On the Edge (18 page)

dinde farci aux truffes
,
poulardes
,
canard
à la Rouennaise, polyglot people and hotel rooms with a view over Lake Geneva. I felt like a useless astronaut, left behind on an inhospitable meteorite, watching the rest of the crew travel on to an unknown blue planet, covered in lush vegetation, with a scattering of lakes and a population of temptress nymphs and eager fauns. Lack of ambition, environmental factors—I used to think: I am the owner of my own deficiencies. The only thing I own is what I lack, what I cannot reach, what I’ve lost, that’s what I have, what is actually mine, the empty vacuum that is me. I have what I don’t have. And I felt infinitely sorry for myself, filled with a bitterness that sometimes verged on hatred of her, a false hatred (no, I don’t think I ever hated her, I still felt aroused whenever I saw her, I desired her, yes, I desired her right up until the end, she was the only woman for me), and a false hatred of Francisco which extended to my father (and did I really hate him, do I still hate him?), or vice versa: love in absentia. They were two sides of the same coin—on one side, what seemed to me unattainable and, on the other, what was denied to me: Francisco showing me what could have been, and my father showing me the depths of the nothingness that had become my sole property. He rubbed my nose in what was not to be: the workshop, the furnished apartment where I had no space to call my own, the caged goldfinches that I took care of after Mom died, Saturday afternoons spent in my tiny room whose walls were covered in posters of Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed until they grew too old and faded and I tore them down; the velvety bluish or reddish flesh standing at the bar of a club that changed locations and names over the years, but always remained the same, the half-vanished paths traversing the marsh, the smell of damp, rotting vegetation, the feathers of a duck, wet with mud and sticky with blood, the steam given off by the skin of a panting dog. The only things that were mine—before the word “mine” became only the empty space left by what I had lost—were the few escapes into adventure that I squandered and that Francisco was able to turn to his advantage. We undertook those adventures together, or, rather, Francisco dragged me along in his wake: a few months in Paris, probably for the sole reason that, in order to live life in style or at least try to, it was assumed you had to go to Paris; a spell in London because, at the time, that was where the avant-garde was happening—op art and pop art, everything that was “in” was there; a few months in Ibiza, before the hippies arrived, but where there were already a few people who grew marijuana and somehow or other got hold of Mexican or Guatemalan peyote, which they chewed slowly with religious unction, following the teachings of their shaman, Castaneda. Laila used to make some delicious hemp seed cakes and, after eating them, we would laugh or cry at the memory of something or other, and end up snuggled against somebody’s chest. I
think
her name was Laila, although I’m not sure now. And I can’t remember either if I had anything much else on my mind then. I occasionally returned from those adventures feeling slightly disgusted (although now I couldn’t say quite why) and totally broke (and I do know the reason for that). In bullfighting terms, I would say that I felt the bull’s tendency to return to the same spot in the ring, I was building my own corral, voluntarily fencing myself in, drawn by the call of house and cradle; if you press me, I would say I was answering the call of the womb, and Leonor gave me that: after all, what is sex but the desire to be enclosed again in that soft, pink arena: to climb back inside someone through any one of her orifices, a desire to return to that warm, dark inner space, to be rocked in amniotic fluid, cradled by mucous secretions. Equally uterine were the washed shirts, ironed and neatly put away in the chest of drawers, the dazzling white underwear (my mother’s block of Lagarto soap, her laundry bluing bleach, the clothes swaying in the sun on the washing lines on the terrace roof beneath the blue dome of the sky, I can see it, smell it), the hot succulent risotto in a bowl on the table cloth and made variously with beans, turnips, greens, pig’s knuckles or ears, and blood sausage. And yet even now I blame my father for my frequent scamperings back home. That’s the version I’ve given to other people, although not to anyone in the village, I haven’t told them anything, what would be the point, I’d just be providing them with fodder for jokes or sideswipes, it’s not a good idea to tell people in Olba any truths, but I did talk about it to the friends I met abroad, with some of whom I remained in touch either by letter or phone (what will have become of them? nearly fifty years have passed since then and yet I still remember them, how many of them will now be nothing but skin and bone?), who were friends for a while, and with whom I used to drink a café Calva near the Bastille in Paris, opposite the stop for some bus heading out into the suburbs (Vitry, Ivry, Maisons-Alfort, Vincennes), or a pint of beer in Camden; the friends I made during the few months I spent at art school and never saw again, it’s the story I’ve always told myself, whining on about what I could have become but didn’t. I tell myself that it was my father who tied me to the workshop, who clipped my wings the way farmers clip the wings of the geese in the pen so that they won’t fly away when they hear the call of the migrating birds heading north from the lagoon (ornithologists ring them every year and have proved that they migrate to England, Russia and Sweden, all the great-great-grandchildren of the goose who carried Nils Holgersson in the books I read as a child), the
padre padrone
who demanded that I stay by his side, because all the other children had flown the coop. One of them had traveled beyond the nebulous destination of those migrating geese: Germán had, for some months already, been living in the land of no return. Carmen had just escaped to Barcelona,
almost a child
, said my father with tears in his eyes—the only time I’ve ever seen him cry—and the third, the flim-flam man, Juan, was flitting about who knows where. I returned home to the rule of staying put. My father’s insistence on this had become more urgent since my eldest brother died. His need to possess. He wanted me here, to be with him, he wanted an assistant and an heir who would give meaning to his work (
at least try to be a carpenter
, he said), he wanted me to give meaning to his life. A workshop in which he was the only carpenter lay bare his empty futurist rhetoric, his egotism, as if everything he had was for him alone. If he wasn’t working for someone else’s sake, to safeguard someone else’s future, his life had no meaning, his betrayal (which is how he saw it) would only have benefitted him. He would have been a coward not a martyr, not a cornered bull, like me. My mother was too small a territory over which to exercise his authority. He felt he was too important to govern only a timid little woman whose love he had never been sure of and whose family of well-to-do farmers had never forgiven her precipitate civil marriage to an adolescent carpenter, the son of a poor, left-wing carpenter, who had given her a child. He needed to expand his territory. My brother German’s death kept me tied to the workshop, even though he had never wanted to stay there, or precisely because he hadn’t wanted to stay and ended up paying for this with disease and death. That’s the official version. It sounds pretty convincing,
Death Kept Me Tied to the Workshop
could be the title of some Soviet tragedy or a socialist variant on one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. But that feeling of guilt has stayed with me right up until now, although I’ve always had a sense that, biologically, I’m a slave in search of a master, and whether that docility is in my genes or I imbibed it with my mother’s milk, I can’t tell. A son worthy of my mother, that queen of sighs and of tears, falling as if to be seen by no one, but that were, in fact, intended to be seen by everyone, the apparently furtive dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief always managed to make her tears the undisputed protagonists of the moment, be it a farewell, an argument, a disagreement, an order flouted or a sudden sharp word. Instant tears and sighs. With my father’s growing rage as counterpoint. I’ve often wondered if perhaps my grandmother wasn’t right to doubt that my mother was still in love with him after insisting he give himself up, yes, I’ve thought that many times, because those falsely modest tears and recriminations were a way of bringing out the worst in him, of stripping away the little pride he had left. His uncontrollable rage at seeing her cry, the slammed doors and the ensuing hours of tense silence as he took refuge in his workshop or in the small room he called his office, with her crying and him furious and then doubtless hating his own brutality and sinking into self-pity for days at a time, despising himself and realizing that his whole life had been a mistake. And it’s been in that climate, or in the silence that filled it after her death, that I’ve spent my almost fifty years in the workshop, trying to erase the pages of the past, to leave them blank, adapting my habits and aspirations to those of everyone else—pure nothingness, a glass of brandy at lunchtime, a game of cards in the evening, a visit to the Lovely Ladies club a couple of times a month (before that, it was called The Cozy Corner and, before that, Caresses, and, as I said, while it may have changed name and location, it’s remained essentially the same). Since the 1980s and 1990s, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, I’ve always been alone, avoiding all witnesses, and some people take me for a queer now, no girlfriends now, no lovers, no more prostitutes, I know what some people say behind my back; and others I’ve run into sometimes, propping up the same bar, consider me an oddball; the workshop, meals with my parents, then just with my father, the two of us alone, not talking to each other, moving about among the machinery and the wood panels, passing each other tools: a gesture, an order, pick that up, grab that plank, we’ve got to finish this today before we close so that we can deliver it to the customer tomorrow; the house with its three closed bedrooms and my room with its two beds, one of them empty (Uncle Ramón used to sleep there when my brothers were still living at home), except when my sister and her children used to visit, and then the two kids would sleep in the bed next to mine; the rest of the time, I was like the residue of what had once been a family: initially, I used to read and listen to music; then, after my mother died, my father took to sleeping in the room next to mine (why that room and not the one he’d shared with his wife at the far end of the corridor? or the one that used to be my sister’s room, also down the corridor? why was he spying on me through the wall, listening to my sighs, to the creakings of my bed, turning them all into guilty secrets?) and banging on the wall whenever I turned up the volume on the record player. I haven’t read a book or listened to music for years now, but I do listen to those radio stations that the lonely can call up in the early hours: desertions, unsatisfactory sex, broken hearts, terrible incurable diseases, that’s what you hear; at night, the world reveals its unsavory underbelly. The radio captures it, showing it to us as if wanting to make it more palatable or make us believe that it’s more palatable than it really is, and while I listen to this caramel-coated catalogue of woes, I think every night about all the people I knew but haven’t seen again; with some I only remember their names, and I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with any of them, since we’re not connected by a single mutual acquaintance, nothing—people who’ve fallen through the cracks—and I think of those who’ve gone—which ones? how many?—and that I’m about to go too, and that when I do, no one will remember them and no one will remember me. No one is thinking about me in the middle of the night. I myself am appropriate fodder for the radio dial-up: feeling that you’re a shadow you could walk through, that you lack all substance, that you’re someone who isn’t like the others but who tries very hard to conform, except that you’re trying to be what the others no longer want to be. I’m a stranger in a house that has never been mine, either by law or habit: the doors never opened or closed when I wanted; my father’s anger when, as a young man, I came home late: this isn’t a hotel, you know, the next time you can sleep out in the street; I wasn’t allowed to put up the paintings or posters I would have liked, my own bedroom has been a burrow guarded by a ferocious ferret: we’re not thieves in this house, you know, there’s no need to shut your door. Take that trash off the walls, by which he meant a few political posters—he was calling “trash” things that were a continuation of his own aspirations, but which, in me, in my ignorance, seemed to him, quite rightly, mere frivolousness—and a few pictures of pop groups that Francisco brought for me: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin. Whenever anyone comes to Bernal with a problem, he always laughs:
The Lord is good enough to keep us alive, so what are you complaining about?
What
do
I have to complain about? I’m in relatively good health for someone of seventy. Many people would envy me. My cholesterol and my triglyceride levels are on the high side, so are my blood pressure and pulse rate, but then the same could be said of anyone my age lucky enough not to be suffering from something far worse. What is happening to me, what has happened to me, is all of my own making. I snipe at Francisco, and it’s true that I’m not as fond of him as when I was a boy or a young man, I don’t know when that resentment first began to brew inside me, it was before the business with Leonor, I’m sure, but I don’t envy him now as I did for all those years: I recognize that he did, at least, dare to take a chance. He had, of course, put down more solid foundations than I had. In between escapades, he’d found time to study philosophy, take some courses in law and, after that, journalism. He learned to think, to write and to do business as dictated by the rules you need to abide by if you want to succeed. I trotted along beside him like a puppy, but my adventures were pure dissipation, pure prodigality, I thought I was squandering my time, but really I was squandering myself. If you have no idea where you’re going, any path will do. I failed to realize this and, as it turns out, I was using up the few provisions Providence had placed in my knapsack. On the other hand, let’s not forget that his engine was running on the top-quality fuel his parents were pumping into him, the money he pretended to despise (or that we both pretended to despise), that and a few discreet but useful contacts. These are not venial sins. You shouldn’t exclude any details if you want your story to be credible. But apart from that, and perhaps because of that, he had a plan. Traveling, screwing around, taking drugs, going to the movies, listening to music, discussing this and that with whoever happened to be around, was all part of what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital. For his father this had taken the form of those night-time raids, trips with the powers-that-be to view the cliffs of Misent or visit the local nightclubs. The methods had changed, but the mechanisms still worked. Even spitting on his Falangist father’s photo was part of his education. It was a matter of laying the foundations on which to build the business-of-all-businesses that has been Francisco Marsal. This is doubtless easier when your accumulation of capital is not exactly primitive, but a second-generation increment, because your father, in his accumulative labors and during his own educative process, did things that were far less instructive than the things you do, which meant that you didn’t have to actually dig in the manure one usually needs in order to create a plantation: having a little bit of capital behind you already gives you a sense of continuity, of multiplying synergies, the kind of capital you can’t acquire when you jump from one job to another, from one temporary post to another, which is what I did in London and Paris, doing the odd cleaning job here and there, mixing with all kinds of different people, as the Charles Aznavour song says,