Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Never has there been so much talk of business in this house as there was during those weeks over lunch. The little dining room with the sideboard and the chairs made by my grandfather or my father or by both; the walnut frames surrounding sepia photos of couples arm-in-arm, with her clutching her bouquet in both hands and him clutching her arm; the modernist lamp with its green glass shade; the china cabinet with the little porcelain cups that had been my mother’s pride and joy and which, if they had actually been worth anything, Juan would have tried to sell. That dining room saw more economic debate than the Cristal de Maldón, Leonor Gelabert’s restaurant, at whose tables, according to Francisco, sat secretaries of state for the economy, for the treasury and for public works and even the occasional minister (Leonor, you left without saying goodbye, on both occasions). Renting, buying, selling, mortgaging, conveying, building, decorating, distributing, warehousing, guaranteeing, endorsing, signing. For a couple of months, those were the sole topics of conversation at mealtimes, until my father could stand it no longer and had had enough of them ruining risottos and paellas, soups, fish, croquettes, omelettes and hamburgers — it all came heavily garnished with bundles of virtual money, piles of bank drafts ready to be signed and hundreds of square feet for sale or to rent, with or without a lease — and one afternoon, after drinking his coffee and lighting the cigar he always smoked after lunch, he put their luggage, Juan’s and the Ukrainian’s, out in the street. They found the suitcases there, by the front door, when they came back in the early hours. The suitcases out on the sidewalk, and the door locked and, just in case, bolted twice with the key left inside in the lock. I imagine that my father knew that, even though the luggage would be left out on the sidewalk for hours, where anyone could take the suitcases, they would contain nothing of any great value. No cash, no checkbooks or credit cards, no bank drafts, no deeds, no priceless painting cut from its frame and rolled up, no jewel case containing a diamond bracelet and a white-gold Piaget ring encrusted with emeralds. Oualó , as Ahmed would say. Rien de rien . Nothing. Tired old clothes given a quick spin in the washing machine to save on soap. Juan and the Ukrainian had, as usual, spent the hours after lunch shut in their room, screaming at each other, my father sitting in front of the television, as he is now, but holding a glass of brandy, with his cup of coffee and the ashtray on the small table next to the sofa, while he took sips of his brandy and puffed on his cigar. He’d raise the glass to his lips, then set it down next to the ashtray exactly where I now place his glass of milk before I put him to bed. He’d fill the glass a couple of times and drink its contents very slowly, as if gathering strength. It was the same every afternoon before we opened the workshop at four o’clock. They would hurl insults at each other, and he would seem not to hear, but on that day, his face was becoming ever grayer, the skin on his cheeks tighter, his cheekbones more pronounced. I was very familiar with the way he displayed his anger. When, after a while, the Barrow gang — our very own Bonnie and Clyde — left the house, he got up, went into the room they’d been staying in (the one with the double bed where he and my mother used to sleep until she died, and which was a sanctuary forbidden to us kids when he was listening to the BBC or to the banned communist radio station La Pirenaica, I still can’t understand why he let them stay there), and he himself gathered their clothes and began stuffing them any which way into suitcases and bags, while he growled and grunted (the double bed profaned, the smell of her cologne replacing the delicate Maderas de Oriente perfume my mother used to wear and that still impregnated the room — in fact, I think the idea of profanation only really struck him then). This is nothing to do with you, go downstairs and open the shutters in the workshop, he said when he saw me leaning in the doorway, watching him. Nothing is ever to do with me in this house. In the workshop, I lit a cigarette and sat down, not in the little office, but on the floor, my back against the power saw. My father never allowed anyone to smoke there, not with all the sawdust, wood shavings, glue, varnish, enamel — we work with flammable materials: you can smoke in the house and in the street, you can smoke in the office, but not in the workshop, he used to say, and yet he himself often walked around with a cigar clamped between his lips, although it was rarely lit. This thing wouldn’t light if you doused it in gasoline, he would grumble, tapping the cigar with his forefinger as if to justify his lack of consistency. Meanwhile, he threw the couple’s luggage out into the street. He locked the door from inside, left the key in the lock, and bolted it twice. That afternoon, he didn’t come down to work and didn’t want to have supper with me. That night, from my room, I heard someone scrabbling at the lock. Then I began to hear my brother’s voice in different tones and registers: at first, it was a whisper, then he began to call to us, softly at first, as if with deep affection, then angrily and, finally, shouting; Fucking hell, he kept growling, spitting out oaths in a crescendo that ended with a long, noisy drum solo — him repeatedly kicking the door. Then, the silence of the night, the shrill cricri of crickets, a car engine, the distant barking of a dog. The peaceful Olba night.

That was the last time I heard Juan’s voice in the flesh so to speak. Since then, we’ve had no further news of him. Not a letter, not a postcard, only that mysterious phone call from Málaga a few years ago (seven or eight years after my father tossed him out), telling me — for reasons known only to him, but probably simply to find out if our father was still alive, or if he could drop by to pick up his inheritance — how well his new business was going, something to do with property management (or was it construction work? I can’t quite remember now). My father had refused to take the phone when I held it out to him as soon as I heard Juan’s voice. His final words—“you can both just go”—included me in his curse. But as soon as the old man dies, I’m sure he’ll turn up in order to demand his part of the inheritance, the part he wanted us to give him in advance; he’ll come back, convinced that the inheritance has continued to grow fatter and fatter (he has always believed whatever he wanted to believe, taking no account of reality) because in his febrile imagination, the carpentry workshop is a fabulously successful business — well, it must have been in the years of the building boom — and that, hidden away somewhere in the cellar — the place he could smell but not locate — there’s a pile of gold ingots, bundles of purple notes arranged by serial number, as well as sheaves of share certificates. It won’t take him long to realize his mistake. By the way, before that pair of frustrated thieves made their hasty departure, I saw the Ukrainian woman naked. It was one morning when he’d left the house alone. Olena — that’s what they said she was called — appeared at the door of my bedroom, dressed (if you can call it that) in a transparent bathrobe. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, just that brief robe, left open to reveal one pink nipple and the reddish shadow of her pubic hair between her very white thighs, which the gauze, or whatever that subtle fabric was, signally failed to cover. She asked to borrow some nail clippers. Who knows why. The nails on fingers and toes were long and carefully painted. Perhaps she needed to remove a hangnail, that’s possible, although I’m convinced that my brother sent her, a variant on his many ways of begging, and her appearance at my door that morning was a commercial proposition. The minuscule robe, the nipple and the reddish shadow sheltering between those white marble thighs were, I thought, an invitation for me to become part of the gang and collaborate in the task of finding the treasure chest, a way of allowing me in as a new associate. If not, why the hell had he got up so early and left the house without her, leaving at my disposal that hint of reddish pubic hair, when the two of them always went everywhere together, because he wanted to keep a watchful eye on the owner of the pubic hair. It was clearly a proposal to make this a family enterprise. I rejected the offer to be a part of that company — whether a holding company or just a holding I don’t know — of which the gauze allowed me a glimpse. In return, I lost the nail clippers that I lent to Olena and which she never gave back.