On the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

Colombian food can be. You Spaniards think we Colombians are savages. True enough, Liliana, among the country bumpkins of Olba, you don’t exactly get good press, but then they’re afraid of anything they haven’t seen born and hope to see die. And then there’s all the stuff you read in the papers, what you hear on the radio or see on TV—all that doesn’t really help: guerrillas, FARC, paramilitaries, drug clans, the cartels in Cali and Medellín, guns, trafficking of this, that and the other, all those shipments that arrive along with consignments of pineapples, canned food, timber, children’s clothes or ballet shoes. Yes, you’re right, Don Esteban, but we’re not all like that, we’re not all guerrillas or drug dealers. And anyway, aren’t there any Spanish thieves, murderers, traffickers, and terrorists? Does no one here ever shoot anyone dead? Are there no cocaine laboratories? And as for terrorism, well, look at all those people who died in the attacks in Madrid, evil is everywhere and probably good is too, although it’s harder to find, especially for women, at least you men have your friends, whereas our female friends are more like rivals. Of course there are bad people here too, Liliana. It’s her voice, and that little roll of fat between her jeans and her T-shirt, so troubling when you can’t sleep: I feel as if she were just a few feet ahead of me, reflected in the windshield, the color of her skin, the tone, the touch: her skin between my hand and the wheel. Warm, soft, deceptively honey-colored. But, I tell myself, this is neither the time nor the place for such thoughts, I have to prepare the stage for the performance. On the days when I combined hunting or fishing with paying for the company of a girl, I felt the excitement of that shared intimacy in the silence of the reedbeds; and my desire only grew when I’d see her getting more and more frightened as we plunged down barely discernible paths. Where are you taking me? she would ask, a tremor in her voice, while I wondered why fear always adds a little spice to sex: you start out searching for the light and end up in a dark labyrinth, you start out looking for the smooth marble of flesh and end up enmired in the mud of secretions. It’s exciting—satisfying—having sex in that dense vegetal boudoir; desire and fear all in one, the ideal combination. And yet, once it was over, I would feel dirtier and guiltier than if I’d done it somewhere else, by which I mean some pokey little room with closed windows and a dim light that was sometimes red, sometimes pink and, at others, vaguely blue; or the nocturnal, ghostly back seat of the car, trembling legs next to an open door. Sex that only intensified the postcoital sadness that seems innate in the human animal. Whenever I had sex here, by the lagoon, I was looking for a sense of freedom, and yet it seemed to me I wasn’t the only one left feeling soiled, which is how I usually feel after my venal contacts in those ill-lit rooms (I relieve it with a vigorous shower when I get home, sponging myself down with plenty of soap and finishing off with a generous sprinkling of eau de Cologne); except for one woman, it always felt as if I was soiling the place itself, which is rather paradoxical, given that the lagoon has long been a kind of neglected backyard for the neighboring towns, one where everything was permitted and where decades of garbage and filth have been allowed to accumulate. It’s only with the latest fad for conservation and ecology that the area has acquired some symbolic value, and the newspapers and the local TV station describe it as the area’s great green lung (the sea is the other great, powerful lung, the one that growls and hisses and grows angry and washes us all), and they refer to it as a refuge for indigenous species and a special place for migrating birds to nest. Until about ten years ago, Bernal, the manufacturer of asphalt roofing felt, used the lagoon as a