My double shift started, and the increase in my work hours was proportional to my absences from school.
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.
My modus operandi was roughly the same. I went into the stores with my well-shined shoes, plastic carry case, and the hat that S had bought me, and fixed my gaze on the person in charge.
There was something in the other’s heart—the other being the person in charge—that I knew how to understand. A fine tapestry woven from mild aches and minor triumphs, where these existed—it was enough to look at the dusty street, at the counter—that stayed forever attached to their pupils. Few knew it. I was one of those few. And it was for that reason that I practiced my repertoire of gazes before the mirror, as these were my infallible instrument of connection.
I didn’t close sales; what I did was practice sophisticated mental gymnastics.
And it worked. Because the ones in charge—those people—saw in me their own weakness and, after that, they let down their guard.
Meanwhile, S stopped being a simple sonofabitch—something in me still mimics S when I remember him, and still trusts in his foulmouthed god—to become a sonofabitch capable of feeling concern for “the daughter of his bedridden sister.”
Invoices were being paid, and shampoos, hand cream, and nail polish remover were finding their places in the world.
S didn’t have any qualms about disregarding the agreement and giving me a percentage of the sale in cash. One percent of earnings. It wasn’t much, but it was real money, secret money that, at the end of the day, after doing the sums on his calculator, S handed me in an envelope.
The calculator was blue, like eye shadow.