On the Edge (35 page)

The back of the calendar for 1960 kept hidden away by Esteban’s father in one of the many invoice files piled up in the cabinet in that glazed room known as the office and which was reached by a set of steps. Only the first page of the calendar, the cover, is missing, but one can safely assume that it does date from 1960 because—even though the year doesn’t appear on each month’s page—on the very bottom of the last page, December, in tiny print, is the name and address of the printer and, underneath, the date when the calendar was presumably printed. September 1959. Since his father wrote these notes, no one has had access to them, not even Esteban, who hasn’t bothered to look through the mountain of old papers that fills nearly the whole cabinet, which has eight shelves and is about eighteen feet wide by ten feet high. The twelve leaves of the calendar are illustrated with images of women in regional dress posing before familiar landscapes or well-known attractions or sights from the area they represent. The explanatory note for the January image says: Castilian woman standing outside the city walls of Ávila; February: A Navarrese woman from the Valle de Ansó. March: A Catalan
pubilla
outside her farm; April: A young woman from Seville standing next to the Torre del Oro. May: A Valencian woman in traditional dress. June: Fisherwomen from La Coruña. July: Woman from Coria (Cáceres). August: “Dulcinea” standing near the windmills of Campo de Criptana. September: Basque housewife. October: An Aragonese woman dressed to dance the
jota
at the Fiesta del Pilar in Zaragoza. November: Woman from the Canary Isles next to the thousand-year-old dragon tree. December: Woman from the Balearic Islands. The hand-written notes are on the back of the pages from June to October (inclusive). The penciled notes are in tiny writing and some parts have faded so completely as to be illegible. That is why they are not included here.

I’m fifteen years old and I’m listening to my father. He’s home on leave from the front for the first time, I touch his soldier’s uniform admiringly, not noticing that it’s made from bad quality cloth and looks as if it were meant for someone four inches shorter than him and weighing forty pounds more. I do not yet know that, very shortly, I will be wearing the same one. The war has just begun. He’s in a hurry to tell me what he knows. He takes it upon himself to educate me, about what it is that surrounds every life and gives it meaning, what frees you from notions of destiny or so-called Divine Will and makes you into a man capable of making his own decisions: you’re the only one who can make the best of what nature has given you, you’re not obliged to do more than that—but you must do nothing less either; that’s what he tells me over and over. Knowing that he’ll soon have to return to the front, he thinks he may only have a brief time in which to teach me what he knows. Everything seems to happen very quickly during the war and no one makes any long-term plans. But if I think of him even ten years before that, I see the same pedagogical impulse: I go back to when I was eight. He’s holding my hand and telling me about the origins of the wood piled up in the port of Valencia: the forests of the Congo, the Amazonian jungle, Scandinavia, Canada or the United States, places I saw later on in movies and on the newsreels. I think he’s making it up. I don’t know if the timber arriving in Valencia at the time did actually come from so many different places. Or perhaps I’m the one distorting my memories and putting in his mouth words he never said, but I don’t think so. I can relive that afternoon in the port of Valencia as if it were yesterday, but quite why exactly we’d gone there, I’m not sure. It was the first time I’d ever seen a big city. Later, during the war, I was in Madrid and Zaragoza, and a few years before the war, I had been on an art school trip to Salamanca. But that was all—then it was prison and after that and ever since, Olba. I think we went to Valencia to visit one of my grandmother’s sisters, because she was ill, and my grandmother said she wanted to see her one last time: a family trip. We had lunch in a little apartment that smelled of medicines, of alcohol and iodine and cat pee, of pills and potions kept in chestnut-wood drawers. An old person’s apartment. In the afternoon, the tram travels down the long avenue leading to the port, and from there, we go to the pier where you catch the boat that takes you past the docks and as far as the estuary. During the whole trip, I feel my father’s hand resting on my head, gently guiding me, pointing out the cranes with their dangling loads of wood and the piles of timber on the wharfs that we can see from the boat. The trunks look enormous. When we leave the boat, the others stay on the beach: my grandmother and her sister, my mother, the wife of one of my father’s cousins, who used to live in Valencia and who was also there that afternoon with her two children, two boys I don’t recall ever meeting again, and three other men, I’m not sure who they were, but probably more of my father’s cousins. We were on Las Arenas beach, near the hotel and the beach huts for rich people. The memory of my father on that happy day, the day when he gave me the gift of a train journey, of a visit to a big city with its lively streets, elegant women and cars; I get on a tram and a boat and he’s there with me, holding my hand or guiding me, the palm of his hand resting on my head, and his presence in the memory is part of that gift. The two old ladies, who can’t crouch down, sit on the rented beach chairs. The others lie or sit on the sand, my mother on a towel so as not to stain her skirt, which she tucks up between her knees against the wind, Ramón (who would be, what, two or three years old?) is playing with the sand, running barefoot through the fringe of foam left by the waves as they slowly retreat. They’re drinking—beer and anis for the men,
horchata
for the women and children—and he separates me out from the group, not even taking my cousins with us—we have some business to attend to, he says by way of an excuse—and he takes me for a walk along the wharfs: from the cranes hang huge tree trunks, white, golden, reddish, dark brown. There’s a book in the office that describes all the woods piled up on the wharf and that my father is now telling me about as we walk past train carriages, vans, carts pulled by great Percheron horses, the drivers idly smoking as they lean against the back of their carts or sit in the driver’s seat, and stevedores bustling back and forth like busy ants. I compare those trunks with the images in the book: there, on the wharf, I see them for the first time life-size and in full color, dark or pale, brown or honey-hued, not in black and white as they appear in my father’s book. Back home, sitting beside him in the workshop, I read, guided by his finger that pauses beneath each word as I pronounce it: the maple tree originates—Dad, what does “originate” mean?—in the Rocky Mountains and Canada, it is a mellow brown, excellent for hard floors, roller-skating rinks or dance floors; rosewood comes from Brazil and is much used in the making of luxury furniture. The Paraná pine or araucaria also comes from Brazil and is highly prized for its unusual honey-colored wood and because it lacks growth rings; the pino amarillo or yellow pine also comes from the Americas and, because it is so strong, has been widely used to provide rafters for the houses in our region. His finger resting on the illustrations shows me the wood that I can now see lying on the concrete and other kinds of timber that, forty years on, I have still never seen. While I’m reading, I keep asking him the meaning of the words I’m saying out loud. Many I don’t understand: originates, excellent, mellow, rafters. But the mystery contained in that unknown vocabulary only increases my curiosity. I will spend weeks trying to introduce those words into my conversation and so I say things like: milk originates in a cow or this bread is excellent—that makes me feel like a grown man who knows certain secrets.

During his leave, my father tells me that in order to love a job, you must have a thorough knowledge of it, understand its purpose, know everything about the materials you work with and respect them—their qualities and defects—as well as the hard work that went into growing and harvesting them: we’re not artists, we’re artisans, although, when all this is over, you’ll be able to go back to the School of Arts and Crafts and become an artist, if that’s what you really want. Always remember, though, that a good carpenter isn’t someone who performs miracles with wood, but someone who makes a living from it; survive first, philosophize later, or make art, but whatever you decide to do, make sure you can earn enough to live on; you also need to know the precise use of each tool: look, touch this chair—he rests his hand on the back—it’s born of the combined labors of nature and man, it was made by people who speak and think, it took a lot of work. The furniture you make supports the bottom or elbows or hands as well as the papers and tablecloths and plates and glasses of someone, intelligent or stupid, rich or poor, but someone, who, thanks to your work, allows himself the little bit of comfort that offers him relief from the hustle and bustle and weariness of each day, just as the headboard on a bed protects sleeping bodies—whether beautiful or misshapen it doesn’t matter—during thousands of nights, it keeps you company while you sleep or if you’re ill, and it’s there, supporting the pillow on which you lay your head the day you die, so you see how important that headboard is. With a bed or a bedside table, your customer has given you access to a world no one else is privy to; more than that, you work with wood from trees that have grown on other continents and were felled by men using specific tools, the trunks of those trees have traveled thousands of miles to get here, they required the work of lumberjacks, dockers, drivers, warehouse workers, sailors, they’ve been hauled along by carts drawn by oxen or by mules, in trucks driven by drivers, in wagons pulled along by a steam engine whose boiler was stoked by a stoker, like the stokers on board the ship that crossed the ocean. When you think like that, then you begin to understand the importance of your work, not because you’re a genius, but quite the opposite, because you’re just one link in the chain, but if that link fails, it will ruin the work of all the others. Man is only his own consciousness, he makes himself. If you don’t know what you’re made of or what the material you use or transform with your work is made of, then you’re nothing. A mere beast of burden. Knowledge gives meaning to your work, makes you a thinking man, because man is what he thinks. For millions of people, work is the only activity that teaches and civilizes them. For others, it’s a form of self-brutalization in exchange for food or money. Yes, people are beginning to live a little bit better now—although this war is sure to bring back poverty—and even we enjoy a few more comforts, but we’re also less as people, the rebel generals doubtless have furniture made of rosewood and walnut wood in their houses, but they’re just mules, they don’t understand the value of work, they think a worker is a mere tool to serve them, unable to think for himself and with no freedom to decide his future, they don’t know the value of what they use, only what it costs, how much money they paid for it. Do you understand what I mean?

I nod.

The war ruined everything. I had to tell my son Germán before he went off to do his military service—doubtless to show him that I myself had fought in a great battle, but also because he would have a war of his own to fight—it will be no easy thing to keep your dignity among the fascist pigs you’ll meet in the barracks, especially when they find out who your father is. Expect the worst, I told him. When I was about ten years old, my father taught me how to carve wood, he kept me by his side while he was making some of the furniture for the house. Then he wanted me to go to school to learn more. He had chosen me. He said to Ramón: once your brother has learned, it will be your turn. I was the oldest, just as you’re the oldest now. There was an order to be followed. There wasn’t enough for all of us. At least one would be saved, and that one would have to help the others along. Once one of us is out of the water, he can throw the others the rope that will save us all. That was the agreement. I learned a few things in the months I spent at the School of Arts and Crafts, how to use a gouge for example. I don’t know whether I would have been any good, but I would like to have been a sculptor. Then the war came. The light went out. I had to abandon everything. For me, it was too late. At first, when I was in the trenches, I held fast to my ambition. I carved a few figures that I sent to my wife via a neighbor—I made my father a really beautiful key-ring, a five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle on it—they all got thrown away or buried or burned before the Nationalists arrived in Olba, because they were politically-charged images—the head of a militiaman, a fist, two crossed rifles, secular imagery, substitutes for the medallions of saints and virgins that people wore around their neck or hung on the walls before the Republic arrived. As well as medallions, I made small plates, key-rings with patriotic, revolutionary motifs. All that’s left are those little wooden figures on the sideboard, not much bigger than chessmen (a woman in profile, with her hair pulled back, a medallion showing a horse, another on which I had carved a vase of flowers). I continued making them in prison, where I would work with any piece of wood I came across; I made a chess set that kept us entertained for hours and, of course, I made spoons and forks with bits of boxwood I managed to smuggle into the cell or the block, because, at first, we weren’t even held in cells: we were all crammed into a kind of warehouse where we had to sleep taking turns because there wasn’t enough space for us all to lie down. I made key-rings and those small secular medallions that prisoners hung round their neck on a bit of string or a shoe lace: a name, an initial, a flower, a leaf from a plane tree. The political symbols had all vanished; we didn’t even think to use the symbols that had accompanied us over the last few years. It was usually the guards who gave me the wood so that I could carve something for them. When I came out of prison, though, I stopped carving altogether—I did try occasionally, I’d pick up a piece of wood, make all my preparations, but then I’d just sit staring at it like an idiot, I think it was because everything I’d lost would suddenly rise up before me. It was like reliving the whole experience. I said to Germán: Look, I may have failed, but you could be a great cabinetmaker, I can’t afford to send you to art school, as I would have liked, but I’ll show you everything I know, all the rudiments, and the rest you’ll pick up as you go along, you’ll see. Who knows, maybe one day, we’ll be able to afford to pay for some courses or you could go and become an apprentice to some master cabinetmaker. Perhaps when you come back from military service, and with your brother helping me in the workshop, we’ll be able to afford to send you to art school.