On the Edge (12 page)

Never has there been so much talk of business in this house as there was during those weeks over lunch. The little dining room with the sideboard and the chairs made by my grandfather or my father or by both; the walnut frames surrounding sepia photos of couples arm-in-arm, with her clutching her bouquet in both hands and him clutching her arm; the modernist lamp with its green glass shade; the china cabinet with the little porcelain cups that had been my mother’s pride and joy and which, if they had actually been worth anything, Juan would have tried to sell. That dining room saw more economic debate than the Cristal de Maldón, Leonor Gelabert’s restaurant, at whose tables, according to Francisco, sat secretaries of state for the economy, for the treasury and for public works and even the occasional minister (Leonor, you left without saying goodbye, on both occasions). Renting, buying, selling, mortgaging, conveying, building, decorating, distributing, warehousing, guaranteeing, endorsing, signing. For a couple of months, those were the sole topics of conversation at mealtimes, until my father could stand it no longer and had had enough of them ruining risottos and paellas, soups, fish, croquettes, omelettes and hamburgers—it all came heavily garnished with bundles of virtual money, piles of bank drafts ready to be signed and hundreds of square feet for sale or to rent, with or without a lease—and one afternoon, after drinking his coffee and lighting the cigar he always smoked after lunch, he put their luggage, Juan’s and the Ukrainian’s, out in the street. They found the suitcases there, by the front door, when they came back in the early hours. The suitcases out on the sidewalk, and the door locked and, just in case, bolted twice with the key left inside in the lock. I imagine that my father knew that, even though the luggage would be left out on the sidewalk for hours, where anyone could take the suitcases, they would contain nothing of any great value. No cash, no checkbooks or credit cards, no bank drafts, no deeds, no priceless painting cut from its frame and rolled up, no jewel case containing a diamond bracelet and a white-gold Piaget ring encrusted with emeralds.
Oualó
, as Ahmed would say.
Rien de rien
. Nothing. Tired old clothes given a quick spin in the washing machine to save on soap. Juan and the Ukrainian had, as usual, spent the hours after lunch shut in their room, screaming at each other, my father sitting in front of the television, as he is now, but holding a glass of brandy, with his cup of coffee and the ashtray on the small table next to the sofa, while he took sips of his brandy and puffed on his cigar. He’d raise the glass to his lips, then set it down next to the ashtray exactly where I now place his glass of milk before I put him to bed. He’d fill the glass a couple of times and drink its contents very slowly, as if gathering strength. It was the same every afternoon before we opened the workshop at four o’clock. They would hurl insults at each other, and he would seem not to hear, but on that day, his face was becoming ever grayer, the skin on his cheeks tighter, his cheekbones more pronounced. I was very familiar with the way he displayed his anger. When, after a while, the Barrow gang—our very own Bonnie and Clyde—left the house, he got up, went into the room they’d been staying in (the one with the double bed where he and my mother used to sleep until she died, and which was a sanctuary forbidden to us kids when he was listening to the BBC or to the banned communist radio station La Pirenaica
,
I still can’t understand why he let them stay there), and he himself gathered their clothes and began stuffing them any which way into suitcases and bags, while he growled and grunted (the double bed profaned, the smell of her cologne replacing the delicate Maderas de Oriente perfume my mother used to wear and that still impregnated the room—in fact, I think the idea of profanation only really struck him then). This is nothing to do with you, go downstairs and open the shutters in the workshop, he said when he saw me leaning in the doorway, watching him. Nothing is ever to do with me in this house. In the workshop, I lit a cigarette and sat down, not in the little office, but on the floor, my back against the power saw. My father never allowed anyone to smoke there, not with all the sawdust, wood shavings, glue, varnish, enamel—we work with flammable materials: you can smoke in the house and in the street, you can smoke in the office, but not in the workshop, he used to say, and yet he himself often walked around with a cigar clamped between his lips, although it was rarely lit. This thing wouldn’t light if you doused it in gasoline, he would grumble, tapping the cigar with his forefinger as if to justify his lack of consistency. Meanwhile, he threw the couple’s luggage out into the street. He locked the door from inside, left the key in the lock, and bolted it twice. That afternoon, he didn’t come down to work and didn’t want to have supper with me. That night, from my room, I heard someone scrabbling at the lock. Then I began to hear my brother’s voice in different tones and registers: at first, it was a whisper, then he began to call to us, softly at first, as if with deep affection, then angrily and, finally, shouting; Fucking hell, he kept growling, spitting out oaths in a crescendo that ended with a long, noisy drum solo—him repeatedly kicking the door. Then, the silence of the night, the shrill
cricri
of crickets, a car engine, the distant barking of a dog. The peaceful Olba night.

That was the last time I heard Juan’s voice in the flesh so to speak. Since then, we’ve had no further news of him. Not a letter, not a postcard, only that mysterious phone call from Málaga a few years ago (seven or eight years after my father tossed him out), telling me—for reasons known only to him, but probably simply to find out if our father was still alive, or if he could drop by to pick up his inheritance—how well his new business was going, something to do with property management (or was it construction work? I can’t quite remember now). My father had refused to take the phone when I held it out to him as soon as I heard Juan’s voice. His final words—“you can both just go”—included me in his curse. But as soon as the old man dies, I’m sure he’ll turn up in order to demand his part of the inheritance, the part he wanted us to give him in advance; he’ll come back, convinced that the inheritance has continued to grow fatter and fatter (he has always believed whatever he wanted to believe, taking no account of reality) because in his febrile imagination, the carpentry workshop is a fabulously successful business—well, it must have been in the years of the building boom—and that, hidden away somewhere in the cellar—the place he could smell but not locate—there’s a pile of gold ingots, bundles of purple notes arranged by serial number, as well as sheaves of share certificates. It won’t take him long to realize his mistake. By the way, before that pair of frustrated thieves made their hasty departure, I saw the Ukrainian woman naked. It was one morning when he’d left the house alone. Olena—that’s what they said she was called—appeared at the door of my bedroom, dressed (if you can call it that) in a transparent bathrobe. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, just that brief robe, left open to reveal one pink nipple and the reddish shadow of her pubic hair between her very white thighs, which the gauze, or whatever that subtle fabric was, signally failed to cover. She asked to borrow some nail clippers. Who knows why. The nails on fingers and toes were long and carefully painted. Perhaps she needed to remove a hangnail, that’s possible, although I’m convinced that my brother sent her, a variant on his many ways of begging, and her appearance at my door that morning was a commercial proposition. The minuscule robe, the nipple and the reddish shadow sheltering between those white marble thighs were, I thought, an invitation for me to become part of the gang and collaborate in the task of finding the treasure chest, a way of allowing me in as a new associate. If not, why the hell had he got up so early and left the house without her, leaving at my disposal that hint of reddish pubic hair, when the two of them always went everywhere together, because he wanted to keep a watchful eye on the owner of the pubic hair. It was clearly a proposal to make this a family enterprise. I rejected the offer to be a part of that company—whether a holding company or just a holding I don’t know—of which the gauze allowed me a glimpse. In return, I lost the nail clippers that I lent to Olena and which she never gave back.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw him lying there gasping for air, his little paws quivering, and the blood spreading out around him as he grew still, I called to him, as if calling could bring him back, but no, after a few more spasms, he lay there, mouth open, and you could see his teeth, which looked suddenly rather threatening. A creature with no feelings, unfamiliar and cruel. As if death had revealed his true nature. Suddenly, I didn’t know him, didn’t love him. I didn’t want to stroke him or even look at him. Those glassy eyes, sharp canine teeth, the stiffness that overtook him almost instantaneously. A carnivorous animal causing me only pain and filling me with fear and disgust. He just wasn’t him any more. I looked away. I don’t know why people insist on gazing at the corpses of their loved ones, because they’re not them any more, they don’t even look like them. Then you’re stuck with that final image forever, it comes back to you when you least expect it and sullies the memory of what went before, of the time when you loved that creature; when you thought it beautiful to see him running about and you felt like stroking him and even weeping with emotion when he looked tenderly up at you. The driver of the car hadn’t even stopped. People said he probably didn’t realize he’d run him over, he was so small. Perhaps that’s true, although personally I think the driver was some heartless man, who simply drove off. I couldn’t believe it, my neighbors had to take me to the hospital because I became hysterical. There they gave me an injection. I couldn’t stop crying, my little dog so full of life was now as stiff and lifeless as a toy.

I’m so alone now, my children live far away, and the truth is they don’t seem to care about me that much, they don’t come and see me very often, and as for my marriage, well, I hardly speak to my husband, not even now that he spends most of his time at home after losing his job at the workshop. He sits down in front of the computer, gets onto the Internet, and snaps at me whenever I speak to him—I’ll ask him to go with me to Lidl or Mercadona: Why don’t you come too, Álvaro, it’ll help clear your head? No, you go, I’m not in the mood. And what mood does he think I’ve been in since I had to give up my job and was put on permanent disability leave? What kind of life is this? The visits to the hospital, which at least provide some distraction. The waiting room where you sit until the door to the doctor’s consulting room opens, or the door to the little room where they do the tests or that other room where there’s a small bed against the wall that no one uses and where I wait to have my warfarin levels checked, having first asked who’s at the end of the line. Yes, it is a distraction, although it seems wrong to say that: I don’t go there for fun, I go there for them to test my blood (if you’re the last in line, then I’ll go behind you), but I like seeing the same faces every month, people who are going there for the same reason as me, and where there’s always a new face to be seen. Some faces disappear too, and I prefer not to ask about them, people do disappear in hospitals, that’s why it’s so lovely to see someone again when you haven’t seen them for a few months, people you see periodically, not the people you’ve seen every day for the last forty years, but people you’re pleased to see because they’re new in your life, do you know what I mean? Even though you’ve probably been going to the same hospital for a couple of years, it’s not the kind of daily event that becomes boring after a while, it’s just a matter of a smile and a few words of greeting; after you’ve met a few times, some will ask how you are or make some other casual remark, that it’s hotter than usual for the time of year, and we all know how badly the heat affects those of us with heart problems . . . that’s why, because these meetings only last as long as the waiting time at the hospital, that’s why you begin to think that the person might be holding something back and that one day they’ll surprise you with a story or might themselves feel pleasantly surprised by a story of yours, they might see in you something that none of the people who’ve lived with you all these years have ever seen before. You have no idea how crowded hospitals are until you start going there, the noise and bustle in the outpatients’ clinics, the hours spent waiting on benches in corridors, the clip-clop of the nurses’ clogs as they walk past, chatting and laughing and leaving behind them a trail of perfume, not the smell of alcohol, not a medicinal smell, but a healthy smell; and how grateful you feel when, among all those people, you find some old acquaintance you haven’t seen for ages. At first, Álvaro used to come with me, taking time off from the workshop, time that he would make up afterward by working late. Now I go on my own. I’m so glad I got my driver’s license, I only learned to drive so as to be able to go shopping and to the doctor’s, because I never needed it for getting to work.
Álvaro’s so unsociable—
I was fed up with having to depend on him—he would get annoyed if I started chatting to someone, he thinks small talk is a waste of time. He used to get bored waiting, he’d get up from his chair, scratch the back of his neck, and whenever a nurse passed by, he’d say in a loud voice, Hmm—it looks like we’re here for the day, as if their appointment system was her fault. I was always worried, ever since I had the blood clot, about what would happen to the dog when I wasn’t there, because my husband wouldn’t bother to buy his food or keep his litter tray clean, so who would look after him, poor little thing. He’s—no, he
was
—as old and infirm as his mistress, and it made me sad to think of leaving him all alone without me there, and then he went and died before I did, taking with him all his joy and a large part of mine too. I’m the one who’s been left alone.

I wrapped him up in newspaper, trying not to look at the threatening teeth death had given him, and then I put him in a plastic bag until I got back to the house, where I placed him inside a wooden toolbox Álvaro had made ages ago, but never used. I thought he’d tell me off when he saw this, that he’d be offended because I’d given a box he didn’t even care about to the dead dog, that he would immediately see that box as a work of art, something he’d taken great pains over and which I clearly despised. I could already hear him saying: You treat everything I do as if it was trash. But that isn’t what happened. He didn’t say anything about the box, although he did make fun of me for putting the dog’s toys in with the body, his ball, his plastic bone, and the blanket he used to sleep on, as well as the little coat he wore when I took him out for walks in winter. I thought they would keep him company. I put the box with the dog and his things in the living room and then, much later that night, we buried him under the magnolia tree in the small square near the house. I made Álvaro go with me in the early hours, despite his protests (it gives me the creeps, with the dog inside the box) and we dug a grave, taking great care that the civil guards wouldn’t find us and that none of the neighbors would see. You’re crazy, he said, and the trouble is that if they catch me here, they’ll say I’m crazy too, he grumbled, but in a low voice, without shouting or getting angry, because he knew I wouldn’t stand for it. Not that night. I was too upset and sad and irritable. I didn’t care what he said—the important thing is to have my dog close to me.