Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

What am I doing out of bed? What am I doing wandering about the house that is only dimly lit by the moon when I walk past the windows in the dining room and pitch-black when I go down the corridor and past the door to my brothers’ bedrooms? Perhaps I woke up and, seeing my uncle’s bed empty, set off to find him. I’m five years old. To the right of the corridor are the stairs that lead down to the workshop. To reach the door handle, I have to stand on tiptoe. I manage to open the door. I don’t know what I think I’m going to find. At the bottom of the stairs, there’s a line of light beneath the door into the workshop, and I advance slowly toward it, afraid I might fall, feeling my way along the wall, feeling carefully for every step, and when I do finally open the door, there is my uncle, sitting, head bowed, eyes fixed on something I cannot see, but which, as I approach, I discover to be a little wooden cart, which he’s holding in his hands. Filled with excitement, I race over to him and he looks up, surprised. I grab the cart and try to wrench it from his grasp, but he holds on tight and looks at me, amused, making the wheels of the cart spin with one finger tip, and I release my grip and discover, lying on the bench to his right, a very thin piece of wood which is, in fact, the silhouette of a horse. The first thing my uncle does when he sees me is to hide the horse beneath a cloth next to him, but when he realizes that I’ve already seen it, he smiles resignedly, sets the wheels spinning again, gently pushes away my hands and returns to the task he was immersed in when I entered. He’s making the horse a pair of reins, threading a slender piece of leather through the tiny hole next to the horse’s mouth. I was expecting you. Santa Claus’s little helper woke you up. Santa Claus says you can see the cart and touch it for a moment, but that you must then go back to sleep so that he can leave it at the end of your bed the day after tomorrow, which is the day when children get their presents. Now I’m the one making the wheels spin with one finger, looking at my first real toy, it’s the first time Santa Claus has ever visited the house. I celebrate the fact that on this night I’ve left my room, walked down the dark corridor, feeling my way along the wall, before being drawn to the line of light under the workshop door. He takes me back to my room, turning on the lights as we go. How did you manage to come down the stairs in the dark? You could have fallen and cut your head. Now let’s both go back to bed and go to sleep, you and me, he says as he draws back the blankets so that I can get in, then pulls them up to my chin. Imagine walking about barefoot on such a cold night, he says. Then he sits down on his bed and starts taking off his shoes. Why did my father, who either did or didn’t carve the elaborate desk, never once make me a toy, a cart, a Pinocchio with a long nose, a wheel? I don’t remember him making any of us a toy, not even Carmen. I’m thinking this as I once again see my uncle’s hand as he accompanies me to the fair and wins a prize at a shooting gallery, a small tin truck hanging on a wide strip of paper that he took just two shots to perforate and tear. The man running the booth congratulates him on his marksmanship and asks: Are you a hunter? And my uncle turns to me: you’ve enough to set up your own freight company now and earn your living, he says, laughing, you’ve got a cart, a horse and a truck, all you need is some gas. Then he places one hand on my shoulder and guides me toward the bumper cars, where we both climb aboard. The metallic sound of the music blaring out from the loudspeakers, the lights, the colored Chinese lanterns, the grown-ups dancing, the music, I can see it all now and hear the music, the couples dancing beneath the lights and the little Chinese lanterns, the songs of Antonio Machín and Bonet de San Pedro, the songs my mother sings as she does the ironing, and now I can hear my uncle’s voice, twenty years later: always remember, great oaks from little acorns grow. I’ve finished my military service, I’ve abandoned art school, and I’ve told him that I want to stay and work as a carpenter in the workshop, and he says: small things are the embryo of larger things, just as every fully grown man starts out as a fetus. And on this sunny morning, I think he was right, happiness can be summed up in that skinny wooden horse and its cart, the tin truck, the lights of the fair and the metallic clang of the bumper cars and the sparks crackling from the web of wires crisscrossing overhead. And the smells of the fair: candy floss, toffee apples, the burnt oil from the stall selling fritters

He says:

“Esteban, we cannot make large things without first making small ones, for example, the maquette that a carpenter makes contains the whole building the architect then goes on to construct, there are no big professions and small professions. I’m glad you’ve decided to stay here with us in the workshop, but you must remember that. Don’t forget: God sits on a chair, eats at a table and sleeps in a bed, just like anyone else. He can make do without the altarpieces and statues and books dedicated to him — including the Bible — but he can’t manage without his chair, table and bed.” My uncle was trying hard. He wanted me to feel at ease with my profession, to begin to love it. He thought I felt like a failure for dropping out of art school. He probably sensed that I needed to love myself a little. But to me, it sounded like empty rhetoric — which it was — because I had just started going out with Leonor and she was what I loved and, through her, I was learning to love myself. I was learning about my body with each part of her body, and my own body was gaining in value because it was part of hers, her complement, I thought we shared two bodies that could never be parted, could never live without one another. We saw each other whenever we had a free moment. When I finished work I would race off to find her. My father: And where are you off to in such a hurry? We would take refuge in the back row of the cinema in Misent (we would go in when the film had already started and the lights were down, so that no one would recognize us), we would make love in the sand dunes, we would rent rooms in boarding houses where sailors went with whores. I brought her to the marsh, and her body was the only one that never made me feel I was soiling the place. Her mud-smeared body was beautiful, even when it smelled of the putrefaction in which we’d been lying. We would wash at the spring, where the water was cleanest, the excitement of treading on that soil slippery as snake skin, the caressing touch of the plants floating in the water, the green filaments clinging to her white flesh and making her body look as if it were wounded and begging for a little tenderness, the faint smell of slime and putrefaction. My uncle’s rather labored hymns to the lathe and the saw seemed to me as futile as my father’s gloomy complaints. Ah, the cool water of the untruth, so easy to drink. But truth was that flesh I could touch, her saliva, her teeth biting into my neck as she moaned with pleasure, the moist, sticky body I embraced in the mud. I didn’t want to stay in the workshop, but then I had no idea what it was that I did want.

The back of the calendar for 1960 kept hidden away by Esteban’s father in one of the many invoice files piled up in the cabinet in that glazed room known as the office and which was reached by a set of steps. Only the first page of the calendar, the cover, is missing, but one can safely assume that it does date from 1960 because — even though the year doesn’t appear on each month’s page — on the very bottom of the last page, December, in tiny print, is the name and address of the printer and, underneath, the date when the calendar was presumably printed. September 1959. Since his father wrote these notes, no one has had access to them, not even Esteban, who hasn’t bothered to look through the mountain of old papers that fills nearly the whole cabinet, which has eight shelves and is about eighteen feet wide by ten feet high. The twelve leaves of the calendar are illustrated with images of women in regional dress posing before familiar landscapes or well-known attractions or sights from the area they represent. The explanatory note for the January image says: Castilian woman standing outside the city walls of Ávila; February: A Navarrese woman from the Valle de Ansó. March: A Catalan pubilla outside her farm; April: A young woman from Seville standing next to the Torre del Oro. May: A Valencian woman in traditional dress. June: Fisherwomen from La Coruña. July: Woman from Coria (Cáceres). August: “Dulcinea” standing near the windmills of Campo de Criptana. September: Basque housewife. October: An Aragonese woman dressed to dance the jota at the Fiesta del Pilar in Zaragoza. November: Woman from the Canary Isles next to the thousand-year-old dragon tree. December: Woman from the Balearic Islands. The hand-written notes are on the back of the pages from June to October (inclusive). The penciled notes are in tiny writing and some parts have faded so completely as to be illegible. That is why they are not included here.