On the Edge (10 page)

He got annoyed when he heard that my uncle was doing well in Misent. There’s no shortage of work, tourists are buying apartments and houses, and they need doors, window frames, and shutters, my uncle would say, adding a dash of cognac to his coffee, and my father would reply that here nothing much had changed: we’re freshwater people in Olba. And fresh water only attracts mosquitoes. He would make fun of my uncle: I suppose now you go fishing in the sea—I know you left your freshwater fishing tackle to him (he didn’t say “my son” or “Esteban,” or even “the boy”: he said “him”). Next time you visit, bring us a grouper or a bit of salted tuna or some red mullet. When he spoke of saltwater people, he wasn’t referring to the fishermen in the port of Misent, who’d always formed a marginal colony of poor folk (have you forgotten that, Leonor? the houses that got flooded in the storms, with no toilets, no modern conveniences), but to those people who were drawn by the strong magnet, the magical spell of the sea, who have generated so much coming and going over the last few decades, so much speculation, an invasion of which my uncle was beginning to be a part. Misent. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sea attracted the first tourists to Misent, a few bourgeois families with aristocratic pretensions, just as in the preceding centuries it had attracted merchants, adventurers, smugglers (the sea as a source of violence), invaders who forced the freshwater men to protect themselves, filling the coastline with watchtowers and fortresses built in the middle of the marshes, the uncertain sea as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: the casinos of Misent, the brothels, the cheap boarding houses and bars that attracted the sailors who moored in the port and the farmers from the villages inland. They would buy supplies from the warehouses, go for a check-up at the doctor’s, visit the notary’s office to sign any legal documents, go to the bars, casinos and gambling dens, until, that is, the bombardments during the war left the port unused for decades, and Misent became almost a ghost town: no ships arrived to unload timber or cement and then load up again with raisins and figs, oranges, grapefruit, pomegranates, brightly painted wooden crates carefully packed with fruit wrapped up in delicate tissue paper. It’s true that bourgeois families continued to spend their summers there, and they had their own cafés in Avenida Orts, but they were not invaders, no, those who came in the summer were like guests: they lived in elegant houses with stucco façades built behind high walls overgrown with jasmine and wisteria, houses built on the low hills with views over the vineyards; for those people, the sea was like a blue fringe on the horizon; they were not the invasion that came later: thousands and thousands of complete maniacs (that’s what he called them, maniacs, idiots), who bought apartments right on the seashore—who in their right mind would choose to live right by the sea, he would say, that’s where the poorest houses have always been built, for fishermen and unskilled laborers, as well, of course, as the merchants’ warehouses, which had to be where the business was, and the boarding houses and lodgings for sailors and prostitutes. I myself see things in rather the same way, and in the midst of all this confusion, the lagoon seems to me the sole surviving nucleus of a timeless world that remains both fragile and forceful, in the center of that diminishing tapestry—sharkskin green—formed by the orange and grapefruit plantations, the orchards, the fields that drink from the lagoon thanks to a complicated system of irrigation channels. We use the word “nature” to describe any forms of artifice that preceded ours, we don’t stop to consider that landscapes are not eternal, they exist and are—like us—condemned to die, and not always more slowly either. I can testify to that. You just have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty years. But what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong, it’s all right, don’t worry, it’s nothing, I’m not crying, yes, I am, Don Esteban, but I’m crying over nothing really, just my own problems, which I don’t want to dump onto you, they’re my problems after all. But, sweetheart, calm down, tell me what’s wrong. No, stop. Tell me why you’re crying, just calm down a little, that’s it, here’s my handkerchief, dry your eyes, come on, raise your head a little and I’ll dry your eyes. That’s better, there you are, you’re so pretty when you smile, and you look ugly when you cry, no, that’s not true, you never look ugly, you’re always pretty, but I do hate to see you sad, let me wipe away your tears again, I’m really sorry to get so upset, don’t worry, you can rest your head on my shoulder if that helps to calm you, that’s it, relax, what tiny hands you have, next to mine they look like toys, like a doll’s hands, look, I can wrap my hand around one of yours and it’s gone, vanished, that’s better, it’s good to see you laughing again, with those lovely eyes of yours, you really do have tiny hands, put them on top of mine, and, look, if I close my hands, they vanish, they’re lost, such small hands and such big eyes. That’s right, relax. Everything passes, but there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, whenever anything bad happens, just remember that nothing lasts forever, that’s what life is like, we’re born and we die, everything passes, nothing remains the same, everything dies, us too, my mother died more than twenty years ago, and how long ago is it since Uncle Ramón died, the one who wasn’t born in time to take part in the war, the one my grandmother kept slapping even while she was clutching him to her when the fascists burst in, can’t you see he’s just a child, she said, clutching the one who married late, was soon widowed and never had children, although I often think that he did have a son in me, just as he was the closest thing I ever had to a father. In his later years, he came back to Olba, he’d closed his workshop in Misent when his wife died: everything reminds me of her, I can’t bear to be in the workshop or the house or down by the port, or in the cafés or shops or the banks in Avenida Orts. He even took to blaming a God he didn’t believe in. Men, he used to say, can fuck you up your whole life, but, as the mystics said, at least we’re allowed all eternity to rest or to continue cursing your enemies. Each man contains his own particular evil and you can prepare yourself to confront him (he talked about men as he did about fish and wild boar, each with his particular bait, each with his particular appetites, each with his particular trap). I’m not afraid of men, but I’m afraid to think that God might exist. He’s the one who created the evil in each of us, the one we keep inside us, the one that emerges into the open only to screw everything up. I hate to think what’s in that divine head of his, or what he shits out of His sacred ass, Mars and the Sun and Jupiter and the Moon are all his turds, and we and the rats and the cockroaches are just stinking little bits of His crap.

One evening, he asked me to drive him to the local brothel. He went upstairs with one of the women, but didn’t even take his clothes off: how can I take my clothes off with all this flab hanging off me (he had continued to put on weight, widowhood had made him greedier, his eyes grew smaller, pillowed in fat) and all these bulging veins. He rolled up one trouser leg and showed me his varicose veins, which covered the complete color spectrum, from sky blue to navy blue, from lilac to black. He paid, sat down on the bed, looked at the naked girl for half an hour, reached out to touch her, a single caress, and came unsteadily back down the stairs, one hand pressed against the wall to support himself. On the way home, I looked at him out of the corner of one eye, where he was sitting in the passenger seat, and I saw his flushed face and the tears rolling down his cheeks. How could those two men possibly be brothers, the sensual man who, in his old age, could still take pleasure in merely looking at a woman’s flesh, and who had only fallen out with life because he loved it so, and then my father, that lugubrious bat who often didn’t leave the house for weeks on end and kept the windows closed to avoid the sun’s dazzling gaze. And yet, with the universe’s usual senseless logic, the one who was full of life was the first to die, while the other has lingered on, growing ever sourer: the one who for more than seventy years has shown no interest in life is still slowly rotting and infecting everything around him with his bitterness.

My older brother Germán and I weren’t alike either; a variant on the same Biblical theme, Cain and Abel, dark and light, although, in this case, I was the bat who survived, while he died of incurable lung cancer (and he didn’t even smoke). Right from the start, he said he didn’t want to be a carpenter. He liked mechanical things, taking cars and motorbikes apart and putting them back together again. Initially, my father was adamantly opposed, but finally gave in and helped Germán open a garage which ended up in the hands of Germán’s wife and her brothers, an unseemly, rather tawdry ending. It’s hard to understand how that young woman, Laura (apparently her father named her after the film, which came out the year she was born, she was seven or eight years younger than my brother), who was apparently so in love, always taking my brother’s arm and giving him sloppy kisses, how that cheerful, helpful girl, so ready to help with the lunch and serve at table, always so house-proud and considerate, especially when it came to our family, giving my mother presents and calling her Mama, kissing my father and calling him Papa, the only one who could ever kiss him without him groaning and who could get his eyes to fill with tears when he received her gift of socks or a sweater, how that same selfless, hard-working woman became the one to cut all ties with our family as soon as Germán died. She’d been almost as ruthless with her husband when she found out that his cancer was terminal. She became cool and indifferent toward us, her in-laws, and even toward him. My mother took better care of Germán than she did, for she was too busy during his final days, rushing about between the land registry and the bank, from the notary to the lawyer’s office, determined not to leave any loose ends, and getting my brother to sign papers when he was almost too weak to hold a pen. She even phoned up my father to get him to sign a few documents too. It’s for the children’s sake, she said, by way of justification. In the end, she managed to keep the garage and the house my brother had set up with our father’s money. For several years, my father had to continue paying the mortgage. So, what was it all about, then, the soft voice (she wasn’t remotely like the highly stylized Gene Tierney who’d played Laura in the film, she was short and chubby, but with a very animated face), the domestic hyperactivity whenever they came to lunch at our house, the eagerness to lay the table, to smooth and iron the table cloth, and help in the kitchen, the charming, industrious little ant who called my parents Mama and Papa, and kissed my brother and straightened his collar and patted his bottom, put her arms around his waist, intertwined her fingers with his while she gazed adoringly into his eyes. Was it all an act? Are we all just actors, who might at any moment grow tired of the role we’re playing and remove our disguise? Or are there also real people? But what does that mean? What does “real people” mean? And if it means nothing,
is
nothing, what sense is there in life? What happens to us if real people don’t exist? We tend to think that people’s true nature comes out at decisive moments, when the going gets tough, when they’re pushed to the limit. The moment for heroes and saints. And yet, strange though it may seem, at such moments, human behavior is usually neither exemplary nor encouraging. The group who elbow their way to the head of the line where the concert tickets are being handed out; the spectators who flee the burning theater, trampling over the weaker members of the audience, not even noticing them, the child, the withered flesh of the old man, crushed beneath the soles of the anxious fugitives, pierced by the heels of young women elegantly dressed for an evening out; the honest citizens, including the women—from middle- and working-class families, there’s no difference—who use their oars to furiously beat back the other shipwreck victims trying to clamber into the overcrowded lifeboat. It’s every man for himself. As we know, Dad, it’s not hard to arrive at the point where you are now; day after day, life insists on proving you right. The great human family. Of the two grandchildren your older son gave you, we haven’t heard a word—they’ve vanished. My mother would occasionally weep for them: I do have grandchildren, but it’s as if they had never existed. That shameless hussy (she was a hussy now, no longer
my dear, I’ve put some croquettes by for you so that you can fry them up later this evening when you get home, because the children love them freshly cooked, nice and hot
), that shameless hussy, my mother would say, she took them from me. She stole them. Just as she stole everything that belongs to our son. Just as she stole what was ours.

My sister’s children helped somewhat to assuage the resurgence of maternal feelings that grandchildren tend to provoke in women. At least she had them, even though they were far away, in Barcelona. At least they came to see her sometimes. She never spoke ill of her daughter, but I know that it pained her never to have been invited to their house in Barcelona. Not once. Either because they found her presence bothersome and didn’t know what to do with her in the big city, or—as Carmen herself said—because their house really was too small. My mother interpreted this as indifference, but that, in turn, became a stimulus. Suffering diverted her, gave meaning to time, gave focus; and it allowed her to complain, to give vent to her bitterness: her grandchildren were there and she, their grandmother, was here, 300 endless miles away. She would knit sweaters for them, buy them jackets, and I imagine that my sister gave these away to some needy child or neighbor, provincial sweaters and cardigans and old-fashioned jackets that no one with any ambition would dream of wearing in the big city. She never saw Germán’s children again, they didn’t even come to her funeral, I can’t remember now if they were still living in Misent when she died, because that was where my brother moved to when he got married and where he’d set up his business. I know they don’t live there any more. My sister-in-law sold the house and the garage years ago when she remarried—the garage went to one of Leonor’s brothers—and then the whole family moved away, possibly to Madrid. Needless to say, I never saw them again either. I imagine they’ll remember us, though, when they find out that my father is dead and that I have no heirs. Then they’ll be happy enough to sit down with the rest of the family to divide up the spoils. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if there are any, there must be some, and Carmen’s children and grandchildren (I know she has grandchildren, not that she’s ever brought them here to visit, I’ve only seen photos—she blames her daughters-in-law,
well, you know what they’re like
). The dish we make by frying up the leftovers from the previous day’s meal is called
ropavieja
, old clothes. That’s what Germán’s family will be eating when they come; they’ll meet their aunt and uncle: Uncle Juan (who was born after me), the ne’er-do-well, who will arrive from some far-flung part of the world to join them in the notary’s office; they’ll meet their Aunt Carmen and the cousins and nephews from Barcelona, they’ll greet each other gladly, exchange phone numbers, addresses, all of them in excellent spirits, looking forward to the prospect of the money that will come to them from the division of spoils, the sale of the house and the carpentry workshop, a magnificent plot right in the middle of the village, although don’t even think of selling it now, there’s no point, prices are at rock bottom; but they’ll be pleased at the valuation placed on the land in Montdor, even though the price of land up there is in free fall: it’s worth only a third of what you would have paid for it six or seven years ago, but it’s still a decent sum of money; they’ll be pleased, too, about the orange grove that my father tended until not that long ago, land now reclassified as suitable for development, but which, like everything else, would be almost impossible to sell at the moment. The old man was unlucky even in death, they’ll remark jovially as they sit in the funeral home parlor, the coffin containing my father’s body safe behind a discreetly drawn curtain, because, although the funeral home has done an excellent job, he really isn’t a pretty sight. Our father was always a complainer, a sourpuss, his once favorite daughter will say. And Uncle Juan, the ne’er-do-well, will call him a miser, an egotist, remembering all the times that his father ignored his cries for help. For a few hours, the surviving brother and sister, the nephews, the children and grandchildren of Carmen and Germán, will all be drawn closer by greed, until they discover that the coffers are empty and there’s nothing left in the bank, and that the land and the house and the workshop no longer belong to the family, then that sense of fraternal togetherness will rapidly evaporate and family ties will be replaced by documents from the holding company set up for legal reasons, by requests for a special levy to pay for a lawyer (
a good lawyer
, one of them, possibly Germán’s widow, will say—
we need the very best, remember we’re up against the banks here, and things are looking really black
), by arguments because the restless, ne’er-do-well brother will, of course, think that what his sister in Barcelona and her offspring are proposing is far too expensive (that’s probably why her husband comes along too,
you don’t think I’d let you go there alone, do you
, in order to keep a close eye on the business, two pairs of eyes are better than one), and by the children and possible grandchildren and the wife of the husband who has been lying in a grave in Misent for years now. And after a while, after the initial skirmishes, and after looking at the problem from every possible angle, the great battle will commence, the family Waterloo, a return to the natural human state, everyone pitted against everyone else, ruthlessly and unreservedly, using every weapon available, siblings against siblings, siblings-in-law against siblings-in-law, aunts and uncles against nieces and nephews, grandchildren against grandparents, cousins locked in combat, with no holds barred, because the prospect of their getting anything at all is now highly unlikely (don’t forget,
we’re up against the banks, it’s a very tricky business
), and they’ve had no luck with the legal steps they’ve taken so far, despite the exorbitant lawyer’s fees (they dropped the one I suggested as the best option, Germán’s widow will say, because they didn’t like the way things were going to be shared out, honestly, they’re cheap jerks even when it comes to acquiring money, and
they
chose this lawyer, not me, and he’s turned out to be not only more expensive, but an out-and-out crook), and the inevitable suspicions that there’s some kind of agreement between one section of the family and the lawyer, an agreement intended to plunder the others; and on and on it goes, the great family war by other means and in other places, the cold, damp Ardennes, dusty El Alamein. And once they’re convinced that the only thing they’re going to inherit are debts, and that what they’re defending is a ruin (the scene now is more like Monte Casino in May 1945, a scorched landscape in which all that remains are blackened walls, stinking corpses and half a dozen dying men), the holding company will be dissolved and they’ll part with no hard feelings. Then, the ne’er-do-well brother will distribute kisses all round, just in case he can still touch one of them for a loan, an advance, a supper or a place at the dinner table and a warm bed, now that he has their addresses and, above all, their phone numbers and email addresses, the cat-flaps through which modern-day intruders creep; anyway, kisses all round and let’s say goodbye like brothers and sisters, with no hard feelings. All that’s left is despair and disillusionment with the family in which they had invested so much hope, and which, for a moment, they even thought would require the occasional get-together, just to enjoy the warmth of belonging to a clan: we don’t want to meet in Madrid, where you live, or in Barcelona, where we live, so why don’t we meet up once a year somewhere halfway between the two, like Zaragoza or Teruel, for example, the Monasterio de Piedra is gorgeous, isn’t it, Pedro? (Carmen addresses this rhetorical question to her husband.) We were there a couple of years ago and we saw the waterfall and, as I was saying, it was just lovely; we could meet once a year to have a great meal together (presumably spending any remnants of the booty they manage to scrape together). It seems incredible, such selfishness between brothers and sisters, between cousins, blood of our blood, my sister Carmen will complain to her closest friends once back in Barcelona. I can’t believe they could be so stingy, she will say charitably, angelically. It wasn’t a very enlightening experience for the children. Or was it? Perhaps it’s best that they learn what life is really like.