How to Order the Universe Read online

  I found this out years later when, looking for a backpack, I came across a box with photographs and clippings from newspapers about the discovery of several bodies.

  All towns are alike, but it didn’t take me too much of an effort to recognize the town in the image as the town of the gunshots.

  Had E made more calls? Had he sent a smoke signal that said I’ve found them?

  I will never know; nor is it important.

  What is important is the interrogation that came after.

  Because I told my mother about the ghost town, E’s call, the gunshots.

  And about S and the envelopes too. About the booklet of false excuse slips. About the hardware stores, perfumeries, S’s little double, skipping school, and, finally, the Great Carpenter.

  As I went on with my story, I’m not sure why, but I started crying, and once I’d started, I cried for several hours. My mother held me close and said that everything would be alright in a voice I didn’t recognize.

  At the same time, another interrogation was happening. The one endured by D.

  I will never know what D said. What my mother knew was that D would be back. He was wily enough to convince his interrogators. And cowardly enough not to risk going down in history as a heroic ghost. He would be freed. And he could go to hell.

  XXXI

  When D came home several kilos lighter with a three-day beard and bruises all over his body, my mother and I had left for what I called our “next life.”

  Before we left, my mother placed on the table a note containing two words, one that she’d learned from my grandmother, and another from her own repertoire: “foolish bastard.”

  Right beside it, I left an envelope with the money I’d saved over the course of my remunerated employment, and a letter that said:

  “I love you.

  P.S. This is a loan.”

  XXXII

  We traveled all night in a bus that took my mother and me far enough away.

  Far from D.

  Far from Kramp products.

  Far from ghosts.

  And the list of things that were now distant affected me profoundly. So much so that on two occasions I tried to take my life by holding my breath. I failed and, at nine years of age, understood that the self-preservation instinct really was something else.

  I explained this to two of my new classmates with those two words: “something else.” And then I urged them to eliminate themselves; they only had to concentrate and stop breathing.

  I didn’t want them to die, I just want to verify that what had faltered in me wasn’t my own determination (which was all that was needed to stop breathing), but that of the entire human race. And I verified it because they, like me, survived.

  My mother was called, and she asked my teacher, in front of me, to please forgive me, that I was going through a rough patch because of a family breakdown.

  I could have explained to my mother and my new teacher that breakdowns of other kinds could be added to the family one: a spiritual breakdown (when I spoke to him from this new city, the Great Carpenter couldn’t hear me); a financial breakdown (I no longer had quid pro quos or envelopes); a vocational breakdown (I was a traveling salesman assistant, and in this new city there were no traveling salesmen).

  Would they have understood?

  Not likely, so I didn’t say anything.

  I decided to let life run its course and it did so with such ease that the following year I had a new father, was soon to have a sister, and we even bought a dog.

  “Flaco,” that’s what we named the dog.

  XXXIII

  I went to school, played with my sister, walked Flaco, and even had time to make new friends.

  It was true that sometimes my gaze would rest on some door viewer or cheap cologne, and I would feel a slight disquiet. But just like a Buddhist monk—a friend of my mother’s, also new, had said as much—I let those thoughts go.

  Twice a year I got a call from D.

  “How are you, M?”

  “Good.”

  “How’s the new city?”

  “Horrible.”

  “I couldn’t call you; did you see the news about the telephone thief?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t leave a single one. We were incommunicado for several months.”

  (Silence.)

  “I’ll try to come visit someday. Sales are down. People have so many screws loose that the floor is littered with them, so they don’t need to buy them at hardware stores.”

  (Laughter.)

  “Take care, M.”

  “You too. Goodbye.”

  We never said I miss you. And we didn’t talk about what had happened, either.

  It was better that way.

  XXXIV

  The ensuing years went by in slow motion. They were so similar that they could have been concentrated into a single day. To help me perceive the passing of time, at the beginning of each year I bought a calendar. I hung it on the wall, crossed off the days, and, when the calendars ended, stowed them in a box I kept beneath the bed.

  In that box was the photo that E had taken of me, and my sales notepad, too.

  What I was safekeeping there was a time machine.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Plus a year when I had no calendar, but that also counted: five years went by.

  And I decided enough time had passed, so I sat down to wait for the next call.

  The telephone sounded when summer number six was beginning.

  “How are you, M?”

  “I’m coming to see you.”

  (Silence.)

  “In one month exactly, wait for me at the train station coffeehouse.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Remember, you owe me money.”

  “I remember.”

  For the past five years, I’d been walking the neighbor’s dog, too. The neighbor was a confirmed bachelor who, for someone as bitter as he, paid very well. If I added the money D owed me to those savings, I calculated that I had enough to get by for a month in one of the hotels.

  I had no trouble obtaining permission to travel. My mother, influenced by my new father, now believed in Buddha, but that didn’t mean she had stopped admiring independence movements. So she lent me her backpack and entrusted me to the primordial emptiness.

  MY MOTHER’S BACKPACK

  The pieces missing from the puzzle that was my mother were there, inside her backpack. A backpack from the time before I came into existence, before D appeared in her life. Inside it she had placed a bundle of letters, three books, and a blue handkerchief with white spots.

  Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada had given her those things.

  And, after giving them to her, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada had disappeared.

  When she found out, my mother took up a needle and thread and started to embroider a star on her backpack, thinking that when she finished it, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada would appear in the doorway of her house and kiss her. But that never happened.

  For years after, she searched for Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada. But all she found were lists of names.

  She tucked them into the outer pocket of her backpack.

  The backpack was heavy, and my mother, who insisted on wearing it, became more stooped with each passing day.

  The world of ghosts is as small as the world of humans.

  Years later, the remains of Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada were found by the man who had been his best friend: E, the photographer.

  News of the fact appeared in a newspaper that seemed to be from another country, a newspaper that someone had forwarded to my mother inside an envelope that had no sender’s address.

  The body of her first love, Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada, was peppered with thirteen black holes and had several broken bones.

  When my mother finished reading, she shut herself in the bathroom with a needle (the same one she had used to embroider the
star on the backpack) and a bottle of black ink.

  She made thirteen punctures on her arm because she wanted her body to feel pain on the outside like it was feeling on the inside. She pricked herself thirteen times. Hard, really hard.

  Later, when I asked her what those moles were, she said she didn’t know. That she had simply woken that morning with a black constellation on her left arm.

  My mother comes out with the weirdest things, I thought.

  My mother, who had been crying again.

  XXXV

  Exactly one month after our phone call, D was waiting for me on the platform.

  Instead of embracing, we gave each other slaps on the back, as old school friends do.

  The same suit.

  The same sample case.

  But, of course, no more Renault.

  So, we took a bus, which deposited us at D’s new house—a tidy, tiny attic. To me it seemed so perfect that I thought of a clock. A clock that made irregular revolutions. In that place, preparing a welcome coffee for me, D seemed like a human being whom time had left inside some kind of parenthesis.

  And it was so nice, cheating time, that by midday I had already set up some of my things on the desk and was measuring the couch to see if my fourteen-year-old body would fit on it.

  “Just for a week,” said D.

  “I have money for a whole month, and I’m thinking that if I stay here on the couch, that will save me what I’d spend on a hotel.”

  “Two weeks, not a day more.”

  “In that case, I’ll take the bed and you can take the couch.”

  For the next few days we tried to resume our old routine.

  Since we didn’t have the Renault, we made the trips by bus or train. It was at one of the stations that, on being up close to other people, I noticed that there was something strange about us.

  From one moment to the next, well-shined shoes, which had been symbolic of a belief—the possibility of walking on the moon—had become a tactic to draw attention away from D’s worn-out shirt. The same went for my T-shirt, which I myself had chosen for the occasion, and the kerchief that I had tied around my neck.

  There were two possibilities:

  A. Precariousness had always been with us, and I’d never noticed.

  B. Something had changed.

  Whichever it was, my childhood memories fractured: crack. And I hated the Great Carpenter, not for the reality but for the insight, which enveloped me in an unpleasant—and until now unknown—shame whenever I felt the gaze of others upon us. Did they know? Did they see our precariousness?

  For the first time I saw them clearly, and it seemed to me that they were giants.

  And it was thinking on this scale, and seeing our disadvantage, that, after years of boring reality, gave me a new vision: D and I were vanishing.

  The people on the platform waited, said goodbye, or went to look for their cars.

  D and I, in contrast, kept still, and at first started to lose our colors, then our shapes. We became smoke rings. And we disintegrated as we crossed the sky above the city.

  There, abandoned on the platform, only his sample case and my backpack remained.

  Years went by. Hundreds of years. It was the same spot, but the landscape had changed: where before there was the station and the city, now there was a desert crowded with containers.

  Our things were still there, and the inhabitants lay wreaths of paper before them.

  We had existed a long time earlier and, contrary to what I had imagined, disappearance itself wasn’t painful at all.

  You turn into smoke. People of the future do what they can with your remains.

  I had understood one of the workings of existence. And I would have gone even further if D hadn’t told me our train was waiting.

  In a few hours, we arrived at our destination.

  We made our first stop at a coffeehouse. No traveling salesman showed up to keep us company, so we quickly set off for the leading hardware store.

  This newfound solitude was repeated over the next few days. It made the image of the desert materialize again and settle on the coffees I ordered. I stirred the image with my teaspoon, dispersing it.

  XXXVI

  We kept on: every day, a town. But something in the landscape we moved through didn’t match the snapshot of reality I’d filed in my head.

  At first, I went inside the hardware stores with D, but it turned out my body was too big to play my old part. The centimeters that my arms and legs had gained in the past few years had made me invisible to those in charge.

  I cursed the Great Carpenter again. If He could keep dwarfs and ponies small, He could have done so with me. But He hadn’t, and His decision had left me at a loss.

  I had to have a think. So, instead of accompanying D, I decided I would wait for him outside.

  When I asked him for the Kramp catalogue to bring myself up to date, he said they didn’t print them anymore. The little he sold, he sold from memory. That’s what he said.

  I realized the situation was more critical than I had imagined, and, if I didn’t want the ground to disappear beneath my feet, it would be best to bring my trip to an end.

  I still had a few memories in my head that hadn’t blended with this new reality, and I wanted to preserve them. So, I said goodbye to D, and gave him more slaps on the back, a hug, and a kiss.

  I had a week left, and some money, so I decided to call S.

  XXXVII

  He came to collect me at the coffeehouse where I said I’d be waiting, tooting the horn from a block away. My happiness to see him was so great that I ran out without paying for the coffees I’d had while I waited.

  “You got big! You’re of no use now, but it’s wonderful to see you again.”

  He hugged me tightly, and I breathed in the unmistakable smell of alcohol and cheap cologne that I’d kept safe for so long in my store of fond memories.

  “I found out you’ve been going hungry the past few years, so I brought you a cheese sandwich. I prepared it myself.”

  I could still recognize the food sold along the highway. On confirming that S was as deceitful as ever and the bread was as dry as I remembered, I recovered some of the territory lost.

  To celebrate our reunion, he opened the glove box: the flask of liquor was there, just like old times.

  He offered me a sip, which I accepted with thanks. The whisky burned my throat, but it was good. It was when I placed the flask back in the glove box that I saw the revolver. I’d never held one in my hands, so I grasped it carefully.

  “Poof!” yelled S.

  Don’t be a moron, you don’t joke around with a loaded weapon. I would have liked to yell that at him, but even though several years had passed, I still felt something like respect for S.

  “Why do you have that here?”

  “To kill myself.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. You leave it there; I want to be the one to decide when my time comes.”

  He explained that business wasn’t good. The sonsofbitches of the big chains, those fuckers, were eating up small and midsized businesses. And as soon as they were done smacking their lips after polishing off hardware stores, perfumeries, pharmacies, and clothing stores, nobody would have any need for traveling salesmen.

  That’s why he had decided to buy a truckload of revolvers. Because he bought the whole load, the gun-store owner—an ex-policeman—had given him a good price. All the traveling salesmen would pull the trigger in unison the day the last business closed.

  “Does D have one too?’

  “We all do.”

  I could have told him he was nuts. That all of them were absolutely nuts. But instead I said:

  “I understand.”

  For the next few days we continued southward, staying in hotels that were so uncomfortable we might as well have slept out in the open.

  With scarcity on all fronts urging us on (or, rather, thanks to it), we managed to perform a bad rendition of
our old operation. I sat quietly in the car, and S explained to the perfumery owners that the silhouette they could make out in the distance was that of his quadriplegic niece, who was now his responsibility.

  “Do you remember the Turk?” he said to me as we passed by his store.

  “The man with the three-day sales.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He hired a secretary who only allowed one-hour visits. You think it’s possible to fill a fucking freight wagon that quickly?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why we stopped selling to the Turkish fag.”

  The week came to an end, so I said goodbye to S with another hug. From the station, I watched him walk away until he became a blurred speck, like an image that you keep inside your head but can’t quite bring into focus.

  XXXVIII

  I went home, inside me an emptiness the size of the backpack I’d borrowed from my mother. Since I needed to find a reason for the emptiness, I blamed the amount owing that I hadn’t collected. I’d crossed half the country to recover it and had come back empty-handed. I was a failure. One hiding a second failure, which I still didn’t know what to call.

  I went back to my routine: school, dogs, my mother, my new father, my sister.

  The others. In a couple of weeks, they’d grown a few centimeters and I’d shrunk a few. They didn’t seem to notice, but I did. And in those brief moments of awareness, the only solution was to make the most of any excuse to hug my sister or my mother.

  I didn’t want to disappear. And to stop that from happening, I had to cling to Planet Earth.

  XXXIX

  Months went by, and the black hole was still there. I decided to cover it up by busying myself with being a good person. And the truth was, at that very moment, the bad people I loved so much could have been blowing their brains out, a clear sign that, if I wanted to survive, I had to switch sides.

  I worked on bettering my grades and my manners, spent more time with my sister, and even told jokes during family lunches. Perfect.

  The next thing would be to make a doghouse. I would buy the materials myself.