Ghosts (3 page)

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.

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.

It’s strange that they hadn’t bought any wine, isn’t it? Especially
since some of the men were committed wine-drinkers. But there were two
reasons why the builder’s young butler hadn’t even thought of buying any: first,
they didn’t drink wine at lunchtime as a rule, except occasionally on a
Saturday, when as well as knocking off early they had something to celebrate,
like a birthday. The second reason was that Raúl Viñas bought all the wine
himself at a store in the neighborhood, where they had a special bottling
system, and recycled the bottles over and over, which worked out to be very
practical and cheap. He had already laid in provisions for that day, and for the
next day as well. It was an extra special occasion: for a start, they were
stopping work early, so they could drink their fill if they wanted to. Afterward
they would be going to their respective homes to get ready for the party that
night, a big family do. There was also something to celebrate, of course,
because it was the end of the year. Overall it had been a memorable year, a year
of work and relative prosperity; they couldn’t complain about that. It could
even have been called a year of happiness, although not straight away; they
would have to wait some time for that to become apparent, in retrospect. It
wasn’t over yet: there were ten hours left, to be precise. So Raúl Viñas was
keeping fourteen bottles of red wine cool, with a system he had invented, or
rather discovered, himself. It consisted of resolutely approaching a ghost and
inserting a bottle into his thorax, where it remained, supernaturally balanced.
When he went back for it, say two hours later, it was cold. There were two
things he hadn’t noticed, however. The first was that, during the cooling
process, the wine came out of the bottles and flowed like lymph all through the
bodies of the ghosts. The second was that this distillation transmuted ordinary
cheap wine, fermented in cement vats, into an exquisite, matured cabernet
sauvignon, which not even captains of industry could afford to drink every day.
But an undiscriminating drinker like Viñas, who chilled his red wine in summer
just because of the heat, wasn’t going to notice the change. Besides, he was
accustomed to the wonderful wines of his country, so it seemed perfectly natural
to him. And, indeed, what could be more natural than to drink the best wines,
always and only the best?