Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

I’m fifteen years old and I’m listening to my father. He’s home on leave from the front for the first time, I touch his soldier’s uniform admiringly, not noticing that it’s made from bad quality cloth and looks as if it were meant for someone four inches shorter than him and weighing forty pounds more. I do not yet know that, very shortly, I will be wearing the same one. The war has just begun. He’s in a hurry to tell me what he knows. He takes it upon himself to educate me, about what it is that surrounds every life and gives it meaning, what frees you from notions of destiny or so-called Divine Will and makes you into a man capable of making his own decisions: you’re the only one who can make the best of what nature has given you, you’re not obliged to do more than that — but you must do nothing less either; that’s what he tells me over and over. Knowing that he’ll soon have to return to the front, he thinks he may only have a brief time in which to teach me what he knows. Everything seems to happen very quickly during the war and no one makes any long-term plans. But if I think of him even ten years before that, I see the same pedagogical impulse: I go back to when I was eight. He’s holding my hand and telling me about the origins of the wood piled up in the port of Valencia: the forests of the Congo, the Amazonian jungle, Scandinavia, Canada or the United States, places I saw later on in movies and on the newsreels. I think he’s making it up. I don’t know if the timber arriving in Valencia at the time did actually come from so many different places. Or perhaps I’m the one distorting my memories and putting in his mouth words he never said, but I don’t think so. I can relive that afternoon in the port of Valencia as if it were yesterday, but quite why exactly we’d gone there, I’m not sure. It was the first time I’d ever seen a big city. Later, during the war, I was in Madrid and Zaragoza, and a few years before the war, I had been on an art school trip to Salamanca. But that was all — then it was prison and after that and ever since, Olba. I think we went to Valencia to visit one of my grandmother’s sisters, because she was ill, and my grandmother said she wanted to see her one last time: a family trip. We had lunch in a little apartment that smelled of medicines, of alcohol and iodine and cat pee, of pills and potions kept in chestnut-wood drawers. An old person’s apartment. In the afternoon, the tram travels down the long avenue leading to the port, and from there, we go to the pier where you catch the boat that takes you past the docks and as far as the estuary. During the whole trip, I feel my father’s hand resting on my head, gently guiding me, pointing out the cranes with their dangling loads of wood and the piles of timber on the wharfs that we can see from the boat. The trunks look enormous. When we leave the boat, the others stay on the beach: my grandmother and her sister, my mother, the wife of one of my father’s cousins, who used to live in Valencia and who was also there that afternoon with her two children, two boys I don’t recall ever meeting again, and three other men, I’m not sure who they were, but probably more of my father’s cousins. We were on Las Arenas beach, near the hotel and the beach huts for rich people. The memory of my father on that happy day, the day when he gave me the gift of a train journey, of a visit to a big city with its lively streets, elegant women and cars; I get on a tram and a boat and he’s there with me, holding my hand or guiding me, the palm of his hand resting on my head, and his presence in the memory is part of that gift. The two old ladies, who can’t crouch down, sit on the rented beach chairs. The others lie or sit on the sand, my mother on a towel so as not to stain her skirt, which she tucks up between her knees against the wind, Ramón (who would be, what, two or three years old?) is playing with the sand, running barefoot through the fringe of foam left by the waves as they slowly retreat. They’re drinking — beer and anis for the men, horchata for the women and children — and he separates me out from the group, not even taking my cousins with us — we have some business to attend to, he says by way of an excuse — and he takes me for a walk along the wharfs: from the cranes hang huge tree trunks, white, golden, reddish, dark brown. There’s a book in the office that describes all the woods piled up on the wharf and that my father is now telling me about as we walk past train carriages, vans, carts pulled by great Percheron horses, the drivers idly smoking as they lean against the back of their carts or sit in the driver’s seat, and stevedores bustling back and forth like busy ants. I compare those trunks with the images in the book: there, on the wharf, I see them for the first time life-size and in full color, dark or pale, brown or honey-hued, not in black and white as they appear in my father’s book. Back home, sitting beside him in the workshop, I read, guided by his finger that pauses beneath each word as I pronounce it: the maple tree originates — Dad, what does “originate” mean? — in the Rocky Mountains and Canada, it is a mellow brown, excellent for hard floors, roller-skating rinks or dance floors; rosewood comes from Brazil and is much used in the making of luxury furniture. The Paraná pine or araucaria also comes from Brazil and is highly prized for its unusual honey-colored wood and because it lacks growth rings; the pino amarillo or yellow pine also comes from the Americas and, because it is so strong, has been widely used to provide rafters for the houses in our region. His finger resting on the illustrations shows me the wood that I can now see lying on the concrete and other kinds of timber that, forty years on, I have still never seen. While I’m reading, I keep asking him the meaning of the words I’m saying out loud. Many I don’t understand: originates, excellent, mellow, rafters. But the mystery contained in that unknown vocabulary only increases my curiosity. I will spend weeks trying to introduce those words into my conversation and so I say things like: milk originates in a cow or this bread is excellent — that makes me feel like a grown man who knows certain secrets.

During his leave, my father tells me that in order to love a job, you must have a thorough knowledge of it, understand its purpose, know everything about the materials you work with and respect them — their qualities and defects — as well as the hard work that went into growing and harvesting them: we’re not artists, we’re artisans, although, when all this is over, you’ll be able to go back to the School of Arts and Crafts and become an artist, if that’s what you really want. Always remember, though, that a good carpenter isn’t someone who performs miracles with wood, but someone who makes a living from it; survive first, philosophize later, or make art, but whatever you decide to do, make sure you can earn enough to live on; you also need to know the precise use of each tool: look, touch this chair — he rests his hand on the back — it’s born of the combined labors of nature and man, it was made by people who speak and think, it took a lot of work. The furniture you make supports the bottom or elbows or hands as well as the papers and tablecloths and plates and glasses of someone, intelligent or stupid, rich or poor, but someone, who, thanks to your work, allows himself the little bit of comfort that offers him relief from the hustle and bustle and weariness of each day, just as the headboard on a bed protects sleeping bodies — whether beautiful or misshapen it doesn’t matter — during thousands of nights, it keeps you company while you sleep or if you’re ill, and it’s there, supporting the pillow on which you lay your head the day you die, so you see how important that headboard is. With a bed or a bedside table, your customer has given you access to a world no one else is privy to; more than that, you work with wood from trees that have grown on other continents and were felled by men using specific tools, the trunks of those trees have traveled thousands of miles to get here, they required the work of lumberjacks, dockers, drivers, warehouse workers, sailors, they’ve been hauled along by carts drawn by oxen or by mules, in trucks driven by drivers, in wagons pulled along by a steam engine whose boiler was stoked by a stoker, like the stokers on board the ship that crossed the ocean. When you think like that, then you begin to understand the importance of your work, not because you’re a genius, but quite the opposite, because you’re just one link in the chain, but if that link fails, it will ruin the work of all the others. Man is only his own consciousness, he makes himself. If you don’t know what you’re made of or what the material you use or transform with your work is made of, then you’re nothing. A mere beast of burden. Knowledge gives meaning to your work, makes you a thinking man, because man is what he thinks. For millions of people, work is the only activity that teaches and civilizes them. For others, it’s a form of self-brutalization in exchange for food or money. Yes, people are beginning to live a little bit better now — although this war is sure to bring back poverty — and even we enjoy a few more comforts, but we’re also less as people, the rebel generals doubtless have furniture made of rosewood and walnut wood in their houses, but they’re just mules, they don’t understand the value of work, they think a worker is a mere tool to serve them, unable to think for himself and with no freedom to decide his future, they don’t know the value of what they use, only what it costs, how much money they paid for it. Do you understand what I mean?