Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Epigraph
1: The Discovery
26 December 2010
2: External Locations
14 December 2010
3: Exodus
‘Will We One …
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Afterword
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448191680
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Harvill Secker
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London SW1V 2SA
Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Rafael Chirbes 2013
English translation copyright © Margaret Jull Costa 2016
Afterword © Valerie Miles 2016
Rafael Chirbes has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published with the title En la Orilla in Spain by Anagrama in 2013
penguin.co.uk/vintage
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates!’ programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persectution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchage of ideas. englishpen.org
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781846558481
On the Edge opens with the discovery of a rotting corpse in the marshes on the outskirts of Olba, Spain — a town wracked by despair after the burst of the economic bubble, and a microcosm of a world of defeat, debt and corruption.
Stuck in this town is Esteban — his small factory bankrupt, his investments stolen by a ‘friend’, and his unloved father, a mute invalid, entirely his personal burden. Much of the novel unfolds in Esteban’s raw and tormented monologues. But other voices resound from the wreckage and their words, sharp as knives, crowd their terse, hypnotic monologues of ruin, prostitution and loss.
Chirbes alternates this choir of voices with a majestic third-person narration, injecting a profound and moving lyricism and offering the hope that a new vitality can emerge from the putrid swamps. On the Edge, even as it excoriates, pulsates with robust life, and its rhythmic, torrential style marks the novel as an indelible masterpiece.
Rafael Chirbes (1949–2015) wrote nine novels and received the National Prize for Literature and the Critics Prize for On the Edge. ABC named him ‘the best writer of the twenty-first century in Spain’.
As a young boy, Rafael Chirbes was sent to an orphanage for the children of railway workers after his father died, because his mother couldn’t afford to keep him. He was born in 1949 in a small town on the shore of the Mediterranean, Tavernes de Valldigna, Valencia, to a Republican family – his grandfather was a basket-maker – on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Beleaguered, considered traitors and ‘Reds,’ his father committed suicide when Rafael was four and his mother, who worked as a pointsman, was eventually detained. Yet before he died, Rafael’s father taught his unusually bright son how to read, and at eight the boy was sent away from the sparkling blue seaside, muscatel vineyards and liberalminded rural town, where they showed films without censoring them for the children and celebrated bawdy, paganinfused spectacles during which vedettes’ breasts would fall from their blouses as they danced in defiance of the suffocating national Catholic dogma imposed by Franco. At least that’s how Rafael Chirbes remembered the warmth and earthiness of the Mediterranean world from which he’d been uprooted to find his way alone in the severe, snowy, landlocked plains of Castile during some of the darkest, most miserable years of the dictatorship.
His peripatetic life began in towns like Ávila, Salamanca and Leon – the dour lands of Santa Teresa, where her pruny reliquary finger presided ‘like a fruit peel’ over life and ‘celebrations’ transmogrified into ominous religious processions with waxy virgins and proselytes dressed in habits, cinctures, olive uniforms, widow’s black or penitent purple. This contrast between the coast versus the famous rainy (often in fact quite dry) plains of Spain (which Chirbes – who went on to become a gourmand with friends like the writer Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, founding the magazine of literature and gastronomy Sobremesa – described as ‘fresh vegetables versus dried legumes and salt cod’) is a recurring motif in some of his early novels.
Just to be on the safe side, his grandmother had warned him when he was taken away that dare he return in priest’s garb, she would strangle him. What he came back dressed in thirty years later, though, was the Spanish language as well as a uniquely obsidian sentimental education that would chisel one of the most renegade and uncomfortable literary testaments of Spain – for both the establishment and anti-establishment alike. ‘Who do I write against?’ Chirbes once asked rhetorically: ‘I write against myself. If you stand yourself up against the character you most despise, you’ll find your own contradictions staring straight back at you’. His novels sprout from a deep human disquiet and this inexorable process of self-examination – novels as private passions that take a public form. Writing as a means for making sense of things that seem incongruous, as a way of broaching that nagging question that won’t go away. First comes fixing the perspective, the way of looking, the point of view from which the story is to unfold, and once he catches sight of the figure trapped in the marble, Chirbes takes no prisoners in the carving, the shaving, the filing, the telling. Not even himself.
It’s not hard to imagine how these years went into crafting a certain narrative distance in his writing, which is an essential feature; the objectivity and detached scrutiny of a solitary, acutely observant child stunned by the weirdness of a strange new environment, the alienation of a new language with its new possibilities. Not merely the desire but also the ambition to make sense of it by naming and appropriating and organising the derangement of a peculiar alternative domain. Though stripped of his native Valencian, he gained the high artifice and syntactical precision of Castilian, a language he fell in love with and a literary tradition he absorbed copiously – along with the French – and with which he was in constant, intense conversation throughout his life; from his revered seventeenth-century Baltazar Gracián – whose philosophy of scepticism influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – to a forty-year love affair with the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós and of his beloved Mexicanexiled French-German-Jewish-Spanish experimentalist Max Aub. No hay mal que por bien no venga (all clouds have a silver lining) Chirbes said of being sent away as a boy; it caused him to relinquish any identification with a single place on earth. He became a stateless writer ‘freed of any romantic baggage’ that would wax syrupy on the orange-blossom breeze of Mediterranean writing and disregard the ripe stench of its marshlands. On the Edge is set in Valencia, yet its intentions are closer to how Gracián ‘works everyday language in a way that deviates from it enough that it neither falls into caricature nor mere reproduction’. He also pointed to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Tale of a Tub’ for the indulgence of its digressions, and closely identified with the intentions of John Dos Passos. On the Edge is a poetic spasm, an epic of the rubbish dump written by a witness who breaks the underclass’s legacy of silence during a crisis that is not merely economic, but social and acutely moral. The song of the property siren from its debris-ridden cesspool, the swan-song of the hope that was deposited in a generation, his generation, who held the country’s future in their once-militant hands and yet quickly betrayed those who, with a modicum of dignity, had struggled before them during the years of the regime. There’s no dignity in the struggle against greed in a world where values have shifted away from the human. You’re just poor. But Chirbes would quote Hermann Broch: ‘Was there ever a time when values were not in crisis?’ He believed that the novel as a form is inescapably a creature of its time and that any writer who considers it to have some supreme value-in-itself as a piece of artifice reduces the form to something banal, a paltry toy. Even in language’s search for what’s on the inside, there is a relationship, a tie, to what’s on the outside. Writers who don’t understand this connection, Chirbes felt, yet claim to inhabit literature as if a sacred temple, are really living in a doll’s house. And like selfish children they are negating the novel’s public concern, cancelling its role in civil accountability.
At a precocious sixteen, and despite the stacked odds, Chirbes moved to Madrid where he studied Modern and Contemporary History at Universidad Complutense. There he joined an underground student group and became involved in clandestine, anti- Franco activities that landed him in Carabanchel prison. He also worked in several bookshops, notably Tarantula in the early seventies, which fed his voracious reading habits and exposed him to many of the books prohibited by the regime that were kept hidden away in a special room, like a speakeasy its bottles of whisky: Sade, Miller, Marx, Lawrence, Aub and Juan Marsé, among many other delicacies. History, politics, social movements and literature converged in these years, and crystallised his perspective as an eyewitness. He spent the rest of his life narrating – in a great, twirling kaleidoscope of voices – the annals of this generation of young rebels who grew into tentative democrats: how many of them fell into the habits of their predecessors, how daily life is much harder to bear than putting up a good fight, how hard it is not to betray the ideals they had fought for as students when it came their time to make life choices. As the French writer Jean Genet quipped when asked what he would like from the world, ‘I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world’. For many, fighting against Franco had been much easier than forging a democracy, which obliges thinking of the greater good.
Chirbes went to Paris for a year and became a consummate Francophile, devouring all of Proust and declaring himself a ‘Proustian Leninist’. He read the maudits, Zola, saw the films of Renoir, Ophüls, Godard, listened to Debussy, Satie. ‘Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant are in me, they are in my novels, they are me. I admire Sartre and Camus in some books, but others are boring. I admit that Braudel is magisterial. I like Carrère’s Limonov and The Wound by Laurent Mauvignier’. From Paris he headed for the Morocco of Paul Bowles, Jean Genet and Mohamed Choukri to teach the history of Muslim Spain in a school in Fez without knowing ‘a potato’ of Arabic. Chirbes was searching elsewhere for paradise; Franco had died and the free-for-all atmosphere disturbed him. He quickly discovered Morocco was no nirvana either, but the experience spurred the writing of his first published novel, the alcohol-infused Mimoun. The novel oozes sexual tension and debauchery and an idea that ‘life is dirty, pleasure and pain sweat, excrete, smell. No human is anything more than a badly stitched sack of muck’. His lifelong fascination with the work of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud should come as no surprise. His writing eventually worked into a style that broke with any conventional idea of realism; his sharp-edged hyperrealism moves into the poetic, the revealing detail so excruciatingly exact, existentially emblematic, that it becomes unbearable, searing. In his later novels, the ageing human body serves as a symbol of the decadence and decay of the political and social body, too. It was the novelist Carmen Martín Gaite who first discovered his work. She sent the manuscript of Mimoun to Jorge Herralde at Anagrama, who called immediately and encouraged Chirbes to present the novel for the Herralde Prize. His debut was voted the runner-up. Herralde continued reassuring Chirbes at a crucial moment in his creative life, and Chirbes never forgot it. The relationship between writer and editor would last his lifetime and produce several novels and essay collections.
History for Rafael Chirbes was the key that opened his creative spigot, the present was the crystallisation of the past and a writer was an antenna able to capture what Chateaubriand called an epoch’s esprit principe. He embraced Walter Benjamin’s concept of the moment of danger, ‘for every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably . . . In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’. Benjamin is one of the ghosts, the deceased writers that Chribes talked to, listened to: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius, Virgil, Döblin, Faulkner, Eça de Quierós.
Chirbes had always been attracted to literature and cinema, but found the vastness of formal abstraction terrifying. History was a system, it tied things down and grounded them, brought things from the fanciful into an initial structure that allowed him to pose questions through literature and use the form of the novel to seek knowledge, to place an object in the light, to apprehend it long enough to distinguish its mechanics and intricacies. History was a boomerang – the past through the light of the present and its projection into the future. ‘You can’t see anything without history because if you don’t comprehend the evolution of things, you’ll never understand anything. Either you bear witness to your time, or you become a symptom of it’.
After returning to Spain, Chirbes settled into a tiny 400-soul town in Badajoz, Extremadura. He wrote travel and culinary pieces to get by, but plunged into eleven years of fervent reading, rereading and writing. By night, he would frequent the town’s profusion of bars and argue with the local socialists about how the cause had been sold for a few measly government contracts. He produced a fine second novel, En la lucha final, and a third, La buena letra, written in the feminine voice against the ‘new pragmatism’ which he said could be summed up perfectly in a phrase by Deng Xiaoping: ‘Black cat, white cat, what does it matter, as long as it hunts rats’. He wanted his storytelling to pierce the marrow of the transition, hit that quivering moment when the scales balance and the novel finds its vantage point, its aura, firing an infinitude of meanings. ‘Beautiful penmanship is a costume for lies,’ his protagonist laments. Chirbes believed that literature is like a lover, either you go all the way or you’ll be left alone.
When his fifth novel, La larga Marcha, came out in 1996 it became a casus belli among certain sectors of the critical apparatus in Spain. It was translated into German, and the critic Reich-Ranicki melted into a paroxysm of accolades, establishing Chirbes as the ‘model to follow’ for the great German novel that was coming. It was ‘the book that Europe needed’. Chirbes became an instant bestseller there, winning prizes and a veritable phenomenon. For many years his most ardent readership was German while in Spain he was still a ‘cult’ writer. ‘I’m not a priest or a politician, I’m not writing to console readers, but to awaken contradictions and disquiet’. This is part and parcel of what made Rafael Chirbes the consummate outsider in Spanish letters, the prickly, unrelenting social conscience of his generation: his was an intimate knowledge of the age-old underbelly of the human condition, he knew that victims become executioners and ‘no human being can be considered free of guilt’. In this he echoed Camus’s famous dictum: ‘In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners’. It’s what suffuses his work with its potent edge, its sense of urgency and grit. For years he was described as a ‘secret’ writer, which in Spain is often a euphemism to describe someone emerging from the underclasses, but as he well knew, eventually the readers are the ones to decide who is a great author, not the establishment. Chirbes the reader’s writer, Chirbes the witness of his time, Chirbes the historian: he always understood the artistic act as an ethical one, and the novel as a potent artefact for describing a particular time and place on earth, as a microcosmic representation, as a fractal, of the universal.
Novel after novel, Chirbes continued pushing form, experimenting, and became one of the greatest prose stylists of the language, forging new and original forms to renovate the boundless European tradition of social realism, adding modern, original twists to the sweeping fresco style of writers like Galdós, Balzac or Musil. Early in the new century, Rafael Chirbes returned to the Levante of his childhood, and found a solitary home in the small town of Beniarbeig, Alicante, living as a near recluse with his two dogs and two cats (he had been afraid of dogs earlier in life, and one can follow their presence throughout his novels). His tipping point came in 2007 with Crematorio, his eighth novel and a force to be reckoned with, like it or not. By now it was too dangerous for the establishment to flaunt ignorance of a writer of such a categorical stature. However uncomfortably, even the audacious few establishmentarians who still believe that history can keep a secret, yes, even they were forced to pay attention – the man isn’t going away and he writes like the devil. And Chirbes’s work proves that history cannot keep a secret. A tepidly conceded finalist for the City of Barcelona Prize that year, Crematorio landed the wildly applauded National Critics’ Award. It was about time. The novel was then adapted for television, becoming one of Spain’s most successful series ever.
In an essay (Chirbes has four books of essays) focusing on the work of one of his totem authors and a fellow member of the underclass, Juan Marsé, Chirbes writes: ‘He devoured his predecessors, ground them up into little pieces and built a new height over their remains from which to observe’. This is what Chirbes did in his last two books that are linked like bubbly (cava) and a hangover; Crematorio describes the Spanish soul at the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly on the Mediterranean coast during the heyday of the property bubble. But if Crematorio was about bling and bigger-than-thou yachts and beachfront properties, On the Edge takes a swan dive into the putrid bog left behind when the bubble burst. The main character is the marsh, the poisoned quagmire where the mafias dump their hot guns and cars, where toilet bowls float with construction site debris, where corpses were hacked and disposed of. It chronicles in human terms the consequences when the tower of cards came tumbling down and asks very difficult questions: Are the underclasses any better off now, than they were under Franco? Do we remember how much they struggled? ‘I dream about the dead people I knew when they were alive,’ Chirbes said to me in Xalapa, México: ‘I’ve touched them, even, and now they’re nowhere, and knowing that they’re not here and that I can’t talk to them or hear their voices distresses me when I go to bed. Some nights they take control of the room: their absence leaves me breathless and I have to turn on the light so I don’t suffocate’. What has his generation done with the new democracy they were given? The word ‘carrion’ appears in the last sentence of Crematorio and in the first one of On the Edge. ‘The wind has dropped again, and in the ensuing calm, from the place where the dog is scratching, a sickly smell of old carrion rises up, impregnating the air’. ‘The first one to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi’. The young Moroccan sees a dog chewing on something. Other dogs try to take it away. He draws closer, apprehensively. It’s a human hand.
On the Edge is a masterful example of writing at the top of its form, a centrifugal novel with sentences like sticky tentacles that clutch onto readers and suck them into a swirling, tempestuous, pulsating centre. The tension comes from the language itself, from the myriad stories of his characters all told in his characteristic torrential, terse, powerful prose, whose cadences echo his beloved American writers, Faulkner, Mailer and Dos Passos. Language that is as theological as it is diabolical, that keeps a surreptitious network, or builds a web, like a dictatorship. On the Edge garnered a second National Critics’ Award and, finally, the National Prize for Literature.
Rafael Chirbes, who died in August 2015 after being diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, accepted his role as the defiant, intrepid author who bears witness, who acts as counterbalance to the forces of power, of corruption and of greed and misery, yet writes lucidly, and even at times tenderly. ‘Literature obliges a radical practice, it demands a form of aloneness that yes, at times can be almost unbearable: but it’s a matter of old virtues and harsh discipline’. Writing was his form of observing and expiating his own inconsistencies and primal urges – sex, power, money – in their modern iterations – property speculation, prostitution and human trafficking, political debauchery – and challenging readers to look into his pages as into a dark mirror, to see the ghostly reflection of their own faces looking back. What redeems these scathing truths – for a writer with this experience and depth of insight – is art.
Valerie Miles
Fuck away like fucking donkeys, but allow me to say ‘fuck’;
I’ll allow you the action, if you’ll allow me the word.
Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot
THE FIRST TO spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.
Every morning, ever since Esteban closed his carpentry business over a month ago, Ahmed walks down Avenida de La Marina. His friend Rachid drives him to the restaurant where he works as a kitchen porter, and Ahmed walks from there to a secluded part of the lagoon where he usually sets up his fishing rod and casts his net in the water. He prefers fishing there in the marshy area, far from the eyes of passers-by and the police. When the restaurant kitchen closes – at 3.30 in the afternoon – Rachid comes to join him and they eat their lunch, sitting on the ground in the shade of the reeds, with a cloth spread out on the grass. They’re bound together by friendship, but also by mutual need, sharing the cost of the petrol for Rachid’s old Ford Mondeo, a ‘bargain’ that he bought for less than a thousand euros, but which has turned out to be something of a white elephant because, as he puts it, the car drinks petrol as greedily as a German drinks beer. It’s about fifteen kilometres from Misent to the restaurant and, just there and back, the car gollops down three litres of petrol. At nearly one euro thirty a litre, that comes to about four euros a day just for fuel, which means a hundred and twenty euros a month to be deducted from an income of less than a thousand euros; at least those are the figures Rachid gives Ahmed (although he may be exaggerating a little), which is why Ahmed pays his friend ten euros a week for transport. If he could find a job, he’d get a driver’s licence and buy his own car. With the crisis, you see, it’s easy enough to find second-hand cars and vans at absurdly low prices, although how they perform afterwards is another matter: cars that people have had to get rid of before the bank repossesses them, vans owned by companies that have gone bankrupt, motorhomes, estate cars; it’s a golden opportunity for anyone hoping to buy cheap and with a little money to invest. What you don’t know is what kind of poison might be concealed beneath the bonnet of these bargains. High petrol consumption, replacement parts, components that break the moment you look at them. You get what you pay for, mutters Rachid, as he puts his foot down. That’s another half-litre gone. He accelerates again. And another. They both laugh. The crisis is making itself felt everywhere. Not only among those at the bottom of the heap. Companies are going broke too or are struggling. Rachid’s brother used to work in a warehouse that owned seven trucks and employed seven drivers, but that was four years ago. Now, they’ve fired everyone, and the trucks stand idle in the car park behind the warehouse. When the company has a delivery to make, they hire a freelance driver, who does the job in his own truck, charges them by the hour and the kilometre and then sits, clutching his mobile phone, waiting for the next call. Ahmed and Rachid discuss the possibility of setting up a business buying old cars and reselling them in Morocco.
The restaurant where Rachid works is at the far end of Avenida de La Marina, which, despite the grand-sounding name, is actually a road running parallel to the beach, but behind the back of the first row of apartment buildings, and continuing through the suburbs of Misent for another twenty or so kilometres, as far as the lagoon’s first drainage canal. Ahmed has to walk for just over a kilometre to reach the spot where he usually fishes. He carries his rod on his shoulder, his net tied round his waist beneath his tracksuit top, and a basket slung on his back by two chains, like a backpack. Three years ago, countless building sites lined this stretch of La Marina. On either side of the road you’d see piles of rubble and buildings in various stages of construction: sites filling up with machinery; others where a bulldozer was opening up the ground, removing the reddish clay, or where cement mixers were filling in the foundations. Pillars bristling with iron rods, struts, sheets of steel reinforcement mesh, pallets full of bricks, piles of sand, bags of cement. There were teams of bricklayers everywhere. Some houses where the construction work had been completed would be covered in scaffolding heaving with painters, while, nearby, groups of men would be digging and gardening and planting trees and shrubs that are, according to the guidebooks, typical of the ornamental flora of the Mediterranean: oleanders, jasmines, carnations, rose trees and clumps of aromatic herbs – thyme, oregano, rosemary and sage. The roads in the area used to be filled with endless lines of trucks bringing in palm trees, leafy carob trees, and ancient olive trees, all bursting out of the vast pots in which they were transported. The air was filled with the metallic sounds of vehicles carrying building materials or dump trucks, and trailers for transporting bulldozers and cement mixers. The whole place was a hive of activity.
On this sunny morning, everything seems quiet and deserted, not a single crane punctuates the horizon, no metallic noises trouble the air, no buzzing or hammering assails the ears. The first time they made the journey together after Ahmed lost his job, his friend Rachid laughed at him when he said he was going there to look for work on the building sites. Work? Only if you want a job digging graves for suicides, Rachid said mockingly. Ma keinch al jadima. Oualó. There’s no work, none. There’s nothing being built in La Marina. In the good times, a lot of labourers would take their week’s wages, then not bother to turn up again because they’d found somewhere else offering more. Now, discouraging signs hang from balconies. Anyone looking for work has become a bit of a pest. NO GARDENING OR MAINTENANCE STAFF REQUIRED. PLEASE DON’T ASK says the sign on the apartments next to the restaurant. Everywhere there are signs in red or black letters – FOR HIRE – FOR SALE – AVAILABLE FOR HIRE WITH AN OPTION TO BUY – FOR SALE GREAT OPPORTUNITY – 40% DISCOUNT – with telephone numbers underneath. All they talk about on the radio every morning is how the building bubble has burst, about the huge national debt, risk premiums, savings banks going bust and the need to cut public spending and reform the country’s labour laws. The crisis. Unemployment in Spain stands at more than twenty per cent and this could rise to twenty-three or twenty-four next year. A lot of immigrants live on unemployment benefits, as he will start to do in a few days’ time, or so he hopes, because after filling in pages and pages of forms at the social security office and standing in various queues, he was told that it will take some time before he receives his first payment. Five or six years ago, everyone was working. The whole area was one big building site. It seemed that not a centimetre of land would be left unpaved; now it looks rather like an abandoned battlefield, or a territory under armistice: sites overgrown with weeds, orange groves transformed into building lots; neglected, withered orchards; walls enclosing nothing at all. When he first arrived in Spain, most of the bricklayers in the area were from Morocco like him, and his first jobs were on construction sites; then men from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia began to arrive. Now no one comes from any of those places. The Moroccans are leaving for France or Germany, and the Latin Americans are going back home, even though they had become the most sought-after workers. Employers trusted them – they spoke the same language, they shared a religion and a culture – and, above all, anyone from Morocco, ever since the 2004 Madrid bombings, was considered suspect (most of the bombers were thought to have been Moroccans) as was having anything to do with Islam or Islamism. Ahmed thinks the Moroccans themselves have contributed to increasing this distrust and making things more difficult. His fellow bricklayers, who, before, had always been perfectly happy to drink and smoke and share a joint with the Spaniards on the construction teams, were now declaring themselves to be strict Muslims, haughtily rejecting the bottle of booze being handed round at lunchtime, and never to be seen in a bar after work. They refuse to eat what the company gives them, demanding a halal menu. Some even insist that the work timetable should be changed during Ramadan. Hamak y Jamak. Fools and madmen, Ahmed calls them. Muslims and Christians only get together to find out which one can best screw the other. On Sunday afternoons, when the streets of Olba are deserted because everyone’s gone to the beach or to have lunch with their families, the Moroccans take solitary walks or sit on the handrails along the Misent road, on the bollards along the pavement. Ahmed quarrels with his fellow Moroccans who, during Ramadan, want the foremen to abandon the lunch break and, instead, shorten the work day. When he was still working at the carpentry workshop and went to deliver a load of doors to one of the sites belonging to Pedrós, one of the managers there said to him: You bloody Moroccans are mad! I never go to Mass, I’ve got nothing to do with priests, and yet you expect me to fast during Ramadan. What am I supposed to tell the crane operator or the guys driving the bulldozers or working the cement mixers? That they skip lunch and eat later on when they get home? That they don’t drink a drop of water while they’re slaving away in the sun, when it’s humid and thirty or more degrees? To his fellow Moroccans Ahmed says: As if the Christians didn’t already have it in for us! It’s as if you wanted them to get rid of us, he said to Abdeljaq, who had persuaded their other flatmates not to drink beer with Spaniards. But no, Abdeljaq had said: Keep away from the unclean. When he got excited, he would say that it wouldn’t be long before they saw the colour of the blood of those Christians. They need us, argued Abdeljaq, and, for as long as they do, they’ll have to put up with us, and if they stop needing us, they’ll get rid of us soon enough, even if we pray the Our Father stuff they spout or make the sign of the cross.
Abdeljaq had celebrated the bombings at Atocha station. He said he could see the face of Allah more clearly in the sky. He’d performed his ablutions, prayed facing Mecca and cooked a mechui of lamb, which he ate wearing a white gandora. It was all done with great formality; he was celebrating martyrdom and vengeance. Look, he said, pointing at the TV screen while puffing on his joint, look, infidel blood. Bismillah. On the television, they were showing twisted metal, people covering their faces with bloodied hands. When he was alone with Rachid, Ahmed would criticise Abdeljaq: You see? The Christians don’t need us any more, and so we’re the first people they get rid of, because we’re the ones who make life difficult for them. They’d rather keep the Colombians and the Ecuadorians. Anyway, Abdeljaq is blaspheming when he says he can see the face of Allah. That’s the worst blasphemy a Muslim can commit. But Abdeljaq’s eyes light up as if he really was seeing that face. A fierce, satisfied face. He talks like some fanatical preacher, a prophet of revenge: The Christians trample on us now, we clean the shit from their toilets, we serve their disgusting wine in bars, we build the houses where they eat jaluf and fuck uncleanly, without washing the semen from their foreskins, our women make their beds and smooth their impure sheets, but the day is coming when we will be the ones who lead them, on all fours, with a chain about their necks. They will bark outside the doors of our houses, revealed as the things they are: dogs; and they’ll polish our leather slippers with their tongues. Our Muslim brethren in America were taken there in ships, in chains, caged up like horses, goats, chickens or pigs. The Black Muslims were just farm animals as far as the Yankee Christians were concerned. The time has come for us to show them that we are men and know how to fight for what is ours. Ahmed argues: But there are rich Muslims too. What about all those sheikhs in the Gulf States. Aren’t rich Muslims even worse than rich Christians? Besides, most of the slave traders in Africa were Arabs. Muslims enslaving Muslims. Abdeljaq shakes his head indignantly: Those are infidel lies. But Ahmed has seen documentaries on television and knows that it’s true. Those Arabs, those traders in human flesh, were feared from one end of Africa to the other, they were feared in India too, in Indonesia, on the southern coast of China. They didn’t care about the religion of the slaves they captured, Christians, Muslims, Animists, Hindus, Buddhists. Any flesh was good enough to fill the cages in the ship’s hold. And what about the Turkish Khedives? They were far crueller in their tortures than the Christians. What about our kings? Are we not here because the late Hassan and his son Mohammed and his family threw us out? We are serving the Christian dogs because our own dogs are even fiercer and sink their teeth into us far more deeply. Here they treat us like servants, there they treated us like slaves. All men are bastards, all human beings, regardless of what God they believe in or say they believe in. We’re all born from a woman’s tabún. Do you believe that Allah blesses those filthy rich bastards in Fez or Marrakech who return from Mecca banging tambourines and sounding the horns of their imported Mercedes just so that everyone can see that they have enough money to have made the pilgrimage and be able to call themselves hajji? Are they fulfilling the teachings of the Koran any better than the rest of us? Why? Because they’ve walked seven times round the Kaaba, because they’ve travelled back and forth seven times between As-Safa and Al-Marwah, and drunk from the Zamzam well? I travel back and forth every day just to scrape a living. And I drink the salt water from the well of my sweat. And yet they, from their luxury hotels in Mecca, humiliate you by telling you that they’re better believers because they can go where you can’t. Just because they can afford the flight to Mecca – first-class pilgrims in a Boeing – they’re convinced that they’ll enter Paradise before you do, you poor unfortunate wretch. Do you really think there will be rich and poor in Allah’s heaven, people who drive Mercedes and people who clean other people’s toilets? What kind of shitty religion is that? Is that Islam? I can assure you, Abdeljaq, that those pilgrims will go to hell before any Christians do. You can be quite sure of that.
Ahmed has walked slightly more than a kilometre from the place where his friend Rachid dropped him off that morning. Two prostitutes, standing at the top of the path to the marsh, eye him suspiciously, or at least so he thinks. He’s never sure if people really do look at him suspiciously because he’s an Arab or if he’s simply getting paranoid and convinced that everyone looks at him like that. He’ll have lunch with Rachid in the field next to the lagoon, the field he’s walking through now. Before leaving home, he had some tea, bread and oil, a tomato and a tin of sardines, and had prepared himself a lunch of two boiled eggs, a few beans and a couple of lamb chops, but, unfortunately, he’d left the lunch box in the boot of his friend’s car. I don’t know why you bring anything, you could save what you bring for lunch and have it for supper, I’ll get something from the kitchen, it’s good food, Rachid tells him every day. The restaurant where he works appears in all the guidebooks, it’s one of the best in Misent, but Ahmed is slightly disgusted by the thought of that meat slaughtered any old way, he likes to buy his meat from the halal butcher’s and cook it himself at home, he likes what he calls beldi food, which is why he takes his own lunch with him every day, even though he usually ends up eating whatever Rachid has brought too. He’s been missing his lunch box for some time now. He’s hungry. He glances at his watch. Rachid, as he does every day, will bring a couple of Tupperware containers, filled with some sort of stew, which is absolutely fine, but not deemed good enough to serve to the customers, as well as some fruit and vegetables that he’s either stolen or which have been given to him because they’re not quite perfect. The light is beginning to thin, the fragile winter light gilds everything it touches. It’s a mild afternoon: the surface of the water, the reeds, the palm trees far off, the buildings he can see in the distance, are all gradually turning to gold; even the sea, visible if he climbs up one of the dunes, even the sea is no longer its usual intense blue, but has taken on a faintly iridescent sheen. He lights a cigarette to assuage his hunger. He decides to make the most of the time he has until his friend arrives, and when he finishes his cigarette, he goes back to the spot where he left his fishing rod firmly anchored between some large stones, casts the net he’s been wearing tied around his waist and studies the mirror-like surface of the lagoon on which insects are tracing geometrical designs with their slender legs. In his basket he has two medium-sized mullets and a rather smaller tench. Not a bad day. Tonight’s supper.
When he leans forward to cast his net again, he suddenly hears a lot of barking and growling: a few metres off, two dogs are quarrelling over some scrap of meat and barking at each other. Ahmed picks up a stone and brandishes it threateningly, at the same time showing them the stick he always brings with him to the lagoon. The dogs don’t even look at him, too busy growling and baring their teeth. He throws the stone. It bounces off the back of the larger dog, an Alsatian with matted fur, which turns its head, revealing a collar: one of those dogs abandoned by tourists at the end of the season which then wander about, lost, for months, until they’re picked up by the local animal protection league. When the stone hits, the dog lets out a yelp and limps off, at which point the other dog grabs whatever it is they were fighting over and disappears into the bushes. The stone hit the Alsatian on the back, but that isn’t why the dog is limping. One of its back legs is so mutilated and covered in scabs that the dog can’t put any weight on it. Ahmed assumes it must have been run over at some point or that it got caught in a trap or entangled in some barbed wire. It runs awkwardly and fearfully. As it moves off, it glances back a couple of times, as if to make sure the man isn’t coming after it to inflict further punishment. A lame, frightened dog and possibly vengeful too, for Ahmed fears that the dog is trying to retain his image, as the dog’s aggressor, in the bloodshot mirror of its eyes. But servility cancels out aggression: the dog lowers its head as it trots gracelessly away. Its attitude indicates fear and submission – a creature beaten and made to suffer. Ahmed shudders, with a feeling that combines both sadness and distaste for the murky reality revealed by the dog’s wounds. Disgust provoked by the sordid, but also by a dread of cruelty, the cruelty of a vengeful dog and the cruelty of the man or men who beat it. There are open wounds on the dog’s skin, bloody welts, the remains of what could be either old and infected wounds or the symptoms of some skin disease. The other dog, smaller and fiercer-looking, has glossy black fur. Surprised by the Alsatian’s reaction on being hit by the stone, the smaller dog at first drops the piece of rotten meat as it flees into the bushes, only to immediately snatch it up again. The dog lies down, its body half hidden among the reeds, only occasionally looking up, eyes bright and watchful. The meat hangs from its mouth. Ahmed has been looking with some curiosity at the piece of meat the two dogs were fighting over, and now he begins to look at it with growing horror, because he realises that the blackish lump is taking on a recognisable shape: despite its dark, putrescent appearance, despite the places where it has been gnawed clean, it is clearly a human hand. Curiosity makes him keep looking, overcoming the feelings of repugnance and horror urging him to look away. Ahmed wants to both see and not see; just as he wants to know and not know. He waves his stick at the black dog, forcing it to retreat a few paces. The animal growls, and although it does withdraw a little, it continues to glare at him and refuses to give up its prey, which – and Ahmed has no doubts about this now – is all that remains of a human hand. At the same time, his gaze slides away, again, deliberately and not deliberately, towards certain shapes lying sunk in the mud a few metres further off, to the right of the place where the dogs had been a moment before. He identifies that spot as the source of the pestilential odour he has been aware of for a while and which suddenly grows more intense. Two of the half-buried, mud-coated shapes in the water are clearly human forms. The remains of the third mangled shape could belong to a man who has been mutilated or to a body largely submerged in mud, it could also be the corpse of an animal, a dog, a sheep, a pig. As soon as he realises that these are human remains, Ahmed knows that he must leave at once. Just having seen them makes him an accomplice to something, impregnates him with guilt. His first impulse is to run, but that would make him look still more suspicious: he starts walking quickly, brushing aside the leaves of the reeds that strike his face. He keeps glancing to right and left to see if anyone could have spotted him, but he sees no one. He’s unlikely to meet one of those English or German retirees who walk briskly along the side of the road convinced that, as they breathe in the exhaust fumes from cars and trucks, they are, in fact, engaged in healthy exercise; or else one of those excessively thin individuals, more drug addicts than sportsmen, who go jogging along by the irrigation ditches and along the edges of the orange groves: no, none of the fauna prowling the orchards and engaged in various forms of exercise regimes ever comes to that particular piece of marshland.