Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

What my father taught me. At home: hold your knife and fork properly, you’ve got two hands, haven’t you, can’t you close a door without slamming it, what are those stupid posters you’re putting up, you’re ruining the walls with those push pins, the walls have got more holes in them than a colander. At work: that isn’t how you use a saw, you’ll slice your hand off one of these days, and then I’ll end up with a crippled son, yet another burden, it’s high time you learned how to use the glue without making such a mess. He always spoke harshly (spare the rod and spoil the child: always the threat of cruelty), drawing attention to my lack of skill and, above all, crushing any ambitions I might have, just as life had crushed his. What the victors from the civil war did to him, he did to me, the only son he had handy. I can’t say I’ve ever loved him. And I’ve paid for my refusal to fulfill the ambitions he placed in me. Just as the suicide kills himself because he can’t accept himself, he probably hated me because, while appearing to be his opposite (I never wanted to be an artist and never took any interest in his political aspirations), I’ve turned out to be just like him. My physique, though, is completely different; he was tall, slim, with an angular face and large eyes, and the intense gaze and the deep lines that have marked his face for decades now both contributed to giving him a vaguely dramatic air. I imagine women must have found him attractive. Women are attracted to men like that, men who seem full of inner life. Liliana says he’s still handsome even now, when he’s in his nineties; and when she looks at the wedding photo on the sideboard, she says again: He really was a very handsome man. But basically, he and I are identical. The same pessimism, the same idea that all men are nothing but a bag of shit tied up in the middle. I think it’s that idea that makes my postcoital depressions even worse: the sense that I’m drawn to that filth, that I’ve clasped one of those putrid bags of shit to me and released part of my own filth into it. I wonder why I even accepted this servile role, if, given that we’re just the same, we should have been associates or at least rivals on equal terms. It’s not easy to find the reasons, it’s not like opening up a corpse and finding heart, liver and spleen. Fears and desires are beyond the reach of scalpels. Although, to be honest, it doesn’t seem such a very grave fault not to love someone, after all, what does the word “love” mean? Most of us live together without feeling any need for an emotion we know nothing about until we read about it in novels or see it in the cinema. I think the fact that we don’t instinctively know what it is tells us that perhaps it’s something that doesn’t naturally exist in us, but is inculcated into us, imported. I think it was an old French philosopher who said that when a man declares his love for the lady marchioness — saying how much he admires her intelligence, her physical grace, her remarkable ideas, her sensitivity — what he’s really saying is that he can’t wait to screw her like a hot bitch. There is some truth in that. We confuse sympathy or pity with desire, we believe we want to cradle and protect when what we really want is to enter and violate. But that’s not true. I’ve often called Liliana “my child,” I’ve wanted to protect her, and that was quite different, a different kind of language. Despite what that French philosopher thought, language does put things in their place, either raising them up or dragging them down. Speaking well of someone confers elevation and nobility. I call Liliana what my father used to call his beloved Carmen. I say “my child.” My little child, my dear little child, my father used to say, kissing her. You’re going so far away, my child. To Barcelona. How lonely we’re going to be without you. That day was the only time I actually saw him break down in tears. The only time. Those words can’t possibly have been contaminated. Did you know that the flower of the coffee tree smells as sweet as orange blossom? It looks the same too, flowers like little white stars: all those plants, orange blossom, jasmine, galán de noche , or that colorful little flower called dompedro, all have a scent, but I think the flower of the coffee tree is the most delicate. In Colombia, we call a black coffee tinto , but here that means red wine. Your father reminds me of my grandpa, you know, I couldn’t say why exactly, he has the same serious face, the same rather sad eyes. He must have been a very good man, your father. It’s awful to see him like this. He has such kind eyes. What would you know, Liliana? You know about your own life, your own domestic sorrows of which I, too, know a little, because you’ve told me about them. Your sorrow touches me as if it were my own, makes me feel like embracing you, like drinking those warm tears that roll down your cheeks. Piel canela . Cinnamon skin. No, you don’t know that song, do you, ojos negros, piel canela , dark eyes, cinnamon skin, no, you’re too young, all I care about is you and you and you and only you, says the song. You’re my only child. I have no other. At least as far as I know, none that I recognize. I did have a child, but it never got past being a little cluster of cells. What does that mean, Señor Esteban? Ah, you’re laughing. I like to see you laughing, Liliana, not like the other day. Oh, the reason I was in such a state then was because I didn’t even have enough money to make the children their lunch, the shelves in the fridge were bare and the vegetable drawer was empty. My husband’s company hadn’t paid him his month’s wages, so it’s just as well you were able to lend me some money, because, otherwise, I don’t know what we would have done. Yes, I know about your problems, Liliana, for me you’re my child, and I’m a father to you, one you can talk to about anything. Your problems, your dreams, your desires. Just pay me back when you can. Money doesn’t matter. Or, rather, it’s money that corrupts everything, spoils everything, a bad father, a cruel father, but which — oddly enough — seems to bring together so many apparently incompatible lives. That’s one of its virtues. It has others. You could say that it’s a bad father who grants his children’s every wish, who spoils them. Without the cement of money, though, think of all the broken families, all the lives set adrift. They have loans and bills to pay, obligations to fulfill, and they remain bound together until death does them part, just as they promised; although there are a lot of people who can think of nothing better to do than spend every day bickering and generally making each other’s lives miserable, and they’re afraid to change a situation they consider safe because at least it’s stable. Resentment guarantees you company, and hurling insults at each other every night does confer a certain stability. People think: What’s the alternative? Being alone? To hear them talk you’d think that being left alone was the worst of all fates. Solitude, abandonment. Sad, threatening words. Terrible: just wait and see what old age has in store for you if you make the mistake of staying single. They try to frighten you. They say: If you carry on like this, you’ll be left all alone. How terrible to die alone, like a dog, they say. And that seems to be the very worst of misfortunes; you have to die, we all have to die, but we want to do so in company, not like a dog. Dying alone is so bleak, so shameful somehow, it reveals a lack in the human being (to use Francisco’s favorite and much more touching term), a lack that should remain hidden, swept away into the shadows, behind the screen they put around the bed in the hospital ward when they’re going to do something nasty to the patient. You could also say that dying alone reveals a certain arrogance, what you might describe as excess pride. You have to share, people say, in other words, go begging for affection, for sympathy, calling in old debts: I brought you up, fed you, clothed you, lent you money, did this for you, gave you that. Now it’s your turn. Take up the sponge, the antiseptic wipes, and start washing this grubby flesh of mine, give me back some of what I gave you. Pay me what you owe me. Success in life, what people call “a good end,” consists in managing to get everyone around your bed. Putting them to work, having a whole multitude ready to wipe your ass. The more the merrier. As if the intensive care unit were a Christmas party attended by all the family, that thrilling moment when parents, children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews burst into a rendition of “Silent Night,” with the cattle lowing and the shepherds watching their flocks, as if you weren’t lying there with your tubes, your probes, your oxygen mask and with more hypodermic needles in you than a modern-day St. Sebastian, or that poor bull in Tordesillas who is chased every year by village brutes armed with lances. What do you care about anyone else at such moments? Are they being pierced or lanced? Or is it a question — again we’re back in the realm of economics — of not wanting to perform something as moving as death to an empty theater. Exploiting it to the full. Generously allocating seats so that the audience can watch the death, a high-voltage show and a useful experience on life’s Grand Tour. Capitalizing on the energy of those final moments. Being alone or accompanied seems essential to give meaning to their lives. Bringing family members and neighbors in to see the burst blood vessels, the bruises, the ecchymoses, the endless lesions caused by all those pointed instruments, by the intravenous drip that perforates and blackens the back of your hand and through which they pump serums and poisons; the probes, the cannulae, the tubes that drain viscous fluids from some other part of your body; the suction pads stuck to your chest where the nurse has used an electric shaver to remove any body hair, leaving patches of whitish skin, the tangle of cables and tubes emerging from somewhere or other, including from your index finger, the ventilator they’ve stuck up your nose or through a hole in your throat, the metal of the stretchers and the IV drips, the plastic bags with their troubling liquids, serums and solutions that flow directly into the blood, the huge amount of money invested in the health industry. The visitors contemplate the dying man, unrecognizable now (he’s so thin, and his skin is almost gray, he won’t get out of this alive) and, as if in passing, they also admire the progress, the advances made in our hospital system in the ward for the terminally ill, they gaze, reverently, fearfully, at all that complex apparatus. And this vast input of skill is wasted if you experience and suffer it in solitude. My mother used to say to me: before I die, I want to see you married to a nice girl who loves you and who’ll take care of you if anything happens. You have to remember, my son (I was my mother’s son, just as Carmen was my father’s daughter), that right now you’re all set to go out and conquer the world because you’re a young man, because you’re healthy, the young only think about the present, they don’t notice the pages from the calendar falling one by one. You may laugh, but when the time comes, you’ll see how important it is to have someone by your side, how important affection is as the years pass. Someone to be with you and to clasp your hand in the final moments (although what other part of a dying man’s body would you be likely to clasp?). And while you’re listening to people talking like that, listening to your mother, you feel anxious, and you can actually imagine yourself being unable to get out of bed, lurching from chair-back to chair-back in order to move around inside the house, feeling your way along the walls to reach the toilet, your body drenched in sour, senile sweat; or choking on something, a piece of half-chewed meat, a sip of water, a breadcrumb, one of those pills you take for your blood pressure or for cholesterol or hyperglycaemia; you’re choking on your own spit: you cough, gasp for air, with no one beside you to slap you on the back or put their fingers down your throat to help you cough up the thing choking you, someone to call the ambulance or bundle you into a car and drive at top speed to the hospital or the nearest clinic. People think loneliness is the worst of all evils. What can I say? It may well be, because, in the end, loneliness — like nakedness, malnutrition, excessive heat or cold — is only a manifestation of the one real evil, a truly terrible evil, one that anyone with any intelligence should avoid at all costs, and that is poverty, yes, Liliana, poverty has been the only real evil since the world began, not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know already. What else were you running away from, what were you escaping from when you came to live here in Spain? The philosopher said: I am I and my circumstances. Exactly. Well, you’d better get used to the idea that “I” is the money that allows you to fund your circumstances; if there’s no money, you’re stuck with your empty “I,” a mere shell without any circumstances worthy of the name: and that opportune hand ready to slap you on the back to help you cough up the piece of half-chewed chicken currently blocking your epiglottis, that hand won’t be there (I don’t mean you, Liliana, how could you even think such a thing, I’m talking in general, I know you would never abandon me); on the other hand, if you have money, you can pay for company, for a nurse, male or female. Right up until the very last moment, you can pay for a chiropodist to buff away the hard skin on your feet and cut your toenails — a task that has become more exhausting each time you attempt it — and to trim your nails so that they don’t become ingrown, a delicate, expert fellow who removes your corns and treats the dangerous sores on the bottom of your foot which, because of your hyperglycaemia, threaten to become chronic, and which, if they fail to heal and begin to spread, can become gangrenous and might then lead to you having your foot or leg amputated; money allows you to pay for a masseur and a barber who cuts your hair and shaves you in bed, a pharmacist who gives you the most effective sedatives to help you up to heaven quickly, to hear the celestial bells and see the soft wings of the angels (did you know that in the church of a nearby village, they worship a feather from the archangel Michael’s wing?), and you can even afford to pay some gorgeous piece of ass (and forgive the crude language, Liliana) to give you a hand-job. And all this in a comfortable house or clinic in Lucerne, a lovely bright room with views of a lake, green meadows, the cows from the Milka chocolate bars and the snows of Kilimanjaro, while you recline on a memory foam (is that what it’s called?) mattress, on which you are dying like someone taking their four o’clock tea if you’re English or a pre-lunch beer and a dish of calamares a la romana if, like me, you’re Spanish, and the whole thing takes place at an ideal, pre-programmed temperature. With your final pill they give you a glass of champagne. But you’re looking very serious, Liliana, no, don’t take it like that, when I talk about paying someone, about buying that kind of care, don’t be offended, I’m not talking about you, you mean something quite different to me, you’re my child, what my sister Carmen was to my father, you’re very special to my father and to me: you’re family, a kind of belated daughter, there are three of us in the family now, two sad old men and one young woman who brings life into the house, I like to hear you singing when you’re doing the dishes, for instance, when you’re hanging out the clothes, you remind me of my mother, or hearing the radio when you have it on in the kitchen to keep you company while you’re doing the ironing, and I think my mother would have liked that too, although we can’t possibly know, because we can’t ask her, she’s not here, no, don’t cry, I feel like putting my arms around you, lifting your chin and making you look into my eyes. That’s it. But, Don Esteban, you know that even if you couldn’t pay me at all, I’d still come and see you both. You’ve already seen that nothing fazes me: I can wash and feed your father and do whatever else he needs me to, and it would be the same with you. For as long as I’m alive, this nurse, or if you’ll allow me, this friend, will always be with you. You know I like it when you call me “my child,” don’t you? Yes, I know, Liliana, now give me a little kiss and stop looking so sad. You’re not crying again, are you? It’s just that I love you as much as I do my own parents, or, rather, my mother, because my father took away any love I felt for him with the blows and the beatings. We’re not talking about love, are we, Liliana? Don’t trust that word. No, don’t take offense, I’m not saying that because of you, but it’s far better to say that we treat each other with mutual respect because we like each other, rather than love each other. And don’t even think about what might happen between us in the future. That’s what distinguishes liking from loving. We are the people we are today, and we’re living and sharing this moment and this same desire to weep today, because we understand each other, but tomorrow, who knows? No, Don Esteban, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, you can count on me until you die. You and your father are my family. I’d still come even if you couldn’t pay me. After all, what does money matter? I know, my child, but, Liliana, just look at my sister Carmen, my father’s beloved daughter, his favorite, she doesn’t even phone any more. She used to be so loving and affectionate, and now? Nothing. Who would have thought it, my father’s beloved favorite has turned out to be nothing . A stranger. Worse than a stranger, because with a stranger you can begin to have some fellow feeling for him or her, but here it’s the other way round, a fire has burned out, and a fire that burns out leaves the ground it burned on black with soot and there’s no getting rid of that stain. When they operated on my father’s trachea, she was here for only as long as was absolutely necessary: the day of the operation, she spent the night at the hospital, but the following morning, she said she had to leave: he’s out of danger now, it’s just a matter of recovering, they won’t keep him in for very long, they’ll probably discharge him tomorrow or, at most, the day after, they try nowadays to get patients out of hospital as soon as they can; besides, with the new, less invasive techniques they use, the incision leaves scarcely any mark, any scar, and the patient is better within a few days. And that was the sum total of her loving contribution. And off she went: Bye bye. Everything else, coping with the anxiety and the sleepless nights because he kept choking, using the blender to make the purées he could barely swallow, doing the laundry, getting him showered, dressed and undressed, changing his incontinence pads, all that was left to someone who didn’t love him and whom he didn’t love, someone who didn’t and still doesn’t like him. It was a mere prolongation of what we did in the carpentry workshop, of the way society functions. Do you see how commercial obligations bind people more closely than love? One of the many changing manifestations of that bad father, money. She cried repeatedly on the phone when I told her how our father was becoming a virtual vegetable. He couldn’t speak and appeared not to understand, he had to have everything done for him: he had to be washed, fed, helped into and out of bed. How sad. And she would cry. They loved each other. It really was very sad. It broke your heart. Those sobs down the telephone line. It even made me cry, and I don’t cry easily. But she still didn’t come and see him: all she sent were those tears. And just in case I didn’t pick these up over the phone line, just in case she failed to transmit them down the almost four hundred miles of copper and fiber wires separating us, she would break off halfway through a word, sigh, pause for a few seconds, clear her throat, begin to talk again, her voice hoarse now (one had to presume she was crying, had a lump in her throat, was uttering sorrowful sighs): You’ll have to find someone to help, you can’t look after him all on your own as well as work, cook, do the dishes, wash the clothes and hang them out. Of course I won’t be able to do that, of course I’ll have to find someone. But not a word was said about who was going to pay the eight euros an hour to that someone (who turned out to be you) or how much it might cost if I had to make special arrangements for that person to be here all day. Nothing but deep, sorrowful sighs. She behaved as if it were in bad taste to debase her grief with talk of money, as if it were unseemly to mix paternal love with filthy lucre, to apply an economic yardstick to love. No, love can’t be judged according to market values. It’s too personal, too private. It’s free of all ties. This isn’t a matter of money. Months later, when his bronchial tubes became blocked up and he had to be rushed to the emergency room and given oxygen, and was kept in the hospital for another week, I phoned to tell her, more in order to annoy her than because I thought she was actually going to give me any support, and, just as I imagined, all I got were excuses: her husband, her children, her work, the economy, everything was against her. She didn’t even bother to cry this time, but gave me a long litany of problems: I can’t take much more to be honest, later, when things calm down, I’ll tell you about the chaos my life is at the moment, we’ve got the workmen in, changing the old drains, and as you know, Pedro is too immersed in his work to help me, and so I have to deal with the plumbers, the bricklayers, and all the various traps they set for me and the dirt they leave everywhere, and how much they want to charge us, I’ve no idea where we’re going to get the money. Anyway, the fact is she never came. Poor thing, she had enough on her plate. She phoned about a week later, and before I could say anything, jumped in with: He’s better, isn’t he? (on that occasion, her voice was clear and hopeful, the voice of a bright, sunny morning — a winter morning like today, with that intensely blue sky above the lagoon — a cool breeze blowing away all trace of tragedy). And again: You have found someone to take care of him and look after him, haven’t you? You can’t possibly keep him clean, wash his clothes and cook his meals, not on your own. She was worried about our father and she was worried about me. And I was grateful for that. It was true, I couldn’t keep him clean, or sew the buttons back on his shirts or on his flies, which he would tear off if he got upset because I didn’t respond to his first imperative gesture, his first grunt; I probably wasn’t even capable of keeping myself clean, and the thought of that kept her awake at night. She came up with a solution: hire someone to look after you both. So considerate. Let’s hire someone to look after us, to keep us clean and well-fed. You see how easy it is? It’s assumed that I’ve been the major beneficiary in all family affairs, I have a house at my disposal, I’ve inherited a job and, above all, it’s assumed that I am the signatory for all the bank accounts. She was concerned about that too, the soul of generosity; she said: Given the state Papa is in, we’ll have to organize things so that we don’t have problems later on with the bank, so that they don’t freeze the savings accounts, and to make sure we all have equal access. I laughed: You’re not going to make Juan a signatory, are you? No, perish the thought, she said at once, he’d clean out the accounts in a week. And, of course, the point was that while she wanted my father and me to be kept nice and clean, she didn’t want the accounts to be equally clean, she wanted them to stay full of lovely green, yellow and purple banknotes, and when the time came for us to get hold of the money — what Carmen called cleaning out the accounts — that was to be done by the two of us, jointly. And then there are Germán’s children and his possible grandchildren, and his widow. They would also have to have access to the bank accounts. We can’t be the only ones to do that. That would be wrong, even illegal.