Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

It’s been a very long time since my sister Carmen came to stay with us as she used to, a couple of times a year, bringing the children and, sometimes, her husband. She did make a lightning visit at the time of my father’s operation, but back when the kids were small, the family would spend the whole summer here; of course, they only set foot in the house to sleep, because they’d spend all day at the beach and every evening on the terrace of one of the ice-cream parlors on Avenida Orts in Misent. Her husband would join them when he was on holiday from the textile factory, usually the last two weeks of August. The house would fill with voices and the colorful detritus that always surrounds children: plastic planes and cars, little bags of sweets and dried fruit, bits of chewing gum stuck to the bathroom shelf, and with inner tubes, flippers, snorkel and mask abandoned on the chairs in the hallway, much to my father’s annoyance. Don’t you know that salt eats into the varnish and ruins the wood? You should leave those things outside. The kids were a nuisance, it’s true, but they brought life into the house, so silent and even gloomy the rest of the year, especially after my mother died — she always used to sing to herself, almost right up until the end, while she scrubbed the floor, dusted the furniture and hung out the clothes in the backyard. La bien pagá, Picadita de viruelas, Angelitos negros, Ay mi Rocío . If, one year, they came later than usual or didn’t come at all, like the summer they went to Galicia instead, Carmen would at least send photos so that we could see how the children were growing up (with the passing years, these became the photos of those grandchildren she never once brought to see us, and my mother laid the blame for this, as I said before, on her daughters-in-law), I think Carmen wanted us — my parents and me, the bachelor uncle from whom they assume the children are going to inherit — to fall in love with them. But such long-distance courtships no longer happen, that was in the old days, when kings would receive a portrait of their future wife and gradually fall in love with her over the years, until she eventually arrived at the palace gates. Indian men would get married to some poor girl with whom they’d exchanged photos and letters, the girl would travel across the ocean, docile and frightened, to find a husband who was really a complete stranger, but who did at least provide a means of escaping the poverty she had known at home. In Olba, in the mid-1950s, there was still the occasional case of a girl hoping to do the same by falling into the arms of some supposedly rich emigrant she didn’t even know, and who, not infrequently, turned out to be a cruel, penniless bastard. Now we take it for granted that, in order to fall in love with someone, you have to get to know them, to live with them, to let them become a daily presence, someone you miss if he or she goes away, and, as I say, we only saw my sister, my brother-in-law and their children at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays, the days when my father and I used to get up a little later. During the week, I would really only see my nephews at night, in the room I had to share with them, both of them asleep in the bed next to mine. I found them annoying while they were in the house, but missed them when they’d left. With the advent of the Internet, the old custom of long-distance courtships has, in part, been revived; adolescents — and older people too — show each other arousing photographs, this is my cunt, this is my dick, seven and a half inches, they talk dirty in emails and get excited, watching each other on the computer screen jerking off (have you got a web cam?) or on their cell phone, more or less as happened before (the usual thing: text and images, the ways in which we humans have chosen to present ourselves to others have remained unchanged for millennia. Before, heirs to the throne would send an oil painting, a locket containing a portrait and would accompany these with a letter, as I said: text and images), but now everything happens with more immediacy. In the past, you’d have had to be the Marquis de Sade or, at the very least, Casanova to write such filth. In the photo you can’t even see her little turned-up nose or his Brylcreemed toupee. I occasionally join these chat rooms and pass myself off as someone else, attractive thirty-six-year-old lawyer, 5' 11", 140 pounds; single forty-year-old architect seeks sex; sometimes I even pretend to be a woman and flirt with various dickheads who say I really excite them and even claim to be falling in love with me. When you check that particular email address months later, you’ll still find messages from them. They miss you. I know you don’t want anything more to do with me, they sob. I imagine them suffering, and they deserve to. If you don’t even really know the people you’ve lived with for decades, how can you possibly trust someone hiding behind a screen? The script is always pretty much the same: given what you’ve told me about your tits and ass, you really sound like my type of woman; besides, whenever I receive a message from you, I always feel that we’re two beings who understand each other, twin souls. I’m sending you a couple of photos of my cock, in one it’s relaxed. Not bad, eh? How would you like to lick it? The head sticks out a bit from the foreskin, because when I was little, I had an operation for phimosis, and they removed a bit of the skin. In the other photo it’s erect, quite a decent-sized prick, don’t you think? Do you like it? Well, this fat shiny prick is knocking at your door. Will you open up? Or will I have to batter my way in? It’s all yours. It will enter you up to the very hilt. I want you to feel it deep inside you. I can’t send you a photo of my ass, because I can’t work out how to take one on my cell phone. I’d have to ask someone else to take the photo for me and who could I ask? But it’s nice and firm and perky. And as you can see, my stomach is pure muscle, a real six-pack. When you send me a photo of your face, I’ll send you one of mine, and may I know where you live? You say you live in this same province, but you haven’t said whether you live in the capital or in a village. Why don’t you want to tell me the name of your village? Why so mysterious? Don’t you trust me? You probably live next door. That is the mechanics of communication. With a few variants: if instead of presenting yourself as a muscular male chest in the prime of life, you pass yourself off as a young girl with small, firm boobs, then the mature married men will immediately start buzzing around, predatory pedophiles, just how young are you, are you sure you’re telling me the truth about your age, I bet you’re older, more like nineteen, no fourteen-year-old girl would talk like you, unless, of course, you’re very advanced for your age. Has someone already given you a good shafting or is your little pussy not yet open for business? I bet you’ve been fucked every which way, you little bitch. Fucking hell, a hot fourteen-year-old. I can’t believe it. Shall I send you a photo of my prick, you little slut? I bet you’ve never seen anything like it (the photo of the huge prick will have been downloaded from some Internet archive). On the other hand, if you adopt the personality of a mature woman, your inbox instantly fills up with propositions from excited little boys who want to have access to what they think of as the wisdom of some remote future. The fetish of experience. All of this has very little to do with love and, if you press me, not much to do with sex either. It’s all a lot of hot air. If you want to fuck someone, just find a prostitute, male or female depending on your tastes, but don’t spend all day sending little messages in order to get aroused. And besides, love, or whatever you want to call it, is something else entirely: if even the normal way of doing things doesn’t work — meeting and getting to know someone gradually over the years — how is looking at a photo of a cunt going to do the trick, while you drink your morning coffee. I mean, putting sex aside for the moment, I’ve known my father for sixty-seven or sixty-eight years (ever since he came out of prison), and I still haven’t learned to love him. Most of the time I haven’t wanted to have anything to do with him, only on very rare occasions have I felt I understood him, and I could count the times we’ve achieved anything like closeness: I wasn’t the son he wanted, from him I almost never experienced the kind of warmth and energy I felt from being with my uncle when he used to take me hunting by the lagoon, when he would sit me on his knees to stick the stamp on a letter, when he made me a little wooden cart to play with — a catalogue of the toys of the poor: a stick between your legs is a horse you’re riding; a bird tethered by a piece of string is the pet I adopted as a friend, that I talked to and fed with little bits of bread soaked in milk, and whose sudden disappearance one morning I experienced as an act both of betrayal and abandonment, and over which I wept bitter tears. I presume the bird simply died, and that my mother removed it from view before I could see it, not realizing how much more upsetting it is for someone to leave without explanation, more troubling than death itself, which doesn’t depend on an act of will, which isn’t a decision made by the individual, at least not usually, but something that happens; and when it is the result of an individual decision, it causes infinite pain and remorse to the people left behind, because that’s a way of escaping, abandoning, punishing. What did we do to make him leave us like that? He had everything he could possibly have wanted, he could never have accused me of not loving him enough, didn’t I always treat him like a prince, cries the widow, I gave him the best food, the best armchair, the TV remote control. Why did he have to go and kill himself? That won’t be my problem. Leonor and Liliana, two birds of passage. The new pain covers up the pain left by the old wounds.