Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

“At least Pedrós has always looked for his real friends among people he liked, people he enjoyed chatting to at the bar, having a few drinks with or going out on the town, never thinking about whether or not they could be useful to him or help him out if he got into difficulties, or, indeed, whether they might even cause him difficulties. As for his other relationships, with politicians, and other such public friendships, it was clear that those were merely business relationships, ways of getting contracts more easily. And today’s society can’t tolerate such naïveté, it’s a difficult balance for anyone to maintain, and it’s rejected by most people, who regard certain acquaintances as ill-advised or suspicious, simply because they don’t belong to the approved circles.” I should bite my tongue, bite it right off, what am I doing defending the bastard who has ruined me, just as a way of saying he was a good guy really, then quickly changing the subject and talking about something else? But that wasn’t the only reason. In fact, I fired that shot across their bows to see if it would shut them up, those creeps, those brown-nosers, who always latch on to the most useful person: I know all about Bernal and Justino. And I imagine the little bank manager is no different. And I take it for granted that it’s the same with Francisco. He’s never told me who he’s had to run after or crawl to, there’s no need. The relationships he tells me about, those Secretaries of State, or the minister who visits the Cristal de Maldón each night and asks for his woodcock bien faisandée . After all, I don’t know any of those individuals and have never set foot in the world they move in, but I know him.

Justino pours a little pessimism on my words:

“The people most likely to distrust someone like that are the ones he’s given his friendship to. They’ll think: why does he want me by his side when I have nothing to offer him?”

I don’t know whether to take this as a counter-thrust or not.

He bends down to pick something up and, in doing so, his shirt rides up, and in the gap between trousers and shirt, you glimpse part of a kind of split globe, dark as a world without sun, and which grows darker the further south you go, with a thickening jungle of hair: he generously reveals this human landscape to you whenever he bends down on the golf course too: a troubling ravine between two wooded slopes that conceal their mysteries beneath his trousers. This split globe is the accumulation of all the succulent lipids consumed over years of eating expensive food, which is why — whether you want to or not — you assume it must be different from that of the new player who has just joined us at the table to replace Bernal, who has gone outside to speak to someone on his cell phone: the newly-appointed bank manager, a pear-shaped young man, who was sent from La Mancha to this rather unfrequented branch (he says he turned down the Misent branch, yes, I bet), and whose pale flesh — he is as yet unaccustomed to the life of this Mediterranean Florida: toasting oneself in the sun at the beach or on the golf course — is sustained by the adobe of tons of gachamigas , dozens of sheep’s cheese sandwiches, mountains of vegetables (he said the same himself only a moment ago) and slices of traditionally cured bacon (with only a suggestion of fine ham from acorn-fed Iberian pigs — Cumbres Mayores, Guijuelo or Jabugo: the ham he’s received as gifts during the year he’s been branch manager). The conversation continues on the theme of how people nowadays set about achieving fame with the least possible effort. And I am the one who continues to mine that seam, which suits me fine. Anything, as long as we steer clear of Pedrós.

“The Islamists have found a really surefire way of appearing on TV. Your name isn’t mentioned, of course, because you’re just an anonymous individual in a collective story, which was also the aim of the people who wrote about the Russian Revolution, the ideal of the great utopianists. They’ll call you The Suicide Bomber Who Blew Himself Up. But, as a nod to the new narcissism and to technology, a few hours before you blow yourself up, you can post a video on Youtube showing you standing in front of a sheet daubed with a verse from the Koran and holding a Russian- or American- or, indeed, Spanish-made machine gun (they come from all over), so that the followers of The Faithful of the Blood of the Sacrificed Lamb can admire you.”

Francisco says:

“Isn’t that business about the lamb part of the Jewish tradition? Or is it Christian? Anyway, it’s definitely one of ours. In Misent, they worship the Precious Blood of Christ, it’s their biggest festival, and that’s what they call it, the festival of the Precious Blood, and just to confirm the horrible actuality of blood worship among Catholics, I read in the newspaper the other day that before John Paul II died, they extracted a small amount of blood from him and put it in a little bottle, just in case he’s made a saint, which he obviously will be. How could he not be made a saint, when he was the victor in that clash of two armies made up of hundreds and millions of soldiers — the Christian armada versus communist atheism? If a victory like that doesn’t get you a place in the calendar of saints’ days, what will? Pope Leo X persuading Attila the Hun not to invade Italy pales into insignificance in comparison. Removing the gangrene of communism from the face of the earth is easier said than done. I mean, damn it, there was a time when more than half the planet’s inhabitants either already were or were about to become communists. We’ve forgotten that in the 1960s and ‘70s we still didn’t know on which side the coin would fall,” says he, who’d himself watched very carefully indeed to see how it fell. With one foot in the Communist Party and the other in the social democrat camp, he always stayed very firmly on the fence.

Justino nods in agreement.

“Yes, I read that too. The newspapers reported about the few vials of blood taken from the man who fought a battle that took three or four hundred million prisoners: yes, four hundred million wolves transformed into cheap labor. It completely changed the world economy. The crisis we’re in now is simply the definitive redeployment of that new legion of man-tools in search of an owner to set them to work.”

“And now the communist wolf has turned vegetarian and eats grass from the hands of the man of peace, Wojtyła, a new St. Francis of Assisi.” Carlos says this sarcastically, making it clear that he is speaking ironically, because he himself is determinedly secular. I imagine him fleeing like a fallow deer before the hypothetical advance of the pack of communist hounds he now finds so charming. Given the hundred or so foreclosure notices he has signed, I doubt very much that he would escape with his life. Or would he end up being under-secretary for finance in the new regime? I don’t think he has what it takes to be a minister, although with wheedling hypocrites like him, you never can tell.

Me:

“Communists: a labor force crying out to be exploited — and they have been.”

Bernal takes up the earlier theme:

“The idea of going down in history as The Suicide Bomber would be quite enticing if you were the only one who’d had the idea, but every day, somewhere in the world, there are dozens of bombers blowing themselves up. Besides, what’s the point: once you’ve blown yourself up, you can’t go back home so everyone can congratulate you on being on the television news that evening. If you’re going to become a jihadi suicide bomber, you must either be very very bitter or have a deep faith in God.”

“Or both,” says the bank manager.

Justino takes up the argument:

“You’d have to be a pretty nasty piece of work too. The Madrid bombers have set the bar very high. A bomb that kills half a dozen people is nothing. You have to kill at least fifty before they’ll give you a few minutes’ coverage on the TV news or put your photo in the newspapers, whether it’s at the gates of a barracks in Karachi, an airport in Moscow or on a subway in Madrid; if it was Madrid, you’d definitely make the front pages in Spain. As for Karachi, Lahore or Kabul, the press there is probably so fed up with acts of carnage they don’t even bother reporting them. They’d run out of paper if they had to report every massacre. No, you have to kill dozens or even hundreds. Even the drug-dealers have been infected with this media frenzy. In Mexico, fifty thousand people have died in the drug wars. They want to be talked about. Individual murders are mainly the reserve of vulgar old domestic violence; but not necessarily, there are men who take their rifle down from the gun rack and clear the house of children, stepchildren, in-laws, the ex-wife’s new boyfriend, and even the dog if it gets in the way. Killing is like eating, it’s all a matter of beginning. It’s hard to swallow the first mouthful, but the rest goes down easily enough.”