Читать онлайн «On the Edge»
Автор Рафаэль Чирбес
Rafael Chirbes
On the Edge
I. The Discovery,
THE FIRST to spot the carrion is Ahmed Ouallahi.
Every morning, ever since Esteban closed his carpentry business over a month ago, Ahmed walks down Avenida de La Marina. His friend Rachid drives him to the restaurant where he works as a kitchen porter, and Ahmed walks from there to a secluded part of the lagoon where he usually sets up his fishing rod and casts his net in the water. He prefers fishing there in the marshy area, far from the eyes of passersby and the police. When the restaurant kitchen closes — at 3:30 in the afternoon — Rachid comes to join him and they eat their lunch, sitting on the ground in the shade of the reeds, with a cloth spread out on the grass. They’re bound together by friendship, but also by mutual need, sharing the cost of the gas for Rachid’s old Ford Mondeo, a “bargain” that he bought for less than a thousand euros, but which has turned out to be something of a white elephant because, as he puts it, the car drinks gas as greedily as a German drinks beer. It’s about nine miles from Misent to the restaurant and, just there and back, the car gollops down three quarters of a gallon of gas. At nearly six euros a gallon, that comes to about four euros a day just for fuel, which means a hundred and twenty euros a month to be deducted from an income of less than a thousand euros; at least those are the figures Rachid gives Ahmed (although he may be exaggerating a little), which is why Ahmed pays his friend ten euros a week for transport. If he could find a job, he’d get a driver’s license and buy his own car. With the crisis, you see, it’s easy enough to find second-hand cars and vans at absurdly low prices, but how they perform afterward is another matter: cars that people have had to get rid of before the bank repossesses them, vans owned by companies that have gone bankrupt, mobile homes, station wagons; it’s a golden opportunity for anyone hoping to buy cheap and with a little money to invest. What you don’t know is what kind of poison might be concealed beneath the hood of these bargains. High gas consumption, replacement parts, components that break the moment you look at them. You get what you pay for, mutters Rachid, as he puts his foot down.
That’s another quarter gallon gone. He accelerates again. And another. They both laugh. The crisis is making itself felt everywhere. Not only among those at the bottom of the heap. Companies are going broke too or are struggling. Rachid’s brother used to work in a warehouse that owned seven trucks and employed seven drivers, but that was four years ago. Now, they’ve fired everyone, and the trucks stand idle in the parking lot behind the warehouse. When the company has a delivery to make, they hire a freelance driver, who does the job in his own truck, charges them by the hour and the mile and then sits, clutching his cell phone, waiting for the next call. Ahmed and Rachid discuss the possibility of setting up a business buying old cars and reselling them in Morocco.
