On the Edge (17 page)

“If he’d wanted to be a politician, he would have run for office. You have more power and more control if you stay in the wings, you’re free then, not controlled by any one party, out of sight of the journalists and politicians, free from their in-fighting, better to be lurking in the shadows, pulling the puppets’ strings.” The slave-driver, the gang-master, the exploiter of the workforce—as, when he was young, Francisco would have described him—but now his partner at the card table tonight in the village bar where the most anyone ever bets is a round of coffees or drinks, at least during the day.

At night, after closing time, things get more serious—players will sometimes bet hundreds or even thousands of euros or offer a kind of IOU in the form of the price of a night out at the local so-called gentleman’s club. But, by then, Francisco is no longer in the bar. Cinderella has gone home before his carriage turns into a pumpkin, leaving no delicate glass slipper to mark his trail; he hides away in his lair to read and write, or so he tells me:

“At night, there’s no noise, no phone calls, no one ringing the doorbell. That’s my favorite time,” he says, as if his night were not as crowded with ghosts as any other seventy-year-old’s. The body sleeps, but ambition keeps working away. Seated at his fine desk made of
lignum vitae
wood, Francisco scribbles on paper or types at his computer, working on the novel or memoir he hopes will bring him the prestige that the last few agitated years have denied him. Wine tastings, reviews of books and restaurants, the wittily written bimonthly editorial, the half-dozen pages of an article on some particular wine region, minor works that will never bring with them the posterity that ambitious writers always demand, that promise of life after death, even if it means ruining their nerves and health spending long, difficult nights writing, not to mention the terrible frustration when their present-day voice fails to produce the expected strokes of genius. At seventy years of age, late at night, you’re besieged not by brilliant ideas but by the half-buried dead—although which of our dead could be said to be entirely buried? Not a single one, they all have at least one limb or another sticking out. For some reason, you end up having an outstanding debt with each of them, a debt that requires repayment. You’ve either done something you shouldn’t have done to all of them, or else failed to do something you should have done. As I well know. But Francisco, that night owl, probably has enough sangfroid to meet them face to face; he has what I lack and he always has. He’ll form alliances with a few ghosts and pit them against the others and he’ll choose his allies wisely. He’ll flip the coin and make an educated guess, heads or tails. At night, he shuts himself up at home. That, he says, is when he sits down to work, but I think his need to keep to himself springs not only from the tiredness that comes with age—and, really, who wants to go flitting about at night at seventy?—but even so, with Francisco, it has more to do with image. He takes great care not to fall into the dark holes that open up late at night in the outside world, even in a village like Olba: the card games after the bar has closed its doors that go on until sunrise, the constantly replenished glasses (
another drink? I’ve already had nine or it is ten?
), the fluorescent lighting at the Lovely Ladies club, the electric-blue flesh, which one imagines must be white or pink or golden when out of those lights, the deceptive glare, flesh you can buy by the hour. This is what Francisco is protecting himself from—with his supposed contentment with his own personal abysses—his ascetic solitude—saying that he prefers it or finds it more bearable; he is also—I would say—keeping scrupulous guard over his reputation as a connoisseur of other, more prestigious vices. He has a lot to gain by not letting himself be contaminated by the vulgarity of those open-all-hours places, the laughter, the slaps on the back, the off-color jokes, the obscenities, the kidding around. Even as a young man, he kept well away from that world frequented then by his father’s friends, and he’ll give it an even wider berth now. If he didn’t, he would immediately be labeled a dirty old man. Being slapped on the back or on the ass amidst loud guffaws, being seen groping the Ukrainian girl or French-kissing the Romanian, and having the bulge in your trousers reveal the hard-on you’ve got from getting up close and personal with that soft, bright, eminently touchable flesh, which only costs forty euros for half an hour and has been handled by plumbers, bricklayers and Latin American or African immigrants—no, that would be to fall very low. That would involve a head-on collision with his image as a rigorous connoisseur of
le grand monde
. It just isn’t Francisco’s style. When he was young, he would try and impress me by bringing back from Madrid a ball of cocaine wrapped in Saran wrap. He would place it on a small mirror he kept in the glove compartment, balancing the mirror on his right leg, which he rested against the gear stick. An alluringly sleazy atmosphere filled the car, parked, at night, in the middle of nowhere. Inside, the only light comes from the moon glinting on the phosphorescent white lines on the mirror, the ambiguous intimacy of sharing something forbidden, combined with Francisco’s cosmopolitanism and my own cosmopolitan melancholy (cocaine, heroin, David Bowie, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, whose posters and records I collected at the time), the ritual of breaking up the lumps and using a credit card to chop the loose powder into neat lines, ready to be snorted through a rolled-up five thousand peseta note, the two of us alone in the night, something almost as alluring as sex, like screwing a complete stranger in the toilet of a disco, keeping the unlocked door jammed shut with one part of your body so that no one can open it, or doing the deed out in the open somewhere, leaning against the trunk of a carob tree, protected from the moon’s impertinent spotlight by the broad, densely-leaved branches. He bends toward me, holding out the mirror so that I can lick the surface before he returns it to the glove compartment; I notice, briefly, the pressure of his elbow in my stomach, then the weight of his forearm on my thigh, we’re close friends, two friends set talking and talking and talking by the cocaine until a smudge of pink appears on the horizon, something superhuman growing on the black surface of the sea, which, in turn, becomes milk-white and silver then gold and blue, all of this seen through the blood-splattered veil formed by the thousands of insects sticking to the windshield. Sometimes he would offer me a small silver spoon, like the protagonist of a novel we had read at the time. A distant, dazzling dandy. His path was already on an upward trajectory that would take him out of that world in whose bargain basements he and I had rummaged around a few years before, when we went off traveling together, on those journeys that, for me, were supposed to be the prologue to something, but ended up being the epilogue to everything, with me trapped in the web of a weaver of dreams (or, rather, desires), a weaver called Leonor. Not for him though. For him they were the goose on which he flew above the world, like Nils Holgersson in the story we read as children. But I digress: he was adding chapters to the formative story of his life. He would return to Olba and, each time, I had the impression he was growing before my eyes, as if in one of those low-angle shots we were told were characteristic of Orson Welles when he made
Citizen Kane
, a way of making the main character seem larger than life, a giant: from his lofty position, he was seducing me, crushing me; our conversations, rather than being shot and counter-shot, were low-angle (him) and high-angle (me). You choose, Francisco—you’re the one who’s just come back from abroad, I’ve been here all year, we can do whatever you want to do or discover, I know this place like the back of my hand, it’s not very exciting for me, not even the starry sky and the smell of orange blossom, which you say you really miss when you’re away, to me it’s all very dull and everyday. I would follow him and, at the same time, loathe him, because I loathed the image of myself that he reflected back at me. I followed him the way a lamb follows the shepherd, the way ducklings will follow any moving object that becomes a protective, maternal presence. I would meekly snort cocaine with him or stand at the bar drinking and listening to him, or trudge up to the rooms in the roadside brothel with my usual apathy, him first and me second, preceded by the two whores. He hadn’t got lost, as I was getting lost, along a path which—like the paths through the marsh—ends up buried beneath scrub. He kept going. I would have needed to prove that I had my own personality, my own criteria, even if that meant simply picking up on some detail as Justino does whenever we get into a discussion. I’m talking now about the early 1980s. I’d been buried in sawdust for eight or even ten years by then, years when I’d lost all hope. Leonor was no longer mine, and never had been. The woman-goose, who flew wherever she wanted, had abandoned me—a mere pastime—in favor of egotistical calculation—she’d shaken off the person riding on her back. Nowadays, cocaine has lost all its glamor, it’s handed round by young men who left school to go into construction and are now unemployed: come into the toilets, the coke’s all ready and waiting. Needless to say, they don’t offer it to me, because of my age and my image as a serious, sensible fellow, even though being single and alone does lend one a faintly bohemian aura: those boys know nothing about my past, and they aren’t interested either—people in villages only manage to get along thanks to the periodical layers of forgetting that are thrown over past events; otherwise, life would be unbearable; like any other old man my age, for them I’m a photo, fixed in its frame, beyond evolution, solidified sediment. Old people reach a state of atemporality, we become immutable, changeless, it’s assumed that there are no intermediate stages between growing old and dying, however many decades that may take. You grow old and then you die; if they happen to see a picture of you when you were their age—I have four on the office wall, and I have shoulder-length hair in one—they’re amazed that you look so much like them. Fuck, check out that hair, and the T-shirt’s really cool. In the photo, I’m wearing a T-shirt and my hair is long and fair and straight; and in another one next to it, I’m wearing a baggy linen shirt, open at the neck to reveal a shark-tooth necklace and a medallion with a large A in the middle: You look like a hippie in that one, but you look youngest in this one with the Beatle haircut and one of those buttoned-up jackets. How old would you have been then? Eighteen? Twenty? That was fashionable for a while. At the time, they called it a Mao jacket, after the uniform Mao used to wear. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Mao? Haven’t you ever seen any documentaries about the Chinese revolution? Oh, fuck, that’s not really you, is it? You look just like Leonardo diCaprio. God, you’ve put on a bit of weight . . . and your face has changed. And look at that great mane of hair. You’re as bald as an egg now. Of course, you don’t think I’ve always had this moon face and a drum for a belly, do you? The worst of it is that most of the men who sported necklaces with shark’s teeth and shells or wore Mao collars are all dead—they were killed or they’re past retirement age, they have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, hyperglycemia, triglycerides, high cholesterol, triple bypasses, pacemakers, varicose veins, prostate problems and osteoarthritis. Or else they’re lying awake in the early hours wondering if they’ll survive the chemotherapy for their colon cancer. They’re old men like me—moon-faced, overstuffed sausages—or doubles for a B-movie Dracula, thin and gray, sallow-complexioned, with deep lines crisscrossing their face; a profusion of bald heads, toothless mouths, huge dentures and white hair. Ruined prostates, with the proof of their radiotherapy sessions there in their dull gaze and in their sharp, frightened little eyes glancing cautiously about in case they should stumble into death—the faces of Jews who have been through the Auschwitz of modern medicine.

The older Francisco despises Olba’s
petits vices
, he wouldn’t sink that low, just the occasional gin and tonic made with Bombay Sapphire or Citadelle gin, which the owner of the Bar Castañer reserves for him. He keeps two bottles on the shelf just for Francisco, who is the only one who’d ever think of asking for either. Other customers order a Larios or a Gordon’s, or, for more fanciful ones, a Tanqueray. Francisco asks for a Citadelle gin and tonic, easy on the gin, purely for medicinal purposes, you understand, to relieve the treacherous drop in blood pressure that occurs each evening, his hypoglycemia, but he never goes in for any heavy drinking. Poker, prostitutes, gambling and drugs are out: he wrinkles his small, decrepit rabbit nose when he hears comments from the other old men (whores, gambling) or from the young men (lines of coke, a joint: marijuana grows well in these sunny climes, young people grow their own, half a dozen plants in the backyard or up on the roof), because, one assumes, he has better things to do, or the same things on a different, but higher level—yes, only the best, far removed from what’s on offer in some pokey room complete with a Romanian whore who has removed any body hair with a razor or with wax because she hasn’t yet heard about laser technology or perhaps can’t afford it; rooms equipped with a toy jacuzzi. I always wonder how those jacuzzis can possibly hold the great carcasses propping up the bar at the Lovely Ladies club, men weighing in at two hundred, two twenty, two hundred and fifty pounds or more, strapping farmers, burly bricklayers, obese truck drivers and mechanics, sedentary real estate agents or bank clerks, asses of all dimensions, fat, soft and low-slung, men with wide hips, who rock from side to side when they walk, like the clapper in a bell. The Mediterranean amphora-shape which one always thought of as female has become unisex. I know many a whoremonger with wide hips, but have no idea why that should be. I can’t imagine those carcasses fitting in one of those mini-jacuzzis.
I
only just fit. Instead of splashing about in the pool with all those high-pressure jets, they presumably crouch over the bidet as I do when I visit, mounted on the pony (isn’t that what the French word means, a small horse? I’ll have to look it up in the French dictionary I’ve kept from my schooldays) while she scrubs your bottom and your asshole with antiparasitic soap to flush out any lice hiding inside; the pool-cum-jacuzzi is pure decoration to bump up the price of the session, an illusion of luxury that even the starving can afford. You pay for it, it’s there, but it’s so difficult to use that you give it up as a lost cause. Another time, you say, next time, or in the next few months, when I’ve lost a bit of weight on the diet the doctor has put me on to lower my cholesterol levels and triglycerides. He said I have to lose nearly thirty pounds and eat a lot of grilled chicken breasts and salads, otherwise, he said, my arteries and my heart will explode like a well-stuffed piñata. Anyway, I came here to fuck not to have a bath. I can do that at home. No, Francisco doesn’t go to places like that. In Olba one bad move is all it takes to tarnish your image, if you lose your name and reputation, you can never get it back, your picture remains sullied forever; my childhood friend, our local celebrity: while we were drinking wine from the local Misent cooperative and ordering paellas at some open-air café, he was working as a journalist in Madrid, for a national magazine,
Vinofórum
, as well as being a co-owner of a trendy restaurant. His wife was nominally the owner (on marriage they had opted for separation of property just in case) and, thanks to a few Castilian businessmen in Salamanca and Valladolid, he was a partner in a couple of boutique wine hotels, selling
vinos de pago
—that’s what they call them, not that they’re so expensive, but because it’s the lame-ass translation of what the French call
cru
, domain or estate:
pago
is a would-be medieval word and, believe me, he would say, there are still plenty of medieval
Franquistas
in this wretched country of ours—and he would talk to me, too, about the slopes of Burgundy and Corton-Charlemagne, which produce white wines because the emperor was fair-haired and red wine stained his beard; and about Romanée-Conti, Médoc and Château Latour. He would explain the virtues of
botrytis cinerea
, the gray mold used to sweeten the wines of Sauternes; and he would lecture me about the decantation time required by each wine, on which he was an expert, as well as being a writer of cook books and articles and travelogues. He was no longer interested in St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and the Thessalonians, nor in the ideas of the lay theologian Enrique Miret Magdalena; and he couldn’t care less about the Second Vatican Council and didn’t even remember it had existed (when
was
that? in the far-off sixties) or about Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, whose books he used to read a few years ago, indeed, we spent many nights discussing their ideas. Long before that, he used to tell me about St. Paul, although, to be honest, I was never a believer, I slightly preferred—although not by much—those German revolutionaries: they had more interesting adventures, although I was always bored by the political vein running through their various trials and tribulations; that was more my father’s territory. Francisco would have enjoyed debating with him, had my father ever agreed to such a debate, but he could never forgive Francisco for being his father’s son, and I’ve always been allergic to heroes and saints, feeling incapable of following their example, but Francisco and I used to talk about all those things, not just here, but in Paris and London and Ibiza during the months of my great escape, my Indian summer that ended with me caught in Leonor’s web. Then came those forty long years of winter. Those people from the German Weimar Republic were like family to Francisco (he had aligned himself with some really fine specimens that would have delighted his hunter father Gregorio Marsal), and the landscapes were familiar, the frozen canal into which Rosa Luxemburg was thrown by her social democrat comrades. Indeed, we knew more about their trials and tribulations than we did about those suffered by our grandparents. I had been given certain hints about how my grandfather met his end, although only in the vaguest of terms, I still knew nothing about the bullet in the back of the neck administered just a few hundred yards from our house, but I knew about the bodies of revolutionaries floating in the icy waters of the River Spree (whenever anyone mentions crime and Germany, there’s always night and fog and the waters have to be icy: even Marx in the
Communist Manifesto
speaks of the icy waters, although in his case they’re the icy waters of egotistical calculation, that I do remember). Nor do I think he knew of his father’s hunting tastes in the 1940s. We were in the early 1980s then and concerned with other things. It wasn’t a time of prisons or of corpses floating in cold, murky rivers, except as chapters in an adventure story, something like the exploits of Jules Verne’s hero, Michel Strogoff, in the waters of the Yenisey River, adventures in which Francisco had wished that he, too, could be a protagonist, while I opted instead for the role of curious onlooker reading about them in some book. Is it a sin to have no interest in revolution or in digging up the past? Then again, after putting out many feelers, he also turned his back on history and the struggle of the proletariat. He chose rather cosier places for his adventures, while I opted not to find out about such things even in books (or, rather, in the book of life itself). After all, the positive option, not to destroy, but to choose the best of what’s on offer—a dilemma that preoccupied him—and which he resolved at the time—seemed more in keeping with social propriety or his family’s status or, more precisely, with his family’s aspirations and pretensions, because his family enjoyed high status in the village, but in a rather confused fashion; it was best not to talk about the origin of that status (Falangist father: pistols, land seizures, black market dealings, the pursuit through the mountains of famished, fugitive scarecrows in rags) to the half-dozen families who had inherited their wealth (the so-called “good families” who had always lived in Olba and who had been able to hang on to their wealth and status without too much fuss or too much vulgar probing), the nouveau riche, however, swallowed whole the farce put on by the Marsal family, along with their pretensions, Don Gregorio this and Don Gregorio that, the uniformed maid serving at table when they had guests; as did other post-civil war upstarts and those who made their money in the 1960s, people who, in a way, considered themselves Don Gregorio’s heirs—following the path opened up by him in the immediate post-war years—and saw themselves reflected in his mirror: second-generation predators, some of them the children of those who used to run with the pack—of which Don Gregorio was a member in his gleaming Hispania motor car—gangmasters, riffraff, a rabble with their newly acquired wealth and a gun license just in case some bastard breaks into your house and wants to steal your undeclared earnings. Their even more credulous children have the Spanish flag emblazoned on their key rings and on their watchbands, and a racist joke always on the tip of their tongues, convinced that locker-room humor is really classy, failing to realize, the poor ignorant fools, that it is, in fact, merely the province of the buffoon. The Marsal family are held in high esteem by the local developers, the dealers in construction materials, paint and metalwork, the bar owners, as well as the multitude of new arrivals who, over the last thirty years, have vied to be even more fascist than their immediate predecessors: the children of the winning side. Put Adolfo Suárez up against the wall. Santiago Carrillo wasn’t just a commie, he was a war criminal. Hitler didn’t go far enough in killing the Jews. This is how they show their colors, by socializing with Don So-and-So and Don Somebody-or-Other, supporters of the regime, brothers of the air force general or the colonel of the civil guard and, inevitably, by sporting the Spanish flag on their key ring, which they proudly brandish whenever they start the car, or having their cell phone belt out the Spanish national anthem in the middle of lunch in a restaurant, and letting the Falangist anthem,
Cara al sol
, blare forth on their CD player as soon as you climb into their SUV, not to mention the camouflage gear they wear in this most urban of settings, and their taste for weapons lightly disguised as a passion for hunting. This was very far from being Francisco’s world when he left, nor would it have become his world had he stayed. On the contrary, these people were his nightmare, his shifting sands, the ones who might reveal his shame, the half-buried corpse that lies behind any recently acquired fortune. He left precisely in order to escape from this world, he wasn’t prepared to be a buffoon, a flunky, which—when all’s said and done—was what his father and his cronies had been, entertaining governors, deputies and high-ranking officers visiting the area. Preparing paellas and eels
all-i-pebre
; taking them out on boat trips to see the cliffs of Misent while they bit off prawn heads (
the head is the tastiest part, General
) and to the club where the best-looking whores could be found. When he began to learn more about his family history, he spat on the photos his father had pinned up on his office wall, photos of his father as a young man, blue shirt and military belt, the yoke and arrows embroidered on his shirt front—although he was careful to wipe away any traces of spit before his father came in—and he was not amused by the bronze bust of José Antonio used as a paper weight. He kept that sanctuary, with its proof of original sin, hidden away from his friends. I think I was the only one ever allowed to see the room, which he considered ignoble because it revealed the murky origins of Gregorio Marsal, his father. He rejects that room, because he has escaped into another world in which, like an astronaut, he enjoys zero gravity, with nothing binding him to the solid ground of recent history, which is pure vulgarity: Don Gregorio’s card games, which he presided over wearing his shoulder holster, cheap music, Mom’s croquettes, the chamber pot under the bed, his grandfather’s enema, he erases all of that; he enjoys not having to set foot in the dust from which he sprang, he lives in a state of weightlessness in which one can build a new, improved self. His new world: crepinette and crème parmentier, foie gras from Perigord and
poulardes de Bresse
, the golden forests of France in autumn, the vineyards somewhere in Burgundy, the red vine tendrils glinting in the fragile October sun. I—like everyone—we’re now in the 1980s, in what seems to be the new Spain—would listen open-mouthed. His little hare’s nose discovering a whole fruit stand in a glass of wine: cherry, apricot, plum; a whole timber yard: cedar, oak; a complete grocery store: honey, sugar, coffee; a submerged garden: there’s a background of aquatic flowers—he would say—irises, water-lilies, clear still water. As if he didn’t know that irises and water-lilies, like all marsh plants, stink of rotten fish. Gastronomic and oenological knowledge, a mastery of
haute cuisine
. At night, I would search the sparse book shelves in my bedroom, looking for something by Luxemburg, Gramsci or Marx, and I discovered that my copies had disappeared too, although how I didn’t know. Not one remained. I couldn’t even remember what I could have done with them. I had probably only read them because Francisco lent them to me. Or perhaps I hadn’t even bothered to read them. I talked about them without having glanced at a single page. They were there in the air. A dense, middle-European fog,
Nacht und Nebel
, icy water, filled my brain and swamped all memories of the life I had abandoned when I decided to come back to Olba, an epic narrative I never really felt was mine. When I returned to the workshop, the past had ceased to exist. I couldn’t bear my father’s—always mysterious—allusions to things that had happened. At first, I didn’t understand the allusions; later, I found them boring and, ultimately, disgusting. He thought I had accepted carpentry as a kind of vocation, and then he felt an urgent need to talk to me about the past, to tell me that he had been part of that epic narrative, but I didn’t want to listen. I said to him: All that bitterness just keeps you from living. It’s over, don’t you see? Like Francisco, I, too, had landed on a weightless planet. Leonor had set me floating, then dropped me. I learned something from all of that, from that time of adaptation, the spell of decompression divers need before returning to the surface, although what I did mostly was suffer horribly, she was there in everything I saw and touched: it wasn’t love, love doesn’t last that long, because, by then, a few years had passed; it was probably bitterness, which has no expiration date, she flies off and escapes, and I remain alone, anchored to the earth, flailing around in the mud, and I rage at her, it’s not fair—I can’t bear it, you bitch—me coming home late at night, sometimes furious, sometimes barely able to keep from crying, and always very drunk. I’d brood on what I had lost by not being brave enough to leave. I could have freed myself from those German martyrs and icy canals without necessarily coming back home to my father and the workshop. Francisco managed to step free and yet he had believed in them in a way I never did. My father was a domestic Liebknecht, and I had shut myself up with him, drowning in the same icy canal. We were both floating, but my planet bore no relation to his. Saw, hammer, chisel, lathe, brace and bit, my father’s voice, the voices of the card-players in the bar, the compulsive drinking, adding up my earnings at the end of the week to see if I could afford half an hour in a room at the Lovely Ladies club, forty years in a world as coarse as sandpaper, vulgar, sordid, and with my one love—who didn’t want to be the mother of my child—married to my best friend, living in a paradise filled with