On the Edge (32 page)

Bernal:

“He’s nuts about her and has simply let her spend, spend, spend.”

Justino:

“She must be forty-five if she’s a day, and when she wears one of those blouses showing off her nice, firm, perky tits, you just know they must be silicone, because they could be the breasts of a twenty-year-old; but when she wears those skin-tight jeans, her ass still looks like an apple you’d like to bite into.”

“If you had enough teeth left.”

“Oh, I’ve none of my own, but my implants have given me back my adolescence. I do have to be careful, though, because when I bite, I can’t always tell how hard I’m biting.”

“But what exactly are you biting and whose whatever-it-is are you biting into?”

More laughter.

Time to hear another fragment from Francisco’s hidden—and falsified—autobiography:

“Women are always man’s main obstacle.” I’m sure this isn’t what he thinks of Leonor, who was hardly an obstacle in his life. I don’t think he’d ever have gotten to the second rung on the ladder without her. “They’re the main brake on our actions. Fall hopelessly in love, and you’re lost.”

Who could he have fallen so hopelessly in love with? While Leonor was still alive? After she died? I don’t mean did he fall in love with her corpse, like an Edgar Allan Poe protagonist, but did he fall in love with someone else when Leonor was already dead or while she was still alive, or has he perhaps fallen in love more recently? When he shuts himself up in his house for the night, does he receive calls from that woman, do they talk dirty on the phone, does he invite her out on his yacht on those days when he disappears from Olba and all the shutters on his house are closed? Or do they lock themselves up in the house for weeks on end? I don’t know that he was ever in love with Leonor, the marriage suited him—it suited them both—he used her—they used each other—economically, socially, eugenically. All right, their son didn’t quite turn out the way they wanted, but they certainly can’t complain about their daughter, an economics whiz. He says he finds her coolness toward him wounding, but I figure she’s intelligent enough to know that if she does talk to him, he’ll only start nagging her. He and Leonor were business partners, like Tomás and Amparo, but Tomás is mad about Amparo: theirs is clearly a sexual relationship (I know this, you can tell), they share a taste for sex, vice, luxury and doubtless even drugs. Pedrós is always touching his nose when he talks, and I imagine she’s the same, the kind who lets someone else put the powder on the mirror, then, apparently reluctantly, sniffs it up, just to be polite of course, but if no cocaine is on offer, she’ll be sure to mention it, in case someone else is willing to share theirs. And they’ve accumulated money together, which is how they’ve managed to live the way they do; I can’t imagine Francisco and Leonor sharing any vices; I’ve always had the impression that his vices occupied a separate, clandestine world, although who knows? And what about her?

Bernal has now stopped playing with his cell phone, having missed the last part of the conversation. He says:

“It’s hard to be really in love with a woman
and
do anything useful in life. Anxiety eats away at you. There’s no point getting hooked up with a woman who’s hard to get, that’s tantamount to spending the rest of your life climbing Everest. You should marry a woman you can keep without too much effort. You can always pay for the company of a real beauty if you want to. For a few euros you can have an eighteen-year-old Russian girl who’s better-looking than any movie star. You fuck, you pay and you go back home to have supper with your family, with your wife, who’s a good cook, but lousy in bed, and who would never dream of leaving you, because, quite apart from anything else, no one is interested. She goes to parents’ night at school, is a leading light of the PTA or whatever they’re called—you know, all that social-democratic garbage that the Partido Popular gleefully copies because it fits their modern-responsible-happy-family image with just a touch of Opus Dei—plus she keeps the children in line and knows which is the best detergent to buy and the best cheese and the best local foie gras. She irons your shirts and sews on your buttons, or can tell the maid how to do it, having first put her through more trials than an Olympic athlete. That’s what a man needs, because it takes a lot of courage to live with a woman who’s your equal and makes you cook the vegetables and hang out the clothes, as well as being insatiable in the sack and screwing you dry. Hard work. No man could stand that.”

“Amparo is too much of a woman for Tomás or for anyone. It’s not just that she’s drop-dead gorgeous, but if she’s arranged to meet someone at seven o’clock, then, rather than arrive even a minute late, she’ll leave whoever she happens to be with in mid-fuck. She has character, style, independence. As well as nice tits and a nice ass. It’s really hard to cope with that at home on a daily basis, having to fight off marauders—because that’s what it’s like these days,” says Justino, who is known to be something of a marauder himself and, doubtless, one of those men Amparo has, on some occasion, left high and dry in mid-fuck.

Bernal again:

“She’s certainly an important factor, but less so than you seem to think. He knows how to have fun too, how to live it up. Amparo played only a small role in the collapse of Tomás’s businesses, all right, there were the facial peels, the nails, the spa treatments, Revlon, Dior, Loewe, Miuccia Prada, and all the rest, but that’s normal for any bourgeois bit of pussy. The wife of any small-time property developer, car dealer or owner of a chain of gas stations or an apartment block will be sure to have acquired that designer stuff over the last few years. Or are there wives who don’t go to those shops, wear those clothes or indulge in aromatherapy massages and hydromassage baths?
He
was the real problem, what with his extravagant tastes, his desire to impress, the money he lavished on social or should that be municipal events (not forgetting the usual bribes paid to the local councilor); and then there were the wines from Burgundy, the seafood, the champagne, and so on, not to mention the Russian girls, and the cocaine,”—ah, so the secret’s out, I always suspected that he took cocaine from the way he kept rubbing his nose, I shoot a quick glance at Francisco, who remains impassive—“because the bastard certainly hasn’t stinted himself.”

Justino:

“He’s screwed the best prostitutes in the region. Not the ones in the clubs, who charge fifty or a hundred or two hundred euros. No. He only used to go there on work outings with his employees or to impress small-time suppliers. He’s always gone for the kind of woman who appears to be working for herself, but is, in fact, just one tentacle of a mafia octopus, the kind of woman you find at the Marina Esmeralda lying on the deck of some yacht, which might belong to a friend, male or female, who has lent it to her, crew included, to enjoy a few days of rest. Rest from what, though? From business deals, catwalks, boutiques, photo sessions or some other sort of session. At least that’s what she’ll tell you when she gets you in her sights. The kind who always has bottles of Moët chilling in the fridge, a forty-inch flat-screen TV and a jacuzzi in a 2000-square foot apartment with a sea view or a clifftop villa in Xábia or Moraira, owned by mafia from Eastern Europe or possibly Western Europe (you’d have to check whose name is on the deeds, and even then you’d never know for sure who’s hiding behind the ostensible owners). Pedrós has often bought himself a few weeks in one of those villas, telling Amparo and us that he’s away traveling, phoning home on his cell phone to complain about the rain in Vigo (it hasn’t stopped all week) or how cold it is in Pamplona (enough to freeze your balls off), and that he’s staying another few days so as to sort out the distributor’s accounts (they’re a complete mess, I’ll tell you about it later), when, in fact, he was opening and closing a pair of silky legs. He’s taken those women out to supper at Quique Dacosta’s, at the Hotel Ferrero, at the Girasol when they had that Swiss or German chef working there, or to spend the night in the Westin Hotel. He’s been seen in those places on more than one occasion and word has spread, after all, it’s a very small world here, and everyone knows everyone else. And he’s learned a lot from you, Francisco, I think. By now, he probably knows more about wine than you do.”

Francisco leaps on this statement like a Bengal tiger:

“Don’t I know it. He loves showing off to me: Olivier Leflaive’s Corton-Charlemagne with the
amuse-gueules
; a Chateau Cos d’Estournel with the
plat de résistance;
and a Coutet Sauternes with the dessert or the foie gras: mere nouveau-riche posturing.”

Justino interrupts:

“Don’t forget the cognacs: Martell, Delamain, Camus, because his other vice—apart from prostitutes—is cigars and cognac, even more so than wines. He loves sitting around after a meal, one hand on his belly, his legs stretched out under the table and his lips pursed, blowing out a great cloud of cigar smoke. He uses wine to give him a veneer of class, but cognacs are his true love. I would say that he’s spoiled Amparo rotten because it suited him to. Husbands who cheat always take great care to make sure their wife lacks for nothing. If you do get caught out at some point, you can always save yourself by saying: but I’m crazy about you, don’t be silly. Don’t I bow to your every whim and treat you like a queen? Besides, anyone can make a mistake.”

Francisco can resist no longer. Falling into the trap of discussing what wines and cognacs Pedrós drinks has hit him where it hurts—in his wine expert’s liver. He can detect direct competition; all that talk about Corton-Charlemagne and Delamain; and hearing someone say that Pedrós knows more about wine than he does is tantamount to challenging the emperor for his crown. And so he adds:

“It’s one thing to say Amparo is still gorgeous, even at her age, and that she’s intelligent and has good taste, but basically he, well, he’s just a fucking plumber. He may have fitted the bathrooms of his Russian clients with gold taps, but he’s still a plumber. That’s how he started out. He knows nothing about cognac or wine. He knows names and labels, but that’s a very different matter. He’s quick on the uptake and notices what the genuinely rich people he mixes with are drinking. He’s the sort who keeps a little notebook and goes into the restaurant toilet to note down the labels of the wines being served with the meal, or which were the most expensive ones on the menu, along with the brand names of the clothes and shoes his fellow diners are wearing, he even notes down words he doesn’t know, but which he notices are considered to be chic. He was on at me for months to teach him about
denominaciones
, wine merchants, good years and bad years. He bled me dry, like a vampire. Not that I’m criticizing him, mind. At least he did his homework. He’s a conscientious fellow. Hard study can turn even an ignoramus into a sage,” Francisco declares, closing his speech with an unexpected defense of the plumber Pedrós. Like Christ with Lazarus. The Lord taketh away and the Lord giveth back. The Lord is God-like in his generosity.”

Justino yawns and stretches voluptuously, undulating his body like an odalisque in a harem, then he scratches his crotch and sighs:

“It’s such a good feeling when you do rein yourself in and stay faithful to your wife. I’m faithful most of the time, and only occasionally do I allow myself to succumb to temptation, but how delicious those occasions are, no?”

Bernal continues:

“They’re each as bad as the other, it’s been pretty much tit for tat between Tomás and Amparo. She’s done her fair share of over-spending too and hasn’t gone without certain other things either: trips abroad, shopping sprees, days spent who knows where (best not ask); solo visits to Paris, exhibitions, although, having said that, their marriage does seem pretty indestructible. Or it has been as long as the money kept flowing in. We’ll see what happens now. But I think that, at least for the moment, their bond will remain strong as long as they still share financial responsibility. What really binds a couple together are the business deals they have in common or the loans taken out in joint names and that have to be repaid. If you sign up for a twenty-year mortgage, you’re pretty much guaranteeing your marriage for the same period of time. That’s true love. Not mere words that the wind can carry away. The banks don’t keep words in their safes; you can’t buy anything with words or use them as a guarantee.”

Justino:

“When things go wrong, that’s that. Like they say, when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window. Unpaid bills put paid to love. The water of debt shortcircuits the electrics of passion. Wow, that sounds like something straight out of an old-fashioned novel or some high-falutin’ essay! You’re the writer, Francisco, take note. Who knows what goes on between husband and wife, it’s forbidden territory, not even a lover has access to the secrets of the marital bedroom, the bedside table with the family photos, the alarm clock, the little boxes with earplugs in them, tampons, KY jelly, it’s years of accumulated habits and obsessions, you get their different versions of events, but you don’t know what really matters, what they owe each other, what money they have, where they keep the safe and who has the keys; that’s what you can’t know, what’s in her name or her father’s name or the name of some spinster aunt above suspicion, they won’t tell you that even if they fight like cat and dog, I know, or I think I know, that they’ve agreed on separation of property. And this bankruptcy could well just be a cover.” He speaks as what some people say he is, one of Amparo’s spurned lovers.

Francisco:

“It’s obvious that the only happy marriages are marriages of convenience, which work like well-oiled machines, with no friction, each partner aware that their aspirations are progressing well thanks entirely to that alliance. It’s really good to see such couples working as a team, having grasped the idea that matrimony is tantamount to being a publicly traded company. They do well in the world, providing each other with total support, each one specializing in a different activity so as to get maximum return on their investment, because they know that whatever one of them gains will benefit them both. Public arguments, disagreements, announcements of a separation make the price of shares on the social stock exchange plummet, damaging the domestic economy, so forget all the garbage that young people and other imbeciles proclaim to the winds, not realizing that they’re devaluing what they have. They believe in being in love and falling out of love, in betrayal and jealousy, unaware that, as soon as what novels and romantic magazines insist on calling ‘love’ gets in the way, you’re fucked. Screwed. An end to all peace of mind. When someone says ‘I’ll love you for ever,’ the affair has already begun to take in water. A mountaineer can’t stay on the peak he’s just conquered, because he’s already reached the highest point. What next? You know that now you have to climb down again and find another K 8000 mountain to climb. Your newly-married neighbor, the office colleague you’d never even noticed before, become new targets. It’s the same with everything. The flames melt it. It’s what happened to the Twin Towers. They melted. At boiling point, the stock in the pan soon evaporates and the stew you were so lovingly preparing burns dry. Ardor only serves to scorch things. The lovers themselves, if they’re truly in love, are in a hurry to end that torment and do all they can to free themselves from it. They force matters. If a marriage is to last, you must never swear eternal love. Rather than a rolling amorous boil, you need a steady selfish simmer on a medium flame.”