On the Edge (21 page)

Vinofórum
. But she’s no longer here, and the stars she was so proud of have burned out, and her widower husband gently places his three of clubs on the table and says:

“The easiest way to attract attention is to do extravagant, stupid things. Standing out from the crowd because of your work is a lot harder. Appearing in the newspaper signing a contract to renovate the locker room of the local soccer team or the south stand, or handing over a check to the local events committee that will pay for all the bulls for this year’s bullfights. That’s easy. Who else is going to waste money on such stupidities? They applaud you on the opening day or when, in front of the press and the mayor, you hand over your check to the councilman in charge of sports, but there’s an end to it, and even then, at that very moment, someone will doubtless be criticizing you, the locals—including the ones who will benefit most from your generosity—will be calling you a spendthrift, a braggart, and wondering aloud if you’re into some form of trafficking, drugs or guns or money-laundering, in order to earn the cash you’re spending like there’s no tomorrow. And instead of climbing up the ladder, you’re on your way down. A few months later, everyone has forgotten your generous gift, but not your dubious reputation.”

“Yes, if you’re hoping to be remembered for doing something no one else is dumb enough to do, namely, throwing away your money, well, even though people are more than happy to pick it up, you’re on your own there,” says Bernal.

Nevertheless, on this luminous winter morning, I—one of the innocuous ones—am the person looking for a stage on which to recreate the natural order, at least in part, with an intimate little drama, a chamber work, offering to restore what history destroyed. I’m preparing the moment, Dad, I’ve taken it upon myself to return you to the place where you would have gone if it hadn’t been for us, I’m restoring the mutilated body of your dignity to make you once more fully a man, a man I never knew, because my other brother, my sister and I only arrived after the mutilation, the children of a reluctantly accepted servitude, beings with no real shape, domestic creatures with no aspirations. The whole country had been deprived of aspirations, and nothing could grow in the midst of all that grayness. It’s up to me now to fulfill your long-postponed wish and return you to your comrades. In fact, I’m putting into practice the lesson my uncle taught me: grant an appropriate death to each creature you hunt, as a restorative act of gratitude to nature, which—like the great tragedy of history or the miracle of transubstantiation—fills with its essence even the tiniest particle, for it is born, lives and dies in each and every one of its manifestations. Use the appropriate bait for each fish. I’m returning to him what I owe him as a son, my life in exchange for several lives, I’m fulfilling my anonymous role in the chain of history, I’m going with him so that in the final act he will lack for nothing, it’s a decisive role, and one that he himself cannot undertake. Civilized peoples honor their dead with a feast held at the graveside. As a proxy at your funeral ceremony, I am a fly growing gradually desiccated, trapped in the sticky web, an insect condemned to be encrypted and caught in the spider’s web of other people’s voices, an echo without a voice: yes, Don Esteban, of course the smell of the orange groves here is good, I’m not saying it isn’t, but the smell of the coffee plant seems to me finer, more delicate, more elegant, you only say you prefer the smell of orange blossom because you’ve never smelled the flowers of a coffee plant, isn’t that right? The perfume is sweeter and the flowers are prettier, like little white, perfumed roses which, in that warm, welcoming climate, fill the air with a scent so dense you can almost touch it. Everything smells of coffee and cinnamon and cocoa. Tropical smells. You’ve never seen a coffee flower, have you, or the fruit of the cacao tree? You never see them here, not even cacao pods. All you can buy is that powdered stuff they sell in the supermarket, and it’s anyone’s guess what that’s really made of. The Indians valued the pods and seeds of the cacao tree so highly that they used them as currency. Hot chocolate, they believed, was the drink of the gods. The other great advantage of those plantations is the unobstructed view: it’s proper countryside, plantation upon plantation growing on the sides of the hills, with the occasional small ranch or a bigger farm in the background, or else on a slope with the snowy peaks of the volcanoes behind, not like here, where all you see are buildings under construction and garbage dumps, the landscape here isn’t calm and quiet, I mean, even on the really narrow streets you have to take care because of all the traffic, the cars and the trucks, it’s like that even now, and yet Wilson tells me that all the building work has stopped. It’s completely different over there: everything is so beautiful, really it is. It’s not the land or the climate that makes us leave, it’s the situation. Men have destroyed paradise, and I don’t think God, who they say can do all things, will ever be able to forgive them for that. He may not want to. The web of voices entrapping you, like an insect caught in a web that suddenly breaks.

Shall I change channels, Dad? Do you want to watch another Western or would you prefer the one about the suicide bombers who are about to explode at any moment? The afternoon is gone in a flash, it gets dark depressingly early in winter, so as soon as we’ve finished eating, I’ll draw the curtains so that we can’t see the night outside and can continue prowling around for a while with these rustlers, beneath the implacable desert sun in Texas or Kansas. So much desert, so much dryness. I need to go and get myself a beer because the dust kicked up by those cowboys is starting to irritate my throat, even though the radiator is barely enough to warm the room or absorb the damp in the air. Here, in Olba, it’s the damp rather than the cold that makes winter evenings so unpleasant. I leave you watching a movie while I take a stroll around Olba, I leave you securely tethered to your chair with the sheet and join Justino and Francisco in the bar for a couple of games of cards or dominoes, and here I am, back in time to watch the news, in time, too, to eat our last supper: the Eucharist of a slice of ham and a glass of milk, our sacred nightly ritual, communion in the form of a solid Christ and a liquid one, just like the early Christians, a custom restored by the Second Vatican Council. It doesn’t matter if I get back a little later tonight, because you’ll be having your midday meal late anyway, which means you won’t have your lunch and supper too close together. After supper, I’ll leave you in your armchair for a while before changing your incontinence pads and washing you. At night, I only wash between your legs. A light immersion, like the priest, who, after mass, dips just the tips of his fingers in a little holy water. It’s the same in our ceremony, a dribble of warm water applied between pad and skin. Latex gloves, warm water and one of those soapy wipes that nurses use to wash patients in hospitals, and then more warm water, until I’ve left his bottom looking like a new-born baby’s: like a wrinkled, purplish prune. I’ve taken to applying some bioethanol spirit gel to my nostrils to dull my sense of smell. I saw a television program that showed some forensic doctors doing just that before examining a corpse, and I decided to follow their example. Even so, the smell never leaves the house, however much bleach or soap I use. It impregnates the walls, furniture, clothes. The smell of an old man’s incontinence pads. It impregnates me too. At bed-time, I just give him a quick wash. The shower can wait until morning. A shower wakes him up, and what I’m trying to do is make sure he goes to bed feeling dog-tired. So that he won’t have the energy to get out of bed and possibly fall over, as he’s done before now; so that he won’t suddenly decide to remove his incontinence pad and smear shit all over the room. This has been my daily schedule, my timetable, ever since I had to let you go, Liliana. It always amazed me that performing these tasks didn’t seem to faze you at all (it really didn’t). He’s so kind, your Dad. Mine wasn’t like that. I don’t miss the people I left behind in Colombia, well, perhaps my Mom a little, what I miss most is the countryside, which is just unimaginably beautiful. I look at the palm trees here, and they seem like toys compared to our tall, elegant palms, so thin and erect, they look as if they were reaching up to the sky, and you can’t help thinking, how can such a slender trunk support that great plume of palm leaves a hundred feet above the ground, and the trunk is soft and smooth and almost blue. I don’t know why no one has thought to bring some over here, although they’re probably very delicate and need a lot of water, as well as the mild climate we have back there, the high pastures for cattle, the hills where they grow the coffee, bananas, sugarcane and mangoes: the higher up you go, the less intense the tropical heat; it’s really fertile there, naturally green and lush, and that’s at more than six thousand feet up, where the air is soft and pure. I think that if you could grow those palm trees anywhere, no one would ever plant any other sort. There’s no comparison, but the problem, as I say, is that they need tropical heat and altitude, they wouldn’t grow just anywhere, it’s impossible, I mean just look at how big Africa is and yet, from what they say on the TV, there are very few places in Africa to compare with the conditions we have there, because Africa’s very flat, at least in those documentaries, you might get one very tall, snowcapped mountain, but the rest is either dead flat or low hills. Which just goes to show what a topsy-turvy place the world is, there’s our country, a paradise, and we have to leave it because men have turned it into a little hell. What with all the bare, rocky mountains you have here and the arid plains I saw in Castile when I traveled down on the bus from the airport in Madrid, you Spaniards ought to be the ones emigrating to Colombia, the way you did all those centuries ago, and yet here we are leaving Colombia and coming to this arid place, where the moment you leave the little fringe of greenness along the coast, it’s nothing but dry earth and rocks. What are you saying, Liliana, this is the closest thing to paradise on earth; half the retirees in the world want to live here in one of those little look-but-don’t-touch houses, with no foundations and plasterboard walls. But be quiet now, Liliana, no, I’m sorry, but your voice troubles me—I need to think about my own affairs, about the way my father dictates the rhythm of my days, as he always has, and even more so now that you’re not here, the two of us alone, and me at his beck and call: cooking his lunch, serving it up, washing the dishes, washing him, putting him to bed, loading the washing machine with his clothes (the all-pervading smell that never leaves the house). While in prison, of course, he had to work for his jailers. They treated us like slaves, he said, breaking up rocks, carrying stones, they didn’t have whips like the ones you see in films about the Nazis, but when one of them got angry, he would take off his belt and, with his trousers almost hanging off him, he’d beat and kick the hell out of you just for stopping for a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow. Yes, Dad, but you had to put up with forced labor, or disciplinary labor as they called it then, for only a year or a year and a half, whereas mine has lasted more than half a century, you didn’t even have to take off your belt and beat me, just a word or a look and I was like a frightened lamb: it’s been a very long prison sentence. Before, Liliana would stay with you—Liliana, who, I believed, was going to look after me as well, who was as much mine as I am yours. You’ll always have me, Señor Esteban, Liliana, her
sancocho
stew her pipián sauce the palm trees the background murmur of her chatter, she would usually stay with him until supper, the smell of coffee the smell of cocoa beans the smell of leafy trees cool leaves freshly washed by the tropical rain the explosion of color of a flame tree, haven’t you ever seen one? It’s one great mass of flowers, a burst of scarlet fire against the green of the forests; and further off, there’s the mauve fire of the jacaranda, and she would feed him and bathe him, and that was usually the time I chose to go out and have a card game at the bar. When I leave him alone in the house, sunk in his armchair, I’m always afraid that, during the game, someone will ask after him, will say: how’s your father doing? Who’s he with, the Colombian woman? I hate having to lie and say yes, he’s with the Colombian woman, as you know, I can’t leave him alone for a moment, because, of course, the person who’s just asked me the question might well run into her a minute later in the street, someone might find out that she doesn’t come to the house any more and that I leave my father alone at home. Social services might intervene then and accuse me of neglect, ill-treatment and who knows what else, I might even get sent to prison, people are very ready to demand that others act responsibly, very keen to point out other people’s obligations and very reluctant to take on their own, and they’re certainly not prepared to lend a helping hand. God, that would be a joke, after spending all my life under his thumb to then, at the last moment, be accused of neglecting him. That would be the final irony if I were to end up in jail, in the clink. Although I’m pretty sure they won’t arrive in time. And so I lie and say, yes, she’s there and my father’s being well looked after, watched over. The Colombian woman, that’s what my partners at the card game call Liliana. Could you help me fold the sheets? Could you help me put the pillowcases on (our hands briefly touch)? Could you advance me a few euros to get me through the next few days? I haven’t even got enough money to buy bread, it’s been a terrible month, awful, there’s the schoolbooks for the children, the older boy needs new clothes, they grow out of their clothes so quickly, or else they tear them playing soccer in the playground at school, then there’s shoes as well, it’s so hard to keep up, and Wilson is having a really tough time finding work. Most construction work has stopped, the bars and the grocers aren’t doing much business either, they’re firing people left, right and center, there isn’t much work at all and what work there is, is really badly paid (in the bar, during the game, Justino, always eagle-eyed, comments: that Colombian woman’s got a nice ass on her), to be honest, I can’t say I like Spain, or that things have worked out well for me here, not that I’m complaining, but it hasn’t been as I imagined it would be when I arrived, (hmm, a little low-slung perhaps, but nice and firm, especially in those tight jeans she wears, you can see her butt crack, and all the men laugh, yeah, a glimpse of her nice, firm butt, she looks like she’s going to burst out of her jeans, I don’t know how the bitches squeeze themselves into them, does she give you a bit of a dip when she washes your father? jokes Bernal, does she change your diapers too? does she sponge you down? yeah, does she rub you down or does she just get you wet? I really don’t like them talking about Liliana that way), no, really, it hasn’t worked out for me at all, I don’t mean with you, of course, you’ve been like a father to me, but ever since I came here I’ve had this feeling that something was just about to arrive, was just around the corner, and when I serve my father his plate of vegetables, the omelette with a bit of parsley (
fines herbes
they call it in French restaurants, Dad), or a bit of ham and a big glass of milk, she’s there at the table with me, as if she had taught me how to position the glass, the plate, the spoon, the knife and fork, yes, Señor Esteban, I thought it was all going to turn out so well, especially at the start, when my husband and my children finally joined me and we got settled in and I got pregnant with my youngest, but the promise of all those good things has never come to anything: I felt that little thrill you get when you know happiness is about to arrive, but I’ve never felt real happiness here, do you know what I mean: maybe a bit here and there, when we bought the car, when we took out the mortgage on the apartment, when we used to leave the children with our neighbor and go dancing, but since then, it’s been largely a matter of keeping our heads above water, waiting for that something good that never arrives, that’s how it’s been, Señor Esteban, she says, everything’s got steadily worse, and now we haven’t even got enough money to carry us through to the middle of the month; and I say: Liliana, my dear, that’s how it usually is, you feel happy when you think happiness is about to arrive, when you can sense it coming, but then it passes you by, escapes, is gone. Her cinnamon-sweet voice returns to me as I towel my father dry after his shower: my father’s cold body like a paradoxical reservoir that has stored away the warmth of her hands, the same hands that, every day, soaped and rinsed this dying flesh, this relief map of stiff tendons and flaccid muscles, these irregular surfaces full of blotches—a multitude of blackish, purplish, yellowish islands, a kind of map of Melanesia or Micronesia—and somehow infected it with her warmth; I want to forget—no, look, you grab the top two corners while I grab the other two, that’s it, now give your two corners to me, yes, I want to forget the edge of her hand brushing mine, soft, brown, warm, just as I want to forget the conversations I had with the accountant, with the tax office, with the bank manager who, when we meet in the bar, looks at me as if nothing had ever passed between us; to empty my head of the discussions I’d had with Joaquín, with Álvaro, with Julio, with Jorge, with Ahmed, and, above all, to rid my memory of the final scene I had with each of them, across the desk in the office.