On the Edge (16 page)

When Francisco bought the house from the Civera family and set about renovating it, he didn’t ask me to do the carpentry work; he wanted an expert. The builders had uncovered the original limestone façade and doorway. The man he had put in charge of restoring the woodwork left the main door and the beams—all made of pinewood—like new. They had also restored all the dining-room furniture (you know about wood, Esteban, and, as you can see, these are an antiquarian’s dream, they could fill a room in a museum), along with all the closets, freestanding and fitted, all the dressers, coffee tables, beds, cupboards, shelves and mantelpieces around the house. The furniture was made of walnut, cherry, lime, kingwood, jacaranda, a veritable catalogue of styles and materials, the furnishings in the kitchen, living room and dressing rooms, were all included in the price of the house, everything: tables, beds, bedside tables, dressers, closets, they didn’t take a thing, look, I’ll show you, they even left this bargueño desk, can you imagine, and this little marquetry table, inlaid with ivory. The house looks like new now or even better, because we’ve improved the varnishes, stripped off any botched retouching done twenty or thirty years ago using really bad-quality varnish that was damaging the wood and corroding it, plus, we’ve treated the woodwork for termites and got rid of a patch of woodworm too. The Civera siblings couldn’t stand each other and so they sold the house as a job lot—no argument about what’s yours and what’s mine, just cash in hand; imagine how much all this would have fetched if sold at auction or in antique shops, but no, they preferred just to take the money and run. They got far less than they could have, but at least that way they didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of arguing about it face-to-face or giving in to each other: they paid for their pride—an extremely expensive and old-fashioned piece of merchandise. And then, along the way, they’d lost more of their inheritance to the Lord so to speak, because, as was the case with so many houses in those days, the wills weren’t drawn up by notaries, but by priests, and part of the inheritance went to a very devout aunt, who gave it to the church, and so the sharing-out of spoils proved fairly ruinous for the family, victims of both religious and human prejudices—well, money and religion do tend to make for a fairly poisonous combination. The foolish squabbles of one of those old families that had been going downhill for decades. Francisco wanted to show me the exquisite woodwork, as well as the restoration work that was being carried out. I knew the house already, having been there a couple of times to carry out a few minor jobs with my father, who, many years before, had repaired a kitchen cabinet for them and a few closets in the ironing room. He eyed the furniture in those rooms with dread. He trembled, he had no confidence in himself, frightened in case he bungled a job that was not only the most important he’d ever been given, but had been given to him by what was certainly his most important customer to date, the head of the Civera household. Even though the work we were called on to do was only in the servants’ quarters, everything around us oozed class. The cabinets in the kitchen and the pantry were made of limewood, and the kitchen cabinets had a carved geometric design on them. All he had to do was repair some doors under the sink and on a couple of cabinets and, in the ironing room, to refurbish some cupboards decorated with a floral motif. These were by no means routine jobs, however, and, in the case of those cupboards, required a certain degree of skill. The skill of a cabinetmaker. But he was frightened. He tried to hide this from me, but I could tell he was nervous. When we arrived, the maid led us to the back of the house, and, on the way, with a lift of his chin, my father indicated to me the many fine pieces of furniture, and whispered in my ear, showing off his expert knowledge: the display cabinets, the ornamentation on the banisters, the delicate work on the oak handrails, the carved newel caps, but also the filigree ironwork on the balconies, and the leaded stained-glass window on the mirador. His eyes shone with tears. That same afternoon, he asked me not to go with him: you’ll just get in the way, he said, but I knew it was because he didn’t want me to see his lack of skill or, rather, his fear of that lack of skill, because that isn’t the story he had told me, and those weren’t the hands capable of carving the table in his office, with its medallions, human figures and
grottesche
, the skills of someone who’d once wanted to be a sculptor.

Half a century later, I visited the house again: the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms; I saw what I remembered and what I didn’t remember, what I recognized and what I’d forgotten, what I hadn’t seen on that first visit when we saw only the part of the house where we were going to work—the rooms and corridors that led there. You don’t show your house to a couple of carpenters or to a carpenter and his assistant, you don’t show them around the way you would your guests. You say
this is here and it’s like this and I’d like it to be like that
. On this visit, Francisco asked my opinion about the restoration that was taking place and explained that they were superb examples of workmanship that no one could possibly afford nowadays, museum pieces. He invited me to run my hand along the edges of tables and sideboards, to open doors and drawers, to admire the perfect finish, the precision with which they had been repaired, saying again that this furniture was a hundred years old: doors that still fitted and drawers that slid smoothly in and out after a century of use. He had found the only furniture and woodwork restorer in the whole region:

“He uses natural, non-aggressive oils—he’s truly a miracle worker—reconstructing what’s damaged, rotten, splintered, wormeaten or broken, I’ve seen some amazing work he’s done before, on a fifteenth-century coffered ceiling in a palace in Valencia, on a couple of Renaissance bargueño desks. He’s worked marvels here too, as you can see, although, everything in the house was in a remarkably good state of preservation, generally speaking, it was just a matter of cleaning it up and using the best treatments to protect the wood, you must know him, though he’s not a local, there’s no one around here now who does this kind of work; he gets calls not just from people in Valencia and Barcelona, but from people in Paris and even Italy, even though he says he’s not that keen on traveling. I travel, he says, because I enjoy the challenges they’re offering me. He’s quite a lot older than us. He must be about eighty, but he looks like a young man. And he has no intention of retiring. He shows me his hands sometimes, and not a tremor. He’s very thin, pure muscle and bone, and yet he can carry a plank of wood on his shoulders that I’m not even sure I could pick up. He says to me: I work with wood that’s three times my age and it hasn’t given up the ghost yet, it’s still looking after clothes and china or holding up roofs, it’s three hundred years old and still doing its duty, so why should I retire at eighty if my materials are good for three centuries? I’m not going to have that wood look down at me, thinking it’s better than I am. He laughs and takes a sip of wine, a little glass at breakfast, another with his lunch and another at supper time. A bit of wine never hurt anyone. And then, after supper, a drop of brandy.”

I don’t blame him for taking on that man. It’s only logical that he should choose the best, someone equal to the task; it’s what the house deserves; we’ve been friends for a long time, but he was talking to me about a world of which I know nothing, a world my father once aspired to, or so he said, but it’s never really interested me, I despised it, and have been a mere jobbing carpenter, doing mundane work, a minor industrialist with no ambition, that’s all I’ve wanted to be ever since it became clear to me that I was going to abandon any aspirations I had in order to accept a future that would be circumscribed by the workshop and by the shadow cast by my father’s tutelary presence. Basic carpentry: I’ve produced work more quickly and with better tools than your average DIY enthusiast, but with only slightly better results, or possibly not even as good, I’ve just never been able to get up the enthusiasm to take on anything more complicated. I’ve stuck to turning out well-finished, but undemanding stuff: doors, windows, closets, shelving, all very elementary and functional, plank to plank or plank fitted into plank, nothing too difficult, and of course carpentry for the building trade. Plain as ditchwater, nothing fancy. That’s how it was to the end. I don’t know if I regret it or not. Having no ambition, I mean. Perhaps, if I’d had ambition, I would have been even more bitter, would have become impregnated with the bile that has always filled my father, contaminating everything around him. I can’t say that I lost my business because I aspired to something better, that I bet to win and lost: no, I don’t have that excuse, nor am I looking for an excuse. I made that bet in order to survive, simply to get by. Or to help myself to die better. My objective had nothing to do with my profession, it was the house, or rather the small refuge I was going to build for myself in the mountains; going for walks with the dog, hunting near the lagoon. I didn’t even lose because I did something wrong, but because Tomás Pedrós failed to meet my expectations, because he drew me in or I wanted to be drawn in or allowed myself to be.
He
was certainly gambling, that’s what he’s done all his life, he’s younger than me, he’ll survive all this and continue to gamble. He had another business before, toward the end of the 1980s, and he made a lot of money too, but according to Bernal, that business went down the tubes. He left his partner in the lurch, without a penny. According to Bernal’s version of events, Pedrós kept his own money on ice for a while, then used it to set up the hardware store and then began to expand from there: the shop, his partnership in the waste management company, his first forays into property development. People said he’d won the lottery or that he’d been involved in some kind of dodgy deal, smuggled something in from one of his trips abroad; that he’d worked as a courier for that Mexican drug lord Guillén, that we all know where he got the money. On the other hand, for me, the business with Pedrós was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I see that now. He went into partnership with me because he knew he was taking a risk with this latest bet of his. He didn’t know whether or not the property development deal would work, and it wasn’t so much a question of splitting the profits if the roulette ball happened to land on the lucky number, but of minimizing his losses if, as was only logical, it didn’t. His wager was my disaster, added to the long chain of unpaid bills over the last two years: whenever he commissioned any carpentry work, he always wanted it done very quickly, with poor-quality materials, chipboard doors and panels; his idea of good-quality wood was newly cut, unseasoned pine put together quickly, hastily: but why am I even bothering to explain, that’s the way everyone was doing business, commissions taken on just to pay the next bill and to dupe clients who think they’re middle-class simply because they don’t work with a shovel and pickaxe but who are merely the saddest of our lower classes nowadays. The deal with Pedrós would have allowed me to sell off the paternal home and workshop, sharing the spoils among the heirs in the same impatient, rapacious spirit as the Civera siblings, to put an end once and for all to what had already gone on for far too long, and with what I obtained from this operation (yes, operation) and the savings I’d been squirreling away behind my father’s back, to build a house in the mountains where I would retire with my dog, even taking a few tools with me so that I could begin to work on some new carpentry caprice, perhaps an old-fashioned Renaissance-style table, complete with
grottesche
and medallions like the one made by my grandfather or father, or that they made together.

Slamming down an ace of clubs on the table, Francisco, who has never liked Pedrós—perhaps because he feels that, in the bar and in local society, Pedrós is stealing some of the limelight he doesn’t want to share with anyone—completes our piratical Lecter’s thought (strange times make for strange bedfellows):

“Yes, the local radio and TV ads—the soccer club director, the local events committee chairman. Sheer greed. The man’s a glutton; he’s tried to shove all the spoons in his mouth at once. At Chinese feasts, they put all the different dishes on the table, serve them up at the same time, but you take a little from each dish on the lazy Susan in the middle, a bit like a roulette wheel, except that you decide where the wheel should stop. You don’t put everything in your mouth at one time. The hardware store, the electronics store, the real estate business, the shares in the waste management company and the water treatment plant: that man has, or had, more departments than one of the giant superstores.”

“Yes—using what he calls synergies (in the language of the big multinationals) to make his way on every front—with his taste for bossing people around, showing off, and cutting a prominent figure in society—add that up and you get a very explosive mix, ready to go off at any moment: envy is a very dangerous thing. If someone sticks his head above the parapet, everyone wants to chop it off; if someone’s winning the marathon, there’s always some spectator ready to stick out a leg and trip him up. What can you do, if that’s how the good Lord or nature made us? People can’t bear to see anyone rising to the top. The more relationships you maintain and the more friends you seek, the more enemies you acquire and the more threads you weave in to your own failure. I don’t know if he was hoping to become mayor or deputy. There isn’t a councilor he hasn’t had in his pocket, who he hasn’t done favors for: invited to suppers, presented with crates of champagne, anointed with money from some business deal or other, or taken to a brothel or sent on a cruise. That’s all very well day-to-day, but in the end, it just evaporates. The councilor doesn’t get re-elected or another associate with more possibilities turns up and then that’s all wasted time and money and you ask yourself: what was it all for? Feast or famine,” concludes Bernal, who’s always been jealous of Pedrós.

Justino disagrees, even though Francisco and Bernal have basically been saying more or less what he said. He tries to differentiate his position by focusing on some nuance. Proud of his own pride, he doesn’t like to always agree with Francisco, he needs to show that he has his own criteria and isn’t going to have someone from Madrid come along and explain to us how things work here: