Cesar Aira: Ghosts

Meanwhile, Raúl Viñas’ young nephew, Abel Reyes, was at the supermarket on the corner buying provisions for the builders’ lunch. As usual, he was keeping it simple and quick: meat, bread, fruit. As youths of a certain age often do, he refused to use the shopping trolleys provided, and since he didn’t have bags either, he was carrying everything in his arms. Barely out of childhood, he wasn’t really a youth yet. Although fifteen years old, he looked eleven. He was thin, ugly, awkward, and his hair was very long. On arriving in Argentina with his parents two years earlier, he had been struck by the way young men wore their hair long, as common in the new country as it was rare back home: he thought it was sublime. Being young, foreign and therefore naïve, he didn’t realize that the Argentineans with long hair belonged to the lowest social stratum, and were precisely those who had condemned themselves never to escape from it. But even if he had realized, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He liked the look, and that was that. So he let his hair grow; it already reached half way down his back, below his flat shoulder blades. It looked truly awful. His parents, who were humble, decent people, had unfortunately tried to reason him out of it; if they had threatened him or issued a decree, he would have submitted to the scissors straight away. But no, they began by telling him he looked like a girl, or a lout; and once they had set off on that path, there was no end to it. They couldn’t retract their reasoning, which was sound. Besides, they were kind and understanding. They said: “He’ll get over it.” Meanwhile their son went around looking like a little woman. Since his hair got in the way when he was working, he had thought of putting it in a pony tail with an elastic band, but for the moment he didn’t dare. On the building sites no one remarked on it, or even deigned to notice. It really was very common; at least he had been right about that. In Chile, he would have been interviewed on television or, more likely, thrown into prison.

The supermarket was bustling. It was peak hour, on a peak day. The place had been seized by a buying frenzy. People were stripping the shelves bare, to make sure they wouldn’t run out of food on New Year’s Eve. In the freezers down at the back, he was lucky to find two big packets of beef ribs, which chilled his hands. He was also carrying a bunch of grilling sausages, a rib cap roast folded into four, and twelve steaks, all sitting in little white trays and wrapped in transparent plastic film. He went to the fruit section and chose two small bags of peaches that seemed to be fairly ripe, and a dozen bananas. All this was complicated to carry without a bag. And the worst was still to come. Before getting the bread he went to look at the ice creams, which were in a deep, trough-like refrigerator. There would have been no point getting ice cream, of course, because it would have melted well before the time came to eat it; but those eight-serve tubs of butterscotch would have been perfect. Two of them would have done the job. He decided to tell his uncle: maybe someone could come back for them at the appropriate moment. It was risky, though, because everything was getting snapped up. He could only hope that the price would put people off; it was very high, after all. Now, yes, the bread. It was essential not just as an accompaniment, but also for resting the meat on, country-style. To eat like that you need a very sharp knife, so to keep their blades honed they were always having to call one of those knife sharpeners who go around blowing on flutes (except that the man who worked in that neighborhood used an ocarina: he must have been the only one in Buenos Aires). Every day, Abel was annoyed by the way they only sold bread in small loaves, barely nine ounces. Four of those little loaves in plastic bags went on top of the packets of meat and the fruit, making a precarious pile; they kept slipping off. But what could he do, short of making two trips? Like a father carrying a big baby in his arms, he headed for the drinks section. Unfortunately, since there was no refrigerator on the site, the builders had to do without cold drinks. But you got used to it, the way you get used to all sorts of things. Abel took two big plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, picking them up by the tops with the index finger and thumb of each hand, which was all he had free. The shoppers had increased considerably in number, and movement along the aisles was obstructed by the supermarket employees, who had begun to mop the floor. Abel looked rather out of place among the other clients, with his torn shirt and long hair, holes in his shoes and cement dust on his trousers. It was amazing how skinny he had stayed, with all the strenuous physical work he had to do. At first glance you could have mistaken him for a girl, a little housemaid. His heart sank when he saw the checkout queue: it stretched the full length of the supermarket, about thirty yards, down to the back, around the corner, and all the way up the next aisle to the front again. Although there were three checkouts, only one was in operation today, and the woman operating it was extremely incompetent; even Abel, who was notoriously dopey, had realized that. In fact, the whole supermarket worked in an inefficient and rather arbitrary way. It wasn’t run as a commercial enterprise; its aim in serving the clients wasn’t to make a profit but to do something else, something religious, though what exactly wasn’t clear. It was part of a chain that belonged to an evangelical sect; you could tell by the lack of business sense. Or rather, you could tell by considering any aspect of the supermarket, right down to the finest details, since the whole place was pervaded by the quintessence of the ineffable: religion. It was rumored that attempts were made to indoctrinate young workers from the neighborhood who happened to venture into the supermarket: they were accosted and presented with a videocassette showing the finest performances of the sect’s patriarch, a North American pastor. Abel Reyes had not been accosted, although he was the only young worker who went there every day: either they had picked him for a Chilean, and therefore a die-hard, fanatical Catholic, or decided he wasn’t much of a catch, because of his hair and what it suggested about his character, or, perhaps, they had thought he wouldn’t have a video player at home (or that he didn’t know English and wouldn’t be able to understand the sermons). He went to the end of the queue, slightly hunched, as always, and started moving forward little by little. It was then that he saw his aunt with the children.

It was getting on for midday, a fateful hour for the housewife, and up in the solar oven, Elisa Vicuña was needled by the feeling that the supermarket on the corner, her sole source of provisions, on which she depended absolutely, might shut at twelve: it wouldn’t have been surprising, not only because most people were taking half the day off, but also because that supermarket was unpredictable; it could be shut already, or it could stay open till five to midnight. Now, if it was shut, she was in trouble, because she hadn’t done even half the shopping for the celebrations that night; so she decided to go and check, although she hadn’t planned to do so, in order to avoid a catastrophic surprise. She tried to go on her own, to save time, but the children simply refused to stay with Patri, who she was leaving in charge of the food while she was gone. She had to put shoes on the barefooted ones, and since some of them hadn’t even washed their faces and wouldn’t cooperate, it took her fifteen minutes to make them more or less presentable (combing their hair and so on). She would never get used to those stairs without banisters, covered with rubble, stones and dust. She carried the baby girl in her arms and the others went down on their own, leaping about, but none of them had ever fallen. There were four children, two boys and two girls; the oldest (a boy) was seven and the youngest (the baby girl) was almost two. She thought they were very pretty, and no doubt they were, with something of their father’s manner, and something from their mother’s side as well. Elisa was a lady of thirty-five, slim and rather short (slightly shorter than her husband, who wasn’t tall), and naturally, given the family’s economic status, not very elegantly dressed or presented. On the first floor, where she noticed that the visitors who had been wandering around the site all morning had disappeared, she exchanged a few words with her husband. Then she left, with the children in tow. She made the baby girl walk, which meant she had to go very slowly. The supermarket was just down the street, no more than thirty yards away, on the same side. Still, it was an outing. As always, the children went running around the columns of the brick façade along the side of the supermarket.