Rafael Chirbes: On the Edge

When he leans forward to cast his net again, he suddenly hears a lot of barking and growling: a few yards off, two dogs are quarrelling over some scrap of meat and barking at each other. Ahmed picks up a stone and brandishes it threateningly, at the same time showing them the stick he always brings with him to the lagoon. The dogs don’t even look at him, too busy growling and baring their teeth. He throws the stone. It bounces off the back of the larger dog, an Alsatian with matted fur, which turns its head, revealing a collar: one of those dogs abandoned by tourists at the end of the season which then wander about, lost, for months, until they’re picked up by the local animal protection league. When the stone hits, the dog lets out a yelp and limps off, at which point the other dog grabs whatever it is they were fighting over and disappears into the bushes. The stone hit the Alsatian on the back, but that isn’t why the dog is limping. One of its back legs is so mutilated and covered in scabs that the dog can’t put any weight on it. Ahmed assumes it must have been run over at some point or that it got caught in a trap or entangled in some barbed wire. It runs awkwardly and fearfully. As it moves off, it glances back a couple of times, as if to make sure the man isn’t coming after it to inflict further punishment. A lame, frightened dog and possibly vengeful too, for Ahmed fears that the dog is trying to retain his image, as the dog’s aggressor, in the bloodshot mirror of its eyes. But servility cancels out aggression: the dog lowers its head as it trots gracelessly away. Its attitude indicates fear and submission — a creature beaten and made to suffer. Ahmed shudders, with a feeling that combines both sadness and distaste for the murky reality revealed by the dog’s wounds. Disgust provoked by the sordid, but also by a dread of cruelty, the cruelty of a vengeful dog and the cruelty of the man or men who beat it. There are open wounds on the dog’s skin, bloody welts, the remains of what could be either old and infected wounds or the symptoms of some skin disease. The other dog, smaller and fiercer-looking, has glossy black fur. Surprised by the Alsatian’s reaction on being hit by the stone, the smaller dog at first drops the piece of rotten meat as it flees into the bushes, only to immediately snatch it up again. The dog lies down, its body half-hidden among the reeds, only occasionally looking up, eyes bright and watchful. The meat hangs from its mouth. Ahmed has been looking with some curiosity at the piece of meat the two dogs were fighting over, and now he begins to look at it with growing horror, because he realizes that the blackish lump is taking on a recognizable shape: despite its dark, putrescent appearance, despite the places where it has been gnawed clean, it is clearly a human hand. Curiosity makes him keep looking, overcoming the feelings of repugnance and horror urging him to look away, to both see and not see; just as he wants to know and not know. He waves his stick at the black dog, forcing it to retreat a few paces. The animal growls, and although it does withdraw a little, it continues to glare at him and refuses to give up its prey, which — and Ahmed has no doubts about this now — is all that remains of a human hand. At the same time, his gaze slides away, again, deliberately and not deliberately, toward certain shapes lying sunk in the mud a few yards further off, to the right of the place where the dogs had been a moment before. He identifies that spot as the source of the pestilential odor he has been aware of for a while and which suddenly grows more intense. Two of the half-buried, mud-coated shapes in the water are clearly human forms. The remains of the third mangled shape could belong to a man who has been mutilated or to a body largely submerged in mud, it could also be the corpse of an animal, a dog, a sheep, a pig. As soon as he realizes that these are human remains, Ahmed knows that he must leave at once. Just having seen them makes him an accomplice to something, impregnates him with guilt. His first impulse is to run, but that would make him look still more suspicious: he starts walking quickly, brushing aside the leaves of the reeds that strike his face. He keeps glancing to right and left to see if anyone could have spotted him, but he sees no one. He’s unlikely to meet one of those English or German retirees who walk briskly along the side of the road convinced that, as they breathe in the exhaust fumes from cars and trucks, they are, in fact, engaged in healthy exercise; or else one of those excessively thin individuals, more drug-addicts than sportsmen, who go jogging along by the irrigation ditches and along the edges of the orange groves: no, none of the fauna prowling the orchards and engaged in various forms of exercise regimes ever comes to that particular piece of marshland.

He moves off as fast as he can, although he can’t resist the temptation to turn round a couple of times and look back at that piece of putrid meat, at the tendons and bones with which the black dog is busily playing, beneath the gaze of the Alsatian, which has returned from its brief absence and is again watching from a couple of yards away. Ahmed looks, above all, at the dark shapes half-buried in the mud. Despite his haste, he still has time to see, behind one of the dunes and hidden in the undergrowth, the burnt-out carcass of a car, whose presence only increases the sinister air the place has suddenly taken on. He stops breathing. He can’t breathe, he can feel a rapid pulse beating in his chest, his temples, his wrists, a buzzing in his head. Esteban told him once that criminals used to throw incriminating weapons into the thick waters of the lagoon. He keeps walking and keeps looking, but can’t seem to control the movements of his eyes, which appear to have acquired a life of their own and move at will: they shift from side to side, forcing him to turn his head. He doesn’t want to look, but can’t help himself, although now he’s less concerned about those shapes or about the dogs than about the shadows he thinks he can glimpse behind the reeds or around each bend in the path or in the dips and folds of the dunes. With each step he takes, he grows more confused by the shifting shadows and silhouettes, which take on seemingly human forms. He feels he’s being watched. He has a sense that people are observing him from the dunes, from the road, from the reedbeds on the far side of the lagoon, even from the slopes of the distant mountains. He suspects that this morning, as he was walking along by the main road, he became an object of interest to passing drivers, to the prostitutes who saw him setting off along the path to the marsh, to the children who were playing by the shacks he passed at the end of Avenida de La Marina, and at that moment, wishing he could erase himself from their memories, he remembers that, in his haste, he has left behind his fishing rod secured between two boulders, his net in the water and his basket on the shore, on the grass. He can’t just abandon his belongings there, it would be so easy for a detective to identify both rod and net; especially the fishing rod, which probably still bears the tag from the sports shop in Misent where he bought it seven or eight months ago when he first started coming with Esteban to go fishing, and so he runs back to the place he has just left (now he really is frightened, his whole body trembling), the reeds cut his face, his cheeks, his eyelids. When he pushes them aside, he feels their sharp edges cutting the palm of his hand. As soon as he has retrieved his fishing rod, he must return to the point on the road where he arranged to meet his friend, but it would be stupid to stay there sitting by the curb, waiting as he usually does where the path meets the road — he’d be leaving all kinds of clues, because that’s already the way his mind is working, as if he were one of the guilty parties. No, he can’t possibly wait there, but neither can he just leave and have his friend set off down the path looking for him, because when the inevitable investigations begin (no, no, calm down, he tells himself, months and months could pass before anyone else goes to that hidden corner) someone might recognize the car and identify Rachid’s clunker, that rusty fifteen-year-old Ford Mondeo, with its dented doors and its back bumper held on with wire. Besides, there’s that burnt-out car in the dunes, and someone is sure to report the disappearances; they’ll start dredging the lagoon, although who knows who those bodies might be. Probably immigrants like him, people just passing through, or maybe mafiosi fallen victim to some settling of scores: Moroccans, Colombians, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians. Perhaps a couple of prostitutes, their throats cut by their pimps, women nobody will take the trouble to look for.