‘I hope he gets struck by lightning.’
It is impossible to describe the sense of failure that this bundle of dirty paper generated, abandoned as it was in the dark patio, with the ties retied, covered with mud on the edges, spotted with blood and fat because the butcher had turned it over pitilessly in his greasy hands.
This type of return happened with too great a frequency.
Learning from previous incidences I would advise the buyer:
‘Look, this cut is the leftovers from cutting paper to shape. If you want I can send you the special cut, it’s eight centavos per kilo more expensive, but you can use all of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter, che,’ the butcher would say, ‘send the cheaper cut.’
But when the paper was delivered, they would insist that the price was lowered by a few centavos per kilo, or else would send back the pieces that were most badly torn, which when it got up to as much as two or three kilos meant that my profit completely evaporated; or else he didn’t pay at all, which meant a total loss…
There were occasional truly ridiculous setbacks that Monti and I laughed about so as not to weep with rage.
One of our clients was a pork butcher who insisted that we deliver the bundles of paper to his house on a set day and at a set time, something that was impossible; there was another man who sent everything back and insulted the delivery driver if he didn’t provide a properly drawn up legal receipt, which wasn’t a requirement; there was another one who wouldn’t pay for the paper until he had been using it for a week.
And let’s not even talk about the way in which the Turks from the fair behaved.
If I went to ask for Al Motamid, they didn’t understand me or else shrugged and went back to cutting a piece of lung for a gossipy relative’s cat.
And selling them anything meant losing the entire morning, and all for being able eventually to send a miserable package of twenty-five kilos immense distances down the streets of unknown suburbs, in order to earn seventy-five centavos.
The delivery driver, a taciturn man with a dirty face, when he came back in the evening with his tired horse and the paper that he hadn’t delivered, would say:
‘Couldn’t deliver this,’ as he threw the bundle grumpily down to the ground. ‘The butcher was in the slaughterhouse, his wife said she didn’t know anything and wouldn’t take anything. This other one was the wrong address, it’s a shoe factory. Nobody could tell me where this street was.’
We talked ourselves to a standstill complaining about these crooks who wouldn’t recognise formalities or agreements of any kind.
Sometimes Mario and I would both get an order from the same person, and when it was sent to him he would reject it, saying he had got the merchandise from a third person at a better price. Some people were shameless enough to claim they hadn’t ordered anything, and if they didn’t have an excuse they weren’t slow to invent one.
When I thought I had earned sixty pesos in a week I ended up with only twenty-five or thirty.
Oh, the riffraff! The tradesmen, the shopkeepers and the pharmacists! How petty, wanting information and free samples!
In order for them to buy something insignificant like a thousand envelopes that said ‘Magnesia’ or ‘Boric Acid’, there was no option other than to go to see them regularly, bring them samples of paper in advance, show them different examples of type, and all for them to say:
‘We’ll see, come back next week.’
I’ve often thought that it would be possible to write a phylogeny and a psychology of the tradesman, of that man who wears a cap behind the counter, who has a pale face and eyes cold as sheet steel.
It is not enough to show one’s wares!
You have to display a truly mercurial subtlety if you are to sell, you have to choose your words and think your ideas through, to flatter circumspectly, to converse on matters about which you know nothing and in which you do not believe, to become enthusiastic about a trifle, to score a point with a sorrowful gesture, to be vividly interested in things you truly do not give a damn about, to be multiple, flexible and witty, to accept the smallest crumb with gratitude, to refuse to become disconcerted or take the matter personally when someone makes a crude remark, and to suffer, you have to suffer patiently your wasted time, sour and grumpy faces, rude and irritating replies, you have to suffer in order to earn a few centavos, because ‘that’s life’.
And if one were the only person engaged in this… but you also need to understand that on exactly the same spot where we stand and expatiate upon the advantages of entering into business with us have stood many other salesmen offering the same produce under slightly different conditions, something which hands the advantage even further to the purchaser.
How to explain why a man chooses another man from among many for their mutual benefit?
It is no exaggeration to say that material and spiritual relations have been established between the individual and the sales man, an unconscious or simulated relationship based on economic, political, religious and even social ideas, and any sale, even of a packet of needles, except in cases of overwhelming need, presents more difficulties than the expansion of one of Newton’s binomials.
If only that were all!
You also have to learn how to control yourself, how to put up with all the insolence of the petty bourgeois.
In general tradesmen are cunning but dumb, low-class people, people who have made themselves rich by dint of most painful sacrifice, by petty larcenies beyond the reach of the law, by waterings-down that either nobody notices or else everyone tolerates.
The habit of lying has put down roots among this riffraff, people accustomed to dealing with capital in large or small quantities and who are made noble by having taken out loans, something that gives them a veneer of respectability and which therefore generates in them some kind of military spirit, that is to say, makes them accustomed to address their inferiors without respect, in the same way as they talk to strangers who need to deal with them in order to do business.
Oh! How painful they are, the despotic gestures of these moneyed hustlers, who take inexorable note of their earnings behind the Judas windows of their offices; how their ignoble muzzles twitch with murderous instinct as they say:
‘Lay off it, man, we only buy from important companies.’
But you tolerate it, you smile and shake hands… because ‘that’s life’.
Sometimes, when I had finished my round, and if I wanted to stay out for a while, I would go to have a chat with the cart attendant at the Flores fair.
It was a fair like many others.
At the end of the street with whitewashed houses, covered by an ocean of sun, the fair would suddenly appear.
The wind brought a sour smell of vegetables, and the awnings of the stalls shaded the tin counters set up parallel with the pavement in the centre of the street.
I can still see this picture in my mind’s eye.
The fair is two rows of stalls.
One row is made up of butchers, pork butchers, egg sellers and cheesemongers, and the other is made up of people selling vegetables. The column stretches out, shoutingly bright, churrigueresque with colours, with bearded men in shirtsleeves next to the baskets full of vegetables.
The line begins with the fishmongers’ stalls, with the ochre baskets stained by the red of prawns, the blue of the pejerreys, the chocolate colour of the bivalves, the bright lead colour of the winkles, the zinc white of the hake.
Dogs patrol, on the lookout for discarded offal, and the salesmen with their hairy naked arms and an apron covering their chest reach out and take the fish their customers ask for by the tail, open its stomach with a single movement of the knife, sink their fingers into its back to pull out the guts and then cut it in half with a sharp blow.