Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Early the next morning, before going out, I took the goldfinch up to the roof terrace and opened the cage door. The bird hesitated for a few moments: initially, just sticking its head out, fluffing its feathers several times as if preparing to take flight, then turned round and went back into the cage to peck at the seeds in the feeder; after a while, it again hopped over to the open door and, this time, it barely paused before fluttering over to the rail, where it remained perched and hesitant for a few more seconds. It turned its head nervously this way and that, repeatedly glancing across at the cage door, moving its head as if an elastic spring had gone wrong. And then, it flew off, slipping away into the faint morning mist softened with dawn light, growing smaller and smaller until it merged with the blue of the sky. My eyes filled with tears as I watched it vanish, and I felt a strange mixture of feelings: while it was beautiful to see the bird flying free, I felt very sad to lose it. And a knot formed in my throat to think that the goldfinch would not escape disaster either. Unaccustomed to finding its own food, to defending itself against any tiny enemies it might meet, it would have great difficulty surviving. And yet it was beautiful to watch it plunging into that diaphanous winter sky: the slight morning haze, the bird’s precise flight, the fragile light of the rising sun misting the blue with gold. The whole episode provided an illusion of freedom, of untarnished joy. We human beings also go out into the world with certain handicaps.

Again my eyes fill with tears — I feel like crying. I bring my fist down hard on the steering wheel (watch out for the airbag, a blow like that might trigger it), before opening the door of the Toyota to make enough room for putting on the wellingtons I left on the floor in front of the passenger seat. While I’m putting them on, I again imagine the bird growing smaller and smaller until it’s lost from view. Liliana’s face: you know, I had that warm feeling you get when happiness is about to arrive, as if something’s about to happen, a kind of inner hustle and bustle, like someone tidying the house for some important visitor — putting things in their proper places, dusting the furniture and cleaning the windows, while, from the kitchen, comes the smell of a special meal being prepared. Now it’s Álvaro on the other side of the desk in the office: You might have warned me. Do you really think I knew this was how things would end? The conflicting feelings are evident in his moist eyes. I taught Álvaro to hunt and fish at the lagoon — about forty years ago — just as my uncle had taught me. Yes: in the mid-seventies—Álvaro is a keen worker, who does all the jobs at the workshop to perfection. Despite the paternal ghost hovering over us, we establish a kind of friendship. I’m just back from my most recent escapade, and he’s the same as when I left — my father’s loyal son. Sometimes he comes with me on a Saturday morning, we have lunch together and I teach him how to handle the rifle and he’s surprised at all the things I know about the lagoon: as you see, time debases everything, erases it, what can I say? Álvaro and me like two brothers, if only we had been, I wish things had turned out differently between us, of course I do, and for you too, although you can’t really complain, you’ve had a steady job without too much responsibility, a house, a family. What I regret most of all is that things didn’t turn out differently for me — if only, rather than spending decades feeling that everything was just temporary, and then realizing too late that life is nearly over and things have never gone as we expected, and that they’re beyond our control, yes, if only, if only… It’s his eyes, the glint in his eyes that I see in the glow of the sunrise. The bird growing smaller and smaller, becoming one with that same glow. Álvaro’s eyes. The glint in his eyes, the tiny spark that lights up the pupil, surrounded now by a wash of blood. The pupil floats in that reddish liquid, just as the sun did a few moments ago, as it emerged from the sea: a red ring floating above a pool of blood. Why am I surprised to find that Álvaro hates or despises me? I don’t like my own father, and yet I’ve spent my whole life with him. Álvaro came with me on dozens of days like today, when you can breathe in the clean winter air. The two of us alone under the clear sky, walking through this luminous space, the light outlining every object, emphasizing every shape, making each one stand out against the landscape like a paper cut-out: after the first autumn rains, the heavy air of the lagoon grows thinner, and the putrefying smell of the stagnant water is replaced by another more vegetable odor, the odor of fresh, new-born vegetables. That’s what I can smell now, like a stimulant, a tonic that helps me walk more energetically, swing my arms higher, more vigorously, take longer, faster strides, step more firmly; for a moment, I look like a man determinedly going in search of what he wants. I advance along the path: the only sound is the whispering of the reeds as I part them, the soft murmur as they swish against my shoulders or brush against my knapsack as they fall back, the monotonous sucking noise of each boot lifting up from the squelching mud. The cawing of a crow, the fluttering of the coots: they jump out almost between my feet, I frighten them and they startle me too when I hear the beating of their wings, the whirr of the air. The dog races, mesmerized, after those fluttering wings, then stops at the edge of the water and turns to watch two ducks taking off. He barks. These noises shatter the glassy air; the splashing of some creature launching into the water: a frog, a toad, a rat; the barking of the dog amplified by the glass dome of the sky. I walk and feel as if I were immersing myself in a world apart, inhabited by other beings and ruled by other laws. Like my father, I feel a sudden desire to stay here forever. Like him, I am a divided being when I leave this labyrinth for the outside world. The dog runs excitedly up to me, overtakes me, then comes trotting back, wagging his tail; he stops, jumps up and puts his front paws on my belly. Filled with emotion, I stroke him, rubbing his head and back. Our guilt is going to take away your innocence, little dog. The wind has dropped, and the silence is almost painful, a warning of the great silence to come, the silence that will fill everything. On some winter days, the north winds bring with them the hum of traffic from the nearby main road or — more loudly from the highway — cars and trucks passing incessantly, a sound amplified beneath the wintry dome of the sky — noises which, on the other hand, the summer mists seem to swallow up the way blotting paper or a sponge absorbs liquids. Not today, there’s no wind today, no noise, not a breath. The welcome knife of the cold wind stopped. I move with a sense that I’m walking along its motionless blade. I’ve parked my SUV further up, because I want to enjoy the walk, but my contemplation of the landscape, my thoughts, are not a distraction from my goal, I know now how far I’ll be able to drive with the Toyota, I’ve calculated the width of the half-overgrown path, the state of the surface, I’ve checked that I’ll be able to drive the car up to the point where the water blocks the path, the bend in the lake, the kidney-shaped pool that, in the summer months, is cut off from the rest of the marsh: for years, my uncle and I used it as a pantry, a natural fish farm, which, tomorrow, will find its nutrients further enriched with meat to nourish its watery inhabitants, at the same time contaminating or poisoning the little spring my uncle showed me I could drink from; once again, good and evil all mixed up together. This was where I baited my first hook, cast my line and caught a couple of tiny fish (I can’t remember what they were, mullet or tench, I imagine) that my grandmother cooked for supper that evening. A stew of potatoes, garlic, sweet peppers and a bay leaf. The fish are for the boy, because he caught them. On the way home, it began to rain and we had to take shelter in the ruined building where we had left the bike. When we saw that the rain showed no signs of stopping and the sky was growing ever darker, my uncle decided to get on the bike, with me sitting on the crossbar with his waterproof cape covering me, head and all, and the rain drumming on the fabric and me inside as if in a glasshouse; I can still feel the warmth of my uncle’s body and the plip-plop of the ever larger raindrops on the cape. In these days of heavy autumn rain, or during winter, you can hear the roar of the waves even in the marshes, because the waters of the sea swell the lagoon, reaching up into the mouths of the river and the drainage canals, and then the mirror of the lake shatters into a thousand pieces, which, like droplets of molten metal, shift and jostle nervously, constantly changing shape and position. The lagoon comes alive, everything moves: the water, the reeds, the shrubs, everything. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but my memories focus on that one afternoon when the sky suddenly grew dark, and the day turned into a strange night bathed in a pale light that seemed to spring from the surface of the water. Light emanated from the leaves, the reeds, from the vegetation on the banks, an inverted light cast upward into the great, black clouds, like a photographic negative. My uncle holds my hand as we walk through that nightmare landscape as far as the ruined warehouse where he left his bike. I hear the rain hammering down on the roof tiles and see the ghostly light, like an optical illusion, on the brick wall nearest the entrance, which suddenly glows intensely red, highlighting the rough surface.