That is how the time granted to you on this earth was spent, my friend. The same goes for me. Now we have to live life’s after-life.
These new times are less frantic, people no longer drive back and forth in powerful cars, in trucks laden with merchandise, in vans rushing to make an urgent delivery, it’s quieter, more restful, less physical (there’s less carnal traffic, the rooms at the Lovely Ladies club stand empty, no one lies down on those pink sheets, no one is lining up in the offices of notaries to sign property deeds: it’s the butterfly effect) and, of course, these are also far less chemical times, there’s not much cocaine around and what’s available is very bad quality and hardly anyone buys it. Well, we’re hardly in a position to waste our money on coke! Obviously, we live less whoring, less rascally lives, have fewer hangovers after nights on the town. One can sense new values in the air, Franciscan virtues: a taste for life in the slow lane, a quiet evening stroll, so good for the heart, we even view poverty differently: I’d go so far as to say that it’s fashionable to be poor and to have your house and car repossessed (but what can I tell you that you don’t already know, my friend. I imagine you’re in more or less the same situation). If you appear on TV because you’ve been evicted or fired, you become a hero; and it’s no longer cool to rev your engine as you pass some café on the Avenida Orts in Misent, so that everyone turns to see you at the wheel of your Ferrari Testarossa, it’s considered bad taste to be caught by a local TV crew in a five-star resort, playing golf or having brunch, that mixture of breakfast and lunch (the news spreads like wild fire: the bastard says he doesn’t have enough money to pay back his loans or his creditors or the men he’s left unemployed, but he can apparently still afford his golf club membership), and if you have a business meeting with someone, it’s best to leave your Mercedes 600 in the garage and take the Volvo instead: it’s important to appear unostentatiously substantial, the worker-owner rather than the speculator; oh, yes, these are definitely duller, drabber times. But what do you expect? I break off my thoughts because Amparo’s tapping me on the shoulder:
“Wake up, Tomás Pedrós, you’re falling asleep and snoring and dribbling too.”
I open my eyes and find her wiping the corners of my mouth and my chin with a Kleenex, I’m touched at such evidence of love in these difficult times. In these new conditions, we have learned to appreciate small kindnesses. On the other side of the window, I see one of those enormous long-distance planes taking off. Another one emblazoned with the profile of the mythical Garuda bird is taxiing up to the passenger walkway. Amparo, my beloved Amparo, throws the tissue in the trashcan beside her and asks: What currency do they use there? What a wonderful woman, always with her eye on what counts. The real? The sol? The bolívar? The quetzal? The rupee? I smile at her as one might smile at an angeclass="underline" it doesn’t matter, my love: money has no homeland, just make sure you’ve got plenty of convertible euros or convertible dollars (is that what they call them?) in your handbag, and try, above all, to store away those gold ingots, because they’ve been around for centuries now, for millennia, along with jewels, gems, rubies and sapphires — they retain the value they had on the eighth day of creation, when Eve saw a serpent and picked it up, thinking it was an emerald necklace.
beniarbeg, july 2012
Afterword
AS A young boy, Rafael Chirbes was sent to an orphanage for the children of railroad 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 switchman, 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 liberal-minded rural town, where they showed movies without censoring them for the children and celebrated bawdy, pagan-infused 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 either 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.