On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes

Author:Rafael Chirbes [Chirbes, Rafael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: psychological thriller
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-12-01T11:00:00+00:00

Losing his job took Álvaro completely by surprise, well, what’s happened to me took me by surprise too—or didn’t it? He believed the workshop was as inevitable as the skin on your bones, he never took any interest in invoices, account books or bank balances, and would look at me mockingly whenever I complained to him about any problems or difficulties, whenever I found myself getting in a tangle over estimates and having to do all kinds of juggling to make sure credits coincided with debits and didn’t leave me in the red. Doing the sums right or wrong, earning money or losing it. I’ve made far too many mistakes drawing up estimates for customers since my father stopped doing it, and I’ve lost too much money as well, and that’s what really justified all the time I spent going over and over the figures, adding, subtracting, and multiplying, the calculations growing ever more complicated; and then there were all those sheets of paper with hand-drawn diagrams, lines in pencil and ballpoint, with numbers scribbled above and below. Customer’s name: F. Delmar. Chipboard 6: 14" wide x 26' long. 2: 16" wide x 8' high. Work, like family, is a burden you have to put up with, what else can you do, you just take it for granted, it’s the Biblical curse in which, since there’s no way out, you try to find a few advantages: you tell yourself that it’s always going to be like this, it’s the law of life, this monotonous existence, especially if you’ve spent thirty or more years in the same job, shut up for eight or ten hours a day in the workshop, five days a week. It’s a real treat going out in the van with Joaquín and Ahmed or with Julio, to do a job or make a delivery, something that needs to be assembled on the spot, a piece of furniture, a closet, some shelves. Sometimes, you even find excuses to do just that, I certainly did. It never even occurs to you to think that things aren’t eternal, that they could change from one day to the next. It would never occur to you that your particular hell might mean being excluded from Yahweh’s curse—in a place outside the pages of that notebook full of orders, far from the invoice book, the machines and the tools, a modern-day reversal of the old Biblical curse: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt not eat thy daily bread, an unexpected, diabolical twist. You discover the irritating calm of mornings with no alarm clock going off, the day like a meadow stretching out toward the horizon, limitless time, an unbounded landscape, no flocks graze in that infinite space, not a building to be seen, not even the silhouette of a tree. Just you walking in the void. Hell is a derelict warehouse, a silent hangar filled only with a terrible emptiness. In the end, the divine curse of earning our daily bread

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