We turn the sheet this way and that before we can agree on which way we’re going to fold it. Our hands touch when I hand her the folded sheet and again when she gives me the pillow to hold while she smooths the pillowcase. Do you know how many varieties of potato there are in Colombia? The pores of our skin give off the warm sweat in which we gently cook during the night.
There are two girls (I don’t think they can even be eighteen yet) standing at the end of the road where I turn off to reach the lagoon, at a point where the reedbeds come right up to the cement embankment. They’re chatting to each other, blocking the way, standing right in front of my car, doubtless assuming I’m a potential customer. I stop for a moment so as not to run them over. Each one runs her tongue over her lips, smiles, strokes her crotch, and one girl reveals a brush of fair, well-trimmed pubic hair, as she elbows her friend and guffaws, pointing at me, perhaps meaning, look at that old man. That dirty old man. A disgusting old man—a lech. At least, that’s the unpleasant thought that passes through my head. I tap my horn and put my foot down on the accelerator. The car lurches forward with an aggressive roar that makes them step hurriedly aside. They wave their arms about and shout things in Russian or Romanian, and it doesn’t take much intelligence to understand that they’re telling me that for all they care I can fuck off. Despite that earlier depressing thought (of the dirty old man, so proud of his sixty-thousand-euro four-wheel drive that I saw reflected back at me in the mirror of their eyes), they’ve nevertheless managed to arouse me and I drive the rest of the way with my left hand pressed down on my fly. My cock deflates beneath the weight of my hand, at the same time as the two whores disappear from my rearview mirror—at the bend in the road, their gesticulating figures have vanished behind the vegetation. The road surface (if you can call it that) is pure mud and full of deep potholes filled with rainwater. I advance very slowly. At the first intersection, I turn left along a dirt road just before you get to the river, or whatever you want to call that stretch of water which, like another half dozen or so similar stretches of water further north, forms the system of canals through which the lagoon flows into the sea. I park the car by the water’s edge, on the grassy bank. The pleasure I get from driving down these diabolical roads comes in large measure from knowing that I won’t meet any police—no civil guards or nature preserve police or environmental police—or even other fishermen or hunters: no one ventures down these dirt roads buried in scrub (the lagoon has been declared a nature reserve, but no one keeps watch over it or guards it: there’s no budget for that), and no one else knows the complicated grid you have to reconstruct each time you visit, given that it’s used less and less, and the people who once knew every inch of the area and kept the pathways reasonably clear have also disappeared. I’ve known this place for over sixty years. I’ve come here either alone or with Francisco, Álvaro, Julio, and lately, Ahmed. I’ve been coming here ever since my Uncle Ramón started bringing me when I was a child, once or twice a week, to hunt for coots, crakes, mallards or one of those ducks that we call mute ducks and the French call Barbary ducks, creatures that added a touch of highly valued protein to our stews, along with a bit of rice—the inevitable local vegetable—some spinach, a few potatoes, a handful of beans, some chard or a few cardoon stalks, protein that was considered a luxury at the market, although most country people, instead of eating what they caught, sold it to restaurants back then or to distributors who sent it off to the butcher’s shops in Valencia. The protein gleaned from the lagoon paid for the inferior protein and fat we bought in the market: bacon, offal, chorizo and black pudding.
Go on, then, tell me how many varieties of potato you have in your country?
Well, they say we have over a thousand,
tuquerreña
,
pastusa
,
roja nariño
,
mambera
,
criolla paisa
. You hardly know anything about my country really. On television, the only time Colombia gets a mention is when there’s an item about drug-trafficking or there’s been another massacre by some guerrilla group.
I’ve known these paths for as long as I can remember. My uncle showed me how to use a shotgun when I was only eleven or twelve: children matured much earlier then; by the age of nine or ten, we were helping in the fields, on building sites, in workshops. The first shot I fired nearly knocked me off my feet and left me with a huge bruise on my shoulder. As you can imagine, I completely missed the target and turned to my uncle, red-faced with embarrassment. I thought he would make fun of me, but he didn’t laugh as I’d feared he would, instead, he tousled my hair and said: You have just acquired the power to take away life, which is a pretty pathetic power really, because if you had real power—the power nobody has—not even God, I mean who ever believed that business with Lazarus?—you’d be able to restore life to the dead.
Taking
life is easy, anyone can do that. They do it every day all over the world. Just read the newspaper and you’ll see. Even you could do it, take someone’s life I mean, although obviously you’d have to improve your aim a little (and then he did smile teasingly, the corners of his lively gray eyes etched with a web of delicate lines). Mankind may have constructed vast buildings, destroyed whole mountains, built canals and bridges, but we’ve never yet succeeded in opening the eyes of a child who has just died. Sometimes it’s the biggest, heaviest things that are easiest to move. Huge stones in the back of a truck, vans laden with heavy metals. And yet everything that’s inside you—what you think, what you want—all of which apparently weighs nothing—no strong man can lift that onto his shoulder and move it somewhere else. No truck can transport it. Loving someone you despise or don’t really care for is a lot harder than flooring him with a punch. Men hit each other out of a sense of powerlessness. They think that by using force they can get what they can’t get by using tenderness or intelligence.
He must have absorbed these ideas from my grandfather, who read them in the Russian novels he borrowed from the community library in Misent (there was no library in Olba at the time); he would cycle there wearing his best clothes, with his carefully pressed trousers folded into his bicycle clips, just as my father used to do on Friday afternoons, years later, although, by then, the community library had gone and there probably weren’t a lot of Russian novels in the municipal library. The men in my family liked those books. We kept them in the house until the war ended (and with it, my grandfather’s life), gospels of a code that was about to impose itself, the violence of the masses, the chronicle of the workers’ epic struggle. Russia came to mean the Soviet Union, the mother of all the world’s workers. Francisco and I have often remarked on how the bright light of all things Russian inspired a couple of generations of Spaniards (although Francisco’s uncles, grandparents and parents experienced it more as a blinding threat). Now, when you say “Russian,” you think the worst: extortion, mafias, the trafficking of women and of human flesh in general, flesh, which, as with herds of animals, seems so dull and undifferentiated when seen from a distance, and yet so magnificent in the one individual you have before you, in those bodies in roadside brothels that can be yours for forty or fifty euros. Soviet Russia. The class struggle. My father always refused to expand the workshop. We take on just enough work to keep us busy. And that’s that. We don’t live off other people’s work, but our own. We don’t exploit anyone. Apart from Álvaro, that is. But Álvaro, he would say, is family, his father helped me when I was in prison with him and stuck by me when I came out. For my father, Álvaro was a son, a relationship I’m not sure I could presume to claim for myself. I was
take this
,
pick that up
,
carry this
,
assemble that
. He never once called me by my name, never used any term of endearment—my dear, sweetheart, sweetie—as I so often have with Liliana: Why buy lightbulbs in the hardware store for two euros, when you can buy them in the Chinese shop for just thirty céntimos? Why buy garbage bags in the supermarket, when you can get twice as many at the Chinese shop for less? I’ll buy the bags next time, because all you’re doing is paying more for the same thing. You’re right, Liliana, you’re a much better shopper—you’re more careful with money. You notice prices, add up the céntimos, work out distances—how much you’d save or what you’d waste on gas, how much you get in a package, twelve or fifteen, you sniff out bargains, clip coupons, accumulate points on your loyalty card.
We sometimes caught a wild boar, which we finished off with the shotgun my uncle kept hidden beneath a trap door in the workshop. My uncle could never get a gun license: he was too young to have been in the war, but was paying the price for his family’s political allegiances. When he got married and left home, he gave the gun to me (I’ve caught my deer now, I just hope she doesn’t stick a pair of antlers on me, he said, beaming and kissing his new wife) as well as his fishing tackle so that I could catch fish in the marsh, possibly easier to catch than the fish in the sea, and they were the best we could get at the time, given that we couldn’t go out to sea and cast our nets like some of our neighbors in Olba, who owned small boats that they kept moored in the nearby harbor of Misent. The marsh was like a fish farm: shrimps, mullet, frogs, tench, barbel; eels and elvers: we didn’t catch the elvers to eat, no, we didn’t eat them; the sight of that seething mass in the bucket disgusted my grandmother, who called them maggots; my uncle would hold them close to her face, laughing, and my father would watch, sitting on a bench in one corner of the kitchen, leave your mother in peace, can’t you see she doesn’t like it, his mask about to crack into the merest hint of a smile. We sold them to a dealer who had a contact in Bilbao, and we made good money like that. The price shot up just before Christmas: later, I found out just how much people were prepared to pay at that time of year for what my grandmother thought were repulsive maggots. In stormy weather or at high tide, the sea bass would swim in from the sea. Nowadays, you only find those borderline fish in the canals of the lagoon. My uncle could pinpoint them with uncanny accuracy. I used to say he had a good nose, but what he had was common sense. He kept a list in his head, a system—every freshwater species, every saltwater species, every creature: The environment is irrelevant, and that applies to birds as well, and if you push me, to human beings too—they all have a right time and a right place, and need to be caught in a particular way and using a particular bait, he would tell me, while he was baiting the hook. I didn’t initially understand what he meant: the fisherman who fails to choose the right bait does so because he doesn’t know how fish think, and a fisherman or a hunter has to become the thing he’s hunting, to think the same way. That’s why the real hunter, the real fisherman, falls in love with his victim: he’s hunting himself. And he feels sorry both for his prey and for himself. Hold the hook like this, no, we’re not going to use the dough we normally use for bait, today we’ll use this stuff. Smell it. Disgusting, isn’t it? What a stink! Well, fish love that smell. And so do crabs. Everything rots. We’ll end up rotting as well and we’ll smell quite a lot worse. Many years from now, you’ll rot too—and it’s that rotten smell that the fish like. When you get older, you’ll realize that they’re like humans in that respect. Don’t go thinking you’re not going to end up smelling like a dead fish, Esteban. Ultimately, we all end up smelling like that, and just as a doctor prescribes particular medicines for each patient, Uncle Ramón offered each creature its particular bait and taught me how to think like a fish, like an eel, like a mallard, and to think about life’s baits too. You will rot too, my boy. You will stink. Like everyone. See how beautiful the color and design of the duck’s neck feathers. But now it’s dead.
And sixty years have passed, long enough for the web of veins to climb up the legs of that once young boy and form a network of blotches which, in the arch of the foot, has become a dark mass. The scaly skin on arms and chest is now the jaundiced color of old ivory, I have age spots on my face and on the back of my hands, and then there’s that old man’s smell, like sour milk, Liliana, that aura of rust and urine. The body is no longer certainty, but doubt, suspicion. You think you’ll make it through to tomorrow, but you know things won’t be getting any better. Are the blue patches on my left foot turning black? Sometimes, with old men, our feet turn gangrenous and have to be amputated.
According to my uncle’s strict code, every creature caught dies its own death, a ritual so precise it verges on the religious: after all, neither he, my father, nor my grandfather, and none of the men in this household, ever had any other religion than that of submitting to the codes imposed on them by nature, or dictated by their profession (perhaps more than most professions, carpentry is an extension of nature: a man goes into a forest armed with an axe, and with the help of his hands and his tools, he transforms nature into some useful civilized object). They put away the other codes—lacking in civilian life (the ones promised in those old Russian books)—to which they’d aspired, and in whose stormy sea they drowned. As for nature’s codes, they managed to learn the rudiments. The civil war cut short any aspirations for justice and a harmonious life lived in common. With my grandfather, all it took was a few gunshots beside a wall outside Olba (it was only one shot, Esteban, why would they waste ammunition, he was found the following morning, along with five other men, next to the cemetery wall, right where the cemetery meets the rocks at the foot of the mountain, a buzzing of wasps announced the presence of the bodies on that spring morning, and there was a burn mark from the bullet in the back of his neck). With my father, any aspirations were frozen during his year and a bit of war and three years in prison, and by the prejudice that has pursued him ever since. Long enough to corrupt and rot any aspirations or hopes, which also die and stink once they’re dead, poisoning everything around them, like fish, like bodies. My uncle was barely an adolescent, two eyes staring in horror at this somber collection of images. My father never complained about being sidelined: he was too proud. Nor did he consider that he’d given up his aspirations (we don’t live by exploiting other people, but from our own work: these words saved him), but he blamed us for the limitations placed on him. Decomposing, fermenting aspirations, just a hint of putrefaction: justice more like a punishment than a balm. He pretended to be above it all, crouched and waiting for these difficult times to pass, as if his own life were on hold, and the effort required to believe this was the fluid sustaining him, keeping him strong enough so that the outside world would not break him. Or so he believed. But he was already broken, he already had a deformity, a kind of monstrous hernia. And we should not dismiss the energy it takes to tell yourself a lie and maintain it. He could do that. He had that constancy of mind, the necessary willpower. After leaving prison, he grew a shell around himself on which the outside world could batter in vain. The shell protected him, sheltered his aspirations (Álvaro’s father was the only one who helped me when I left prison, and Álvaro is like a son to me, the son of my best friend, the friend who never called me “comrade,” because he thought the word, in my ears, might be demeaning), and he has probably kept those aspirations to the end, like wine turning sour in the barrel. I said he shut himself away, but that’s not true, he always had his antenna alert to a rather remote outer world: he didn’t live outside the world, but in opposition to it, and that included his wife and children, who, I suppose, he made unhappy, if it’s possible to make other people happy or unhappy.