On the Edge (7 page)

He prattles on, he laughs, he grabs you by the lapels with his great mitts and pulls you toward him, splattering your shirtfront and your face with spit, which you wipe away, not that he notices, of course. You feel like asking: When was that? Why didn’t you tell me at the time? But you don’t, because his hairy hand is now on your shoulder and his face is now resting between his hand and the bit of your throat that his hand isn’t touching, the place where a vampire would bite, and you feel on your neck the warmth of his breath, the tickling of his mobile tongue, your neck sticky with saliva, and the girls at the bar have started looking at us, thinking that, tonight, one of them will be making up a threesome.

The watching birds who fly up at the first morning light, the waiting wild boar who come down at dawn from the nearby mountains to drink in the ponds, the murmur of the reeds that bend or break as they advance. For nearly half a century, the shed in the backyard has been filled with all the necessary tackle and tools for fishing and hunting: rifles, ramrods, straps and cartridge belts, rubber waders, Wellington boots, rods, nets and baskets of various shapes and with various uses, and which, locally, are given different names according to their shape and purpose. To every animal its own death, to every tool its own name:
ralls
,
mornells
,
gamberes
and
tresmalls
. It’s like a small collection ready to be exhibited on one of those TV programs about hunting, with titles like
Rod and Gun
,
Forest and Stream
, or the other kind—which are the opposite really—that you get on those cute little local TV stations or the no less cute national ones, with titles like
Environment, Blue Planet
,
Territories
or
Our Traditions
, which show, with reverential sanctimoniousness, the landscapes that mankind has supposedly not yet destroyed; they talk about old rural customs, visit some ethnological museum where they keep tools once used for cultivating, threshing, pruning, as well as millstones, oil presses and wagons, programs that try to make a near-paradise or a precious natural park out of the place I knew as a child. On the road leading out of Olba, the sewers flowing into the dried-up riverbed transmitted infections to the neighboring houses, which were built in areas regularly flooded by the torrential autumn rains. As children we used to play among garbage piles, would plunge up to our knees in quagmires plagued with mosquitoes and rats, among the remains of dead animals, old clothing, dry excrement, filthy mattresses and blood-stained bandages and gauze nibbled by vermin. We were looking for comics, cigarette cards showing soccer stars or movie idols, pages torn from illustrated magazines, movie posters, scraps of old film strips, discarded tools that we could use as toys, a spinning top, a broken doll, a mutilated cardboard horse, a punctured ball that could be mended with a rubber patch of the sort used by the man in the bicycle repair shop or that we would simply kick around half-inflated. We particularly liked the little penicillin bottles, widely used as the recently discovered remedy for tuberculosis and venereal diseases, and which we would adopt as containers for our tiny treasures. My mother would fly into a rage whenever she discovered, hidden in my pencil case or my satchel, one of those glass bottles with the rubber stopper still bearing the scar left by the syringe, and now with an insect for my collection. She thought those bottles would bring into the house the very diseases they were supposed to cure. Who knows who might have touched it, people with TB or some other infectious disease, throw it away right now. She would make me get rid of them however much I protested and explained how useful they were and how I had washed them thoroughly (which wasn’t always true), and I would cry whenever she, with an abrupt movement of her arm, tossed one of them over the wall. The river and the pools around the marsh were full of all kinds of detritus—old furniture, the sweepings from backyards, dead animals—the assumption being that the mud would swallow it all up, that the next flood would carry it off or that vermin would eat whatever was edible. This hobby of mine, which would now be described as ethnological, has led to me preserving and adding to my uncle’s collection of tackle and tools. Francisco often accompanied us on our trips to the marsh and, despite never wanting to fire a shot, he actively helped in casting the nets and would hold the rod and get excited when he felt a fish tugging near the shore. However, he would contemplate all this equipment as if it were part of some museum of torture. He would say to me:

“I don’t know how you can bring yourself to shoot an inoffensive animal.”

“Fishing is just as cruel. A fish seems to me more helpless than a wild boar, and more worthy of compassion.”

“But fishing seems less aggressive somehow.”

“How can you say that? They’re caught on a hook that pierces their jaw. They die slowly from asphyxia in the net, those innocent little creatures,” I would say mockingly.

“But fish are cold-blooded things that you can’t really feel much empathy for, but if you see a mammal dying, soaked in blood, you have a sense that a creature like you is dying, and when you skin one, the body is disconcertingly like a human body, like our body.”

“Try observing the death of an insect through a magnifying glass. You’ll see the same frightening convulsions, the same contortions, the desperate opening and closing of the mouth, the frantically waving legs. It’s really awful.”

At the time, neither of us had seen anyone die, although I had caught glimpses of my grandmother on her deathbed.

Francisco used the word “human”—a human being—whenever he wanted to describe something worthy of pity, perhaps the soul he imagines we carry inside us; “human” is a word with a powerful emotive impact. He knew how to use it. Now, when we’ve witnessed several deaths, the resemblance strikes us as even more troubling. And I say “us,” even though I haven’t stopped hunting and even though he no longer finds it repugnant. With age, we become more knowledgeable about the unpleasant side of life and, doubtless as a way of making it slightly more bearable, we become less sensitive too. Wars and massacres are usually topics of conversation for hardened old men, the young are mere pawns moved by arthritic fingers. What they see in war sweeps away their innocence, prepares them to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. Turning, turning, turning, that’s what this world has been doing for millennia. It makes the young suddenly old, and they become those fingers capable of moving the pawns.
Gira, il mondo, gira, nello spazio senza fine
, Jimmy Fontana used to sing. I watched my grandmother dying (in secret, through a crack in the door, a disfigured creature, railing and moaning, I was six or seven), I’ve seen my mother die, my mother’s brothers, Uncle Ramón, my brother Germán, defenseless hares trembling in their beds, I’ve seen them gasping and flailing just like the various dogs who have died on me, the same struggle, the same harsh, intermittent breathing. Francisco watched Leonor dying for months, an animal gradually being consumed despite all the stratagems of doctors and family members, her dying must have cost them a fortune, what with trips to Houston, treatments in private hospitals here and there. Right now, I’m watching the endless dying of my father who, at this point, could easily be hunted and dispatched without too many ethical qualms.

But we were only twenty-something then, and I would say:

“My father has always hated hunting, which is understandable after what he saw during the war, but Uncle Ramón and my grandfather had to hunt in order to eat.”

They finally managed to hunt down my grandfather (with a bullet in the back of the neck), a fruitless, cruel bit of hunting, we never used to talk about those things, we didn’t even know about them, I thought my grandfather had died in an accident. “It’s just the food chain, so why go digging around for any deeper meaning, it’s cruelty without the guilt. It was simply a matter of staying alive. Now that need has disappeared, we’ve become corrupted, sophisticated, and nothing has that same necessary, urgent character that carries within it its own absolution. We argue about whether hunting, since it’s no longer a matter of survival, is a pleasure or a hobby, a pastime or a vice, or if we simply carry in our genes a death impulse, some mechanism in our system that drives us to want to continue freeing ourselves from those who are not like us . . .”

“Unfortunately, there are far too many instances of people viciously freeing themselves from those who are all too like them.”

“Of course, and you free yourself from yourself precisely because you are too like yourself. No, don’t laugh, Francisco. You commit suicide because you are who you are and not the person you’d like to be, you put a bullet through your head because you can’t bear yourself. Out of pure hatred. To resist that, to remain alive, you need a good dose of idealism. The ability to lie to yourself. The only people who survive are those who manage to believe that they are what they are not.”

“Are you trying to convince me that you hunters are looking for some unnecessary guilt to load onto yourselves, like a belated payment for the innocence of your ancestors?”

“To call a man innocent is an oxymoron. Is that what they call putting two contradictory words together to create a strange effect? You taught me that. Oxymoron. A thunderous silence, an innocent man. The first is good for poetry, the second for sociology, religion or politics. Our ancestors ate the putrid remains of whatever the wild beasts had hunted and left half-eaten. They had no skills, they couldn’t run or jump like their prey, they weren’t able to hurl themselves on a deer and sink their teeth into its jugular. On the other hand, they carried the seed of evil within them: they invented traps and tools. The things I still use for hunting and fishing. Up until then, they fought with dogs and vultures over scraps of food. I don’t see innocence anywhere. Cunning and duplicity, yes. What can I say, Francisco? We don’t always do what we should. There is such a thing as negative egotism, the desire for what will destroy us. Perhaps that’s the best thing about us, that uncertainty, that fragility. Humans are strange creatures, we think with a logic that is quite different from what we feel, and all too often what we feel goes against what we need—love, passion, and, yes, hatred, those are the feelings that can bring about our downfall, and we go toward that downfall knowingly, we seem to need to keep doing that, and no one can explain why.”

I could have talked to him about that, about the magnetic attraction that drew me to Leonor—to each his own trap—but that was a secret I promised her I would keep. We met in secret. I’d left art school in Madrid and decided to work where I’d never wanted to work, in my father’s carpentry workshop, and I didn’t even want to admit to myself that she was the thing holding me there, sucking dry my ambitions. In fact, the work was purely incidental, unimportant. I hated carpentry, but that wasn’t the problem, that was by the by. I felt superior. It seemed to me stupid to spend time learning the aesthetic codes our teachers at art school were trying to drill into us—what was the point? It all seemed to me as futile as what Francisco was studying at the faculty of philosophy and letters; his political, artistic or theological debates, the search for the message contained in books and films, were mere adolescent trifles I thought, because I was involved in something real, something adult for which it was worthwhile putting up with any job, even putting up with my father: an undertaking worthy of a man seeking ways to keep a woman at his disposal, a woman who says: again, fuck me again. That was what it was about: doing a job you don’t like, just as grown-ups do; having a woman who wants you, not your sympathy, not your intelligence, but your flesh, that’s how desire works between grown-ups. At least, that’s what I thought. That was my idea of maturity. While Francisco talked about Plato, Marx or Antonioni, infantile babblings, I had a woman who obeyed me, who begged me, yes, like that, I want to feel you inside me. It wasn’t just hot air about the meaning or the truth about life. It
was
the truth. Possessing that flesh, defending it from other men’s desires, knowing it was there at my disposal and off limits to other men. Being a man. The call of the primordial pack.

“But God—”

“God arrived quite a lot later, when your ancestors had already been killing and eating each other for millennia, and sucking the marrow from the bones of their neighbor, poking fingers and tongue into their hollow bones. I think the real reason people suck each other’s cocks is because they can’t suck their bones. It’s a leftover from cannibalism. After all, we bite each other when we fuck, don’t we? And when we’re screwing, we say ‘eat me, eat me.’” I said this as a joke, secretly mocking him, enjoying the fact that he would think I was just joking, because I knew those were the words that poured from my lips into her ear. And there he was talking to me about God and about some amazing book he’d just read.

“I say that God gives no one the right to make even the most insignificant of His creatures suffer,” Francisco insisted, more mystic than anthropologist. He believed not in the primordial pack, but in the placid primordial family circle. Papa and Mama, the puppies gamboling about in the shade of the leafy trees, the grandparents observing the scene, and a pot of stew bubbling gently away (don’t ask about the ingredients). He had become an active member of two of the Catholic youth movements in vogue at the time, the Juventud Española Católica and the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica. In his house, what with the fabric store, the grocery store (which, later, with the arrival of tourism, became a chain of supermarkets), the orange groves and the vineyards and, above all, his father’s membership of the Falangist party, which opened so many doors to the family—hence the blue shirt of the Falangists that he strutted about in once the war was over—they could allow themselves the luxury of buying the necessary protein for their meals without having to hunt for it. If money serves any purpose at all, it at least buys innocence for your descendants. Which is no small thing. It removes you from the animal kingdom and places you in the moral kingdom. It humanizes you. Thanks to money, it had completely slipped the Marsal family’s feeble memory that they had participated in the hunt for resistance fighters in the mountains and around the lagoon: the months during which his father placed his gleaming Hispania motor car at the service of the Falangists (they really were a pack of hounds, survivors of the primordial pack). The assistant at the grocery store, in his gray overalls, would polish the car before the owner, Don Gregorio Marsal, set off to act as chauffeur to the Falangist patrols swarming everywhere. They would appear suddenly, block the roads, pursue any cyclists carrying a couple of sacks of black market rice or sugar or oil. They would confiscate any goods, demand to see documentation, and hand out beatings to any black marketeers or drunks or other unfortunates unable to justify their presence on the road at that hour, or those suspected of having fought for one of the Popular Front parties who were unlucky enough to be passing by. My uncle and, quite a long time later, my father told me these stories, although I always found them rather boring. I didn’t understand the epic of resistance that they, especially my father, wanted to pass on to me. The sinister black car would circulate the streets at night, its headlights off, and park outside the door of some house, laughter wafting from the car windows left open to the hot night. The summer of 1939. Shots fired into the air was their letter of introduction, along with the crunch of plaster flaking off a wall where, the following morning, the neighbors would see the holes left by the bullets. A butcher’s car, a whiff of carrion. But those were the dark days, which, one way or another, are inevitable in what Marxists term “primitive accumulation.” For the plant to grow, you must first add manure. Those raids weren’t as youthful and carefree as the accompanying jokes, laughter and drinks might appear to indicate, they were calculated steps necessary for continued growth, rites of passage, stages in the formation of the new entrepreneurial generations: during those skirmishes, the grocer’s features began to grow rounder, his eyes took on a jovial glint, his voice a frank, manly tone, his gestures became more authoritative (
don’t you try it on with me
), a satisfied smile parted his plump, pink lips. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Money, among its many other virtues, has a detergent quality. And many nutritious qualities too. It puts a sparkle in your eyes, fills out your cheeks, allows you to sit in an armchair, stretch out your legs, and read the newspaper. It gives you those immaculate hands that emerge from starched white shirt cuffs. It’s no longer you prowling the night. You employ assistants and servants to trap, kill and skin the creatures from which one obtains the vital ingredients for the Sunday stew or paella. The wealthy have always enjoyed that privilege. The master of the house doesn’t deliver the mortal blow to the rabbit, the mistress of the house doesn’t slit the throat of the chicken and pluck it, holding between her legs the bowl full of breadcrumbs to soak up the blood to make the meatballs for the stew. The animals have always arrived ready-cooked, in a dish, served on a tray covered by a gleaming silver dome and so transformed as to be unrecognizable and, for that very reason, delicious in their false innocence. That’s how it has always been and remains so today; it has taken only a few years for us to acquire that privileged status, the illusion that we are all lords and ladies of the manor, while in remote factories, workers kill and skin and carve and package the animals we eat once they’ve become acceptably aseptic: pink fillets that look more like salmon than veal thanks to the substances they add so that the meat doesn’t darken and is therefore attractive to look at (yes,
attractive
, the cut-up, dismembered corpse like the corpse of the victim of some deflagration): shanks, chops, steaks, entrecôtes, shoulders; chicken thighs and breasts placed in little white polyurethane containers covered in transparent Saran Wrap, as pure as it can be, given that it’s the small coffin of something that died a violent death. In the meat section of the supermarket they can’t quite get rid of all trace of blood, we sense its presence, but avoid it. We force ourselves not to decipher the signs, so that the dismembered corpse doesn’t shock us, just as we’re not shocked by what we see on television, figures lying sprawled on some dusty avenue with palm trees in the background. In the lower social orders (from which we think we have escaped in recent years), there’s no room for metaphysical discussions about what limitations can be placed on us when we exercise our right over other animals. Things are as they are. There’s no moral kingdom anywhere to be seen. You’re in the lower orders because you haven’t sufficiently de-animalized yourself. The lower orders worry more about work strategies, questions of method, ways of increasing efficiency with the least waste of energy. They exist on the technical plane, searching for more results with less effort; empiricism: how to tie together the wings of a duck so that it doesn’t struggle when you sacrifice it, how to deliver the punch to the back of the rabbit’s neck so that it dies the first time, how to stick the knife into the pig’s gullet so that the blood flows into the pot prepared by the sausage-maker, a pot containing finely chopped onion and paprika, ready to make the blood puddings. No halfway intelligent rich man commits murder. They’re not psychopaths. They have no reason to be. That’s what employees are for: to be murderers and psychopaths.