Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Even though you didn’t go into hiding in the marsh as you wanted to, you weren’t one of those men. You stayed in your hole. Others did too. They lived as if they hadn’t really lived. They didn’t count somehow, they weren’t part of their own times. They gradually died off, without ever having existed. They would walk quickly, cautiously along the sidewalk, keeping close to the wall, looking at the world out of the corner of one eye. Shut up in their houses, they would silently brood over their sadness. You are part of that legion of shadows, as dignified as you are insignificant. Fresh out of prison, you make a note of all the cowards, all the traitors. You’re preparing for the next act. You’re reviewing your troops. Counting your money. You ask my mother and my uncle to tell you about this man or that man: if they bow their head or stop to greet members of the Falangist party when they meet them in the street; you send me, when I’m only seven or eight years old, to see if so-and-so is taking part in the religious processions this year, if he’s helping to carry the saint, if he’s barefoot and wearing chains round his ankles or if he’s donned the purple shirt of the penitent. Idiot, you say, when I confirm that the man was, indeed, barefoot. Idiots, what can one think of men who accept without complaint what they’re told from the pulpit by someone who says the first thing that comes into his head, because he knows no one can contradict him. What kind of common sense is that, grown men dumbly nodding at what the priest is saying: virgins who give birth, fishermen who can speak every language in the world, dead men come back to life, devils using their three-pronged forks to prod a few wretches being boiled in pots or stretched out on a grill. And those same grown men said nothing. Have we all gone mad? You should have seen the meetings and assemblies held in the Cine Tivoli or in the town hall square during the Republic: they would all shout at once, talking over each other, arguing, threatening each other, grabbing each other by the lapels. You suddenly fall silent. You remember that it’s me you’re talking to. You probably notice my bored expression. You’re not talking to a comrade or even to your eldest son, who does at least appear to be listening, even though, later on, he’ll betray you, but to this other son who is bored by your stories, and you think that it’s because of him — because of this son and your other children and your wife, at this point you make no distinctions — that you’re here in the workshop and at home, mere prolongations of prison, as, indeed, they were. For years, he received regular visits from the Falangist brigade, he was forbidden to go into the village, he had to present himself each week at the headquarters of the civil guard in order to sign on and, as a way of getting by, of surviving, he tried to decipher what seemed to him to be the signs of something yet to come. They had won the battle, but the war remained unresolved. When he left prison, he preferred to go for solitary walks on Montdor. So as not to see “them,” he would say. Then he shut himself up in the house, probably because there was no way of avoiding seeing “them.” He only left the house for work reasons. He didn’t go to the bar because he didn’t want to bump into the blue shirts who, each time they threw down a card on the green baize table top, would smugly pat the shoulder holster in which they kept a pistol with its mother-of-pearl butt, or the other men who laughed at their jokes, people who, now that everything has changed, have brought out their photos of the time when they were young Republicans, before they ran like little dogs tied to the victors’ cart. God knows where they kept those photos hidden, the cap with the tassel at the front, the flag whose colors are not visible in the black-and-white photo, but which we know were red, yellow and purple, the raised fist. The 1980s: when you see the faces of the children of post-war opportunists on electoral campaign posters, you groan: who does he think he is? So his father and grandfather made a fortune out of ham and chorizo, big deal, but they’re still butchers. And what does the son and grandson of a butcher have to teach us, he asks me.

Even though I’ve never taken any interest in your political obsessions, I must acknowledge that I’ve inherited a few drops of that poison: expecting only the worst of human beings, seeing man as a factory for shit in various stages of preparation, a bag of garbage tied up with string you used to say when you were in a bad mood (although your actual words were “a bag of shit”). But I’ve never given this pessimism of mine a social dimension. I’ve kept it to myself. I’ve felt my frustration without ever thinking it was part of this fallen world, rather, I’ve lived with the conviction that everything to do with me will die when I disappear because it’s merely a manifestation of the little nucleus that is my life. An easily replaceable being among thousands and millions of other easily replaceable beings. That is where we disagree. You have had the capacity, the gift of being able to read your biography as part of the great tableau of the world, convinced that the ups and downs of your own life contain part of the tragedy of history, present-day history, the gossip and meanness of Olba, as well as the old history of the disloyalties and betrayals of the war, and the history going on thousands of miles from here and several centuries away: you are touched by the wars going on in the mountains of Afghanistan, in Baghdad or in some tiny village in Colombia: your suffering is a suffering to be found everywhere, in the very heart of every misfortune, just as, for Christians, the body of Christ is present in each and every communion wafer: Christ’s whole sleek, vigorous body is there in those fragile wafers given out time and again to the faithful in any of the churches of the world, the same whole identical body in wafers that have been given out century after century. Your attitude, like that of those church-goers, confirms me in my belief that what most successfully survives the passing of time is a lie. You can embrace a lie and hold on to it without it ever deteriorating. Truth, on the other hand, is unstable, it rots, dilutes, slips away, escapes. The lie is like water, colorless, odorless, tasteless, and yet even though we can’t taste it on our palate, it nonetheless refreshes us.

A sect with no members, no accomplices: just you and your comrades, as ubiquitous and as invisible as the body of Christ hidden in those communion wafers, golems made to the measure of your own desires. You celebrate your rituals at home: the little office at the workshop with its small glazed windows, the shed in the yard, the solitude of your bedroom, where, on top of a small dressing table, you keep your radio. In the 50s and 60s, you press your ear to the speaker, which you keep at a barely audible volume. You listen to the news about Spain broadcast by the BBC in London, by Radio Paris, Radio Pirenaica. In order to muffle the sound further, you cover the radio and your head with a towel; none of us is allowed to enter the room while you’re listening to the news; and underneath the workbench, in an invisible place (I happen upon it one day when I’m playing, crawling about on the floor) you stick photos of Marx’s bearded face and of La Pasionaria, cut out from some old book or magazine. A long time passed before I found out who those people were, those faces you kept hidden away, just as the painters of the Altamira caves hid their images of fetish animals. And after your release from prison you used the back of the calendars hanging in the office to mark in pencil any dates you believed were decisive steps toward the circumstances that would allow you to restore the manhood you felt had been diminished the moment you decided to hand yourself over to the authorities. You kept those annotated calendar pages, just as I imagine you believed you were keeping back any feelings of husbandly love or fatherly affection until that hoped-for future normality arrived, when the dark times and the years that had transformed us into nonentities would end; not that you ever put into practice those feelings of compassion and solidarity, or if you did, I certainly never noticed (yours was a future solidarity whose time never came, a bird with no branch on which to perch and make its nest). I came upon some of those calendar pages a while ago now. You kept them at the bottom of one of the boxes piled up in the office. Messages from the past, a feeding ground for future affections, the days preceding the coming celebration of solidarity. On the page corresponding to August 1944, only a few months after you were granted provisional release from prison, you had written: Warsaw uprising; 25 th: Leclerc division commanded by our compatriot Amado Granell, a r. from Burriana (r. doubtless meant Republican) , takes Paris, and the Spanish t. (i.e., the tricolor) flies over the Arc de Triomphe. And written in red pen, in large almost angry capital letters: outside they’re winning what is being lost inside. I was born four years earlier (I must been conceived during the very last days of the war when you were wondering whether or not you should hand yourself in), when you were still in prison, which meant, of course, that you couldn’t make a note of my birth on one of your calendars, but Juan and Carmen were born in 1944 and 1947, and yet they didn’t merit any mention either, you presumably saw their births as being of no future significance, you saw no hope in them and therefore no hope for them, just as I believe you saw no hope in me. On the back of one of the pages the following year, you had written: February 13, the Russians take Budapest; on another: April 13, Soviet troops occupy Vienna ; on the following: May 2, the nazis surrender berlin to the soviets. In 1949: October 1, Mao Tse Tung (that’s how it was written then) establishes people’s republic in China . 1959: January 8, Fidel Castro enters Havana. Is he with us or with them? Don’t ask because time will tell . And he had added: time, goddamn time, how quickly it passes too, it’s been twenty years since all that, but it seems like yesterday; and how slowly it passes, each day seems like a century to me. For the moment, Batista is out (no insulting adjective, you don’t say “that bastard Batista,” or even “the dictator Batista,” you just give his name: you have to be careful what you write, those bits of paper could be dangerous, they could fall into the wrong hands, and reveal that the virus isn’t dead, only sleeping, I’m surprised you even dare to write “us” and “them” because, at the time, they had a single, dangerous meaning). 1968: Russian tanks take Prague. What the hell is going on? I don’t understand. I could weep . Your writing is there on the back of colored pictures of landscapes, paintings by Velázquez and Murillo, photos of cathedrals in Spain, of singers, soccer stars and bullfighters. Clandestine, sterile notes, condemned to grow moldy, their faces to the wall, although I imagine, too, that you took a certain perverse delight in that secrecy, because what was on show in your little office — those vulgar, innocuous images — was concealing your pride: the virus wasn’t even sleeping, it was still working away, stealthily but indefatigably. The solid nucleus that nothing had managed to destroy — not the years in prison or in the vacuum to which your neighbors subsequently relegated you — was still there, intact. The old mole was still tunneling in the night, or so you believed, because the truth is that those written notes neither changed nor nourished anything, you were the only one who read them. We didn’t know of their existence. In the solitude of Olba, which condemns you to melancholy walks in the countryside (going with someone else would only cast suspicion on them, you used to say, but I think it was more that you couldn’t stand to be with anyone, perhaps not even your comrade, Álvaro’s father), it was you yourself who you were nourishing with those notes: they’re the nutrients that allow you to survive until your moment comes again. How quickly time passes, and how slowly it passes too, you wrote, each day seems like a century to me : time, while it was busily devouring terrible memories, continued to generate new variants on the ominous. As I said, there’s no mention of us, of your wife, your children; not even your mother or your siblings appear in the notes. According to those notes, we are not born, we have no birthdays, we don’t fall ill, we don’t start school; your mother dies during those years, in 1950 or 1951, and yet her death doesn’t appear either. We don’t merit so much as a mention, we don’t form part of the progress of the world, no god watches over us, we’re outside the universal system of pain and injustice and rebellion, we’re not part of that legion of transubstantiated bodies, pale comrades you can just make out on the horizon; we have no access to the great concepts that nourish them. We represent the personal, which is to be deplored, which binds you and keeps you earthbound, on the level of animal nature: being born, eating and defecating, working, reproducing: and what a wretched way we have of reproducing, how low down the scale of species that mode of reproduction places us. Dying: another moment not worthy of being recorded, again that closeness to our animal nature, a regression that only confirms you in your ideas. Everything you learn and know dissolves into nothing. Beings with no public importance, individual selves that fall like leaves in autumn. Others will begin to sprout in a few months’ time and replace them and you won’t even be able to tell the difference.