Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

I’ve left and returned a few times over the years — I don’t mean the village, but the bar; there have been periods when I’ve abandoned it entirely, but I’ve always come back in the end, to that stimulating daily journey, the one that pries me out of my solitude at the workshop in the evenings: down Calle de San Ramón where I live, along Calle del Carmen, Calle de la Paz, Paseo de la Constitución (formerly known as General Mola), and here I am — as on so many evenings for so many years — in Bar Castañer, my refuge: the protective gauze of cigarette smoke, which, today, like the snows of yesteryear, has vanished. You can’t smoke inside any more. Although, even after all these months of the smoking ban, the smell of nicotine that used to impregnate walls and tables may have gone, but other components of that comforting olfactory gauze linger on: the smell of old cooking oil, damp wool, sweaty vests and overalls, the smell of cheap beer and sour wine. All of these still allow me to recognize the place, to snuggle down in my nest and shuffle the cards. Lately, I’ve been coming almost every evening. Saying goodbye to all this was the dream of an empty-headed youth who ended up staying and who has, in the meantime, become a decrepit old man without ever passing through maturity. I think I was trying to avoid maturity, and there was the added attraction of getting away, of not thinking too much and leaving it to Time to resolve everything. The result: I have adorned my old age with bankruptcy, a little twist of angostura bitters to spice up my last drink. I’ll say goodbye before they put a name to the disease (because they’ve already detected it, this transmittable disease, to be kept at arm’s length), before they hang the leper’s bell around my neck. I’ll snatch victory from under their noses when they’ve already prepared the pyre, guns at the ready; leaving them without any prey in their sights. Screw them all. I finally feel able to say goodbye: burnt cooking oil coffee beer anis wine and damp wool. Goodbye to the overflowing ashtray outside the street door which we visit from time to time, stretching our legs and receiving, cigarette clamped firmly between our lips, a breath of clean winter air.

But Justino is speaking:

“At least he doesn’t have to spend money any more on radio ads or appear in the directors’ box at the soccer stadium or preside at their suppers along with the players and the powers-that-be paying homage to him, the generous builder of their new changing-room with its hot and cold showers, to the man who gave them the south stand. Right now, his creditors are providing him with an ad campaign gratis, for nothing. If he wanted to be talked about, he’s certainly succeeded, because he’s left an awful lot of people in the lurch: suppliers, clients who’ve paid for materials he’s never delivered, would-be owners of apartments who’ve put down a deposit they’re never going to recoup, not to mention paid for all the stuff that’s already installed in those unfinished buildings. No, he’s on the run, who knows where, to China or Brazil perhaps, to some more or less civilized place where there’s no extradition treaty.”

Francisco says:

“Given how few such places are left, things don’t look so good for our friend. I can’t see Pedrós plunging into darkest Africa armed with pistol, pith helmet and bug spray. He’s not exactly into extreme travel , as they say, he’s more your civilized, cosmopolitan, urban tourist, looking for a nice central hotel and some Cartier perfumes.”

Bernal adds:

“What with the Schengen Agreement and the mess the Swiss bankers have got into, it’s not so easy now to bury money, it’s really difficult to find a nice quiet resting-place, a mausoleum where your money can safely repose; and it’s even harder for the owner of the money to disappear. There must be places, of course, certainly for the money, gigantic black holes where by day you can stash the cash that races back and forth in the night: between drug traffickers, Arab sheikhs, financiers in London and New York, the owners of oil wells, the people who attend art auctions, because they’re the truly rich. If you yourself want to disappear, there’s always the Pitanguy option, one of those plastic surgery magicians who can change your face and even swap your fingerprints for those of some anonymous third world corpse who was never fingerprinted while alive, there must be hundreds of thousands of them.”

Justino clearly knows a lot about the subject: “Why, just down the road, a drug dealer got caught because he’d replaced the skin on his fingertips with the skin on the ends of his toes, just so that he could change the prints on his passport. I’m not making it up. It was in the newspapers.”

“Well, I can’t see Pedrós and his wife, such the lady, doing anything like that, they’re your typical lazy, comfortably-off bourgeoisie, although who knows… when necessities arise… ” says Francisco.

And Bernal says:

“What’s the point in getting rich if you end up enjoying your fortune in a prison cell surrounded by psychopaths, wife-murderers, Russian hitmen, and faggots with huge cocks.”

“Well, where could he go?” ponders Francisco, taking this opportunity to give us a lesson in human geography. “I seem to remember that one of the countries that has no extradition treaty with Spain is Indonesia, and they certainly know how to enjoy money there: women, jewels, good food. Bali belongs to Indonesia — celebrities go there to get married. Beautiful girls carrying trays of fruit and flowers on their heads (and if you don’t like small, dark girls, there’s a whole collection of big, buxom Australians vacationing there), beaches lined with coconut palms, good discotheques. But that’s too handy for the creditor’s hitmen, those Bulgarians who are such experts in tracking people down and in the ancient art of inflicting pain.”

“They’re not usually Bulgarians, they’re Moldavians,” Justino states, with his encyclopedic knowledge of dark subjects. “People say the Moldavians are worse, even more ruthless.”

For a second, I wonder if I, too, in order to recover what I’m owed, should get in touch with that band of pursuers. But I immediately think, no, it’s too late, the horse has well and truly bolted. Sometimes I forget and continue to think as if I have years ahead of me, not just hours. While he talks, Justino skillfully cuts the cards, shuffles them like a magician or like the cardsharp he is, although at this hour of the evening, he behaves more like a modest pensioner, as most of us do, as Francisco does, and as I have also started to do: pure theater. The money which, to frighten his rivals, he places on the table in the clandestine card games he plays at night — when he takes off his mask and shows his teeth — had its origins in Switzerland and Germany in the 1960s (those German marks and Swiss francs begat pesetas that then begat euros, three monetary generations). Thanks to contacts he had with who knows what mafias, he earned his money by charging commissions on the work contracts and permits he acquired for men from the area seeking employment abroad. He took men from the villages to work as sanitation workers, waiters, bricklayers, or laborers, and he alone knows all the shady dealings involved. He’d housed the men in large, freezing-cold huts, where they would have died of hypothermia if they hadn’t paid separately for coal, or oil for the heater, and then, on top of what they’d shelled out for the journey and the work permit, he had deducted some twenty or thirty percent from their wages in payment for continued protection and accommodation. What puzzles me is that the survivors of those expeditions still speak to him, even buy him a drink and think he did well by them. Forty years later, they still say: the guy’s so smart, a genius really. I mean we’re talking about Germany and Switzerland here — they’re so finicky about who they let in. But he could smuggle you across three frontiers under a blanket, feeding you sips of brandy to keep you warm during the time you spent in the trunk of a car or sharing a refrigerated trunk with a cargo of Galician fish; and when you got there, everything was already sorted and the next day you were working. The victims speak of him with almost religious awe, and you might think that they still haven’t realized that they were slaves in the hands of a trafficker of human flesh. However, when the same grateful guy has had a few drinks things change radically. Then the whole story changes, and at that point, you do get a glimpse of the cannibal, of our very own Hannibal Lecter. The predator. In Olba, he has continued to do more or less the same thing, just variants of slave-trading: taking vanloads of workmen to jobs he finds for them in exchange for keeping twenty or twenty-five percent of what they earn. That’s just an example. He’s a protean being who has a finger in every pie: agriculture, construction, import-export, banking. And he dabbles in all the professions too: teams of orange-pickers, groups of bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, whole brigades of drivers. Not to mention the white-collar sector: customs men and port agents, superintendents, lawyers, notaries, town councilors, mayors. He makes them all employees in his service company, which, of course, has no legal existence. He could be seen as a champion in the struggle against unemployment: he has all kinds of ways to keep other people working. Wherever he goes, work flows forth. He always collects the money himself and then distributes it as he sees fit. If you meet him, if you stop to talk to him, it won’t be long before he’s offering you some little job too: Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Would you do me a favor? He’d make an ideal candidate for the post of Minister for Social Affairs. Some years ago, he got into trouble because, it seems, he sent phantom teams of orange-pickers into orchards that weren’t his and where he hadn’t been invited. In a matter of hours, entirely without the permission of the owner, the workers had picked clean two whole orchards and, immediately afterward, our very own Hannibal Lecter was either selling the stolen fruit to warehouses that don’t ask too many questions, or else warehousing it himself and distributing it throughout half of Europe, including the former Iron Curtain countries, crating up the fruit with stickers that someone had managed to forge or steal for him, or which were given to him by the warehouses themselves for a trifling amount, on condition that no one ever found out about their involvement. I can’t quite remember what exactly happened or how things panned out, but, depending on who you talk to, he either narrowly escaped prison or ended up doing time. Anyway, he disappeared for a while, and various reasons were given for his absence. There are lots of businessmen who spend prolonged periods in limbo or at imaginary spas, when they’re actually in the clink or in a clinic somewhere detoxing from alcohol and cocaine. Such retreats are all part of the businessman’s busy life. Ahmed knows him because he worked for a while as a fruit-picker, before finding work as a bricklayer and then with me in the workshop, and I’ve noticed that he always greets Justino with a nod whenever we pass him; these Arabs know all about murky dealings — in fruit, clothes, scrap metal or the routes taken by the boats carrying marijuana from the Alboran Sea to Spain or about the ads on the internet for gigolos and rent boys; on that vague frontier with the lumpenproletariat, the Arabs offer their own complicated services, although they doubtless make more modest profits; they compete, not always on friendly terms, with the gypsies, although at present the kings of all this trafficking are the Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians and Lithuanians — in short, that unstable multitude we describe as Eastern European, specialists in copper, top-of-the-line cars, burglaries, break-ins, and in the use of backhoes to wrench cash machines or safes from walls; they’re experts, above all, in the exercise of disproportionate violence: capable of smashing in the skulls of two pensioners just to make them reveal where they were hiding the fifty euros they needed to see them through to the end of the month.