When I arrange to meet them in the office, the other four already know what I’m going to say, because Álvaro has told them, even though I asked him not to. I want to be the one to tell them, I said, so that they find out from me, I don’t want them to think I’m hiding, afraid to show my face. But all pacts have been broken, nothing binds us together any more. Jorge is very sure of himself and of his skills as a carpenter. Ahmed and Julio, on the other hand, have no very high hopes. They live from hand to mouth. Joaquín just seems bewildered. But Álvaro, sitting opposite me, apparently gazing at me meekly, is merely pretending to be resigned to his fate. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you, his eyes are saying. He’s the one who referred to himself as “old” just to make me feel bad, and yet he’s the one refusing to pity me: you surely don’t expect me to help you, do you, he said when I asked him to keep the secret to himself for a few days, and he again purses his lips and tut-tuts when we’re all gathered in the office. Again, he looks as if he’s about to spit. At me. By warning the others about the situation, he was doubtless doing what he logically had to do, being loyal to his colleagues, class solidarity and all that, but I’ve worked with him for forty years, we’ve often had lunch down by the lagoon; together—again that endless tape running inside my head—he and I made many a furtive fishing or hunting expedition on a Saturday, although lately I’ve been going there with Ahmed instead, because Álvaro, as a father and a grandfather, had family commitments, social obligations, or so he said—excuses, lies, his children hardly ever go to see them, his wife once told me bitterly—and suddenly all those days we’ve spent together don’t exist, but the painful memory of them does. He said: you can’t do this to me, not when I’ve only got another four years before I retire. You know what you are, don’t you? He seems convinced that I’m deliberately losing everything just to annoy him, that I’m doing this just to him. He’d figured I would retire five years ago, when I was sixty-five, but would keep the workshop open, leaving him in charge, the effective boss, giving orders to an assistant, who would do the heavier work. I would presumably have hired that assistant and have kept coming down to the workshop each day and generally carry on as normal, keeping in touch with customers, checking the accounts, etc., because if you take Álvaro away from the cutting-machine, the lathe, the polisher, the drill or the rasp, if you take him away from the varnish, he hasn’t a clue what to do, he has hands, but no head. He thought nothing would change, that it would all stay more or less the same, the only change being me drawing my pension from the bank on the twenty-fifth of each month and him getting a large increase in salary because he was taking on more responsibility. The workshop closing, the dismissals, the pre-bankruptcy embargo, that was all totally unforeseen, and he can’t forgive me for that—none of them can—as if I had closed the workshop and fired them all on a mere whim. They hate me because I’ve smashed the milk jug they were carrying on their heads: the jug is in pieces and the milk has spilled everywhere, filling the cracks in the tiles; but I’m not to blame for their dreams, I didn’t encourage them. As I would have said in my young days with Francisco: I exchanged money for labor. We each contributed our labor and fulfilled our part of the bargain. No dreams were in the contract: they’re the responsibility of the individual; and each and every one of the disappointments, disruptions or discomforts they’ll suffer as a consequence will hurt me with a pain that goes far beyond the economic, not that they’ll believe that, they don’t understand and there’s no reason why they should; they’ve been left without work, their calculations have all proved wrong; I imagine what these were: the payments on Álvaro’s RV so that, when the time came, when he and his wife both retired, he could embark on the happy life of the wanderer; on that day, the day he received his pension,
then
I could close the workshop. It didn’t matter about the others. And what was to be done with the installments on Joaquín’s Peugeot 307 Break, with the communion party for his daughter or his son, I can’t quite remember now if it was the boy or the girl who was due for first communion, but he told me months ago that he’d already booked the restaurant for the spring, Las Velas, one of the most popular—and most expensive—places for such occasions; he told me: you have to book a year in advance, because, otherwise, they won’t take your reservation. I want to give my son the very best, everything I didn’t have as a child; you see, my wife works in the cookie factory (or the fruit warehouse—I’m not sure now where Joaquín told me she was working) and earns a nice little wage. Not that we’re well-off, of course, but we can afford it. And what about Ahmed and his plan to bring his widower father over from Morocco, where he lives alone, because his other brothers have emigrated to France and Belgium, and his idea of buying a four-bedroom house, one room for him and his wife, another for the father, and one for each child, because they’re a boy and a girl and it’s not right for children of different sexes to share a room, however young they are. It’s immoral and, in the long run, dangerous, Señor Shteban. A Muslim doesn’t want that, he would explain when we went fishing together, doubtless hoping to touch my heart and get me to say: I’m going to give you a loan that you can pay back gradually, when you can—these Arabs think money grows on trees here—or that I would, at least, guarantee a loan as a down-payment on one of those apartments he’d seen; or an advance on his wages, he would suggest, as we approached one of those moments of togetherness that happen when you spend the morning in the countryside alone with someone; Julio’s Saturday suppers (or Friday suppers in Ahmed’s case and at his house) and Jorge’s season ticket to watch Valencia play; or the christening party for Álvaro’s grandchildren. And Ahmed: Mulud, circumcision, the nightly feasts during Ramadan, spicy harissa perfumed with the coriander he buys in the halal shops—the other day, I noticed they’re selling coriander in the local supermarket too, well, money’s money, and coriander has an expanding niche in the market, the Latin Americans use it too, as I know from Liliana—dates, almond cakes, the parties he holds when they kill a lamb and roast it in the oven in the courtyard, and to which they invite their Moroccan friends from Misent, parties that he’s told me about—he even invited me to one. Roast lamb, salads, honey-glazed fritters, almond cakes, Coca-Cola and all the tea you can drink. Were those invitations intended to pave the way to that advance on his wages? I will leave this world without ever knowing, not that it matters. It’s a bit late to find out who genuinely cared about you, and who was motivated entirely by self-interest, who was nice to you purely because he wanted something, like my brother Germán’s wife, the hypocrite who fooled us all, even my mother, who was initially jealous because she was taking her eldest son from her, the handsomest one too. Álvaro, Joaquín, Julio, Jorge, Ahmed. Jorge, his pink face, his little eyes sunk in fat: meals with friends, feasts with relatives, birthday celebrations, a season soccer ticket, bus trips to the Mestalla stadium in Valencia with other fans from Misent, wearing the team scarf and singing the team anthem,
amunt, amunt València
, Friday night or Saturday afternoon visits to the La Marina shopping mall. H&M, Zara, Massimo Dutti, Adolfo Domínguez, Movistar and Vodafone, and then a family visit to the pizzeria or the movies, the latest
Avatar
in 3D or the second season of
Millennium
, you could spend all weekend in the mall, apart from going to the soccer game; and if it isn’t pizza, it’s hamburgers with the kids in Hollywood at the entrance to the mall, and then there’s the medieval bouncy castle, the pretend horses and immodestly rocking plastic bulls, on which the children practice riding for the first time; as well as the swings and inflatable slides. Julio, Jorge and Ahmed are not the same as Álvaro, who has worked with me all my life, or as Joaquín, who I would like to have taken on permanently, had time not been against us. He’s a born worker. I know how thrilled he was to exchange sweeping the streets for driving the van and assembling furniture in people’s homes along with Ahmed (who is also a good guy). He’s the kind who can’t wait to show you his driver’s license: I’ve got the full license, I can drive any kind of vehicle—he shows you the pink card bearing the relevant symbols, truck, car, motorcycle—and I’m strong enough to carry any load. When he says this, he raises one arm and flexes it, imitating the strong man in the circus. When they finish work, he and Ahmed give each other a high five and then have a beer in the bar. He’s no genius, but he’s as strong as an ox and very willing. Yes, I would have kept him on. And, at a pinch, Ahmed too. Not the others though (Julio is just a nobody; Jorge is too proud and thinks he knows more than he actually does). Ahmed thought he was my favorite because I took him fishing on Saturdays, let him drive the 4x4 down the narrow paths around the lagoon, spread the tablecloth on the ground by the water, open the cans of tuna and make a salad. We used to barbecue lamb chops over a fire, using olive twigs I kept in the car as skewers. The day before, he’d say: I’ll buy the lamb chops, Señor Shteban, because the Moroccan butcher, who’s the best local butcher, slaughters the lamb as it should be slaughtered, and then he’d pause, expecting me to hand him a twenty-euro note and say, go on, keep the change; he was apparently just being helpful, but the truth is he hates to eat meat that hasn’t been slaughtered in one of their slaughterhouses, I don’t know, these Moroccans, after all the hunger and hardship they’ve endured, now they go all delicate on us: if it isn’t halal, I can’t eat it. The animals have to be facing Mecca when their throats are slit, then they’re bled to death. There’s no shilly-shallying, no quick blow to the head for a chicken or a rabbit, or a harder blow if it’s a lamb, and, needless to say, no euthanasia in the form of an electric shock, they don’t even allow strangling: no, they slit the animal’s throat, praying to God as they do so. Islamist terrorists also favor throat-slitting. Machine guns and explosives are mere substitutes, albeit highly effective, but there’s nothing like slicing open a throat and having the blood spill onto the ground. It’s in the Semitic genes: Yahweh asked Abraham to cut the throat of his son Isaac, then let him swap the boy for a poor lamb who happened to be passing: the important thing is cutting throats and soaking the ground with blood. The crackling flames from the dry branches placed on top of a bed of damp grass, the sizzling fat as the lamb roasts, a lamb that was turned to face Mecca before it had its throat cut and was bled to death by a circumcised butcher. The smell of burning fat and wood mingling with the sickly-sweet air of the marsh. He used to drink with me too (he had nothing against Christian wine and beer, only wrongly butchered meat), and so we’d always put a few cans of beer in the ice chest.
But Álvaro should understand the situation better than any of them: he was as much a part of the business as I was (he who was like a son to my father, the son he inherited from his best friend) or as I once was, he can hardly complain about the death of a limb when the body has died. The firm collapsed on the very same day for him as it did for me, not a day sooner, I waived all privileges. The same day and the same hour for the carpenter’s actual son and for the guy who was like a son to the carpenter. I didn’t jump overboard and start swimming to see if I could reach the beach a minute before him. I stood on the deck until the very last moment so that we would go down together. If the business goes under, then so do we. I go under and Álvaro goes under. We go under together. That’s how it is. The others, the ones I took on more recently—Joaquín, as I say, is the exception, a very strange fish indeed, a complete mystery, who knows what lies behind that eternal smile of his?—the others were merely birds pecking at the elephant’s fleas, despite Álvaro’s alarm when he saw how skilled Jorge was. The business consisted of my father, Álvaro and me. Isn’t that right? We don’t exploit anyone, we just do our work, isn’t that so, my friend? It doesn’t matter that Álvaro has grown-up children and even a few grandchildren and has paid off his mortgage. Losing his dream of an RV is not so very grave either. They can use the car they’ve always used. A seven- or eight-year-old Renault Laguna, which he bought, apparently, because the magazines said it was the safest car on the market, and Álvaro’s very keen on safety. It’s not bad at all, it’s perfectly fine. If he’s looked after it—and I know he takes more care of it than he does of his wife, checking it, studying it, cleaning and caressing it—it could last him another ten years. And I think his wife has a car too, because she drives to work. He’ll get two years’ unemployment benefits too. That’s not bad at all. Two years. Many people would happily sign up to a guarantee that they’d have that much time in the world. Besides, his wife has worked for years at Mercadona, which is about the securest job you can get at the moment, and even though she’s been off sick lately because of depression—or has been suffering from depression after being diagnosed with heart disease or one of those rare illnesses they diagnose people with nowadays—she’ll still get disability. I know it’s not the same thing, of course it isn’t, but if they’ve been left jobless, so have I, and it’s far worse for me, because the workshop and the machines no longer belong to me, not a single one of the planks in the stores—which have presumably all now been impounded—is mine. Those cunts don’t yet know that even the bed I sleep in is no longer mine, not even the showerhead I use when I wash my Dad. My account books have been impounded. I got so tired of creditors ringing me up, I decided to rip out the landline and throw my cell in the lagoon—there’s no point going through the rigmarole of canceling my account—and thus I have joined the long list of the lagoon’s destroyers and contaminators. Yet another one. Criminals throw incriminating weapons into the marshy pools; recently, acting on a tip, the police dragged one of the lagoons and found a veritable arsenal, I read about it in the local newspaper, dozens of guns with their serial numbers erased and the barrels sawn off, thus removing all the bore marks, which doubtless correspond to bullets found in bodies dumped on garbage heaps, on empty building sites, in the trunks of cars or abandoned on the sidewalk or inside a bank after a robbery; police divers even found a car submerged beneath the water, it’s really nothing new: years ago, Bernal used to off-load asphalt roofing felt into the lagoon. But what was I saying, ah, yes, the telephone has drowned, the workshop is shut, the bank account is frozen, the Toyota will be clamped by the local authorities in a couple of weeks’ time, because that’s the deadline for me to hand over all the relevant papers to the judge (not that I’ll do that, no, I won’t be giving the incumbent of Court Number Two in Misent that particular pleasure) and as for the house, there’s a foreclosure notice that will come into force in a month: they’ll confiscate all the furniture, thus adding to the problems at the court warehouse, which, in this, the age of foreclosures and evictions, is already full to bursting. They’ve run out of space for all the confiscated electronics, furniture, machines and tools, for the old cars that are no use to anyone, but that have been seized simply to comply with a court order, whose sole aim is to punish the owners for having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. There just isn’t room for all those cars, and so they stay out in the street, slowly falling to pieces, getting covered in dust and rust, and at the mercy of predatory scrap merchants. What matters is ensuring that the owner is well and truly screwed. Every now and then, auctions are organized to try and get rid of some of that junk, but even auction vultures aren’t keen to take on those particular bargains: apartments, mattresses, computers, cars with four or five thousand miles on the odometer. What had once seemed so necessary is now excess to requirements. Yes, the courts will take everything, imposing a court order that my brother and sister will challenge as soon as they find out that my father’s ghost continued to sign checks, guarantees and loans right up until his final moments. O to be a fly on the wall when they realize there’s nothing left, because, in order to get the necessary loans that would allow me to take on the extra work for Pedrós, I forged my father’s signature with, as my accomplice, the bank manager, the one who preceded the Secular Pear, and into whose office I dragged the old man, who was clearly in no fit state to sign anything. It cost me a fat bribe, a fancy dinner and a couple of bottles of French white and Spanish red. We sat in the manager’s office with my tamagotchi father, whose signature I forged several times, signatures that appeared on every page of every contract, copies and all, as well as I don’t know how many other documents and checks. I can imagine my sister Carmen’s fury when she finds out, although, if she and my brother have any sense and get themselves a good lawyer and an expert to certify that the signatures are forgeries, and, above all, if they don’t get flustered or lose their heads, they just might win the case. And then they would be far better off than me, because I am about to abandon them, not in order to swim to shore from the sinking ship, nor even to have the satisfaction of saying “fuck you.” They are only a small part of the theatrical company I’m bidding farewell to, because that’s what’s required by the particular play my father and I are performing. They’re welcome to their unemployment benefits or, indeed, their tantrums at the lack of them or, in the case of my brother and sister, their properties, always assuming they can wrench them from the bank’s greedy grasp. My future would be a pension, of which I’d only be able to hang on to six or seven hundred euros, because anything above that would have to go to slowly reducing a debt that could never be paid off in a hundred years, and a second count, as the judges say in their summings-up, of forgery, fraud, misappropriation of funds, or whichever term the penal code would use to describe what I’ve done—I didn’t bother to consult it before forging all those signatures—and a subsequent prison sentence. And I really don’t see myself doing time in the can at my age: in winter, in Fontcalent prison, you could probably get by, a bit of sun warming the exercise yard and a couple of blankets to keep you snug at night, but in summer, it must be unbearable, a frying pan where you fry in your own fat. Álvaro’s fucked, but not because of my finaglings or my failures. He gambled his life away just as I did, no, he’s fucked because his sole ambition in life was to stay in a stuck-in-the-mud, dead-end carpentry workshop for more than forty years. Can a lazy bastard also be a hard worker? Álvaro is living proof. Slogging away out of sheer idleness and indifference, because it’s easier, because you can’t be bothered to walk a hundred feet to find yourself another more instructive, more exciting job, with more prospects and possibly better pay. Such workers used to be described as model employees, and they’d be presented with a gold-plated medal on the day they retired: fifty years in the same company and what do you get? A ribbon round your neck and a medal. Fantastic. An idler who has sat in the same chair or stood at the same machine for fifty years. Now it’s mobility that gets rewarded. Loyalty is seen as lethargy, a lack of get-up-and-go; you get brownie points for betraying your various bosses, and with each new betrayal comes more money and promotion. Ahmed and Jorge have two quiet years ahead of them in which to rethink their lives, I don’t know what Joaquín’s situation is, whether he still has some unemployment benefits owing to him from previous jobs, and then there’s always child benefits, worth four hundred or so euros for anyone who’s been long-term unemployed and so is no longer eligible for unemployment benefits, and then there are the short-term contracts given out by the town council to do cleaning, gardening—which is something he knows about—or bricklaying. Julio won’t have that possibility, but that’s his fault for choosing to work illegally, because it suited him to receive unemployment benefits and child benefits or help for the long-term unemployed on top of his wages, which meant that he could easily afford his rent or his mortgage or whatever; I don’t honestly know what his situation is and, frankly, I don’t care. At least he has youth and time on his side. I’d happily swap places with him. No question. His future for mine. It’s a deal. I hear them talking about their lives, telling me about their dreams, as if I were a wizard who could grant their every wish, a fairy godmother with a magic wand capable of turning pumpkins into golden carriages. You know, Don Esteban, last Sunday, after my husband hadn’t even bothered to come home the previous night, I took my two kids to the park, and there beneath the clear blue sky, I sat listening to the band and watching my kids playing on the swings and the slides and in one of those rope maze things, and I was thinking if only I could have been born in a place where you could just sit and listen to a band on a Sunday morning and watch your children playing, rather than having to pack up and leave everything behind. I thought, too, that I didn’t really need him, Wilson, I mean; God knows where he’d got to, because he was out all Saturday night and didn’t come home until Monday. Just me on my own, listening to the music and with my kids there with me. Don’t cry, Liliana, because when you cry, I don’t know what to do with you, I feel like touching you, caressing you, putting my arms around you as if you were a little girl, come on now, let me dry those tears, I cry too sometimes, but I don’t like anyone to see me. Don’t cry, my child. What’s wrong? Are you worried that he’ll have spent all his money during those two nights on a spree, like he did last month? That’s it, isn’t it? And you’re afraid it’ll be the same again, because he got paid on Friday and, so far, hasn’t given you a centimo. Don’t worry, we’ll find a solution, where there’s life there’s hope. How much do you need? But, first, dry those tears. No, no need to kiss me (I’m lying, kiss me, kiss me, even if it’s only a daughterly peck on the cheek). We should all help each other out when we can. And one of these days, I’d like you to come in wearing the earrings and the necklace I gave you so that I can see how pretty you look, although I know you come here to work and not to party. Liliana in my arms, her lips kissing my cheek, a couple of kisses moist with tears, and the pressure of her body against mine, seeking protection, and while what I feel is infinite tenderness, a kind of corporeal pity kicks in and I begin to notice a discomfiting thickening of the blood, but I don’t know how to move away discreetly so that she won’t notice that involuntary movement of the flesh, which would sully what really is genuine pity, you’re my little girl, Liliana, and I want to protect you, I don’t want you to suffer because that makes me suffer too, I say, but body and soul are at odds, or perhaps pity is just an unsavory form of desire. That embrace, that feeling of plenitude, and now nothing but emptiness, a void, something akin to what a woman must feel after giving birth: completely empty, her body hollow as a bell. Yes, Liliana, a feeling of emptiness: the workshop gone, you gone, and this silence, but a feeling of repose too, of being at peace. My head is no longer filled with invoices, deadlines, loans, designs, numbers, nothing, I’m no longer in pain, I can’t even feel the emotion that used to fill me whenever I saw her eyes well up, when I held her close, nor the descent into the lower depths when I watched her say goodbye, not even bothering to close the door behind her, no, now I don’t even have you, Liliana. The other day, I turned and escaped down the nearest side street when I saw her in Olba, walking along with that ball of overcooked fat, her husband, who had one great paw resting on her shoulder, when I saw their apparent affection for each other—because they were walking along together laughing and kissing, and she returned his kisses—an affection financed by me. None of that need bother me any more, I feel only rest and certainty. The calm that rushes in on a pervert the day after he’s been castrated, but describing it in those terms has other murky implications, when in this case there is—and was—only a paternal feeling. Having a business fail must be the male equivalent of having an abortion. You see, Leonor, how we are bound together by similar experiences? You and I united by a rushing stream of water carrying away part of our inner self. After all, shit is also part of our inner self. Sometimes we give things an importance that only exists inside our head. How much do you need, Liliana, would five hundred euros be enough? Here, make that seven hundred, that way you won’t have to worry. No, really, you can pay me back when you can. The workshop lived inside me. I didn’t mean to stay, Leonor, you knew that. I wanted to leave as well, but when I came back, I realized that I just didn’t have the strength to leave this house that has always been my home,
even though it’s never really been mine, it’s my parents’ house that I used as collateral—along with the orchard and the land in Montdor—for part of the loan I applied for, supplemented by the money I withdrew from the bank in order to become an equal partner in Pedrós’s latest building venture. I, who had never owned my own house, was suddenly part-owner of several dozen houses. I’ve never been allowed to buy furniture and arrange it in the rooms as I wished, I’ve never been able to bring a friend home, I could never have brought