Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

My brother: If you don’t like any of the solutions I’m proposing, all you need do is sign a guarantee written in such a way that the bank can never trace it back to you. I know how to do it — he insisted tirelessly — a guarantee that passes the ball to someone else, a sort of chain guarantee — he went on. I have a friend in Barcelona who has drawn up a few trick contracts of the kind that has the bank tearing its hair out for ever having signed them: that’s how he tried to get round us, to deceive us, but when has anyone passed off a false guarantee to a bank? The bankers can cheat you, but you cheat them? Ha. Still he goes on: I’ve never asked for anything. Another of his lies: he’s done nothing but ask ever since he was a child. He was always asking, in all kinds of ways, on any excuse, adopting every possible tone of voice: seductive, threatening, pleading, imploring. He was asking from the moment he learned how to speak, and before he could speak, he used gestures. He used to wheedle things out of my mother when she was still alive; and when I was an adolescent, he still managed to get the odd bit of money out of me too (not much, I never had much: for sweets or for the cinema when he was small; for cigarettes and the occasional beer once he started shaving), he may even have got something out of my sister (and though she may be an utter cow, you can milk her as hard as you like and you won’t get much out of her dried-up teats), he tried to cajole money out of neighbors and friends, and we never did find out how everything slipped through his fingers so very fast. So young and such a spendthrift, such a scrounger, such a layabout. When he was twelve, he discovered where my mother hid her money and he stole it to buy a racing bike. He had to take the bike straight back to the shop, but they couldn’t accept it, because he’d already managed to scratch the saddle.

On that visit, his last, he would either be talking about this latest new business opportunity or, a couple of days later, bemoaning the fact that he was getting older and really needed to buy an apartment, to have somewhere of his own to live so that he wouldn’t find himself a penniless old man, living on the streets, it really frightens me the thought of ending up homeless, eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in hostels, or, worse still, sitting in a doorway, covered by cardboard boxes, with only a piece of stale bread to eat and a carton of red wine to stave off the cold. There was such anguish in his eyes, it broke your heart. He just needed a really small apartment, the bare essentials. He would look for a job and retire to live somewhere near us. I said: We have empty rooms here and you could work in the workshop. But no, that wasn’t what he wanted: a little apartment just for me, he said pouring all his tenderness into that word “little.” My father continued eating, staring down at his plate; he paused for a moment, a spoonful of succulent rice suspended between plate and mouth, his gaze fixed on the minute hand of the clock on the wall: Juan’s torpedo had missed its target again. He changed tactics. A day or so later, what he wanted was to rent an apartment, yes, he would settle for that: he’d seen a tiny third-floor one-bedroom apartment, nice and bright, with a kitchen-cum-living room and a bathroom with a full-length tub, and it was a great deal, the owners were asking almost nothing for the sale price and an equally ridiculous sum for the rent, but there was one small problem: they were demanding a guarantee for the very large deposit they wanted, and not only that, they also required payment of the first four or five months’ rent in advance and, until he managed to get himself organized and find a job locally, that was what he was asking us to provide in order for him to fulfill his dream: having a little place of his own to live. Another torpedo is launched, the spoon pauses, suspended in the air, my father’s eyes are fixed on the clock, and again, nothing. The ship remains afloat, impassive, sailing straight ahead. My father raises to his lips the spoon containing the saffron-flavored stock and the grains of rice and makes more noise than usual as he slurps it up. Hot stuff, he says. And one assumes that when he says this, he’s referring to the rice. Days later, Juan had come down to earth and what he wanted now was to buy a ground-floor business premises, a warehouse — or rather than buy it, he wanted to rent. We’re no longer on the third floor (in the cozy, comfortable one-bedroom apartment with the full-length bathtub), but on the ground floor; his business ambitions drop several stories and hit the ground when he sees that, once again, my father fails to avert his gaze from either his spoon or the clock, while I raise my eyebrows to form something like an ironic question mark. He was finally about to achieve his life’s ambition. In the last few weeks he had pulled out all the stops, done everything he could, and, eureka, the miracle had happened (he addressed that word “miracle” to my father, who, for a millisecond, interrupted the journey of spoon to mouth, he’s never believed in miracles, you idiot, but in Marx, the republic and the class struggle), and the chance for him to open a car dealership was within reach. He had all the municipal paperwork in order, the approval of the manufacturer, the paperwork for the franchise was ready to be signed, but to do that — who would have thought it — he needed, surprise, surprise, a certain amount of money. Not much, just the deposit and the first three months’ rent in advance for the premises plus the deposit and the guarantees that would allow Hyundai to release the cars to him. He realized that this was much more than he had asked for the deposit on the apartment, about a thousand or two thousand times more, but, of course, this was something really important, not a loan, not a guarantee, but a family business with guaranteed short-term profits, profits that he would, of course, share with us. It would be shared out equally, I would just be the employee, the manager, and you would be the capitalists. We would immediately be able to begin paying back the large loan we had asked for and begin putting coins in our piggy banks. Dinero, argent , money, flus, Geld . That’s what he needed, that’s what we would have to pay back and that’s what we would share out and, in our free moments, we would be happy. All paths led to the same place. To the hare’s hiding place, where the fuck was it? I can smell it. He wasn’t asking very much. A few days later, another change of direction, while the Ukrainian was sticking her knife into a meatball, tasting a mouthful and saying: it’s good, really good, and in Spanish you call this a pelota ? — they had something similar in Ukraine and called it by a name that was either much longer or a little shorter. Meanwhile, he was still intent on finding that hare. Trying every trick in the book. The hare with its agile legs, its twitching mouth behind which you could see its sharp teeth: the stiff little mustache, the nice ears, and the back feet with which it scratches its nose. He told us that he had been given the Hyundai concession for the whole region — he apparently had exceptionally good contacts in the land of the rising sun — this was, quite simply, an unmissable opportunity. He said this with an absolutely straight face, as if I hadn’t driven past the Hyundai concession a hundred times when leaving Misent. Whenever I have a delivery to make there, I see those second-hand Japanese cars glinting in the sunlight, warming their undersides on the heat coming off the tarmac, and I see the signs with the price written in bright red and the slogans, unique opportunity emblazoned in garish colors on the hoods of the second-hand cars: bargain of the year. They keep the new cars inside, behind the big smoked-glass windows, and there they sit, cool and protected by the air-conditioning, neatly lined up, gleaming, and saying: Buy me if you can. Take me, I’m yours for €25,000.