On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes Page B

friend Francisco should know, after all, his family owned a vineyard and even had shares in the winery where they made moscatel. He could have asked his father about the baskets, and also about how his family came by those vineyards and those shares in the first place, and what became of the people who owned them before the war. To reconstruct that episode of village life, he could have arranged for his father and the father of Bernal—the same Bernal who’s sitting here right now—to sit down together and get them talking. That would be a real surf-and-turf menu, as the chefs of the restaurants he frequents might call it, restaurants he may still frequent when he disappears from Olba. His father would provide the turf, Bernal’s father the surf. It’s a shame he never did that, never got them together for a good long chat, that he didn’t order them a coffee and a glass of wine and leave them to natter away, swapping anecdotes about the old days. That would have been real ethnology. But they both disappeared a long time ago. As far as Francisco is concerned, our evening get-togethers at Bar Castañer are pure anecdote, whereas for us, the bar is an indispensable part of our lives, or has been; for him, it’s an exotic landscape, and we are his own personal tristes tropiques , colorful local figures. He observes us the way anthropologists observe a Bedouin village, the desert, the pyramids, the Arab with his turban and his camel; or the potbellied, loin-clothed inhabitants of the Amazonian jungle, the cannibal with a bone through his nose or worn as an ornamental comb, a bone saved from the missionary he ate earlier. For a time, Bar Castañer stopped being my sole refuge: I had wanted to leave that village forever and perhaps only return as he has returned, like a professor with a camera, butterfly net and tape recorder; that had been my intention. When I returned, I’d been convinced I’d only stay a short time. I thought I was coming back in order to gather strength for the great leap, but, instead, I settled back onto a soft flesh mattress, and what was temporary ended up becoming permanent. I lost the mattress years ago and have been sleeping on the floor ever since. That’s what usually happens, it happens to a lot of people: they think the situation they’re in is merely temporary and that all they’re doing is living their life, the life they’ve been given or the life they wanted—Olba, until my last breath.
    I’ve left and returned a few times over the years—I don’t mean the village, but the bar; there have been periods when I’ve abandoned it entirely, but I’ve always come back in the end, to that stimulating daily journey, the one that pries me out of my solitude at the workshop in the evenings: down Calle de San Ramón where I live, along Calle del Carmen, Calle de la Paz, Paseo de la Constitución (formerly known as General Mola), and here I am—as on so many evenings for so many years—in Bar Castañer, my refuge: the protective gauze of cigarette smoke, which, today, like the snows of yesteryear, has vanished. You can’t smoke inside any more. Although, even after all these months of the smoking ban, the smell of nicotine that used to impregnate walls and tables may have gone, but other components of that comforting olfactory gauze linger on: the smell of old cooking oil, damp wool, sweaty vests and overalls, the smell of cheap beer and sour wine. All of these still allow me to recognize the place, to snuggle down in my nest and shuffle the cards. Lately, I’ve been coming almost every evening. Saying goodbye to all this was the dream of an empty-headed youth who ended up staying and who has, in the meantime, become a decrepit old man without ever passing through maturity. I think I was trying to avoid maturity, and there was the added attraction of getting away, of not thinking too much and leaving it to Time to resolve everything. The result: I have adorned my old age with bankruptcy,