On the Edge (31 page)

you
home with me, Leonor, and shut myself up with you in my room, our room, we could never have come out of the bathroom and walked down the corridor naked or sunbathed on the roof terrace or made love without worrying that someone in the next room might hear us sigh or moan, or hear the mattress creaking, never, I could never even masturbate in peace, my mother was always watching and listening: I don’t like you locking yourself in your room, Esteban, I’m always afraid something might be wrong. My father’s harsh voice: we’re not thieves in this house, you know, there’s no need to shut your door. But it wasn’t just because the carpentry workshop was part of the house I’ve always lived in, it’s more because I’ve carried the cross of this business for more than forty years now, I mean, what else have I done with my life? Fishing, hunting, a few games of cards in the evening, going out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights—as I did for a few years—preceded only, during the time when I managed to be defined by neither house nor workshop, by a short walk on what I thought was the wild side (the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix); and yet what should have been part of the sentimental education of a hero of our times—as it was for Francisco—turned out, in my case, to be of no importance whatsoever: Can’t you hear the music, Leonor? It’s playing now, you must be able to hear it, all those groups playing at the same time and driving me mad. I could multiply that list by ten, doubtless because I lack judgment or still have no confident, mature sense of what I like, because I’m incapable of saying, as Leonor did, this is brilliant and this is garbage, then heading straight for the thing I’ve chosen without caring what or who I trample on the way. I sampled this and that, and it all seemed good, nourishing stuff to me, but I probably lacked focus, character, get-up-and-go, or whatever. That break during the mid-sixties did get me out of here, but I didn’t have the courage or the intelligence to convert that experience into the embryo of another way of life; like Álvaro, I gave in and chose the easy chair: at first, I called that easy chair Leonor—fool that I was, because she was restlessness personified, constantly choosing between this and that—but Leonor made her choice and left, while I stayed behind and made the workshop in Olba my solitude. I didn’t even go to the bar (a recurrence of the symptoms of the infection inherited from my father), I saw no one, spent whole weeks without leaving the house; yes, I was a true heir to my father, he returning from his war and me from mine; he from icy Teruel and me from the cold, rainy boulevards and orange lights of Paris. Two defeated men. As he locked the workshop door from inside, I would go upstairs to my room, where I found myself in a kind of nowhere-land; initially, I felt claustrophobic shut up in there, listening over and over to the fifty or so LPs I’d brought with me, plus those that Francisco brought me on his visits later on. It wasn’t enough to open the windows in order to drive out anxiety, because there was a wall surrounding Olba, I could almost see it in the distance, to the south, the boundary line: the houses in Misent, the cliffs blurred by mist, the little shapes of the fishing boats coming back as evening fell, followed by a flock of seagulls; and on the other side, the stony slopes of Montdor. From the roof terrace, I could see those boundaries stretching to the north as well, the great void of the lagoon, the endless reedbeds; the curve of the beaches that, over time, have disappeared behind the many blocks of apartments and houses; I gradually got used to it: a couple of times a month I’d get spruced up and take the workshop van: Are you off out again? Can’t you just stay quietly at home or go for a walk in the hills? Walking’s good for the health: my father. Sometimes, I would put my wellington boots and the rifle in the van too so that he’d think I was going hunting, and then I’d turn up at the club in the early evening, when you’re unlikely to meet anyone you know, and if you do, it’s because they don’t want to meet anyone they know either, a time when the girls are just starting to take up their positions at the bar. Even now, that’s the time I usually choose to go there, when they’re chatting to each other, sharing the music they’ve recorded on their cell phones, exchanging songs and ring tones, and I quickly select one of them (aren’t you at least going to buy me a drink? what’s the big hurry?), diversions that have never touched the very kernel of my rat-like existence, clinging desperately to a passing piece of wreckage and jockeying for space with my fellow rats, competing for salvation. The gloomy workshop, whose destruction I should see as a slave’s freedom papers, but which feels instead like a painful mutilation. The way a woman must feel when her child is torn from her: that was my first thought. A child given to me in adoption has been torn from me. Does that sound familiar, Leonor? We have each, in our own way, suffered a loss; I know, I know, your loss was an exercise in emptying yourself out, whereas I have merely removed an excrescence, no, you’re right, it isn’t the same: your loss was insignificant or, rather, liberating, while all I’m losing is an innocuous, transmissible bit of property inherited from my father, and which he inherited from his father, an under-nourished, ill-fed piece of property; the workshop closed its doors during the years he spent in prison, and only the odd jobs my uncle did kept things going until my father, on his release, rather reluctantly took up the reins again. I wouldn’t have had anyone to leave the business to anyway. If Álvaro were to keep it going for a few years longer, it would still be a business run by two old men. Or “two poor old men,” as he would say, growing wrinkled and decrepit and already beginning to rot. While my father was away, my uncle, an adolescent at the time, did odd jobs in people’s houses: mending doors, building tool sheds, making chicken runs or rabbit hutches on modest roof terraces (the post-war years brought farming into the villages, just so that people had something to eat); my father started the business up again in the face of great difficulties—so he did still have some ambition when he left prison, his apathy was a bit of a pose really, even if, as an artist turned laborer, it meant that he was unable to fulfill his possible aspirations—but that was also when the business first fell prey to the disease that brought it to its later state of decay, symptomatic of the times. And left in my hands, it has died without issue. Yes, Leonor, the tale of a barren creature. Liliana: you don’t understand because you don’t have any children of your own. Very true, I know nothing of such things.

Neither the pain of loss—knowing that I will never really have anything of my own—nor the peace that seems to fill me bear any resemblance to the sense of repose felt by a mother when she finally gives birth, when something that was part of her, that lived and breathed thanks to her, suddenly begins to breathe on its own, to move independently, to live its own life. The empty space inside her is the beginning of something, a willing surrender, whereas what I’m experiencing is an ending: the piles of wood, the motionless machines, the silent workshop, they’re still there, not that I’m allowed in, because they’ve sealed the doors to stop me taking anything away, as if a load of planks would be of any use to me where I’m going. Not that it matters. I can close my eyes and see it all, not just the machines, the equipment, the small glazed office and the steps up to it, the filing cabinets and the desk carved by my cabinetmaker grandfather or by my carpenter father with ambitions to be a sculptor (I’ve never really known who made that desk, it was, for some reason, kept a deep dark secret). No, I could see every bit of wood in the stores as well, every plank: I have a horribly photographic memory, which was a real boon over the years when it came to finding what I needed in that shambolic workshop, and which is now—all too vividly—helping me to feel what an unfortunate wretch I am; because when I look at all those things, I don’t see something I myself created in order to give back to life, I see only what I’ve buried. Once they’ve been used, the roadside whores are thrown back in the gutter. When a driver abandons them, they become available again to give pleasure to others, to provide some sexual release for the drivers who park their cars or vans next to the reedbeds, half-hidden away, their license plates covered by vegetation so that no one will recognize them. Being spotted haggling with a whore at the roadside means being accepted as a companion in the last circle of hell, a being unable to control his lust—or, far worse, a wretch unable to control his money, who can afford nothing better—and thus condemned to catch one of the many infectious diseases transmitted by those women. And what else is a bankrupt business but a transmissible disease that has never given pleasure to anyone? Clients and providers pretend never to have had anything to do with it, they conceal all previous connections, because even the mere suspicion of contact contaminates: having sent invoices or delivery notes or IOUs bearing that name, having exchanged letters of credit, having supplied materials, all those things make you a suspect being. I’m talking about the business, but I could just as easily be talking about myself. How many years have I spent in this godforsaken place? I remove the judicial seals and—what the fuck—tear off the orange tape crisscrossing the door connecting the workshop and the house, then once again contemplate the workshop, the machines, the stacks of wood. I sit down at the desk in the office or on one of the stools in the storeroom, surrounded by all those materials, which are even more like corpses than me, useless and abandoned and just about to begin the process of putrefaction. It will all be put up for sale at risible prices at the next auction, and probably won’t even find a buyer. The instability of things, the emptiness of words. Yes, my eldest son will only eat hamburgers and he’d eat them all the time if he could, he’s always on me to buy them. I refuse, of course, but I know he buys them anyway with the pocket money I give him, even though I give him a hard time, because he’s really fat, I mean, he’s only twelve and he weighs almost as much as that great fool of a father of his, he’s actually obese, and that’s a reason nowadays for them to take your child away from you if a teacher reports you; children want nothing but pizzas and pasta. And do you know why children like pasta so much? No, how could you if you don’t have children of your own? She says: you don’t have children of your own, as if I were some very meek domestic animal, as incapable of causing harm as of giving pleasure; and her words fill me with a sense of worthlessness that restores to Leonor the guilt from which death should have freed her. A carpenter is expected to be a peaceable fellow, a cuckolded St. Joseph, “they,” the others, have to manage businesses, cope with stress, do dirty jobs in a factory, dangerous jobs on a building site, exciting work at a lawyer’s desk, and they think of carpentry as a harmless profession, with the golden filter of the sun gilding the sawdust floating in the air, like the splinters of gold from a goldsmith’s chisel, the pleasant, soothing smell of wood, pinewood, cedarwood, resin, even the smell of glue is pleasing to the nose: all lies and clichés of course. Even the most serious accidents seem relatively minor in a carpenter’s workshop, not like truckdrivers who might get burned to a crisp inside their cab; or bricklayers who fall from scaffolding sixty feet up and land on the pavement, their head split open like a melon; or metalworkers who, tragically, trip and fall into a blast furnace: here, at most, you might inadvertently saw off your finger tip or bring the hammer down on your thumbnail, minor wounds received during a domestic war and that further consolidate your image as a peaceable man who has honed his skills in honest toil, as if the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” didn’t apply to you, simply because you’re incapable of killing anyone.

I put down an ace of spades and reach out to pick up the cards scattered on the small green baize mat in the middle of the table, and, as I do so, I brush Francisco’s hand. That almost imperceptible contact evokes an image. In the dark of the movie theater, Leonor nibbles my ear, licks it, pokes her warm, firm tongue inside, where it echoes, half-crackle, half-murmur. That damp, moving warmth tickles the cartilage, and that warm, vibrant, sticky feeling spreads like a shudder through the rest of my body and makes me catch my breath, or to be more precise, gives me a hard-on, it’s true, and I am panting like a steam engine. Francisco laughs at something he has just said, and which I didn’t even hear, as he throws down his two remaining cards, admitting defeat. This evening he has spoken with unusual frankness. Normally, if he criticizes someone, he avoids naming names. He says “him” or “that guy.” He leaves an apparent freedom of interpretation to his listener who he has just injected with a dose of poison. He places the burden of guilt on him: it’s up to the listener to put a name or a face to “that guy,” and thus become the thinker of evil thoughts, the betrayer. He merely provides the clues, much as one buckles on one’s seat belt in the car—just in case. Or as if he were speaking with the knowledge that someone has turned on a tape-recorder or placed a microphone in a hole in the plaster ceiling or underneath the table. He must have learned these linguistic precautions at the courses he attended when he was a member of the JOC or the JEC.

Justino stubbornly returns to the leitmotiv I’m trying hard to avoid:

“Tomás’ problem has always been his wife, but then that goes for all of us.”

And looking thoughtful, like someone who has just made a discovery and is pondering what exactly it might mean, he goes on:

“The clifftop house with the infinity swimming pool must have cost him a fortune, and then there’s the designer furniture, and the Gucci and the Prada. I’m not just saying this, I’m not inventing it. She herself tells you when you meet her.”

“She tells
you
? Amparo tells you that she’s wearing clothes from Prada? Are you buying them for her?” asks Bernal.

More laughter.

“No, of course she doesn’t tell
me
, because I don’t talk about clothes with her (I’d like to, but she won’t), but she tells my wife. She does it very casually, while she’s talking about something else, dropping a name here and there, and if you were to ask my wife what all those bits and pieces were worth on
The Price is Right
, she’d win hands down. You know what women are like. They see a woman wearing a nice blouse and it’s, Minuccia, silk, three hundred and twenty euros, from Vanités, Avenida Orts in Misent; or Marqués de Dos Aguas in Valencia; or Madison Avenue in New York. Ah, but those shoes are fake Blahnik, only a hundred and fifty euros. Identical to the real thing and, if you press me, I’d say they were better finished too, but they’re as false as Judas.”