On the Edge (27 page)

That wasn’t the only time Francisco spoke to me in that complaining tone. This failed Francisco first confided in me a few days after he came back to settle here, having already arranged to buy the Civera house (he didn’t mention this to me at the time, not a word), he came to retire here like a humble peasant (our very own Josep Pla), and marked his return to the simple life by acquiring the best house in Olba, owned so long by the former lords of the village, and already had his yacht moored in the Marina Esmeralda a few yards from the terrace café where we met on subsequent occasions, and, again, I knew nothing about the existence of that yacht and he never mentioned it, because he used me—isn’t that what old friends are for?—as a shoulder to cry on, while, to others, he spoke only of his triumphs. That’s friendship for you. With me, he wanted admiration with a pinch of pity. He used to come and see me at the workshop, sit down on the other side of the polisher and speak of the joy of getting back to the simple life, trying to convince me how hard his working life had been: those free flights all over the world, tasting wines from Médoc and Burgundy, from South Africa, Australia and California, snoring the night away in five-star hotels, eating for free in Michelin-starred restaurants, and indulging in the usual energetic, lubricated pastimes that keep human beings entertained on all five continents. He would tell me about his sexual experiences with the natives and then, a couple of minutes later, his eyes would fill with tears and he would say how much he missed his wife, how disappointed he was in his son, how distant he felt from his daughter, and how much, over the years, he had missed us, we imbeciles who had stayed put in this village, scratching our asses, with no Atelier de Joël Robuchon, no Maison Troisgros, drinking wine from the local cooperative (which, a few years ago, bore no resemblance to today’s wine, three glasses of the stuff and you’d throw up), eating rice cooked in a thousand and one different ways—in the oven, as a risotto, in a paella, with a fish stock—as we have all our lives (the very recipes he’s collecting together for the book he’s writing—an encyclopedia of the food and cuisine of the region, over a thousand pages, part literature and part research—recording our customs just as anthropologists record the customs of the mountain peoples of Puerto Rico) and playing cards and dominoes in the evenings with the same bastards who have been screwing us over big time for the last fifty years, because Olba is a small village, which means that, when it comes to the theater of social life, this is a repertory company, with the same actors appearing in a variety of different plays. Today Othello, tomorrow Lear, the day after that Romeo, and if necessary, you put on a wig and play Lady Macbeth because the leading lady has come down with a sore throat. You see them in a bar and, a while later, in one of the other ten or twelve bars that exist in the village, you pass them in the street, meet them at the funerals of other locals and at bullfights; whether in their work clothes or in their Sunday best, they’re always the same people. True, in each place and on each occasion, they’re playing a different role. But they’re always, always the same people. And he wanted
me
to feel sorry for
him
. He complained that he was lonely, as if I had really struck it lucky living with Tutankhamun’s mummy, my father and comrade, who, years later, I would have to feed, dress and wash, the broken tamagotchi who neither laughs nor cries, and doesn’t even say Mama and Papa, as even the cheapest made-in-China doll will do. He wanted me to feel sorry for him, this man who, thirty years ago, used to tell me about that restaurant built on undeclared money given to him by a brother-in-law in some high government position, and would talk me through the script of the get-rich-quick years in which he played an active role, the golden days of Miguel Boyer and Carlos Solchaga, the happy times when—according to the then social-democrat minister for the economy—Spain was the country in Europe where you could get rich quickest. I was filled with a mixture of anger, scorn and envy, and yet I would laugh and say: No, Spain is the country in Europe where some people, like you and your friends, can get rich quickest, because the workshop is having a really hard time of it (the late 1980s were disastrous for the region, the World Expo in Seville—Spain’s biggest ever urban building project, he would say excitedly—and the Olympics in Barcelona swallowed all the available public and private capital and stole all the tourists: workers here started emigrating again, like in the 1950s, because, in Spain, all the money flowed down those two great drains: Seville, such a wonderful place, and Barcelona,
bona si la bossa sona
—good as long as there’s money in the purse). In my house—that’s how he referred to the restaurant: my house, it was fashionable to do so at the time, famous chefs did the same in any newspaper interviews they gave: in our house we eat, in our house we only serve—in his house, he had only the best; the vice-president had moved into an apartment in the same building as the restaurant and dined there most nights. Anyone who wanted to do any kind of deal by, with or for the government, and always at the government’s expense, had to be seen at the Cristal de Maldón, it was a real gold mine, they had it all worked out. And then there was that business created with money from ICEX, the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade, to promote and export Spanish products throughout the world, a front for getting subsidies that were shared for eight or ten years with a Secretary of State who had placed his wife in charge of the institute, and this was quite apart from the wine and hotel scams he was involved in and his position in that powerful publishing group. But here we are in Bar Castañer, talking about this and that, so as to avoid talking about what really matters, and I speak out in defense of Tomás Pedrós, as a form of self-defense and also to see if I can, once and for all, finish off the subject:

“At least Pedrós has always looked for his real friends among people he liked, people he enjoyed chatting to at the bar, having a few drinks with or going out on the town, never thinking about whether or not they could be useful to him or help him out if he got into difficulties, or, indeed, whether they might even cause him difficulties. As for his other relationships, with politicians, and other such public friendships, it was clear that those were merely business relationships, ways of getting contracts more easily. And today’s society can’t tolerate such naïveté, it’s a difficult balance for anyone to maintain, and it’s rejected by most people, who regard certain acquaintances as ill-advised or suspicious, simply because they don’t belong to the approved circles.” I should bite my tongue, bite it right off, what am I doing defending the bastard who has ruined me, just as a way of saying he was a good guy really, then quickly changing the subject and talking about something else? But that wasn’t the only reason. In fact, I fired that shot across their bows to see if it would shut them up, those creeps, those brown-nosers, who always latch on to the most useful person: I know all about Bernal and Justino. And I imagine the little bank manager is no different. And I take it for granted that it’s the same with Francisco. He’s never told me who he’s had to run after or crawl to, there’s no need. The relationships he tells me about, those Secretaries of State, or the minister who visits the Cristal de Maldón each night and asks for his woodcock
bien faisandée
. After all, I don’t know any of those individuals and have never set foot in the world they move in, but I know him.

Justino pours a little pessimism on my words:

“The people most likely to distrust someone like that are the ones he’s given his friendship to. They’ll think: why does he want me by his side when I have nothing to offer him?”

I don’t know whether to take this as a counter-thrust or not.

He bends down to pick something up and, in doing so, his shirt rides up, and in the gap between trousers and shirt, you glimpse part of a kind of split globe, dark as a world without sun, and which grows darker the further south you go, with a thickening jungle of hair: he generously reveals this human landscape to you whenever he bends down on the golf course too: a troubling ravine between two wooded slopes that conceal their mysteries beneath his trousers. This split globe is the accumulation of all the succulent lipids consumed over years of eating expensive food, which is why—whether you want to or not—you assume it must be different from that of the new player who has just joined us at the table to replace Bernal, who has gone outside to speak to someone on his cell phone: the newly-appointed bank manager, a pear-shaped young man, who was sent from La Mancha to this rather unfrequented branch (he says he turned down the Misent branch, yes, I bet), and whose pale flesh—he is as yet unaccustomed to the life of this Mediterranean Florida: toasting oneself in the sun at the beach or on the golf course—is sustained by the adobe of tons of
gachamigas
, dozens of sheep’s cheese sandwiches, mountains of vegetables (he said the same himself only a moment ago) and slices of traditionally cured bacon (with only a suggestion of fine ham from acorn-fed Iberian pigs—Cumbres Mayores, Guijuelo or Jabugo: the ham he’s received as gifts during the year he’s been branch manager). The conversation continues on the theme of how people nowadays set about achieving fame with the least possible effort. And I am the one who continues to mine that seam, which suits me fine. Anything, as long as we steer clear of Pedrós.

“The Islamists have found a really surefire way of appearing on TV. Your name isn’t mentioned, of course, because you’re just an anonymous individual in a collective story, which was also the aim of the people who wrote about the Russian Revolution, the ideal of the great utopianists. They’ll call you The Suicide Bomber Who Blew Himself Up. But, as a nod to the new narcissism and to technology, a few hours before you blow yourself up, you can post a video on Youtube showing you standing in front of a sheet daubed with a verse from the Koran and holding a Russian- or American- or, indeed, Spanish-made machine gun (they come from all over), so that the followers of The Faithful of the Blood of the Sacrificed Lamb can admire you.”

Francisco says:

“Isn’t that business about the lamb part of the Jewish tradition? Or is it Christian? Anyway, it’s definitely one of ours. In Misent, they worship the Precious Blood of Christ, it’s their biggest festival, and that’s what they call it, the festival of the Precious Blood, and just to confirm the horrible actuality of blood worship among Catholics, I read in the newspaper the other day that before John Paul II died, they extracted a small amount of blood from him and put it in a little bottle, just in case he’s made a saint, which he obviously will be. How could he not be made a saint, when he was the victor in that clash of two armies made up of hundreds and millions of soldiers—the Christian armada versus communist atheism? If a victory like that doesn’t get you a place in the calendar of saints’ days, what will? Pope Leo X persuading Attila the Hun not to invade Italy pales into insignificance in comparison. Removing the gangrene of communism from the face of the earth is easier said than done. I mean, damn it, there was a time when more than half the planet’s inhabitants either already were or were about to become communists. We’ve forgotten that in the 1960s and ‘70s we still didn’t know on which side the coin would fall,” says he, who’d himself watched very carefully indeed to see how it fell. With one foot in the Communist Party and the other in the social democrat camp, he always stayed very firmly on the fence.

Justino nods in agreement.

“Yes, I read that too. The newspapers reported about the few vials of blood taken from the man who fought a battle that took three or four hundred million prisoners: yes, four hundred million wolves transformed into cheap labor. It completely changed the world economy. The crisis we’re in now is simply the definitive redeployment of that new legion of man-tools in search of an owner to set them to work.”

“And now the communist wolf has turned vegetarian and eats grass from the hands of the man of peace, Wojtyła, a new St. Francis of Assisi.” Carlos says this sarcastically, making it clear that he is speaking ironically, because he himself is determinedly secular. I imagine him fleeing like a fallow deer before the hypothetical advance of the pack of communist hounds he now finds so charming. Given the hundred or so foreclosure notices he has signed, I doubt very much that he would escape with his life. Or would he end up being under-secretary for finance in the new regime? I don’t think he has what it takes to be a minister, although with wheedling hypocrites like him, you never can tell.

Me:

“Communists: a labor force crying out to be exploited—and they have been.”

Bernal takes up the earlier theme:

“The idea of going down in history as
The
Suicide Bomber would be quite enticing if you were the only one who’d had the idea, but every day, somewhere in the world, there are dozens of bombers blowing themselves up. Besides, what’s the point: once you’ve blown yourself up, you can’t go back home so everyone can congratulate you on being on the television news that evening. If you’re going to become a jihadi suicide bomber, you must either be very very bitter or have a deep faith in God.”

“Or both,” says the bank manager.

Justino takes up the argument:

“You’d have to be a pretty nasty piece of work too. The Madrid bombers have set the bar very high. A bomb that kills half a dozen people is nothing. You have to kill at least fifty before they’ll give you a few minutes’ coverage on the TV news or put your photo in the newspapers, whether it’s at the gates of a barracks in Karachi, an airport in Moscow or on a subway in Madrid; if it was Madrid, you’d definitely make the front pages in Spain. As for Karachi, Lahore or Kabul, the press there is probably so fed up with acts of carnage they don’t even bother reporting them. They’d run out of paper if they had to report every massacre. No, you have to kill dozens or even hundreds. Even the drug-dealers have been infected with this media frenzy. In Mexico, fifty thousand people have died in the drug wars. They want to be talked about. Individual murders are mainly the reserve of vulgar old domestic violence; but not necessarily, there are men who take their rifle down from the gun rack and clear the house of children, stepchildren, in-laws, the ex-wife’s new boyfriend, and even the dog if it gets in the way. Killing is like eating, it’s all a matter of beginning. It’s hard to swallow the first mouthful, but the rest goes down easily enough.”