Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Then I’ll put you back in your armchair (I won’t need to tie you in with the sheet this time, I’m here standing guard), and we can watch some more TV: he’ll fall asleep, after lunch he usually goes to sleep until it’s time for tea. He’ll be having a late lunch today, poor thing, lunch and tea all in one, but I had to come here, you see, to this marsh, these reedbeds, this stagnant water. I wanted to check out the scene, to drink in the dubious or perhaps contradictory perfume of the place where we’re going to stage our play. Just as the growers of those exotic fruits have their backdrop of coconut palms, coffee trees and bamboo, so we have our backdrop, this putrid, life-giving marsh, and I want to make sure that everything is in order on the eve of our premiere, which will also be our dernière , isn’t that what they say in French? La première and la dernière . I do remember some things from my Paris days and from the years I spent at school, the alpha and omega of the Greeks, I learned that on the trips you helped me pay for when we still had some hopes of each other, a journey essential to the education of any artist, isn’t that what they all used to do? The obligatory trip to Italy. Donatello, Della Robbia and Michelangelo were intended to inspire the artistic vocation of a son who had to be what you were not allowed to be or could not be. A world premiere with only one performance: dunes, reeds, rushes, the watercress whose presence signals the spot where the water in the lagoon is cleanest, and the maidenhair fern that grows in the shade, the blue irises and the yellow irises: all that’s missing is poor Uncle Ramón, but, don’t worry, we’ll see him too, one of these days we’ll meet him when we’re strolling about in that place where the days and nights no longer pass, where nothing worthy of mention happens (no historians have left any record of it in their annals): he’s waiting for us there, impatiently, you’ll see, you’re finally going back to the place where you almost turned your back on us in order to preserve your dignity. That was what it came down to, that stark choice: us or your dignity, and you, generously, chose us — those of us who were already here and those of us yet to come — you sacrificed the treasure of your dignity, but, convinced that this show of generosity was, in a way, a betrayal of your comrades, you hated it and, consequently, could never love those of us who had benefited from it. I owe you the pain of that moment when I had not even yet been born. I have to repay you. And I will give you what we took from you, don’t worry, I will restore the dignity you gave to me then, always assuming that the priceless gift of your dignity really does exist and that one can ever recover what is lost: a foot, a leg, an arm, a face, these can all now be restored to those who’ve lost them, as long as you act quickly, and if not, they can reconstruct them: that’s what the surgeon Dr. Pedro Cavadas of Valencia does, but you can’t recover what you lost, and, besides, how can you possibly reconstruct it after all these years, when it’s already rotted away? But I will free you of the obligations you took on, the obligations that prevented you from being a proper man: feeding us, clothing us, educating us, the sticky web in which your biography became trapped, but don’t think about that now, what’s the point, it’s too late: I’m afraid we don’t have time to recover anything, however hard we try. Here you are, drink up, I say, handing him the glass of warm milk (mind you don’t burn yourself); he grabs it with his two hands, holds it tight and raises it to his lips, he picks up the package of cookies which he eats greedily until I take them away. They’ll make you ill, I say, not knowing if he can hear me: he clings on to the cookies when I try to take them away, he grunts: a kind of dull groan, his bony fingers gripping the package.

We all know that the world is divided between what I am and what others are. The great existential chasm. The whole history of philosophy turns on that divide, and it’s something we take for granted as soon as we begin to form our own first perceptions. It’s part of the essential baggage of life, but, for you, that is all the world has ever been, the struggle between the I, your I, and the others, us, who formed a society of accomplices, a guilty family from which you felt excluded. You weren’t entirely wrong: almost all of them were, yes, accomplices. There they were, kneeling at mass, groveling fearfully before the authorities, responding to the police chief’s questions in a quavering, little old lady’s voice and, above all, hurling themselves like a pack of wolves on the remains of the fallen, shamelessly gobbling them up. They denounced each other in order to wipe from their own police record the memory of the half dozen or so years when they had puffed out their chests and openly said what they thought; they elbowed each other out of the way, bidding at the auction of confiscated goods. You remembered seeing your neighbors wrapped in the tricolor during the years of the Republic and in the days shortly after the military uprising, when they were convinced they were going to win the war, and you saw them when they came back, when everything was over: they lined up at the town hall to denounce their comrades, they couldn’t wait to squeal to the local thugs, telling them in whispers where they could find the person they were looking for, in which hiding place, in which country house, in which attic, in which barn, in which cave, in which corner of the marsh. Anything to save themselves. Suddenly, pride did not consist in raising a clenched fist, singing the International and waving the tricolor. It meant wearing a reasonably new jacket (they didn’t yet dare to wear the Falangist blue shirt, that would mean risking a beating, you , how do you of all people dare to wear the sacred blue shirt that José Antonio embroidered with his own red blood?). Or speaking with a nicely judged degree of confidence to the local leader of the Movimiento Nacional or the commander of the civil guard; it meant having your wife, wearing her black lace mantilla, genuflecting at the head of the line for midday mass, high mass (waddling slowly along, head up, she would walk from the house to the church, so that people could see her, mantilla covering her hair, hands clasping prayer book and rosary). I’m not afraid of anyone, they would say whenever they had the opportunity, but would fearfully greet the Falangist scum — the fifth columnist — who had spent the war in hiding and had joined the entourage of the victors to tell them about everything that had happened in Olba during the war years. They would doff their cap and bow their head when they passed a town councilor or the civil guard, they would kiss the priest’s hand. Big strong men would bend low and press their lips to the soft little hand of Father Vicente, smiling at him like devout fools. The same men who, during the Transition, ransacked their attics, rummaged around in chests, in hiding places beneath the floorboards or in holes in the backyard to dig out the photos that capture the glory of those proud times, but who have carefully buried, erased, expunged any photos that record the post-war complicities and miseries that followed. The same men who fought off others in order to be allowed to help carry the saint in the procession; who, having only escaped execution by the skin of their teeth, now present the priest with a crate of oranges (the sweetest in the whole region, Father Vicente, they say unctuously), meanwhile offering to renovate the parish house for free; who stand next to a pillar in church, listening to mass with head bowed and clutching their rolled-up beret; who sit on the front pew during religious ceremonies and earnestly read their prayer book, having previously thrown their incriminating copy of Manuel Azaña’s The Garden of the Friars onto the kitchen fire.