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 varied 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.