On the Edge Read Online Free

tell no one what he’s seen (not even Rachid, who will know from his face that something has happened? Why didn’t you wait for me by the roadside? You seem worried, has something happened? ), and yet he needs to tell someone as soon as possible, because he won’t be able to rest until he does; only by sharing the fear will he be able to detach it from himself. He approaches the junction and slows his pace to something approaching normal. He stops for a moment to open his basket and throw the fish into the gutter, the fish he caught and that now disgust him. He imagines the crows or the foxes biting greedily into them. He feels like throwing up. The lagoon, which was the color of cast steel when he arrived, is now smooth and delicate, like old gold, with coppery tints on the waves whipped up by the breeze.

II
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    December 14, 2010
    I’VE SAT my father down in front of the TV to watch his morning Western, whichever one was on the pay-per-view that day. He sits there amazed at the galloping horses, the neighing, the Indians, and the noise of gunfire: I know he won’t move until I come back. After the Western, they’ll put on some movie about terrorists, with scowling Arabs speaking a guttural language, translated into subtitles too small to decipher on the TV screen; or one about policemen chasing drug-traffickers, Latinos or blacks, with lots of cars screeching round corners, crashing into each other and, finally, hurtling off a high metal bridge. He’ll stay there, eyes glued to the screen or, more likely, he’ll doze off, eyes closed—it comes to the same thing. In fact, he stares with equal interest at the bathroom wall when I’m washing him or at the ceiling when I put him to bed. The important thing is that he doesn’t try to get up and risk hurting himself. To avoid this, I put him in a big armchair that he couldn’t get out of even if he wanted to, because it’s too deep and too low—not, of course, that he’d have the strength to stand up anyway, but just to make sure he won’t fall out, I roll up a sheet, wrap it round his chest and tie it to the chair back, taking care not to tie it too tightly. I check that he can move his body back and forth. Is that all right, not too tight? I ask simply to say something, simply to ask something, because he hasn’t spoken for months now, and I can’t even tell if he can actually see. That is, he can see, because he closes his eyes if I shine a bright light in his face or if I make him turn his head toward a lightbulb, and his eyes follow my hand if I move it slowly from side to side in front of him; and he can hear too, although it isn’t clear whether he understands me or not; he jumps and looks frightened if I shout at him or if he hears a loud noise immediately behind him. He hasn’t spoken since they removed the tumor from his trachea. He doesn’t speak, but he could write and ask for things in writing, he could express himself through gestures, but he doesn’t—he doesn’t show the least interest in communicating. The doctors have run all kinds of tests and scans and tell me that since there’s no damage to his brain, they can’t understand what’s wrong with him. Age. He’s over ninety now. He’s become a shop-window mannequin. Not that I’m particularly interested in anything he might have to say, although now that Liliana doesn’t come any more and I’ve closed the workshop, I do spend more time observing him. I watch him, study him, learning useless lessons with no practical application. Human life is nature’s biggest waste of time and energy: just when it seems that you’re beginning to make the most of what you know, you die, and those who come after you have to start all over again from scratch. Helping a child learn how to walk, taking him to school and teaching him to tell a circle from a square, yellow from red, solid from liquid, hard from soft. That’s what he taught me. Life—a waste of time. Get used to it.