On the Edge

by Rafael Chirbes

  Half a century later, I visited the house again: the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms; I saw what I remembered and what I didn’t remember, what I recognized and what I’d forgotten, what I hadn’t seen on that first visit when we saw only the part of the house where we were going to work—the rooms and corridors that led there. You don’t show your house to a couple of carpenters or to a carpenter and his assistant, you don’t show them around the way you would your guests. You say this is here and it’s like this and I’d like it to be like that. On this visit, Francisco asked my opinion about the restoration that was taking place and explained that they were superb examples of workmanship that no one could possibly afford nowadays, museum pieces. He invited me to run my hand along the edges of tables and sideboards, to open doors and drawers, to admire the perfect finish, the precision with which they had been repaired, saying again that this furniture was a hundred years old: doors that still fitted and drawers that slid smoothly in and out after a century of use. He had found the only furniture and woodwork restorer in the whole region:

  “He uses natural, non-aggressive oils—he’s truly a miracle worker—reconstructing what’s damaged, rotten, splintered, wormeaten or broken, I’ve seen some amazing work he’s done before, on a fifteenth-century coffered ceiling in a palace in Valencia, on a couple of Renaissance bargueño desks. He’s worked marvels here too, as you can see, although, everything in the house was in a remarkably good state of preservation, generally speaking, it was just a matter of cleaning it up and using the best treatments to protect the wood, you must know him, though he’s not a local, there’s no one around here now who does this kind of work; he gets calls not just from people in Valencia and Barcelona, but from people in Paris and even Italy, even though he says he’s not that keen on traveling. I travel, he says, because I enjoy the challenges they’re offering me. He’s quite a lot older than us. He must be about eighty, but he looks like a young man. And he has no intention of retiring. He shows me his hands sometimes, and not a tremor. He’s very thin, pure muscle and bone, and yet he can carry a plank of wood on his shoulders that I’m not even sure I could pick up. He says to me: I work with wood that’s three times my age and it hasn’t given up the ghost yet, it’s still looking after clothes and china or holding up roofs, it’s three hundred years old and still doing its duty, so why should I retire at eighty if my materials are good for three centuries? I’m not going to have that wood look down at me, thinking it’s better than I am. He laughs and takes a sip of wine, a little glass at breakfast, another with his lunch and another at supper time. A bit of wine never hurt anyone. And then, after supper, a drop of brandy.”

  I don’t blame him for taking on that man. It’s only logical that he should choose the best, someone equal to the task; it’s what the house deserves; we’ve been friends for a long time, but he was talking to me about a world of which I know nothing, a world my father once aspired to, or so he said, but it’s never really interested me, I despised it, and have been a mere jobbing carpenter, doing mundane work, a minor industrialist with no ambition, that’s all I’ve wanted to be ever since it became clear to me that I was going to abandon any aspirations I had in order to accept a future that would be circumscribed by the workshop and by the shadow cast by my father’s tutelary presence. Basic carpentry: I’ve produced work more quickly and with better tools than your average DIY enthusiast, but with only slightly better results, or possibly not even as good, I’ve just never been able to get up the enthusiasm to take on anything more complicated. I’ve stuck to turning out well-finished, but undemanding stuff: doors, windows, closets, shelving, all very elementary and functional, plank to plank or plank fitted into plank, nothing too difficult, and of course carpentry for the building trade. Plain as ditchwater, nothing fancy. That’s how it was to the end. I don’t know if I regret it or not. Having no ambition, I mean. Perhaps, if I’d had ambition, I would have been even more bitter, would have become impregnated with the bile that has always filled my father, contaminating everything around him. I can’t say that I lost my business because I aspired to something better, that I bet to win and lost: no, I don’t have that excuse, nor am I looking for an excuse. I made that bet in order to survive, simply to get by. Or to help myself to die better. My objective had nothing to do with my profession, it was the house, or rather the small refuge I was going to build for myself in the mountains; going for walks with the dog, hunting near the lagoon. I didn’t even lose because I did something wrong, but because Tomás Pedrós failed to meet my expectations, because he drew me in or I wanted to be drawn in or allowed myself to be. He was certainly gambling, that’s what he’s done all his life, he’s younger than me, he’ll survive all this and continue to gamble. He had another business before, toward the end of the 1980s, and he made a lot of money too, but according to Bernal, that business went down the tubes. He left his partner in the lurch, without a penny. According to Bernal’s version of events, Pedrós kept his own money on ice for a while, then used it to set up the hardware store and then began to expand from there: the shop, his partnership in the waste management company, his first forays into property development. People said he’d won the lottery or that he’d been involved in some kind of dodgy deal, smuggled something in from one of his trips abroad; that he’d worked as a courier for that Mexican drug lord Guillén, that we all know where he got the money. On the other hand, for me, the business with Pedrós was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I see that now. He went into partnership with me because he knew he was taking a risk with this latest bet of his. He didn’t know whether or not the property development deal would work, and it wasn’t so much a question of splitting the profits if the roulette ball happened to land on the lucky number, but of minimizing his losses if, as was only logical, it didn’t. His wager was my disaster, added to the long chain of unpaid bills over the last two years: whenever he commissioned any carpentry work, he always wanted it done very quickly, with poor-quality materials, chipboard doors and panels; his idea of good-quality wood was newly cut, unseasoned pine put together quickly, hastily: but why am I even bothering to explain, that’s the way everyone was doing business, commissions taken on just to pay the next bill and to dupe clients who think they’re middle-class simply because they don’t work with a shovel and pickaxe but who are merely the saddest of our lower classes nowadays. The deal with Pedrós would have allowed me to sell off the paternal home and workshop, sharing the spoils among the heirs in the same impatient, rapacious spirit as the Civera siblings, to put an end once and for all to what had already gone on for far too long, and with what I obtained from this operation (yes, operation) and the savings I’d been squirreling away behind my father’s back, to build a house in the mountains where I would retire with my dog, even taking a few tools with me so that I could begin to work on some new carpentry caprice, perhaps an old-fashioned Renaissance-style table, complete with grottesche and medallions like the one made by my grandfather or father, or that they made together.

  Slamming down an ace of clubs on the table, Francisco, who has never liked Pedrós—perhaps because he feels that, in the bar and in local society, Pedrós is stealing some of the limelight he doesn’t want to share with anyone—completes our piratical Lecter’s thought (strange times make for strange bedfellows):

  “Yes, the local radio and TV ads—the soccer club director, the local events committee chairman. Sheer greed. The man’s a glutton; he’s tried to shove all the spoons in his mouth at once. At Chinese feasts, they put all the different dishes on the table, serve them up at the same time, but you take a little from each dish on the lazy Susan in the middle, a bit like a roulette wheel, except that you decide where the wheel should stop. You don’t put everything in your mouth at one time. The hardware store, the electronics store, the real estate business, the shares in the waste management company and the water treatment plant: that man has, or had, more departments than one of the giant superstores.”

/>   “Yes—using what he calls synergies (in the language of the big multinationals) to make his way on every front—with his taste for bossing people around, showing off, and cutting a prominent figure in society—add that up and you get a very explosive mix, ready to go off at any moment: envy is a very dangerous thing. If someone sticks his head above the parapet, everyone wants to chop it off; if someone’s winning the marathon, there’s always some spectator ready to stick out a leg and trip him up. What can you do, if that’s how the good Lord or nature made us? People can’t bear to see anyone rising to the top. The more relationships you maintain and the more friends you seek, the more enemies you acquire and the more threads you weave in to your own failure. I don’t know if he was hoping to become mayor or deputy. There isn’t a councilor he hasn’t had in his pocket, who he hasn’t done favors for: invited to suppers, presented with crates of champagne, anointed with money from some business deal or other, or taken to a brothel or sent on a cruise. That’s all very well day-to-day, but in the end, it just evaporates. The councilor doesn’t get re-elected or another associate with more possibilities turns up and then that’s all wasted time and money and you ask yourself: what was it all for? Feast or famine,” concludes Bernal, who’s always been jealous of Pedrós.

  Justino disagrees, even though Francisco and Bernal have basically been saying more or less what he said. He tries to differentiate his position by focusing on some nuance. Proud of his own pride, he doesn’t like to always agree with Francisco, he needs to show that he has his own criteria and isn’t going to have someone from Madrid come along and explain to us how things work here:

  “If he’d wanted to be a politician, he would have run for office. You have more power and more control if you stay in the wings, you’re free then, not controlled by any one party, out of sight of the journalists and politicians, free from their in-fighting, better to be lurking in the shadows, pulling the puppets’ strings.” The slave-driver, the gang-master, the exploiter of the workforce—as, when he was young, Francisco would have described him—but now his partner at the card table tonight in the village bar where the most anyone ever bets is a round of coffees or drinks, at least during the day.

  At night, after closing time, things get more serious—players will sometimes bet hundreds or even thousands of euros or offer a kind of IOU in the form of the price of a night out at the local so-called gentleman’s club. But, by then, Francisco is no longer in the bar. Cinderella has gone home before his carriage turns into a pumpkin, leaving no delicate glass slipper to mark his trail; he hides away in his lair to read and write, or so he tells me:

  “At night, there’s no noise, no phone calls, no one ringing the doorbell. That’s my favorite time,” he says, as if his night were not as crowded with ghosts as any other seventy-year-old’s. The body sleeps, but ambition keeps working away. Seated at his fine desk made of lignum vitae wood, Francisco scribbles on paper or types at his computer, working on the novel or memoir he hopes will bring him the prestige that the last few agitated years have denied him. Wine tastings, reviews of books and restaurants, the wittily written bimonthly editorial, the half-dozen pages of an article on some particular wine region, minor works that will never bring with them the posterity that ambitious writers always demand, that promise of life after death, even if it means ruining their nerves and health spending long, difficult nights writing, not to mention the terrible frustration when their present-day voice fails to produce the expected strokes of genius. At seventy years of age, late at night, you’re besieged not by brilliant ideas but by the half-buried dead—although which of our dead could be said to be entirely buried? Not a single one, they all have at least one limb or another sticking out. For some reason, you end up having an outstanding debt with each of them, a debt that requires repayment. You’ve either done something you shouldn’t have done to all of them, or else failed to do something you should have done. As I well know. But Francisco, that night owl, probably has enough sangfroid to meet them face to face; he has what I lack and he always has. He’ll form alliances with a few ghosts and pit them against the others and he’ll choose his allies wisely. He’ll flip the coin and make an educated guess, heads or tails. At night, he shuts himself up at home. That, he says, is when he sits down to work, but I think his need to keep to himself springs not only from the tiredness that comes with age—and, really, who wants to go flitting about at night at seventy?—but even so, with Francisco, it has more to do with image. He takes great care not to fall into the dark holes that open up late at night in the outside world, even in a village like Olba: the card games after the bar has closed its doors that go on until sunrise, the constantly replenished glasses (another drink? I’ve already had nine or it is ten?), the fluorescent lighting at the Lovely Ladies club, the electric-blue flesh, which one imagines must be white or pink or golden when out of those lights, the deceptive glare, flesh you can buy by the hour. This is what Francisco is protecting himself from—with his supposed contentment with his own personal abysses—his ascetic solitude—saying that he prefers it or finds it more bearable; he is also—I would say—keeping scrupulous guard over his reputation as a connoisseur of other, more prestigious vices. He has a lot to gain by not letting himself be contaminated by the vulgarity of those open-all-hours places, the laughter, the slaps on the back, the off-color jokes, the obscenities, the kidding around. Even as a young man, he kept well away from that world frequented then by his father’s friends, and he’ll give it an even wider berth now. If he didn’t, he would immediately be labeled a dirty old man. Being slapped on the back or on the ass amidst loud guffaws, being seen groping the Ukrainian girl or French-kissing the Romanian, and having the bulge in your trousers reveal the hard-on you’ve got from getting up close and personal with that soft, bright, eminently touchable flesh, which only costs forty euros for half an hour and has been handled by plumbers, bricklayers and Latin American or African immigrants—no, that would be to fall very low. That would involve a head-on collision with his image as a rigorous connoisseur of le grand monde. It just isn’t Francisco’s style. When he was young, he would try and impress me by bringing back from Madrid a ball of cocaine wrapped in Saran wrap. He would place it on a small mirror he kept in the glove compartment, balancing the mirror on his right leg, which he rested against the gear stick. An alluringly sleazy atmosphere filled the car, parked, at night, in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the only light comes from the moon glinting on the phosphorescent white lines on the mirror, the ambiguous intimacy of sharing something forbidden, combined with Francisco’s cosmopolitanism and my own cosmopolitan melancholy (cocaine, heroin, David Bowie, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, whose posters and records I collected at the time), the ritual of breaking up the lumps and using a credit card to chop the loose powder into neat lines, ready to be snorted through a rolled-up five thousand peseta note, the two of us alone in the night, something almost as alluring as sex, like screwing a complete stranger in the toilet of a disco, keeping the unlocked door jammed shut with one part of your body so that no one can open it, or doing the deed out in the open somewhere, leaning against the trunk of a carob tree, protected from the moon’s impertinent spotlight by the broad, densely-leaved branches. He bends toward me, holding out the mirror so that I can lick the surface before he returns it to the glove compartment; I notice, briefly, the pressure of his elbow in my stomach, then the weight of his forearm on my thigh, we’re close friends, two friends set talking and talking and talking by the cocaine until a smudge of pink appears on the horizon, something superhuman growing on the black surface of the sea, which, in turn, becomes milk-white and silver then gold and blue, all of this seen through the blood-splattered veil formed by the thousands of insects sticking to the windshield. Sometimes he would offer me a small silver spoon, like the protagonist of a novel we had read at the time. A distant, dazzling dandy. His path was already on an upward trajectory that would take him out of that world in whose bargain ba
sements he and I had rummaged around a few years before, when we went off traveling together, on those journeys that, for me, were supposed to be the prologue to something, but ended up being the epilogue to everything, with me trapped in the web of a weaver of dreams (or, rather, desires), a weaver called Leonor. Not for him though. For him they were the goose on which he flew above the world, like Nils Holgersson in the story we read as children. But I digress: he was adding chapters to the formative story of his life. He would return to Olba and, each time, I had the impression he was growing before my eyes, as if in one of those low-angle shots we were told were characteristic of Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane, a way of making the main character seem larger than life, a giant: from his lofty position, he was seducing me, crushing me; our conversations, rather than being shot and counter-shot, were low-angle (him) and high-angle (me). You choose, Francisco—you’re the one who’s just come back from abroad, I’ve been here all year, we can do whatever you want to do or discover, I know this place like the back of my hand, it’s not very exciting for me, not even the starry sky and the smell of orange blossom, which you say you really miss when you’re away, to me it’s all very dull and everyday. I would follow him and, at the same time, loathe him, because I loathed the image of myself that he reflected back at me. I followed him the way a lamb follows the shepherd, the way ducklings will follow any moving object that becomes a protective, maternal presence. I would meekly snort cocaine with him or stand at the bar drinking and listening to him, or trudge up to the rooms in the roadside brothel with my usual apathy, him first and me second, preceded by the two whores. He hadn’t got lost, as I was getting lost, along a path which—like the paths through the marsh—ends up buried beneath scrub. He kept going. I would have needed to prove that I had my own personality, my own criteria, even if that meant simply picking up on some detail as Justino does whenever we get into a discussion. I’m talking now about the early 1980s. I’d been buried in sawdust for eight or even ten years by then, years when I’d lost all hope. Leonor was no longer mine, and never had been. The woman-goose, who flew wherever she wanted, had abandoned me—a mere pastime—in favor of egotistical calculation—she’d shaken off the person riding on her back. Nowadays, cocaine has lost all its glamor, it’s handed round by young men who left school to go into construction and are now unemployed: come into the toilets, the coke’s all ready and waiting. Needless to say, they don’t offer it to me, because of my age and my image as a serious, sensible fellow, even though being single and alone does lend one a faintly bohemian aura: those boys know nothing about my past, and they aren’t interested either—people in villages only manage to get along thanks to the periodical layers of forgetting that are thrown over past events; otherwise, life would be unbearable; like any other old man my age, for them I’m a photo, fixed in its frame, beyond evolution, solidified sediment. Old people reach a state of atemporality, we become immutable, changeless, it’s assumed that there are no intermediate stages between growing old and dying, however many decades that may take. You grow old and then you die; if they happen to see a picture of you when you were their age—I have four on the office wall, and I have shoulder-length hair in one—they’re amazed that you look so much like them. Fuck, check out that hair, and the T-shirt’s really cool. In the photo, I’m wearing a T-shirt and my hair is long and fair and straight; and in another one next to it, I’m wearing a baggy linen shirt, open at the neck to reveal a shark-tooth necklace and a medallion with a large A in the middle: You look like a hippie in that one, but you look youngest in this one with the Beatle haircut and one of those buttoned-up jackets. How old would you have been then? Eighteen? Twenty? That was fashionable for a while. At the time, they called it a Mao jacket, after the uniform Mao used to wear. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Mao? Haven’t you ever seen any documentaries about the Chinese revolution? Oh, fuck, that’s not really you, is it? You look just like Leonardo diCaprio. God, you’ve put on a bit of weight . . . and your face has changed. And look at that great mane of hair. You’re as bald as an egg now. Of course, you don’t think I’ve always had this moon face and a drum for a belly, do you? The worst of it is that most of the men who sported necklaces with shark’s teeth and shells or wore Mao collars are all dead—they were killed or they’re past retirement age, they have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, hyperglycemia, triglycerides, high cholesterol, triple bypasses, pacemakers, varicose veins, prostate problems and osteoarthritis. Or else they’re lying awake in the early hours wondering if they’ll survive the chemotherapy for their colon cancer. They’re old men like me—moon-faced, overstuffed sausages—or doubles for a B-movie Dracula, thin and gray, sallow-complexioned, with deep lines crisscrossing their face; a profusion of bald heads, toothless mouths, huge dentures and white hair. Ruined prostates, with the proof of their radiotherapy sessions there in their dull gaze and in their sharp, frightened little eyes glancing cautiously about in case they should stumble into death—the faces of Jews who have been through the Auschwitz of modern medicine.