Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

A few days ago, when I drove past the cemetery, I noticed an enormous rat creep out of the shrubbery and crawl over the wall, doubtless attracted by the stink of the most recent burials. With the crisis, people are now getting buried in really cheap coffins that don’t always retain the rotting bodies. When I saw the rat, I swear I jumped, jolted by a tremor of fear for you, afraid the rat might harm you in some way, although I doubt there’s much left to gnaw on beneath the stone bearing your name and your photo, but who knows, rats will give anything a try: the wooden planks of the coffin — even top-quality ones like yours — or bones or any remnants of cloth that have survived the pervading damp. Because here it’s damp in summer too, even on really hot summer nights, when the temperature is more tropical than Mediterranean, sultry nights when you toss and turn, unable to sleep, nights that seem interminable even though they’re the shortest of the year, when, as I lie in my bed, I can hear the night dew dripping from the roof onto the sidewalk. You flail about between the damp, burning sheets, stewing in the heat, your face glued to the pillow with sweat, as sticky as the still air around you. And as you drift in and out of sleep, the blinding light of the sun suddenly appears, unannounced, and the crushing heat of day falls on the scorched grass and the whirring cicadas. No, Leonor, this isn’t Sweden or Germany or gentle Brittany, those shady, gothic, nocturnal places, where sex seems to take on a metaphysical density. There’s no room here for the tale of a lover returning to her first love. For a while we used to have sex together, then you chose someone else to keep you company in bed, and that was that, there’s nothing melancholy about it, nothing that needs to be put right, nothing to feel nostalgic about, such rhetoric is quite simply unthinkable: this is the Mediterranean, where all mysteries shrivel up and die in the excess of light. No romantic metaphysics can survive under such a sky. Not for us the vast, shady forests, splendid deciduous trees, or sad, solitary, wandering souls, no poetic penumbras. Our trees are more gnarled than leafy, have more wood than leaves, are more gray than green. You have to keep your feelings to yourself, because they fade fast beneath this impertinent light. But surely everyone knows that. And so the only person to visit and leave flowers on her grave every month or so was her husband. As is only right and proper.

I often see him pass the workshop on his way to the cemetery, and I think that the flowers he’s carrying are partly mine, not because of the love I may have felt for Leonor, nor because of any part of myself that may have remained inside her (for we leave part of ourselves, our saliva, our fluids, our bacteria and viruses inside the person we love, we leave certain gestures, certain vices: therefore, I must have been present during whatever may have gone on between them, certain words, a certain deft way of touching, of setting off certain springs in the body, all of which we learned together), but those flowers contain the empty space she left behind, because I am what I lack, what is missing, what I am not. I can hear Leonor saying: this is mine, it’s inside me. I’m the only one who can give you permission to poke your nose into my business, and, as you see, I’m not going to. She even refused to allow me to make a contribution toward the cost of that intimate piece of butchery. I think of the blood-stained doll floating briefly in the toilet bowl, but the truth is, I didn’t see it, I don’t know what it actually looked like, I’m talking about how these things happen in movies and documentaries and magazines, but I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know where she went to get it done or who did it, who paid or how much. I prefer to think she went alone, that, at the time, she was still alone. I don’t even know if she returned to Misent afterward or if she got on the train and went straight to Madrid; if she had prepared her escape beforehand as previously agreed with him, or if she sought him out once she was there. I can picture an apartment in Valencia, on one of the many housing developments, and I can even see the room, with all its windows closed, but I’ve never known for sure. Like my father with his war stories, she decided it was none of my business. What was my business? Francisco used to come back from Madrid, eat in some of the bars in Olba and visit the cemetery, until he decided to return for good, and, in the process of restoring the house and moving in, he gradually forgot about the grave which had, it seems, been more of an excuse for him to come back: to smell the orange blossom in the spring, to stick his spoon into a paella, to go sailing on his yacht on calm days: my children have their own lives to lead, but here, I at least have her, the only thing I truly do have; besides, Olba’s a nice, quiet place, and if you want a bit of excitement, you’ve got Misent about six miles away, Benidorm thirty miles away and Valencia a mere sixty miles. You can even get on a boat in Misent and in a couple of hours, you’re in Ibiza, although you’d need to be forty-five or fifty years younger to cope with the club scene there. While he was giving me this spiel justifying his return, he would laugh, taking sips from his glass or swirling the wine around and claiming to be able to detect the smell of broom and scrubland and sun-scorched rockroses, of animal pelts (all the animals we know locally have been to school, we used to say when he wasn’t there, and we’d laugh and imitate his mannerisms, raising our glasses, studying the contents and swirling them around), of tanned hides and tanneries. I remember him at the Saturday-morning brunches we organized; that was when I still used to occasionally go out on the weekends: these partridges would go really well with a Marqués de Riscal 86 or a Tondonia 88, since I don’t think we’re going to be able to stretch to an Único de Vega Sicilia (and I won’t even mention a Latour, that would be going a bit far). And still talking, he would head off to what he rather pretentiously called the cellar, the garage-cum-dining room he had installed in the freestanding annex where he kept his wine along with any tools or equipment: we never went upstairs, or only once and one at a time, his Olba friends were not allowed, it was reserved for a different kind of guest, although each of us believed that we were the only ones to have been given the privilege of visiting the finer parts of the Civera house, until we discovered that he had, in fact, shown them to us all, but always swearing us to secrecy. Vanity has always been his weak point. Anyway, he would stroll off to the cellar and, voilà , as if by magic, would emerge bearing two bottles of Vega Sicilia and show us the faded, yellowing labels on which one could still read the year: he would point at the date several times, assuring us that it had been a very special year and that, in a recent auction, someone had paid 20,000 duros for a bottle like the one we would be drinking in forty-five minutes or so (for the wine to be perfect, we need to let it breathe, and, meanwhile, we can set the table, prepare the salads, drink an aperitif and grill the meat). Some of the wilier guests would make a mental note of the date and the way the wine was described, so that they could repeat it later on like a parrot when they were at a meeting with suppliers or clients, or use the information in situations where such knowledge would gain the most brownie points, for example, in the office of the bank manager from whom they’re hoping to get a loan so risky that not even the boss of Banco Santander would sign off on it: perhaps he can be seduced by all that talk of coffee, cedars of Lebanon, water lilies, autumn leaves and fruits of the forest, and with the remark: I was with Marsal the other day, you know, Don Gregorio’s son, the one who used to edit that foodie magazine, what a guy, no? he’s traveled all over and you’d be amazed what he can taste in a wine, he showed me a box full of little bottles containing maybe eight or ninety different smells, or was it only sixty, but still, sixty different aromas that you can find in a glass of wine, my friend’s wife — God rest her — (and thus they add Francisco’s esteemed friendship to their CV) used to run a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Madrid, the Cristal de Maldón, you must have heard of it, it was in all the magazines and on the TV, anyway, as I was saying, the other day, we were having brunch with some other friends, and he brought out two bottles of Único de Vega Sicilia, I can’t remember the year now, and they’re convinced that by telling this to the bank manager — who, before he came to Olba, had probably never drunk anything more expensive than a twelve-euro bottle of Jumilla — he will be persuaded that the person asking for the loan is not some poor wretch in need of a few euros, but a man of the world who got out of bed this morning hoping to do business with another man of the world, a fellow entrepreneur, the loan really being more of an excuse to sit on the office sofa and smoke an expensive cigar with him in private and drink a glass of this Martell brandy I’ve brought for you, no, wait, wait, it’s here in my briefcase, no, let me serve you, and you keep the bottle, I’ll be offended if you don’t. You know how snake-like bank managers and realtors are: when confronted by someone who can persuade them that he’s actually rolling in money and is only asking for credit on a whim, simply to have the pleasure of talking to him for a while, they crawl and fawn and remove all obstacles and don’t even ask for guarantees; if you can make them feel small enough, you’ve got that impossible loan in your pocket, guaranteed by a guy without so much as an ID card to his name. However, if you go there explaining that you need a loan so that you can carry on working, so that you won’t have your car repossessed or be evicted from your house, they’ll just snort scornfully and show you the door. I was never that impressed by Francisco’s little act. Sniffing out the next opportunity with that sensitive hare’s nose and that reptilian brain of his, not soul, because he doesn’t have a soul; neither do I, we share that idea in common, we cannot have what does not exist, there is what there is and it lasts as long as it lasts. Then, it’s over. So what’s the point of putting flowers on her grave and standing there grim-faced, your eyes full of tears? What are you doing standing there in front of something that is nothing and expects nothing? Or are you just crying for yourself, you jerk?