Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

The image of the dog lying in a pool of blood makes me shudder (what will become of you and your innocence, Tom?), but I respond sarcastically:

“Don’t tell me you have difficulty getting past that first mouthful too. I thought it was just me.”

General laughter.

I go on:

“Yesterday in the paper, there were reports of floods in Pakistan that had left I don’t know how many thousands dead; then, in Afghanistan, a bus had plunged down a ravine, another thirty dead; in Iraq, a bomb exploded outside a police station, killing another fifty. And all on the same day. In this avalanche of news, the report from Iraq seemed to me, in a way, both willful and naive: I thought to myself, why bother with these attacks when Allah kills quite enough people on his own account.”

“Pariahs of the Earth that Fanon, Mao, Lenin, Marx and Che all vainly tried to save (they won’t let themselves be saved, they’re hopeless cases), and because the heart has reasons that reason cannot know, they continue chanting suras to Yahweh-Allah, the bearded one, and even diligently help him in his task as the Great Executioner. So why bother trying to figure it out?” says Francisco.

Secular Carlos says:

“Someone once said that the people who believe in God are the ones who have least reason to.”

“Poverty is naturally pessimistic. The poor are always convinced that, however hard a time they’re having, something far worse is lurking just around the corner. As a human being you’re basically born guilty, and God only confirms that pessimistic view, especially if you happen to be born in a shantytown or in some bad neighborhood on the outskirts of town, or go hungry from the moment your mother offers you her withered breast to chew on and sends you out to work as soon as you can stand. If you lose an arm, the priest, rabbi or ulama is quick to remind you that you could have lost your head, and if you lose your head, he’ll persuade you that it would have been far more serious if whoever it was had chopped you up into little pieces, because then there would be no body and no funeral mass. Even without a head, your relatives are happy and give thanks to God that they still have at least most of the corpse that they can take to be buried and thus feel superior and sorry for the neighbors who haven’t found so much as their loved one’s nose. Poor wretches, they think, because they have no one and nothing to which they can dedicate a mass, not even a consoling bit of spleen or a thigh or a kidney,” I say, pleased with the direction the conversation has now taken.

“I think the upper classes are more skeptical as far as the virtues or qualities of a corpse are concerned. It can easily be replaced with cocktails at some deluxe funeral home or, if their grief is more intense, eased by a shopping trip to New York, or, perhaps more fittingly, a melancholy stroll among olive trees, cypresses and ruins on one of the Greek islands,” says Francisco, adding: “It’s touching the way the poor search so desperately for their dead, even though there’s nothing left of them. They don’t care if they stink, if they’re mutilated or rotten; they want to take them with them, to collect the corpses before the city workers pick them up, or whoever it is who has to deal with any carrion. There’s probably some distributive justice going on here: the poorest families from the poorest countries are the richest in corpses. They have no money, no villa in Cap Ferrat, not even a modest pension to look forward to, but they’re the owners of a rich variety of macabre biomass: those who have died in accidents at work, of an overdose, of malnutrition, AIDS, cirrhosis of the liver, hepatitis C, domestic violence or a mugging; people who have died because, unable to stand it any longer, they’ve blown their brains out or hanged themselves on an olive tree. They’re the owners of a whole varied legacy of corpses, which they defend tooth and nail. Suffer the poor to come unto me, said Jesus.”

“He said suffer the little children to come unto him not the poor.” It’s Carlos again, our Secular Pear.

Me:

“Of course, but he was probably referring to the children of the poor, because no rich man would allow his son to approach a stranger. The poor man would, though, because that meeting might be the beginning of some profitable transaction. The poor tend to exist below the threshold invented by the Protestant bourgeoisie and that they call morality.”

It’s the sour smell that predominates: in summer, it gets mixed up with other stronger, more unpleasant smells, the smell of decomposition, of dead meat, but the most unbearable of all is the smell of rotting fish or seafood. Leave a hake out in the sun for a couple of days, or an octopus or a few mussels, or the remains of the fish you’ve just eaten, leave them out in the garbage can during those suffocatingly hot summer days, and you’ll see what becomes of the meal you so enjoyed eating and for which you would pay fifteen or twenty euros in a restaurant or a bar: not that our garbage collection is exactly perfect, partly because people are totally unscrupulous about what they put in their trash cans, we’ve even found dead dogs, the putrefying bodies of cats or rats, when people know they’re supposed to put their garbage in bags, not loose, and certainly nothing dead, especially not in summer, the towns can’t cope with all the crap produced by the thousands and thousands of tourists, the cans aren’t big enough, they either overflow or sit there surrounded by bags that the dogs or the rats gnaw at, scattering the contents everywhere; the streets in the town center stink, and so do the residential areas: it’s a kind of uniformly funereal smell that mingles with the smells from the flowers and the gardens around the apartments and houses, and with the smell of gasoline, and ends up becoming a single smell, the smell of the coast. I was paid to put up with it, and although some of my colleagues used to wear a mask, I never bothered, I’ve got a fairly robust sense of smell or maybe it’s simply that I’m not very sensitive, but I do find it odd that tourists come here and pay good money to spend a month next to those stinking trash cans. They’re probably used to it, because their cities smell the same or even worse, after all, the same things rot everywhere, the same brands from the same chains, bought in the same superstores all decorated in the same style. Not that I care. According to one of my fellow garbage men, Nico, who came as a child from a village up in the mountains, it’s the smell of the twenty-first century, neither good nor bad, it’s simply what the new age smells like, the twentieth century was one smell and now it’s another, he says. Until quite late into the twentieth century, the smell was wet grass and basil, but also the dung from donkeys or cows, and dirty clothes, and unwashed crotches (don’t you remember being told how the old ladies in the village really stank, they’d never washed in their life, because washing was for whores, how they stank of pee or decades of concentrated menstrual blood; and how the old men smelled of pee, as well as dried cum); now we’ve become like animals, and our lairs stink because of all the stuff we keep in the fridge until it absolutely has to be tossed away; I shouldn’t think the caves and huts of primitive men smelled of Chanel No. 5, and can you imagine what the streets of the big cities were like two thousand years ago? And imagine what ancient Rome was like: animal bones and guts rotting in the mud along with vegetables and bits of fish, all thrown out into the street, buckets full of the night’s excretions tossed out of the windows with a cry of garde loo, assuming of course that the emptier of the bucket had the courtesy to warn passersby. Rome’s refuse collectors had to pick up dead animals abandoned on the highway and throw them onto the carts, and sweep up real shit, and, from what I’ve seen in that TV series, Rome , they would probably pick up three or four human corpses every night — another corpse for the cart, I’ll take the arms and you take the legs, and one, two, three and UP, God, what a weight — bodies left on street corners, with their guts hanging out, smelling of shit, or already half-rotten, the flies green as emeralds forming a buzzing cloud around the corpse; if a rat, which is only about the size of your hand, smells bad when it rots and provokes a swirl of bluebottles and wasps around it, imagine what a rotting body weighing a hundred and fifty pounds must smell like, and imagine the swarm of insects around that. You see dead bodies in movies and on the TV news. They don’t smell, but those rotting bodies, swollen as wineskins, washed up on the banks of the river that runs through Rome and whose name escapes me, well, imagine the stink of that, and the garbage collectors didn’t have gloves or masks then, no day-glow vests so that they wouldn’t get knocked down in the dark by a runaway horse. I guess they would only collect the trash during the day, because it would be just impossible at night, too dark, don’t you think? Mind you, it doesn’t exactly smell of roses here in the summer. In winter, it’s different: there are fewer people, the cans don’t overflow with trash, except on the holidays: Christmas and New Year, or days when there’s a lot of present-giving, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and so on, but not many; apart from days like that, the trashcans are plenty big enough, and there are some areas it’s hardly worth bothering with, areas where there are mainly vacation homes, apartment blocks near the marina or housing developments up in the mountains, where, in the winter months, the trashcans are empty or pretty much so, and the air you breathe there is very different from the summer air, the cold freezes the smells, makes them less potent, keeps them in their place, stops them spreading; when it’s cold, it’s the things themselves that smell, each separate thing, not the air; if something smells bad, it’s just that one thing that smells, not like in summer, when the smell really spreads, like gauze impregnated with the stench of filth, and that gauze is everywhere, wrapping about everything. On winter days like today, when I used to ride on the running board on the back of the truck, bumping along the streets of those developments built along the coast, or in among the elegant houses up in the hills, there were some nights when I felt as I imagine people who go water-skiing must feel: the slap of cold air in your face, the smell of wet grass, resin, damp earth, the solitude of the night and the darkness (and we’re the only people out in those streets edged with walls or railings lush with vegetation), whole districts where there’s not a single light in the windows, and in some parts, the mayor doesn’t even bother turning on the streetlamps. It’s like a ghost town where you feel you’re the only man alive, the king of all you survey. These days, now that I’ve got nothing to do since I got laid off at the workshop, I go there for walks and a cigarette, because it’s a way of calming down or escaping, instead of spending the whole day thinking, how the hell are we going to live on my wife’s wages and my last few months of unemployment benefits. We should never have bought that new TV, we gave ours to the kids, but now they’re always squabbling because they each want to watch a different program: the cure is worse than the disease, my wife says, and more expensive too, I add, just to get her goat, because it was her idea to buy a new TV; we should never have bought the new Peugeot either, but it seemed necessary at the time, because, of course, while I was working as a garbage man, our timetables were compatible, with her working during the day and me at night, but after I started at the workshop, it was different, I had to be in Olba at half past seven in the morning, and she had to get to the cookie factory in Misent by eight, and once we’d got the kids up and dressed and made them breakfast, it was impossible for us to coordinate things, of course I could have made do with my old moped, after all, it never gets that cold here. Or we could have arranged things so that she changed to the evening shift, as she did later on, then I could drive her there in the car after lunch. When they closed the cookie factory, she managed to get a job at the fruit warehouse, which was lucky, although, depending on the day, she doesn’t finish work until midnight and sometimes even later. And now that I’m unemployed, she’s the one who needs the car, the one who uses it. It’s just as well we didn’t move to Olba, which she always preferred to Misent: you’d be nearer your job, she’d said, and it would be better for the kids. It would have been disastrous, because we even looked at a couple of semi-detached properties: they’re about half the price of houses in Misent, and they’re better built, better finished, and with a little garden too, she said, looking out at the handkerchief-sized patch complete with a tiny palm tree, which the red palm weevil would doubtless kill off in a matter of months. I kept thinking, why is she looking at house prices and comparing them with prices in Misent, when we’ve never even owned an apartment in Misent and have always rented? I just hope to God we can afford to go on doing that.