On the Edge (43 page)

Capullito florecido
. The smell of burnt oil from the stalls selling fritters, the smell of caramel apples and cotton candy. The blaring music. The noise of the pellet guns used to knock over the ducks that circle endlessly round and round at the back of the stand, or to sever the strips of paper on which were pinned a pack of cigarettes, a bag of sweets, a tin car. The music that booms out metallically from the bumper cars, the equally metallic voice of the man announcing the tombola prizes. I don’t know if these things still exist, they probably do, and are more or less the same, although it’s been years since there was a fair in Olba. My hand holding my uncle’s hand as we did the rounds of all the stands. Can happiness be located so very far away? So far away in time, I mean; in terms of perspective, it’s neither near nor far, happiness is something one waits for, looks for, and just when you begin to tire of waiting for your rendezvous with happiness, it turns out that the owner of the place where you’ve been waiting is in a hurry to close (hey, don’t rush me, please, no bum’s rush, let me at least finish my drink). The door he’s pushing you toward is right there, and outside is the night you must face alone, the darkness the child is afraid of, and you really don’t want to go out into that blackness.

Dunes at the mouth of the estuary, which is really more like a drainage canal and, in rough weather, overflow from the battering waves. When the wind from the Gulf of Lion is blowing hard and the waves get really big, the sea tries to recover what has been stolen from it by nature’s own sedimentary contributions and by human silt. The whole marsh was once a vast bay: the sea penetrated inland to form an arc that mirrored the one formed by the mountains, and the waves licked the foot of the mountainous amphitheater whose peaks I can see now above the reeds and beyond the cultivated areas that extend beyond the oxide-rich wetland. In winter, the boundaries are clearer, unobscured by the greens of spring and summer: first, the ochers of the over-wintering reeds, then the dark green of the orange trees and, on the slopes, the very slightly lighter green of the pine trees; and above them, the bluish tones of the limestone. The bay has gradually been closing in on itself as the belt of dunes has grown higher and more extensive. The feeling one gets from this confused landscape—in which water alternates with mud that is sometimes more like shifting sand, and with terra that is only more or less firma—is that of an unfinished world (and it is: nature is slowly continuing the silting process, the mud remains part of the lagoon even as it’s swallowing it up; it is, simultaneously, birth and death), an unreliable still photo of the moment when God began to separate the waters from the earth, a shifting geography still in the process of being made, halted on the morning of the third day of creation, assuming that being made is different from being destroyed, for the same process that brought the marsh into existence is contributing to its disappearance. What engenders the marsh is also condemning it to extinction. It is, in any case, an undefined space, a half-made world, progressively becoming blocked by the heaps of sand deposited by the waves and by the mud brought down by the streams swollen with the autumn rains, with the sediment of corpses of millions of plants and animals, in short, putrefaction, what is now known as active biomass, to which we humans add our own residues; the remnants of our various projects linger like scars: canal-digging schemes that were failed attempts to drain the whole marsh and convert it into cultivable land, walls that were supposed to act as defenses and that are now mere ruins, rusty piping abandoned among the scrub, the remains of irrigation pools that lie unused or were never used, trash piles, garbage dumps, dunes worn down by bulldozers or by machines that blithely carried away tons of sand for construction work; but also fresh dunes on which grow endemic species of plant that resemble cat’s claws and some of which are, I believe, called just that. The bulky torsos of the mountains—whose feet, centuries ago, were licked by the sea—seem like bits of distant, abandoned scenery, the ruins of some ancient edifice. Before me, in the foreground, lie drifting spots of color, botanical detritus floating on the greenish mirror of the water, pushed gently along by the sharp knife of the mistral; at certain points, the peaks on the horizon seem to emerge out of nothing: beyond are the reedbeds, which stand plumed in white like feather dusters, they float on the flat surface of the water that the mud and the waterlilies either disguise or adorn. The passing clouds reflected on the surface create an illusion of a world in constant evolution, but which is, in fact, motionless, fixed as if in an old photograph, whose sepia tones precisely match the rusty colors of the winter reeds, faded yellows and ochers and a brown so dark it’s almost black, and which forms sooty clumps, the melancholy tombs of giants.

III

Exodus

“
WILL WE
one day find ourselves nostalgically recollecting the good old days?”

The ten o’clock brunch, with salad, pickles, salt fish drizzled with olive oil (dried octopus, mackerel, fine slivers of salted tuna and tuna roe), a few lamb chops, cold meats, wine and beer, finished off with whisky or coffee or, in my case, a good cognac (no, I won’t have whisky like the others, give me a Martell out of that bottle you keep just for me); this is followed by a post-prandial conversation at the same table, which lasts until the pre-lunch aperitif (shall we get up and stretch our legs, I’m stiff as a board) and then the paella (God, that brunch went on a long time, we might as well have lunch here too, no?), some succulent risotto or else a dish of
fideuà
, which arrives when the clock has just struck three. Around the table, builders turned developers and other owners of prosperous businesses—glassworks, plumbing, carpentry, furniture shops, building materials, paint warehouses, truckers, men with independent incomes from various sources—meet together in peaceful coexistence, good people who receive—like the golden rain from a slot machine—the surplus value that, with every hour that passes, falls upon them from every shop assistant, every secretary tapping away in front of a screen, every laborer—Spanish, Peruvian, Colombian, Moroccan, Bulgarian or Romanian—working hard laying bricks or perched, like birds, on scaffolding. Some of those birds, as well as producing money, sing songs learned back in their own country or heard in the car—on the way to work or going home—on the radio or on one of those channels for migrant workers that have started broadcasting locally and that play vallenatos, salsas and merengues, often preceded by dedications to our Colombian friends, our dear fellow Ecuadorians, all the Peruvians in Misent, Olba and the neighboring towns, to a Guatemalan, you know who you are and you know who I am too, the person who’s dedicating this song to you, just so you know I’m thinking of you. You can hear their unappealing warblings above the hammering of the carpenters or the metallic clank of the men nailing up the steel reinforcement mesh.

The waiters have not yet finished clearing away the plates piled high now with the discarded shells from the seafood, but they have already placed on the table the steaming coffee cups and the glasses of cognac, whisky or sloe gin. The colleague seated on my right, a developer-and-builder, tells me that every time he hears the clock chime on the wall opposite, he imagines he can hear the chink of money pouring into his pockets. I can actually hear it, he says, and it’s pure joy, sheer paradise. Of course, I say, no harps, no angels, no ghosts or spirits or theological disquisitions, no, yours isn’t a Catholic paradise, it’s more of a Muslim one: all tasty tidbits, tempting human flesh and alcohol. According to this very talkative developer, he spends the day buzzing about here and there, doing nothing very much, and, at the end, he does his sums: if twenty or so Moroccans or Romanians or Africans, or a group of other men of different nationalities, each work eight hours a day, that’s 160 hours. I charge the client—averaging out the cost of a skilled worker and a laborer—about fifteen euros an hour per man: that comes to 2,400 euros, and I pay the laborers six, seven or eight euros an hour (depending on whether the guy’s a friend, how long he’s been working for me, whether I like him or not, because now that I work for myself and not with that bastard Bertomeu, I can do what I like, I’m my own boss) and I pay the skilled workers twelve euros an hour (take it or leave it), so, as I said, that averages out at eight euros per man, which comes to 1,280 euros, and once you subtract that from the 2,400 I charge the client, that leaves me with 1,120 euros: which means that, on this very pleasant afternoon, something over eleven hundred euros have clinked their way into my pocket, not bad, no?—especially when you bear in mind that more than half the workers aren’t registered for social security, and with those who are, I’ve arranged that they pay me the equivalent of the contribution out of the money they earn. That’s as far as I go, because arithmetic isn’t really my strong point. The calculator does the work for me. He rambles boastfully on: what I’m saying is, that, sitting here in this restaurant beneath the air conditioner, before these empty plates being taken away by the waiter (careful now, don’t drop the lobster claws), as I’m watching those hands removing plates heaped with the debris of prawns, fish bones and skin, bits of rice and breadcrumbs and aioli sauce, I can still hear the clink of that money, which is why I’m ordering another whisky—to toast my amazing good luck—and proposing to my dining companions: Let’s all go off to the Lovely Ladies club. It won’t be open yet, says one man, best have a game of tute first, or poker, oh, and by the way, there’s another line of coke for you in the toilet, you’d better hurry, though, before that dickhead behind the bar spots it, the bastard’s always on the lookout for trouble, snooping around, seeing what he can find out. That’s the trouble with living in a village like Olba. There’s no privacy. The clock chimes again: clink, clink, clink, the endless tinkle of coins falling into my pocket, the way they fall into the little tray on slot machines, when a row of cherries or bananas or oranges lines up; I can almost hear them, can feel them against my thigh, the sixty or seventy euros every hour, clink, clink, clink, clinkclinkclinkclink, the three oranges, plus I charge twenty euros for every hour I spend in here, because, in theory, I’m conducting business, buying materials, drawing up plans, dealing with work-related matters, a meeting with suppliers, for example. I go out into the street for a moment while my whisky’s being poured over ice, shouting into my cell phone, giving orders. I tell someone off, then get him to put me on to someone else and tell him off too. I pretend to be angry—honestly, where would you deadbeats be without me harassing you along—to be anxious about the sheer number of problems I’m left to deal with because of their incompetence. So that the workers can see I’m on top of them, watching their every move, breathing down their necks, making sure they’re not slacking off: come on, boys, suck it up, and in a couple of weeks, we’ll finish that house in Benalda, have a fancy meal to celebrate and then on to the next thing. The bungalows in Serrata, where work should have started a month ago, are still bogged down, I keep a laborer on site, looking busy, so that the owner knows I haven’t forgotten him, that I’m thinking about him, but he’ll have to wait anyway. When I meet the owner, a bulldog-faced German, I swear to him that I’m so worried on his behalf that I’m not sleeping or eating, ha ha. Well, for someone who doesn’t eat, your belly’s getting bigger by the day, you bastard, he says, and I laugh again, but the trouble is, you see, I’ve got too much work. Anyway, since there’s no way he’s going to find another builder, who cares? We’re going great guns, we are, up to our ears in work. My father could never have foreseen such a brilliant future for his son, I mean, when I first started working for him as a laborer at fourteen, he was always telling me what a useless jerk-off I was. You can’t even carry a bottle of milk without dropping it, God knows what we’re going to do with you. Well, surprise, surprise, Dad, you didn’t need to do anything, I’ve done it all on my own, all by myself; alas, I can’t do anything for you, Dad, because where you’ve gone, you’ve got no needs, no anxieties, no problems. Yes, I did it all myself, the family idiot learned damn fast. I’ve got twenty blacks slaving away, perched on some scaffolding, I drive an SUV, and I’m lying on pink silk sheets, my private parts newly washed by this lovely Ukrainian girl, who is now moving her hand up and down my cock and drumming on it with her fingers, working away, trying to get some response, but what with the drink and the coke, I just can’t get it up, and yet I’m happy (oh yes, look how easily it slips in, oh yes, do it again, look how hard it is now), I like to watch my cock sliding in and out of that sweet mouth, with not a thought for my wife or the kids, who’ll be off doing what they do best, namely, spending money: they’ve gotten used to having all the good things in life, the tennis club, the rides around the bay in a catamaran belonging to friends, regular facials and manicures, Saturday night suppers with a bottle of Moët & Chandon for starters, followed by a bottle of Ribera del Duero; Sunday brunch at the Marriott; what is brunch? says the radio ad, trying to civilize us: very simple, it’s half breakfast, half lunch, you see, neither fish nor fowl, we had brunch last Sunday and we’ll go again this Sunday—the Ukrainian or Lithuanian girl is still at it, come on, keep going, but not so rough, you stupid bitch, keep working, that’s what I’m paying you for—followed, of course, by a round of golf—fucking hell, woman, slow down, careful you don’t bite, there’s no rush, no hurry, all in good time.

I interrupt him: please, my friend, spare me the details, you’re almost splashing me. Time to stop the tape. Your life isn’t so very different from mine, although sometimes I have to put on an act, move in rather higher circles, but in the autumn, I go to the Marriott on Sunday mornings too, haven’t you seen me there? I’ve certainly seen you. A clear blue sky, straight out of a tourist brochure, the miraculous Mediterranean light when the mist has gone and everything stands out so clearly, silhouetted by the sun’s rays, me with my baseball cap on back to front, American-style, me and the kids wearing Nike and Adidas (I don’t like Lacoste, that’s more your spoiled rich kids’ style, better suited to a banker or an office clerk or an architect, but not an independent entrepreneur like me, I favor the sporty, informal look), and Amparo in her Italian straw hat (well, the straw comes from the next village actually, where they make a lot of stuff out of wicker, straw and rattan, or did, because now everything’s imported from China, but she tells her friends she bought it in Florence), her sunglasses covering half her face: my wife looks like a model from a TV show, slightly faded perhaps, but a model nonetheless, the problem is that she wants to look like one of those gaunt-faced TV glamor girls, whereas she’s got a naturally round face, and she’s getting really scrawny too, what with dieting and Pilates, she’s still got nice tits, though, and those plump red lips of hers, which she applies to the straw in her Campari as eagerly as that whore sucking your prick; on the seat beside her, a Louis Vuitton bag; and then, of course, there are the Dior shoes, the dress by Versace or Carolina Herrera. With men it’s watches that matter. From my sun lounger, I can see how the men keep stretching out one arm so that the others can see their watches, I mean, how crass is that, the wristband tight on their sunburnt wrists, because most of them are just upstarts, builders like you, my friend. You can tell how a man votes from his watch: a big fat Rolex with all kinds of chronometers and barometers on it indicates a PP voter, a right-winger; while a stylish Patek Philippe, which is what Felipe González wears, indicates someone more drawn to the socialists. Patek Philippe, a good cigar, a neat, toned ass, and a gin-and-tonic served with a stuffed olive—heaven. And perfectly consistent with socialism too, which, after all, represents wealth, well-being and money for everyone.