cremation

  Also by Rafael Chirbes

  from new directions

  On the Edge

  Copyright © 2007 by Rafael Chirbes

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Valerie Miles

  Originally published as Crematorio in 2007 by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Support for the translation of this book was provided

  by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 1518 in 2021

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chirbes, Rafael, 1949–2015, author. | Miles, Valerie, 1963– translator.

  Title: Cremation / Rafael Chirbes ; translated from the Spanish by Valerie Miles.

  Other titles: Crematorio. English

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021037305 | ISBN 9780811224307 (paperback) |

  ISBN 9780811224314 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PQ6653.H6 C7413 2021 | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037305

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  cremation

  You’re laid out on a sheet, a metal table, maybe a slab of marble. I can picture you. Again, I picture you. I’d forgotten about you while I was talking to the Russian in the café first thing this morning, watching, through the window, the tourists lounging in the patio chairs outside, another cluster of them a few more feet along stretched out on the sand, frolicking in the water. He drank a pair of bourbons. I had an iced tea. Don’t like to start so early. Though I kept a restless eye on the two tumblers the waiter set on the table in front of him. If it weren’t for him, if I’d come on my own, I might have been able to relax in that spacious, empty salon (just the two of us there) with its beachfront view, so green along the shoreline rising into a deep band of cobalt at the horizon, the barges already moving, the sailboats, the catamarans. Traian, the Russian, drank both shots of bourbon. First one then the other, an almost continuous motion. I glanced back at the café as I turned the key in the ignition, thinking why not go back in, why not hang out for a while under the jet of air-conditioning, read my newspaper and enjoy the view, by myself now, with my own bourbon in hand, two rocks. I picture you laid out someplace. Who knows where? But there you are anyway, lying on a steel table, a sheet, a cold marble slab, under a jet of air-conditioning. Truth is I don’t like seeing you that way. The engine turns and I press the button beside the steering wheel with my index finger to switch on the radio. The sudden commotion, the sound of the motor, they displace you, leaving me alone; I concentrate on the movement of my hands now, gripping the wheel, the movement of my right foot, stepping on the accelerator. The car’s wheels crunch across the sheet of sand blanketing the ribbon of asphalt along the beach. Little granules of it dust the sidewalk, framed by fences and trellises sprouting with leafy flora: hibiscus and oleander slowly drift past the car window, bougainvillea, green hedges of thuja, rows of cypress trees. Black, pink, and blue trash bags are piled beside the dumpsters and hanging from apartment railings, like another species of blossom. They impregnate the musty iodine breath of the sea with their tang. The car rolls sluggishly forward and I forget about you, Matías. I stop seeing you. It’s sweltering even at this early hour. I push the button to close the window and isolate myself in the vehicle’s interior. Finally alone. It’s five past ten in the morning; the little green numbers on the dashboard flash thirty-four degrees centigrade. Consecutive foggy mornings and high levels of humidity had made the air grow stagnant, muggy, and oppressive — what the French call marais thermique — but a rough westerly kicked up on Tuesday afternoon that dried the atmosphere out, stoking the mercury an asphyxiating three or four degrees higher. Come afternoon the scorching winds stir up again. The branches of shrubs sway to and fro as the oven door opens in an incandescent yawn somewhere behind the mountains, its afterglow deepening as dusk settles in. The local radio DJ is talking about the heat; Misent’s climate records tell us there hasn’t been a heat wave like this since the fifties. It’s the second one this summer. The first (not quite a wave, more of an episode the meteorologists say) peaked at the end of June: the thermometers spiked unpredictably, hitting maximums of over thirty-six degrees for eight or nine days straight, eighty percent humidity and higher, before temperatures plunged again in the following weeks. Now the episode is repeating itself, but more savagely. The radio says to expect temperatures to soar above forty degrees inland, and none of the satellite images forecast an appreciable shift. The tiny arrows dotting the maps on the television news predict continued sweltering, sand-laden winds. Cars parked outside overnight are covered in a film of reddish dust by the morning. I had to ask the gardener to wash mine before I left home this morning; I forgot to park it in the garage last night. A new Heat Task Force was announced on the news, with an emergency hotline. The broadcasters are constantly warning everyone to keep hydrated, stay out of the sun in the merciless peak hours, wear a hat and light clothing so the body can perspire — cotton, linen — and slather on the sunscreen; but mostly they recommend water and more water: drink several liters a day, splash a little on the wrists and nape of the neck. The broadcaster repeats the Heat Task Force number, reminding us it’s toll-free, one eight hundred. All this harping seems ridiculous to me. In Misent, in Xàbia, in Calp, in Benidorm, summers have always been sweltering. But the broadcaster and all the guests on his program babble on about the advance of climate change, how the rapid depletion of the ozone is wreaking havoc and they support their assertions with data and statistics that invite pessimism: the mounting thermal oscillations are melting the ice caps in the Antarctic, causing chunks to break off and create drifting icebergs (dangerous for ocean fauna, for navigation); the Alpine glaciers are thawing (danger of avalanches this winter in the Swiss ski stations), and the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing (inevitably causing droughts and new famines on the dark continent: the death knell of the great African lakes, reduced to mudflats. Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest summit, crowned by the perpetual snows and immortalized by Hemingway, is now scantily clad in tiny patches of ice. Africa’s ceiling is no longer white, the broadcaster cries excitedly). Where Spain is concerned (how will climate change affect us?, a listener asks), the talk show guests discuss how the drought threatens at least one third of the Iberian Peninsula with desertification over the next few decades, including the landscapes I’m driving past right now; all the orange plantations peeking out from behind the dwellings and condominiums will vanish, the sea will eventually swallow up the waterfront properties. None of it matters to you anymore, Matías, and I’ve just about had it with all this squawking. I push the button to change from the radio to a CD, and music spills over the car’s interior. I need to find calm now, break the tension built up during the conversation with Traian. It’s done, I told him, Collado’s been taken care of. He tilted his glass toward me for a second. Motionless. Sarcós called me first thing to confirm. Talking to Traian always aggravates me. Cheers, he says, clinking his glass against my outstretched teacup. The music is soothing, lending a sense of unreality, of somnolence. I need my composure on a day like today. I’d planned on meeting several foremen at a few building sites scattered around Moraira, in Xàbia, in Altea, the ones that were supposed to be done before summer, but probably won’t; not even by Christmas. I’d spend the entire day in the car, most likely, and don’t feel up to it. Might just skip the three morning appointments. Do what’s best for me, stop for lunch somewhere, maybe even go home to eat. I don’t have anyone to answer to. I’m on my own. I enjoy spending these days on my own, no chauffeur, no yapping guests tying me down to a schedule. My mind works better when I’m alone. Just me, humming along to the music, whistling the tune, moving my head to the melodies. Music helps me think. That team of architects pops into mind, the one helping me design the project in Benidorm to rework the poolside restaurant into something more formal, more exclusive, more private, with the cool slip of water sans swimmers (I envision the type of place I’d take a client for lunch, or Monica for dinner, or a lady friend), I like the pool view, but don’t want to share it with random bathers, these are my thoughts at ten minutes past ten in the morning, while in some other room, some cold basement, I imagine, they’re dressing you, applying foundation, powder, rouge; but I don’t want that in my thoughts right now; I’ll think about it later, when you’re in front of me, and I’ll think about you when you no longer exist, when you’re nothing but smoke, and even then I won’t be free of you, you’re with me, Matías. Like it or not, I’m going to think; I’ll have him with me. The problem is that even now you get into my thoughts when I don’t want you to. There you are laid out, projected like a transparency between my eyes and the cars in front of me. Something external, but inside of me, too. Like a spiderweb in my head that leaves very little space to think. I try to shake the image, and concentrate on the day’s work, on what I’m doing right now, on the brake lights of the car in front of me, on how the car behind me accelerates suddenly, on the man’s face I see reflected in the rearview mirror. I look out the window and survey Nido Beach, already teeming with early morning beachgoers, as the car rolls forward slowly, stopping every couple of meters in traffic that’s blocking the access road leading to the highway. The traffic on my left, heading in the opposite direction, is at a complete standstill. I watch the cars idling, trying to make their way downtown. Many have their windows rolled down, the elbows of their tanned and sweaty arms hanging out. Everything glistens in the sun, the surface of the sea, the glass of the buildings, the metal of the cars, the skin of the people inside of them. I keep the windows shut so the cool of the air-conditioning can’t escape. I feel sheltered, like other times when I’ve sat here with the music just beginning to play (Schubert. The Late Piano Sonatas. D 958–960. Andreas Staier, Forte­piano, the CD cover reads), in the crisp cubicle that acts like a barrier from the summer bustle outside. I’m amused by watching what’s around me, what I’m slowly but surely leaving behind each time I take my foot off the brake. I catch glimpses of the palm trees between buildings that climb high on my right; there’s the azure sea, and the thin yellow strip of Nido Beach. I used to spend time there as a boy, as a teenager, but I wouldn’t think of setting foot there now, the dubious hygiene of the water, the congested beaches. For years the inside of my car has been my favorite summer spot, my own private Nido, but it’s not a bird’s nest, for something snug and warm-blooded; it’s more like the cool, clammy den of a reptile brumating in the rocks. I laugh at the idea (a reptile in the rocks) and glance at the skin of my hands, all rough and liver spotted: lizard skin, a little more saurian than reptilian, and it takes a few seconds for the irony to fold in on itself and bring a stab of despair, which I struggle to contain: furrowed hands that no lotion can smooth, dappled arms, necrotic skin in the cycle of decay, face covered in spots that no cream can blanch, no youth-preserving moisturizer like the ones Monica lightheartedly applies to my skin at night; spa sessions, water therapy, essential massages of grapefruit, carrot, wine, chocolate, or mud. Think about other things, better things, or better yet, don’t think at all, live the happy moment inside this car, the cool air expanding, the fresh, welcoming vessel that shelters you from the metallic light, the aluminum glare outside. A reptile’s den. The air-conditioning, climate control: it makes the air characteristically humid and cold, makes your nose prickle in that particular way like it does when you’re in a cave, among the rocks, that in-the-bilge kind of cold, wine cellar cold, or saltpetered-walls-of-a-dungeon-in-a-castle-by-the-sea kind of cold. So I think heat, I think oven, and Matías is back. I think dungeon and there he is again. He’s here. He reads aloud so I can hear him. He reads about Edmond Dantès suffering locked away in the cold, dank rocks, a reptile’s den, a damp dungeon, a capsule frosted with saltpeter and quarantined from the sun of Marseille, his prison cell in Château d’If, where he hears the sea breathing outside the walls, sees the hoary white blisters of saltpeter filtering through them. Matías reads me chapters from The Count of Monte Cristo under the garden trellis of our house in Pinar. He says: “I want to be Providence, because the thing that I know which is finest, greatest, and most sublime in the world is to reward and to punish.” I must be eighteen, Matías a little over ten, or maybe not — no, he hadn’t turned ten yet, he must have been eight or nine, but he reads well, haltingly, using different levels of stress in the sentences to tickle out meaning: the finest, most sublime thing in the world is to reward and punish; he modifies his voice, changes timbre and tone for the dialogue: neutral for the narrator, more affected for the different characters. He says: Let’s go down to the pond and read another chapter, and as soon as he falls into the hammock he starts reading again. I doze dreamily, think about my things (what am I thinking about?), Matías’s voice still has a child’s pitch; its musicality drives my thinking. They say the first thing you forget about a dead person is their voice, but if I concentrate, I can still hear his voice when he was a boy, or maybe I only think I can hear it: I want to be Providence. To reward and to punish. I must’ve been about eighteen. I hadn’t gone to college yet, or maybe I was already in my first year as an architecture student, and back for vacation. The light breeze made the leaves of the lemon tree shiver, the laurel leaves, the eucalyptus, a breezy commotion of leaves in the back garden: it sounds like the tide, the sea sucking at stones, rubbing the pebbles against each other, sucking at them again. Memories: the fuchsia bougainvillea blossoms, translucent, as if made of silk paper; the wisteria curling over the garden wall like a spongy blue wave; the fleshy leaves of garden plants, the sun aglow, and the boy who is Matías reading to the teenage Rubén. The table is set, the maid’s voice can be heard from the terrace above, the house invisible behind the vegetation, the two of us hidden in a vegetable labyrinth with the muted crepitation of the breeze and the deep sound of the motor that spurts a jet of cold water to nourish the irrigation pond — it’s a world that’s mine alone now, nobody else’s. I’m the sole proprietor of those memories. Safe in my refrigerated car, I preserve it. The bluish-gray tinted window increases my feeling of isolation, of being protected. Nobody else remembers the old garden anymore, the voice, how the sun reverberates on the pond’s basalt blackness, shimmering, like a colossal petrified flower with four curled stone petals; wasps gliding over the water, red dragonflies levitating, the wind rippling its presence across the surface; a few devil’s darning needles, green and blue, iridescent, glimmering electric carapaces, their wings moving like fizz in the air. The maid calls. Lunch is ready. Go on now, time to wash up. There’s soap in the bathroom. Matías, I want those hands smelling of Heno de Pravia soap — if they don’t there’s no dessert for you, and no snack later, either. And for your information there’s vanilla ice cream in the freezer and chocolate sauce in the jicara bowl. Summer. The table is set. Nobody else remembers this. Only me. And when I’m no longer here to remember, it will no longer exist. Silvia’s been to the garden, the pond, she’ll have her own memories, similar memories (our childhoods were alike), but not this one, not this vegetable tableau, not these words spoken on this day, in that place, the asthmatic rustle of the air breathing among the trees, stirring the old eucalyptus’s canopy into a rasping, resonant backdrop. I think about it all and it seems like such a wasteful thing: to have lived and then to stop living. To have recorded all of this somewhere, and then conceal it forever. What I’m looking at right now in Technicolor is furtive, what I hear, what I smell. The music in the car playing quietly: the pianist’s fingers describing virtually imperceptible filigrees on the keyboard to transmit feelings of serenity, of distance, and the beach jam-packed, observed from behind the tinted glass, filtered through an invisible curtain of music, there’s something strange about it all, as if summer were being projected on a screen in an air-conditioned cinema: the scenography, the representation of heat that’s somewhere else, people fully dressed inside — it’s absurd, like a silent movie. Matías says: Let me read another chapter. The wings of the devil’s darning needle shiver, vibrate, and then buzz against my fingers when I catch one. I hold the little blue body up, the wings are transparent, fragile as silk. They shiver, hum. Flutter only slightly. Here, Matías, look what I caught for you, I tell him. I hand the little blue-green creature to Matías, its body is twisting and doubling itself, the creature opens a tiny mouth to bite only when it’s trapped in the glass jar, a harmless little mouth opening and closing, wings beating desperately now. I stare at the luminous orbs of its eyes. I can hear its wings, only now a dryer sort of thumping because they’re beating against the glass of the jar Matías is holding. To reward and to punish, be Providence. The insect is captive in a luminous dungeon like Edmond Dantès in his miserable cell. Is it a prize or a punishment? Matías: A prize, because now it’s my friend. Summer advances. I liked summer when I was young, the constant hustle and bustle of friends coming and going, looking for the scene, the place to be, crushed ice in our glasses (frappé, we used to say back then, peppermint frappé, to the sounds of Lorenzo Gonzalez’s bolero; or later, a few years later, even tackier, we adopted a lounge English to sound sophisticated and ordered our drinks “on the rocks,” a “güisgui own di rrocs,” we would say, and dance in the sand to Peppino di Capri’s “Saint-Tropez Twist,” like in that Vittorio Gassman flick), skinny-dipping at night, quick, casual hookups with the first tourists who came to town before the real estate boom (I was already married by the “Saint-Tropez Twist” craze, and had already started building), all the necking, the sex in the water, or in the cordgrass that grew in the still empty dunes back in the day, or in some rinky-dink hotel room: French women, Germans, they had no inhibitions. That was a long time ago. And yet it’s summer again. The effervescence of those summers, the buzz, because now I spend my time avoiding the sun, the heat, stuck in a nodal grid of climatized capsules: the office, the car, restaurants, cafeterias, the hillside house on Montbroch hermetically sealed and air-conditioned all day (I endure enough heat each time I visit one of the construction sites); but I haven’t completely given up the occasional afternoon dip in the pool — I still relish them — a glass of crisp white wine, an occasional vermouth, and every once in a while an indulgent poolside gin and tonic, sipped while still dripping and a towel around my neck. I like to catnap on the patio chaise during sea-breezy afternoons, in the shade with my car, yachting, or travel magazines; a book on art or architecture; a novel; but no economics or politics, I get enough of that on the radio throughout the day, or in conversations with partners and clients. I read something light and stare at the palm fronds swaying in the breeze. I breathe in the fragrant grass as the afternoon glides by, the soil drenched by the sprinklers; the scent of jasmine and lady of the night (here we call it lady’s man of the night), whose perfume grows lustier as dusk steals closer. The moon above, like a lighthouse, like a slice of ripe melon. I ask Monica: Why don’t we eat out here tonight? And I continue reading while I wait for salad to be served the way she likes it, with little crunchy things: some bacon, pine nuts, or toasted almonds. Not on your life would we venture into the city to sit in some crowded patio under the old sycamores on Avenida Orts, no seaside dinner in a windowed restaurant overlooking the cliffs with hordes of people milling about and kitchen staff rolling out orders double time and waiters taking an age and a half to serve your dishes, all those strident people, all the fracas and shrill music. I dutifully grunt through it when I have a business lunch with partners, clients, or suppliers. But I can’t suffer crowds anymore. Silvia makes fun of me when I complain: Don’t cold-shoulder them, these people are your clients. She speaks softly, Silvia’s voice is whispered and wounding — yes, it is — like a serpent slithering among the sea rocks. She’s used that voice since she was a little girl: it’s something that slinks along the ground while threatening you from above. My first wife is more than a little to blame for Silvia’s slippery aplomb, and it isn’t something transferred through the genes (Amparo was made of a different clay, more benevolent, though equally uptight), but in the classroom, it’s an entire school of behavior; she was sent to demanding French schools because Amparo felt the Spanish educational system (heir to Franco after all) was, besides more than a little uptight, lousy. She said they don’t teach philosophy in literature departments, or how to order one’s mind, and instead it was pure rhetoric, variants of scholasticism, redundant languages (she had studied at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense and considered herself a victim). As a result of her painstaking education, to which Matías contributed a few of his own Jacobin notions, Silvia doesn’t really even try to communicate (no rhetoric) and then only in whispers; and for me, being hard of hearing especially on my left side (my car speakers are customized to a volume setting accordingly) means I have to bow my head and lean in close to hear the not always veiled barbs my daughter tosses my way, put on a façade of staunch attentiveness, which I find particularly humiliating since with my head lowered like that, it looks as though I’m conceding victory even before I’ve heard what it is she has to say. That’s how you make your living, Papa, by packing all these nice people in, Silvia says, whenever learning about one of my new building projects, or when the company purchases a property: I read it in the paper yesterday, she says. Bertomeu buys, sells, develops. She always sees it in the paper, hears it on the radio, while out shopping somewhere, always by chance, not that any of it interests her one bit. She carps: Misent is looking a lot like Dayefe, she says, which is what she calls Mexico City, as if she were so familiar with the place, with Mexico D.F. Concrete and rubble everywhere, she says. I’ve never figured out whether her allusions to my development projects are meant to criticize their negative impact on the environment, or to recriminate me for getting so rich (I make a note in my little pad: write her another check, buy a stereo system for Miriam, remind the secretary to book hotel rooms and flights for the trip to Saint Petersburg with Juan in the spring to celebrate his birthday). When I look at my grandchildren, Miriam and Felix, and my son-in-law (Juan, why don’t you stick around and watch the game with us? Plasma screen, forty inches, HD), it makes me realize nobody ever raises their voice in my house — you can be wounding without ever raising your voice: my mother, my wife, but above all my mother, knows how — so I repeat the lesson in my patient voice, the same lesson I’ve been trying to teach my daughter for thirty-odd years (now I say it so my granddaughter can hear me, and so the same old tune can start boring a hole in my grandson’s skull. I like to think: before you retire, your grandchildren will be working for you, you’ll watch them prance into the office every morning, hang their jackets and bags on the coatrack). I explain it very serenely, very deliberately, it’s not the builder’s or the real estate agent’s fault that half of Europe wants a Mediterranean vacation, or wants to spend their retirement years here (not me, though: I peer sideways at my bubble gum chewing granddaughter, what’s she eating, what’s she putting in her body, those bloodshot eyes, that croupy voice when she comes over on a Sunday afternoon; my grandson, a little doll dressed up in his homespun Spider-Man costume, snot-green pajamas, mask and cape). I ridicule her, hoping the kids will eventually figure it out, even if only by the tone, the inflection, the air of the old song and dance: In Mexico Dayefe not many people can put up the thirty-some million pesetas it now costs to buy even the crummiest condominium, the kind you like to call “shitty” (I still can’t get used to talking in euros, I earn in euros but speak in pesetas). People were dying of hunger here not so long ago. I saw it. I saw folks rummaging, salvaging, pulling up the grass from the sides of the roads. I saw men calling at the house in Pinar to ask for three pesetas against future work, women sobbing to my mother who would shout for the maid and tell her to serve a plate of leftover potatoes in the kitchen from the batch she’d boiled yesterday, the mangy urchins with their heads stained with iodine or sulphur against ringworm, mashing potatoes with a spoon, adding a little water from the bottle the maid set in front of them, cold potatoes watered down with cold water, not even oil. I’d leave the kitchen unable to stomach the scene. Not a red cent, my mother would say; the men drink it all away. Charity: a concept that’s all but disappeared. Nobody’s in need of bread anymore, or oil, or even kids’ clothes. Look around at how people live nowadays, how much has changed in just a few years — make a list of my own cars: a Citroën 2CV, a Simca, a Peugeot 507, the used Mercedes 1, the Mercedes 2, Mercedes 3, a Volvo, the BMW 1, and the BMW 2. A chronological list of the cars a person’s owned over the past twenty-five or thirty years is enough to measure the size of the jump; thirty years of everyone trading their cars in for better ones; and me, thirty-odd years arguing with city counselors, deputies, the director of the zoning commission (clever guy, a real fox: same background, former leftist militant alongside Matías, I helped a little too, some money, times were different then: life is a merry-go-round), with landowners, architects, construction workers, painters, welders, drywall installers, ironworkers, machine operators, plumbers, electricians, landscapers, plasterers, designers, decorators; I had to pressure people into modifying the plot development plan to rezone an area that somebody had had the big idea of trying to keep rural and protected; get the license; get the certificate showing it’s fit to be inhabited; negotiate power-line supplies with the hydroelectric agency, cabling with the phone company, the art of persuasion and calling in favors; though the toughest battles of all are the ones unleashed in the offices, the office wars as they’re called, right? — the bloodiest, the ones that go something like this: if you buy a plot, it’s zoned for agricultural or social use, tertiary, undevelopable, whatever; but if I buy it, first thing tomorrow the permit will be signed by the municipal architect for seven or eight floors and an illegal penthouse — to which they’ll turn a blind eye in city hall — garages, and commercial sites. It’s a matter of receding the floors a few centimeters, setting it back structurally in order to eke a few extra meters of height: and then there’s the kickback, again the briefcase, the plastic bag, the regular bag, the man purse, the sports bag like the ones bricklayers use to carry their change of clothes at a building site. As I said to Collado a couple of years back, when it still seemed like Collado might be capable of learning a thing or two: it’s a question of tact, and you need to practice; here, among the cranes tickling the sky, booms and jibs, container trucks, dump trucks and those earsplitting backhoes, stealth is an asset; ceremoniousness, ritual, know when to raise your voice and when to lower it to a whisper; when to use the art of seduction, caress the nape of a person’s neck, speak softly in his ear so your lips just slightly graze the lobes, grab him by the kidneys, give him a bear hug, a pat on the shoulder, a little slap on the back and a rub while you’re talking; know right when to drop that nice little tailor-made phrase you know fits just there between his two worst fears, and work it like a lever, like the ice that seeps into the fissures of a block of granite and ends up cracking it open. Business to me is like those retractile flowers whose pincers close ever so coyly when a shiver of air suggests the imminent presence of an insect. You have to know exactly where the equator cuts, the precise pressure point that can shatter the glass. Collado never got that through his skull. I told him over and over again: Be careful that your strength doesn’t turn against you. Strength pushes you forward, but you have to know how to focus the momentum to avoid crashing. When you’re strong, you fall harder. It’s easier to crack your skull open. For Silvia — unlike with Collado — you have to convince her that not everything in life is a minuet. Silvia has always considered me the most fragile filament, the easiest person to break. Matías’s shadow hovers over all of us, a shade among us, engulfing us, obscuring us. Red-eyed Matías tapping the countertop with his glass, a liquid ring on the marble. We’d argue. If she was present, she’d always take his side. Silvia would spend entire Sundays in Benalda cooking, talking with Matías, walking out into the sown fields with Matías, but she and the kids only come to my house once in a blue moon, they all sit with the tips of their asses balanced on the edge of their chairs and jump to leave as soon as dinner is over, using any lame excuse on hand. Silvia, Juan, and the kids; Silvia and Matías. My mother and Matías and Silvia. Silvia builds a common front with Ernesto, Matías’s son, even though she hates him, just to prove that despite being my daughter, she’s conscientious about things like the so-called environment. She’s jealous of Ernesto for being Matías’s son and wants to prove that she and Matías are connected through a different type of filiation, disons que intellectual or moral. She’s always concocting new ways to aggravate me; she’ll look me straight in the eye and say: The buildings around here are so tacky. There’s not a single country house left, which European architects study for their balance of harmony and functionality (Le Corbusier himself came to study the old Mediterranean houses. Sert brought him to Ibiza to see a casament, a typical Ibizan house, which are canonical examples of local architecture and used to be all over the place before you starting razing them). She knows Ernesto spends a lot of time in Santander and the Basque Country, where the climate imposes different building conditions, and praises him, fishing for his complicity: Everything’s so two-bit here. Now I’m the one looking at Ernesto. I’m convinced his views are closer to mine than to my daughter’s. What he does in Santander and the Basque Country, he says, isn’t so different from here. I jump in: Silvia thinks the local construction companies are to blame, since a hundred years ago it occurred to someone to invent reinforced cement, what the Yanks call concrete, or the French béton, and on top of that they realized its advantages over other materials, for example, its strength, its durability, its reduced cost and ease of production. My encyclopedia at home goes into greater detail: the component materials of reinforced cement can be found everywhere, within arm’s reach; it’s easy to work with, requires no specialization; it’s highly ductile and adapts to a wide variety of forms; it’s stronger than natural stone. It resists corrosive conditions, particularly in marine environments. Arguing with my daughter is so boring. What do you think Le Corbusier planted in the bucolic landscapes of Provence and outskirts of Marseille, if not concrete? Those villes radieuses he designed. Don’t they say that concrete was last century’s flag for architectural progressivism? What about Niemeyer in Brasilia? Frank Lloyd Wright said thanks to the invention of reinforced concrete, a building could be designed to look like a flag held in the fingertips of outstretched arms. He proclaimed a new era of freedom. So, in freedom we stand, Silvia. New York is nothing more than a big block of concrete, or béton, or whatever you want to call it, with thick macadam on the streets where not a single blade of grass can grow. Maybe this place is tackier than New York, you’re right, but only because we’re poorer. It’s a matter of scale. Nothing else. You like cities that are richer than this one (personally, I like Paris most of all), that’s your real problem, but don’t go on some moral tangent, some swerving moral clinamen. You’re looking down your nose at the penny-pinching middle class who built all of this. And now you want something better. That’s what happens when you travel first class and stay at fancy hotels from a young age: you admire what’s above you and despise the shabbiness below. I’ve never heard you say that Manhattan is congested; that its streets are a mess of tar and potholes. That it’s filthy and noisy and that even in the poshest neighborhoods the homeless rummage through garbage during the day, and as soon as dusk falls the rats come out, slinking around the cracked sidewalks. Never in my life have I seen so many rats in one place as in New York. And yet you find it so exhilarating. You go, you come back, you tell everyone you were there, what you saw, what you bought. And I always agree with you. We never fight then. Jünger, the German writer, said he was particularly sensitive to concrete architecture (he hated bunkers, casemates) and for that reason he never thought it strange when he fell into the deepest depression of his life precisely in New York. Not the Ukraine, not the Caucasus, where he witnessed unbearable things during the war, even cannibalism. I don’t share his view, but at least it’s coherent. If you hate concrete, then you hate New York more than anything. But, ah, yes, who’s going to sniff at a loft on Madison Avenue? The first time you went there was with me; we had to wait in those endless lines to go up the Empire State Building. But I wanted you to realize that we were right smack in the center of the world. If I were to take you to the center of the world today, we’d have to go to Shanghai, Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong, where Jünger also lost his mind (totum revolutum he called it. His favorite city in the world was Paris, and I have to agree with the old fascist on this point). Obviously, you were too young to appreciate anything on that first trip to New York. You were homesick most of the time — all you wanted to do was go back to Misent. Probably some new boyfriend, or some plan you were missing out on with your pals. The whole time, Ernesto looking on, smirking complacently. I think he enjoyed watching me scold Silvia. Like I said, they’ve never really gotten along. I’d shoot her a scowl and say: It’s tiring to constantly be explaining the world to Silvia. I’d say to her: Take a photo and look for yourself. The world is what it is. So why not drop it, and let’s make do with what we have, which is not nothing. Your grandfather used to say this was the closest he’d ever come to paradise. He roamed a lot when he was young, got as far as Buenos Aires — a vague, youthful adventure he never cared to talk about, planting orange trees in Argentina like Blasco Ibáñez’s settlers in New Valencia, or something like that — but as an adult he resolved to never again set foot outside the county and shut himself away in the Pinar house, with his music and his records. He would stroll through the orange groves and go fishing with his friends. It may not be a paradise. But it’s certainly not the worst place I’ve seen. What neighborhoods in Dayefe did they show you, Silvia, that make you want to compare them to this? I admit we put up with some violence these days, a few gangs, express kidnappings, but how could you have missed seeing the tens of kilometers of slums there? Where is there anything comparable around here? Our main problem is that everyone wants a more luxurious apartment than the one they already have and a second home in some exclusive neighborhood with views of the sea or a snowcapped peak. Ernesto suggested we toast to celebrate his imminent trip to New York, and then Mexico (the trip is what started the argument in the first place). You’ll be on my mind when I’m at the Empire State Building, he said, and especially Uncle Rubén, the Concrete King; I’ll think of you two (addressing Felix and Miriam in the voice of a kindly schoolteacher) when I cross the Brooklyn Bridge, which you’re going to see over and over again on television and in movies; and I’ll raise a cold Coca-Cola to Silvia’s health in the ferry passing by the cast-iron Statue of Liberty. Salud, cousin! The glasses clink. Silvia can barely contain her anger. So, think you’ll have time to see it all? she asks. She knows Ernesto’s itinerary is too ambitious and he’s only making a quick stop in each of the cities he’s planning to visit. I hold my tongue, and think gloomily: I’ve made the best world I can for you, my little dove, and I can’t make it any other way. I wouldn’t know how. I’d like a different one for myself, but can’t seem to find it. Oh, it doesn’t exist. Yes, call her little dove, the same term of endearment Dostoyevsky’s characters give to their daughters, girlfriends, or Chekhov in his plays, one of those sweet nicknames Russian authors place on their characters’ tongues. A character in The Cherry Orchard calls his beloved his “little cucumber.” Yes, I like that. Addressing her with words that make you feel so tender, so sad, things like: I’m only your father my little lettuce, not God the father. I’ve made some blueprints, yes, but not for the world. I gave you baths when you were a baby, I gave you your pacifier and took it away. I changed your diapers when they were dirty and smelly. This and that. The daily rituals, same as everywhere, same things parents have been doing since time immemorial. This is the world, big and little all at once, so wildly different and so fucking the same. Life. Now, as I inch forward in this line of traffic thinking about these things, I feel a warm wave of nostalgia wash through my body. Silvia, my little lettuce: I imagine my little lettuce as something tender and crunchy; the moisture between my teeth when I bite is innocent and clean. I could never have said such a thing to Silvia. Ever. Or her mother. Even in the privacy of our bedroom it was hard for me to tell Amparo that I wanted to fuck her, that I wanted a good solid poke. I always had to beat around the bush, as it were — why don’t we lie back for a bit, come now, let me give you a little kiss: never telling her what I really wanted to do to her, never telling her I wanted to fuck her nice and hard. Fuck you right here like this, baby, like that. Not being able to say that to your own wife — what kind of a goddamn marriage is that? How could anyone find it strange that you’d look elsewhere for those things, outside the marriage, to say the kinds of things a man needs to say? To feel like you performed it all, said it all, touched it all. Sex is spoken, too. I had to wait for Monica to come into the picture before I could feel that way at home, and now it’s really too late. Now the words are stronger than the flesh, and words alone only go halfway, to say them without being able to act on them is pathetic. Look at her, fondle her. The urge to fuck so strong it makes you want to cry. I say to Silvia: I liked Notre-Dame du Haut when I visited it with your mother in Ronchamp, but I got there too late to build it myself (tell her about the last trip I made with her mother. Try to stir my daughter’s emotions by trafficking in memories). In my time, things like that weren’t built anymore. Or maybe I just didn’t know how. It wasn’t as easy as you think. No matter what your Uncle Matías tried to claim (Ernesto pricks up his ear, Silvia doesn’t love me; Ernesto and I don’t love Matías: he doesn’t love his father, I don’t love my brother, that’s just life: asymmetries), even capitalism needs its portion of heroes, martyrs, the ones who are condemned to silence. Contrary to Christianity, no one should try to imitate the martyrs of capitalism. The fiascoes, the bankruptcies, the insolvencies that leave creditors in the lurch, the outstanding payments, the debt. Capitalism turns its martyrs into outlaws. I told her as much one day: Your husband has a good subject there, he’s so interested in realist literature, the social novel: Misent’s martyred bourgeoisie, people wiped off the map, ruined by gambling, whores, drugs; who live in hiding in Brazil, in Argentina; who put a bullet through their temple or who hanged themselves because they couldn’t get free of their creditors. The martyrs of capitalism fall into a dark well of silence. He should pay attention to this subject, he should write his own novel already, instead of trawling decades-old working-class novels. The working class is no longer a protagonist of anything, or a subject of history. It doesn’t even exist. It’s dead. What’s more, this region never had a working proletariat. The transition from impoverished peasantry to small-business class happened too quickly. Most of the parents of Misent’s business class had been simple peasants, mule drivers, shepherds; even immigrants: shrewd newcomers who knew how to exploit the relatives they brought with them from the south or the plains. Juan agreed, saying I was right. But I don’t know why I even care about these sorts of things, they’re as boring as a weatherman who won’t stop blathering inane details. Forget about them, focus on myself. The piano is still playing. Andreas Staier, etc. I stopped listening to the music for a minute. Didn’t even hear it. The CD was playing, but I got distracted by the chatter in my head (landscapes have soundtracks my father used to say: I learned the music of landscapes with my father; the cities, the ports, the mountain ranges, each place its own score; it’s been a while since the only sounds in my head are voices tripping over each other). So, there’s the piano again, and someone honking a horn behind me. The sea sparkles in the sunlight, raising an expanse of what looks like molten steel just above the water, diffusing the landscape through the haze into a single, sticky mass. The metallic gleam is reflected on the bodies of the cars. It flashes across the windshields, the side lunettes, the rearview mirrors, glints of white fire, white sparks, white-hot steel, lightning in a dry storm (Staier’s piano). A blazing oven and a traffic jam. Luckily, I can turn right at the first light and probably escape the cacophony. I change over to the radio to hear human voices, to distract myself. I press the button beside the steering wheel and the pianist stops short. As if they’d cut off his hands with a guillotine. The newscaster comes on. I turn up the volume. I’m going deafer by the day. I have trouble making out the DJ’s words, chattering about everyday things: a car bomb hitting a military barracks in Baghdad, the massive arrival of refugees in rafts (this year they’re calling rafts what last year they called pateras, trends in journalese, like climate change), more than a thousand sub-Saharan Africans have descended upon the beaches in the Canary Islands over the past three days, taking advantage of the fair weather of the Atlantic summer. The newscaster tells of a Toyota Corolla exploding into flames on the outskirts of the city, near the parking lot of a bar along Highway 332. The firemen were called to the scene. Minutes earlier, someone pulled a man from the vehicle, whose initials are R. C. V. — he was rushed to the hospital in Misent with third-degree burns, he’s in serious but stable condition. The police are investigating the cause of the explosion, the newscaster continues, while I tell myself that Sarcós is as big a brute as ever. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, to find out how he did it and I’ll have to call Collado, too. Ask the wounded man: What happened, what’d you get yourself mixed up in, son? What did they do to you, who did this; nothing to do with why you called the other day, right? Got yourself into some real trouble, huh? I hope you learned your lesson this time. Give me a call next week. If things go south, maybe I can figure something out. Talk to him again like father to son.

 

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