On the Edge (23 page)

Losing his job took Álvaro completely by surprise, well, what’s happened to me took me by surprise too—or didn’t it? He believed the workshop was as inevitable as the skin on your bones, he never took any interest in invoices, account books or bank balances, and would look at me mockingly whenever I complained to him about any problems or difficulties, whenever I found myself getting in a tangle over estimates and having to do all kinds of juggling to make sure credits coincided with debits and didn’t leave me in the red. Doing the sums right or wrong, earning money or losing it. I’ve made far too many mistakes drawing up estimates for customers since my father stopped doing it, and I’ve lost too much money as well, and that’s what really justified all the time I spent going over and over the figures, adding, subtracting, and multiplying, the calculations growing ever more complicated; and then there were all those sheets of paper with hand-drawn diagrams, lines in pencil and ballpoint, with numbers scribbled above and below. Customer’s name: F. Delmar. Chipboard 6: 14" wide x 26' long. 2: 16" wide x 8' high. Work, like family, is a burden you have to put up with, what else can you do, you just take it for granted, it’s the Biblical curse in which, since there’s no way out, you try to find a few advantages: you tell yourself that it’s always going to be like this, it’s the law of life, this monotonous existence, especially if you’ve spent thirty or more years in the same job, shut up for eight or ten hours a day in the workshop, five days a week. It’s a real treat going out in the van with Joaquín and Ahmed or with Julio, to do a job or make a delivery, something that needs to be assembled on the spot, a piece of furniture, a closet, some shelves. Sometimes, you even find excuses to do just that, I certainly did. It never even occurs to you to think that things aren’t eternal, that they could change from one day to the next. It would never occur to you that your particular hell might mean being excluded from Yahweh’s curse—in a place outside the pages of that notebook full of orders, far from the invoice book, the machines and the tools, a modern-day reversal of the old Biblical curse: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt
not
eat thy daily bread, an unexpected, diabolical twist. You discover the irritating calm of mornings with no alarm clock going off, the day like a meadow stretching out toward the horizon, limitless time, an unbounded landscape, no flocks graze in that infinite space, not a building to be seen, not even the silhouette of a tree. Just you walking in the void. Hell is a derelict warehouse, a silent hangar filled only with a terrible emptiness. In the end, the divine curse of earning our daily bread by the sweat of our brow seems almost agreeable, the sound of alarm clocks, water gushing out of faucets or showers, the bubbling of the coffee pot, the hustle and bustle of morning traffic, the murmur of conversations at the bar in the café where you usually have your coffee and croissant, the voices of the other men in the warehouse, the discussions between colleagues, the buzz of machinery, the sandwich and the small glass of beer halfway through the morning. Álvaro: he arrives at the workshop at eight o’clock, has a coffee break at half past nine; a glass of wine or an aperitif at half past one, then home, where, at two o’clock on the dot, his wife will have lunch ready on the table: a plate of rice, another of salad, some pickles, and beside them, a piece of cheese and the basket of fruit; a quick doze in the armchair as the local TV news begins, then a stroll back to the workshop—good for the digestion—followed by the usual afternoon sloth when movements inevitably grow slower, and then, a few glasses of wine at the bar with friends (although Álvaro always drank alone, out of sheer misanthropy according to some, and out of cheapness according to others), then supper, sofa, TV and bed. Now what? He just can’t get up the energy. No more smile of satisfaction when he sees that an order is going out on time and that the goods have been delivered in an impeccable state. True, there’s no reason why a worker should have an overall vision of a business, that’s what people call having a business mentality, a perspective or outlook much more likely to belong to those who own the business or who—if we’re talking about larger enterprises—work as directors or managers. The obligations of a worker end once the goods are packed up and loaded onto the truck, which is standing there, the front door open, waiting for the driver, and with the back doors closed. A bit boring maybe, but it has the advantage that you’re free as soon as the clock strikes quitting-time. He never showed the slightest sympathy or understanding, which I would have appreciated on occasion, and he even seemed annoyed if I asked for it. If, over coffee in the Café Dunasol, I spoke to him about invoices, delivery receipts or monies due, he would just look the other way and change the subject. I can see him now examining the knots in the wood: he follows every vein, detects any weak spots, touching the wood with expert fingers, his tool-like hands detecting whether or not the timber has been well seasoned: his hands are larger than mine, his fingers nimbler, stronger and more gnarled, they have a certain instrumental quality that mine do not, even though I’ve been in the trade all my life. My hands are softer somehow: although they’re full of calluses, my fingers are fleshier, just as my body is, always on the brink of obesity, while his, when he was a young man, was as flexible as a reed (and inside him lurks the same turbid opacity as the lagoon where the reeds grow) and now his body has taken on the hardness and irregularity of certain particularly knotty tree trunks, an old olive tree or a carob tree. He’s entirely focused on his work, oblivious to everything happening around him, above or below, indifferent to the vicissitudes of the business. “Business” is a dirty word these days; a century ago, it signified action and progress, but now it’s a synonym of other words heavy with negative energy: exploitation, egotism, wastefulness. He was surprised when, instead of retiring and leaving him in charge of the workshop with an increase in wages, which would have proved most advantageous when it came to his pension, I remained where I was, behind the carved desk in the little glazed room upstairs that we call the office, which oversees the whole workshop—I can follow Álvaro’s every move, watch him using the lathe, the saw, the plane. Indeed, going against my father’s principle (we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work), I took on Jorge, another carpenter, whom Álvaro thought had come to compete for his position, along with three assistants to help us out, especially with driving the truck and delivering the items of furniture that were easiest to assemble on site, mostly those being installed in the apartments in Pedrós’s developments, our developments. I want to increase my own income as well, and I’ve gotten involved in a really major deal, more work for all of us and more pay for you (all right, it wasn’t just more pay he was hoping to get as boss of the workshop, but at least I raised his wages, which wasn’t to be sniffed at): dealing with the small jobs, the odd jobs, but, above all, working constantly on the doors and other carpentry work for Pedrós’s properties, we’ll have to work overtime, you’ll get well paid (I didn’t tell him that I’d gone into partnership with Pedrós on the apartments he was building, the block that was almost ready for the owners to move in, plus the two other developments he had just begun, one of which was still only at the stage of laying the foundations, I had become a guarantor for his loan by using my plot of land up on the mountain as collateral, and a co-borrower on the loan we took out in order to do the work,
and
a partner in fifty percent of the new buildings, a condition laid down by Pedrós, not to mention re-mortgaging the house, the workshop and the land, and putting in all the savings the old man had in the bank as well as any savings I had managed to squirrel away without his knowledge). That’s a lot of money, he said, and I had only told him about the carpentry work for the apartments that were nearly finished. It wasn’t the right moment to tell him about the other two new developments. Nor, of course, did I say anything about the partnership. And certainly nothing about the loans and the mortgages. I told him I was going to take on some new people. I did tell him that. He gave me a look as if to say I was clearly getting greedy in my old age. You’ve taken on all the carpentry work for Pedrós? he asked, as if he hadn’t understood the first time. I heard him ask this and I heard my father’s words: we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work. That’s what he wanted, he wanted those words to ring in my ears. Álvaro the exception, the son of my father’s comrade, doubtless my father’s favorite son. Another family member, unexploited. For the first time in my life, I was making decisions, aspiring to something, showing ambition. Instead of the expected, last few languishing years, what lay ahead were a few months of frenetic activity. I don’t want to rely on the pathetic state pension for the self-employed I’ll receive when I retire and on my own puny private pension. Yes, you’re right, we just end up with shitty little pensions, he said, apparently agreeing. That was all. He didn’t say: sell the ground floor of the house, sell the workshop, or sell the whole lot and find a small apartment you can pay for with the interest on what you make from the sale—that is, after you’ve shared out what you have to share out with your brother and sister; or else build the house you’ve always wanted on that plot of land you own, then move in and enjoy a quiet life. He could have said that, but he didn’t: he was thinking about himself, thinking that the workshop must not be touched, because what worried him, what bothered him, was the possibility that he might not be left in charge. And he wanted me to keep paying his wages so that he wouldn’t miss the installments on the RV he was going to buy for himself when he retired. His plan was to sell their present apartment and exchange it for a smaller place, just for him and his wife, why do we need such a big place when the children have all left home and married and it’s just the two of us, yes, we could buy a smaller apartment and, with our savings and the money from the sale, buy an RV so that we can spend the winter further south, near the beach, filling our lungs with the sea breezes, and in summer, we can find a camp site with a backdrop of snow-capped mountains, where even in August the snow is still only just beginning to melt and where foaming, icy torrents plunge down the slopes. He smiled that distinctly un-frank smile of his, which seems to express not happiness, but some unspecified grief. A man who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, a serious, silent, honest man, who we imagine must harbor some deep inner sorrow that demands our respect, a man who has a couple of glasses of wine on his way home at lunchtime and orders a couple of tapas, just for him, standing at the bar (other people don’t see this sorrow, they say he drinks alone deliberately, so that he won’t have to buy anyone else a drink). That’s why I’m surprised at the capacity for loathing he displays when I tell him that the Pedrós deal has collapsed, that we’re not going to get paid, and since we won’t get any cash back for the materials we’ve already supplied, we’ll have to close down for a while until we’ve found a way around the problem, until I’ve thought of a solution that will make sure none of you lose out, recoup the money I owe you and get everyone back to work as soon as possible (that’s all I say, but he knows perfectly well that, given my age, I’m obviously planning to close the workshop for good). I don’t expect him to shed any tears for me or offer to help me out, or say here I am, still by your side after more than forty years, ready to do whatever I can, I certainly don’t expect that from a miserable jerk like him, who, when he’s drinking his wine and eating his tapas, takes such care not to catch anyone’s eye just in case he should have to buy them a drink, no, he drinks and eats as solemnly as if he were taking communion (solid and liquid, bread and wine, flesh and blood: always that trace of blood), although I would appreciate a little understanding, a vague show of solidarity, I would even gladly accept a hint of pity, a gesture or a word of consolation. All right, the workshop has been his life, but it’s been mine for even longer. And it’s been my house too, or, rather, my father’s house—it’s where I’ve always lived. I could accept him saying: poor Esteban. In the circumstances, that wouldn’t even seem humiliating; a brief embrace, a sympathetic pat on the back, and a murmured “poor Esteban.” But no, he shifts instantly from his usual attitude—just concentrating on the job in hand, sawing, gluing, polishing, assembling—to an all-embracing hatred, a universal, all-purpose hatred, and now there is nothing in him
but
hate, a bile that overflows onto me and onto everything around us—the machinery, tools and work spaces that have ceased to be instruments he can use to his advantage—the lathe, the saw, the plane, the polisher, the workshop walls and the fluorescent ceiling lights, everything’s an object of hatred, he hates the planks, hates the machines and the tools, hates the place itself, none of it’s going to help him now to buy that RV and allow him to head off to gape in foolish wonder at summer snows and winter beaches, none of those tools or machines or instruments is going to work to realize his egotistical dream of a life spent circling around the warmest of suns, that infantile dream for which he’s sacrificed his life; naturally, that bile is aimed at me in particular and manifests itself physically in the sticky, white saliva at the corners of his mouth, saliva coagulated by rage into a substance like carpenter’s glue. It isn’t just what he says, it’s his tone of voice, his gestures—the violence of his response is conveyed by those tool-like hands, transformed into pincers, hammers: his nails dig into his palms leaving faint red lines, channeling all his rage, he squeezes hard—pressure, as if we had been enemies from the moment we first set eyes on each other, and as if he had always known that I would end up cheating on him; then he falls silent, he’s never been open and honest, he’s slippery, elusive, murky, but there is now a kind of clarity, a solidity, you could stand on him now and you wouldn’t have the feeling he was going to give way beneath you: I’ve never trusted you and with good reason, your father could always see straight through you too, say his eyes, his tight lips, his nails digging into his palms, in this final explosion of the suspicions that have been brewing inside him for more than thirty years. He entered the house when I went off to art school, my father was left alone, when Álvaro was my replacement, half-adopted by my father when his own father died, a boy, a beloved son who arrived to make up for the shortcomings of his own unwanted son; and even though I’m troubled, above all, by what his eyes are telling me, I watch his clenched fists, that seem like tools about to unleash all their force on the glass-topped desk, that supposedly elegant desk, with its Renaissance or Isabelline gothic carving, made by my grandfather, or by my grandfather and my father, and on permanent display in this tiny office, the desk that my father ended up claiming as his masterpiece, possibly a case of misappropriation. My father behaves as if skills were inherited rather than the fruit of a long, hard apprenticeship. He sees himself as carrying on his father’s work. The desk is a fake catalogue intended to seduce the customer, along with the four matching chairs, all apparently the same, but all actually quite different when you look at the detail: the incisions in the chair back, the carving on the back legs, because what on one of the chairs is a kind of geometric hemstitch, on another is a garland or a floral hatching, and one assumes that they are all the work of someone with ambitions to be a sculptor, although, as I say, it’s never been clear to me who actually did the work, whether he made it with his father’s help or whether his father made it with his help: the version changed depending on the customer, for reasons known only to him; he must have done his calculations and his sums, emphasizing either the traditional values of the workshop or his own merits—to each creature its own bait, as his brother used to say; over time, he became more and more likely to offer the first version in which he attributed all the work to himself, with his father as mere assistant or onlooker, and my uncle never cleared up the mystery, as if that would have been tantamount to revealing the murderer who committed the original crime on which the business was built, and as if the confusion served to conceal what really mattered. My father behind the desk: the workshop has been in existence for nearly a hundred years, he’s saying when I go into the office to pick up an invoice, and he talks that way because he likes to think he’s convincing the potential customer that this is the studio of a well-known cabinetmaker accustomed to using only the very finest woods, lime, walnut, mahogany, and not the workshop of some cheap carpenter, who survives by taking on odd jobs and various other run-of-the-mill tasks, someone incapable of carrying out any really delicate work, although he doesn’t hesitate to say that he can—yes, of course, no problem, we’ve often done this kind of work, why, last year we did something very similar, even more complicated actually, and the customer was so pleased that he still congratulates me on it whenever we meet—yes, taking on such commissions was a cinch, although, afterward, he would keep endlessly postponing the work until the customer got fed up and vanished. I mean, all the customer had to do was glance out over the workshop and see the materials stored there, the chipboard made respectable with a thin wood veneer, the poorly seasoned pinewood planks, the fiberboard, the plywood. All right, give me your card, I need to think about it and then I’ll give you a call closer to the time when I need the work done, says the customer—if he’s got any sense. But now I’m here with Álvaro, and his face is fixed in a grimace, with his lips pursed and his tongue making a sound as if he were about to shoot a gob of spit at some particularly repugnant person. He is a gloomy walnut-wood carving of some un-named devil’s face, not Baal, not Beelzebub, not Lucifer, no, another anonymous devil, tense, tormented, one not mentioned in the Bible or in any treatises on esoterics and demonology. That crease in his lower lip. I am that repugnant person, a soft, glutinous being like those green monsters made out of snot or plasticine that you get in children’s cartoons. He almost yells at me: What am I going to do now? Do you honestly think that, with the way things are, anyone’s going to give a job to an old man who’s just turned sixty? He snorts. He lingers over the word “old man”—a very low blow—and I feel something resembling disgust. He is now the soft plasticine doll. The bastard hates me, and yet he’s pretending to be helpless, not angry, not scornful, just so that I won’t hit back, won’t even put myself on my guard, so that I’ll feel sorry for him. What does this son-of-a-bitch want? Does he expect me to burst into tears, when I haven’t even wept any tears for myself? I don’t like people who want you to take pity on them, for example, beggars who, rather than asking for alms in a dignified fashion, instead kneel down, arms outstretched at the door of the church, with some religious image hanging around their neck, and mumble Our Fathers and other fervent prayers. It’s not their poverty I find repellent, they just seem morally reprehensible to me. Frauds. I’m sorry, Liliana, but all too often I just don’t like myself. Oh, that’s normal, Don Esteban, it happens to us all, I often feel the same way. When I look in the bathroom mirror, I feel like crying, I look so ugly and tired, and then I go out onto the terrace and look up at the starless sky and see only the dense yellowish glow from the streetlamps, like an awning of luminous air. Here in Olba, I can’t see the stars. Apparently, when she stood at the door of her house, out in the countryside in Valle del Cauca or Quindío, she would look up and it was as if a whole array of possible lives lay before her. That’s what she tells me. Each star was like a possible life, a different life from the one she was living. But all she sees here is that whitish, yellowish awning, the spider’s web of light from the streetlamps, from the roads, from the factories, from the housing developers, shutting off her view, closing her horizons. I say to my husband Wilson: I thought we came here to have a better life. But he just laughs at me: life’s the same everywhere, or did you really think we would come here and be walking upside down like in the Antipodes? I sometimes think that, when I came here, I’d been hoping for that something none of us can quite put our finger on, but which we all aspire to in secret: instead, what I’ve discovered is that there is no paradise anywhere. They say the Spanish brought their God to Colombia, but it seems to me that he abandoned Spain altogether and left to go over there, but that, since then, he’s abandoned Colombia too, and escaped somewhere else, who knows where: in Spain, heaven is the clothes you buy, the moisturizing creams, the fridge and what’s in the fridge, the car you drive to work or to take the children out on a Sunday afternoon, to the beach at Misent, so that they can play in the sand and splash around in the waves, although the truth is they don’t get to the beach very often because whenever I ask Wilson, he tells me that the weekend is for lying on the sofa and doing nothing, for resting or watching soccer, not playing chauffeur and getting stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the beach. He’d be all nerves and tension then, and not rested at all. No way, he says. The only heaven is this business of accumulating things, and that heaven costs money, money is the key to heaven, and that creates a lot of anxiety if you don’t have the euros you need to make the payments. It’s just soul-destroying having to keep adding up the bills over and over each month only to end up with nothing, with me asking you for help. Back home, the poor people pray to a little figure of the Virgin holding a child and standing on a half moon, Our Lady of Chiquinquirá she’s called, or to a child wearing a red cape and a crown on his head and holding the globe of the world in his hand, or to that other Divine Child, so pretty in his pink tunic and his little green belt, who holds out his arms as if asking his father to pick him up, but in Olba, there’s no point, the saints are just dolls no one believes in, and I know perfectly well that the saints can’t really help, but at least they keep you company and give you the illusion that something extraordinary or unexpected might happen, a miracle, something that will come along and change this painful life of ours, the huge lack of love filling everything, because it even fills the kids now, they go off to school in the morning and when they come back, they don’t want you, they don’t want what you’ve got and can actually give them, they want things you can’t afford or only if you make a huge sacrifice, and they keep asking you for them and throw tantrums when you say you can’t afford Nike trainers, an Adidas track suit, a Playstation, the little bit of heaven that costs money and that you can’t give them, and when you think about it, you realize that they’re right, because why should they love you if you’re refusing to give them heaven? It’s not so straightforward, Liliana: there are other things too. What, for example? I don’t know, the things that bind us together, our conversations. Why don’t we have a black coffee, a