Read Online On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes - Free Book Online Page B

existence. He could be seen as a champion in the struggle against unemployment: he has all kinds of ways to keep other people working. Wherever he goes, work flows forth. He always collects the money himself and then distributes it as he sees fit. If you meet him, if you stop to talk to him, it won’t be long before he’s offering you some little job too: Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Would you do me a favor? He’d make an ideal candidate for the post of Minister for Social Affairs. Some years ago, he got into trouble because, it seems, he sent phantom teams of orange-pickers into orchards that weren’t his and where he hadn’t been invited. In a matter of hours, entirely without the permission of the owner, the workers had picked clean two whole orchards and, immediately afterward, our very own Hannibal Lecter was either selling the stolen fruit to warehouses that don’t ask too many questions, or else warehousing it himself and distributing it throughout half of Europe, including the former Iron Curtain countries, crating up the fruit with stickers that someone had managed to forge or steal for him, or which were given to him by the warehouses themselves for a trifling amount, on condition that no one ever found out about their involvement. I can’t quite remember what exactly happened or how things panned out, but, depending on who you talk to, he either narrowly escaped prison or ended up doing time. Anyway, he disappeared for a while, and various reasons were given for his absence. There are lots of businessmen who spend prolonged periods in limbo or at imaginary spas, when they’re actually in the clink or in a clinic somewhere detoxing from alcohol and cocaine. Such retreats are all part of the businessman’s busy life. Ahmed knows him because he worked for a while as a fruit-picker, before finding work as a bricklayer and then with me in the workshop, and I’ve noticed that he always greets Justino with a nod whenever we pass him; these Arabs know all about murky dealings—in fruit, clothes, scrap metal or the routes taken by the boats carrying marijuana from the Alboran Sea to Spain or about the ads on the internet for gigolos and rent boys; on that vague frontier with the lumpenproletariat, the Arabs offer their own complicated services, although they doubtless make more modest profits; they compete, not always on friendly terms, with the gypsies, although at present the kings of all this trafficking are the Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians and Lithuanians—in short, that unstable multitude we describe as Eastern European, specialists in copper, top-of-the-line cars, burglaries, break-ins, and in the use of backhoes to wrench cash machines or safes from walls; they’re experts, above all, in the exercise of disproportionate violence: capable of smashing in the skulls of two pensioners just to make them reveal where they were hiding the fifty euros they needed to see them through to the end of the month.
    The slave-trader continues:
    “No one wants to lead a life like everyone else’s, no one wants his obituary to read: He was born, he lived, he worked, he reproduced and he died—and so people try to attract attention. They do absurd, tedious, painful things they’d refuse to do if they were required to by their work contract—it’s been the same since the world began. Tomás Pedrós thought he could grow as big as El Corte Inglés, Inditex, or Mercadona, or like that Bañuelos guy—making his fortune here and now building like mad in Brazil apparently.”
    And then there’s Pedrós, growing like a malignant tumor, yes, and Justino has been a malignant tumor himself: and like all tumors, he grows in darkness and in silence. We laugh, yes, so do I, although I’m afraid they might notice that my laughter is somewhat forced, because I feel utterly wretched.
    “Well, yes, he always had to cause a stir, and have a finger in every pie,” Bernal comments mildly, and it