On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes

film strips, discarded tools that we could use as toys, a spinning top, a broken doll, a mutilated cardboard horse, a punctured ball that could be mended with a rubber patch of the sort used by the man in the bicycle repair shop or that we would simply kick around half-inflated. We particularly liked the little penicillin bottles, widely used as the recently discovered remedy for tuberculosis and venereal diseases, and which we would adopt as containers for our tiny treasures. My mother would fly into a rage whenever she discovered, hidden in my pencil case or my satchel, one of those glass bottles with the rubber stopper still bearing the scar left by the syringe, and now with an insect for my collection. She thought those bottles would bring into the house the very diseases they were supposed to cure. Who knows who might have touched it, people with TB or some other infectious disease, throw it away right now. She would make me get rid of them however much I protested and explained how useful they were and how I had washed them thoroughly (which wasn’t always true), and I would cry whenever she, with an abrupt movement of her arm, tossed one of them over the wall. The river and the pools around the marsh were full of all kinds of detritus—old furniture, the sweepings from backyards, dead animals—the assumption being that the mud would swallow it all up, that the next flood would carry it off or that vermin would eat whatever was edible. This hobby of mine, which would now be described as ethnological, has led to me preserving and adding to my uncle’s collection of tackle and tools. Francisco often accompanied us on our trips to the marsh and, despite never wanting to fire a shot, he actively helped in casting the nets and would hold the rod and get excited when he felt a fish tugging near the shore. However, he would contemplate all this equipment as if it were part of some museum of torture. He would say to me:
    “I don’t know how you can bring yourself to shoot an inoffensive animal.”
    “Fishing is just as cruel. A fish seems to me more helpless than a wild boar, and more worthy of compassion.”
    “But fishing seems less aggressive somehow.”
    “How can you say that? They’re caught on a hook that pierces their jaw. They die slowly from asphyxia in the net, those innocent little creatures,” I would say mockingly.
    “But fish are cold-blooded things that you can’t really feel much empathy for, but if you see a mammal dying, soaked in blood, you have a sense that a creature like you is dying, and when you skin one, the body is disconcertingly like a human body, like our body.”
    “Try observing the death of an insect through a magnifying glass. You’ll see the same frightening convulsions, the same contortions, the desperate opening and closing of the mouth, the frantically waving legs. It’s really awful.”
    At the time, neither of us had seen anyone die, although I had caught glimpses of my grandmother on her deathbed.
    Francisco used the word “human”—a human being—whenever he wanted to describe something worthy of pity, perhaps the soul he imagines we carry inside us; “human” is a word with a powerful emotive impact. He knew how to use it. Now, when we’ve witnessed several deaths, the resemblance strikes us as even more troubling. And I say “us,” even though I haven’t stopped hunting and even though he no longer finds it repugnant. With age, we become more knowledgeable about the unpleasant side of life and, doubtless as a way of making it slightly more bearable, we become less sensitive too. Wars and massacres are usually topics of conversation for hardened old men, the young are mere pawns moved by arthritic fingers. What they see in war sweeps away their innocence, prepares them to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers. Turning, turning, turning, that’s what this world has been doing for millennia. It makes the young suddenly old, and they become