Read Online Open Door by Iosi Havilio - Free Book Online

mine regretful. But I can tell that she likes me, or that she’s bored, or something like that, because she changes her mind straight away.
    ‘Do you need much?’
    ‘A packet of coarse salt.’
    ‘Come in,’ says the girl, and enters the shop, raising more dust. I follow her, a metre behind. Inside, it’s cool and dimly lit, ideal to rest my eyes and my head for a while, worn out as they are from so much sun. A light, crystalline dust with a taste of pollen envelops the atmosphere. It’s there and it’s not there, I can feel it, but I can’t see it, like a spent cloud at ground level.
    It’s a typical general supply shop, but quite a bit smaller and much poorer than those that you still see in some villages, imitating those of days gone by. Even so, despite its precarious construction, it has that characteristic spirit of a cosmic market that conveys a sense of powerful abundance. Against the back wall, behind the counter, shelves reach to the roof, fashioned from piles of bricks and planks of wood, forming niches of different sizes in which the less usual merchandise is kept. It’s not that the items are unusual in themselves, the odd thing is their coexistence. Their proximity to each other makes them absurd. There are brooms, flippers, bulk and bagged flour, candles, nails, screws, nuts, whips, household and garden tools, inflatable dolls, bundles of wood, balls, portable barbecues, lifejackets, two bicycle wheels, a cement mixer, noodles, two fishing rods with red floaters, bottles of gin, liqueurs and demijohns, an old mobile phone with a broken antenna, more balls, sunglasses, stale bread, three carrots, six potatoes, a tomato, various pairs of espadrilles hanging from a string of garlic, all together and in full view.
    The girl climbed a high stepladder and took a moment to find the salt, which, in the end, she found by her hand.
    ‘I don’t serve very often,’ she apologised, ‘it’s my dad and brother who work here.’
    I watched her in silence and now that I could see her better, without the sun on her face, there was something in her gaze, in her precise hand gestures, that I couldn’t put my finger on, something that made her rather unusual.
    I asked her for a box of matches, just so that I could look at her a bit longer.
    She had a slim back that contrasted with her hips, which were very developed for her age. She was wearing faded trousers, full of patches and mud stains.
    ‘Anything else?’ she asks and I stay quiet as long as I can, just for the sake of it, I want to see what she does. She gets nervous, glancing at me, she bites her lips until she ends up smiling. She reveals her teeth, very small and white, all the same size, like the matching pieces of a game. I pay for the salt and the matches and I’m pushing aside the plastic strips when I hear her voice again.
    ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’
    ‘No, I’m not from round here. I’m passing through,’ I say. It’s about right.
    The girl comes to the door and waves her hand vigorously, as if we were never to see each other again.

TEN
    It’s Monday morning and Jaime is feeling much better, although he still has a touch of fever. I prepare a mug of maté and take it to him in bed. It’s best, we agree, that he doesn’t go out until his temperature drops. I suggest calling a doctor, but he’s almost annoyed by that. It’s not serious enough to call a doctor, he says.
    ‘Don’t you have to go back?’ Jaime asks, beginning to sense that I don’t, and hurriedly adds:
    ‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
    He asks me to go to the hospital to drop off some papers at the office. They’re time-sheets, he explains without my asking and adds: So that I get paid. He gives me the keys of the pick-up and a few instructions about how to get there.
    As I’m leaving, he stresses, in case I’m in any doubt:
    ‘You can take all the time you want.’
    •
    I pull up in front of the barrier at the hospital entrance and wait