Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

He got annoyed when he heard that my uncle was doing well in Misent. There’s no shortage of work, tourists are buying apartments and houses, and they need doors, window frames, and shutters, my uncle would say, adding a dash of cognac to his coffee, and my father would reply that here nothing much had changed: we’re freshwater people in Olba. And fresh water only attracts mosquitoes. He would make fun of my uncle: I suppose now you go fishing in the sea — I know you left your freshwater fishing tackle to him (he didn’t say “my son” or “Esteban,” or even “the boy”: he said “him”). Next time you visit, bring us a grouper or a bit of salted tuna or some red mullet. When he spoke of saltwater people, he wasn’t referring to the fishermen in the port of Misent, who’d always formed a marginal colony of poor folk (have you forgotten that, Leonor? the houses that got flooded in the storms, with no toilets, no modern conveniences), but to those people who were drawn by the strong magnet, the magical spell of the sea, who have generated so much coming and going over the last few decades, so much speculation, an invasion of which my uncle was beginning to be a part. Misent. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sea attracted the first tourists to Misent, a few bourgeois families with aristocratic pretensions, just as in the preceding centuries it had attracted merchants, adventurers, smugglers (the sea as a source of violence), invaders who forced the freshwater men to protect themselves, filling the coastline with watchtowers and fortresses built in the middle of the marshes, the uncertain sea as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: the casinos of Misent, the brothels, the cheap boarding houses and bars that attracted the sailors who moored in the port and the farmers from the villages inland. They would buy supplies from the warehouses, go for a check-up at the doctor’s, visit the notary’s office to sign any legal documents, go to the bars, casinos and gambling dens, until, that is, the bombardments during the war left the port unused for decades, and Misent became almost a ghost town: no ships arrived to unload timber or cement and then load up again with raisins and figs, oranges, grapefruit, pomegranates, brightly painted wooden crates carefully packed with fruit wrapped up in delicate tissue paper. It’s true that bourgeois families continued to spend their summers there, and they had their own cafés in Avenida Orts, but they were not invaders, no, those who came in the summer were like guests: they lived in elegant houses with stucco façades built behind high walls overgrown with jasmine and wisteria, houses built on the low hills with views over the vineyards; for those people, the sea was like a blue fringe on the horizon; they were not the invasion that came later: thousands and thousands of complete maniacs (that’s what he called them, maniacs, idiots), who bought apartments right on the seashore — who in their right mind would choose to live right by the sea, he would say, that’s where the poorest houses have always been built, for fishermen and unskilled laborers, as well, of course, as the merchants’ warehouses, which had to be where the business was, and the boarding houses and lodgings for sailors and prostitutes. I myself see things in rather the same way, and in the midst of all this confusion, the lagoon seems to me the sole surviving nucleus of a timeless world that remains both fragile and forceful, in the center of that diminishing tapestry — sharkskin green — formed by the orange and grapefruit plantations, the orchards, the fields that drink from the lagoon thanks to a complicated system of irrigation channels. We use the word “nature” to describe any forms of artifice that preceded ours, we don’t stop to consider that landscapes are not eternal, they exist and are — like us — condemned to die, and not always more slowly either. I can testify to that. You just have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty years. But what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong, it’s all right, don’t worry, it’s nothing, I’m not crying, yes, I am, Don Esteban, but I’m crying over nothing really, just my own problems, which I don’t want to dump onto you, they’re my problems after all. But, sweetheart, calm down, tell me what’s wrong. No, stop. Tell me why you’re crying, just calm down a little, that’s it, here’s my handkerchief, dry your eyes, come on, raise your head a little and I’ll dry your eyes. That’s better, there you are, you’re so pretty when you smile, and you look ugly when you cry, no, that’s not true, you never look ugly, you’re always pretty, but I do hate to see you sad, let me wipe away your tears again, I’m really sorry to get so upset, don’t worry, you can rest your head on my shoulder if that helps to calm you, that’s it, relax, what tiny hands you have, next to mine they look like toys, like a doll’s hands, look, I can wrap my hand around one of yours and it’s gone, vanished, that’s better, it’s good to see you laughing again, with those lovely eyes of yours, you really do have tiny hands, put them on top of mine, and, look, if I close my hands, they vanish, they’re lost, such small hands and such big eyes. That’s right, relax. Everything passes, but there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, whenever anything bad happens, just remember that nothing lasts forever, that’s what life is like, we’re born and we die, everything passes, nothing remains the same, everything dies, us too, my mother died more than twenty years ago, and how long ago is it since Uncle Ramón died, the one who wasn’t born in time to take part in the war, the one my grandmother kept slapping even while she was clutching him to her when the fascists burst in, can’t you see he’s just a child, she said, clutching the one who married late, was soon widowed and never had children, although I often think that he did have a son in me, just as he was the closest thing I ever had to a father. In his later years, he came back to Olba, he’d closed his workshop in Misent when his wife died: everything reminds me of her, I can’t bear to be in the workshop or the house or down by the port, or in the cafés or shops or the banks in Avenida Orts. He even took to blaming a God he didn’t believe in. Men, he used to say, can fuck you up your whole life, but, as the mystics said, at least we’re allowed all eternity to rest or to continue cursing your enemies. Each man contains his own particular evil and you can prepare yourself to confront him (he talked about men as he did about fish and wild boar, each with his particular bait, each with his particular appetites, each with his particular trap). I’m not afraid of men, but I’m afraid to think that God might exist. He’s the one who created the evil in each of us, the one we keep inside us, the one that emerges into the open only to screw everything up. I hate to think what’s in that divine head of his, or what he shits out of His sacred ass, Mars and the Sun and Jupiter and the Moon are all his turds, and we and the rats and the cockroaches are just stinking little bits of His crap.

One evening, he asked me to drive him to the local brothel. He went upstairs with one of the women, but didn’t even take his clothes off: how can I take my clothes off with all this flab hanging off me (he had continued to put on weight, widowhood had made him greedier, his eyes grew smaller, pillowed in fat) and all these bulging veins. He rolled up one trouser leg and showed me his varicose veins, which covered the complete color spectrum, from sky blue to navy blue, from lilac to black. He paid, sat down on the bed, looked at the naked girl for half an hour, reached out to touch her, a single caress, and came unsteadily back down the stairs, one hand pressed against the wall to support himself. On the way home, I looked at him out of the corner of one eye, where he was sitting in the passenger seat, and I saw his flushed face and the tears rolling down his cheeks. How could those two men possibly be brothers, the sensual man who, in his old age, could still take pleasure in merely looking at a woman’s flesh, and who had only fallen out with life because he loved it so, and then my father, that lugubrious bat who often didn’t leave the house for weeks on end and kept the windows closed to avoid the sun’s dazzling gaze. And yet, with the universe’s usual senseless logic, the one who was full of life was the first to die, while the other has lingered on, growing ever sourer: the one who for more than seventy years has shown no interest in life is still slowly rotting and infecting everything around him with his bitterness.