On the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page A

say. Well, yes, you old bastard, yours at the moment is a waste of time several times over, dragging our lives down with you. Before setting off, I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught sight of the dog’s alert eyes and thought how sad that the wisdom they express will vanish along with us, will just end up amid the detritus of our own personal garbage can. The lives of pets don’t seem to be compatible with economic returns either. Despite everything you know, dog, despite everything you’ve learned, despite the supple movements of your back when you run, despite the skill with which you sniff out your prey and diligently bring it back to me, you, too, are going to have to say goodbye to all this. What’s to be done? I think, and only then, with the ignition key between my fingers, my eyes fixed on the dog’s eyes, only then do I hesitate and feel like crying. The damn dog.
    First, you mash the corn, then you add the beans and a bay leaf, heat up the stock, peel the plantains, grate the yucca. Liliana’s voice. It’s really delicious. The dog’s eyes. From the workshop, I drive along the road that skirts La Marina beach, past the apartment blocks and the gardens that peer over the walls—palm trees, bougainvilleas, jasmines, thujas, the complete catalogue of plants from the local nurseries—and on as far as the junction with Route 332. The two roads meet in a kind of suburban landscape: abandoned orchards, scrub, rubble that the autumn rains have covered in grass, the characteristic adornment of these areas that were about to be reclassified as urban in the latter years of the economic boom, but which remain in a kind of legal limbo, an apparent no-man’s land on which shacks have sprung up, doubtless built by people from Eastern Europe or by Moroccans who work as agricultural laborers and go marauding for metal, discarded household appliances, old furniture, copper, and whatever else they can find or steal: they’ll take anything, they’ll rip up pipes, irrigation hoses, cables; they’ll make off with tractors, with tons of fruit and even destroy whole orchards; it wouldn’t be the first time a farmer has arrived at his orange grove to find that every tree has been chopped down to be sold for firewood. They work as scrap dealers near their local shantytown, piling up scrap metal and strewing around them the mutilated carcasses of cars, fridges, washing machines and old air-conditioning units, and all within sight of the housing developments advertised on the huge roadside billboards as “luxury estates.” People don’t care: as long as the marauders don’t throw their garbage over the wall and the smell of putrefaction doesn’t reach their private terrace, the whole world can sink into the shit for all they care.
    At the point where the two roads cross, twenty or so prostitutes sit basking in the winter sunshine. They sit on plastic chairs next to the reedbeds or walk up and down the hard shoulder; they perch at small rickety plastic tables painting their nails, studying themselves in their powder compacts, playing solitaire or smoking; they wear G-strings that reveal their thighs and ass, and tiny unbuttoned jackets that show their tits, even though in the damp air of this muddy area between the lagoon and beach the December sun is too weak to take the edge off the chill, which definitely has its claws out on a day like today, when the wind is from the northwest. Some of the women pace nervously up and down, only a few yards back and forth, as if they were pacing not the hard shoulder of a highway but a narrow prison cell (where several of them doubtless learned this invigorating exercise). They’ll gesticulate, perform—opening their legs or crouching down and wiggling their asses at any traffic, alerted by the sound of a truck or the beep of a horn. They lift their clothes up above their tits, showing their naked bodies to the truckers, to the solitary occupants of vans bearing the logos of