Álvaro has grayish-brown eyes, Julio’s are a kind of greenish-blue, framed by thick lashes that he uses to great effect, lowering them slowly when he wants to ask a favor, blinking quickly when he’s trying to intimidate me, silently reminding me that I’ve been employing him illegally, without a contract. I’m completely bullet-proof though. If he reports me, I’ll pay up, but he’ll have to give back years of unemployment benefits and social security payments. It’s your choice, my eyes are telling him, and he again lowers his lashes. Today, he’s all meek and submissive. Ahmed’s shining, jet-black eyes float against the backdrop of the whites which in his case are yellowish and emphasize his dark pupils rather than diluting or blurring them. He looks at me with pretend fury, and that pretense is telling me: I know you have to put on this act in front of the others, but I’m sure you’ll phone me later on and we’ll continue to work together and go fishing in the lagoon and have lunch on the grass: that’s what he’s saying to me. He still thinks this is all just theater, a set-up to get rid of someone I don’t like (Julio perhaps or, more likely, Jorge). We’ll see what happens when he realizes it’s not an act. Well, I won’t see that actually, I won’t be here, so what do I care? Jorge’s brown eyes, small and bright, are almost buried among folds of fat; sometimes they’re wounding and sometimes they oil his words and even his silences; the ever-pragmatic Jorge’s eyes laugh, mock, threaten: I’m owed two years’ unemployment benefits, they say. Give me a decent severance package, and we’ll still be friends. Otherwise, you’d better watch your back. He thinks that, as the skilled carpenter he is, he’ll always find work. Being unemployed is just a holiday in between jobs. As for Joaquín, I don’t know what to make of him. A bewildered child, his eyes always moist, ready to fill with tears because the toy he was given for Christmas has broken. As I walk along, I have before me those five pairs of eyes, each quite distinct, but over the past few days, seeing them staring at me from across the desk, they’ve begun to blur into a single pair of eyes, a confused combination of them all, a fragmentary, polyhedric eye, a Polyphemic eye into which I would like to plunge a stake to make it stop watching—accusing, mocking, pleading—an eye that is, at once, jet-black, greenish-blue, dark brown, and an infantile grayish-brown floating in its yellow whites, bright eyes half-buried in folds of fat: the eye of all eyes. Plunging a stake into it, blinding the monster and escaping. Because that’s what I see now, the monster, the primordial predator, the carrion-eater. I discover the dark depths of mankind: the long-buried resentments. They go hunting and their calculations are based on pure efficiency, getting more for less: it’s sheer necessity, devoid of any moral value, economics in its purest form; how to stick the knife in the pig’s gullet so that it makes as little fuss as possible when it dies, how to pluck the chicken as quickly as possible; like Francisco’s hunting father now cleansed of his youthful misdemeanors, I splash around in the puddle of morality, that higher form of good manners. I speak gently, reasonably. I discover the persistence of what, in different times, Francisco and I would have called the class struggle. But how is that possible? The class struggle has faded away, dissolved; democracy has acted as a social solvent: everyone lives, shops at the supermarket, visits the local bar and attends the concerts in the square sponsored by the town hall, and they all talk at the same time, their voices mingling, as they did in the tumultuous meetings at the Tivoli movie theater my father used to tell me about, there is no top and bottom of the heap, everything is blurred, confused, and yet a mysterious order does still reign, and that is the nature of democracy. But in the last couple of years, I’ve begun to sense a more explicit, less insidious order being rebuilt. The new order is perfectly visible, it’s as clear as day who’s at the top and who’s at the bottom: some proudly leave the mall with bulging shopping bags, they greet one another, smiling, and stop to chat with a neighbor, while others are rummaging around in the dumpsters where the supermarket employees have thrown the discarded shrink-wrapped packages of meat past their expiration date, the bruised fruit and vegetables, the factory-produced pastries gone stale. They fight among themselves. And I don’t know who I am or where I am, I’m not sure whether I should be stopping to greet a neighbor or digging about in those dumpsters, because if there’s one person who’s been exploited in this fucking workshop, it’s me, what about my fragile state, does anyone care about that? I want to show them that there is no dividing line separating us. But I can’t, because there is. The edge of this desk. I’m on one side, talking about what is and isn’t owed, about the severance money they have a right to, I’m shuffling their future just as I shuffle cards in the bar, I talk about how much and when I will be able to pay and when they will receive (I’m lying, I’m lying to them, there isn’t a single euro in the safe; who is going to pay them their three months of unpaid wages?). But why am I thinking about this now, while I’m walking, why am I thinking about the past? The workshop is done for, there is no top and bottom of the heap, not for me at any rate. Pedrós’s bankruptcy has made us all equal again, brought us all down to the same level, everyone on the floor, as that would-be coup leader Tejero told the parliamentarians, what could have redeemed us is gone and will soon be nothing at all. I’m at the lagoon, searching the marshes for the best setting for our play, the place where my father once wanted to take refuge. This is not the time for trivial matters, what counts now is the transcendent. Although what am I saying? Is the class struggle trivial? Wasn’t it the determining factor that impregnated and marked everything? The great engine of world history? Isn’t that what my father and his friends believed, what the young Francisco believed, what I neither believed nor disbelieved, but took for granted? The martyrs, the fallen, the fighters, the people tortured by the politico-social brigade, by PIDE, by the CIA, by the Okhrana. They were the battery fueling my father’s aspirations and those of the young Francisco locked in secret combat with his own father (spitting on the photo of the Falangist, then wiping away all trace of saliva). That’s why I’ve despised my father for as long as I can remember. For putting that at the center of his life. It bored me to hear him moaning on about it and cursing. About those at the top and those at the bottom, them and us. Yours and ours. About how that’s the way it’s always been. Although, that afternoon in my office, faced by that Polyphemus with five pairs of eyes merged into one, the language that once bored me to distraction came back to me: they are me and we are them. Enough. Let’s get on with things. Take the moment seriously. What is serious in this life? Is dying serious? Even newborn babies can do it. Even the stupidest animals know how to die. Don’t be afraid, Dad, death isn’t a serious matter, it’s nothing, the lagoon is like the very softest of laps, and the mud is a warm cradle enfolding you as night falls, a mattress of foaming chocolate on which you will rest, on which we will rest. Haven’t you ever seen those tombs of medieval lords at whose feet, carved out of the same marble as their masters, a faithful dog lies curled? Well, that’s how it will be here, you and your pup.
On the Edge Page 21