Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

He decides to start walking along the main road, back to La Marina, and trust that Rachid will spot him from his car. Much as he would like to, he can’t stay still. He sets off toward Misent, then immediately retraces his steps, watching the passing cars, waiting anxiously for Rachid to appear, as if getting into his friend’s car would be like entering a refuge where he could disappear as soon as he sits down, arms hanging loose, breathing under control, head against the headrest, one cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window, relaxing and vanishing completely: the same psychological mechanism that allows children to believe they’re invisible when they cover their eyes with their hands: if you can’t see, then you can’t be seen. Sitting beside the driver of the Mondeo would be proof that he had nothing to do with that putrefying hand, with the stinking shapes buried in the mud, with that burnt-out car; once he has relaxed enough to disappear into the passenger seat of Rachid’s Mondeo, when they reach the intersection at the Avenida de La Marina a few miles further on, he will roll down the window and lean out to feel the cool evening air on his face, convincing himself that he saw nothing. He will be just another passenger among the thousands of others who travel along Route 332 every day, people filling that over-populated area for a few seconds and then lost again along the capillaries of the traffic heading for one of the small towns nearby or continuing on to some other part of Europe. At that point, his only thought is that he must tell no one what he’s seen (not even Rachid, who will know from his face that something has happened? Why didn’t you wait for me by the roadside? You seem worried, has something happened? ), and yet he needs to tell someone as soon as possible, because he won’t be able to rest until he does; only by sharing the fear will he be able to detach it from himself. He approaches the junction and slows his pace to something approaching normal. He stops for a moment to open his basket and throw the fish into the gutter, the fish he caught and that now disgust him. He imagines the crows or the foxes biting greedily into them. He feels like throwing up. The lagoon, which was the color of cast steel when he arrived, is now smooth and delicate, like old gold, with coppery tints on the waves whipped up by the breeze.

I’VE SAT my father down in front of the TV to watch his morning Western, whichever one was on the pay-per-view that day. He sits there amazed at the galloping horses, the neighing, the Indians, and the noise of gunfire: I know he won’t move until I come back. After the Western, they’ll put on some movie about terrorists, with scowling Arabs speaking a guttural language, translated into subtitles too small to decipher on the TV screen; or one about policemen chasing drug-traffickers, Latinos or blacks, with lots of cars screeching round corners, crashing into each other and, finally, hurtling off a high metal bridge. He’ll stay there, eyes glued to the screen or, more likely, he’ll doze off, eyes closed — it comes to the same thing. In fact, he stares with equal interest at the bathroom wall when I’m washing him or at the ceiling when I put him to bed. The important thing is that he doesn’t try to get up and risk hurting himself. To avoid this, I put him in a big armchair that he couldn’t get out of even if he wanted to, because it’s too deep and too low — not, of course, that he’d have the strength to stand up anyway, but just to make sure he won’t fall out, I roll up a sheet, wrap it round his chest and tie it to the chair back, taking care not to tie it too tightly. I check that he can move his body back and forth. Is that all right, not too tight? I ask simply to say something, simply to ask something, because he hasn’t spoken for months now, and I can’t even tell if he can actually see. That is, he can see, because he closes his eyes if I shine a bright light in his face or if I make him turn his head toward a lightbulb, and his eyes follow my hand if I move it slowly from side to side in front of him; and he can hear too, although it isn’t clear whether he understands me or not; he jumps and looks frightened if I shout at him or if he hears a loud noise immediately behind him. He hasn’t spoken since they removed the tumor from his trachea. He doesn’t speak, but he could write and ask for things in writing, he could express himself through gestures, but he doesn’t — he doesn’t show the least interest in communicating. The doctors have run all kinds of tests and scans and tell me that since there’s no damage to his brain, they can’t understand what’s wrong with him. Age. He’s over ninety now. He’s become a shop-window mannequin. Not that I’m particularly interested in anything he might have to say, although now that Liliana doesn’t come any more and I’ve closed the workshop, I do spend more time observing him. I watch him, study him, learning useless lessons with no practical application. Human life is nature’s biggest waste of time and energy: just when it seems that you’re beginning to make the most of what you know, you die, and those who come after you have to start all over again from scratch. Helping a child learn how to walk, taking him to school and teaching him to tell a circle from a square, yellow from red, solid from liquid, hard from soft. That’s what he taught me. Life — a waste of time. Get used to it. He’s always been very bright, the old man, bright and a real bastard too. But that’s what he taught me and what I repeated to Liliana, perhaps simply because I wanted to make her feel sorry for me. I’m packing things away: it’s time to shut up shop, I told her. And she said: Well, it’s never too late to learn something new. One day, I’m going to cook you both a really good sancocho , which is like a stew, except that we add vegetables you Spaniards hardly ever use or don’t even know about — vegetables like arracacha, corn cob, yucca, green plantain, and we season it with coriander, that herb I used to miss so much here until they started selling it in the Colombian shop and in the Muslim shops. A sort of fragrant parsley. We Latin Americans eat it and so do the Arabs. Because it’s on my way, I usually buy coriander in that Arab greengrocer’s next to the halal butcher. I would never buy meat from that butcher, of course. God knows where they get their lamb and their beef. I saw a TV program once that said Spain’s full of illegal slaughterhouses supplying Muslim shops. Apparently, they have to kill the animal while facing Mecca, well, we all have our little ways, I suppose. In the same program, they showed you how Chinese restaurants store ducks, dear God, apparently their fridges smell worse than a dead dog, it’s enough to make your hair stand on end, and you don’t even want to know what else they said they found there. But I was talking about coriander, which you don’t use here, or even know about, just as you don’t know about real fruit: mangos, papayas, soursops, guayabas, uchovías, passion fruit, custard apples, pitayas and ahuyama, which you call squash. You’re getting more familiar with some of those fruits now, because the supermarkets sell them, but as far as I know, you’ve only ever eaten tasteless things like bananas, apples, pears, oranges, and that’s about it, oh, and those awful pineapples that arrive from Costa Rica and taste of nothing at all and go rotten if you leave them in the fridge for a few days. No, don’t laugh, it’s true. I bet you’ve never eaten a decent pineapple in your life. A perfectly ripe pineapple, just picked, with that lovely sweet, honeyed flavor. Her voice, every evening, while I sit him down at the table laid with a plastic table cloth and on which I will place the larger plate with the vegetables and the smaller plate with the omelette, just as she used to do up until a few days ago. Even in his present helpless state, he’s still ruling my life, setting me tasks, imposing a timetable, more or less as he’s always done, yes, my diary is still dependent on him. Before, he achieved this by imposing his authority; now he does so through his silence and ineptitude. He is the powerless patient: he’s swapped authority for a demand for compassion; and I have become his servant, because I feel sorry for him. On the other hand, we have all been subject to his mood swings for as long as I can remember. His life, on the other hand, has been his property alone. He has behaved much as a king behaves — depending on the constitution — or a certain sort of artist — taking no responsibility for his actions: today I protest and complain, tomorrow I won’t utter a word, the day after that I’ll be an attention-seeker, the next I won’t even be able to bear anyone looking at me. Now that I think about it, he did have an artist’s mentality. In his youth, he wanted to be an artist. He loved to read novels, as well as books about history, art and politics. He would borrow them from the local library. On Friday afternoons, he’d get cleaned up, put on a white shirt and a jacket, and go and change his library books. On Sunday afternoons, in other people’s houses, when soccer matches were blaring out from radios, utter silence reigned in ours: my father would be sitting by the window, reading, taking advantage of the afternoon light; then he would lower the blind and turn on the standard lamp next to the only armchair in the house, and remain immersed in his book until supper time, after which he would return to the armchair and resume his reading. The soul of an artist. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor, which is what he wanted me to be as well, but the chaos of the civil war put an end to his ambitions. I managed to put an end to my own ambitions all by myself. I was never interested in the skill he’d chosen for me. I lasted only a few months at art school. He and my grandfather made some of the bits of furniture for the house, furniture decorated in a style that was old-fashioned even then, around the time of the Republic and in the years immediately preceding, because, by then, in the late 1920s and early 30s, people were choosing designs that were vaguely art deco, while they, those staunch revolutionaries, adopted a Renaissance style, with carving reminiscent of certain façades that tend to feature in TV documentaries about Salamanca: full of grottesche , medallions and acanthus leaves. Obsolete from the day they were born, but no one could deny their excellent quality. They lent a dignity to our house at a time when we had barely enough to eat. More a matter of professional pride than extravagance.