How to Order the Universe
a novel
María José Ferrada
TRANSLATED BY ELIZABETH BRYER
For D.
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Reader’s Guide
“You still owe me two hundred dollars.”
Addie to her father, in Paper Moon
I
D began his career selling hardware items: nails, saws, hammers, handles, and door viewers, brand name Kramp.
The first time he left the guesthouse where he lived, with a sample case in hand, he couldn’t work up the courage to step inside the city’s leading hardware store—and this was back when the city was just a town—until he’d walked past it thirty-eight times.
His first sales attempt happened the same day a man took a step on the moon. The townspeople assembled in the square to watch the moon landing thanks to a projector the mayor had wheeled out to his office balcony, which cast the moving image onto a white sheet. Since it played no sound, the fire brigade band provided the backing track.
When D saw Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon, he thought that anything was possible—all it took was the right attitude and the right outfit.
So, the next day, after approaching the hardware store for the thirty-ninth time, he stepped inside it, in the most polished shoes the city had ever seen, and offered his Kramp products to the person in charge. Nails, saws, hammers, handles, and door viewers. He didn’t close a sale, but he was told to come back the following week.
D treated himself to a coffee and jotted down on the napkin: “Every life has its own moon landing.”
Later, when D told his father that man had reached the moon, his father said it was an out-and-out hoax, that God had created man with his feet on the ground and with no wings to speak of, and everything else was lies spouted by the president of the United States.
Either way, the following week D made his own small step for mankind: he sold a half-dozen saws and a dozen door viewers. When he left the hardware store with the order inside his suitcase, he felt that all moments of happiness, large and small, deserved to be projected into a town square.
II
Over the next few weeks, D delivered three photographs and four Chilean escudos to the Traveling Salesmen Registry. Fifteen days later his ID was ready, no. 13709.
With the ID in his pocket, and at a discount that was equivalent to a commission for 2,356 saws, 10,567 nails, 3,456 hammers, or 1,534 door viewers, he bought a Renault. Seated inside it, he started making trips to nearby towns, following the advice of an old-timer salesman. Really it was a piece of advice and a declaration.
The piece of advice:
“When you come to a town, your first task is to find the central coffeehouse and the hotel where the other traveling salesmen stay. Usually it’s on the same block as the town square and the bar.”
(That’s where he would come across the men who, from that moment forward, would be a kind of floating family. A family with no relatives and, for that reason, more tolerable than any other.
The Made-in-China plastic-products salesman.
The Parker Pen salesman.
The English cologne salesman.
And everybody else.)
The declaration:
“All towns are the same: godforsaken shit heaps.”
It is their nature, and there is nothing you can do to change the nature of things.
III
Bit by bit, D started to construct his own epistemology. And the first thing he did was separate life events into two groups: the probable and the improbable.
It was probable that he would visit seventeen clients that week. It was probable that ten of them would make a purchase. And it was probable that it would rain, because it was winter.
It was improbable, and D repeated this as he looked at himself in the mirror, that a house constructed from 80 percent Kramp products would collapse in the event of an earthquake or a tornado.
And it was improbable that, due to a bus workers’ strike, a woman would be hitchhiking to university on the very same corner that D’s Renault passed.
That was exactly what happened on 13 November 1973.
D thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And the woman, who hadn’t laughed for a long time, thought D was talkative and entertaining.
A year later, on 13 November 1974, they got married.
On leaving the Civil Registry, D asked the woman to wait a second and went to find a serviette, where he jotted down what had just happened (their wedding) in a subcategory of his classification of things that he baptized “truly improbable things” (“those phenomena that make us think that some kind of god exists”).
IV
D and the beautiful woman built a house out of Kramp products and, some time later, had a daughter they called M. I am M.
Soon, my parents designed a learning plan that would allow me to comprehend the things that a child—a girl, in this case—needed in order to make her way in the world.
Thus, I began early with a classification of things.
In my first year of life I discovered, for example, that there is something called day and something called night, and that everything that happens in life fits into one of those two categories.
The second year I learned to look out the window. My parents told me that, over the course of my life, I would win and lose many things. I shouldn’t worry; the world would still be out there.
The third year I discovered the existence of people. Once more, my parents used the window to explain to me that people could be classified as either summer people or winter people. I still don’t know what they meant by that.
In my fourth year of life, I stepped out onto the patio of my house and saw fireflies. I decided that this would be my very own, unclassifiable memory. Fireflies that never stopped glowing.
V
When I was seven (it was a spring day, I know so because my mind insists on drenching that memory in a yellow hue), I heard the story of the moon landing and its moral for the first time: with well-shined shoes and the right outfit, anything is possible. And, to shield me from the nature of life, I think, D added that a little luck was needed too.
The same afternoon I polished my patent leather shoes with a brush, put on a green dress that I teamed with green socks, and decided I would be D’s assistant.
I went out to the patio, lit a cigarette, and took a slow drag. I’d stolen it from D’s pack, for in the evenings he fell asleep smoking in front of the television.
VI
I’d inherited from D an uncommon gift for persistence. So, a week later we got into the Renault—which now had, on both its doors, a Kramp products logo—and we set out for a neighboring town.
When we arrived and parked the car by the town square, D gave me a few instructions:
1.Smile.
2.Go for a walk if you get bored, but don’t venture beyond the same block.
3.Say thank you if the person in charge gives you a chocolate or anything.
And he promised that if we closed a sale or collected the amount owing for the previous month’s sale, in the late afternoon we would go to the coffeehouse.
We visited three stores that sold Kramp products alongside chocolates, toys, buttons, magazines, colognes, and dishcloths. On our first few trips, I could already see that objects designed for a vast array of uses established a sort of camaraderie in the town stores. I developed the habit of searching the display cabinets for objects with no apparent relationship to each other and telling myself that, if I discovered whatever the relationship was, I would have a lucky day (a wooden pencil was connected to a metal handle because the handle would be put on a door one day. A wooden door. Pencil–wood, wood–door. Luck).
That afternoon we sold three hundred saws and collected two amounts owing for sales closed the previous month.
I was also given a puzzle book and a can of pineapple, for which I said thank you.
In the late afternoon we went to the coffeehouse. So began our partnership.
VII
Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.
Maybe that fragment of my mother was an astronaut, and on one of her journeys through outer space she had come across D (who since the moon landing had developed the habit of peering at the sky every so often) and had decided that the part of her that did come back would stay with him. Or, rather, with us.
But touchdowns are never easy and, during hers, my mother lost half the vision in her left eye.
In that blind spot, what I referred to as my double life started to take place.
A mother who was whole would have noticed.
Did that make my mother irresponsible?
I don’t think so; I think that, instead, life had been a bit irresponsible with her.
VIII
I started to think of our excursions, which usually lasted an entire day, as a practical subject—an extension of my schooling.
D and my mother had come to an agreement: I could be his assistant only after school and during vacations. And no matter what day it was, I had to be home by nine.
But deals never meant much to D, or to my mother, so most days we kept on past the school gate and headed for the highway.
After hearing so much talk about Kramp products, I started using them as a way to comprehend the workings of the world, and that was how, while my classmates wrote poems about trees and the summer sun, I wrote odes to door viewers, pliers, and saws.
I also invented instruments such as the “Adding Machine,” which was a rectangular piece of chipboard equipped with nails and nuts (it was a regular abacus, but I called it that, the “Adding Machine”).
I remember how, at school camp, when we were out looking at the stars, I used the Southern Cross as a reference point and explained to my classmates that the specks that shone so brightly in the distance weren’t stars but three-inch tacks that the Great Carpenter had used to hang the whole sky. Us included.
What I’m trying to say is that every person tries to explain the inner workings of things with whatever is at hand. I, at seven years of age, had reached out my hand, and had grasped a Kramp catalogue.
IX
HARDWARE STORES
Every construction is the sum of its parts, parts that are joined by fittings.
D explained it like this: a building, even the biggest in the world, relies upon a structure held together by bolts. Which was the equivalent of saying:
1.The big and the small complement each other.
2.Just one bolt, if poorly fitted, can bring about the end of the world. And the building, as it toppled, would tear down another, and that other building, in a terrible domino effect, would do the same to the neighboring building, on and on until the whole city, entire countries, even civilization itself, was razed to the ground.
The workings of ecosystems, the law of cause and effect, relativity—“every subject matter can be understood by looking inside a box of hardware,” D once said. “Same goes for the saws and hammers hanging from the wall.”
EVERYBODY ELSE
As the old-timer salesman had predicted, the coffeehouse and the bar (I didn’t visit the latter) together formed the center of the universe around which the planet of sales revolved. Nobody arranged to meet. It was simply known that everybody would be there at certain times of the day, hating on their goddamned luck.
The coffeehouses were private suns and, had anyone looked beneath the table, they would have seen an assortment of black shoes, painstakingly polished; sample cases; and a single pair of white shoes swinging from the chair—mine.
I liked breathing in the smoke from their cigarettes. Watching the salesmen order one coffee after another.
Listening to their lies, time and again.
C’s STORY
C caused a woman to die from a heart attack when he sent her a truckload of a million needles. Only one thousand people lived in that town, so on seeing the truck pull up outside her store and the driver begin to unload the goods, the woman simply stopped breathing.
Truth be told, the orders were never exact. They had the habit of inflating. If somebody ordered a dozen of whatever, most likely a little more of the whatever would arrive. Imprecision (as well as going to great pains to avoid signing any kind of documentation—in this case, the order) was one of the first laws of sales, and of life.
The story about the needles had happened a long time ago, but it was repeated until we were dead tired of it.
The first time I heard it I felt sorry for the woman but, soon after, a smile escaped me, and then a chuckle, to which I added a clap, which merged with the smoke and the chuckles of everybody else.
F’s STORY
F’s is a simple story. He came to a certain town, and there he finished off a barrel of rum.
F then hopped aboard the train, took a nap, and, when he woke, found himself in the same town he’d left. It was the same time of day, but the calendar was showing the next day’s date. On top of losing a day of his life, F had lost both his sample case and his suitcase.
Every time he told the story he was asked if he’d paid for a return fare. And then the person posing the question would erupt into noisy laughter.
I liked to imagine that circular trip: a train with F inside it, traveling ad infinitum around a planet in the shape of a barrel.
S’s STORY
One afternoon, S left a godforsaken town (he always said that: godforsaken town) and crashed his Citroneta into the side of a bridge. As can be expected, the guardrail gave way, and S plunged into the river. The impact was so powerful that the Citroneta broke into a thousand pieces, and S was knocked unconscious; he drifted down the river atop one of the car doors.
Hours or maybe days went by until he ran aground on the bank of another town, “which, as well as godforsaken, was very poor.” The locals took S, who was still unconscious, and who over the course of his ordeal had lost all his clothing, to a house where they tried to revive him. When they met with no luck, they dressed him in the clothes of a scarecrow and took him to the only hospital, where, weeks later, he regained consciousness.
When he arrived at his house ten kilos lighter and dressed as a scarecrow, his dog didn’t recognize him, and he discovered his third wife had run off with a pharmacist. “Because one calamity is always followed by another,” rounded off S, who was my favorite.
The story varie
d each time S told it. The door that had saved him from sure death was sometimes a wheel or a tree trunk that had happened to float down the river. The scarecrow’s clothing could be a curtain, the clothes of a dead man, or somebody’s quilt.
X
Days went by, and into D’s sample case I slipped letters of this kind:
“I like being your assistant.”
And in lieu of a signature I drew flowers and “lucky beetles.”
D responded to the letters with phrases like:
“I’m pleased!”
And in lieu of a signature he drew fish and whales.
XI
Sometimes another kind of relative joined the family of traveling salesmen: people seeking free travel.
Within this group, there were two classes: idealists who believed in the kindness of strangers, and stingy individuals who were prepared to talk for the whole trip to save what the fare would have cost.
I never managed to classify E as belonging to either category, so I decided to position him halfway between.
E’s job was to screen films at the university cinema.
As well as screening them, he sourced them, and he was responsible for opening and closing the cinema too. His fifth duty consisted in charging a fee that most filmgoers didn’t pay. This didn’t bother E, as his aim wasn’t to turn a profit (the business wasn’t his), but to have others watch the film so he would have someone to talk to about it afterward.
And it was thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey that D and E met. D was not really a film buff, but sometimes he “needed” to see a film. That’s how he explained it. Generally, the films he “needed” to see were about detectives or boxers. But that day, on seeing the image of the spaceship orbiting the moon, which is the opening of Kubrick’s film, he had an epiphany: he, not the machine, was orbiting the earth. And, seen from above, the earth was a speck, a tack like all the others, lost in that great timber structure that was the dawn of time. Due to a distancing effect, everything was condemned to disappear. To disconnect. To keep hurtling headlong toward who knows where.
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