On the Edge (24 page)

tintico
—is that the right word? And no saccharin today, I’ll have sugar. That way, we’ll be drinking exactly the same thing. United in pain and sweetness. Come over here, I want to show you something, look at this little box. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Touch it, see how soft it is. Smell it. It’s made of rosewood. Open it, don’t be shy, I want you to see what’s inside. What do you think? Do you like it? It’s my mother’s jewelry, inherited from her mother, who I never knew. I was my mother’s favorite, and I loved her too in my fashion, although I hated the way she was always bursting into tears, but then I would cry along with her. I think she’s the only woman who’s seen me cry, no, that’s not true, there was another one, not that I actually cried in her presence, but she did make me cry. But we were talking about my mother. I think she would have liked to have pictures and figures of virgins and saints around the house, because her family was very devout, but my father couldn’t stand that side of her, and she took her revenge by sucking our souls out of us, the mother hen covering her brood with her wings, sometimes I felt I was her son alone, not my father’s, she would give you everything, and although she always made it seem that she gave it all out of selflessness, really it was pure egotism, a way of stealing from my father the part of us that belonged to him. Do you like the pendant? And the earrings? It’s the only jewelry we own, it’s more than a hundred years old. My mother’s parents were quite well-off, you see, and they never forgave her for marrying a loser like my Dad. The stones are sapphires, go on, take them, you’ve more right than anyone. Put them on, let me see how they look. Oh, yes, lovely, the blue of the pendant and the earrings really suit your complexion. Take a peek in the mirror. No, don’t take them off. Keep them on. Today is our little party. But why are you crying? Tell your husband they’re a gift from an old man who’s very grateful for the care and affection with which you treat him and his even more ancient father. Why would your husband be jealous? Oh, kisses and tears together. Wet kisses. In those hundred years, the stones have lost none of their watery blue brilliance, and the white gold has lost none of its glow. The stability of jewels gives us hope, Liliana. Knowing that there are things that stay the same in a world that’s constantly changing and constantly growing more corrupt. There was a time when the Virgin of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá lost all her color, and then suddenly, one day, it all came back, and she looked more beautiful than when she was first painted. What if a miracle like that were to happen to us? What if all the dirt and murk around us were to be filled with color? Come on, Liliana, make some coffee. Don’t tell me you don’t want to drink a
tintico
with me. Did I say it right? Doña Liliana, would you care to drink a
tintico
with me? Sipping my coffee while I gaze on you all bedecked with jewels. We old people enjoy looking upon youth. My Uncle Ramón told me that. I was too young to understand at the time. One day, I’ll tell you about him.

Álvaro has grayish-brown eyes, Julio’s are a kind of greenish-blue, framed by thick lashes that he uses to great effect, lowering them slowly when he wants to ask a favor, blinking quickly when he’s trying to intimidate me, silently reminding me that I’ve been employing him illegally, without a contract. I’m completely bullet-proof though. If he reports me, I’ll pay up, but he’ll have to give back years of unemployment benefits and social security payments. It’s your choice, my eyes are telling him, and he again lowers his lashes. Today, he’s all meek and submissive. Ahmed’s shining, jet-black eyes float against the backdrop of the whites which in his case are yellowish and emphasize his dark pupils rather than diluting or blurring them. He looks at me with pretend fury, and that pretense is telling me: I know you have to put on this act in front of the others, but I’m sure you’ll phone me later on and we’ll continue to work together and go fishing in the lagoon and have lunch on the grass: that’s what he’s saying to me. He still thinks this is all just theater, a set-up to get rid of someone I don’t like (Julio perhaps or, more likely, Jorge). We’ll see what happens when he realizes it’s not an act. Well, I won’t see that actually, I won’t be here, so what do I care? Jorge’s brown eyes, small and bright, are almost buried among folds of fat; sometimes they’re wounding and sometimes they oil his words and even his silences; the ever-pragmatic Jorge’s eyes laugh, mock, threaten: I’m owed two years’ unemployment benefits, they say. Give me a decent severance package, and we’ll still be friends. Otherwise, you’d better watch your back. He thinks that, as the skilled carpenter he is, he’ll always find work. Being unemployed is just a holiday in between jobs. As for Joaquín, I don’t know what to make of him. A bewildered child, his eyes always moist, ready to fill with tears because the toy he was given for Christmas has broken. As I walk along, I have before me those five pairs of eyes, each quite distinct, but over the past few days, seeing them staring at me from across the desk, they’ve begun to blur into a single pair of eyes, a confused combination of them all, a fragmentary, polyhedric eye, a Polyphemic eye into which I would like to plunge a stake to make it stop watching—accusing, mocking, pleading—an eye that is, at once, jet-black, greenish-blue, dark brown, and an infantile grayish-brown floating in its yellow whites, bright eyes half-buried in folds of fat: the eye of all eyes. Plunging a stake into it, blinding the monster and escaping. Because that’s what I see now, the monster, the primordial predator, the carrion-eater. I discover the dark depths of mankind: the long-buried resentments. They go hunting and their calculations are based on pure efficiency, getting more for less: it’s sheer necessity, devoid of any moral value, economics in its purest form; how to stick the knife in the pig’s gullet so that it makes as little fuss as possible when it dies, how to pluck the chicken as quickly as possible; like Francisco’s hunting father now cleansed of his youthful misdemeanors, I splash around in the puddle of morality, that higher form of good manners. I speak gently, reasonably. I discover the persistence of what, in different times, Francisco and I would have called the class struggle. But how is that possible? The class struggle has faded away, dissolved; democracy has acted as a social solvent: everyone lives, shops at the supermarket, visits the local bar and attends the concerts in the square sponsored by the town hall, and they all talk at the same time, their voices mingling, as they did in the tumultuous meetings at the Tivoli movie theater my father used to tell me about, there is no top and bottom of the heap, everything is blurred, confused, and yet a mysterious order does still reign, and that is the nature of democracy. But in the last couple of years, I’ve begun to sense a more explicit, less insidious order being rebuilt. The new order is perfectly visible, it’s as clear as day who’s at the top and who’s at the bottom: some proudly leave the mall with bulging shopping bags, they greet one another, smiling, and stop to chat with a neighbor, while others are rummaging around in the dumpsters where the supermarket employees have thrown the discarded shrink-wrapped packages of meat past their expiration date, the bruised fruit and vegetables, the factory-produced pastries gone stale. They fight among themselves. And I don’t know who I am or where I am, I’m not sure whether I should be stopping to greet a neighbor or digging about in those dumpsters, because if there’s one person who’s been exploited in this fucking workshop, it’s me, what about
my
fragile state, does anyone care about that? I want to show them that there is no dividing line separating us. But I can’t, because there is. The edge of this desk. I’m on one side, talking about what is and isn’t owed, about the severance money they have a right to, I’m shuffling their future just as I shuffle cards in the bar, I talk about how much and when
I
will be able to pay and when
they
will receive (I’m lying, I’m lying to them, there isn’t a single euro in the safe; who is going to pay them their three months of unpaid wages?). But why am I thinking about this now, while I’m walking, why am I thinking about the past? The workshop is done for, there is no top and bottom of the heap, not for me at any rate. Pedrós’s bankruptcy has made us all equal again, brought us all down to the same level, everyone on the floor, as that would-be coup leader Tejero told the parliamentarians, what could have redeemed us is gone and will soon be nothing at all. I’m at the lagoon, searching the marshes for the best setting for our play, the place where my father once wanted to take refuge. This is not the time for trivial matters, what counts now is the transcendent. Although what am I saying? Is the class struggle trivial? Wasn’t it the determining factor that impregnated and marked everything? The great engine of world history? Isn’t that what my father and his friends believed, what the young Francisco believed, what I neither believed nor disbelieved, but took for granted? The martyrs, the fallen, the fighters, the people tortured by the politico-social brigade, by PIDE, by the CIA, by the Okhrana. They were the battery fueling my father’s aspirations and those of the young Francisco locked in secret combat with his own father (spitting on the photo of the Falangist, then wiping away all trace of saliva). That’s why I’ve despised my father for as long as I can remember. For putting that at the center of his life. It bored me to hear him moaning on about it and cursing. About those at the top and those at the bottom, them and us. Yours and ours. About how that’s the way it’s always been. Although, that afternoon in my office, faced by that Polyphemus with five pairs of eyes merged into one, the language that once bored me to distraction came back to me: they are me and we are them. Enough. Let’s get on with things. Take the moment seriously. What
is
serious in this life? Is dying serious? Even newborn babies can do it. Even the stupidest animals know how to die. Don’t be afraid, Dad, death isn’t a serious matter, it’s nothing, the lagoon is like the very softest of laps, and the mud is a warm cradle enfolding you as night falls, a mattress of foaming chocolate on which you will rest, on which we will rest. Haven’t you ever seen those tombs of medieval lords at whose feet, carved out of the same marble as their masters, a faithful dog lies curled? Well, that’s how it will be here, you and your pup.

“Yes, who wants to be remembered for doing something no one else is fool enough to do, namely, throwing away his money?” says Justino Lecter, repeating an argument I seem to recall had already been put forward by someone else and taking a puff on the plastic mouthpiece of the fake mentholated e-cigarette which, since smoking was banned in the bar, has replaced the cigar he used to smoke during our card games. As if he wasn’t always boasting to me about how he throws his money away on caviar, champagne, whores, wine-pairing for complimentary flavors in the same tonality or enhanced to get a contrast effect. But he prefers not to say too much about precisely how he earns the money which he now claims never to squander: multi-occupancy apartments, warehouses turned into sweatshops full of Africans in multicolored robes, ill-shaven or bearded Arabs, and citizens of Eastern Europe, so blonde, so pale, so clean even when they don’t wash: each animal in its own cell, its own cubicle, Russians with Russians, Africans with Africans, Maghrebis with Maghrebis, a perfectly ordered zoo, no mixing of sheep and goats or gazelles and tigers, even though there aren’t many gazelles in those crowded apartments: plenty of hyenas and wolves, yes, there’s certainly no shortage of hyenas, who travel the country from garbage dump to garbage dump, collecting carrion and storing it away. The one constant feature that unites this hodgepodge of languages, colors and races, what all the animals in Justino’s zoo share in common, is a transit van that has failed inspections and which, laden with human flesh or stolen fruit or both, is driven at night with its lights off along the intricate paths of orchards, that and wretched jobs, abandoned warehouses turned into squats, furniture picked up on successive raids on garbage dumps, gas cookers connected by defective rubber tubing and at permanent risk of exploding, washbasins full of soapy water, clothes lines hung with damp rags.

Carlos, the manager of the bankrupt bank, arrived a short while ago and, seated behind us, is watching our game. He smiles all the time as if everything we said amused him. If the play we put on each evening was a morality play, he would represent geniality and fairness: the honest bank manager. Tenacity, transparency, public service. The servant of our most neglected citizens. Wasn’t that why banks came into being—to meet the needs of what we call ordinary people? He acts as though he doesn’t know that every light casts a shadow, that every day has its night, and that the night is a breeding ground in which evil grows fat and in which the needs of the unfortunate pay for the whims of the powerful. As if he didn’t know that all the rhetoric about the common good had gone down the drain. No one believes it any more. He himself is a discreet nest of shadows when he signs the documents, mine included, warning of repossession for failure to keep up mortgage repayments. Anyone would think someone else did that for him. Anyway, I’m quite sure that, this evening, the name “Pedrós” will not be on his lips, a name he knows to be irremediably linked with mine, because he’s in charge of all the files and all the mortgage documents, and he was the one who gave his blessing to our bankruptcy; he looks at me out of the corner of one eye, telling me that I’m a witness to the fact that no one will be able to say he spoke ill of Pedrós. Just for the record. Just in case. So that no one will take him to court for breach of confidentiality. While he’s talking, I’m thinking that, from the terrace of my house, I can see the cranes standing motionless above the unfinished blocks of apartments, some still with wheelbarrows hanging from them, and those loads are the seal signifying disaster, my disaster, the end of all my plans, the sign that the cranes are no longer being used and that the company is bankrupt. I see the blocks of apartments, some mere skeletons, others with bare, unplastered walls. I notice particularly those that belong—or belonged—to us, to Pedrós and me: the crane silhouetted against the sky and the wheelbarrow dangling there, swaying like a hanged man at the end of his rope. I try to divert the conversation onto more abstract subjects. Like Carlos, I’m particularly keen to stay well away from any mention of Pedrós: