Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Hamak y Jamak . Fools and madmen, Ahmed calls them. Muslims and Christians only get together to find out which one can best screw the other. On Sunday afternoons, when the streets of Olba are deserted because everyone’s gone to the beach or to have lunch with their families, the Moroccans take solitary walks or sit on the handrails along the Misent road, on the bollards along the pavement. Ahmed quarrels with his fellow Moroccans who, during Ramadan, want the foremen to abandon the lunchbreak and, instead, shorten the work day. When he was still working at the carpentry workshop and went to deliver a load of doors to one of the sites belonging to Pedrós, one of the managers there said to him: You goddamn Moroccans are mad! I never go to mass, I’ve got nothing to do with priests, and yet you expect me to fast during Ramadan. What am I supposed to tell the crane operator or the guys driving the bulldozers or working the cement mixers? That they skip lunch and eat later on when they get home? That they don’t drink a drop of water while they’re slaving away in the sun, when it’s humid and ninety or more degrees? To his fellow Moroccans Ahmed says: As if the Christians didn’t already have it in for us! It’s as if you wanted them to get rid of us, he said to Abdeljaq, who had persuaded their other roommates not to drink beer with Spaniards. But no, Abdeljaq had said: Keep away from the unclean. When he got excited, he would say that it wouldn’t be long before they saw the color of the blood of those Christians. They need us, argued Abdeljaq, and, for as long as they do, they’ll have to put up with us, and if they stop needing us, they’ll get rid of us soon enough, even if we pray the our-father-stuff they spout or make the sign of the cross.

Abdeljaq had celebrated the bombings at Atocha station. He said he could see the face of Allah more clearly in the sky. He’d performed his ablutions, prayed facing Mecca and cooked a mechui of lamb, which he ate wearing a white gandora. It was all done with great formality; he was celebrating martyrdom and vengeance. Look, he said, pointing at the TV screen while puffing on his joint, look, infidel blood. Bismillah . On the television, they were showing twisted metal, people covering their faces with bloodied hands. When he was alone with Rachid, Ahmed would criticize Abdeljaq: You see? The Christians don’t need us any more, and so we’re the first people they get rid of, because we’re the ones who make life difficult for them. They’d rather keep the Colombians and the Ecuadorians. Anyway, Abdeljaq is blaspheming when he says he can see the face of Allah. That’s the worst blasphemy a Muslim can commit. But Abdeljaq’s eyes light up as if he really was seeing that face. A fierce, satisfied face. He talks like some fanatical preacher, a prophet of revenge: the Christians trample on us now, we clean the shit from their toilets, we serve their disgusting wine in bars, we build the houses where they eat jaluf and fuck uncleanly, without washing the semen from their foreskins, our women make their beds and smooth their impure sheets, but the day is coming when we will be the ones who lead them , on all fours, with a chain about their necks. They will bark outside the doors of our houses, revealed as the things they are: dogs; and they’ll polish our leather slippers with their tongues. Our Muslim brethren in America were taken there in ships, in chains, caged up like horses, goats, chickens or pigs. The Black Muslims were just farm animals as far as the Yankee Christians were concerned. The time has come for us to show them that we are men and know how to fight for what is ours. Ahmed argues: But there are rich Muslims too. What about all those sheikhs in the Gulf states. Aren’t rich Muslims even worse than rich Christians? Besides, most of the slave traders in Africa were Arabs. Muslims enslaving Muslims. Abdeljaq shakes his head indignantly: Those are infidel lies. But Ahmed has seen documentaries on television and knows that it’s true. Those Arabs, those traders in human flesh, were feared from one end of Africa to the other, they were feared in India too, in Indonesia, on the southern coast of China. They didn’t care about the religion of the slaves they captured, Christians, Muslims, Animists, Hindus, Buddhists. Any flesh was good enough to fill the cages in the ship’s hold. And what about the Turkish khedives? They were far crueler in their tortures than the Christians. What about our kings? Are we not here because the late Hassan and his son Mohammed and his family threw us out? We are serving the Christian dogs because our own dogs are even fiercer and sink their teeth into us far more deeply. Here they treat us like servants, there they treated us like slaves. All men are bastards, all human beings, regardless of what God they believe in or say they believe in. We’re all born from a woman’s tabún . Do you believe that Allah blesses those filthy rich bastards in Fez or Marrakech who return from Mecca banging tambourines and sounding the horns of their imported Mercedes just so that everyone can see that they have enough money to have made the pilgrimage and be able to call themselves hajji ? Are they fulfilling the teachings of the Koran any better than the rest of us? Why? Because they’ve walked seven times round the Kaaba, because they’ve traveled back and forth seven times between As-Safa and Al-Marwah, and drunk from the Zamzam well? I travel back and forth every day just to scrape a living. And I drink the salt water from the well of my sweat. And yet they, from their luxury hotels in Mecca, humiliate you by telling you that they’re better believers because they can go where you can’t. Just because they can afford the flight to Mecca — first-class pilgrims in a Boeing — they’re convinced that they’ll enter Paradise before you do, you poor unfortunate wretch. Do you really think there will be rich and poor in Allah’s heaven, people who drive Mercedes and people who clean other people’s toilets? What kind of shitty religion is that? Is that Islam? I can assure you, Abdeljaq, that those pilgrims will go to hell before any Christians do. You can be quite sure of that.

Ahmed has walked slightly less than a mile from the place where his friend Rachid dropped him off that morning. Two prostitutes, standing at the top of the path to the marsh, eye him suspiciously, or at least so he thinks. He’s never sure if people really do look at him suspiciously because he’s an Arab or if he’s simply getting paranoid and convinced that everyone looks at him like that. He’ll have lunch with Rachid in the field next to the lagoon, the field he’s walking through now. Before leaving home, he had some tea, bread and oil, a tomato and a can of sardines, and had prepared himself a lunch of two boiled eggs, a few beans and a couple of lamb chops, but, unfortunately, he’d left the lunchbox in the trunk of his friend’s car. I don’t know why you bring anything, you could save what you bring for lunch and have it for supper, I’ll get something from the kitchen, it’s good food, Rachid tells him every day. The restaurant where he works appears in all the guidebooks, it’s one of the best in Misent, but Ahmed is slightly disgusted by the thought of that meat slaughtered any old way, he likes to buy his meat from the halal butcher’s and cook it himself at home, he likes what he calls beldi food, which is why he takes his own lunch with him every day, even though he usually ends up eating whatever Rachid has brought too. He’s been missing his lunchbox for some time now. He’s hungry. He glances at his watch. Rachid, as he does every day, will bring a couple of Tupperware containers, filled with some sort of stew, which is absolutely fine, but not deemed good enough to serve to the customers, as well as some fruit and vegetables that he’s either stolen or which have been given to him because they’re not quite perfect. The light is beginning to thin, the fragile winter light gilds everything it touches. It’s a mild afternoon: the surface of the water, the reeds, the palm trees far off, the buildings he can see in the distance, are all gradually turning to gold; even the sea, visible if he climbs up one of the dunes, even the sea is no longer its usual intense blue, but has taken on a faintly iridescent sheen. He lights a cigarette to assuage his hunger. He decides to make the most of the time he has until his friend arrives, and when he finishes his cigarette, he goes back to the spot where he left his fishing rod firmly anchored between some large stones, casts the net he’s been wearing tied around his waist and studies the mirror-like surface of the lagoon on which insects are tracing geometrical designs with their slender legs. In his basket he has two medium-sized mullets and a rather smaller tench. Not a bad day. Tonight’s supper.

Читать дальше