Rafael Chirbes: On the Edge

The slave-trader continues:

“No one wants to lead a life like everyone else’s, no one wants his obituary to read: He was born, he lived, he worked, he reproduced and he died — and so people try to attract attention. They do absurd, tedious, painful things they’d refuse to do if they were required to by their work contract — it’s been the same since the world began. Tomás Pedrós thought he could grow as big as El Corte Inglés, Inditex, or Mercadona, or like that Bañuelos guy — making his fortune here and now building like mad in Brazil apparently.”

And then there’s Pedrós, growing like a malignant tumor, yes, and Justino has been a malignant tumor himself: and like all tumors, he grows in darkness and in silence. We laugh, yes, so do I, although I’m afraid they might notice that my laughter is somewhat forced, because I feel utterly wretched.

“Well, yes, he always had to cause a stir, and have a finger in every pie,” Bernal comments mildly, and it seems to me that he looks at me out of the corner of his eye when he says this, or is that just my paranoia?

Justino returns to the charge:

“Exactly, the self-made man. All those films from the 1950s and 1960s — or even today — all contain that same poisonous hidden message. The Kennedy saga, the Obama story. Pedrós was always so keen on all that freedom of the individual crap, about will power and hard work, the winner burning his excess energy at the gym or on the tennis court, and he encountering other alpha-males, who help him make his way thanks to a spider’s web of influences they call synergies. Sure, he was very ambitious, but there was that touch of the mythomaniac, the fantasist: he was just too much in love with himself, the butterfly, the show-off.”

“And the times were ripe for men like him,” says Bernal sagely.

“Yes,” says Justino, “but not everyone fell into the trap.”

Of course they didn’t, and our Hannibal Lecter is no show-off. Justino’s no butterfly — more of a moth. He moves among the shadows of the night, where evil lurks and where his succubi have their beds, the laborers who stoke our nightmares with filthy coal. Justino covers up, dissembles, hides. His life is a mystery, you have to decipher the meaning slithering about beneath his words, he’s the oracle of all things murky, the sibyl of the unsavory: he conceals the truth with lies and conceals lies with half-truths. You always have the feeling that he’s deceiving you; if he says it’s a nice day and points up at the sun, you can be sure this is merely a diversionary tactic so that you won’t notice what’s going on down below. And he takes every precaution and successfully fends off the tax people — he’s a past master at hiding any so-called “signs of ostentatious living”—but we all know that he leads a secret life and that, in the shadows, he lives far beyond his theoretical means. I’m not talking about the watches and chains he wears, or the fact that his wife looks like a walking jewelry shop: those are mere trinkets, the equivalent of the finger pointing at the sun; I’m talking about land transactions, property transfers, estates registered in the name of nephews, brothers- and sisters-in-law, his retired mother- and father-in-law who both have Alzheimer’s or senile dementia, poor defenseless stooges whose signatures he has forged and who, even in their wildest meanderings, would never dream they were the owners of apartments, business premises, import-export companies, orange groves and building sites like the ones they possess thanks to Justino: underhand deals that you hear others mention only obliquely and sotto voce. And then there are the occasional disappearances, the mysterious periods spent in limbo, trips you know nothing about but which — as I said — you imagine to be to some spa to cure his arthritis or to an exclusive clinic to control his hyperglicemia or his high triglyceride levels, trips that his enemies say are time spent in prison or on journeys to some dangerously borderline country (Thailand, Colombia, Mexico) to coordinate the transport of illegal substances and about which his vanity will eventually lead him to spill the beans one night when he’s had a couple of drinks and you’re alone with him and he’s telling you about a wife-swapping club in Paris ( you didn’t take your wife, did you , I asked, and he replied: Don’t be an idiot, where she’s concerned I have exclusive rights ), or a place in Miami (ah, wonderful, chaotic Miami, so popular with wheeler-dealers up to no good) where at the reception desk, you have to leave not just the money for the ticket, but all your clothes (yes, even your underpants, he laughs, adding with a touch of vulgar humor, and your jockstrap: your wallet and your watch are put in a safe with a secret code), and only then can you go over to the bar and order a whisky or a glass of champagne and, finally, enter the spa, the main room with its sofas, swimming pools, jacuzzis and saunas, and the tortuous labyrinth of small rooms with beds of various sizes. He can’t resist telling these secrets — out of sheer boastfulness and egotism, he can’t help it: they make him seem different, more interesting, more mysterious, in the eyes of the person he’s talking to, in my eyes too, me, the bored carpenter who, for the last four decades, has barely gone any further than back and forth to the marsh or to some small room at the Lovely Ladies Club, but who, in his now distant youth, did his fair share of globe-trotting too and can, therefore, be of use as a confidante (you know what I’m talking about, Esteban, you’ve been around a bit, you traveled when you were a young man, although you rarely leave the house now, I mean, would you ever even go to the local pick-up joint if I didn’t drag you there? — and you’re single, for heaven’s sake, you don’t have to account to anyone), and these confidences make him grow in his own eyes too, because among us prestige is consolidated by such anecdotes, which seem to slip out as unexpectedly as farts, but which he has learned to ration out, knowing that such stories are as easily transmitted as flu, and are vague enough not to get him into any trouble with the authorities. In order to make sure that everyone finds out, he only has to use the words: This is just between you and me, in confidence.

“I told you that ? I certainly didn’t mean to. Had we had too much to drink that night? I’ve really got to drink less and be more careful and watch what I say when I leave the house. Please, not a word to anyone else.”

Even though he was supposedly as drunk as a lord, he still couldn’t resist whispering to me — his mouth pressed to my ear — about the oysters in champagne that he ate in Monte Carlo ( I won’t tell you why I went there , he says, adding further to the mystery, while I yelp: ugh, you’re sticking your tongue in my ear , and wipe away the saliva). He boasts about the luck he had at roulette that night, the Russian bitch I was with seemed to have seriously lucky nipples — she kept sticking her roulette chips down her front and rubbing them on her tits before putting them down, and the ball stopped on her number every time; then he tells me about the journey from Monte Carlo to Paris in her convertible BMW ( la douce brise de la Provence sur mes joues, la huître au vent : needless to say, she wasn’t wearing any panties, and while she drove, my hands roamed around) and about the half pound of caviar that they bought in Kaspia — on the Place de la Madeleine, next door to Fauchon — and ate in their room in the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail. Actually, the hotel’s a real disappointment. The furniture, the bathroom fittings, the room with its dusty corners, all very shabby and dated, hotels in Spain are much better maintained and a much better deal too — it really needs a complete overhaul, he says. He probably suggested to the manager that he could carry out the renovation himself (his architects, his teams of bricklayers, his decorators, leaving the Lutetia like new), he probably left his card on the desk and, in exchange, got a free bottle of champagne, although it’s hard to get anything out of the French — stingy bastards. But — oh, and the champagne I drank out of that Russian oyster was Krug Millésimé, so rich, so nutty, so strong, have you never tried it? Ask your friend Francisco about it. He’ll tell you. Ask his opinion as an expert, as a connoisseur. It’s certainly my favorite, and I know more about champagne than you might think, in fact, I know a lot. Krug champagne is, now how would your friend Francisco describe it? — serious, elegant, noble. Justino continues to allow himself to be carried away by details: do you know that French painting called The Origin of the World ? Do you know the one I mean? With that great furry hole in the foreground. Well, that was the scene I had before me, the original black hole — albeit pink and fair in this case — from which everything emerges and through which everything enters, I caressed it with my teeth, with the tip of my tongue, I stuck my whole tongue into that dense jungle and touched the genesis, no, it wasn’t shaven, but a good dense mat of hair, neat and trimmed, but furry, I like pubic hair, the fair, silky kind, which makes the thing itself look like a shy, delicate little animal, it makes you want to caress it, bite it, eat it, we Spaniards call it el conejo , the rabbit, while the French call it la chatte : well, I gobbled up the first day of creation along with a sip of champagne. And I ate the end of the world, I ate the world from beginning to end, I stuck my tongue into that other retractile, slightly brownish hole where everything ends, but through which one can begin the excavation in reverse, traveling from darkness to light. I dug my tongue into that sweet, dark well, and then I plunged my steam hammer into that place where, it must be said, hélas , others had fervently dug before. She was, after all, a high-class whore. But that night, I voyaged from alpha to omega. I penetrated the very beginning and the very end.