The salesmen’s destinations were cities and, mostly, towns.
These functioned as base camps, the strategic hearts of which were the hotels. Once set up, the salesmen embarked upon—we embarked upon—forays to conquer the neighboring territories. We were colonizers, and we wanted to convert the savages to the religion of Kramp products, Parker Pens, English cologne, or Made-in-China plastic products.
The more virgin territories there were, the better it was for us: the towns spontaneously recovered their virginity every thirty days, a time period that roughly coincided with the spell between the salesmen’s visits.
These forays were governed by stricter rules than our usual trips, and during my two years of work I only went on four or five, as I could only take part during school breaks. And an eight-year-old girl, as a rule, isn’t allowed to stay anywhere overnight without a reasonable explanation.
What I could do was skip school—which I was doing more and more often—and go home acting as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, thanks to the enlightenment D provided: “Most of the time, complex problems require surprisingly simple solutions.”
So we made a false booklet of parent–teacher communications that D signed (truancy), which coexisted with the real booklet of parent–teacher communications that my mother signed (meeting requests, museum visits, a farm excursion). Depending on the circumstance, I had to hand over one booklet or the other.
“You must never mix up the booklets.”
“Of course not.”
It wouldn’t have made a difference. With thirty students in the class, it was almost impossible for the teacher to memorize the narrative thread of any one of our booklets. And as for my mother, she was a reserved woman. Although, now that I think of it, she wasn’t reserved. She was simply sad, and her sadness meant she couldn’t pay attention to details.
Each highway, town, and city had its place in my parallel education about the workings of things. While the central cosmogony was associated with Kramp products, D added new elements whenever my comprehension required it.
The relationship between time and space, for example.
“Do you remember my telling you R’s story?”
“The one about the man who faked his own death?”
“No, the one about the man who worked for the local council and used an entire year’s budget to construct a landing strip for small planes—on which, of course, no small plane ever landed.”
“I remember. He planned the whole thing when he was a kid. His classmates testified, saying that back then he would spend all day making paper planes.”
“That’s the one. Now, think: if that had happened in a city, how long would everybody have been telling the story?”
“Weeks.”
“And if it had happened in a town?”
“Months.”
“And if it had happened in a small town?”
“Years.”
“Exactly.”
We continued the trip in silence, and after the Renault had progressed roughly a kilometer, I said to D that there was a fourth option:
“If the town were really really really small they’d be telling R’s story forever.”
D said, “Most likely,” and half a kilometer later he added that physics had yet to discover an explanation for this particular phenomenon, because an explanation had not yet been found for why those kinds of towns existed in the first place.
We could add to the relationship between time and space the evolution of the species theory, the expansion of the universe theory, and even some basic notions of physics and theology.
My comprehension of the world expanded like a sponge, especially when you include everything I heard at the hardware store counters, in the coffeehouses, the hotels.
When, years later, I told my friends about these memories, I tried to make it clear that D hadn’t been a fool—that’s what my grandmother on my mother’s side called him: “the fool”—but a pioneer of systemic pedagogy.