Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

I interrupt him: please, my friend, spare me the details, you’re almost splashing me. Time to stop the tape. Your life isn’t so very different from mine, although sometimes I have to put on an act, move in rather higher circles, but in the autumn, I go to the Marriott on Sunday mornings too, haven’t you seen me there? I’ve certainly seen you. A clear blue sky, straight out of a tourist brochure, the miraculous Mediterranean light when the mist has gone and everything stands out so clearly, silhouetted by the sun’s rays, me with my baseball cap on back to front, American-style, me and the kids wearing Nike and Adidas (I don’t like Lacoste, that’s more your spoiled rich kids’ style, better suited to a banker or an office clerk or an architect, but not an independent entrepreneur like me, I favor the sporty, informal look), and Amparo in her Italian straw hat (well, the straw comes from the next village actually, where they make a lot of stuff out of wicker, straw and rattan, or did, because now everything’s imported from China, but she tells her friends she bought it in Florence), her sunglasses covering half her face: my wife looks like a model from a TV show, slightly faded perhaps, but a model nonetheless, the problem is that she wants to look like one of those gaunt-faced TV glamor girls, whereas she’s got a naturally round face, and she’s getting really scrawny too, what with dieting and Pilates, she’s still got nice tits, though, and those plump red lips of hers, which she applies to the straw in her Campari as eagerly as that whore sucking your prick; on the seat beside her, a Louis Vuitton bag; and then, of course, there are the Dior shoes, the dress by Versace or Carolina Herrera. With men it’s watches that matter. From my sun lounger, I can see how the men keep stretching out one arm so that the others can see their watches, I mean, how crass is that, the wristband tight on their sunburnt wrists, because most of them are just upstarts, builders like you, my friend. You can tell how a man votes from his watch: a big fat Rolex with all kinds of chronometers and barometers on it indicates a PP voter, a right-winger; while a stylish Patek Philippe, which is what Felipe González wears, indicates someone more drawn to the socialists. Patek Philippe, a good cigar, a neat, toned ass, and a gin-and-tonic served with a stuffed olive — heaven. And perfectly consistent with socialism too, which, after all, represents wealth, well-being and money for everyone.

I can hear the developer’s murmuring prattle and my own, and I can even see the scene, the day we met in the restaurant, I can’t remember the man’s name, but I look back sadly now on those innocent times. I wonder what’s become of him and his warbling workers. The golden age was just around the corner, we could almost touch it with our fingertips, it was so very close, but it never came, and when we jumped up to grab it, we fell flat on our asses: it’s all gone, the money that fell from the skies (for my friend the developer, it fell from the scaffolding, whereas I had various springs from which it bubbled up), the multitudinous suppers, the cocaine, and the whore who would come blow your horn; and the paddle tennis and the squash and the Pilates and the brunch. It lasted as long as it lasted, and we really can’t complain, the thousands of generations who came before us never enjoyed a single day like that, and now we’re left with the hangover, that nail drilling into your head (an occupational hazard, no pleasure without risk and no such thing as eternal happiness), and all because the grasshoppers failed to store away any food for the bad times and, at the moment, it isn’t just that we can’t afford a whisky or a cognac, we can’t even afford a jar of instant coffee or some frozen lamb chops, let alone a piece of line-caught hake or grouper, in your dreams, it’s a time of wailing and gnashing of teeth, a time of repentance: where are the euros of yesteryear? What became of those lovely purple notes? They fell as fast as dead leaves on a windy autumn day and rotted in the mud: they fell on the casino tables, onto the claws of the lobsters and crabs we used to crack open with a nutcracker (yes, I did the same, I was one of the first, several rungs higher, but it was basically the same: don’t make the rice with fish stock today, and it’s better to use lobster rather than crayfish, that’s even drier than the chicken breasts my wife grills so as to keep to her diet), they fell on the rickety beds in brothels; on the lines of white powder left on toilet tanks (I always went for really expensive beds, for mirrors and little spoons and tubes made from silver or from 500 euro notes, but it wouldn’t be the same for everyone, and it wasn’t): those lovely purple 500 euro notes, ubi sunt? Where are they? Everyone’s looking for them and no one can find them, those of us who are entrepreneurs are looking for them and so are the taxmen, but they’re nowhere to be found. They search lawyers’ offices, private homes, false bottoms in car trunks, in the hulls of yachts, but the notes aren’t there, they were flushed down the bidets where those women washed away the remnants of the human effluent they had so expensively coaxed out; down the plugholes of sinks where you washed that incriminating nose of yours, which has begun to bleed again; down restaurant urinals, restaurants in which tons of rare veal steaks from Ávila, Galicia, Cantabria or the Basque Country were eaten, along with whole crates of line-caught hake, suckling pig from Segovia and lamb from Valladolid, fish or prawn risotto, and paella made with lobster; along with wine from Ribera del Duero and whisky from a Scottish distillery in some wild glen somewhere (there again I differ from most people in that I prefer French wine and cognac). It all went down the drain, down the toilet, into the holes of cunts just coming into bloom and already grown calloused from all that friction. Do you really think it’s any different with life itself, our life? The whole world is being washed down the drain, but how we miss all those things that will never come back. The snows of yesteryear, the rose that opened this morning and will have faded by evening, and whose petals will fall when the sun shines on it tomorrow, leaving only an ugly dry ball, a miniature skeleton that crunches between your fingers when you squeeze, the princes of Olba, the ladies of Ukraine. Where did they go, all those people who passed so swiftly before our eyes, where were they going, where did they end up? Water swallowed by the drain, by the labyrinth of pipes, sewers, filters and water treatment plants, pipes that flow out into the sea.

That is how the time granted to you on this earth was spent, my friend. The same goes for me. Now we have to live life’s after-life.

These new times are less frantic, people no longer drive back and forth in powerful cars, in trucks laden with merchandise, in vans rushing to make an urgent delivery, it’s quieter, more restful, less physical (there’s less carnal traffic, the rooms at the Lovely Ladies club stand empty, no one lies down on those pink sheets, no one is lining up in the offices of notaries to sign property deeds: it’s the butterfly effect) and, of course, these are also far less chemical times, there’s not much cocaine around and what’s available is very bad quality and hardly anyone buys it. Well, we’re hardly in a position to waste our money on coke! Obviously, we live less whoring, less rascally lives, have fewer hangovers after nights on the town. One can sense new values in the air, Franciscan virtues: a taste for life in the slow lane, a quiet evening stroll, so good for the heart, we even view poverty differently: I’d go so far as to say that it’s fashionable to be poor and to have your house and car repossessed (but what can I tell you that you don’t already know, my friend. I imagine you’re in more or less the same situation). If you appear on TV because you’ve been evicted or fired, you become a hero; and it’s no longer cool to rev your engine as you pass some café on the Avenida Orts in Misent, so that everyone turns to see you at the wheel of your Ferrari Testarossa, it’s considered bad taste to be caught by a local TV crew in a five-star resort, playing golf or having brunch, that mixture of breakfast and lunch (the news spreads like wild fire: the bastard says he doesn’t have enough money to pay back his loans or his creditors or the men he’s left unemployed, but he can apparently still afford his golf club membership), and if you have a business meeting with someone, it’s best to leave your Mercedes 600 in the garage and take the Volvo instead: it’s important to appear unostentatiously substantial, the worker-owner rather than the speculator; oh, yes, these are definitely duller, drabber times. But what do you expect? I break off my thoughts because Amparo’s tapping me on the shoulder: