Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Bernal:

“He’s nuts about her and has simply let her spend, spend, spend.”

Justino:

“She must be forty-five if she’s a day, and when she wears one of those blouses showing off her nice, firm, perky tits, you just know they must be silicone, because they could be the breasts of a twenty-year-old; but when she wears those skin-tight jeans, her ass still looks like an apple you’d like to bite into.”

“If you had enough teeth left.”

“Oh, I’ve none of my own, but my implants have given me back my adolescence. I do have to be careful, though, because when I bite, I can’t always tell how hard I’m biting.”

“But what exactly are you biting and whose whatever-it-is are you biting into?”

More laughter.

Time to hear another fragment from Francisco’s hidden — and falsified — autobiography:

“Women are always man’s main obstacle.” I’m sure this isn’t what he thinks of Leonor, who was hardly an obstacle in his life. I don’t think he’d ever have gotten to the second rung on the ladder without her. “They’re the main brake on our actions. Fall hopelessly in love, and you’re lost.”

Who could he have fallen so hopelessly in love with? While Leonor was still alive? After she died? I don’t mean did he fall in love with her corpse, like an Edgar Allan Poe protagonist, but did he fall in love with someone else when Leonor was already dead or while she was still alive, or has he perhaps fallen in love more recently? When he shuts himself up in his house for the night, does he receive calls from that woman, do they talk dirty on the phone, does he invite her out on his yacht on those days when he disappears from Olba and all the shutters on his house are closed? Or do they lock themselves up in the house for weeks on end? I don’t know that he was ever in love with Leonor, the marriage suited him — it suited them both — he used her — they used each other — economically, socially, eugenically. All right, their son didn’t quite turn out the way they wanted, but they certainly can’t complain about their daughter, an economics whiz. He says he finds her coolness toward him wounding, but I figure she’s intelligent enough to know that if she does talk to him, he’ll only start nagging her. He and Leonor were business partners, like Tomás and Amparo, but Tomás is mad about Amparo: theirs is clearly a sexual relationship (I know this, you can tell), they share a taste for sex, vice, luxury and doubtless even drugs. Pedrós is always touching his nose when he talks, and I imagine she’s the same, the kind who lets someone else put the powder on the mirror, then, apparently reluctantly, sniffs it up, just to be polite of course, but if no cocaine is on offer, she’ll be sure to mention it, in case someone else is willing to share theirs. And they’ve accumulated money together, which is how they’ve managed to live the way they do; I can’t imagine Francisco and Leonor sharing any vices; I’ve always had the impression that his vices occupied a separate, clandestine world, although who knows? And what about her?

Bernal has now stopped playing with his cell phone, having missed the last part of the conversation. He says:

“It’s hard to be really in love with a woman and do anything useful in life. Anxiety eats away at you. There’s no point getting hooked up with a woman who’s hard to get, that’s tantamount to spending the rest of your life climbing Everest. You should marry a woman you can keep without too much effort. You can always pay for the company of a real beauty if you want to. For a few euros you can have an eighteen-year-old Russian girl who’s better-looking than any movie star. You fuck, you pay and you go back home to have supper with your family, with your wife, who’s a good cook, but lousy in bed, and who would never dream of leaving you, because, quite apart from anything else, no one is interested. She goes to parents’ night at school, is a leading light of the PTA or whatever they’re called — you know, all that social-democratic garbage that the Partido Popular gleefully copies because it fits their modern-responsible-happy-family image with just a touch of Opus Dei — plus she keeps the children in line and knows which is the best detergent to buy and the best cheese and the best local foie gras. She irons your shirts and sews on your buttons, or can tell the maid how to do it, having first put her through more trials than an Olympic athlete. That’s what a man needs, because it takes a lot of courage to live with a woman who’s your equal and makes you cook the vegetables and hang out the clothes, as well as being insatiable in the sack and screwing you dry. Hard work. No man could stand that.”

“Amparo is too much of a woman for Tomás or for anyone. It’s not just that she’s drop-dead gorgeous, but if she’s arranged to meet someone at seven o’clock, then, rather than arrive even a minute late, she’ll leave whoever she happens to be with in mid-fuck. She has character, style, independence. As well as nice tits and a nice ass. It’s really hard to cope with that at home on a daily basis, having to fight off marauders — because that’s what it’s like these days,” says Justino, who is known to be something of a marauder himself and, doubtless, one of those men Amparo has, on some occasion, left high and dry in mid-fuck.

Bernal again:

“She’s certainly an important factor, but less so than you seem to think. He knows how to have fun too, how to live it up. Amparo played only a small role in the collapse of Tomás’s businesses, all right, there were the facial peels, the nails, the spa treatments, Revlon, Dior, Loewe, Miuccia Prada, and all the rest, but that’s normal for any bourgeois bit of pussy. The wife of any small-time property developer, car dealer or owner of a chain of gas stations or an apartment block will be sure to have acquired that designer stuff over the last few years. Or are there wives who don’t go to those shops, wear those clothes or indulge in aromatherapy massages and hydromassage baths? He was the real problem, what with his extravagant tastes, his desire to impress, the money he lavished on social or should that be municipal events (not forgetting the usual bribes paid to the local councilor); and then there were the wines from Burgundy, the seafood, the champagne, and so on, not to mention the Russian girls, and the cocaine,”—ah, so the secret’s out, I always suspected that he took cocaine from the way he kept rubbing his nose, I shoot a quick glance at Francisco, who remains impassive—“because the bastard certainly hasn’t stinted himself.”

Justino:

“He’s screwed the best prostitutes in the region. Not the ones in the clubs, who charge fifty or a hundred or two hundred euros. No. He only used to go there on work outings with his employees or to impress small-time suppliers. He’s always gone for the kind of woman who appears to be working for herself, but is, in fact, just one tentacle of a mafia octopus, the kind of woman you find at the Marina Esmeralda lying on the deck of some yacht, which might belong to a friend, male or female, who has lent it to her, crew included, to enjoy a few days of rest. Rest from what, though? From business deals, catwalks, boutiques, photo sessions or some other sort of session. At least that’s what she’ll tell you when she gets you in her sights. The kind who always has bottles of Moët chilling in the fridge, a forty-inch flat-screen TV and a jacuzzi in a 2000-square foot apartment with a sea view or a clifftop villa in Xábia or Moraira, owned by mafia from Eastern Europe or possibly Western Europe (you’d have to check whose name is on the deeds, and even then you’d never know for sure who’s hiding behind the ostensible owners). Pedrós has often bought himself a few weeks in one of those villas, telling Amparo and us that he’s away traveling, phoning home on his cell phone to complain about the rain in Vigo (it hasn’t stopped all week) or how cold it is in Pamplona (enough to freeze your balls off), and that he’s staying another few days so as to sort out the distributor’s accounts (they’re a complete mess, I’ll tell you about it later), when, in fact, he was opening and closing a pair of silky legs. He’s taken those women out to supper at Quique Dacosta’s, at the Hotel Ferrero, at the Girasol when they had that Swiss or German chef working there, or to spend the night in the Westin Hotel. He’s been seen in those places on more than one occasion and word has spread, after all, it’s a very small world here, and everyone knows everyone else. And he’s learned a lot from you, Francisco, I think. By now, he probably knows more about wine than you do.”