On the Edge (29 page)

All that was in my days as a garbage man, but then the same company made me a street cleaner, a better job, they said, more sanitary, more gentlemanly, ballroom dancing with a broom: that’s how they tried to fob it off on us, announcing that they’d be moving us to a different section, and from the nocturnal trip on the truck to a diurnal stroll with a broom over our shoulder; it was better, they said, more ecological, using only human fuel, a promotion, really, which was all very well, except—and they didn’t tell us this, we only found out later—not only were we paid less per hour, but there was no real overtime, and the truth is that in jobs like ours, overtime is crucial. You can’t live on the seven hundred euros they pay you in wages, but, as a garbage man, they would often give you thirteen or fourteen hours of overtime a week, and then of course you’d earn quite a lot, especially in summer, what with the tourists, the bars, the food and drinks concessions, or at fiesta time with the stands and the people boozing in the streets, until the new mayor arrived and, according to the company, he was looking for an excuse to give the garbage collection contract to another company owned by a friend, because every mayor is in the pay of someone, and when a new mayor arrives, he naturally wants to get his pals on the gravy-train (that’s what they were saying, but how likely was it that anyone was going to take the contract away from the Koplowitz family, who have the contract here in Olba, and in Misent, and in the whole region and in half of Spain?), what they also told us (and here we had no alternative but to believe them), was that the new mayor had said it was an
absolute scandal
that we were routinely being given a few hours’ overtime every blessed day of the year, and so they cut our hours, and even got rid of some of us and made others, whether we liked it or not, into street cleaners. Anyway, that’s what happened. My wages were cut by nearly half, and I couldn’t complain either, I was one of the lucky ones, I mean, at least I still had a job, because they fired more than a third of the garbage men. We intend to respect the rights and the seniority of those who remain, they said, and we will also be taking family circumstances into consideration, and since I have three children, the company did me a favor and let me keep my job, but, of course, by downgrading me from garbage man to street cleaner, they took away my overtime: it was a nicer job, less stressful, none of that jumping on and off, loading and unloading I’d had to do before, because I’d be completely exhausted after my night’s work, although now the foreman was always hurrying us along and, on Friday and Saturday nights, what with young people binge-drinking and everything, the place was like a latrine, a pigsty, you can’t imagine the things you’d find in some areas, and these are young people who’ve finished high school, gotten their degree, even already going to university, but they’re real savages, far worse than any laborer: one night, they pulled up the entire avenue of palm trees that had been neatly planted that very week in readiness for the visit of the Catalan President, who was coming to inaugurate the new garden; another day, they’d uprooted all the rosebushes in the park: and yet another time, removed all the leaves and branches from the little trees in some new square, leaving only the trunks, I saw that for myself: you go there one day and see the garden looking all pristine and lovely, and the next day, the beautiful trees the gardeners had planted a couple of months before are just thirty or forty bare stakes without a leaf or a branch on them, I mean, what possible pleasure can those assholes get from ruining trees, because it must have taken them a long time too, it’s sheer malice. And yet that malice seems to get the bastards going, they don’t do a lick of work all day, and so, come nightfall, they’re full of energy, because they must have been busy all night with a saw, an axe, a chainsaw or whatever; every weekend it’s the same story: filth, vomit, urine, broken glass, even shit: they shit in the doorways or behind the bushes, by the walls or in the sandbox or on the grass, and the next day, children arrive with their mothers and start playing in the sand and go running to their mums with their hands all covered in shit, and then the mothers complain to the town council, saying how filthy everything is, that there’s even human excrement in the parks, and we street cleaners get the blame, as if it was our shit. Those infantile sons-of-bitches will shit anywhere, out of necessity sometimes, because they stuff themselves with all kinds of junk, which upsets their stomach and gives them diarrhea, but they do it out of spite too, to spoil things for other people, basically, they’re just little shits (in every sense); there were times when I thought I’d been better off as a garbage man: you had your route, your job, certain trashcans to empty, and that gave you a routine, a feeling of security, although you did get the occasional surprise, but being a street cleaner, it’s one permanent surprise, and on market days or when the town council put on a dance or some special event, fucking hell, then I thought I’d have been a hundred times better off collecting garbage, although there were also times when I thought the exact opposite: on bright winter or spring mornings, there you were all alone with your broom, as if you owned the whole village, cool mornings, sunny mornings, the streets empty, the people still at home or working, the children at school, just the occasional old lady out with her shopping cart, smiling at you and saying good morning, dear, then you hoped you’d live forever and you’d get out your sandwich and your can of beer, sit on a park bench and eat and drink a toast to the winter sun or to the spring shade of some pine tree: it was hard to believe you were being paid for that. On the mornings when it was my turn to clean up outside the school where Iván, my youngest, goes, and it was playtime, at first, I’d feel embarrassed when he’d call to me and run over to the fence to give me a kiss (although I was pleased too, of course), but then it would really make my day when all the kids ran over with Iván to say hello, and skipped around me, shouting and laughing in the natural, joyful way kids do, because, at that age, there’s not an ounce of malice in them, and they like costumes and uniforms: they’d see me in my uniform and the little angels would say that when they grew up, they wanted to be street cleaners too and wear a uniform like mine, because, of course, they still weren’t old enough to know what that uniform meant, although their Mom or Dad would explain to them later when they got home, what do you mean, you want to be a street cleaner? That’s the lowest of the low, sweetheart, no, you’ll be an engineer or an architect or a singer or a soccer star like Ronaldo, or a Hollywood actor like Brad Pitt. It’ll be the same with Aida, my oldest, or Aitor, who’s my middle child. Their fellow students will have been told what a street cleaner does, and that there are uniforms and uniforms; at their age, if they see you in the street in your street cleaner’s outfit, they’ll wish the earth would swallow them up, and try to hide away somewhere although that’s not actually true, that’s what you’d think, but the truth is very different: whenever Aida has spotted me on the street, she’s run over and given me a kiss, although I can’t imagine she enjoys her friends—because you know how stupid fourteen-year-old girls are nowadays, all pretending that they’re the daughters of lawyers, when really their dad is just a laborer mixing cement (the rich girls and the semi-rich go to private schools)—anyway, she can’t have liked her friends knowing that her father’s a street cleaner, even though the other girls’ fathers are only bricklayers or plumbers who spend all day unblocking pipes; Aida is the more affectionate one: Aitor is colder, more stupid in a way, well, he’s a boy, but even he comes over to give me a kiss. He’ll leave the gang of nitwits he’s sitting with on a bench somewhere, plotting something or other, never anything good, and slouch over, head down, to greet me. And at home, he’d often say: I know who pulled up the palm trees or who burned those three garbage cans, but I can’t tell you; they’re real bastards, Dad, they burn the cans, the mailboxes, they shit in the street and take a video, crap and all, on their cell phones, and I wondered sometimes if those bastards weren’t his friends, those same creeps sitting on the bench with him, sucking on a joint all day, a faint smile on their lips, looking jeeringly at you and at anyone else who happened to pass. I’ve never been ashamed of being a street cleaner. It’s an important job, what would things be like if we didn’t work our asses off, although that’s a lie, I’ve felt ashamed sometimes, when I’ve seen those supposedly unemployed men taken on by the town council (where they happen to have useful contacts) sloping off and hiding behind a bush in the park or sitting in the bar mid-morning, snacking and drinking, and people saying: only lazy jerks become street cleaners, but they don’t care, they just laugh, water off a duck’s back; and often they themselves will joke with some complete stranger about how little work they do. Then I’d feel ashamed of being a street cleaner, but only then, though that was often enough because those incidents were pretty frequent. It makes me even angrier now; when I see them, my blood boils, here I am unemployed and there they are, the ones with all the right connections, taking it easy and having a laugh at our expense. No, the bad thing about being a street cleaner, the reason I left, wasn’t because I was ashamed, but because they stopped paying overtime: if there was a dance or a fiesta put on by the town council, or some binge-drinking party out in the street, you simply had to work faster, and if you couldn’t finish on time, that was your problem. You slogged away, then had to put up with people complaining about how dirty the streets were, but that wasn’t the worst of it, the worst was ending up with just seven hundred euros a month. But I never felt ashamed, no. My father: I can’t believe you really want to be a street cleaner for the rest of your life. It’s no job for a man of forty, he used to say. And me: Dad, things have changed. My mother: Leave the boy alone. I got sick to death of seeing him puffed up like a turkey, his drunkard’s eyes glinting mockingly, making fun of my job, and one day, I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I said: And what have you done with your life? You’ve been a
collidor
, an orange-picker—you hardly need a university degree to learn how to handle the shears or how to carry the crates around like a mule, worrying about whether it’s going to rain, because if it rains, you don’t get paid, and you have to put food on the table every day, oh yes, and as if that wasn’t a miserable enough life, then you go and get a slipped disc and have to walk around all bent. And what became of your pension, huh? You get the bare minimum. Or even less. Nothing. We go at each other then, me and my Dad, as he counters with: Yes, but at least shears are
a man’s
tool and you work with other
men
(that was then, I said to myself, now it’s all Romanians picking the oranges, more women than men, women pick more quickly and carry more crates, and if you don’t watch out, the foreman, who tends to be a forewoman now, will shout at you and humiliate you; I’ve seen it happen), and picking oranges and pruning and burning dead leaves and scrub and carrying crates and putting them on a truck are jobs men have always done, but trailing around with a broom and leaning on street corners, that hardly seems like a job for a man, I mean the only people I’ve ever seen sweeping the street are old women sweeping the sidewalk outside their house, but I know you’ve always preferred that to carrying wooden beams, climbing up scaffolding, hefting bags of cement, or even driving a truck, you soon got tired of all that; your mother and I gave you a good strong body, and you could have earned as much as you liked these past few years, when there was bags of money to be made in the construction business, like you did when you drove the truck, but, no, you never wanted that, you may have a strong body, but you lack oomph. I told him to go to hell. Are you calling me a fairy? And you, you call yourself a man? You never even made it to the end of the month on what you earned and then you’d spend all day whining on about how your back ached from all that bending and lifting and carrying, despite mother’s hot salt baths, and rubbing your back with herbs and oils, calling the doctor every five minutes because you’d got a sore throat (it’s because they’re exposed to the damp air in the orchards all day, it’s because there was such a heavy frost this morning, it’s because: yes, every day she had an “it’s because your poor father”), or taking you to the clinic because you’d pulled a muscle, and you didn’t even have the balls to go to the doctor’s on your own, the sight of the hospital corridor and the stretchers was enough to make you practically shit yourself; if I am a coward, then I’ve inherited that cowardice from you. You’re not a man. You’ve been a slacker all your life, and you’ve been treated like a slacker and paid what a slacker should be paid. It’s not even really a job, picking oranges, you’ve never really been able to say: I have a job. You had a job the day they took you on and lost it the day they didn’t take you on—you’re just a tame dog, trailing after the first person to offer you a few euros, wagging your tail, and it was pour us another brandy, another glass of wine, and if no one offered you work, then you’d be in a foul mood, grumbling on about how you hadn’t been picked for any of the teams because it was raining or because the bastard on duty (they were all bastards according to you) had chosen someone cheaper and—of course—nowhere near as good as you, or because there were no more oranges left to pick, and then you’d take it out on her, raise your voice and your hand to her, but not to those bastards who had failed to choose you. You’ve been jobless all your fucking life, a permanent job-seeker: every night you’d go to the bar, every day to the main square on the look-out for work, showing yourself off the way whores do, smiling at the man doing the choosing, trying to get into conversation, to see if some jerk would notice you or like you better than someone else and take you on. Clowning around so that they’d pick you rather than another man. Desperately telling jokes. Saying you’d buy the guy a drink or give him a cigarette, when he had enough money to buy a million drinks and a million cigarettes. So they’re all men, are they, that bunch of losers you get together with in the bar, all of them with a chip on their shoulder, their pensions too small to get them through to the end of the month, but criticizing anyone who attempts to improve his lot? Haggling with the waiter, noticing who pays for a round and who doesn’t, and whether they drank a one-euro glass of wine or a brandy that cost one twenty-five. Are they men, those wretches who spend all day watching what others do with their lives, as if, by talking about other people’s lives, they could forget what they’ve done or failed to do with their own? Because you didn’t exactly equip me with the right weapons for this war. Not me or my sister. You were far more interested in your game of cards, in having a late breakfast with your friends on Saturday mornings and a brandy every evening after work, than in what I had or hadn’t done. So don’t you fucking lecture me. I feed my kids and I take them to school and I’ll pay for their studies for as long as I can. You had me working as soon as I was old enough, it didn’t matter what kind of work. You just wanted the money earned by your fourteen-year-old son. You shameless . . . My mother hurled herself at me, covered my mouth with her hands to stop me talking. I pushed her away: you keep out of it, it’s none of your business. She started crying. Her solution to everything. But all I wanted was to be able to earn a little more so that I could live the way I had up until then. And that was when I got lucky and started working at the carpentry workshop. Or, rather, I thought I’d got lucky—that I had, at last, found a nice, quiet, stable job.