How to Order the Universe

by María José Ferrada

  XVII

  A couple of times, while D was collecting amounts owing, I accompanied E.

  No, photographing ghosts certainly wasn’t like photographing people.

  It took a long time to find the ghosts. You had to ask questions, make calls from public telephone booths, and talk with people who were afraid of telling you what they knew.

  “When a ghost withers, it becomes a bone.

  And if it withers further, it becomes dust.

  We have to find them before that stage,” E explained to me.

  And when he finished his sentence, for the first time ever, I experienced a strange feeling that I defined as a black-hole feeling.1

  1A sadness that, even though you feel it, doesn’t belong to you.

  XVIII

  The day that E—the photographer—met my mother, a strange silence descended.

  It was the weekend, and E had come by our place to bring D an old film projector. But as much as they tried, they couldn’t get it to work.

  And so, to show that E hadn’t made the trip in vain, D invited him to stay for lunch.

  That was when my mother came in. She’d been pruning the magnolia in the garden.

  When D introduced them, E and my mother looked at each other with familiarity. With sadness, too.

  “We know each other,” said my mother.

  “We had a friend in common at university,” added E.

  From then on, everything was strange. Lunch was served, but E didn’t talk about photographs or ghosts, and my mother, who always seemed to be on another planet, this time appeared to be striving to reach another galaxy.

  I, accustomed to salvaging uncomfortable situations—there wasn’t a huge difference between a hardware store counter and our family table—intuited that the only thing bringing us together in that moment, and therefore the thing that could save us, was the film we’d seen on television the day before. My mother and I had watched it, and D, who had arrived just as the film was ending, said he’d seen it too. E had seen many films, so I was confident he knew it too.

  I started talking about The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  Five minutes later we were all talking about The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  D and E started talking about World War II and the Chinese (in my head at the time, the Japanese and the Chinese lived in one country), and we still had time to whistle the film’s theme song.

  That’s what I was doing when, looking at the bowl of asparagus soup, I had an epiphany, the first in my life.

  Steam was rising from the bowl, and it transformed into a ghost the size of my thumb. That first ghost was followed by a second, a third, a fourth ghost.

  This procession of ghosts from the afterlife sprouted from the soup and moved above the table, trying to communicate with the beforelife. But they didn’t manage to. Poor things.

  When I mentioned my strange vision after coming out of my trance, my mother burst into tears and E said it was time to go.

  D, who couldn’t find any conceivable analogy in the Kramp catalogue to help him comprehend what was happening, told E no problem but to please leave him the film projector.

  My mother shut herself in her room for the rest of the afternoon, and D and I stayed in the dining room.

  “If we fix the projector, what should we watch?” I asked.

  “A pirate film.”

  “Okay,” I said, feigning an exaggerated enthusiasm and hugging D, an atypical expression of affection that neither of us was accustomed to.

  Epiphanies were almost always followed by insight, as I would confirm over the years, and that day I realized the following:

  D was alone.

  I was alone.

  Life was a lonely place.

  And this fact belonged to the category of “Things that Were Simply the Way They Were.”

  So I left D tinkering with the projector and went to my room to read my comics.

  XIX

  In the town stores there was no disorder, only dynamic order. You didn’t have to be especially smart to comprehend the true nature of town stores: they were proto-anarchic systems.

  From the simple to the complex:

  Stores where objects were grouped together according to their nature (umbrellas only, hats only, tobacco only).

  Stores where objects were ordered according to spatial criteria (everything that fit between a pin and a lawnmower, from right to left).

  Stores where objects were grouped according to an as-yet undeciphered numerical sequence (counters that displayed seven forks, fifteen shirts, eighteen plastic buckets, and so on).

  This final category was what most caught my attention, because I thought that discovering the sequence would bring me a little closer to comprehending the classifications used by the Great Carpenter to order the universe.

  Whatever the case, the different shops illustrated the organizational possibilities that, through making associations, the human brain can concoct.

  SHOE STORES

  Out of all of them, my favorite was the shoe store that belonged to a German immigrant who had escaped a war and, as he fled, had observed the following:

  1.The enemy is obliged to enter the battlefield through a space.

  2.This space is bound by time.

  Which was the equivalent of saying that if one manages to stop time, the enemy will be stopped in its tracks too.

  Proud of his discovery, the German, whose father and grandfather were shoemakers, worked hard and saved enough money to continue the family business in this new land. After the grand opening, which the whole town attended—except for the greengrocer, an English immigrant who hated the Germans—he threw himself into accomplishing his central objective: to stall time.

  The mechanism was simple: in his shoe store, he sold only shoes from the late forties—peacetime.

  He’d bought many—so many that by the time his first load sold out, he’d trained several saddlers to make the shoes of the era.

  Every time they visited the town, the traveling salesmen stopped by his store and asked for a pair of modern shoes, their sole purpose to hear the German roar and bellow about his opposition to war.

  D and I went there occasionally.

  And the day we sold a consignment of timber planers that had proved very tricky to move, we bought two pairs of shoes in celebration: black patent leather with wooden soles for me, and lace-up oxfords for D.

  We slipped them on immediately, tossed our old ones in a dustbin by the door, and set out with shoes that could stop an enemy in its tracks.

  SPECIAL STORES

  There were special stores too. Stores that, considering the size of the towns, were big. The closest thing to a supermarket that the townspeople knew.

  If you closed a sale in one of these stores, the consignment would occupy one whole freight wagon of the train. That’s what they said. And, to fill it, the sale process would take a couple of days.

  Not just one salesman made the trip, but several at the same time.

  The Turk’s store was famous. It was never about simply showing him the catalogues and samples. You also had to be capable of talking to the Turk for fifty-eight or seventy-two hours straight, pretty much. The salesmen slept overnight in rooms inside his house, which was a continuation of the shop. And the next morning, with hangovers that only the owner of the house awoke without, they took up where they had left off the night before.

  The stories were prepared in the days leading up to the visit. For if the Turk had a good night, he bought huge quantities from everyone. If he didn’t enjoy himself, he bought only what was necessary, which was more than enough all the same.

  Not that it really mattered all that much, as, however long the marathon sale lasted, they ate and drank as if they had walked into a story from the Thousand and One Nights.

  Only a select few were invited. Word got around the coffeehouses. Whoever went could consider himself a true salesman and, if the freight wagon was filled, a true hero of a war that
was part pagan, part religious.

  When, fifteen days later—the length of time it took for the order to be dispatched—the consignment passed along the railroad close to the highway, the salesmen tooted their horns.

  It was a beautiful sound that only the chosen ones of sales heaven could understand.

  XX

  D had read in some magazine that thing about a happy worker being more productive and committed to the business. So, every now and then, instead of going to visit hardware stores, we would go to E’s cinema, the university cinema. We would go in the mornings, not at the time it was open to the public (Monday to Thursday continuous showings from 4 p.m.; Wednesday cheap night), so the cinema was always empty.

  I don’t think D and E ever planned these visits. We went, and E was simply there. We got comfortable in the middle of the space, the lights went out, and it started: first the sound, and, seconds later, the film.

  For as long as that form of remuneration for my early commitment to the trade lasted, we watched:

  The Kid (twice).

  Paper Moon (twice).

  The Red Balloon (three times).

  And a strange animated short film called The Sand Castle (once), which I never saw or heard mentioned again. Maybe I imagined it.

  In any case, in all those films we cried, dried our tears, and noisily blew our noses, using two white, perfectly ironed handkerchiefs that D always carried in his pocket: one for him, the other for me.

  Spurred by our taste for drama in dealing with the films—and with life—we asked for them to be replayed, using a method of my own invention that consisted of whistling and yelling, “Curtain turn!”

  The phrase escaped all logic and grammar, but E understood that we wanted him to show the film again.

  “No trouble at all. Quite the contrary; in times like these one appreciates an enthusiastic public,” he would say.

  It was when we stepped out after seeing The Kid for the second time that we spotted my mother at a distance.

  She was in one of the university quadrangles with a group of people, who were all talking in a serious, disciplined way. I recognized her leather jacket and her backpack with its red star.

  What was my mother doing there? My mother, who had left university years ago?

  What was my mother talking about with that group of people?

  Who were those people?

  It was possible that my mother—who, when viewed from this far away, looked like one of my dolls—had also seen us and would add another question to the list:

  What were we doing there, on a workday for D, and a school day for me?

  After reaching that point, we would have three options:

  One: Keep adding questions to the list: What were human beings doing on Planet Earth? What was the meaning of life?

  Two: Talk to my mother and try to figure out an answer together. But an answer would have obliged us to give details about my parallel education, and my mother to tell us about her unknown friends.

  The third option was to forget the whole thing. Maybe it wasn’t my mother after all; maybe it was a woman who resembled my mother, someone who had my mother’s tastes, someone who even wore the same clothes as my mother but was in fact someone else.

  I vote for option three. I didn’t say it, but I thought it.

  I vote for option three. D didn’t say it, but he thought it.

  Fine, we agreed, in the room for silence that friendship allows. Because at this stage D was both my employer and one of those friends who understands that, most of the time, a good silence is more valuable than a good piece of advice.

  So, we quickly crossed the university quadrangle, D with his black leather sample case, and I with my nurse’s carry case.

  On getting into the Renault we each lit a cigarette. And in recognition, I think, of the fact that I had grasped the complexities of human beings at such a young age, D showed me how to blow smoke rings.

  Small rings that crossed the city, expanding and dissolving in the distance.

  XXI

  Our sales model started to be analyzed across “the sector.”

  We were asked questions, and some salesmen even tried to convince their children to accompany them—with no success, thanks to insecure and overprotective mothers.

  That was when S, that Moses of sales, had the idea to hire me. And it didn’t seem such a bad idea.

  He explained it like this: He and D sold different products: perfumery and hardware, respectively. I could accompany them on the same trip, changing my appearance ever so slightly. Nothing sophisticated, a simple hat would do it. He himself would buy it. Nobody would notice that in the morning I was daughter to one of them and, in the afternoon, daughter or niece to the other.

  All that was needed was good timing and a little flexibility, this last requisite on my part.

  Whatever S earned from the sales he closed in my company, he would give us a commission.

  I listened to the plan with great interest, imagining the new hat and the commission. D paid me five pesos for every 100 earned in his quid pro quo system, but, taking into account the additional effort, as well as my growing clout before the store counters, I was sure that this time I could get ten out of every 100 in real money.

  “Of course not,” said D. And he thought of the samurai.

  The logical thing would have been to call to mind feudal patriarchs, but maybe because he was still obsessed with fixing the film projector—brand-name Fuji Photo Film—he thought of the samurai, and added:

  “Under no circumstances.”

  In all ideals-based communities there is a code of honor, operating norms, “prin-ci-ples.” And D always emphasized that last word, gave it a special cadence.

  Then he launched into a speech about how violating a code of honor, so long as the code was effective, and independent of whether it was honorable, could cost the offender not only admonition from fellow community members but also, even worse, expulsion.

  S and I looked at him in silence, not understanding where he was going with this.

  “She can accompany you, but there’ll be no money changing hands,” D concluded.

  I could have protested, but I knew that, in the sales society, I was not yet considered a true samurai, despite my strong performance. I was a tiny samurai, defending a tiny castle, capable of committing a tiny hara-kiri. Nothing more, but nothing less, either. The three of us were clear on that point and, for the moment, that should have been enough for my diminutive honor.

  I maintained a stoic silence (with nothing but a light kick that I landed on an empty chair to give me away), but I couldn’t help it when my angry gaze met S’s happy one. It was at that point exactly that our gazes cancelled each other’s out.

  The thing is, deep down I felt something like affection toward S.

  “When do we start?” I asked, forgetting the commission and remembering professionalism.

  “Tomorrow,” said S.

  “I have a birthday party at school,” I said.

  “The day after tomorrow, then,” said D.

  “Okay,” said S and I at the same time.

  And we took that synchronicity as a sign that the deal was done.

  XXII

  The drives I most liked were the drives home. And it wasn’t because home was at the end of the road, but because the late-afternoon light simplified everything. At that time of day, the world looked like a scale model I’d seen in one of the many hardware stores we visited.

  Someone had cut out the trees and set them down along the straight line that out of convention we called a road, someone had whittled a house and put it there (had used steel shears and a gouge). And, following that logic, which the light prompted me to do, someone had fashioned us and put us here.

  Great Carpenter, I whispered, as if aiming to irritate someone who was a little deaf.

  XXIII

  My double shift started, and the increase in my work hours was proportional to my absences from school.
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  D anticipated my teachers’ potential concern and, to prevent them from calling my mother, invented a sickness for one of my grandmothers, the one on my mother’s side. She was a second mother to me, we had a special bond (brand-name Kramp, 12 mm width), and I wanted to enjoy her last weeks on earth. He understood, and the school, the school understood too, of course. The relationship between grandparents and grandchildren was especially blessed by the Christian god, and my school was Catholic.

  So, free from institutional pressures, I started to ply my trade with greater freedom.

  Three days per week—the fake grandmother lived in another town—I skipped school and divided my time according to products: mornings, hardware; afternoons, perfumery and cosmetics.

  I couldn’t accompany D and S on long trips (we were still unable to find a way of justifying overnight stays to my mother when I wasn’t on school break), but gaining the three days out of five away from school was a step almost as important as the one taken by astronauts.

  PERFUMERY AND COSMETICS

  Let’s go see this thieving sonofabitch, S would say, before stepping inside each perfumery, a phrase that underwent a slight modification—goddamned whore—if the manager or owner was a woman.

  S repeated these words with such fervor every time he visited a client that, more than cursing, he seemed to be asking permission to start work from a god as foulmouthed as he. And the work consisted of selling shampoos, hand cream, nail polish and nail polish remover, eye shadows, and lipsticks.

  S had his own way of meting out justice, which, in this case, meant adding an extra percentage to the prices the company gave him. It didn’t matter; the owners were Chinese morons who didn’t check the invoices because these fucking Chinese didn’t even know how to read.

  S explained everything in simple and direct terms. He had that virtue.