Rafael Chirbes: On the Edge

We sometimes caught a wild boar, which we finished off with the shotgun my uncle kept hidden beneath a trap door in the workshop. My uncle could never get a gun license: he was too young to have been in the war, but was paying the price for his family’s political allegiances. When he got married and left home, he gave the gun to me (I’ve caught my deer now, I just hope she doesn’t stick a pair of antlers on me, he said, beaming and kissing his new wife) as well as his fishing tackle so that I could catch fish in the marsh, possibly easier to catch than the fish in the sea, and they were the best we could get at the time, given that we couldn’t go out to sea and cast our nets like some of our neighbors in Olba, who owned small boats that they kept moored in the nearby harbor of Misent. The marsh was like a fish farm: shrimps, mullet, frogs, tench, barbel; eels and elvers: we didn’t catch the elvers to eat, no, we didn’t eat them; the sight of that seething mass in the bucket disgusted my grandmother, who called them maggots; my uncle would hold them close to her face, laughing, and my father would watch, sitting on a bench in one corner of the kitchen, leave your mother in peace, can’t you see she doesn’t like it, his mask about to crack into the merest hint of a smile. We sold them to a dealer who had a contact in Bilbao, and we made good money like that. The price shot up just before Christmas: later, I found out just how much people were prepared to pay at that time of year for what my grandmother thought were repulsive maggots. In stormy weather or at high tide, the sea bass would swim in from the sea. Nowadays, you only find those borderline fish in the canals of the lagoon. My uncle could pinpoint them with uncanny accuracy. I used to say he had a good nose, but what he had was common sense. He kept a list in his head, a system — every freshwater species, every saltwater species, every creature: The environment is irrelevant, and that applies to birds as well, and if you push me, to human beings too — they all have a right time and a right place, and need to be caught in a particular way and using a particular bait, he would tell me, while he was baiting the hook. I didn’t initially understand what he meant: the fisherman who fails to choose the right bait does so because he doesn’t know how fish think, and a fisherman or a hunter has to become the thing he’s hunting, to think the same way. That’s why the real hunter, the real fisherman, falls in love with his victim: he’s hunting himself. And he feels sorry both for his prey and for himself. Hold the hook like this, no, we’re not going to use the dough we normally use for bait, today we’ll use this stuff. Smell it. Disgusting, isn’t it? What a stink! Well, fish love that smell. And so do crabs. Everything rots. We’ll end up rotting as well and we’ll smell quite a lot worse. Many years from now, you’ll rot too — and it’s that rotten smell that the fish like. When you get older, you’ll realize that they’re like humans in that respect. Don’t go thinking you’re not going to end up smelling like a dead fish, Esteban. Ultimately, we all end up smelling like that, and just as a doctor prescribes particular medicines for each patient, Uncle Ramón offered each creature its particular bait and taught me how to think like a fish, like an eel, like a mallard, and to think about life’s baits too. You will rot too, my boy. You will stink. Like everyone. See how beautiful the color and design of the duck’s neck feathers. But now it’s dead.

And sixty years have passed, long enough for the web of veins to climb up the legs of that once young boy and form a network of blotches which, in the arch of the foot, has become a dark mass. The scaly skin on arms and chest is now the jaundiced color of old ivory, I have age spots on my face and on the back of my hands, and then there’s that old man’s smell, like sour milk, Liliana, that aura of rust and urine. The body is no longer certainty, but doubt, suspicion. You think you’ll make it through to tomorrow, but you know things won’t be getting any better. Are the blue patches on my left foot turning black? Sometimes, with old men, our feet turn gangrenous and have to be amputated.

According to my uncle’s strict code, every creature caught dies its own death, a ritual so precise it verges on the religious: after all, neither he, my father, nor my grandfather, and none of the men in this household, ever had any other religion than that of submitting to the codes imposed on them by nature, or dictated by their profession (perhaps more than most professions, carpentry is an extension of nature: a man goes into a forest armed with an axe, and with the help of his hands and his tools, he transforms nature into some useful civilized object). They put away the other codes — lacking in civilian life (the ones promised in those old Russian books) — to which they’d aspired, and in whose stormy sea they drowned. As for nature’s codes, they managed to learn the rudiments. The civil war cut short any aspirations for justice and a harmonious life lived in common. With my grandfather, all it took was a few gunshots beside a wall outside Olba (it was only one shot, Esteban, why would they waste ammunition, he was found the following morning, along with five other men, next to the cemetery wall, right where the cemetery meets the rocks at the foot of the mountain, a buzzing of wasps announced the presence of the bodies on that spring morning, and there was a burn mark from the bullet in the back of his neck). With my father, any aspirations were frozen during his year and a bit of war and three years in prison, and by the prejudice that has pursued him ever since. Long enough to corrupt and rot any aspirations or hopes, which also die and stink once they’re dead, poisoning everything around them, like fish, like bodies. My uncle was barely an adolescent, two eyes staring in horror at this somber collection of images. My father never complained about being sidelined: he was too proud. Nor did he consider that he’d given up his aspirations (we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work: these words saved him), but he blamed us for the limitations placed on him. Decomposing, fermenting aspirations, just a hint of putrefaction: justice more like a punishment than a balm. He pretended to be above it all, crouched and waiting for these difficult times to pass, as if his own life were on hold, and the effort required to believe this was the fluid sustaining him, keeping him strong enough so that the outside world would not break him. Or so he believed. But he was already broken, he already had a deformity, a kind of monstrous hernia. And we should not dismiss the energy it takes to tell yourself a lie and maintain it. He could do that. He had that constancy of mind, the necessary willpower. After leaving prison, he grew a shell around himself on which the outside world could batter in vain. The shell protected him, sheltered his aspirations (Álvaro’s father was the only one who helped me when I left prison, and Álvaro is like a son to me, the son of my best friend, the friend who never called me “comrade,” because he thought the word, in my ears, might be demeaning), and he has probably kept those aspirations to the end, like wine turning sour in the barrel. I said he shut himself away, but that’s not true, he always had his antenna alert to a rather remote outer world: he didn’t live outside the world, but in opposition to it, and that included his wife and children, who, I suppose, he made unhappy, if it’s possible to make other people happy or unhappy.

Yesterday, as I do every evening, I went to the bar. First, a game of dominoes, then the chance to get your revenge with a few hands of cards. My partner’s Justino — he’s an occasional associate of Pedrós, whereas I’m an associate around whose neck Pedrós has tied a very large stone, just as Bernal’s father — Bernal is partners with Francisco today — did with the corpses he threw into the Canal de Ibiza. After the game of dominoes — the losing pair pay for the coffee — we bet a couple of drinks on a few hands of tute, and that’s when Justino announces that Pedrós’s businesses — the hardware store, the domestic appliances shop, the offices — have been “intervened.”