Cremation by Rafael Chirbes

Author:Rafael Chirbes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811224314
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:01+00:00

You have to put yourself in his shoes, he used to tell Sarcós, to understand Bertomeu. Then he’s answer himself: Sure, I’d love to put myself in Bertomeu’s shoes, especially at night when he lies down on Monica. How’s that for a house. How’s that for a wife, how about that car. It’s him who needs to try to understand me for once, someone who’s devoted his whole life to working for him, who’s taken risks for him and has nothing to show for it; who’s dealt consistently with the goons who go around pinching our posts, cement mixers, cable, saws, the compressor; who wrangles deals with the security companies, the clans that send their thugs over to try and scare us into their clutches, all those fights over them stealing our materials — and they aren’t some kind of idiot neighbors who pilfer a few sacks of cement only to throw their backs out a couple of times, who lug the sacks off, but within a couple of months are looking to ditch them somewhere because the sacks got wet before they could figure out what to do with them, and now they’re just lumps of rock. No, I mean the ones who filch entire machines, the tools, the generators; they blast the wall you’d just raised the day before; next day you show up to find the site empty, they carried off the grappling hooks: the kid you hired as a night watchman is left behind with bruises and a shiner. Grappling hooks are worth ten, twelve euros apiece and they pinched three hundred of them; or they swiped all the wire meshes you’d prepared for the site, or the boilers you were just about to install; they stripped the piping to the boilers, all the copper, or the doors about to be fitted, the security gates, and it’s money, serious money you have to add to the home buyer’s invoice; you have to factor in the costs because if you don’t pay up, if you try to deal with it some other way, you’re completely fucked. No choice but to pay up. The extortions depend on the size of the construction project, and on top of it they force you to hire a few members of the gypsy clan and pay for their insurance on site even though they won’t lift a finger, they just lounge around all day, plucking their harp strings, and they’re probably the only two workers on the entire site with insurance coverage. But that’s how it works, and the pair of insured deadbeats keep the people who sent them informed in real time on the materials, the quantities, coming in and going out, and whether the security contract needs to be adjusted or not and everyone complies, the big companies and the little guys, because nobody wants the extra trouble; see, construction already comes with its fair share of conflict and who needs a body riddled with bullets dumped at the foot

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