Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page A

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