Authors: César Aira
Except for the oldest couple and the youngest, all the others had
embarked on their second, that is to say, definitive, marriages. Which is why
they had invested in comfortable, pleasant dwellings, where they could settle
down and live for years. That was Tello’s style: sensible,
child-friendly, family-oriented design. And good business
sense, of course.
The little group hanging on his words, those remarried couples with
their shared project of happiness, had been infiltrated by two individuals, two
naked men covered in fine cement dust. They were listening too, but only as a
pretext for bursting continually into fierce, raucous laughter. Or not so much
laughter as vehement, theatrically sarcastic howling. Since the others didn’t
hear or see them, the conversation continued at its polite and leisurely pace.
The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They
were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid,
with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men’s
toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were
adults. A builder who happened to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on
the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped
the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to
a length of two yards, then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When
he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went
on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls and the stairs without marble
paving, up and down the empty elevator shafts, like the lowest string of a
Japanese harp. The two ghosts laughed more loudly and frenetically than ever.
The architect was saying that electricians lie, painters lie, plumbers lie.
Most of the visitors were already leaving when a truck loaded with
perforated bricks arrived and backed into what would be the lobby on the ground
floor. The architect was impressed to see the delivery being made, given the
half holiday. He explained to his audience that it was the final load of
perforated bricks for partition walls, then indulged in a subtly cruel quip: if
anyone wanted to make a last-minute change to the floor plan, they
should speak now or forever hold their peace. Things were becoming irrevocable,
but that didn’t worry the owners; in fact, it enriched their sense of
well-being. For the builders, however, the delivery came as an
unpleasant surprise, since they had no choice but to unload the truck, and their
half-day would have to be extended. They lined up quickly, forming a
human chain, as they do for unloading bricks. The two ghosts had taken up a new
position in the air above a round-faced electric clock hanging from a
concrete beam above the place where the elevator doors would go. Both of them
were head-down, with their temples touching; one vertical and the
other at an angle of fifty degrees, like the hands of a clock at ten to twelve;
but that wasn’t the time (it was after one). Tello suggested going upstairs, so
as not to get in the way, and to show the late arrivals the games room and the
swimming pool, which were the building’s prime attractions. Those who were not
going up said good bye. When they got to the top, where it was scorchingly hot,
they said what a good idea a swimming pool was. The metal skeleton rearing above
them required some explanation: the solarium would be roofed with sliding glass
panels, moved by a little electric motor, and a special, separate boiler would
send hot water through that tangle of pipes, because of course the pool would be
used much more in winter than in summer, when people generally go to the beach.
A huge number of glass panes had to be fitted: the whole roof and most of the
sides (not the south side, facing the street, because that was where the
dressing rooms, the bathrooms and the caretaker’s apartment would be). The
laminated glass, with an interlayer of pure crystal, had already been delivered;
the packages were waiting in the basement. The fitting of the panes would be one
of the last jobs. They went to the edge to look at the view. It wasn’t truly
panoramic (after all, they were only at seventh-floor level), but it
was fairly sweeping, and took in the impressive rampart of buildings along the
Avenida Alberdi, with its crazy racing traffic, a hundred yards away, plus a
broad expanse of houses and gardens, and a few scattered high-rise
buildings in the distance. And overhead a glorious dome of sky, the cobalt blue
of summer midday. Except in the early morning, the sun would be visible from the
pool all day long. As they had noticed a number of children watching them, they
started talking about the night watchman and his family. News of his drinking
had reached them, but it was not a cause for worry: the proximity of the police
station, which they could see from where they were, had insured them against
theft during the construction of the building, in spite of the watchman’s
distractedness and hangovers. Within a few weeks, the family would be gone.
They’re Chileans, did you know? Yes, they had thought so. Chileans were
different: smaller, more serious, more orderly. And in the architect’s
experience they were also respectful, diligent, excellent workers. Naturally
Raúl Viñas was in the habit of getting drunk with his Chilean relatives, some of
whom had been employed as laborers on the site. Very soon they would all
disappear forever, them and the others. They had been living on the site for a
year. The owners found all this curiously soothing. Someone had to be living
there before they came to live definitively. They could even imagine the
happiness of being there, provisionally, balancing on the edge of time. During
the first months, while the frame went up, the night watchman’s family had lived
on the ground floor in a very flimsy shelter with cardboard walls, then they
came up to the top. In a way it was a rather poetic existence, but it must have
been terribly cold for them in winter, and now they were roasting. Not that Raúl
Viñas cared, of course. And, naturally, they had lied: for a start, they weren’t
legal residents; they didn’t have work permits. On the other hand, they were
paid practically nothing, although it was a lot for them, because of the
exchange rate. Apparently they already had somewhere to live afterward, and in
fact they’d been asked to stay a few weeks more, because it wasn’t worth hiring
another night watchman for such a short time. “They’re better off than us,” said
Mrs De López. At least as far as timing was concerned, they agreed.
Meanwhile, on the third floor, the carpet layer, a short, chubby man,
was checking his notes for the last time, room by room, and sometimes taking the
measurements again, just to be sure that he hadn’t made a mistake. After reading
off the number, he flicked his wrist expertly and the metal tape retracted
itself, dancing about briskly, making a sheathing noise. All the measurements
were right. All of them, from the first to the last. He could have carpeted the
ceilings. Before going down, he leant over the balcony to see if his
mini-van, a yellow Mitsubishi, was still where he had parked it.
Directly below him the snout of a big truck was sticking out, the truck from
which the bricks were being unloaded.
The builders were in such a hurry they had made two chains instead of
one. Eight of them were busily at work. Two men in the back of the truck took
the perforated bricks three at a time and threw them down to a pair below, who
threw them in turn to two more builders, who threw them on to the last pair, who
piled them up against a wall. Each flight of the bricks through the air was the
same as the previous flights, down to the way they separated slightly and were
clapped back together in the hands of the catcher, making a sound like
castanets. People with time on their hands are often fascinated by the sight of
this operation and spend hours watching from the opposite sidewalk. In this case
the only spectator was a fat little four-or five-year old
boy with blond hair, who had walked in beside the truck. After watching the
synchronized movements for a few minutes, he approached Raúl Viñas, who was
juggling bricks in one of the chains, and asked him: Aren’t the kids here,
Mister? Viñas, who was in a particularly bad mood because lunch had been
delayed, didn’t even look at him. It seemed he wouldn’t answer, but then he did,
with a monosyllable, through the smoke of his cigarette (he was managing to
smoke while catching and throwing bricks, three by three): No. The kid insisted:
Are they upstairs? Another silence, bricks going and coming, and the boy: Huh?
Finally Viñas said: José María, why don’t you fuck off home? The builders burst
out laughing. Offended, José María stepped aside and stood there watching, quite
calmly. Offended, but pleased that his name had been pronounced. Besides, he
really was interested in Operation Bricks. He was in no hurry, because lunch was
late at his place, and anyway, he always waited until his grandmother, a little
old lady with a powerful voice, whose shouts had made his name known throughout
the neighborhood, came to fetch him (she lived around the corner). But then he
saw one of the naked individuals, white with cement dust, at the back of the
building, and went tearing out the way he had come in. The fat guy from Santiago
del Estero on the back of the truck, dripping sweat as he heaved the bricks,
remarked: How strange. Which made the others laugh again, partly because of his
accent and partly just to prolong the fun. They laughed mechanically, without
losing concentration, which was all that mattered until the job was done.
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.