How to Order the Universe Read online

  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.

  XXIV

  By S’s side, I learned that vanity is good business, and I encountered the multiverse theory for the first time. For S had a parallel life with another wife and son. This other son was the same age as the one he had with the wife I knew.

  We were sipping coffee when S received a telegram from someone who knew him well enough to put the coffeehouse as the address.

  Sonofafuckingbitch, S said, and then he explained that before arriving at the town where we were headed that afternoon, we would have to make two stops.

  The first was at a perfumery we’d already visited, where S asked them to pay an invoice in advance, before the eye shadows, lipsticks, and hair gels were delivered to their respective shelves. On S’s request, I acted with greater drama than usual, and I even pretended to faint when S mentioned his sister, my supposedly bedridden mother.

  The sorrow is dizzying, he said, lifting me to my feet and counting the notes.

  Second stop: we pulled up outside a house. S reached for the envelope containing the money and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  A woman opened the door, S went inside, and, soon after, a miniature S peeped out the window.

  We looked at each other and waved.

  There were two possibilities: either the door that S had stepped through was a passage to the past, and in that case the boy looking at me through the window was S forty years earlier; or, S had a child who was none of the children I knew (those children went to my school).

  A while later, a small hand rapped on the door of the Citroneta and offered me a glass of juice.

  When I gave him back the empty glass, the boy peeped through the car window, leaned half his body through it, and gave me a hug.

  For as long as the hug lasted, I pretended to be the sister he would never meet. I pretended, the boy pretended, S was pretending; the world was a ridiculous theatre.

  I watched him go back to his house and knew at that moment that sometimes it’s best to let things lie. So, when S came out and shut the front door with a bang, which was followed by a vase being hurled from inside the house, he got into the car and was met with my most perfect silence.

  The silence was so conspicuous that when we pulled into a petrol station, after filling the tank, S went inside and bought me an ice cream.

  I decided to place what I’d seen in the category of “Things I Maybe Imagined” and, since I couldn’t keep quiet forever, as a topic of conversation I brought up a game I’d learned in math class that was perfectly designed for talking without saying anything.

  “Think of a number from 1 to 9 and multiply it by 9.”

  “Done.”

  “Now add up the two digits, subtract 5, and think of the letter it corresponds to in the alphabet.”

  “What?” (S had no patience, but he kept playing because he was afraid I would go quiet again.)

  “Well if the number is 1 it’s A, if it’s 2, then B, if it’s 3, then C…”

  “Got it.”

  “Do you have the letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now think of a country that begins with that letter.”

  “Okay.”

  “And with the second letter of that country, think of an animal.”

  “Is there much to go?”

  “This is the last bit. Have you thought of an animal?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are no elephants in Denmark.”

  “How the fuck did you do that?”

  Any number from 1 to 9 multiplied by 9 gives two digits that, when added together, are 9. On subtracting 5, that number will always be 4, which corresponds, in alphabetical order, to the letter D. And, when thinking about a country that starts with the letter D, 99 percent of human beings think of Denmark, and 97 percent, on focusing on an animal starting with E, think of an elephant. The margin of error is very small.

  But instead of saying that to S, I said, “I guessed it.”

  “In that case, guess whether they’ll buy something from us in the next store.”

  “They won’t buy anything.”

  “Well then, we’re finished for the day,” said S, at the same time as he did a U-turn in the middle of the road.

  “Let’s go eat till we pop,” he concluded.

  So we parked in the town square and headed for a coffeehouse, where we asked for two coffees: a regular (mine), and a half serve (S’s).

  S filled the remainder with whisky from a flask he always carried in his pocket. It was a habit the waiters knew about (S had been visiting the same coffeehouses for twenty years) and which they no longer remarked upon because, from what I observed in those years, waiters, same as traveling salesmen, pick their battles carefully.

  “To help me deal with the misadjustments, do you get me, M?”

  “Gotcha.”

  To celebrate this communion between two human beings, something that didn’t happen every day, we rounded out our coffees with four slabs of thousand layer cake, which we finished right when D showed up to collect me.

  XXV

  On the drives home I didn’t only experience revelations about the workings of life. I also jotted down stories and messages on the notepad I kept inside my carry case.

  In fact, the notepad included something like an early will and testament on the page that followed the lists of “Quid Pro Quos” and “Money” (this last one written in a code that substituted vowels for numbers).

  My will was called “The Future.” In it I divided my worldly goods among the people I knew. It was full of blots because, as my feelings for those individuals waxed or waned, I switched around what they would inherit. The modifications were made every day and basically depended on who I’d shared the past few hours with.

  If I’d spent the afternoon with D, when night came, I bequeathed him my Kermit the Frog brooch and 150 pesos.

  If, on the other hand, I’d spent the previous hours with S, I added to his list—which already included pliers, brand-name Kramp—50 pesos, and the same brooch that, meanwhile, I erased from D’s list, as well as subtracting 50 pesos.

  I had lists for my mother, the photographer, and a few others.

  My feelings were fickle and shifting. But I didn’t care about that; what I really cared about was the work that went into rewriting, erasing, and rewriting my will each night. So, in an effort to save myself some toil, I asked D when the future would arrive.

  “Tomorrow morning,”
he responded.

  And, since he looked so sure, I made the most of the situation and asked what the future was, exactly.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he responded once more.

  XXVI

  During the school break my mother granted me permission to accompany D for a whole week, which was to say that I accompanied him without having to resort to the false excuse slips or other lies about my day.

  (“Did you learn a lot of things at school?”

  “Lots, Mamá.”)

  And I waited for that week to arrive, like the other kids I knew waited for Christmas, because I would be allowed to stay at a hotel overnight, just like the older salesmen.

  I shared a room with D, which had its upside: I could listen to the radio as long as I wanted; and its downside: I had to wrap my head in a scarf so as not to hear his snores. This method was relatively effective; my head was small, and the scarf was long.

  When I mentioned my problem to the hotel manager the next morning, she told me to imagine I was in a forest where, from a certain hour, sleeping in the bed opposite mine wasn’t D but a small bear. I would cease to notice the snores and would fall asleep.

  A big bear, I corrected her.

  From then on, my school break was doubly productive. We would leave early to sell Kramp products; some afternoons I would accompany S; and, in the evenings, I would venture deep into the forest in my room to take care of the bear.

  Everything was going well until the afternoon it rained.

  “From every which way,” S would say later.

  It rained, but, like stubborn fish, we visited one client, then another, and another.

  I refused to take off my dripping-wet hat (I knew that the power of my character, the daughter of S’s bedridden sister, resided in that hat).

  When I got back, I didn’t feel like dinner, and I dreamed about a tree that bloomed with nuts and door viewers. There were also glass flowers. And in the dream, I thought that such a garden wouldn’t survive the winter. So, I took a saw from my pocket and cut off a piece of root. The root, once separated from the tree, turned into a piece of string, which I tied to my wrist.

  The next morning, I woke with a 40-degree fever. I cried out for my mother and confused D with a real bear.

  Frightened, D went downstairs to fetch some aspirin and a mug of tea with a squeeze of lemon. He also dampened one of his white handkerchiefs with cold water and pressed it to my forehead.

  I dozed all morning, and, along the blurry line that connects reality to dreams, I saw D walking from the room to the bathroom and back again, cooling the handkerchief.

  “This method is fail-safe,” he said, nervous, pressing the handkerchief to my forehead once more.

  When he went downstairs to the dining room, he informed everybody of my feverish state. The most distressed was S, who, on remembering my wet hat the afternoon before, said again:

  “The rain was coming from every which way. And she wouldn’t take off the fucking hat.”

  For lunch I only had a bowl of chicken broth that the hotel manager brought to my room, as well as a second mug of tea, taken with a squeeze of lemon, and a comic book, which I didn’t read but instead tucked beneath my pillow.

  By the afternoon I felt better, but since I still couldn’t get out of bed, with everybody else’s permission D borrowed the only television in the hotel, and we watched a Mexican film.

  I’m not sure if it was the last vestiges of the fever, but something made me ask him:

  “Will I sell Kramp products forever?”

  “Forever is a very long day,” responded D.

  And since I liked the sound of that phrase, I jotted it down on a napkin while he told me about a new Kramp product: a waterproof flashlight with a lifetime guarantee, to light up “the darkest corners.”

  Five minutes later, there was a knock at the door. S came in, lit a cigarette, and took a black doll out of his pocket.

  “She’s African, so you’d better not let her get cold,” he said.

  And from the same pocket he extracted a flask of whisky, which he gave to D—I’m not sure if out of paternal solidarity or guilt. S, as well as foulmouthed, was very Catholic.

  I had almost recovered by dinnertime, but out of consideration for how bad my day had been, the salesmen who were staying at the hotel didn’t demand the television back, nor did they get drunk. And they went to bed on tiptoe, like well-behaved bears.

  XXVII

  I got over my cold—or pneumonia—but my appearance wasn’t the best. I was very skinny, and two shadows—each the shape of a half-moon—settled beneath my eyes, never to fade away.

  I had a recurring dream: we were traveling along the highway, and the salesmen’s Renaults were flashing their headlights in different combinations. My task was to discover what they meant. Two blinks: Continue? Just one blink: Caution? Three blinks: Stop? As hard as I thought and as much as I jotted down ideas on my notepad, I didn’t manage to decipher them. I woke from the dream distressed and had trouble getting back to sleep.

  I returned to school and kept accompanying D, who, out of consideration for the fact that I still bore signs of convalescence, decided I wouldn’t be doing double shifts anymore. S, guilty as he was, accepted this dissolution of our partnership without protest.

  When D told me, I didn’t feel sadness, only emptiness. Emptiness in the shape of an envelope full of cash.

  Was everything that happened next D’s fault? Something inside me still refuses to answer that question.

  I prefer to blame E.

  XXVIII

  E was a secondary character in our lives. And we were secondary characters in a larger story. A series of elements—ghosts, faith in the Great Carpenter, my early vocation, the times we were living in—could have crossed paths and then continued on their way, but instead they collided head-on.

  It all unfolded like this:

  Our work hours were strict, and at nine in the evening we had to be indoors, preferably at home. That day we’d come home at six o’clock.

  The telephone sounded. It was E. He needed D to go pick him up, and he needed me to go with D. He had found the ghosts, he had photographed them, and this time it was more important than ever that he make it back to the city without raising any suspicions.

  The basic argument—which nobody said, but we all understood—was roughly the same one S had used, so I will fall back on his language: pulling over one sonofabitch is not the same as pulling over two sonsofbitches who have a young girl in the back seat.

  D’s code of honor could, in exceptional cases, be extended to individuals outside the family of traveling salesmen. So, considering that E let him into the cinema free of charge whenever D wanted, and making the most of the fact that my mother wasn’t home yet, he decided we would help him. It was seven o’clock. The town was an hour’s drive away. At nine o’clock on the dot we would be back.

  I would like to recall that, on that trip specifically, we talked about something important as we headed down the highway, but I don’t.

  We arrived, and E was waiting for us.

  When I greeted him, I asked if he’d found the ghosts, but he didn’t say anything, only took my hand and squeezed it a moment.

  D looked at his watch and suggested that E lie down on the back seat, so I got into the passenger seat once more.

  We were leaving the town when a car blocked our way. Two men got out.

  We didn’t try to hide E, as it would have been impossible. Nor did I try any of my theatrical ploys, because the little experience I had was enough for me to know that, this time, I was in the middle of a real drama.

  Placing my trust in our talent—and in the theory of compassion—would have been ingenuous, so the best I could do, and what I did, was stay still in my seat.

  D and E got out of the car and moved away, escorted by the two men.

  Minutes went by without them returning, so I got out of the Renault and went back to the town square.

  The
town seemed like a desert, so I sat beneath a tree—a mulberry—and pulled a cigarette out of my bag.

  The smoke rings rose and, on watching them dissipate, I had the second epiphany of my life. I shrank and was borne away on one of my smoke rings.

  On that privileged night journey I saw how the stars amassed heat and: POOF! appeared. Millenia went by, they consumed their last reserves of hydrogen, and POOF! they dissolved.

  The view of the stars blended with that of the tacks, which, even though they were made of stainless steel, didn’t escape the cycle of dissolution (POOF! POOF! POOF! POOF!).

  Swinging from my smoke ring, I got a privileged view of things.

  And it was while I was experiencing this clarity of mind that I heard a hoarse voice shout:

  “Let’s see if you’ll still feel like digging up bones when you’re in hell, you fucking dog.”

  XXIX

  The bullets that were fired a few seconds later ripped open one, two, three, four, five black holes. And through one of those black holes passed a “lucky beetle.”2

  2“Lucky beetles” are not a species, but an insect that alights in the exact spot where life took a different course. That spacetime in which one chooses to walk down one side of the road or the other, to leave the house or not, to say or to refrain from saying something. It’s a fraction of a second so small that only an insect can pass through it. An insect that, when it appears, parts life in two.

  XXX

  The next morning, I was found unconscious beneath the tree in the town square, with the onset of hypothermia. I was taken to a store and given something to drink—alcohol, I imagine—which revived me enough that I could say my phone number and my mother’s name.

  THE CALL AND THE CONVERSATION THAT CAME NEXT

  When my mother got the call, the part of her that had been absent for so many years came back in a flash. What she didn’t know was that this happened the day after E had found, buried among the others, the ghost that had kept her asleep to us for so long.