Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

He prattles on, he laughs, he grabs you by the lapels with his great mitts and pulls you toward him, splattering your shirtfront and your face with spit, which you wipe away, not that he notices, of course. You feel like asking: When was that? Why didn’t you tell me at the time? But you don’t, because his hairy hand is now on your shoulder and his face is now resting between his hand and the bit of your throat that his hand isn’t touching, the place where a vampire would bite, and you feel on your neck the warmth of his breath, the tickling of his mobile tongue, your neck sticky with saliva, and the girls at the bar have started looking at us, thinking that, tonight, one of them will be making up a threesome.

The watching birds who fly up at the first morning light, the waiting wild boar who come down at dawn from the nearby mountains to drink in the ponds, the murmur of the reeds that bend or break as they advance. For nearly half a century, the shed in the backyard has been filled with all the necessary tackle and tools for fishing and hunting: rifles, ramrods, straps and cartridge belts, rubber waders, Wellington boots, rods, nets and baskets of various shapes and with various uses, and which, locally, are given different names according to their shape and purpose. To every animal its own death, to every tool its own name: ralls, mornells, gamberes and tresmalls . It’s like a small collection ready to be exhibited on one of those TV programs about hunting, with titles like Rod and Gun, Forest and Stream , or the other kind — which are the opposite really — that you get on those cute little local TV stations or the no less cute national ones, with titles like Environment, Blue Planet, Territories or Our Traditions , which show, with reverential sanctimoniousness, the landscapes that mankind has supposedly not yet destroyed; they talk about old rural customs, visit some ethnological museum where they keep tools once used for cultivating, threshing, pruning, as well as millstones, oil presses and wagons, programs that try to make a near-paradise or a precious natural park out of the place I knew as a child. On the road leading out of Olba, the sewers flowing into the dried-up riverbed transmitted infections to the neighboring houses, which were built in areas regularly flooded by the torrential autumn rains. As children we used to play among garbage piles, would plunge up to our knees in quagmires plagued with mosquitoes and rats, among the remains of dead animals, old clothing, dry excrement, filthy mattresses and blood-stained bandages and gauze nibbled by vermin. We were looking for comics, cigarette cards showing soccer stars or movie idols, pages torn from illustrated magazines, movie posters, scraps of old film strips, discarded tools that we could use as toys, a spinning top, a broken doll, a mutilated cardboard horse, a punctured ball that could be mended with a rubber patch of the sort used by the man in the bicycle repair shop or that we would simply kick around half-inflated. We particularly liked the little penicillin bottles, widely used as the recently discovered remedy for tuberculosis and venereal diseases, and which we would adopt as containers for our tiny treasures. My mother would fly into a rage whenever she discovered, hidden in my pencil case or my satchel, one of those glass bottles with the rubber stopper still bearing the scar left by the syringe, and now with an insect for my collection. She thought those bottles would bring into the house the very diseases they were supposed to cure. Who knows who might have touched it, people with TB or some other infectious disease, throw it away right now. She would make me get rid of them however much I protested and explained how useful they were and how I had washed them thoroughly (which wasn’t always true), and I would cry whenever she, with an abrupt movement of her arm, tossed one of them over the wall. The river and the pools around the marsh were full of all kinds of detritus — old furniture, the sweepings from backyards, dead animals — the assumption being that the mud would swallow it all up, that the next flood would carry it off or that vermin would eat whatever was edible. This hobby of mine, which would now be described as ethnological, has led to me preserving and adding to my uncle’s collection of tackle and tools. Francisco often accompanied us on our trips to the marsh and, despite never wanting to fire a shot, he actively helped in casting the nets and would hold the rod and get excited when he felt a fish tugging near the shore. However, he would contemplate all this equipment as if it were part of some museum of torture. He would say to me:

“I don’t know how you can bring yourself to shoot an inoffensive animal.”

“Fishing is just as cruel. A fish seems to me more helpless than a wild boar, and more worthy of compassion.”

“But fishing seems less aggressive somehow.”

“How can you say that? They’re caught on a hook that pierces their jaw. They die slowly from asphyxia in the net, those innocent little creatures,” I would say mockingly.

“But fish are cold-blooded things that you can’t really feel much empathy for, but if you see a mammal dying, soaked in blood, you have a sense that a creature like you is dying, and when you skin one, the body is disconcertingly like a human body, like our body.”

“Try observing the death of an insect through a magnifying glass. You’ll see the same frightening convulsions, the same contortions, the desperate opening and closing of the mouth, the frantically waving legs. It’s really awful.”

At the time, neither of us had seen anyone die, although I had caught glimpses of my grandmother on her deathbed.

Francisco used the word “human”—a human being — whenever he wanted to describe something worthy of pity, perhaps the soul he imagines we carry inside us; “human” is a word with a powerful emotive impact. He knew how to use it. Now, when we’ve witnessed several deaths, the resemblance strikes us as even more troubling. And I say “us,” even though I haven’t stopped hunting and even though he no longer finds it repugnant. With age, we become more knowledgeable about the unpleasant side of life and, doubtless as a way of making it slightly more bearable, we become less sensitive too. Wars and massacres are usually topics of conversation for hardened old men, the young are mere pawns moved by arthritic fingers. What they see in war sweeps away their innocence, prepares them to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. Turning, turning, turning, that’s what this world has been doing for millennia. It makes the young suddenly old, and they become those fingers capable of moving the pawns. Gira, il mondo, gira, nello spazio senza fine , Jimmy Fontana used to sing. I watched my grandmother dying (in secret, through a crack in the door, a disfigured creature, railing and moaning, I was six or seven), I’ve seen my mother die, my mother’s brothers, Uncle Ramón, my brother Germán, defenseless hares trembling in their beds, I’ve seen them gasping and flailing just like the various dogs who have died on me, the same struggle, the same harsh, intermittent breathing. Francisco watched Leonor dying for months, an animal gradually being consumed despite all the stratagems of doctors and family members, her dying must have cost them a fortune, what with trips to Houston, treatments in private hospitals here and there. Right now, I’m watching the endless dying of my father who, at this point, could easily be hunted and dispatched without too many ethical qualms.

But we were only twenty-something then, and I would say:

“My father has always hated hunting, which is understandable after what he saw during the war, but Uncle Ramón and my grandfather had to hunt in order to eat.”