Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

As I leave the workshop where I’d gone looking for a job, I wonder how people can be so cruel, so rude. You have to be pretty hard-nosed to say such things to a married man with three children, without even knowing him. They throw all your limitations in your face. How do they expect a man, a worker, to recover his pride? What right do they have, these people you don’t even know, to call you useless, to play with you, the way a cat plays with a frightened mouse. They stand in the doorway to watch you leave, a cigarette between their lips, hands in their pockets, lips twisted into a half-smile. They don’t have to look for work, they don’t have to humble themselves or borrow money. They have plenty of bread on the table, and the haves have always acted cruelly toward the have-nots. Their power comes from knowing that they can decide whether other people’s mouths are empty or full, that’s the origin of that half-smile, that cigarette clamped between the lips. During military service, the mess sergeants wore the same disgustingly smug smile, the smile of someone who has what others need and want. My father often used to say the same.

The biggest treat my grandfather gave my uncle was to sit him on his knee and allow him to lick the stamp for the letter he’d written to a supplier ordering something for the workshop. He would let him stick on the stamp, then walk with him, hand-in-hand, to the post office, where he would lift him up so that he could reach the open mouth of the bronze lion that served as the letter box and slip the envelope into his mouth. This became a kind of hereditary game, because my uncle went on to have the same ritual with me. When I came home from nursery school, he would sit me on his knee and place before me a few envelopes and a diminishing sheet of stamps. I would then tear along the perforated edge, taking great care not to damage the stamps, and once I’d removed a single stamp, I would lick it very carefully, stick it on the top right-hand corner of the envelope, and thump it hard several times with my fist. On this bright morning, I can still remember that sickly glue taste on the tip of my tongue and the sadness I felt at letting go of those little bits of colored paper when I posted them in the post box. Why don’t you make a stamp collection from the letters you receive at home, my grandfather suggested, but we didn’t receive enough letters at the carpentry workshop to make a collection, and the few that did arrive, from suppliers or from the savings bank, had stamps all stained by the postmark.

“But,” he insisted, “those are the stamps some collectors value most, the post-marked ones, showing the date the letter was sent and where it came from.”

It was my Uncle Ramón who let me stick the stamps on, who gave me a little wooden cart and a real bird tied by a thread to a perch, the person who took me to the fair and won me a tin truck at the shooting gallery. If I look up now, I can see — through the sharp leaves of the reeds — the bare, blue, rocky mountains on which a small clump of pine trees somehow manages to grow, and the lower slopes, their terraces dotted with olive trees and the occasional dense green stain of a carob tree. It’s the same landscape I used to look at with him. On this cold morning, I can still feel the sickly taste of glue on my tongue.

When he came back from the war, my father considered hiding in the reedbeds near the lagoon until the worst was over, but my mother persuaded him to go to the town hall and turn himself in.

My grandmother’s suspicions about my mother date from that time, with my mother asking him to give himself up and my grandmother telling him to leave, to hide somewhere no one could find him. She had a vague sense that my mother selfishly wanted to have him near even if that meant putting his life in danger. During his time in prison, though, the idea lodged in my grandmother’s head that her daughter-in-law, all revolutionary fervor gone, now regretted her earlier “indiscretion” as well as her Republican wedding in the presence of other comrades, her first child — Germán, my older brother — who was already running around the house, and her second child, namely me, who was chewing on her dry, malnourished breasts, a child whom her husband didn’t even know because, for months, she refused to take me with her to visit him in prison, saying that I was too small and frail for such a difficult, dangerous journey. I don’t want to put the child at risk, she said, who knows what might happen in the train or outside the prison. She and my grandmother used to take my brother, but not every time. Often her parents would look after him. My grandmother believed that my mother wanted another husband, perhaps one in a better position to face the new era that was just beginning. After all, those civil marriages were invalid now, null and void. There remains something confusing about this story, however, something no one has ever explained to me. My grandmother didn’t trust or even like my mother, a clumsy, empty-headed girl, who poured all her energies into cleaning the house, doing the laundry and the cooking, but always sulky and tearful, because my father was away and she was left at the mercy of her authoritarian mother-in-law. My grandmother expected a different kind of energy from her. They had been driven apart by the arguments that raged between them about having my father hand himself over to the authorities. And that rift remained for as long as my grandmother lived. Your father gave himself up so as to get away from those women and their bickering, Uncle Ramón would joke when he told me about it years later.

Anyway, my father duly handed himself in and spent nearly three years in prison waiting for a death sentence that was, in the end, commuted. He survived, but he felt like a deserter from an army that existed only in his head, the ghostly army of those who did what he wished he had done — fighters who did not surrender, who managed to cross the frontier or join the resistance or stay hidden near the lagoon, surviving for several years on whatever they could hunt or catch. Some village men did this, innocuous Robinson Crusoes, whose enforced lakeside life did not, for the most part, go well: they caught malaria, any wounds they had became infected, and in that dank atmosphere, the slightest scratch from a reed gave them tetanus, condemning them to a horrible death, added to which they were constantly being hunted by the civil guard, who pursued them like animals, even burning down vegetation. The crackle of the reedbeds burning and the sticky smell of the smoke suffocating the other marsh creatures would reach as far as Olba. To make the fire spread more rapidly, they would pour gas on the reedbeds and the scrub, which were often small islands of floating vegetation. It wasn’t all about repression though. There was a business aspect too. On the excuse that they had to hunt down those poor wretches, the authorities encouraged the draining of the lagoons, promoted the idea of filling them in, giving swathes of swampy land to a few friends and ex-combatants, granting them authority to drain and cultivate it. Greed was enough of an incentive to mobilize the volunteers for the hunts. Properties like Dalmau and La Citrícola were born out of those re-distributions. The export company Dalmau was created on the newly cultivated areas given to General Santomé, who was, in fact, little more than a jumped-up officer risen from the ranks and mentioned in dispatches (as I found out later, he was also the instigator in the rearguard of indiscriminate shootings, bullets in the back of the neck like the one that killed my grandfather, the burning down of houses with their inhabitants still inside: farmworkers accused of providing food, clothes, blankets or of simply talking to fugitives and sharing a cigarette with them), and La Citrícola was born out of the part of the lake handed over to Pallarés to be drained, another blue shirt who strutted about with a pistol in his shoulder holster, generally tyrannizing the area until the late 1960s, when his legal heirs took over the estate, and while they — a sign of the times — have behaved rather more discreetly, they have been just as greedy, and all their dealings wiped clean of the old ideological cobwebs: clean money without the packaging of patriotic speeches, proclamations or saber-rattling. These calculated acts of aggression were a mixture of military strategy, political vengeance and economic pillaging. The perfect storm, as glib commentators like to say nowadays to describe the moment when the conditions for some disaster to occur are just right. Whenever the civil guard captured one of the escapees, they would display his corpse on a cart or on the back of a truck and parade it through the streets of the village. The locals proudly allowed themselves to be photographed standing next to these putrefying bodies. Someone must still have those photos, identical to the ones that hunters take after a wild boar hunt. Those human trophies have dark stains on their cheekbones, foreheads, shirts, on the crotches of their trousers. They were the succubi who pursued my father. For years afterward, he kept watch on those huntsmen, thanks to information given him by his wife and children and possibly by some other secret informant. Our words fed him. I know now that words can do that, can nourish you. Yes, I’ve learned that too: I can make you a proper Colombian chicken soup now because here, in the local shop, they sell all the ingredients, as well as yucca and yam and all the things I could never find in the usual stores, but now, ever since they opened up on the corner, I can get everything I need, it’s just like being in Manizales or Medellín or Popayán: I can cook plantain fritters, a few arracachas , potato, peanut and pork tamales , I can cook all those things for you here whenever you like. And don’t tell me you don’t like food you’ve never even eaten. You have to try it first. Your father would probably have liked it too, he must have been a very gentle soul, he reminds me of my grandfather.