The Statue Salesman

To get to the dining room you had to cross rows of doors facing a narrow and chilly hallway, its walls decorated with green plants framing the bathroom door.

In the dining room there were heavily stained tablecloths and Viennese chairs where many women and fat professors sat.

Madame Renaud, who owned the boardinghouse, ran up and down the hallway clapping her hands and checking on her boarders at mealtime. There was a professor of Greek who stared, for fear of falling, at the center of the table; there was a chess player, a cyclist, also a statue salesman, and a saleswoman of lace embroidery who caressed the lace trim of the tablecloth with the hands of a blind woman. A seven-year-old boy ran from table to table, until he stopped at the statue salesman’s table. He wasn’t a bad boy, but there was a secret hostility between them. For the statue salesman even just a kiss from a boy was trouble: he had the same fear of the boy that he had of clowns and people wearing masks.

In the lumberyard next door the statue salesman had his workshop. Big letters announced on the entrance door: “Octaviano Crivellini. Copies of statues from European gardens, cemeteries and salons”—and there was a battalion of daunting statues that made it a struggle for buyers to choose. He ordered a little room to be built so he could live there comfortably. In the meantime he lived in the boardinghouse next door, and before going to bed he’d surreptitiously say good night to the statues.

At the dining room table Octaviano Grivellini was a man devoured by anxieties. He was sitting before the cold cuts, sad and listlessly repeating: “I don’t have to worry about these things, I don’t have to worry about these things.” The seven-year-old boy lurked behind his chair and, like some perverse juggler, invisibly kicked him, and this scene repeated daily, but that wasn’t all. He would have been able to put up with the invisible kicks at dinner like autumnal mosquito bites, terrible and tolerable because every night one could take refuge under mosquito nets inside with the lights off and screens on the windows. But the various annoyances caused by Tirso, the seven-year-old kid, were constant and relentless. There was nowhere to run where he could get away from him. He probably hadn’t known his mother or had a terrified father whom nobody dared approach.

It had already been a week since that night he had escaped the house, running after him. He must have seen him kissing, as he cleaned them, the plaster heads that moved stiffly in the night like stars. Tirso laughed uncontrollably and rode the back of a lion with its loose, thick mane. The moonlight turned the earth into a lake filled with shadows where cemetery angels—a Venus with empty eyes, a Diana the Huntress running against the wind, and some bust of Socrates—wept. Octaviano, when he saw Tirso mounted on one of his favorite lions, quickly cut short his “good night” wishes and left, overcome with shame and terror. Tirso, thinking that the frozen statue salesman hadn’t seen him, assumed that he had the prodigious power of invisibility and tiptoed back to bed again feeling like he’d witnessed a miracle. From that day on he had followed him to the lumberyard every night and had become familiar with all the statues, with the plaster hands and feet kept in closets, with the white dogs. Octaviano, however, distanced himself from his statues—he cleaned them with very few caresses in front of the boy. Tirso began to grow tired of that gift of invisibility he had enjoyed for a short while. The chess player had spoken to him two or three times. The cyclist had given him a candy. The saleswoman had tried a stitched collar on him, confusing him with a little girl one day when he was wearing an apron, but the statue salesman didn’t speak to him at all.

When they finished eating, Octaviano stood up like a child being punished with no dessert—he, who would have wanted Tirso to be denied his dessert. He tied a kerchief around his neck and left as he always did. Tirso followed him. He began to write his name on the statues with red chalk, and Octaviano thought he would go mad with shame. Tirso was evicting him, stealing his tranquility, murdering him by undermining him, and Tirso was as impervious and independent as only major criminals can be. When he went back to bed and tried to close the door to his room, he felt a giant’s strength holding on to the door. He made futile attempts to close it, until suddenly, unexpectedly, it came down on him, almost crushing his arm. A few minutes later the door opened again. There was no need to see who had opened the door with such force, it could only be Tirso—and this scene, like others, happened again and again every night. The first few times he tried to gather all his strength in his eyes to stare him down, but Tirso’s eyes were as hard as metal doors. He had eyes that must have never cried, and only by killing him could one hurt him just a little.

At the far end of the lumberyard was a large shed where the desperate man took refuge one night. Tirso, when he saw that the statue salesman wasn’t there, left in disappointment. But he kept galloping every night. He began to notice that his actions were as invisible as his body; he never found the names he had written on the statues the night before, which is why he took out his penknife to carve them, as on trees, to make sure it worked.

One loud night when the dogs were barking at the moon, the statue salesman retired earlier than usual, taking shelter in his shed. Tirso didn’t want to get off the lion, but finally he began to trot in crazy circles and semicircles, dragging rusty iron chains noisily against the ground. After a while the statue salesman heard nothing more; silence and a sense of well-being took over the night. He was going to come out of the shed when he heard the key turning twice, locking him in.

Very little breathable air was left, perhaps enough for a few more hours of life: he heard all the statues he had sold and hadn’t sold throughout his life marching in single file. A cemetery angel approached, pointing the way to heaven. He had a name written on his forehead. He was afraid: he took off the kerchief and slowly erased the name in the darkness of the shed where the last drops of air and light were fading.