Rafael Chirbes: On the Edge

THE FIRST to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.

Every morning, ever since Esteban closed his carpentry business over a month ago, Ahmed walks down Avenida de La Marina. His friend Rachid drives him to the restaurant where he works as a kitchen porter, and Ahmed walks from there to a secluded part of the lagoon where he usually sets up his fishing rod and casts his net in the water. He prefers fishing there in the marshy area, far from the eyes of passersby and the police. When the restaurant kitchen closes — at 3:30 in the afternoon — Rachid comes to join him and they eat their lunch, sitting on the ground in the shade of the reeds, with a cloth spread out on the grass. They’re bound together by friendship, but also by mutual need, sharing the cost of the gas for Rachid’s old Ford Mondeo, a “bargain” that he bought for less than a thousand euros, but which has turned out to be something of a white elephant because, as he puts it, the car drinks gas as greedily as a German drinks beer. It’s about nine miles from Misent to the restaurant and, just there and back, the car gollops down three quarters of a gallon of gas. At nearly six euros a gallon, that comes to about four euros a day just for fuel, which means a hundred and twenty euros a month to be deducted from an income of less than a thousand euros; at least those are the figures Rachid gives Ahmed (although he may be exaggerating a little), which is why Ahmed pays his friend ten euros a week for transport. If he could find a job, he’d get a driver’s license and buy his own car. With the crisis, you see, it’s easy enough to find second-hand cars and vans at absurdly low prices, but how they perform afterward is another matter: cars that people have had to get rid of before the bank repossesses them, vans owned by companies that have gone bankrupt, mobile homes, station wagons; it’s a golden opportunity for anyone hoping to buy cheap and with a little money to invest. What you don’t know is what kind of poison might be concealed beneath the hood of these bargains. High gas consumption, replacement parts, components that break the moment you look at them. You get what you pay for, mutters Rachid, as he puts his foot down. That’s another quarter gallon gone. He accelerates again. And another. They both laugh. The crisis is making itself felt everywhere. Not only among those at the bottom of the heap. Companies are going broke too or are struggling. Rachid’s brother used to work in a warehouse that owned seven trucks and employed seven drivers, but that was four years ago. Now, they’ve fired everyone, and the trucks stand idle in the parking lot behind the warehouse. When the company has a delivery to make, they hire a freelance driver, who does the job in his own truck, charges them by the hour and the mile and then sits, clutching his cell phone, waiting for the next call. Ahmed and Rachid discuss the possibility of setting up a business buying old cars and reselling them in Morocco.

The restaurant where Rachid works is at the far end of Avenida de La Marina, which, despite the grand-sounding name, is actually a road running parallel to the beach, but behind the back of the first row of apartment buildings, and continuing through the suburbs of Misent for another twelve or so miles, as far as the lagoon’s first drainage canal. Ahmed has to walk for just under a mile to reach the spot where he usually fishes. He carries his rod on his shoulder, his net tied round his waist beneath his tracksuit top, and a basket slung on his back by two chains, like a rucksack. Three years ago, countless building sites lined this stretch of La Marina. On either side of the road you’d see piles of rubble and buildings in various stages of construction: sites filling up with machinery; others where a bulldozer was opening up the ground, removing the reddish clay, or where cement mixers were filling in the foundations. Pillars bristling with iron rods, struts, sheets of steel reinforcement mesh, pallets full of bricks, piles of sand, bags of cement. There were teams of bricklayers everywhere. Some houses where the construction work had been completed would be covered in scaffolding heaving with painters, while, nearby, groups of men would be digging and gardening and planting trees and shrubs that are, according to the guidebooks, typical of the ornamental flora of the Mediterranean: oleanders, jasmines, carnations, rosetrees and clumps of aromatic herbs — thyme, oregano, rosemary and sage. The roads in the area used to be filled with endless lines of trucks bringing in palm trees, leafy carob trees and ancient olive trees, all bursting out of the vast pots in which they were transported. The air was filled with the metallic sounds of vehicles carrying building materials or dumpsters, dump trucks and trailers for transporting bulldozers and cement mixers. The whole place was a hive of activity.

On this sunny morning, everything seems quiet and deserted, not a single crane punctuates the horizon, no metallic noises trouble the air, no buzzing or hammering assails the ears. The first time they made the journey together after Ahmed lost his job, his friend Rachid laughed at him when he said he was going there to look for work on the building sites. Work? Only if you want a job digging graves for suicides, Rachid said mockingly. Ma keinch al jadima. Oualó . There’s no work, none. There’s nothing being built in La Marina. In the good times, a lot of laborers would take their week’s wages, then not bother to turn up again because they’d found somewhere else offering more. Now, discouraging signs hang from balconies. Anyone looking for work has become a bit of a pest. no gardening or maintenance staff required. please don’t ask says the sign on the apartments next to the restaurant. Everywhere there are signs in red or black letters — for rent — for sale — available for rent with an option to buy — for sale great opportunity—40 % discount — with telephone numbers underneath. All they talk about on the radio every morning is how the building bubble has burst, about the huge national debt, risk premiums, savings banks going bust and the need to cut public spending and reform the country’s labor laws. The crisis. Unemployment in Spain stands at more than twenty percent and this could rise to twenty-three or twenty-four next year. A lot of immigrants live on unemployment benefits, as he will start to do in a few days’ time, or so he hopes, because after filling in pages and pages of forms at the social security office and standing in various lines, he was told that it will take some time before he receives his first payment. Five or six years ago, everyone was working. The whole area was one big building site. It seemed that not an inch of land would be left unpaved; now it looks rather like an abandoned battlefield, or a territory under armistice: sites overgrown with weeds, orange groves transformed into building lots; neglected, withered orchards; walls enclosing nothing at all. When he first arrived in Spain, most of the bricklayers in the area were from Morocco like him, and his first jobs were on construction sites; then men from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia began to arrive. Now no one comes from any of those places. The Moroccans are leaving for France or Germany, and the Latin Americans are going back home, even though they had become the most sought-after workers. Employers trusted them — they spoke the same language, they shared a religion and a culture — and, above all, anyone from Morocco, ever since the 2004 Madrid bombings, was considered suspect (most of the bombers were thought to have been Moroccans) as was having anything to do with Islam or Islamism. Ahmed thinks the Moroccans themselves have contributed to increasing this distrust and making things more difficult. His fellow bricklayers, who, before, had always been perfectly happy to drink and smoke and share a joint with the Spaniards on the construction teams, were now declaring themselves to be strict Muslims, haughtily rejecting the bottle of booze being handed round at lunchtime, and never to be seen in a bar after work. They refuse to eat what the company gives them, demanding a halal menu. Some even insist that the work timetable should be changed during Ramadan.