“Yes, who wants to be remembered for doing something no one else is fool enough to do, namely, throwing away his money?” says Justino Lecter, repeating an argument I seem to recall had already been put forward by someone else and taking a puff on the plastic mouthpiece of the fake mentholated e-cigarette which, since smoking was banned in the bar, has replaced the cigar he used to smoke during our card games. As if he wasn’t always boasting to me about how he throws his money away on caviar, champagne, whores, wine-pairing for complimentary flavors in the same tonality or enhanced to get a contrast effect. But he prefers not to say too much about precisely how he earns the money which he now claims never to squander: multi-occupancy apartments, warehouses turned into sweatshops full of Africans in multicolored robes, ill-shaven or bearded Arabs, and citizens of Eastern Europe, so blonde, so pale, so clean even when they don’t wash: each animal in its own cell, its own cubicle, Russians with Russians, Africans with Africans, Maghrebis with Maghrebis, a perfectly ordered zoo, no mixing of sheep and goats or gazelles and tigers, even though there aren’t many gazelles in those crowded apartments: plenty of hyenas and wolves, yes, there’s certainly no shortage of hyenas, who travel the country from garbage dump to garbage dump, collecting carrion and storing it away. The one constant feature that unites this hodgepodge of languages, colors and races, what all the animals in Justino’s zoo share in common, is a transit van that has failed inspections and which, laden with human flesh or stolen fruit or both, is driven at night with its lights off along the intricate paths of orchards, that and wretched jobs, abandoned warehouses turned into squats, furniture picked up on successive raids on garbage dumps, gas cookers connected by defective rubber tubing and at permanent risk of exploding, washbasins full of soapy water, clothes lines hung with damp rags.
Carlos, the manager of the bankrupt bank, arrived a short while ago and, seated behind us, is watching our game. He smiles all the time as if everything we said amused him. If the play we put on each evening was a morality play, he would represent geniality and fairness: the honest bank manager. Tenacity, transparency, public service. The servant of our most neglected citizens. Wasn’t that why banks came into being—to meet the needs of what we call ordinary people? He acts as though he doesn’t know that every light casts a shadow, that every day has its night, and that the night is a breeding ground in which evil grows fat and in which the needs of the unfortunate pay for the whims of the powerful. As if he didn’t know that all the rhetoric about the common good had gone down the drain. No one believes it any more. He himself is a discreet nest of shadows when he signs the documents, mine included, warning of repossession for failure to keep up mortgage repayments. Anyone would think someone else did that for him. Anyway, I’m quite sure that, this evening, the name “Pedrós” will not be on his lips, a name he knows to be irremediably linked with mine, because he’s in charge of all the files and all the mortgage documents, and he was the one who gave his blessing to our bankruptcy; he looks at me out of the corner of one eye, telling me that I’m a witness to the fact that no one will be able to say he spoke ill of Pedrós. Just for the record. Just in case. So that no one will take him to court for breach of confidentiality. While he’s talking, I’m thinking that, from the terrace of my house, I can see the cranes standing motionless above the unfinished blocks of apartments, some still with wheelbarrows hanging from them, and those loads are the seal signifying disaster, my disaster, the end of all my plans, the sign that the cranes are no longer being used and that the company is bankrupt. I see the blocks of apartments, some mere skeletons, others with bare, unplastered walls. I notice particularly those that belong—or belonged—to us, to Pedrós and me: the crane silhouetted against the sky and the wheelbarrow dangling there, swaying like a hanged man at the end of his rope. I try to divert the conversation onto more abstract subjects. Like Carlos, I’m particularly keen to stay well away from any mention of Pedrós:
“Attracting attention is really quite difficult nowadays, but the idiotic fools who appear on those trashy TV programs want exactly that. They’re not trying to attract attention because of something they actually do or produce, they’re just attracting attention for attention’s sake. It’s a kind of imbecilic vicious circle, you’re there because you’re in the news and you’re in the news because you’re there, but if you’re not, and you’re not nice-looking—at least according to current criteria—and shameless too, and you want to jump on the merry-go-round, but don’t know how to do anything useful, like inventing a new kind of engine or a vaccine against cancer, then you have to do something really big. I can think of a few things: poisoning your children or finding out that they’ve been raped and chopped up into little pieces; stabbing your wife and jumping off a viaduct. The possibilities are endless: then you’ll be guaranteed your three or four minutes on the news. The announcer puts on a sorrowful face and says: a horrifying case of parricide, another instance of domestic violence, another sex crime, and there’s your ID photo all over the news. The civil guard are looking for you, they’re searching the nearby fields with police dogs, and when the neighbor tells the reporter that he saw you leap in your car and race off into the mountains, they search the rocky slopes and the caves of Montdor; and if, on the following day’s news, they say you’ve been caught hiding, crouched behind an olive tree, or sprawled at the bottom of a ravine, or hanging from a rope in the shade of a leafy carob tree, then there’s a good chance they’ll show your photo again. If you don’t commit suicide, but hand yourself in, the aura grows still larger: you’re back on the screen the day you’re taken to court, walking unsteadily, as if you were drunk, you’re in handcuffs and your head is covered by a blanket, with a policeman’s hand pressing firmly down on it, or else it’s concealed beneath a balaclava or a crash helmet. The first time I saw defendants with their heads covered when they went into court was twenty or so years ago: the newspaper showed two smartly dressed men in suits and ties, each wearing a bull’s head; apparently they were a pair of American drug-runners about to be put on trial. We were watching in the bar and we all just burst out laughing. We couldn’t understand what was going on. Now, we’ve gotten used to seeing defendants going into court wearing a crash helmet with the visor down, or a Batman mask or a mask bearing Rajoy’s or George W.’s face. You also get to be on TV if you’ve been murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion: if you get chopped up and the pieces are mailed to your brother-in-law or your cousins, or they find your butchered thighs in the freezer of an apartment in some rough outlying suburb, and catch the murderer sitting at the table eating your testicles fried in breadcrumbs (much tastier than bull’s testicles, he told the police who arrested him, according to newspaper reports the next day); if, rather than being the victim, you decide to be the person doing the chopping up, you’re guaranteed to see your face in the newspaper (the headline: cannibal ate victim’s testicles, and the reader gets all excited: how big were they? a meal in themselves? how did the murderer cook them?), but this comes at a very high price. The photo is no compensation, not even if your entire family album is handed over to be used in a TV debate about the decline in law and order and the rise of a new kind of crime, or about serial killers or cannibalism in the modern world. Or a panel of gastronomes and nutritionists discussing the advantages, as regards taste and nutritional value, of human flesh over lamb, mentioning the Mayans, Caribs and certain African or Polynesian tribes, who all had a passion for a delicacy available nowadays only to a privileged few.”
“The only recourse left to the bankrupt is violence, unless he’s a decent sort, then he can always sell his own body. In the Third World, people sell a kidney or an eye just to earn enough money to make it through to the end of the month. They sell themselves off piecemeal.”
Carlos:
“Freixenet’s New Year ad for their best cava costs more than you will earn in your entire lifetime. Suicide and crime are the revenge of the poor: you’re promoting the one business asset I hav
e, this body-cum-tool for whose labor you fuckers pay a mere pittance. I’ve filled more TV hours today than Coca-Cola. The relatives of the victims meet every year and leave candles and flowers in memoriam, and in doing so, they remember me, the murderer. They want my wretched name never to be forgotten. And I’m glad to help, and grateful too, because that sudden multiplication of my market value as a source of labor (we’re talking about my death here and the deaths of a few more, so nothing very important) benefits my widow and my children, who, with the help of a good PR man, can turn a nice little profit by taking part in a few reality shows over the coming weeks. plea for forgiveness from family of multiple murderer who ate his neighbors. living with a monster: his widow speaks. They bring in the right to hire and fire, increase job insecurity, or just fire you, and you respond by multiplying to infinity your market value. exclusive: the goodbye note the monster wrote to his daughter.
Justino:
“It’s best if they take a while to find you. That prolongs the game a little: murderous maniac on the loose. And so on for a couple of weeks. A few minor attacks, a few explosions that put the authorities on their guard, before the major suicide bombing. And afterward, you’re the subject of interviews, they talk about you in debates: the well-known Cordoban psychiatrist Giménez de la Pantera reveals the personality of the nursery-school suicide bomber. Tonight, exclusively on Channel 8. Can we have absolute security and still have democracy? Are freedom and security incompatible? An impassioned debate between Judge Camarón de la Ventisca and Professor of Ethics Eloísa de Bracamonte, introduced by Mercedes Corbera.”
Kindly Carlos is concerned about the future of the murderer-victim:
“The trouble is that if they carry you out all blown to pieces and with your guts all over the floor, you provoke more disgust than pity . . .”
Justino:
“Oh, I don’t know, people like to see a nice loin of pork in the butcher’s window, a sirloin steak. In the supermarket, they gaze in ecstasy at cuts of meat they can no longer afford thanks to the crisis. The newly-bankrupt dream about them just as, during the post-war years, that comic book character, Carpanta, used to dream of eating roast chicken. Seeing a dismembered corpse on TV is a bit of a free snack. People can afford to consume it and they do; then—and this gives them even greater pleasure—they tell other people about that act of cannibalism: didn’t you see that guy on last night’s news? God, he was in a terrible state. Like he’d been ground up in a coffee-grinder. Honestly, the images they show on the news just when you’re sitting down with your family for the evening meal, it’s enough to turn your stomach. They should ban them.”
Bernal:
“But if they ban them, you won’t see them at all, and that would be a real bummer. You won’t get to gobble it all down. You’re left with nothing but a miserable chickpea stew. Lenten fare. And who doesn’t like a good stew made with bacon, black pudding and marrowbone?”
Francisco:
“It’s risky though. Whether you’re the victim or the killer, if they dig out some old snapshot of you with your wretched neolithic peasant parents, or with friends from your youth at a party, complete with paper hat and party horn, you just look like a complete moron. Your fellow wild-eyed, wild-haired, gaping party-goers still stink of cheap wine thirty years later. A terrible image. You sometimes see photos like that in the magazines funded by local councils as a way, they say, of making sure we don’t forget what village life used to be like, when what it was, and what it still pretty much continues to be, should—as that nineteenth-century reformer said of El Cid’s tomb—be locked up with seven locks and forgotten.”
Bernal:
“Not that the photo on your ID card is a great improvement, that look of terror we all wear whenever we come face to face with officialdom (the police no less), the frightened eyes of a bull trying to pass itself off as a tame cow so as not to arouse the suspicions of the always overly punctilious superintendent (I mean, who doesn’t have something to hide?); and in the photos taken during your military service, there’s the same cheap wine and soda as in those pictures of you and your friends at a party, except that here you’re surrounded by strangers who appear to be either mentally or economically retarded, brutes straight out of one of Lombroso’s albums of criminal types. Why do all the people one knew during national service look like mental defectives? With images like that, you fall far below your own aspirations, however modest. Best to have no biography at all, or, if you press me, best not to exist.”
On the Edge Page 22