On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes Page B

against what we need—love, passion, and, yes, hatred, those are the feelings that can bring about our downfall, and we go toward that downfall knowingly, we seem to need to keep doing that, and no one can explain why.”
    I could have talked to him about that, about the magnetic attraction that drew me to Leonor—to each his own trap—but that was a secret I promised her I would keep. We met in secret. I’d left art school in Madrid and decided to work where I’d never wanted to work, in my father’s carpentry workshop, and I didn’t even want to admit to myself that she was the thing holding me there, sucking dry my ambitions. In fact, the work was purely incidental, unimportant. I hated carpentry, but that wasn’t the problem, that was by the by. I felt superior. It seemed to me stupid to spend time learning the aesthetic codes our teachers at art school were trying to drill into us—what was the point? It all seemed to me as futile as what Francisco was studying at the faculty of philosophy and letters; his political, artistic or theological debates, the search for the message contained in books and films, were mere adolescent trifles I thought, because I was involved in something real, something adult for which it was worthwhile putting up with any job, even putting up with my father: an undertaking worthy of a man seeking ways to keep a woman at his disposal, a woman who says: again, fuck me again. That was what it was about: doing a job you don’t like, just as grown-ups do; having a woman who wants you, not your sympathy, not your intelligence, but your flesh, that’s how desire works between grown-ups. At least, that’s what I thought. That was my idea of maturity. While Francisco talked about Plato, Marx or Antonioni, infantile babblings, I had a woman who obeyed me, who begged me, yes, like that, I want to feel you inside me. It wasn’t just hot air about the meaning or the truth about life. It was the truth. Possessing that flesh, defending it from other men’s desires, knowing it was there at my disposal and off limits to other men. Being a man. The call of the primordial pack.
    “But God—”
    “God arrived quite a lot later, when your ancestors had already been killing and eating each other for millennia, and sucking the marrow from the bones of their neighbor, poking fingers and tongue into their hollow bones. I think the real reason people suck each other’s cocks is because they can’t suck their bones. It’s a leftover from cannibalism. After all, we bite each other when we fuck, don’t we? And when we’re screwing, we say ‘eat me, eat me.’” I said this as a joke, secretly mocking him, enjoying the fact that he would think I was just joking, because I knew those were the words that poured from my lips into her ear. And there he was talking to me about God and about some amazing book he’d just read.
    “I say that God gives no one the right to make even the most insignificant of His creatures suffer,” Francisco insisted, more mystic than anthropologist. He believed not in the primordial pack, but in the placid primordial family circle. Papa and Mama, the puppies gamboling about in the shade of the leafy trees, the grandparents observing the scene, and a pot of stew bubbling gently away (don’t ask about the ingredients). He had become an active member of two of the Catholic youth movements in vogue at the time, the Juventud Española Católica and the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica. In his house, what with the fabric store, the grocery store (which, later, with the arrival of tourism, became a chain of supermarkets), the orange groves and the vineyards and, above all, his father’s membership of the Falangist party, which opened so many doors to the family—hence the blue shirt of the Falangists that he strutted about in once the war was over—they could allow themselves the luxury of buying the necessary protein for their meals without having to hunt for it. If