn himself in.

  My grandmother’s suspicions about my mother date from that time, with my mother asking him to give himself up and my grandmother telling him to leave, to hide somewhere no one could fi
nd him. She had a vague sense that my mother selfishly wanted to have him near even if that meant putting his life in danger. During his time in prison, though, the idea lodged in my grandmother’s head that her daughter-in-law, all revolutionary fervor gone, now regretted her earlier “indiscretion” as well as her Republican wedding in the presence of other comrades, her first child—Germán, my older brother—who was already running around the house, and her second child, namely me, who was chewing on her dry, malnourished breasts, a child whom her husband didn’t even know because, for months, she refused to take me with her to visit him in prison, saying that I was too small and frail for such a difficult, dangerous journey. I don’t want to put the child at risk, she said, who knows what might happen in the train or outside the prison. She and my grandmother used to take my brother, but not every time. Often her parents would look after him. My grandmother believed that my mother wanted another husband, perhaps one in a better position to face the new era that was just beginning. After all, those civil marriages were invalid now, null and void. There remains something confusing about this story, however, something no one has ever explained to me. My grandmother didn’t trust or even like my mother, a clumsy, empty-headed girl, who poured all her energies into cleaning the house, doing the laundry and the cooking, but always sulky and tearful, because my father was away and she was left at the mercy of her authoritarian mother-in-law. My grandmother expected a different kind of energy from her. They had been driven apart by the arguments that raged between them about having my father hand himself over to the authorities. And that rift remained for as long as my grandmother lived. Your father gave himself up so as to get away from those women and their bickering, Uncle Ramón would joke when he told me about it years later.