When I arrange to meet them in the office, the other four already know what I’m going to say, because Álvaro has told them, even though I asked him not to. I want to be the one to tell them, I said, so that they find out from me, I don’t want them to think I’m hiding, afraid to show my face. But all pacts have been broken, nothing binds us together any more. Jorge is very sure of himself and of his skills as a carpenter. Ahmed and Julio, on the other hand, have no very high hopes. They live from hand to mouth. Joaquín just seems bewildered. But Álvaro, sitting opposite me, apparently gazing at me meekly, is merely pretending to be resigned to his fate. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you, his eyes are saying. He’s the one who referred to himself as “old” just to make me feel bad, and yet he’s the one refusing to pity me: you surely don’t expect me to help you, do you, he said when I asked him to keep the secret to himself for a few days, and he again purses his lips and tut-tuts when we’re all gathered in the office. Again, he looks as if he’s about to spit. At me. By warning the others about the situation, he was doubtless doing what he logically had to do, being loyal to his colleagues, class solidarity and all that, but I’ve worked with him for forty years, we’ve often had lunch down by the lagoon; together—again that endless tape running inside my head—he and I made many a furtive fishing or hunting expedition on a Saturday, although lately I’ve been going there with Ahmed instead, because Álvaro, as a father and a grandfather, had family commitments, social obligations, or so he said—excuses, lies, his children hardly ever go to see them, his wife once told me bitterly—and suddenly all those days we’ve spent together don’t exist, but the painful memory of them does. He said: you can’t do this to me, not when I’ve only got another four years before I retire. You know what you are, don’t you? He seems convinced that I’m deliberately losing everything just to annoy him, that I’m doing this just to him. He’d figured I would retire five years ago, when I was sixty-five, but would keep the workshop open, leaving him in charge, the effective boss, giving orders to an assistant, who would do the heavier work. I would presumably have hired that assistant and have kept coming down to the workshop each day and generally carry on as normal, keeping in touch with customers, checking the accounts, etc., because if you take Álvaro away from the cutting-machine, the lathe, the polisher, the drill or the rasp, if you take him away from the varnish, he hasn’t a clue what to do, he has hands, but no head. He thought nothing would change, that it would all stay more or less the same, the only change being me drawing my pension from the bank on the twenty-fifth of each month and him getting a large increase in salary because he was taking on more responsibility. The workshop closing, the dismissals, the pre-bankruptcy embargo, that was all totally unforeseen, and he can’t forgive me for that—none of them can—as if I had closed the workshop and fired them all on a mere whim. They hate me because I’ve smashed the milk jug they were carrying on their heads: the jug is in pieces and the milk has spilled everywhere, filling the cracks in the tiles; but I’m not to blame for their dreams, I didn’t encourage them. As I would have said in my young days with Francisco: I exchanged money for labor. We each contributed our labor and fulfilled our part of the bargain. No dreams were in the contract: they’re the responsibility of the individual; and each and every one of the disappointments, disruptions or discomforts they’ll suffer as a consequence will hurt me with a pain that goes far beyond the economic, not that they’ll believe that, they don’t understand and there’s no reason why they should; they’ve been left without work, their calculations have all proved wrong; I imagine what these were: the payments on Álvaro’s RV so that, when the time came, when he and his wife both retired, he could embark on the happy life of the wanderer; on that day, the day he received his pension, then I could close the workshop. It didn’t matter about the others. And what was to be done with the installments on Joaquín’s Peugeot 307 Break, with the communion party for his daughter or his son, I can’t quite remember now if it was the boy or the girl who was due for first communion, but he told me months ago that he’d already booked the restaurant for the spring, Las Velas, one of the most popular—and most expensive—places for such occasions; he told me: you have to book a year in advance, because, otherwise, they won’t take your reservation. I want to give my son the very best, everything I didn’t have as a child; you see, my wife works in the cookie factory (or the fruit warehouse—I’m not sure now where Joaquín told me she was working) and earns a nice little wage. Not that we’re well-off, of course, but we can afford it. And what about Ahmed and his plan to bring his widower father over from Morocco, where he lives alone, because his other brothers have emigrated to France and Belgium, and his idea of buying a four-bedroom house, one room for him and his wife, another for the father, and one for each child, because they’re a boy and a girl and it’s not right for children of different sexes to share a room, however young they are. It’s immoral and, in the long run, dangerous, Señor Shteban. A Muslim doesn’t want that, he would explain when we went fishing together, doubtless hoping to touch my heart and get me to say: I’m going to give you a loan that you can pay back gradually, when you can—these Arabs think money grows on trees here—or that I would, at least, guarantee a loan as a down-payment on one of those apartments he’d seen; or an advance on his wages, he would suggest, as we approached one of those moments of togetherness that happen when you spend the morning in the countryside alone with someone; Julio’s Saturday suppers (or Friday suppers in Ahmed’s case and at his house) and Jorge’s season ticket to watch Valencia play; or the christening party for Álvaro’s grandchildren. And Ahmed: Mulud, circumcision, the nightly feasts during Ramadan, spicy harissa perfumed with the coriander he buys in the halal shops—the other day, I noticed they’re selling coriander in the local supermarket too, well, money’s money, and coriander has an expanding niche in the market, the Latin Americans use it too, as I know from Liliana—dates, almond cakes, the parties he holds when they kill a lamb and roast it in the oven in the courtyard, and to which they invite their Moroccan friends from Misent, parties that he’s told me about—he even invited me to one. Roast lamb, salads, honey-glazed fritters, almond cakes, Coca-Cola and all the tea you can drink. Were those invitations intended to pave the way to that advance on his wages? I will leave this world without ever knowing, not that it matters. It’s a bit late to find out who genuinely cared about you, and who was motivated entirely by self-interest, who was nice to you purely because he wanted something, like my brother Germán’s wife, the hypocrite who fooled us all, even my mother, who was initially jealous because she was taking her eldest son from her, the handsomest one too. Álvaro, Joaquín, Julio, Jorge, Ahmed. Jorge, his pink face, his little eyes sunk in fat: meals with friends, feasts with relatives, birthday celebrations, a season soccer ticket, bus trips to the Mestalla stadium in Valencia with other fans from Misent, wearing the team scarf and singing the team anthem, amunt, amunt València, Friday night or Saturday afternoon visits to the La Marina shopping mall. H&M, Zara, Massimo Dutti, Adolfo Domínguez, Movistar and Vodafone, and then a family visit to the pizzeria or the movies, the latest Avatar in 3D or the second season of Millennium, you could spend all weekend in the mall, apart from going to the soccer game; and if it isn’t pizza, it’s hamburgers with the kids in Hollywood at the entrance to the mall, and then there’s the medieval bouncy castle, the pretend horses and immodestly rocking plastic bulls, on which the children practice riding for the first time; as well as the swings and inflatable slides. Julio, Jorge and Ahmed are not the same as Álvaro, who has worked with me all my life, or as Joaquín, who I would like to have taken on permanently, had time not been against us. He’s a born worker. I know how thrilled he was to exchange sweeping the streets for driving the van and assembling furniture in people’s homes along with Ahmed (who is also a good guy). He’s the kind who can’t wait to show you his driver’s license: I’ve got the full license, I can drive any kind of vehicle—he shows you the pink card bearing
the relevant symbols, truck, car, motorcycle—and I’m strong enough to carry any load. When he says this, he raises one arm and flexes it, imitating the strong man in the circus. When they finish work, he and Ahmed give each other a high five and then have a beer in the bar. He’s no genius, but he’s as strong as an ox and very willing. Yes, I would have kept him on. And, at a pinch, Ahmed too. Not the others though (Julio is just a nobody; Jorge is too proud and thinks he knows more than he actually does). Ahmed thought he was my favorite because I took him fishing on Saturdays, let him drive the 4x4 down the narrow paths around the lagoon, spread the tablecloth on the ground by the water, open the cans of tuna and make a salad. We used to barbecue lamb chops over a fire, using olive twigs I kept in the car as skewers. The day before, he’d say: I’ll buy the lamb chops, Señor Shteban, because the Moroccan butcher, who’s the best local butcher, slaughters the lamb as it should be slaughtered, and then he’d pause, expecting me to hand him a twenty-euro note and say, go on, keep the change; he was apparently just being helpful, but the truth is he hates to eat meat that hasn’t been slaughtered in one of their slaughterhouses, I don’t know, these Moroccans, after all the hunger and hardship they’ve endured, now they go all delicate on us: if it isn’t halal, I can’t eat it. The animals have to be facing Mecca when their throats are slit, then they’re bled to death. There’s no shilly-shallying, no quick blow to the head for a chicken or a rabbit, or a harder blow if it’s a lamb, and, needless to say, no euthanasia in the form of an electric shock, they don’t even allow strangling: no, they slit the animal’s throat, praying to God as they do so. Islamist terrorists also favor throat-slitting. Machine guns and explosives are mere substitutes, albeit highly effective, but there’s nothing like slicing open a throat and having the blood spill onto the ground. It’s in the Semitic genes: Yahweh asked Abraham to cut the throat of his son Isaac, then let him swap the boy for a poor lamb who happened to be passing: the important thing is cutting throats and soaking the ground with blood. The crackling flames from the dry branches placed on top of a bed of damp grass, the sizzling fat as the lamb roasts, a lamb that was turned to face Mecca before it had its throat cut and was bled to death by a circumcised butcher. The smell of burning fat and wood mingling with the sickly-sweet air of the marsh. He used to drink with me too (he had nothing against Christian wine and beer, only wrongly butchered meat), and so we’d always put a few cans of beer in the ice chest.
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