Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

end of the notes written by esteban’s father on the back of the calendar.

P.S. When, in a few days’ time, they come to clear the house and take the furniture to the municipal warehouse or to some other place designed to keep all the repossessed goods of the last two years, no one, needless to say, will notice this 1960 calendar lost among the piles of papers, invoices, delivery notes, catalogues, newspapers and magazines. Before the furniture is auctioned, which will happen some months later, the men will empty desk drawers and cupboards of any useless objects and throw papers and items of clothing into the garbage dump, where they will be burned along with other detritus. But that won’t be for a few months.

It was impossible to patrol that labyrinth of water, mud and reeds. The pursuers set fire to the vegetation, intending to smoke out the fugitives, to flush them from their burrows as if they were animals (which they were), dogs were sent in along with the patrols that squelched through the mud, but it proved too costly to track the fugitives down, among the pools, bogs and tiny islands that turned out to be nothing but clumps of plants set adrift or vegetation rooted to the lagoon bottom, and, after all, the eight or ten desperados who had taken refuge there presented no real threat, they were not — as they were elsewhere — guerrilla fighters, but, rather, a handful of cornered, desperate castaways, more dead to the world and more forgotten than those who really had died many years before and whose photographs and names their descendants could see on their headstones in the cemetery, although a few women did continue to make secret visits to the marsh to see their husbands or boyfriends. Locals would see them disappear off into the reeds and return, at nightfall, a couple of days later. As children we heard others mention these men under their breath, when they had probably all long since died, and we imagined them then to be amphibious beings with membranes between their fingers, a kind of web-footed creature covered in scales like the sad aquatic beast from a movie I saw a few years later, Creature from the Black Lagoon , beings condemned to endure a bestial life. Some chose suicide. A revolver pressed to the temple. Or perhaps the muzzle of a rifle placed in the mouth: they would take off one alpargata (although, by then, they were probably barefoot, their alpargatas having long since been eaten away by the damp) and use their big toe to squeeze the trigger. Their comrades would bury them somewhere, or their corpses would be left exposed to the elements, their flesh devoured by animals, and time would eventually cover their bones in mud and scrub. But that wasn’t the story my father kept in his head; for him, the life of the marsh fugitives had a nobler aura. I caught a certain note of satisfaction in his words when he spoke to me of those who had shot themselves: they were not poor beasts worn down by despair, but the only locals who still had the right to call themselves men. Caked in mud, bearded, half-naked, wearing only rags or a loincloth made from the remnants of old clothes or woven together from leaves. He himself had not had access — or else had relinquished the chance to have such access — to that moment when you are absolute master of your own destiny — that moment when you grip the barrel of a rifle with your teeth, when your lips kiss metal. That, for my father, was the moment when a man was almost a god — the only real contact with freedom that life afforded. And his family, we’d been the ones who had forced him to linger on as a lesser being. Well, today, Dad, I agree with you: you’ll never be the master of your own fate, you’ll never be closer to being entirely your own man, the dictator of your own agenda. You have accepted that you’ll never succeed in opening the eyes of a dead child, not even a god can do that, but you can snatch back from death its arbitrary power, by imposing an order, a time and a date: I may have no control over my life, but I do have control over how long my life will last, I own that decisive moment. No greater power has been given to us — we are able to close forever eyes that would otherwise remain open. Whatever priests, politicians and philosophers may say, man is not a bearer of light, he is a sinister breeder of shadows. Incapable of giving life (how can I say this, when I myself came so close to creating life and when humanity continues ceaselessly to reproduce, but I know what I’m saying), he can kill at will. The greatest power a man can wield is that of taking away life. Squeezing the trigger and seeing the bird that had been flying swiftly across the sky suddenly drop like a stone to shatter the mirror of the water. I close my eyes and listen to my father, the noise of his false teeth crunching their way through a lettuce leaf, grinding away at a cookie. That noise gets right inside me. It’s like the sound you hear when you step on a cockroach. Those grinding teeth, the smell when I remove his incontinence pads, his eyes fixed on mine, although I have no idea what lies behind them. The old may have poorer memories than the young, but they are also the ones who forget least. The soft mud, the smell of putrefaction. Into my head come memories that belong to me because I myself amassed those memories, along with others I inherited, but which are no less vivid for that, part of the vortex of a life: they whirl past on a carousel, protagonists and bit-part players, and not only them, because, this touring theater company of mine takes with it the trunks containing the costumes and the crates containing the scenery for all the plays that are to be put on, and yes, the props as well: there are the faces, the gestures, the voices (yes, I can hear all those people talking, there’s no point covering my ears), but there are also the clothes they wear or wore; the rooms in which they lived, the furniture. My nightmare includes both the façades of the houses and the interiors with their own particular smell, because every room has its own smell; the landscapes, the sounds, the light that changes depending on the time of day or night, the temperature — hot or cold, the dense air, the cloying humidity of evening — the languor that fills you as you watch the rain snaking down the window pane, my mother holding the iron close to her face to see if it’s hot enough, or sprinkling the clothes with a few drops of water that sizzle into nothing as the iron touches them; Uncle Ramón’s red eyes as he comes down the brothel stairs, feeling his way along the wall, and when he fastens his seat belt on the passenger side and watches through the window the soul-less warehouses, the places where neon signs flash on and off day and night, the shadows of the orange trees, the emerald-green rice fields, their glow prolonged by the last rays of sun as if the greenness itself were giving off light rather than receiving it, the reeds and the bulrushes.

It isn’t true what they tell you, that you come from nothing and will leave with nothing. You had something when you arrived, Francisco: a fine cradle, linen diapers, a warm bottle, possibly a wet nurse, and certainly, shortly afterward, a nanny or a governess. After school, I would often see you and your brothers picnicking in the park beneath the watchful eye of that woman wearing a white apron. Not that this explains very much. What matters isn’t how you come into the world or how you leave it, but what you are like now: if you have to worry about essentials or if they just come to you naturally, if things fall into your hands or slip through your fingers — or, worse still, if you never get them at all, if your whole life is a struggle to obtain what you know you can’t have. That is the poison. You’re pursued by what you can’t have. What matters isn’t the beginning and the end of the play, curtain-up-curtain-down, but the play itself, how it evolves — life; demagogues like my father tell you that what matters is the beginning — the social class you come from: that’s what revolutionaries tell you — or the ending — the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell: that’s what priests tell you, as people like Francisco do in a way. In both cases, the end — which, for Francisco, was, initially, revolution, and latterly, the creation of a modern, cosmopolitan society — justifies the means, like some modern form of casuistry. Ideologues tell you that it’s a matter of beginnings and endings, which are, in any case, inextricably linked, because for the less favored classes, the suffering of every day also finds its justification in the ending, and both sides devalue the one thing that is of any real value, namely, life itself, the moment: that’s what my Uncle Ramón used to say after he was widowed: he made no distinction between revolutionaries and priests, he had lost the ability to choose, to evaluate, the whole world was part of a thick, malignant drool; that’s what he thought, but it didn’t sour his nature as it did my father’s. His despair was strictly for internal use only. Saying that at the end of the road we’re all going to die alone and, as Machado said, with very little baggage, is rather like the fable of the fox and the grapes. It’s accepting that you won’t pick the grapes because you can’t reach them. You tell yourself: why pick something that’s too green to eat today and that, in a few days’ time, will be rotten: you deny yourself the pleasure of possession, of savoring the moment, why have anything if death will take it all away? But what about the icy milkshakes you take out of the fridge on broiling hot August afternoons, the tender steak you slap on the grill when you have friends over in the winter, or the air-conditioning that cools you while I’m frantically working away in the unbreathable atmosphere of the workshop? Don’t tell me that those things, however transient, are of no importance, I mean they may only last about as long as a cool drink stays cool in summer, but are you really saying those things don’t matter? Of course they do, imagine the construction worker on a roof in the August sun, the man cement-spraying the walls of a swimming pool in forty degrees of heat, or me sweating over a saw because the workshop budget would never stretch to having air-conditioning installed, and you, Francisco, sitting under an air conditioner or on a recliner on the deck of your yacht, enjoying the sea breeze and sipping a single-malt whisky: you’re not going to tell me there’s no difference, vanity of vanities, all is vanity, that’s what you used to say when you were a Christian and an excitable worker-priest in the making. It’s a lie, as you now know and, as you also know, not even the priests believe it, although, for some, faith does manage to override common sense. Faith didn’t remove your ability to take action. You fled from the seminary, you ran at a gallop. You saw the essential contradiction in Catholicism: if you’re convinced that everything will return to dust, why build those huge churches, marble upon marble upon marble. Marble floors, marble columns, marble façades. The mosaics and coffered ceilings and frescos and gold leaf; the gold and marble altars: Travertine, Carrara, Paros; onyx and marble, red and pink and serpentine and green; lapis lazuli and white ivory, and more gold and cedarwood and mahogany, and yet you’re telling me that everything turns to dust once you’ve slammed down the double six on the marble table top at the end of a game of dominoes, when we’re left alone at the bar and you tell me — the friend whose shoulder you can cry on — how disappointed you are, how unhappy. Obviously we are dust and to dust will return, but all in good time — we will return to dust, but you, Francisco, are afraid that death will take away your material pleasures, that the grim reaper will prevent you from going back to your yacht on another luminous day like today, when the sea is utterly calm and blue as blue; in the air, only the crystalline breath of the mistral; or that death might not allow you to eat one last partridge in brine garnished with caramelized shallots, garlic, black pepper and a bay leaf, while, for me, in this workshop, which is blazing hot in summer and damp in winter, the wait for death seems very long and I call on death to see if I can finally get some rest. That’s how you need to think, Francisco, if you want us to be real friends, as we once were, you need to start thinking frankly and not hypocritically: watch me eat the grapes, little fox. Yes, me, I’m eating them: see how the pips crack between my teeth, how the sweet juice trickles from the corners of my mouth, how I chew and suck and enjoy. They’re muscat grapes. The pleasure of desire and the pleasure of the act. If you’re starving, you can’t even allow yourself to feel desire, you cut desire off at the root because it’s such a painful reminder of everything you lack, while for me — rolling in money as I am — it’s the door through which I pass into real life: that’s why I cultivate my desire, feed it, postpone the moment of fulfillment, it is the ample vestibule that precedes pure pleasure, a warehouse set apart from the one in which dire need is stored. I prolong desire, just as, when I’m having sex, I prolong the moment before I come, because I prepare meticulously for that small explosion, I make the foreplay last as long as possible so that my orgasm is all the more intense. I enjoy the thirst for possession, and I enjoy, above all, the moment when I quench that thirst, when desire explodes, when that little spring bursts forth, God, it’s good that little death, la petite mort, that holds you captive for a moment, then returns you back to earth: I think that’s what the French call it, la petite mort , at least I seem to recall reading or hearing that somewhere. When the journey is over, yes, we will both die, each on our appointed day and at our appointed hour, but you will leave without having lived, while I will have lived my life to the full: that’s the difference between us; I will be dust, but, as Quevedo says, I will be dust in love: dust that has eaten, drunk and fucked royally, a dust rich in nutrients, an opulent concentration of the very best that human beings have produced; and maybe, who knows, dust has a memory, a memory that floats obstinately, eternally, above time, and consoles us with the thought that at least we drained life to the very last drop, it’s either that or we’re desperately unfortunate and we will be plagued for all eternity by the knowledge that life passed us by without our having had the chance to enjoy it. That’s how you should talk to me, Francisco — show me that what I have is just so much trash and that the sooner the wind rises and carries it all away, the better for everyone, and here I am, saying this to you today as I stand on the shore of the lagoon and gaze out over the water made still more beautiful by the blue sky, as if nature wanted to seduce me into playing with her for a little longer; and yet, I can assure you that, even while gazing on all this beauty, I feel eager to know what it will be like to cross the threshold and step into the kingdom of shadows, yes, to cross that threshold for good.