On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t go out to sea and cast our nets like some of our neighbors in Olba, who owned small boats that they kept moored in the nearby harbor of Misent. The marsh was like a fish farm: shrimps, mullet, frogs, tench, barbel; eels and elvers: we didn’t catch the elvers to eat, no, we didn’t eat them; the sight of that seething mass in the bucket disgusted my grandmother, who called them maggots; my uncle would hold them close to her face, laughing, and my father would watch, sitting on a bench in one corner of the kitchen, leave your mother in peace, can’t you see she doesn’t like it, his mask about to crack into the merest hint of a smile. We sold them to a dealer who had a contact in Bilbao, and we made good money like that. The price shot up just before Christmas: later, I found out just how much people were prepared to pay at that time of year for what my grandmother thought were repulsive maggots. In stormy weather or at high tide, the sea bass would swim in from the sea. Nowadays, you only find those borderline fish in the canals of the lagoon. My uncle could pinpoint them with uncanny accuracy. I used to say he had a good nose, but what he had was common sense. He kept a list in his head, a system—every freshwater species, every saltwater species, every creature: The environment is irrelevant, and that applies to birds as well, and if you push me, to human beings too—they all have a right time and a right place, and need to be caught in a particular way and using a particular bait, he would tell me, while he was baiting the hook. I didn’t initially understand what he meant: the fisherman who fails to choose the right bait does so because he doesn’t know how fish think, and a fisherman or a hunter has to become the thing he’s hunting, to think the same way. That’s why the real hunter, the real fisherman, falls in love with his victim: he’s hunting himself. And he feels sorry both for his prey and for himself. Hold the hook like this, no, we’re not going to use the dough we normally use for bait, today we’ll use this stuff. Smell it. Disgusting, isn’t it? What a stink! Well, fish love that smell. And so do crabs. Everything rots. We’ll end up rotting as well and we’ll smell quite a lot worse. Many years from now, you’ll rot too—and it’s that rotten smell that the fish like. When you get older, you’ll realize that they’re like humans in that respect. Don’t go thinking you’re not going to end up smelling like a dead fish, Esteban. Ultimately, we all end up smelling like that, and just as a doctor prescribes particular medicines for each patient, Uncle Ramón offered each creature its particular bait and taught me how to think like a fish, like an eel, like a mallard, and to think about life’s baits too. You will rot too, my boy. You will stink. Like everyone. See how beautiful the color and design of the duck’s neck feathers. But now it’s dead.
    And sixty years have passed, long enough for the web of veins to climb up the legs of that once young boy and form a network of blotches which, in the arch of the foot, has become a dark mass. The scaly skin on arms and chest is now the jaundiced color of old ivory, I have age spots on my face and on the back of my hands, and then there’s that old man’s smell, like sour milk, Liliana, that aura of rust and urine. The body is no longer certainty, but doubt, suspicion. You think you’ll make it through to tomorrow, but you know things won’t be getting any better. Are the blue patches on my left foot turning black? Sometimes, with old men, our feet turn gangrenous and have to be amputated.
    According to my uncle’s strict code, every creature caught dies its own death, a ritual so precise it verges on the religious: after all, neither he, my father, nor my grandfather, and none of the men in this household, ever had any other religion than that of submitting to the codes imposed on them by nature, or dictated by their