On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes

money serves any purpose at all, it at least buys innocence for your descendants. Which is no small thing. It removes you from the animal kingdom and places you in the moral kingdom. It humanizes you. Thanks to money, it had completely slipped the Marsal family’s feeble memory that they had participated in the hunt for resistance fighters in the mountains and around the lagoon: the months during which his father placed his gleaming Hispania motor car at the service of the Falangists (they really were a pack of hounds, survivors of the primordial pack). The assistant at the grocery store, in his gray overalls, would polish the car before the owner, Don Gregorio Marsal, set off to act as chauffeur to the Falangist patrols swarming everywhere. They would appear suddenly, block the roads, pursue any cyclists carrying a couple of sacks of black market rice or sugar or oil. They would confiscate any goods, demand to see documentation, and hand out beatings to any black marketeers or drunks or other unfortunates unable to justify their presence on the road at that hour, or those suspected of having fought for one of the Popular Front parties who were unlucky enough to be passing by. My uncle and, quite a long time later, my father told me these stories, although I always found them rather boring. I didn’t understand the epic of resistance that they, especially my father, wanted to pass on to me. The sinister black car would circulate the streets at night, its headlights off, and park outside the door of some house, laughter wafting from the car windows left open to the hot night. The summer of 1939. Shots fired into the air was their letter of introduction, along with the crunch of plaster flaking off a wall where, the following morning, the neighbors would see the holes left by the bullets. A butcher’s car, a whiff of carrion. But those were the dark days, which, one way or another, are inevitable in what Marxists term “primitive accumulation.” For the plant to grow, you must first add manure. Those raids weren’t as youthful and carefree as the accompanying jokes, laughter and drinks might appear to indicate, they were calculated steps necessary for continued growth, rites of passage, stages in the formation of the new entrepreneurial generations: during those skirmishes, the grocer’s features began to grow rounder, his eyes took on a jovial glint, his voice a frank, manly tone, his gestures became more authoritative ( don’t you try it on with me ), a satisfied smile parted his plump, pink lips. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Money, among its many other virtues, has a detergent quality. And many nutritious qualities too. It puts a sparkle in your eyes, fills out your cheeks, allows you to sit in an armchair, stretch out your legs, and read the newspaper. It gives you those immaculate hands that emerge from starched white shirt cuffs. It’s no longer you prowling the night. You employ assistants and servants to trap, kill and skin the creatures from which one obtains the vital ingredients for the Sunday stew or paella. The wealthy have always enjoyed that privilege. The master of the house doesn’t deliver the mortal blow to the rabbit, the mistress of the house doesn’t slit the throat of the chicken and pluck it, holding between her legs the bowl full of breadcrumbs to soak up the blood to make the meatballs for the stew. The animals have always arrived ready-cooked, in a dish, served on a tray covered by a gleaming silver dome and so transformed as to be unrecognizable and, for that very reason, delicious in their false innocence. That’s how it has always been and remains so today; it has taken only a few years for us to acquire that privileged status, the illusion that we are all lords and ladies of the manor, while in remote factories, workers kill and skin and carve and package the animals we eat once they’ve become acceptably aseptic: pink fillets that look more like salmon than veal