by Cesar Aira
Meanwhile, on the third floor, the carpet layer, a short, chubby man, was checking his notes for the last time, room by room, and sometimes taking the measurements again, just to be sure that he hadn’t made a mistake. After reading off the number, he flicked his wrist expertly and the metal tape retracted itself, dancing about briskly, making a sheathing noise. All the measurements were right. All of them, from the first to the last. He could have carpeted the ceilings. Before going down, he leant over the balcony to see if his mini-van, a yellow Mitsubishi, was still where he had parked it. Directly below him the snout of a big truck was sticking out, the truck from which the bricks were being unloaded.
The builders were in such a hurry they had made two chains instead of one. Eight of them were busily at work. Two men in the back of the truck took the perforated bricks three at a time and threw them down to a pair below, who threw them in turn to two more builders, who threw them on to the last pair, who piled them up against a wall. Each flight of the bricks through the air was the same as the previous flights, down to the way they separated slightly and were clapped back together in the hands of the catcher, making a sound like castanets. People with time on their hands are often fascinated by the sight of this operation and spend hours watching from the opposite sidewalk. In this case the only spectator was a fat little four-or five-year old boy with blond hair, who had walked in beside the truck. After watching the synchronized movements for a few minutes, he approached Raúl Viñas, who was juggling bricks in one of the chains, and asked him: Aren’t the kids here, Mister? Viñas, who was in a particularly bad mood because lunch had been delayed, didn’t even look at him. It seemed he wouldn’t answer, but then he did, with a monosyllable, through the smoke of his cigarette (he was managing to smoke while catching and throwing bricks, three by three): No. The kid insisted: Are they upstairs? Another silence, bricks going and coming, and the boy: Huh? Finally Viñas said: José María, why don’t you fuck off home? The builders burst out laughing. Offended, José María stepped aside and stood there watching, quite calmly. Offended, but pleased that his name had been pronounced. Besides, he really was interested in Operation Bricks. He was in no hurry, because lunch was late at his place, and anyway, he always waited until his grandmother, a little old lady with a powerful voice, whose shouts had made his name known throughout the neighborhood, came to fetch him (she lived around the corner). But then he saw one of the naked individuals, white with cement dust, at the back of the building, and went tearing out the way he had come in. The fat guy from Santiago del Estero on the back of the truck, dripping sweat as he heaved the bricks, remarked: How strange. Which made the others laugh again, partly because of his accent and partly just to prolong the fun. They laughed mechanically, without losing concentration, which was all that mattered until the job was done.
Meanwhile, Raúl Viñas’ young nephew, Abel Reyes, was at the supermarket on the corner buying provisions for the builders’ lunch. As usual, he was keeping it simple and quick: meat, bread, fruit. As youths of a certain age often do, he refused to use the shopping trolleys provided, and since he didn’t have bags either, he was carrying everything in his arms. Barely out of childhood, he wasn’t really a youth yet. Although fifteen years old, he looked eleven. He was thin, ugly, awkward, and his hair was very long. On arriving in Argentina with his parents two years earlier, he had been struck by the way young men wore their hair long, as common in the new country as it was rare back home: he thought it was sublime. Being young, foreign and therefore naïve, he didn’t realize that the Argentineans with long hair belonged to the lowest social stratum, and were precisely those who had condemned themselves never to escape from it. But even if he had realized, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He liked the look, and that was that. So he let his hair grow; it already reached half way down his back, below his flat shoulder blades. It looked truly awful. His parents, who were humble, decent people, had unfortunately tried to reason him out of it; if they had threatened him or issued a decree, he would have submitted to the scissors straight away. But no, they began by telling him he looked like a girl, or a lout; and once they had set off on that path, there was no end to it. They couldn’t retract their reasoning, which was sound. Besides, they were kind and understanding. They said: “He’ll get over it.” Meanwhile their son went around looking like a little woman. Since his hair got in the way when he was working, he had thought of putting it in a pony tail with an elastic band, but for the moment he didn’t dare. On the building sites no one remarked on it, or even deigned to notice. It really was very common; at least he had been right about that. In Chile, he would have been interviewed on television or, more likely, thrown into prison.
The supermarket was bustling. It was peak hour, on a peak day. The place had been seized by a buying frenzy. People were stripping the shelves bare, to make sure they wouldn’t run out of food on New Year’s Eve. In the freezers down at the back, he was lucky to find two big packets of beef ribs, which chilled his hands. He was also carrying a bunch of grilling sausages, a rib cap roast folded into four, and twelve steaks, all sitting in little white trays and wrapped in transparent plastic film. He went to the fruit section and chose two small bags of peaches that seemed to be fairly ripe, and a dozen bananas. All this was complicated to carry without a bag. And the worst was still to come. Before getting the bread he went to look at the ice creams, which were in a deep, trough-like refrigerator. There would have been no point getting ice cream, of course, because it would have melted well before the time came to eat it; but those eight-serve tubs of butterscotch would have been perfect. Two of them would have done the job. He decided to tell his uncle: maybe someone could come back for them at the appropriate moment. It was risky, though, because everything was getting snapped up. He could only hope that the price would put people off; it was very high, after all. Now, yes, the bread. It was essential not just as an accompaniment, but also for resting the meat on, country-style. To eat like that you need a very sharp knife, so to keep their blades honed they were always having to call one of those knife sharpeners who go around blowing on flutes (except that the man who worked in that neighborhood used an ocarina: he must have been the only one in Buenos Aires). Every day, Abel was annoyed by the way they only sold bread in small loaves, barely nine ounces. Four of those little loaves in plastic bags went on top of the packets of meat and the fruit, making a precarious pile; they kept slipping off. But what could he do, short of making two trips? Like a father carrying a big baby in his arms, he headed for the drinks section. Unfortunately, since there was no refrigerator on the site, the builders had to do without cold drinks. But you got used to it, the way you get used to all sorts of things. Abel took two big plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, picking them up by the tops with the index finger and thumb of each hand, which was all he had free. The shoppers had increased considerably in number, and movement along the aisles was obstructed by the supermarket employees, who had begun to mop the floor. Abel looked rather out of place among the other clients, with his torn shirt and long hair, holes in his shoes and cement dust on his trousers. It was amazing how skinny he had stayed, with all the strenuous physical work he had to do. At first glance you could have mistaken him for a girl, a little housemaid. His heart sank when he saw the checkout queue: it stretched the full length of the supermarket, about thirty yards, down to the back, around the corner, and all the way up the next aisle to the front again. Although there were three checkouts, only one was in operati
on today, and the woman operating it was extremely incompetent; even Abel, who was notoriously dopey, had realized that. In fact, the whole supermarket worked in an inefficient and rather arbitrary way. It wasn’t run as a commercial enterprise; its aim in serving the clients wasn’t to make a profit but to do something else, something religious, though what exactly wasn’t clear. It was part of a chain that belonged to an evangelical sect; you could tell by the lack of business sense. Or rather, you could tell by considering any aspect of the supermarket, right down to the finest details, since the whole place was pervaded by the quintessence of the ineffable: religion. It was rumored that attempts were made to indoctrinate young workers from the neighborhood who happened to venture into the supermarket: they were accosted and presented with a videocassette showing the finest performances of the sect’s patriarch, a North American pastor. Abel Reyes had not been accosted, although he was the only young worker who went there every day: either they had picked him for a Chilean, and therefore a die-hard, fanatical Catholic, or decided he wasn’t much of a catch, because of his hair and what it suggested about his character, or, perhaps, they had thought he wouldn’t have a video player at home (or that he didn’t know English and wouldn’t be able to understand the sermons). He went to the end of the queue, slightly hunched, as always, and started moving forward little by little. It was then that he saw his aunt with the children.
It was getting on for midday, a fateful hour for the housewife, and up in the solar oven, Elisa Vicuña was needled by the feeling that the supermarket on the corner, her sole source of provisions, on which she depended absolutely, might shut at twelve: it wouldn’t have been surprising, not only because most people were taking half the day off, but also because that supermarket was unpredictable; it could be shut already, or it could stay open till five to midnight. Now, if it was shut, she was in trouble, because she hadn’t done even half the shopping for the celebrations that night; so she decided to go and check, although she hadn’t planned to do so, in order to avoid a catastrophic surprise. She tried to go on her own, to save time, but the children simply refused to stay with Patri, who she was leaving in charge of the food while she was gone. She had to put shoes on the barefooted ones, and since some of them hadn’t even washed their faces and wouldn’t cooperate, it took her fifteen minutes to make them more or less presentable (combing their hair and so on). She would never get used to those stairs without banisters, covered with rubble, stones and dust. She carried the baby girl in her arms and the others went down on their own, leaping about, but none of them had ever fallen. There were four children, two boys and two girls; the oldest (a boy) was seven and the youngest (the baby girl) was almost two. She thought they were very pretty, and no doubt they were, with something of their father’s manner, and something from their mother’s side as well. Elisa was a lady of thirty-five, slim and rather short (slightly shorter than her husband, who wasn’t tall), and naturally, given the family’s economic status, not very elegantly dressed or presented. On the first floor, where she noticed that the visitors who had been wandering around the site all morning had disappeared, she exchanged a few words with her husband. Then she left, with the children in tow. She made the baby girl walk, which meant she had to go very slowly. The supermarket was just down the street, no more than thirty yards away, on the same side. Still, it was an outing. As always, the children went running around the columns of the brick façade along the side of the supermarket.
As soon as she reached the door she was stunned by the number of people inside. She might have foreseen something similar (although she wasn’t given to such predictions), but not so many people, or even half as many. Reality usually outstrips predictions, even if no one has made them. All she could do was remind herself why she had come: to check if they were shutting at midday. Since there was no notice to be seen, she went in to ask. At the counter where they gave coupons in exchange for containers, ten people were waiting, all carrying huge loads of empty bottles and complaining; there was no one to serve them. The kids had already gone down the aisles, as they always did, and disappeared into the crowd. Unruffled, their mother went to look for them, and find someone to ask while she was at it. Elisa Vicuña was that anomaly, not nearly as rare as is often supposed: a mother immune to the terrifying fantasy of losing her children in a crowd. Reality kept proving her right, since she always found them again, if they were ever lost in the first place. She was still holding the baby girl, Jacqueline, by the hand. In the first aisle she went down, threading her way among trolleys and shoppers, she came across the boy who usually served at the bottle counter; he was mopping the floor, with great difficulty because of all the people coming and going. She was relieved when he told her that they would be shutting at four. That meant she could come back after lunch. She continued in her search for the children, looking at packets of food on the way. She was trying to make a mental list. She had to pick up Jacqueline, who had started to whine, and then wanted to get down again as soon as she saw the other kids. The three of them were standing in front of a supermarket employee in a red apron, wearing too much make up, who was handing out little sample cups of coffee to anyone willing to try them. The kids obviously wanted to ask for some, but they didn’t dare; she wouldn’t have given them any, of course, and they didn’t even know what it was. They had never tasted coffee. But they had been overcome by childish curiosity, that craving to receive. Since she was there in the supermarket, Elisa took a bottle of bleach off the shelf, thinking she had run out, or was about to. She consumed a great deal of bleach, because she used it for all her washing. It was a habit of hers. Which explained why all the family’s clothes were so faded and had that threadbare look, humble and worn and yet beautifully so. Even if an article of clothing was new, or brightly colored when she bought it, from the very first wash (a night-long soak in bleach) it took on the whitish, delicate and somehow aristocratic appearance that distinguished the clothes of the Viñas family. As soon as she picked up the bottle, however, she realized how absurd it would be to queue for an hour to buy just that; she would go straight to the checkout and ask the person at the head of the queue to let her in, since she only had one item. She gathered the children and told them it was time to go. Whether out of obedience or boredom, they followed. But as it turned out, she didn’t even have to go through with the manoeuvre, which often caused a fuss if there happened to be one of those argumentative women at the head of the queue, because she spotted her nephew Abel near the other end, with his arms full of packets and the two big bottles of Coke hanging from his fingers. Poor thing: what an ugly, ridiculous-looking kid, with his hair falling all over his shoulders. He had seen her too, and greeted her from a distance with his polite little smile, reserved, of course, for members of the family. She came over and asked him to do her a favor: buy the bleach (she gave him an austral from her purse) and then bring it up to her. Abel accepted graciously. She looked at what he had bought, and judged it to be insufficient. Tactlessly, she told him so, leaving him there downcast and worried, with the bottle of bleach on the floor, between his feet. Off they went. On the way out, the kids ran into José María on his bicycle. They pleaded raucously with their mother to let them stay and play on the sidewalk for a while, especially the older boy, Juan Sebastián, to whom José María was going to lend the bike. But she took a firm stand, because, as she said, “it was already time for lunch.” That little brat was always hanging around in the stre
et. She didn’t want to have to come down again in half an hour to look for them. They went on whining, interminably, and in the end she spent fifteen minutes on the corner, talking to the florist, while they ran around. When she went up, dragging the children with her, there was still no sign of her nephew with the bleach.
