Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

My boots sink into the mud, which has a kind of rubbery consistency, the path is almost impassable, I can barely go any further, I don’t know how I’ll manage to get my father this far, even though it’s only a matter of a few yards, there’s no way I could get a wheelchair along here. In this glutinous clay, the wheels would be more of a hindrance than a help; for cyclists, the marsh is a real trap, some paths remain deep in mud all year round, and it’s a particularly sticky mud, the enemy of rubber tires that get stuck fast as if in a sculptor’s plaster mold; other paths — most of them — turn to mud as soon as a little rain falls, and some stretches are so overgrown by vegetation that only walkers can fight their way through. I could pick him up or let him walk very slowly to the shoreline. It would only be about thirty feet. This is the unspoken pact I have made with him, to return him to the place that we forced him to leave. No one comes to this deserted area of reedbeds, in which, if you’re not careful, you find yourself stepping into a patch of treacherous quicksand, into which you sink a little deeper with each step you take. It’s not a very attractive place to go for a walk, unless you know it really well and are drawn to it precisely because of its difficulties, plunging down dubious paths flanked and overshadowed by reeds. The bustle of life is only a step away, but still safely outside. This is a very discreet, secretive corner of the world, where we will be together. The dog stops and turns his head, looking at me with his honey-colored eyes; he trots back toward me, brushing against my leg. He’s panting and keeps looking up at me. I pat his back, crouch down and press him to me, I feel very emotional again, on the point of crying. I’ll drive the car up to this point and, before I conclude my task, I’ll move it back a few yards, onto the side of the dunes, so that the fire won’t spread to the reeds. I pat the car too. And the dog? I look away, I can’t bear to see him, but the dog is part of the family. I couldn’t possibly leave him alone. I would say that even cars are part of the family too, and it would be cruel to abandon them. They can’t be separated from the people who drive them, they contain our memories, our DNA, which is at the disposal of any policemen who might want to find us. It would be immoral to leave the car in the grubby hands of some auctioneer.

The past transformed into an alien that keeps swelling in size, an agglomeration of faces and voices that create an unbearable pressure inside me. I’m going to explode under my own weight, and meanwhile, everything is becoming noiseless, fading, growing thinner, fainter, about to vanish, disappear: the faces looking at me and the voices speaking to me are upbraiding me for my fifty years of solitude here, when I tear off the tape on the workshop put there by the local officials and go downstairs (after all, what more can the judge do to me now?), when I sit down in front of the TV or wash my father. The solitude of the night in my bedroom: best not think about the night. The night becomes theirs, it’s their time, they are in charge. They occupy the whole room, I can feel them cleaving the air, and I have to turn on the light and sit up so as not to suffocate, and so that they return to the walls from which they have escaped. I sit up, gasping for breath. In the darkness, I hear them moving about, they brush my skin with their tattered clothes, their fingers. I feel the air they dislodge touch my cheeks, and when they have, at last, gone, they leave behind a cold blade of air, as if someone had left the door of a deep freeze open. The light switch. The brightness of the lightbulb drives away those bodies I touched, returns them to their airy state, shuts them up in the walls they have escaped from, dissolves them into the nothing they should never have left. I get up, take a sip of milk from the carton in the fridge, make myself a cold drink, turn on the TV in the living room, smoke a cigarette, inhaling deeply and then, I return to my own room and get back into bed, but spend the rest of the night with the light on so that they don’t return. Apnea, I think the doctors call that sudden pause in breathing while you sleep, a kind of mini-death that makes you wake suddenly, gasping for air like a fish out of water. An obscene smell hangs in the room. I manage to get to sleep, and now I’m walking along passageways that tunnel into the earth in all directions, that meet and mesh, forming a labyrinth of suffocating burrows, an outbreath of damp earth that mingles with the vapor given off by weary flesh. In the nightmare, my footsteps ring hollow. Each step draws from the earth a dull thud. Empty steps, sounding ever farther from my feet, pale reflections of themselves. And again that smell of dampness, of mustiness, of decomposing vegetation. It’s the smell of the marsh on a hot day; and yet, even though I’m sweating, the room feels cold and damp. I walk aimlessly on, trapped in the network of passageways, which feel as if they were inside something indecipherable, like the convoluted guts of some enormous animal. But inside what? Inside where I am? The viscous crust of the earth — or whatever it is I’m walking on — contains a kind of vapor that is slowly dissolving until vapor and earth become one slimy substance. I walk on that vapor and my feet sink further in with each step. When the nightmare ends and I wake up, I realize that the outside world offers me no relief, that what stretches endlessly out beyond the shutters and windows that I fling open in the early hours, in the hope of breathing in some clean night air, makes no difference, I can’t reach what lies on the other side. Outside, I am not myself. It’s an alien place, the stage on which other people act out their lives, people who have arrived after me, too late to take part in the play of which I am the protagonist or, rather, in which I have been only an extra. The writer hasn’t even given me any words to say. A character who enters and leaves and, when he appears, leaves a tray on the table, empties the ashtray, places a vase on a sideboard, or hangs some piece of clothing in the closet. Those who arrive now cannot know — they’re not authorized either — anything more than the ending, which isn’t going to interest them one bit. But what are they hoping to see, if this is no longer the play, but what happens afterward, the removing of the costumes and putting them back in the trunk, picking up brushes and make-up sticks, helping to dismantle the scenery, fold up the curtains, tasks which, although hard work, mean very little, it’s just part of the process: closing the workshop, closing it on the customers whose work has been left unfinished, employees and suppliers who have not been paid, the accountant to whom the bank returned the last three checks, the bank employees who want to get everything sorted out as soon as possible. Above them all, like in the religious services that used to be held in the theater at school, there appears the eye of God inside a triangle, the fateful eye that sees everything, and from which there is no point hiding anywhere in the city or even the countryside. Cain, where is Abel, am I my brother’s keeper? And Pedrós is the eye, a kind of contemporary God, the eye inscribed above the stage on which grown-ups are putting on a play, my familiar god, my domestic god, my household god, the one who has changed the ending and become the owner of the diary, ahead even of my father: whether you like it or not, my father’s diary has the innocuous nature of the private, while Pedrós’s diary has all the seriousness of the public: topographers, appraisers, notaries, lawyers, judges, bailiffs, prison officers. Pedrós elbows aside the old boss, changes the script, alters the dialogues in the final scene and, above all — and this is what matters now — he determines and manipulates the ending. Curtain. The whole company is on stage now. The main characters rub shoulders with those who appeared in only a couple of scenes and then exited, those who are no longer alive and those who survived, those I still see — or did until a few weeks ago — and those I met fifty years ago on the journeys that constituted my brief summer of love, and who could be anywhere. Those wearing tracksuits, skirts, shoulder bags, bomber jackets, fashionable sneakers, either with genuine designer labels or bought in street markets, made here or imported from France, Italy, America, China or India, coexist with those wearing only dark rags clinging to their scrawny flesh and bones. What were once white shirts with collars, cuffs and starched fronts, are now, as you see, mere threads attached to withered skin or worn bones. There are so many other characters. They pass quickly, a motley, pressing crowd. I’d like to put names to them, but there’s no time, so quickly do they pass, and so fragile is their presence, I can’t even remember their names; and not being able to name them, not finding their names in my memory however hard I try, fills me with anxiety. Fruitlessly I rummage around in what should be a warehouse, but which has become a garbage dump: a missing or squandered heritage. Life as waste, isn’t that one of your central ideas, Dad? On sleepless nights, they have probably vainly racked their brains for my name too, tried to relive scenes in which I played a part. But the floodgates have opened. We are emptying ourselves out. I notice that I have included Liliana in the cast, when actually she’s part of the disappointing present, part of contemporary theater, a character — like Pedrós — playing an undesirably prominent role in my dénouement, the protagonist of her own play, which will, foreseeably, take a few years to reach its climax, a climax I won’t be around to see. I won’t see what she’s like at fifty: her body will change, her voice will lose its silken touch or the silk will wear thin — you gave me a preview of that particular transformation, Liliana — her smile will fade — it already has — her tears will dry. I won’t see you, and seeing or not seeing you won’t be the result of any decision or whim of mine. The other day, in order to avoid you, I turned and walked in the opposite direction when I realized that, otherwise, we would bump into each other near the main square. (Olba is so small, such encounters are almost inevitable.) You were alone. Not arm-in-arm with your husband. And so that’s what I did, I turned down a sidestreet, I just couldn’t bear to see you; I didn’t even know what I would do if we did meet, whether I would speak to you or look away. By then, though, when the time I’ve been talking about arrives, I won’t be able to see you, even if I want to; or, rather, I won’t even be able to want to see you; I won’t hear your voice, I won’t inhabit any memories: I collect my little girl from the nursery and then pick up my youngest boy from school, because I can’t be sure he’ll make it home on his own, there have been so many awful cases involving children lately, I go to the supermarket to do my shopping, drop in at the Colombian shop where I buy stuff that may or may not come from Colombia, but which is the same as what we get at home, wild bananas, guayaba, yucca, sweet granadilla, sweet potato and so on. By the time my husband gets home, me and the children have already had supper and they’re either doing their homework or have gone to bed, and I’ve sat down to watch TV; sometimes I wait to have supper with him and, at others, I keep his supper warm for him, one plate on top of the other, and you have no idea how sad they make me feel, those two plates on the kitchen table, when I look at them as I turn out the light, when I’ve been waiting up for him, because, since he’s been unemployed, he arrives home later not earlier, and he’s nearly always drunk too (where else do you think I’m going to meet people and find out where the jobs are, he grumbles — while I’m folding up the clothes I’ve just ironed — here on the sofa? Do you really think someone’s going to drop by and offer me a job just like that?) That’s what you tell me, Liliana, and hearing your words is like watching a recent performance, one that may be depressing for you, but which opens up complicated emotional spaces in me, rooms I thought had long ago been sealed up. Your sadness feeds my hopes: my arms offer you a refuge from your disappointments, which I caress and make mine, making the warmth of your sadness mine too, and that excites me, and I don’t know if that excitement is clean or dirty, you’re my daughter, and yet I’m filled with desire, a desire to have your small body in my arms, a desire to look at it, as my Uncle Ramón used to do when he went to visit whores, he would look at them as if they were daughters or mothers, and like him, I myself never appear on stage naked, it must be a family thing or, more likely, my age: I press your warm, supple body to my chest — now that is dirty; you are living out your own play, a play written solely for you, and my play is from another age entirely, the time scales don’t coincide, it’s what the French call décalage , my play has gone cold, a bad script-writer has made the plot too long, the audience is getting bored, and yet I have to go on until the end now, we have to perform the final act.