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

profession (perhaps more than most professions, carpentry is an extension of nature: a man goes into a forest armed with an axe, and with the help of his hands and his tools, he transforms nature into some useful civilized object). They put away the other codes—lacking in civilian life (the ones promised in those old Russian books)—to which they’d aspired, and in whose stormy sea they drowned. As for nature’s codes, they managed to learn the rudiments. The civil war cut short any aspirations for justice and a harmonious life lived in common. With my grandfather, all it took was a few gunshots beside a wall outside Olba (it was only one shot, Esteban, why would they waste ammunition, he was found the following morning, along with five other men, next to the cemetery wall, right where the cemetery meets the rocks at the foot of the mountain, a buzzing of wasps announced the presence of the bodies on that spring morning, and there was a burn mark from the bullet in the back of his neck). With my father, any aspirations were frozen during his year and a bit of war and three years in prison, and by the prejudice that has pursued him ever since. Long enough to corrupt and rot any aspirations or hopes, which also die and stink once they’re dead, poisoning everything around them, like fish, like bodies. My uncle was barely an adolescent, two eyes staring in horror at this somber collection of images. My father never complained about being sidelined: he was too proud. Nor did he consider that he’d given up his aspirations (we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work: these words saved him), but he blamed us for the limitations placed on him. Decomposing, fermenting aspirations, just a hint of putrefaction: justice more like a punishment than a balm. He pretended to be above it all, crouched and waiting for these difficult times to pass, as if his own life were on hold, and the effort required to believe this was the fluid sustaining him, keeping him strong enough so that the outside world would not break him. Or so he believed. But he was already broken, he already had a deformity, a kind of monstrous hernia. And we should not dismiss the energy it takes to tell yourself a lie and maintain it. He could do that. He had that constancy of mind, the necessary willpower. After leaving prison, he grew a shell around himself on which the outside world could batter in vain. The shell protected him, sheltered his aspirations (Álvaro’s father was the only one who helped me when I left prison, and Álvaro is like a son to me, the son of my best friend, the friend who never called me “comrade,” because he thought the word, in my ears, might be demeaning), and he has probably kept those aspirations to the end, like wine turning sour in the barrel. I said he shut himself away, but that’s not true, he always had his antenna alert to a rather remote outer world: he didn’t live outside the world, but in opposition to it, and that included his wife and children, who, I suppose, he made unhappy, if it’s possible to make other people happy or unhappy.
    Yesterday, as I do every evening, I went to the bar. First, a game of dominoes, then the chance to get your revenge with a few hands of cards. My partner’s Justino—he’s an occasional associate of Pedrós, whereas I’m an associate around whose neck Pedrós has tied a very large stone, just as Bernal’s father—Bernal is partners with Francisco today—did with the corpses he threw into the Canal de Ibiza. After the game of dominoes—the losing pair pay for the coffee—we bet a couple of drinks on a few hands of tute, and that’s when Justino announces that Pedrós’s businesses—the hardware store, the domestic appliances shop, the offices—have been “intervened.”
    “‘Intervened’? Like what happens to banks or to EU member states? What does that mean? That they’ve sent in the men in black?” asks Francisco.
    And Justino