“I think the upper classes are more skeptical as far as the virtues or qualities of a corpse are concerned. It can easily be replaced with cocktails at some deluxe funeral home or, if their grief is more intense, eased by a shopping trip to New York, or, perhaps more fittingly, a melancholy stroll among olive trees, cypresses and ruins on one of the Greek islands,” says Francisco, adding: “It’s touching the way the poor search so desperately for their dead, even though there’s nothing left of them. They don’t care if they stink, if they’re mutilated or rotten; they want to take them with them, to collect the corpses before the city workers pick them up, or whoever it is who has to deal with any carrion. There’s probably some distributive justice going on here: the poorest families from the poorest countries are the richest in corpses. They have no money, no villa in Cap Ferrat, not even a modest pension to look forward to, but they’re the owners of a rich variety of macabre biomass: those who have died in accidents at work, of an overdose, of malnutrition, AIDS, cirrhosis of the liver, hepatitis C, domestic violence or a mugging; people who have died because, unable to stand it any longer, they’ve blown their brains out or hanged themselves on an olive tree. They’re the owners of a whole varied legacy of corpses, which they defend tooth and nail. Suffer the poor to come unto me, said Jesus.”
“He said suffer the little children to come unto him not the poor.” It’s Carlos again, our Secular Pear.
Me:
“Of course, but he was probably referring to the children of the poor, because no rich man would allow his son to approach a stranger. The poor man would, though, because that meeting might be the beginning of some profitable transaction. The poor tend to exist below the threshold invented by the Protestant bourgeoisie and that they call morality.”
It’s the sour smell that predominates: in summer, it gets mixed up with other stronger, more unpleasant smells, the smell of decomposition, of dead meat, but the most unbearable of all is the smell of rotting fish or seafood. Leave a hake out in the sun for a couple of days, or an octopus or a few mussels, or the remains of the fish you’ve just eaten, leave them out in the garbage can during those suffocatingly hot summer days, and you’ll see what becomes of the meal you so enjoyed eating and for which you would pay fifteen or twenty euros in a restaurant or a bar: not that our garbage collection is exactly perfect, partly because people are totally unscrupulous about what they put in their trash cans, we’ve even found dead dogs, the putrefying bodies of cats or rats, when people know they’re supposed to put their garbage in bags, not loose, and certainly nothing dead, especially not in summer, the towns can’t cope with all the crap produced by the thousands and thousands of tourists, the cans aren’t big enough, they either overflow or sit there surrounded by bags that the dogs or the rats gnaw at, scattering the contents everywhere; the streets in the town center stink, and so do the residential areas: it’s a kind of uniformly funereal smell that mingles with the smells from the flowers and the gardens around the apartments and houses, and with the smell of gasoline, and ends up becoming a single smell, the smell of the coast. I was paid to put up with it, and although some of my colleagues used to wear a mask, I never bothered, I’ve got a fairly robust sense of smell or maybe it’s simply that I’m not very sensitive, but I do find it odd that tourists come here and pay good money to spend a month next to those stinking trash cans. They’re probably used to it, because their cities smell the same or even worse, after all, the same things rot everywhere, the same brands from the same chains, bought in the same superstores all decorated in the same style. Not that I care. According to one of my fellow garbage men, Nico, who came as a child from a village up in the mountains, it’s the smell of the twenty-first century, neither good nor bad, it’s simply what the new age smells like, the twentieth century was one smell and now it’s another, he says. Until quite late into the twentieth century, the smell was wet grass and basil, but also the dung from donkeys or cows, and dirty clothes, and unwashed crotches (don’t you remember being told how the old ladies in the village really stank, they’d never washed in their life, because washing was for whores, how they stank of pee or decades of concentrated menstrual blood; and how the old men smelled of pee, as well as dried cum); now we’ve become like animals, and our lairs stink because of all the stuff we keep in the fridge until it absolutely has to be tossed away; I shouldn’t think the caves and huts of primitive men smelled of Chanel No. 5, and can you imagine what the streets of the big cities were like two thousand years ago? And imagine what ancient Rome was like: animal bones and guts rotting in the mud along with vegetables and bits of fish, all thrown out into the street, buckets full of the night’s excretions tossed out of the windows with a cry of garde loo, assuming of course that the emptier of the bucket had the courtesy to warn passersby. Rome’s refuse collectors had to pick up dead animals abandoned on the highway and throw them onto the carts, and sweep up real shit, and, from what I’ve seen in that TV series, Rome, they would probably pick up three or four human corpses every night—another corpse for the cart, I’ll take the arms and you take the legs, and one, two, three and UP, God, what a weight—bodies left on street corners, with their guts hanging out, smelling of shit, or already half-rotten, the flies green as emeralds forming a buzzing cloud around the corpse; if a rat, which is only about the size of your hand, smells bad when it rots and provokes a swirl of bluebottles and wasps around it, imagine what a rotting body weighing a hundred and fifty pounds must smell like, and imagine the swarm of insects around that. You see dead bodies in movies and on the TV news. They don’t smell, but those rotting bodies, swollen as wineskins, washed up on the banks of the river that runs through Rome and whose name escapes me, well, imagine the stink of that, and the garbage collectors didn’t have gloves or masks then, no day-glow vests so that they wouldn’t get knocked down in the dark by a runaway horse. I guess they would only collect the trash during the day, because it would be just impossible at night, too dark, don’t you think? Mind you, it doesn’t exactly smell of roses here in the summer. In winter, it’s different: there are fewer people, the cans don’t overflow with trash, except on the holidays: Christmas and New Year, or days when there’s a lot of present-giving, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and so on, but not many; apart from days like that, the trashcans are plenty big enough, and there are some areas it’s hardly worth bothering with, areas where there are mainly vacation homes, apartment blocks near the marina or housing developments up in the mountains, where, in the winter months, the trashcans are empty or pretty much so, and the air you breathe there is very different from the summer air, the cold freezes the smells, makes them less potent, keeps them in their place, stops them spreading; when it’s cold, it’s the things themselves that smell, each separate thing, not the air; if something smells bad, it’s just that one thing that smells, not like in summer, when the smell really spreads, like gauze impregnated with the stench of filth, and that gauze is everywhere, wrapping about everything. On winter days like today, when I used to ride on the running board on the back of the truck, bumping along the streets of those developments built along the coast, or in among the elegant houses up in the hills, there were some nights when I felt as I imagine people who go water-skiing must feel: the slap of cold air in your face, the smell of wet grass, resin, damp earth, the solitude of the night and the darkness (and we’re the only people out in those streets edged with walls or railings lush with vegetation), whole districts where there’s not a single light in the windows, and in some parts, the mayor doesn’t even bother turning on the streetlamps. It’s like a ghost town where you feel you’re the only man alive, the king of all you survey. These days, now that I’ve got nothing to do since I got laid off at the workshop, I go there for walks and a cigarette, because it’s a way of calming down or escaping, instead of spending the whole day thinking, how the hell are we going to live on my wife’s wages and my last few months of unemployment benefits. We should never have bought that new TV, we gave our
s to the kids, but now they’re always squabbling because they each want to watch a different program: the cure is worse than the disease, my wife says, and more expensive too, I add, just to get her goat, because it was her idea to buy a new TV; we should never have bought the new Peugeot either, but it seemed necessary at the time, because, of course, while I was working as a garbage man, our timetables were compatible, with her working during the day and me at night, but after I started at the workshop, it was different, I had to be in Olba at half past seven in the morning, and she had to get to the cookie factory in Misent by eight, and once we’d got the kids up and dressed and made them breakfast, it was impossible for us to coordinate things, of course I could have made do with my old moped, after all, it never gets that cold here. Or we could have arranged things so that she changed to the evening shift, as she did later on, then I could drive her there in the car after lunch. When they closed the cookie factory, she managed to get a job at the fruit warehouse, which was lucky, although, depending on the day, she doesn’t finish work until midnight and sometimes even later. And now that I’m unemployed, she’s the one who needs the car, the one who uses it. It’s just as well we didn’t move to Olba, which she always preferred to Misent: you’d be nearer your job, she’d said, and it would be better for the kids. It would have been disastrous, because we even looked at a couple of semi-detached properties: they’re about half the price of houses in Misent, and they’re better built, better finished, and with a little garden too, she said, looking out at the handkerchief-sized patch complete with a tiny palm tree, which the red palm weevil would doubtless kill off in a matter of months. I kept thinking, why is she looking at house prices and comparing them with prices in Misent, when we’ve never even owned an apartment in Misent and have always rented? I just hope to God we can afford to go on doing that.
I like going out in the rain. I put on my parka and walk the deserted streets. On rainy nights, we’d be hanging on to the back of the truck, and my colleague Nico used to say: Right now we’re the masters of all this, we can enjoy it more and at a better time of year than those idiots who pay a fortune to come and spend the worst two weeks in August here. I wouldn’t come and spend August here if you paid me; I’d go north, somewhere with green fields and a clean river and a tiny village with about twenty or thirty inhabitants and where you can buy good bread and get the local dairyman to provide you with fresh milk, although nowadays you can’t get any peace and quiet even in those semi-abandoned villages (in summer, all the emigrants come back from Madrid, Bilbao or Barcelona, talking loudly, getting their wallets out in the bar so that you can see how stuffed they are with euros, and legions of tourists come too, looking, like you, for some peace, but completely ruining it for each other), you can’t even buy fresh milk, they won’t sell it to you because it’s not allowed and farmers risk getting slapped by a big fine; so there you are, practically standing next to a cow, and you’re buying cartons of skim milk, enriched with calcium or with added isoflavones or whatever those vitamins are they’re always coming up with. You can see the cows grazing in the fields, but you have to buy the same milk you’d buy here. It makes you feel like running up the hill, crouching down under the cow and sucking on its udder. That would be great. I don’t know what they would accuse you of if they caught you at it, but I’m sure they’d accuse you of something: animal cruelty, non-consensual sex, molesting a mental defective, who knows. But wouldn’t that be great, squeezing and feeling the milk gush straight into your mouth? I used to enjoy drinking my wife’s milk. Did you ever try that? It’s sweeter than cow’s milk. I figure most of us have drunk some of the milk intended for our children. We humans have a tendency to want to eat and drink each other. Haven’t you ever seen that picture of Saturn eating his children? Didn’t you feel like eating your kids when they were just tender little pink piglets? Don’t be so disgusting, I would say. And he’d bellow out: We’re the kings of the streets. And I would think: beyond our kingdom, behind the trashcans and the streetlights and the plants climbing up the railings and fences, are monkey puzzle trees, palm trees, wisteria, hibiscus, swimming pools, covered and uncovered, bubbling jacuzzis, ultra-slim plasma TVs, houses and gardens to which we would never have access, not even to collect the trash. And so I would say to him: The only thing we’re the kings of is the garbage, and not even that. We’re actually the slaves of the garbage, the real queen of the garbage is Esther Koplowitz, who owns the company with all the fat contracts. I wouldn’t mind being employed to tidy the gardens of some of those rich jerks, but no, they’re too mean, instead, they employ Ukrainians or Romanians and pay them ten or twelve euros a day, but once the Ukrainians and Romanians have pruned their roses and trimmed their palm trees, they get even for being swindled by hitting their employers over the head with an iron rod or a hammer or else knifing them, then stealing all the jewelry from the safe along with the latest household appliances. Confessors and judges call it restitution. The rich pretend to be protecting themselves, but in fact they’re drawn to danger, walking on a knife-edge or on the wild side, like in that Lou Reed song Esteban says he’s so fond of, Doo do doo do doo do do do do do doo: they invite the thief into their house just to save a few euros; God or nature or whatever must plant in their genes that overwhelming instinct in favor of obligatory redistribution as a counterbalance to their greed. The rich enjoy stealing and get a small thrill when someone steals from them, a feeling of danger that doubtless confirms them in their desire to keep everything under lock and key, makes them value their possessions even more, hurriedly replacing any stolen goods and hiding them away still more effectively, and thus continuing to accumulate loot. Nature is very wise.
All that was in my days as a garbage man, but then the same company made me a street cleaner, a better job, they said, more sanitary, more gentlemanly, ballroom dancing with a broom: that’s how they tried to fob it off on us, announcing that they’d be moving us to a different section, and from the nocturnal trip on the truck to a diurnal stroll with a broom over our shoulder; it was better, they said, more ecological, using only human fuel, a promotion, really, which was all very well, except—and they didn’t tell us this, we only found out later—not only were we paid less per hour, but there was no real overtime, and the truth is that in jobs like ours, overtime is crucial. You can’t live on the seven hundred euros they pay you in wages, but, as a garbage man, they would often give you thirteen or fourteen hours of overtime a week, and then of course you’d earn quite a lot, especially in summer, what with the tourists, the bars, the food and drinks concessions, or at fiesta time with the stands and the people boozing in the streets, until the new mayor arrived and, according to the company, he was looking for an excuse to give the garbage collection contract to another company owned by a friend, because every mayor is in the pay of someone, and when a new mayor arrives, he naturally wants to get his pals on the gravy-train (that’s what they were saying, but how likely was it that anyone was going to take the contract away from the Koplowitz family, who have the contract here in Olba, and in Misent, and in the whole region and in half of Spain?), what they also told us (and here we had no alternative but to believe them), was that the new mayor had said it was an absolute scandal that we were routinely being given a few hours’ overtime every blessed day of the year, and so they cut our hours, and even got rid of some of us and made others, whether we liked it or not, into street cleaners. Anyway, that’s what happened. My wages were cut by nearly half, and I couldn’t complain either, I was one of the lucky ones, I mean, at least I still had a job, because they fired more than a third of the garbage men. We intend to respect the rights and the seniority of those who remain, they said, and we will also be taking family circumstances into consideration, and since I have three children, the company did me a favor and let me keep my job, but, of course, by downgrading me from garbage man to street cleaner, they took away my overtime: it was a nicer job, less stressful, none of that jumping on and off, loading and unloadin
g I’d had to do before, because I’d be completely exhausted after my night’s work, although now the foreman was always hurrying us along and, on Friday and Saturday nights, what with young people binge-drinking and everything, the place was like a latrine, a pigsty, you can’t imagine the things you’d find in some areas, and these are young people who’ve finished high school, gotten their degree, even already going to university, but they’re real savages, far worse than any laborer: one night, they pulled up the entire avenue of palm trees that had been neatly planted that very week in readiness for the visit of the Catalan President, who was coming to inaugurate the new garden; another day, they’d uprooted all the rosebushes in the park: and yet another time, removed all the leaves and branches from the little trees in some new square, leaving only the trunks, I saw that for myself: you go there one day and see the garden looking all pristine and lovely, and the next day, the beautiful trees the gardeners had planted a couple of months before are just thirty or forty bare stakes without a leaf or a branch on them, I mean, what possible pleasure can those assholes get from ruining trees, because it must have taken them a long time too, it’s sheer malice. And yet that malice seems to get the bastards going, they don’t do a lick of work all day, and so, come nightfall, they’re full of energy, because they must have been busy all night with a saw, an axe, a chainsaw or whatever; every weekend it’s the same story: filth, vomit, urine, broken glass, even shit: they shit in the doorways or behind the bushes, by the walls or in the sandbox or on the grass, and the next day, children arrive with their mothers and start playing in the sand and go running to their mums with their hands all covered in shit, and then the mothers complain to the town council, saying how filthy everything is, that there’s even human excrement in the parks, and we street cleaners get the blame, as if it was our shit. Those infantile sons-of-bitches will shit anywhere, out of necessity sometimes, because they stuff themselves with all kinds of junk, which upsets their stomach and gives them diarrhea, but they do it out of spite too, to spoil things for other people, basically, they’re just little shits (in every sense); there were times when I thought I’d been better off as a garbage man: you had your route, your job, certain trashcans to empty, and that gave you a routine, a feeling of security, although you did get the occasional surprise, but being a street cleaner, it’s one permanent surprise, and on market days or when the town council put on a dance or some special event, fucking hell, then I thought I’d have been a hundred times better off collecting garbage, although there were also times when I thought the exact opposite: on bright winter or spring mornings, there you were all alone with your broom, as if you owned the whole village, cool mornings, sunny mornings, the streets empty, the people still at home or working, the children at school, just the occasional old lady out with her shopping cart, smiling at you and saying good morning, dear, then you hoped you’d live forever and you’d get out your sandwich and your can of beer, sit on a park bench and eat and drink a toast to the winter sun or to the spring shade of some pine tree: it was hard to believe you were being paid for that. On the mornings when it was my turn to clean up outside the school where Iván, my youngest, goes, and it was playtime, at first, I’d feel embarrassed when he’d call to me and run over to the fence to give me a kiss (although I was pleased too, of course), but then it would really make my day when all the kids ran over with Iván to say hello, and skipped around me, shouting and laughing in the natural, joyful way kids do, because, at that age, there’s not an ounce of malice in them, and they like costumes and uniforms: they’d see me in my uniform and the little angels would say that when they grew up, they wanted to be street cleaners too and wear a uniform like mine, because, of course, they still weren’t old enough to know what that uniform meant, although their Mom or Dad would explain to them later when they got home, what do you mean, you want to be a street cleaner? That’s the lowest of the low, sweetheart, no, you’ll be an engineer or an architect or a singer or a soccer star like Ronaldo, or a Hollywood actor like Brad Pitt. It’ll be the same with Aida, my oldest, or Aitor, who’s my middle child. Their fellow students will have been told what a street cleaner does, and that there are uniforms and uniforms; at their age, if they see you in the street in your street cleaner’s outfit, they’ll wish the earth would swallow them up, and try to hide away somewhere although that’s not actually true, that’s what you’d think, but the truth is very different: whenever Aida has spotted me on the street, she’s run over and given me a kiss, although I can’t imagine she enjoys her friends—because you know how stupid fourteen-year-old girls are nowadays, all pretending that they’re the daughters of lawyers, when really their dad is just a laborer mixing cement (the rich girls and the semi-rich go to private schools)—anyway, she can’t have liked her friends knowing that her father’s a street cleaner, even though the other girls’ fathers are only bricklayers or plumbers who spend all day unblocking pipes; Aida is the more affectionate one: Aitor is colder, more stupid in a way, well, he’s a boy, but even he comes over to give me a kiss. He’ll leave the gang of nitwits he’s sitting with on a bench somewhere, plotting something or other, never anything good, and slouch over, head down, to greet me. And at home, he’d often say: I know who pulled up the palm trees or who burned those three garbage cans, but I can’t tell you; they’re real bastards, Dad, they burn the cans, the mailboxes, they shit in the street and take a video, crap and all, on their cell phones, and I wondered sometimes if those bastards weren’t his friends, those same creeps sitting on the bench with him, sucking on a joint all day, a faint smile on their lips, looking jeeringly at you and at anyone else who happened to pass. I’ve never been ashamed of being a street cleaner. It’s an important job, what would things be like if we didn’t work our asses off, although that’s a lie, I’ve felt ashamed sometimes, when I’ve seen those supposedly unemployed men taken on by the town council (where they happen to have useful contacts) sloping off and hiding behind a bush in the park or sitting in the bar mid-morning, snacking and drinking, and people saying: only lazy jerks become street cleaners, but they don’t care, they just laugh, water off a duck’s back; and often they themselves will joke with some complete stranger about how little work they do. Then I’d feel ashamed of being a street cleaner, but only then, though that was often enough because those incidents were pretty frequent. It makes me even angrier now; when I see them, my blood boils, here I am unemployed and there they are, the ones with all the right connections, taking it easy and having a laugh at our expense. No, the bad thing about being a street cleaner, the reason I left, wasn’t because I was ashamed, but because they stopped paying overtime: if there was a dance or a fiesta put on by the town council, or some binge-drinking party out in the street, you simply had to work faster, and if you couldn’t finish on time, that was your problem. You slogged away, then had to put up with people complaining about how dirty the streets were, but that wasn’t the worst of it, the worst was ending up with just seven hundred euros a month. But I never felt ashamed, no. My father: I can’t believe you really want to be a street cleaner for the rest of your life. It’s no job for a man of forty, he used to say. And me: Dad, things have changed. My mother: Leave the boy alone. I got sick to death of seeing him puffed up like a turkey, his drunkard’s eyes glinting mockingly, making fun of my job, and one day, I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I said: And what have you done with your life? You’ve been a collidor, an orange-picker—you hardly need a university degree to learn how to handle the shears or how to carry the crates around like a mule, worrying about whether it’s going to rain, because if it rains, you don’t get paid, and you have to put food on the table every day, oh yes, and as if that wasn’t a miserable enough life, then you go and get a slipped disc and have to walk around all bent. And what became of your pension, huh? You get the bare minimum. Or even less. Nothing. We go at each other then, me and my Dad, as he counters with: Yes, but at least shears are a man’s tool and you work with other men (that was then, I sai
d to myself, now it’s all Romanians picking the oranges, more women than men, women pick more quickly and carry more crates, and if you don’t watch out, the foreman, who tends to be a forewoman now, will shout at you and humiliate you; I’ve seen it happen), and picking oranges and pruning and burning dead leaves and scrub and carrying crates and putting them on a truck are jobs men have always done, but trailing around with a broom and leaning on street corners, that hardly seems like a job for a man, I mean the only people I’ve ever seen sweeping the street are old women sweeping the sidewalk outside their house, but I know you’ve always preferred that to carrying wooden beams, climbing up scaffolding, hefting bags of cement, or even driving a truck, you soon got tired of all that; your mother and I gave you a good strong body, and you could have earned as much as you liked these past few years, when there was bags of money to be made in the construction business, like you did when you drove the truck, but, no, you never wanted that, you may have a strong body, but you lack oomph. I told him to go to hell. Are you calling me a fairy? And you, you call yourself a man? You never even made it to the end of the month on what you earned and then you’d spend all day whining on about how your back ached from all that bending and lifting and carrying, despite mother’s hot salt baths, and rubbing your back with herbs and oils, calling the doctor every five minutes because you’d got a sore throat (it’s because they’re exposed to the damp air in the orchards all day, it’s because there was such a heavy frost this morning, it’s because: yes, every day she had an “it’s because your poor father”), or taking you to the clinic because you’d pulled a muscle, and you didn’t even have the balls to go to the doctor’s on your own, the sight of the hospital corridor and the stretchers was enough to make you practically shit yourself; if I am a coward, then I’ve inherited that cowardice from you. You’re not a man. You’ve been a slacker all your life, and you’ve been treated like a slacker and paid what a slacker should be paid. It’s not even really a job, picking oranges, you’ve never really been able to say: I have a job. You had a job the day they took you on and lost it the day they didn’t take you on—you’re just a tame dog, trailing after the first person to offer you a few euros, wagging your tail, and it was pour us another brandy, another glass of wine, and if no one offered you work, then you’d be in a foul mood, grumbling on about how you hadn’t been picked for any of the teams because it was raining or because the bastard on duty (they were all bastards according to you) had chosen someone cheaper and—of course—nowhere near as good as you, or because there were no more oranges left to pick, and then you’d take it out on her, raise your voice and your hand to her, but not to those bastards who had failed to choose you. You’ve been jobless all your fucking life, a permanent job-seeker: every night you’d go to the bar, every day to the main square on the look-out for work, showing yourself off the way whores do, smiling at the man doing the choosing, trying to get into conversation, to see if some jerk would notice you or like you better than someone else and take you on. Clowning around so that they’d pick you rather than another man. Desperately telling jokes. Saying you’d buy the guy a drink or give him a cigarette, when he had enough money to buy a million drinks and a million cigarettes. So they’re all men, are they, that bunch of losers you get together with in the bar, all of them with a chip on their shoulder, their pensions too small to get them through to the end of the month, but criticizing anyone who attempts to improve his lot? Haggling with the waiter, noticing who pays for a round and who doesn’t, and whether they drank a one-euro glass of wine or a brandy that cost one twenty-five. Are they men, those wretches who spend all day watching what others do with their lives, as if, by talking about other people’s lives, they could forget what they’ve done or failed to do with their own? Because you didn’t exactly equip me with the right weapons for this war. Not me or my sister. You were far more interested in your game of cards, in having a late breakfast with your friends on Saturday mornings and a brandy every evening after work, than in what I had or hadn’t done. So don’t you fucking lecture me. I feed my kids and I take them to school and I’ll pay for their studies for as long as I can. You had me working as soon as I was old enough, it didn’t matter what kind of work. You just wanted the money earned by your fourteen-year-old son. You shameless . . . My mother hurled herself at me, covered my mouth with her hands to stop me talking. I pushed her away: you keep out of it, it’s none of your business. She started crying. Her solution to everything. But all I wanted was to be able to earn a little more so that I could live the way I had up until then. And that was when I got lucky and started working at the carpentry workshop. Or, rather, I thought I’d got lucky—that I had, at last, found a nice, quiet, stable job.
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