But Álvaro should understand the situation better than any of them: he was as much a part of the business as I was (he who was like a son to my father, the son he inherited from his best friend) or as I once was, he can hardly complain about the death of a limb when the body has died. The firm collapsed on the very same day for him as it did for me, not a day sooner, I waived all privileges. The same day and the same hour for the carpenter’s actual son and for the guy who was like a son to the carpenter. I didn’t jump overboard and start swimming to see if I could reach the beach a minute before him. I stood on the deck until the very last moment so that we would go down together. If the business goes under, then so do we. I go under and Álvaro goes under. We go under together. That’s how it is. The others, the ones I took on more recently—Joaquín, as I say, is the exception, a very strange fish indeed, a complete mystery, who knows what lies behind that eternal smile of his?—the others were merely birds pecking at the elephant’s fleas, despite Álvaro’s alarm when he saw how skilled Jorge was. The business consisted of my father, Álvaro and me. Isn’t that right? We don’t exploit anyone, we just do our work, isn’t that so, my friend? It doesn’t matter that Álvaro has grown-up children and even a few grandchildren and has paid off his mortgage. Losing his dream of an RV is not so very grave either. They can use the car they’ve always used. A seven- or eight-year-old Renault Laguna, which he bought, apparently, because the magazines said it was the safest car on the market, and Álvaro’s very keen on safety. It’s not bad at all, it’s perfectly fine. If he’s looked after it—and I know he takes more care of it than he does of his wife, checking it, studying it, cleaning and caressing it—it could last him another ten years. And I think his wife has a car too, because she drives to work. He’ll get two years’ unemployment benefits too. That’s not bad at all. Two years. Many people would happily sign up to a guarantee that they’d have that much time in the world. Besides, his wife has worked for years at Mercadona, which is about the securest job you can get at the moment, and even though she’s been off sick lately because of depression—or has been suffering from depression after being diagnosed with heart disease or one of those rare illnesses they diagnose people with nowadays—she’ll still get disability. I know it’s not the same thing, of course it isn’t, but if they’ve been left jobless, so have I, and it’s far worse for me, because the workshop and the machines no longer belong to me, not a single one of the planks in the stores—which have presumably all now been impounded—is mine. Those cunts don’t yet know that even the bed I sleep in is no longer mine, not even the showerhead I use when I wash my Dad. My account books have been impounded. I got so tired of creditors ringing me up, I decided to rip out the landline and throw my cell in the lagoon—there’s no point going through the rigmarole of canceling my account—and thus I have joined the long list of the lagoon’s destroyers and contaminators. Yet another one. Criminals throw incriminating weapons into the marshy pools; recently, acting on a tip, the police dragged one of the lagoons and found a veritable arsenal, I read about it in the local newspaper, dozens of guns with their serial numbers erased and the barrels sawn off, thus removing all the bore marks, which doubtless correspond to bullets found in bodies dumped on garbage heaps, on empty building sites, in the trunks of cars or abandoned on the sidewalk or inside a bank after a robbery; police divers even found a car submerged beneath the water, it’s really nothing new: years ago, Bernal used to off-load asphalt roofing felt into the lagoon. But what was I saying, ah, yes, the telephone has drowned, the workshop is shut, the bank account is frozen, the Toyota will be clamped by the local authorities in a couple of weeks’ time, because that’s the deadline for me to hand over all the relevant papers to the judge (not that I’ll do that, no, I won’t be giving the incumbent of Court Number Two in Misent that particular pleasure) and as for the house, there’s a foreclosure notice that will come into force in a month: they’ll confiscate all the furniture, thus adding to the problems at the court warehouse, which, in this, the age of foreclosures and evictions, is already full to bursting. They’ve run out of space for all the confiscated electronics, furniture, machines and tools, for the old cars that are no use to anyone, but that have been seized simply to comply with a court order, whose sole aim is to punish the owners for having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. There just isn’t room for all those cars, and so they stay out in the street, slowly falling to pieces, getting covered in dust and rust, and at the mercy of predatory scrap merchants. What matters is ensuring that the owner is well and truly screwed. Every now and then, auctions are organized to try and get rid of some of that junk, but even auction vultures aren’t keen to take on those particular bargains: apartments, mattresses, computers, cars with four or five thousand miles on the odometer. What had once seemed so necessary is now excess to requirements. Yes, the courts will take everything, imposing a court order that my brother and sister will challenge as soon as they find out that my father’s ghost continued to sign checks, guarantees and loans right up until his final moments. O to be a fly on the wall when they realize there’s nothing left, because, in order to get the necessary loans that would allow me to take on the extra work for Pedrós, I forged my father’s signature with, as my accomplice, the bank manager, the one who preceded the Secular Pear, and into whose office I dragged the old man, who was clearly in no fit state to sign anything. It cost me a fat bribe, a fancy dinner and a couple of bottles of French white and Spanish red. We sat in the manager’s office with my tamagotchi father, whose signature I forged several times, signatures that appeared on every page of every contract, copies and all, as well as I don’t know how many other documents and checks. I can imagine my sister Carmen’s fury when she finds out, although, if she and my brother have any sense and get themselves a good lawyer and an expert to certify that the signatures are forgeries, and, above all, if they don’t get flustered or lose their heads, they just might win the case. And then they would be far better off than me, because I am about to abandon them, not in order to swim to shore from the sinking ship, nor even to have the satisfaction of saying “fuck you.” They are only a small part of the theatrical company I’m bidding farewell to, because that’s what’s required by the particular play my father and I are performing. They’re welcome to their unemployment benefits or, indeed, their tantrums at the lack of them or, in the case of my brother and sister, their properties, always assuming they can wrench them from the bank’s greedy grasp. My future would be a pension, of which I’d only be able to hang on to six or seven hundred euros, because anything above that would have to go to slowly reducing a debt that could never be paid off in a hundred years, and a second count, as the judges say in their summings-up, of forgery, fraud, misappropriation of funds, or whichever term the penal code would use to describe what I’ve done—I didn’t bother to consult it before forging all those signatures—and a subsequent prison sentence. And I really don’t see myself doing time in the can at my age: in winter, in Fontcalent prison, you could probably get by, a bit of sun warming the exercise yard and a couple of blankets to keep you snug at night, but in summer, it must be unbearable, a frying pan where you fry in your own fat. Álvaro’s fucked, but not because of my finaglings or my failures. He gambled his life away just as I did, no, he’s fucked because his sole ambition in life was to stay in a stuck-in-the-mud, dead-end carpentry workshop for more than forty years. Can a lazy bastard also be a hard worker? Álvaro is living proof. Slogging away out of sheer idleness and indifference, because it’s easier, because you can’t be bothered to walk a hundred feet to find yourself another more instructive, more exciting job, with more prospects and possibly better pay. Such workers used to be described as model employees, and they’d be presented with a gold-plated medal on the day they retired: fifty years in the same company and what do you get? A ribbon round your neck and a medal. Fantastic. An idler who has sat in the same chair or stood at the same machine for fifty years. Now it’s mobility that
gets rewarded. Loyalty is seen as lethargy, a lack of get-up-and-go; you get brownie points for betraying your various bosses, and with each new betrayal comes more money and promotion. Ahmed and Jorge have two quiet years ahead of them in which to rethink their lives, I don’t know what Joaquín’s situation is, whether he still has some unemployment benefits owing to him from previous jobs, and then there’s always child benefits, worth four hundred or so euros for anyone who’s been long-term unemployed and so is no longer eligible for unemployment benefits, and then there are the short-term contracts given out by the town council to do cleaning, gardening—which is something he knows about—or bricklaying. Julio won’t have that possibility, but that’s his fault for choosing to work illegally, because it suited him to receive unemployment benefits and child benefits or help for the long-term unemployed on top of his wages, which meant that he could easily afford his rent or his mortgage or whatever; I don’t honestly know what his situation is and, frankly, I don’t care. At least he has youth and time on his side. I’d happily swap places with him. No question. His future for mine. It’s a deal. I hear them talking about their lives, telling me about their dreams, as if I were a wizard who could grant their every wish, a fairy godmother with a magic wand capable of turning pumpkins into golden carriages. You know, Don Esteban, last Sunday, after my husband hadn’t even bothered to come home the previous night, I took my two kids to the park, and there beneath the clear blue sky, I sat listening to the band and watching my kids playing on the swings and the slides and in one of those rope maze things, and I was thinking if only I could have been born in a place where you could just sit and listen to a band on a Sunday morning and watch your children playing, rather than having to pack up and leave everything behind. I thought, too, that I didn’t really need him, Wilson, I mean; God knows where he’d got to, because he was out all Saturday night and didn’t come home until Monday. Just me on my own, listening to the music and with my kids there with me. Don’t cry, Liliana, because when you cry, I don’t know what to do with you, I feel like touching you, caressing you, putting my arms around you as if you were a little girl, come on now, let me dry those tears, I cry too sometimes, but I don’t like anyone to see me. Don’t cry, my child. What’s wrong? Are you worried that he’ll have spent all his money during those two nights on a spree, like he did last month? That’s it, isn’t it? And you’re afraid it’ll be the same again, because he got paid on Friday and, so far, hasn’t given you a centimo. Don’t worry, we’ll find a solution, where there’s life there’s hope. How much do you need? But, first, dry those tears. No, no need to kiss me (I’m lying, kiss me, kiss me, even if it’s only a daughterly peck on the cheek). We should all help each other out when we can. And one of these days, I’d like you to come in wearing the earrings and the necklace I gave you so that I can see how pretty you look, although I know you come here to work and not to party. Liliana in my arms, her lips kissing my cheek, a couple of kisses moist with tears, and the pressure of her body against mine, seeking protection, and while what I feel is infinite tenderness, a kind of corporeal pity kicks in and I begin to notice a discomfiting thickening of the blood, but I don’t know how to move away discreetly so that she won’t notice that involuntary movement of the flesh, which would sully what really is genuine pity, you’re my little girl, Liliana, and I want to protect you, I don’t want you to suffer because that makes me suffer too, I say, but body and soul are at odds, or perhaps pity is just an unsavory form of desire. That embrace, that feeling of plenitude, and now nothing but emptiness, a void, something akin to what a woman must feel after giving birth: completely empty, her body hollow as a bell. Yes, Liliana, a feeling of emptiness: the workshop gone, you gone, and this silence, but a feeling of repose too, of being at peace. My head is no longer filled with invoices, deadlines, loans, designs, numbers, nothing, I’m no longer in pain, I can’t even feel the emotion that used to fill me whenever I saw her eyes well up, when I held her close, nor the descent into the lower depths when I watched her say goodbye, not even bothering to close the door behind her, no, now I don’t even have you, Liliana. The other day, I turned and escaped down the nearest side street when I saw her in Olba, walking along with that ball of overcooked fat, her husband, who had one great paw resting on her shoulder, when I saw their apparent affection for each other—because they were walking along together laughing and kissing, and she returned his kisses—an affection financed by me. None of that need bother me any more, I feel only rest and certainty. The calm that rushes in on a pervert the day after he’s been castrated, but describing it in those terms has other murky implications, when in this case there is—and was—only a paternal feeling. Having a business fail must be the male equivalent of having an abortion. You see, Leonor, how we are bound together by similar experiences? You and I united by a rushing stream of water carrying away part of our inner self. After all, shit is also part of our inner self. Sometimes we give things an importance that only exists inside our head. How much do you need, Liliana, would five hundred euros be enough? Here, make that seven hundred, that way you won’t have to worry. No, really, you can pay me back when you can. The workshop lived inside me. I didn’t mean to stay, Leonor, you knew that. I wanted to leave as well, but when I came back, I realized that I just didn’t have the strength to leave this house that has always been my home, even though it’s never really been mine, it’s my parents’ house that I used as collateral—along with the orchard and the land in Montdor—for part of the loan I applied for, supplemented by the money I withdrew from the bank in order to become an equal partner in Pedrós’s latest building venture. I, who had never owned my own house, was suddenly part-owner of several dozen houses. I’ve never been allowed to buy furniture and arrange it in the rooms as I wished, I’ve never been able to bring a friend home, I could never have brought you home with me, Leonor, and shut myself up with you in my room, our room, we could never have come out of the bathroom and walked down the corridor naked or sunbathed on the roof terrace or made love without worrying that someone in the next room might hear us sigh or moan, or hear the mattress creaking, never, I could never even masturbate in peace, my mother was always watching and listening: I don’t like you locking yourself in your room, Esteban, I’m always afraid something might be wrong. My father’s harsh voice: we’re not thieves in this house, you know, there’s no need to shut your door. But it wasn’t just because the carpentry workshop was part of the house I’ve always lived in, it’s more because I’ve carried the cross of this business for more than forty years now, I mean, what else have I done with my life? Fishing, hunting, a few games of cards in the evening, going out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights—as I did for a few years—preceded only, during the time when I managed to be defined by neither house nor workshop, by a short walk on what I thought was the wild side (the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix); and yet what should have been part of the sentimental education of a hero of our times—as it was for Francisco—turned out, in my case, to be of no importance whatsoever: Can’t you hear the music, Leonor? It’s playing now, you must be able to hear it, all those groups playing at the same time and driving me mad. I could multiply that list by ten, doubtless because I lack judgment or still have no confident, mature sense of what I like, because I’m incapable of saying, as Leonor did, this is brilliant and this is garbage, then heading straight for the thing I’ve chosen without caring what or who I trample on the way. I sampled this and that, and it all seemed good, nourishing stuff to me, but I probably lacked focus, character, get-up-and-go, or whatever. That break during the mid-sixties did get me out of here, but I didn’t have the courage or the intelligence to convert that experience into the embryo of another way of life; like Álvaro, I gave in and chose the easy chair: at first, I called that easy chair Leonor—fool that I was, because she was restlessness personified, constantly choosing between this and that—but Leonor made her choice and
left, while I stayed behind and made the workshop in Olba my solitude. I didn’t even go to the bar (a recurrence of the symptoms of the infection inherited from my father), I saw no one, spent whole weeks without leaving the house; yes, I was a true heir to my father, he returning from his war and me from mine; he from icy Teruel and me from the cold, rainy boulevards and orange lights of Paris. Two defeated men. As he locked the workshop door from inside, I would go upstairs to my room, where I found myself in a kind of nowhere-land; initially, I felt claustrophobic shut up in there, listening over and over to the fifty or so LPs I’d brought with me, plus those that Francisco brought me on his visits later on. It wasn’t enough to open the windows in order to drive out anxiety, because there was a wall surrounding Olba, I could almost see it in the distance, to the south, the boundary line: the houses in Misent, the cliffs blurred by mist, the little shapes of the fishing boats coming back as evening fell, followed by a flock of seagulls; and on the other side, the stony slopes of Montdor. From the roof terrace, I could see those boundaries stretching to the north as well, the great void of the lagoon, the endless reedbeds; the curve of the beaches that, over time, have disappeared behind the many blocks of apartments and houses; I gradually got used to it: a couple of times a month I’d get spruced up and take the workshop van: Are you off out again? Can’t you just stay quietly at home or go for a walk in the hills? Walking’s good for the health: my father. Sometimes, I would put my wellington boots and the rifle in the van too so that he’d think I was going hunting, and then I’d turn up at the club in the early evening, when you’re unlikely to meet anyone you know, and if you do, it’s because they don’t want to meet anyone they know either, a time when the girls are just starting to take up their positions at the bar. Even now, that’s the time I usually choose to go there, when they’re chatting to each other, sharing the music they’ve recorded on their cell phones, exchanging songs and ring tones, and I quickly select one of them (aren’t you at least going to buy me a drink? what’s the big hurry?), diversions that have never touched the very kernel of my rat-like existence, clinging desperately to a passing piece of wreckage and jockeying for space with my fellow rats, competing for salvation. The gloomy workshop, whose destruction I should see as a slave’s freedom papers, but which feels instead like a painful mutilation. The way a woman must feel when her child is torn from her: that was my first thought. A child given to me in adoption has been torn from me. Does that sound familiar, Leonor? We have each, in our own way, suffered a loss; I know, I know, your loss was an exercise in emptying yourself out, whereas I have merely removed an excrescence, no, you’re right, it isn’t the same: your loss was insignificant or, rather, liberating, while all I’m losing is an innocuous, transmissible bit of property inherited from my father, and which he inherited from his father, an under-nourished, ill-fed piece of property; the workshop closed its doors during the years he spent in prison, and only the odd jobs my uncle did kept things going until my father, on his release, rather reluctantly took up the reins again. I wouldn’t have had anyone to leave the business to anyway. If Álvaro were to keep it going for a few years longer, it would still be a business run by two old men. Or “two poor old men,” as he would say, growing wrinkled and decrepit and already beginning to rot. While my father was away, my uncle, an adolescent at the time, did odd jobs in people’s houses: mending doors, building tool sheds, making chicken runs or rabbit hutches on modest roof terraces (the post-war years brought farming into the villages, just so that people had something to eat); my father started the business up again in the face of great difficulties—so he did still have some ambition when he left prison, his apathy was a bit of a pose really, even if, as an artist turned laborer, it meant that he was unable to fulfill his possible aspirations—but that was also when the business first fell prey to the disease that brought it to its later state of decay, symptomatic of the times. And left in my hands, it has died without issue. Yes, Leonor, the tale of a barren creature. Liliana: you don’t understand because you don’t have any children of your own. Very true, I know nothing of such things.
On the Edge Page 27