Half a century later, I visited the house again: the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms; I saw what I remembered and what I didn’t remember, what I recognized and what I’d forgotten, what I hadn’t seen on that first visit when we saw only the part of the house where we were going to work — the rooms and corridors that led there. You don’t show your house to a couple of carpenters or to a carpenter and his assistant, you don’t show them around the way you would your guests. You say this is here and it’s like this and I’d like it to be like that. On this visit, Francisco asked my opinion about the restoration that was taking place and explained that they were superb examples of workmanship that no one could possibly afford nowadays, museum pieces. He invited me to run my hand along the edges of tables and sideboards, to open doors and drawers, to admire the perfect finish, the precision with which they had been repaired, saying again that this furniture was a hundred years old: doors that still fitted and drawers that slid smoothly in and out after a century of use. He had found the only furniture and woodwork restorer in the whole region:
“He uses natural, non-aggressive oils — he’s truly a miracle worker — reconstructing what’s damaged, rotten, splintered, wormeaten or broken, I’ve seen some amazing work he’s done before, on a fifteenth-century coffered ceiling in a palace in Valencia, on a couple of Renaissance bargueño desks. He’s worked marvels here too, as you can see, although, everything in the house was in a remarkably good state of preservation, generally speaking, it was just a matter of cleaning it up and using the best treatments to protect the wood, you must know him, though he’s not a local, there’s no one around here now who does this kind of work; he gets calls not just from people in Valencia and Barcelona, but from people in Paris and even Italy, even though he says he’s not that keen on traveling. I travel, he says, because I enjoy the challenges they’re offering me. He’s quite a lot older than us. He must be about eighty, but he looks like a young man. And he has no intention of retiring. He shows me his hands sometimes, and not a tremor. He’s very thin, pure muscle and bone, and yet he can carry a plank of wood on his shoulders that I’m not even sure I could pick up. He says to me: I work with wood that’s three times my age and it hasn’t given up the ghost yet, it’s still looking after clothes and china or holding up roofs, it’s three hundred years old and still doing its duty, so why should I retire at eighty if my materials are good for three centuries? I’m not going to have that wood look down at me, thinking it’s better than I am. He laughs and takes a sip of wine, a little glass at breakfast, another with his lunch and another at supper time. A bit of wine never hurt anyone. And then, after supper, a drop of brandy.”
I don’t blame him for taking on that man. It’s only logical that he should choose the best, someone equal to the task; it’s what the house deserves; we’ve been friends for a long time, but he was talking to me about a world of which I know nothing, a world my father once aspired to, or so he said, but it’s never really interested me, I despised it, and have been a mere jobbing carpenter, doing mundane work, a minor industrialist with no ambition, that’s all I’ve wanted to be ever since it became clear to me that I was going to abandon any aspirations I had in order to accept a future that would be circumscribed by the workshop and by the shadow cast by my father’s tutelary presence. Basic carpentry: I’ve produced work more quickly and with better tools than your average DIY enthusiast, but with only slightly better results, or possibly not even as good, I’ve just never been able to get up the enthusiasm to take on anything more complicated. I’ve stuck to turning out well-finished, but undemanding stuff: doors, windows, closets, shelving, all very elementary and functional, plank to plank or plank fitted into plank, nothing too difficult, and of course carpentry for the building trade. Plain as ditchwater, nothing fancy. That’s how it was to the end. I don’t know if I regret it or not. Having no ambition, I mean. Perhaps, if I’d had ambition, I would have been even more bitter, would have become impregnated with the bile that has always filled my father, contaminating everything around him. I can’t say that I lost my business because I aspired to something better, that I bet to win and lost: no, I don’t have that excuse, nor am I looking for an excuse. I made that bet in order to survive, simply to get by. Or to help myself to die better. My objective had nothing to do with my profession, it was the house, or rather the small refuge I was going to build for myself in the mountains; going for walks with the dog, hunting near the lagoon. I didn’t even lose because I did something wrong, but because Tomás Pedrós failed to meet my expectations, because he drew me in or I wanted to be drawn in or allowed myself to be. He was certainly gambling, that’s what he’s done all his life, he’s younger than me, he’ll survive all this and continue to gamble. He had another business before, toward the end of the 1980s, and he made a lot of money too, but according to Bernal, that business went down the tubes. He left his partner in the lurch, without a penny. According to Bernal’s version of events, Pedrós kept his own money on ice for a while, then used it to set up the hardware store and then began to expand from there: the shop, his partnership in the waste management company, his first forays into property development. People said he’d won the lottery or that he’d been involved in some kind of dodgy deal, smuggled something in from one of his trips abroad; that he’d worked as a courier for that Mexican drug lord Guillén, that we all know where he got the money. On the other hand, for me, the business with Pedrós was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I see that now. He went into partnership with me because he knew he was taking a risk with this latest bet of his. He didn’t know whether or not the property development deal would work, and it wasn’t so much a question of splitting the profits if the roulette ball happened to land on the lucky number, but of minimizing his losses if, as was only logical, it didn’t. His wager was my disaster, added to the long chain of unpaid bills over the last two years: whenever he commissioned any carpentry work, he always wanted it done very quickly, with poor-quality materials, chipboard doors and panels; his idea of good-quality wood was newly cut, unseasoned pine put together quickly, hastily: but why am I even bothering to explain, that’s the way everyone was doing business, commissions taken on just to pay the next bill and to dupe clients who think they’re middle-class simply because they don’t work with a shovel and pickaxe but who are merely the saddest of our lower classes nowadays. The deal with Pedrós would have allowed me to sell off the paternal home and workshop, sharing the spoils among the heirs in the same impatient, rapacious spirit as the Civera siblings, to put an end once and for all to what had already gone on for far too long, and with what I obtained from this operation (yes, operation) and the savings I’d been squirreling away behind my father’s back, to build a house in the mountains where I would retire with my dog, even taking a few tools with me so that I could begin to work on some new carpentry caprice, perhaps an old-fashioned Renaissance-style table, complete with grottesche and medallions like the one made by my grandfather or father, or that they made together.