Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

“You mean he lent you money? A lot? You must have done something in return. If you had told Wilson about the kisses and the money, he’d have killed him, but then he would have killed you too.”

“Oh, I doubt it. When I brought home the earrings and the necklace, he just grunted: Why did he give you those, then? If that old bastard comes on to you, I’ll kill him. But a week later, the earrings and the necklace were gone, and I still don’t know whether he sold them or gave them away. Kill me? After what I’ve had to put up with. He’s drunk as a skunk most nights. When he does come home on a Saturday, because often he doesn’t get back until Monday, I have to take off those great clodhoppers of his and lift his legs onto the bed, where he lies snoring for hours, like a very noisy corpse, no, it’s certainly not the pale pink and green tulle they wrap you in on your wedding day, damn right it isn’t, and then there’s that sweetish, sourish smell that kind of creeps under your skin if he happens to come home feeling horny and wants to kiss you, the god-awful stink of sour saliva, tobacco and alcohol, and him filling your mouth with his hot, disgusting saliva and that sour waft of indigestion. Sometimes he gets up in the early hours and drags himself off to throw up in the toilet and when he comes back to bed, he licks your face, thrusts his tongue in your mouth, as hard as a muscle, and then his saliva tastes of vomit too, because he hasn’t even had the courtesy to wash his mouth out, and this happens night after night. When I first met him, he smelled of shaving lotion, eau de cologne, and his mouth smelled of toothpaste and his saliva and his breath of fresh mint. Of course, at the time, you see him as a suitor, as a fiancé, who bathes and shaves and perfumes himself before coming to see you, and you see this radiant man and you’re fool enough to think things are bound to get better, that he’ll mature and soften and won’t fly into a howling rage as he sometimes does, you think: he’s still young, but when he sees his first child or, rather, when he holds his son in his arms, when he holds in the palm of his great big hands that little scrap of warm flesh moving and laughing and crying, he’ll mellow, he won’t have those worrying tantrums, he’ll be the handsome, perfumed, affectionate man who touches you gently as you dance. But no, the child who he finds captivating at first, who makes him laugh, the child he plays with, later on, just seems to annoy him. He says brusquely: Can’t you shut that brat up or change his fucking diapers, because he stinks, I’ve never known a child whose shit stank like that, it’s like an old man’s shit — as if he himself wasn’t related to the producer of that shit. And you answer back and say: How would you know what an old man’s shit smells like? I do, because of the shit I have to clean up every day so that you can go out drinking, all you care about are those good-for-nothing friends of yours at the bar, that’s the only smell that doesn’t seem to bother you, because you even find it disgusting when it’s my time of the month, you get angry if you touch me and find your fingers all sticky, but that’s how it is with women, and if you don’t like it, go and find yourself a man, who doesn’t have a period, and give it to him up the ass and then see how your cock smells when you take it out, you bastard, well, that’s what I wanted to say to him, but I didn’t dare, because I knew he’d smack me in the face.”

“Pink tulle, the loving bridegroom, that’s straight out of those trashy daytime soaps you have time to watch now that you don’t go and look after the two old men at the workshop, and that’s what’s feeding your fantasies. You’re going mad.”

“It’s true, Susana, when I’ve got a free afternoon, now that I don’t go and see the old men, I listen to the radio and watch TV, and that’s how I know more about what’s going on. I think I heard that stuff about God on the radio and heard it again in the fish shop or the shop where I buy limes and chillis for the ceviche , yes, while I was waiting on the line, I heard a woman say it, and, according to her, even the Pope agreed. She’d read it in some newspaper, she said, and the Pope had stated that there was no hell, and if there’s no hell, then there’s no heaven either and no God, and that’s why all these bad things are happening.”

“What a thing to say! I mean, in that case what are you doing talking to the dead? Where do you think they are? If the Pope agrees that God is dead, then he should give him a decent burial and join the line at the unemployment benefits office. After all, isn’t he God’s representative on Earth? Anyway, as you well know, gods don’t die, they’re immortal. Our gods back home and the ones the Blacks brought with them on the boats from Africa are all immortal, yes even we are: we die for a while, as if we were having a long sleep, but in time, we wake up. We will wake up.”

“But how? Where will we wake up? Will we wake up here, surrounded by all these damn Spaniards, or will we wake up in Quindío or in Caldas or in Risaralda, on the banks of the River Cauca, or in Magdalena? We’ll probably wake up downstream, in Cartagena de Indias, in one of those discotheques full of rather pathetic, lukewarm Spaniards looking for a bit of Caribbean fire, or else in the middle of the ocean. Will we wake up one warm spring afternoon, lying in the shade of a big mango tree or among the flowering coffee trees or the guamo trees, and will we wake up to be confronted by the faces of those same bastards who drove us out?”

“How should I know? But we will wake up. I know we will, because the gospels say so. It’s a matter of faith. If it’s not true and there’s nothing after death, then what’s left for us? After all our suffering…”

“But who’s going to wake up those half-eaten bodies, the ones the vultures tore the guts out of probably a hundred years before? No one comes back from the dead, no one ever will.”

“I feel sorry for you, you know. You may have your head stuffed full of TV soaps, but you’ve no imagination, that’s why you can’t believe in God, only in your ugly old dead people, you can’t believe that this life will change one day, that life can be different. I believe that one day I’ll get lucky and win the lottery, and I pray for that to happen and praying comforts me. I would pray even if there wasn’t a God. Just in case.”

“No, you just don’t want to admit that what’s happening to us here in Spain is even worse than that. We don’t even wonder any more if miracles are possible or not, whereas we used to in Colombia, or if we’ll ever see justice or understand the truth or if you can achieve happiness simply by doing your duty; we don’t even ask ourselves now what the meaning of life is, only if any of this makes any sense at all. There’s no time, we can’t be bothered, we just can’t do it. Those questions have grown too big for us.”

“But, in that case, you can’t even have the consolation of a good cry. People cry over something they’ve lost or something they want. Neither of these applies to you. Do you see what I mean? So why are you crying? You’ve suffered a lot, I don’t deny it, and that’s what’s troubling you: all that past suffering. But so what if you had to work the streets in order to bring over your husband and son? There’s no shame in that.”

“Don’t be cruel, don’t remind me of those things. It’s water under the bridge. It happened. Necessity made it happen, but it’s over. It no longer exists. OK, a new life will come along, but we also have an old life that’s been and gone. All right, I agree, I too believe that we’ll wake up after we’re dead. It’s a matter of faith. A better life. Otherwise, what else have we got? We’ll all have suffered for nothing…”