Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

“And then there are those impressive sculptures cast in bronze or iron, which we find so amazing,” the teacher went on.

At the school, they showed us the works of Mariano Benlliure, and I almost died of envy, he was still a fashionable sculptor then, despite his statues of the king. What I had done up until then was little more than what shepherds all over the world do, whittling the handles of walking sticks, I had worked with my father in the workshop, and he’d taught me various techniques, but what we were looking at now was art, although my biggest surprise came when we visited an altarpiece by Damià Forment in the School of Fine Arts; that was when I realized my teacher was right, wood really could compete with the grandeur and perfection of stone and metal. My teacher told me: you’ve already worked with wood, so you’ve done the hard part, or do you imagine that Forment didn’t have enormous difficulties to overcome? As I said before, you have to understand wood, even more than you do stone, you have to find out what it can offer, its qualities, what it wants of you, where it’s leading you, the grain, the differences in density that alter millimeter by millimeter; it’s a warmer material than stone, there’s more of a flow of energy between your hand and what you’re sculpting, which is precisely why it often makes more demands on you, it won’t be deceived, it asks you to understand it, to care for it, it asks you what a friend asks at the beginning of a friendship; although I should say that, for me, the most beautiful material — my teacher was getting carried away now — because it’s the one closest to man, is even humbler than wood. I mean clay, which adapts itself to your hand, is easily marked, clay is a prolongation of yourself, after all, you yourself are clay and will be clay again one day. When you work with clay, you understand that. You realize that you are dust and will return to dust. A fragile creature working with a fragile material. And yet, in books, we see those terracotta figures from Crete or made by the Etruscans — still beautiful after thousands of years — and which, by their mere existence, show that, with intelligence and hard work, the fragility of man and clay becomes strength. Stone and metal won’t necessarily last longer than clay. When you finish making a clay object, you have the feeling that you’re letting go of a part of yourself. Rodin modeled his sculptures in clay, that was Rodin, then he cast them in bronze and it became industrialized.

At the art school, we used to go to class equipped with a sketch pad, an inkwell, a pen, a pair of compasses and a triangle. We learned by drawing the capitals and bases of Greek and Roman columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan), we copied engravings from Vignola’s treatise on architecture, we copied the Piazza Sant’Ignazio in Rome, the Pantheon dome, the Parthenon frieze, the elevation of the temples of Paestum, the relief work on the Ara Pacis Augustae. I drew all those things and yet I’ve never seen any of them, I’ve never been to Rome or to Southern or Northern Italy, I’ve never really left Olba, and both the desire to see those places and the possibility were buried the day they put me on a truck and sent me to the Teruel front at the age of seventeen, part of the so-called diaper brigade. When I came home on my first leave, I tore up all those drawings — my fingers gnarled from the cold and full of cuts and calluses from digging trenches with pickaxe and spade, and my ears still ringing with the noise of the bombs and shells that had fallen around me, and I was pursued by images of the frozen corpses you stumbled over at every step and the screams of the wounded, operated on in the field hospitals without any anesthetic, and the moans of the dying being carried along on stretchers, I felt like crying or screaming too, even though I wasn’t wounded and no one was sawing my leg off; more than anything, I felt like running away. I did weep as the truck took us back to the front that first time, leaving the fields of Olba behind. My uniform fitted me better than it had my father, but I didn’t see him that time, my leave didn’t coincide with his, in fact, I never saw him again. But I didn’t know that then. On some nights, lying on my camp bed, I felt as if my head would explode and I trembled more with fear than cold, and had to repeat the word “deserter” to myself over and over in order to stop myself from getting up and running away. Fear of the bombs and the bayonets. More horrible even than being blown up by a bomb was finding yourself face to face with an enemy, the bomb requires nothing of you, there’s nothing you can do, your fate is sealed, but in hand-to-hand combat you are the one who has to act — and my greatest fear was that I might discover I belonged to the secret army of cowards. It troubled me to think I might be a potential coward, although, with time, I realized that any man who finds himself dragged into a war, any man, that is, with a glimmer of intelligence or an ounce of sense, is a potential coward. It’s only human to want to desert and utterly absurd to decide to stay there waiting to get drenched in blood, yours or someone else’s. Not even ideas can drive that thought out of your head. Some will say that you’re fighting hard because you know you’re fighting for a good cause, but that’s not true. Only someone who has been there can speak about these things, only someone who has had that experience can know what I’m talking about — and I’m making no distinction between the people on either side — just whoever was actually there, dragging the weight of his body over those hard, icy rocks — those harsh landscapes of apparently fragile glass: having lived through all that creates a mysterious bond with the enemy, with the man who was and has continued to be your enemy, it transforms him into an accomplice, a comrade, and being transformed into your enemy’s comrade makes everything seem even more unsavory, culpable, absurd, cruel and senseless, but that’s in hindsight, when you — on both sides — know what you’re talking about and despise the ignorance of those who weren’t there and cannot know and yet who speak about war and, like parrots, repeat words like heroism, moral courage, self-sacrifice. Your enemies also know this, although they have won and have continued their cruel behavior because victory is a potent drug that makes you forget everything, creates new feelings, while mutilating and anaesthetizing others, and unleashing pride and greed; as the victor, you want peace to repay you many times over for all that you put into the war, you feel that peace is your personal property. They certainly felt and behaved like proprietors, and yet they know more than all of the people on your own side who stayed here, they understand you better than your family, than your fellow travelers who were lucky enough — or clever enough — to be posted to the rearguard, to barracks, hospitals, offices, armories, places where they weren’t obliged to fire a single shot in the three years that the war lasted. I missed the first two years, but had to endure the last. I looked at my hands and thought about those two tools, simultaneously hard and flexible, capable of working, sculpting, caressing, but also of punching, smashing, killing. I know that, nowadays, hands are worth less and less, many things are done by turning a knob, moving a lever back and forth, hitting a key, pressing a button, but, at the time, hands were still man’s greatest gift, binding him to the creator god, part of the skills given to man by the great sculptor of the universe, whom we know does not exist (although my father used to say: never forget your head — your hand is a like a pair of pliers, just a tool — but the head is the man, the seat of man’s mechanism, of understanding, desire, willpower, the ability to withstand the very worst).