Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

“Wake up, Tomás Pedrós, you’re falling asleep and snoring and dribbling too.”

I open my eyes and find her wiping the corners of my mouth and my chin with a Kleenex, I’m touched at such evidence of love in these difficult times. In these new conditions, we have learned to appreciate small kindnesses. On the other side of the window, I see one of those enormous long-distance planes taking off. Another one emblazoned with the profile of the mythical Garuda bird is taxiing up to the passenger walkway. Amparo, my beloved Amparo, throws the tissue in the trashcan beside her and asks: What currency do they use there? What a wonderful woman, always with her eye on what counts. The real? The sol? The bolívar? The quetzal? The rupee? I smile at her as one might smile at an angel: it doesn’t matter, my love: money has no homeland, just make sure you’ve got plenty of convertible euros or convertible dollars (is that what they call them?) in your handbag, and try, above all, to store away those gold ingots, because they’ve been around for centuries now, for millennia, along with jewels, gems, rubies and sapphires — they retain the value they had on the eighth day of creation, when Eve saw a serpent and picked it up, thinking it was an emerald necklace.

beniarbeg, july 2012

AS A young boy, Rafael Chirbes was sent to an orphanage for the children of railroad workers after his father died, because his mother couldn’t afford to keep him. He was born in 1949 in a small town on the shore of the Mediterranean, Tavernes de Valldigna, Valencia, to a Republican family — his grandfather was a basket maker — on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Beleaguered, considered traitors and “Reds,” his father committed suicide when Rafael was four and his mother, who worked as a switchman, was eventually detained. Yet before he died, Rafael’s father taught his unusually bright son how to read, and at eight the boy was sent away from the sparkling blue seaside, muscatel vineyards and liberal-minded rural town, where they showed movies without censoring them for the children and celebrated bawdy, pagan-infused spectacles during which vedettes’ breasts would fall from their blouses as they danced in defiance of the suffocating national Catholic dogma imposed by Franco. At least that’s how Rafael Chirbes remembered the warmth and earthiness of the Mediterranean world from which he’d been uprooted to find his way alone in the severe, snowy, landlocked plains of Castile during some of the darkest, most miserable years of the dictatorship.

His peripatetic life began in towns like Ávila, Salamanca, and Leon — the dour lands of Santa Teresa, where her pruny reliquary finger presided “like a fruit peel” over life and “celebrations” transmogrified into ominous religious processions with waxy virgins and proselytes dressed either in habits, cinctures, olive uniforms, widow’s black or penitent purple. This contrast between the coast versus the famous rainy (often in fact quite dry) plains of Spain (which Chirbes — who went on to become a gourmand with friends like the writer Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, founding the magazine of literature and gastronomy Sobremesa —described as “fresh vegetables versus dried legumes and salt cod”) is a recurring motif in some of his early novels.

Just to be on the safe side, his grandmother had warned him when he was taken away that dare he return in priest’s garb, she would strangle him. What he came back dressed in thirty years later, though, was the Spanish language as well as a uniquely obsidian sentimental education that would chisel one of the most renegade and uncomfortable literary testaments of Spain — for both the establishment and anti-establishment alike. “Who do I write against?” Chirbes once asked rhetorically: “I write against myself. If you stand yourself up against the character you most despise, you’ll find your own contradictions staring straight back at you.” His novels sprout from a deep human disquiet and this inexorable process of self-examination — novels as private passions that take a public form. Writing as a means for making sense of things that seem incongruous, as a way of broaching that nagging question that won’t go away. First comes fixing the perspective, the way of looking, the point of view from which the story is to unfold, and once he catches sight of the figure trapped in the marble, Chirbes takes no prisoners in the carving, the shaving, the filing, the telling. Not even himself.

It’s not hard to imagine how these years went into crafting a certain narrative distance in his writing, which is an essential feature; the objectivity and detached scrutiny of a solitary, acutely observant child stunned by the weirdness of a strange new environment, the alienation of a new language with its new possibilities. Not merely the desire but also the ambition to make sense of it by naming and appropriating and organizing the derangement of a peculiar alternate domain. Though stripped of his native Valencian, he gained the high artifice and syntactical precision of Castilian, a language he fell in love with and a literary tradition he absorbed copiously — along with the French — and with which he was in constant, intense conversation throughout his life; from his revered seventeenth-century Baltazar Gracián — whose philosophy of skepticism influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — to a forty-year love affair with the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós and of his beloved Mexican-exiled French-German-Jewish-Spanish experimentalist Max Aub. No hay mal que por bien no venga (all clouds have a silver lining) Chirbes said of being sent away as a boy; it caused him to relinquish any identification with a single place on earth. He became a stateless writer “freed of any romantic baggage” that would wax syrupy on the orange blossom breeze of Mediterranean writing and disregard the ripe stench of its marshlands. On the Edge is set in Valencia, yet its intentions are closer to how Gracián “works everyday language in a way that deviates from it enough that it neither falls into caricature nor mere reproduction.” He also pointed to Jonathan Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub” for the indulgence of its digressions, and closely identified with the intentions of John Dos Passos. On the Edge is a poetic spasm, an epic of the garbage dump written by a witness who breaks the underclass’s legacy of silence during a crisis that is not merely economic, but social and acutely moral. The song of the real estate siren from its debris-ridden cesspool, the swan song of the hope that was deposited in a generation, his generation, who held the country’s future in their once-militant hands and yet quickly betrayed those who, with a modicum of dignity, had struggled before them during the years of the regime. There’s no dignity in the struggle against greed in a world where values have shifted away from the human. You’re just poor. But Chirbes would quote Hermann Broch: “Was there ever a time when values were not in crisis?” He believed that the novel as a form is inescapably a creature of its time and that any writer who considers it to have some supreme value-in-itself as a piece of artifice reduces the form to something banal, a paltry toy. Even in language’s search for what’s on the inside, there is a relationship, a tie, to what’s on the outside. Writers who don’t understand this connection, Chirbes felt, yet claimed to inhabit literature as if a sacred temple, are really living in a dollhouse. And like selfish children they are negating the novel’s public concern, canceling its role in civil accountability.

At a precocious sixteen, and despite the stacked odds, Chirbes moved to Madrid where he studied Modern and Contemporary History at Universidad Complutense. There he joined an underground student group and became involved in clandestine, anti-Franco activities that landed him in Carabanchel prison. He also worked in several bookstores, notably Tarantula in the early ’70s, which fed his voracious reading habits and exposed him to many of the books prohibited by the regime that were kept hidden away in a special room, like a speakeasy its bottles of whisky: Sade, Miller, Marx, Lawrence, Aub and Juan Marsé, among many other delicacies. History, politics, social movements and literature converged in these years, and crystalized his perspective as an eyewitness. He spent the rest of his life narrating — in a great, twirling kaleidoscope of voices — the annals of this generation of young rebels who grew into tentative democrats: how many of them fell into the habits of their predecessors, how daily life is much harder to bear than putting up a good fight, how hard it is not to betray the ideals they had fought for as students when it came their time to make life choices. As the French writer Jean Genet quipped when asked what he would like from the world, “I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world.” For many, fighting against Franco had been much easier than forging a democracy, which obliges thinking of the greater good.