On the Edge (25 page)

“Attracting attention is really quite difficult nowadays, but the idiotic fools who appear on those trashy TV programs want exactly that. They’re not trying to attract attention because of something they actually do or produce, they’re just attracting attention for attention’s sake. It’s a kind of imbecilic vicious circle, you’re there because you’re in the news and you’re in the news because you’re there, but if you’re not, and you’re not nice-looking—at least according to current criteria—and shameless too, and you want to jump on the merry-go-round, but don’t know how to do anything useful, like inventing a new kind of engine or a vaccine against cancer, then you have to do something really big. I can think of a few things: poisoning your children or finding out that they’ve been raped and chopped up into little pieces; stabbing your wife and jumping off a viaduct. The possibilities are endless: then you’ll be guaranteed your three or four minutes on the news. The announcer puts on a sorrowful face and says: a horrifying case of parricide, another instance of domestic violence, another sex crime, and there’s your ID photo all over the news. The civil guard are looking for you, they’re searching the nearby fields with police dogs, and when the neighbor tells the reporter that he saw you leap in your car and race off into the mountains, they search the rocky slopes and the caves of Montdor; and if, on the following day’s news, they say you’ve been caught hiding, crouched behind an olive tree, or sprawled at the bottom of a ravine, or hanging from a rope in the shade of a leafy carob tree, then there’s a good chance they’ll show your photo again. If you don’t commit suicide, but hand yourself in, the aura grows still larger: you’re back on the screen the day you’re taken to court, walking unsteadily, as if you were drunk, you’re in handcuffs and your head is covered by a blanket, with a policeman’s hand pressing firmly down on it, or else it’s concealed beneath a balaclava or a crash helmet. The first time I saw defendants with their heads covered when they went into court was twenty or so years ago: the newspaper showed two smartly dressed men in suits and ties, each wearing a bull’s head; apparently they were a pair of American drug-runners about to be put on trial. We were watching in the bar and we all just burst out laughing. We couldn’t understand what was going on. Now, we’ve gotten used to seeing defendants going into court wearing a crash helmet with the visor down, or a Batman mask or a mask bearing Rajoy’s or George W.’s face. You also get to be on TV if you’ve been murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion: if you get chopped up and the pieces are mailed to your brother-in-law or your cousins, or they find your butchered thighs in the freezer of an apartment in some rough outlying suburb, and catch the murderer sitting at the table eating your testicles fried in breadcrumbs (much tastier than bull’s testicles, he told the police who arrested him, according to newspaper reports the next day); if, rather than being the victim, you decide to be the person doing the chopping up, you’re guaranteed to see your face in the newspaper (the headline:
CANNIBAL ATE VICTIM’S TESTICLES
, and the reader gets all excited: how big were they? a meal in themselves? how did the murderer cook them?), but this comes at a very high price. The photo is no compensation, not even if your entire family album is handed over to be used in a TV debate about the decline in law and order and the rise of a new kind of crime, or about serial killers or cannibalism in the modern world. Or a panel of gastronomes and nutritionists discussing the advantages, as regards taste and nutritional value, of human flesh over lamb, mentioning the Mayans, Caribs and certain African or Polynesian tribes, who all had a passion for a delicacy available nowadays only to a privileged few.”

“The only recourse left to the bankrupt is violence, unless he’s a decent sort, then he can always sell his own body. In the Third World, people sell a kidney or an eye just to earn enough money to make it through to the end of the month. They sell themselves off piecemeal.”

Carlos:

“Freixenet’s New Year ad for their best cava costs more than you will earn in your entire lifetime. Suicide and crime are the revenge of the poor: you’re promoting the one business asset I have, this body-cum-tool for whose labor you fuckers pay a mere pittance. I’ve filled more TV hours today than Coca-Cola. The relatives of the victims meet every year and leave candles and flowers
in memoriam
, and in doing so, they remember me, the murderer. They want my wretched name never to be forgotten. And I’m glad to help, and grateful too, because that sudden multiplication of my market value as a source of labor (we’re talking about my death here and the deaths of a few more, so nothing very important) benefits my widow and my children, who, with the help of a good PR man, can turn a nice little profit by taking part in a few reality shows over the coming weeks.
PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS FROM FAMILY OF MULTIPLE MURDERER WHO ATE HIS NEIGHBORS. LIVING WITH A MONSTER: HIS WIDOW SPEAKS.
They bring in the right to hire and fire, increase job insecurity, or just fire you, and you respond by multiplying to infinity your market value.
EXCLUSIVE: THE GOODBYE NOTE THE MONSTER WROTE TO HIS DAUGHTER
.

Justino:

“It’s best if they take a while to find you. That prolongs the game a little:
MURDEROUS MANIAC ON THE LOOSE.
And so on for a couple of weeks. A few minor attacks, a few explosions that put the authorities on their guard, before the major suicide bombing. And afterward, you’re the subject of interviews, they talk about you in debates: the well-known Cordoban psychiatrist Giménez de la Pantera reveals the personality of the nursery-school suicide bomber. Tonight,
EXCLUSIVELY
on Channel 8. Can we have absolute security and still have democracy? Are freedom and security incompatible? An impassioned debate between Judge Camarón de la Ventisca and Professor of Ethics Eloísa de Bracamonte, introduced by Mercedes Corbera.”

Kindly Carlos is concerned about the future of the murderer-victim:

“The trouble is that if they carry you out all blown to pieces and with your guts all over the floor, you provoke more disgust than pity . . .”

Justino:

“Oh, I don’t know, people like to see a nice loin of pork in the butcher’s window, a sirloin steak. In the supermarket, they gaze in ecstasy at cuts of meat they can no longer afford thanks to the crisis. The newly-bankrupt dream about them just as, during the post-war years, that comic book character, Carpanta, used to dream of eating roast chicken. Seeing a dismembered corpse on TV is a bit of a free snack. People can afford to consume it and they do; then—and this gives them even greater pleasure—they tell other people about that act of cannibalism: didn’t you see that guy on last night’s news? God, he was in a terrible state. Like he’d been ground up in a coffee-grinder. Honestly, the images they show on the news just when you’re sitting down with your family for the evening meal, it’s enough to turn your stomach. They should ban them.”

Bernal:

“But if they ban them, you won’t see them at all, and that would be a real bummer. You won’t get to gobble it all down. You’re left with nothing but a miserable chickpea stew. Lenten fare. And who doesn’t like a good stew made with bacon, black pudding and marrowbone?”

Francisco:

“It’s risky though. Whether you’re the victim or the killer, if they dig out some old snapshot of you with your wretched neolithic peasant parents, or with friends from your youth at a party, complete with paper hat and party horn, you just look like a complete moron. Your fellow wild-eyed, wild-haired, gaping party-goers still stink of cheap wine thirty years later. A terrible image. You sometimes see photos like that in the magazines funded by local councils as a way, they say, of making sure we don’t forget what village life used to be like, when what it was, and what it still pretty much continues to be, should—as that nineteenth-century reformer said of El Cid’s tomb—be locked up with seven locks and forgotten.”

Bernal:

“Not that the photo on your ID card is a great improvement, that look of terror we all wear whenever we come face to face with officialdom (the police no less), the frightened eyes of a bull trying to pass itself off as a tame cow so as not to arouse the suspicions of the always overly punctilious superintendent (I mean, who doesn’t have something to hide?); and in the photos taken during your military service, there’s the same cheap wine and soda as in those pictures of you and your friends at a party, except that here you’re surrounded by strangers who appear to be either mentally or economically retarded, brutes straight out of one of Lombroso’s albums of criminal types. Why do all the people one knew during national service look like mental defectives? With images like that, you fall far below your own aspirations, however modest. Best to have no biography at all, or, if you press me, best not to exist.”

Carlos, the bank manager, who was transferred from Alcázar de San Juan:

“Oh, you’re right there. You look like such a hick in photos even just a few years after they were taken! The more modern you try to be in the present, the more dated you’ll look in the future. You become a symptom. That’s what comes of being born in a poor country and in an even poorer village. Your face is like a shopwindow, displaying all the tons of lentils and chickpeas that made up your ancestors’ nourishing diet. Nothing fresh, just tough old vegetables and stiff strips of salted cod.”

Francisco:

“You say that because you’re from Castile. Here it’s still beans and lentils and the omnipresent rice, but there’s plenty of fresh stuff, light soups, vegetables and fish. The diet may be different, but the pain is the same.”

Me:

“It’s all a matter of social class. The passage of time suits the rich just fine, transforming them into historical figures. Remember all those British period pieces that get made into movies or TV series,
Brideshead Revisited
or
A Room with a View
. The passage of time suits the rich just fine, transforming them neatly into historical figures.”

Francisco:

“No, you’re ignoring some crucial differences; yes, as you say, there are rich and poor, those at the top and those at the bottom, the British and the Spanish, north and south, Europe and Africa. Because Spain, my friends, however hard we try to deny it, is still the Africa that begins at the Pyrenees. The last fifteen or twenty years have been a complete illusion. Haven’t you noticed that, with the crisis, even the Spanish cars are starting to look more Moroccan than Swedish or German?”

Justino:

“You’re all using terminology that went out with Noah’s ark. Mentally defective, neolithic. What are you talking about? English hooligans in action are profoundly European, and when you see them on TV, they bear more and more resemblance to clearly inferior species: pigs, oxen, newly shorn sheep. You guys just don’t get it. People today don’t care if you feel sorry for them, as long as they get talked about. Mothers who suffocate their children, children who decapitate their parents or their sisters with a machete, and people who demonstrate against them or in favor, using them as an excuse to be able to appear on TV for a few days, complaining about the rise in crime or calling for the death penalty for everyone, including the suspect’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law, the suspect usually being an illegal immigrant who just happened to be passing by.”

Francisco:

“Mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law. That’s a whole other subject: the continuing importance of the family in Mediterranean countries. As the economic analysts keep saying, it’s thanks to the family that we don’t notice the five million or so unemployed. Spain is surviving the crisis with the aid of the family, thanks to the solidarity shown by members of the clan, help from parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and in-laws. If it wasn’t for the big dish of pasta that Mom puts on the table every day to feed her unemployed son’s kids, violence would long since have erupted onto the city streets. The whole country would be in flames, which wouldn’t be a bad thing actually. A new beginning. Out of the ashes the light will rise again, the gospels say, or something like that, or was it St. Paul? I can’t remember now. I haven’t read the Bible in ages. A return to the old system of fertilizing the earth by burning the stubble.”

Me:

“Just think how hard our mothers had to struggle to disguise a poverty there was no way of disguising, and which everyone knew about anyway.” My words sound almost like an insult. Did Francisco’s mother struggle? Did Bernal’s? They were definitely caught up in a war, but a different war, or, rather, they were on a different side with different objectives. “But now it’s the opposite. If you’re not completely destitute, you’re nobody; if you’re not the victim of some domestic tragedy: a violent husband, a child with some rare disease, a foreclosure notice”—I try not to look at Carlos—“you’re nobody. It’s the only way people can get anyone to notice them. These days, who
wasn’t
raped by their father or their grandfather? Even high-class writers talk about it in their books. Yeah, my grandpa used to stick it up me. Well, that never happened before. I don’t know anyone of my generation who was screwed by his or her own grandfather. All right, the priests used to touch us sometimes and fondle the altarboys, especially in boarding schools. You were at boarding school, Francisco, and you’ve talked about it sometimes, but we took it all as a bit of a joke, not an emotional trauma: you mean, you let Don Domingo handle your little dick, you big faggot.”

Justino:

“If poor families remember the past, it’s with feelings of profound shame.” He knows what he’s talking about, he’s from humble beginnings like me. “A whole catalogue of horrors: eating cats, dogs, rats, potato peelings, rotten melons, maggoty meat. That’s what our parents did. Worse than that, they starved. In those museums of memory you find in other countries, they never include a CD with a recording of the rumbling from someone’s starving innards or the meowing of a cat rising up from the depths of a shrunken stomach. Has anyone ever been taught to listen for that music? No, the background music is always Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, or, at most, some ballad taken out of context or García Lorca’s ‘The Four Muleteers’ or the old national anthem. Never any meowing.”