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.