On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes Page A

those fingers capable of moving the pawns. Gira, il mondo, gira, nello spazio senza fine , Jimmy Fontana used to sing. I watched my grandmother dying (in secret, through a crack in the door, a disfigured creature, railing and moaning, I was six or seven), I’ve seen my mother die, my mother’s brothers, Uncle Ramón, my brother Germán, defenseless hares trembling in their beds, I’ve seen them gasping and flailing just like the various dogs who have died on me, the same struggle, the same harsh, intermittent breathing. Francisco watched Leonor dying for months, an animal gradually being consumed despite all the stratagems of doctors and family members, her dying must have cost them a fortune, what with trips to Houston, treatments in private hospitals here and there. Right now, I’m watching the endless dying of my father who, at this point, could easily be hunted and dispatched without too many ethical qualms.
    But we were only twenty-something then, and I would say:
    “My father has always hated hunting, which is understandable after what he saw during the war, but Uncle Ramón and my grandfather had to hunt in order to eat.”
    They finally managed to hunt down my grandfather (with a bullet in the back of the neck), a fruitless, cruel bit of hunting, we never used to talk about those things, we didn’t even know about them, I thought my grandfather had died in an accident. “It’s just the food chain, so why go digging around for any deeper meaning, it’s cruelty without the guilt. It was simply a matter of staying alive. Now that need has disappeared, we’ve become corrupted, sophisticated, and nothing has that same necessary, urgent character that carries within it its own absolution. We argue about whether hunting, since it’s no longer a matter of survival, is a pleasure or a hobby, a pastime or a vice, or if we simply carry in our genes a death impulse, some mechanism in our system that drives us to want to continue freeing ourselves from those who are not like us . . .”
    “Unfortunately, there are far too many instances of people viciously freeing themselves from those who are all too like them.”
    “Of course, and you free yourself from yourself precisely because you are too like yourself. No, don’t laugh, Francisco. You commit suicide because you are who you are and not the person you’d like to be, you put a bullet through your head because you can’t bear yourself. Out of pure hatred. To resist that, to remain alive, you need a good dose of idealism. The ability to lie to yourself. The only people who survive are those who manage to believe that they are what they are not.”
    “Are you trying to convince me that you hunters are looking for some unnecessary guilt to load onto yourselves, like a belated payment for the innocence of your ancestors?”
    “To call a man innocent is an oxymoron. Is that what they call putting two contradictory words together to create a strange effect? You taught me that. Oxymoron. A thunderous silence, an innocent man. The first is good for poetry, the second for sociology, religion or politics. Our ancestors ate the putrid remains of whatever the wild beasts had hunted and left half-eaten. They had no skills, they couldn’t run or jump like their prey, they weren’t able to hurl themselves on a deer and sink their teeth into its jugular. On the other hand, they carried the seed of evil within them: they invented traps and tools. The things I still use for hunting and fishing. Up until then, they fought with dogs and vultures over scraps of food. I don’t see innocence anywhere. Cunning and duplicity, yes. What can I say, Francisco? We don’t always do what we should. There is such a thing as negative egotism, the desire for what will destroy us. Perhaps that’s the best thing about us, that uncertainty, that fragility. Humans are strange creatures, we think with a logic that is quite different from what we feel, and all too often what we feel goes