Cesar Aira: Ghosts

As soon as she reached the door she was stunned by the number of people inside. She might have foreseen something similar (although she wasn’t given to such predictions), but not so many people, or even half as many. Reality usually outstrips predictions, even if no one has made them. All she could do was remind herself why she had come: to check if they were shutting at midday. Since there was no notice to be seen, she went in to ask. At the counter where they gave coupons in exchange for containers, ten people were waiting, all carrying huge loads of empty bottles and complaining; there was no one to serve them. The kids had already gone down the aisles, as they always did, and disappeared into the crowd. Unruffled, their mother went to look for them, and find someone to ask while she was at it. Elisa Vicuña was that anomaly, not nearly as rare as is often supposed: a mother immune to the terrifying fantasy of losing her children in a crowd. Reality kept proving her right, since she always found them again, if they were ever lost in the first place. She was still holding the baby girl, Jacqueline, by the hand. In the first aisle she went down, threading her way among trolleys and shoppers, she came across the boy who usually served at the bottle counter; he was mopping the floor, with great difficulty because of all the people coming and going. She was relieved when he told her that they would be shutting at four. That meant she could come back after lunch. She continued in her search for the children, looking at packets of food on the way. She was trying to make a mental list. She had to pick up Jacqueline, who had started to whine, and then wanted to get down again as soon as she saw the other kids. The three of them were standing in front of a supermarket employee in a red apron, wearing too much make up, who was handing out little sample cups of coffee to anyone willing to try them. The kids obviously wanted to ask for some, but they didn’t dare; she wouldn’t have given them any, of course, and they didn’t even know what it was. They had never tasted coffee. But they had been overcome by childish curiosity, that craving to receive. Since she was there in the supermarket, Elisa took a bottle of bleach off the shelf, thinking she had run out, or was about to. She consumed a great deal of bleach, because she used it for all her washing. It was a habit of hers. Which explained why all the family’s clothes were so faded and had that threadbare look, humble and worn and yet beautifully so. Even if an article of clothing was new, or brightly colored when she bought it, from the very first wash (a night-long soak in bleach) it took on the whitish, delicate and somehow aristocratic appearance that distinguished the clothes of the Viñas family. As soon as she picked up the bottle, however, she realized how absurd it would be to queue for an hour to buy just that; she would go straight to the checkout and ask the person at the head of the queue to let her in, since she only had one item. She gathered the children and told them it was time to go. Whether out of obedience or boredom, they followed. But as it turned out, she didn’t even have to go through with the manoeuvre, which often caused a fuss if there happened to be one of those argumentative women at the head of the queue, because she spotted her nephew Abel near the other end, with his arms full of packets and the two big bottles of Coke hanging from his fingers. Poor thing: what an ugly, ridiculous-looking kid, with his hair falling all over his shoulders. He had seen her too, and greeted her from a distance with his polite little smile, reserved, of course, for members of the family. She came over and asked him to do her a favor: buy the bleach (she gave him an austral from her purse) and then bring it up to her. Abel accepted graciously. She looked at what he had bought, and judged it to be insufficient. Tactlessly, she told him so, leaving him there downcast and worried, with the bottle of bleach on the floor, between his feet. Off they went. On the way out, the kids ran into José María on his bicycle. They pleaded raucously with their mother to let them stay and play on the sidewalk for a while, especially the older boy, Juan Sebastián, to whom José María was going to lend the bike. But she took a firm stand, because, as she said, “it was already time for lunch.” That little brat was always hanging around in the street. She didn’t want to have to come down again in half an hour to look for them. They went on whining, interminably, and in the end she spent fifteen minutes on the corner, talking to the florist, while they ran around. When she went up, dragging the children with her, there was still no sign of her nephew with the bleach.

Abel Reyes was still queuing patiently; his arms had gone numb from the weight. There were some very pretty girls in the queue, and he was watching them to pass the time. But in the most discreet way. He could truthfully have said that girls were what he liked best in the world, but he always admired them from a certain distance, held back by his pathological, adolescent shyness. He also felt that the inevitable stillness of a supermarket queue put him at a disadvantage. Movement was his natural state, albeit the movement of flight. To him, stillness seemed a temporary exception. He advanced step by step, as the train of full trolleys made its very slow way forward. Many of them were full to capacity, with what looked like provisions for a whole year. The people behind and ahead of him in the queue were talking continually. He was the only one who was silent. He couldn’t believe that the neutron bomb really existed. Here, for example, how could it eliminate people and not things, since they were so inextricably combined? In a situation like this, a supermarket queue, things were extensions of the human body. Still, since he had nothing better to do, he imagined the bomb. A silent explosion, lots of radiation. Would the harmful radiation get into the packets of food, the boxes and tins? Most likely. An analogy for death by neutron bomb occurred to him: you’re at home, listening to the radio, and a song begins to play; then you go out, and you hear the same song coming from the window of a house down the street. A block further on, a car drives past with the song playing on its radio. You catch a bus, the radio is on, and what do you hear but the same song, still going — without meaning to, you’ve practically heard it all. Everyone hears the radio (at some point during the day) and many people have it tuned in to the same station. For some reason this struck him as an exact analogy, supernaturally exact; only the effects were different. These thoughts helped him to while away the time. As usual, the trolleys just in front of him took longer than the others; the woman at the checkout even went to the bathroom and left them standing there for ten extra minutes. But everything comes to pass. Finally, it was his turn. It was a relief to put his shopping down on the metal counter. The cashier pressed the wrong buttons on the electronic register a couple of times, as she had done with almost all the clients. Every time she made a mistake she had to call the supervisor, who pushed through the hostile multitude and used a key to cancel the error. It came to forty-nine australs. Abel paid with a fifty-austral note, and the cashier asked if he didn’t have any change. He rummaged in his pockets, but of course he had no change, not a cent. The note he had given her was all the money he had brought. The cashier hesitated, looking grief-stricken. Don’t you? she asked. She stared as if urging him to check. Abel had noticed that the cashiers at this supermarket (maybe it was the same everywhere) made a huge fuss about change. They always had plenty, but they still made a fuss. In this case there was really no reason: she only had to give him one austral. He was waiting, holding the one-austral note his aunt had given him, folded in four. The cashier looked at the note. So that she could see it wasn’t hiding forty-eight others, Abel unfolded it for her. In the end she lifted the little metal clip holding down the one-austral notes in the register (there were at least two hundred), extracted one with utter disgust, ripped off the receipt and handed it over without even looking at him. He went straight for the door, forgetting his shopping, which was still on the counter. The woman behind him in the queue, who had started to pile her purchases on top of his, called out: Why did you pay for this stuff if you don’t want to take it away? Back he came, mortally embarrassed, and gathered it all up as best he could. He dropped the little loaves of bread, and various other things. By the time he got back to the site, the truck had gone, and they were waiting for him with the fire alight under the grill. His uncle and another builder, an Argentinean named Aníbal Fuentes, or Aníbal Soto (curiously, he was known by both names), who were the designated grillers, tossed the meat onto the grill, a rectangular piece of completely black wire mesh. What’s that? Viñas asked him, pointing at the bottle of bleach. It’s for Auntie Elisa, Abel replied, I’ll just take it up to her. They asked him to get some things while he was there, glasses and so on. He disappeared up the stairs. Since the architect had left, Viñas decided to close up the wooden fence, and put the chain on, but not the lock. Now, at last, they could have their lunch in peace.