His daughter wants a hot chocolate, so we walk back to the town, hoping to find a bar that’s open. The woman with the broom says, “Ask down that way,” and we proceed to a barbershop, which, to our surprise, has numerous clients inside. “At the top of that road, in about three hundred meters,” a man tells us, reclining in his chair, his face covered with soap.
We walk to the top of the road but alas, the bar is closed. The large awning, which still needs to be taken down for the season, whips wildly in the wind.
We go back to the car parked in front of the precipice. And as he turns on the engine and shifts into reverse I feel a panic starting to rise, not trusting that low cement barrier between us and the abyss. I don’t trust that the car will move backward, all I feel is the steep downward slope, pointing toward danger. But we go up, the car whines as it pulls out in reverse gear and we move, against the force of gravity, away from the little town with its spotlessly clean piazza, and the hushed grotto that enchanted me, and the man who will have dinner tonight, freshly shaved. No hot chocolate, just the depleting artificial heat inside the car. We go home without talking, though the little girl hums strange songs to herself all the while.
At the Stationer’s
My beloved stationery store is in the heart of the city, in a beautiful old building built on the corner of two busy streets. I make a trip at the end of every year to buy my agenda, which happens to be my favorite purchase, and which has turned into a sort of rite, but apart from that I like to stop by nearly every week to pick up, who knows, a transparent folder, or sticky page markers, or a new eraser that has yet to wipe anything out. I poke through the colored notebooks and try out the inks of various pens on a piece of paper trampled by countless unknown signatures and urgent, agitated scribbles. I ask for spare paper for my printer at home and boxes to organize my life’s paper trail: letters, bills, jottings. Even when I don’t need anything in particular I stop in front of the window to admire the display, which always appears so festive, decked with backpacks, scissors, tacks, glue, Scotch tape, and piles of little notebooks, with and without lines on their pages. I’d like to fill them all up, even that unwelcoming accounts ledger. Even though I can’t draw, I’d like one of those sketchbooks, hand bound, with thick cream-colored paper.
Through the window I can also observe the family that owns the store. The mother, a rotund woman with dark, dry hair, sits at the register. The father oversees the fountain pens stored in a glass case, as if they were precious jewels, bottles of ink lined up like costly perfumes. The parents are always talking to their lanky son, dressed in black, who clambers up the ladder in two seconds to bring down this or that from the shelves. A lively, intelligent debate is their way of communicating. They comment on articles in the newspaper that the mother is always leafing through, the crazy things that happen every day in the city, the great difficulties facing countries they’ll never visit.
I’m especially fond of the mother. One time I thought I’d left my sunglasses in the store. I rushed back, and when I told her what I was missing she stepped down from the cash register right away, accompanying me carefully through the store, stopping in front of the shelves, retracing my steps. I’d bought a lot that day but she’d kept track of it all, she still had each purchase in her head, which is why she led the way without asking me a thing.
“I don’t see them here, honey,” she’d said at the end of her investigation, but then, giving me a hard look, she conveyed that the sunglasses were attached to the collar of my coat, hanging like a bat behind my scarf.
This stationery store has been one of my haunts for years. When I was a young girl I’d go there to get what I needed for school, then for college, and now for teaching. Every purchase, however mundane, makes me happy. Each item validates my life somehow.
But today when I get here all I see are suitcases in the window, all hard-shelled, most of them the right size to carry on board for a quick getaway by plane. They’re all on deep discount. Inside, they’ve taken down the high shelves, and in the middle of that space there are more suitcases, some bigger, arranged by color and manufacturer. There’s nothing harmonious about this, the store looks hideous. In spite of the high ceiling and the graceful proportions it’s turned ugly, bereft of character. It reminds me of that disorderly part of the airport where orphaned suitcases gather once they come off the conveyor belt, knowing that no one will come to claim them.
I grow sad looking at all those brand-new suitcases, all of them empty, waiting for a traveler, waiting for various things to fill them, waiting for someplace to go. There’s nothing else for sale. Just suitcases. But then, right at the entrance, I notice a bunch of umbrellas, big ones and small ones, of the cheapest quality, bait for desperate tourists caught in a downpour, those pathetic umbrellas that almost always end up in the garbage can after the storm, shoved in with a certain fury, looking like tortured herons.
The family that ran the stationery store isn’t in charge of this place, I don’t see them. There’s just a languid young man with fine features who looks halfheartedly through the store window, out onto the street and at the passing cars. I feel like walking in and asking, Where’s the family? I wonder if the business failed, if they were evicted, humiliated, if they’d been upset. But it’s not this young man’s fault. He’s just here to make a living. As disappointed as I am, I’m not surprised that my beloved stationery store no longer exists, the rents must be sky-high around here, and furthermore, who buys notebooks in the end? My students can barely write by hand, they press buttons to learn about life and explore the world. Their thoughts emerge on screens and dwell inside clouds that have no substance, no shortage of space.
A couple comes in: they’re young and in love, attached at the hip, that sublime phase when every stupid thing feels enchanting. The store doesn’t upset these two, on the contrary, it’s clear that this is just the place they’ve been looking for. They get pleasurably lost in that warren of luggage. They open and close the brand-new models, lined, unlined, pulling on the zippers, pounding plastic carapaces. It’s probably the first time they’re going away together. Maybe also the last? Will they come to the conclusion, after spending three days together in a hotel, that they’re not really so in love? Or will their bond only deepen? As I contemplate this, the suitcases turn, for a few seconds, into enormous books: they’re swollen volumes lacking titles, lacking meaning, collected in a library for monsters, or for idiots.
She picks out a purple suitcase. He decides on bright yellow. They pay the young man, then put their new luggage to the test, placing a few shopping bags inside, along with the jackets and scarves they don’t need given that, after a coolish morning, the day has turned suddenly warm and everyone on the street is peeling off layers. These two appear quite satisfied, eager for their voyage together. They leave the store dragging behind them, on four spinning wheels, an unquestionable joy that furrows the worn-down cobblestones of the city.