Album familiar - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

This morning I went shopping. That pastime is perhaps the most hypocritical of all, but, like the store manager said to me, even the shopkeepers have to do something.

The old guard lady took my five thousand dollar bill to protect it while I browsed. Later she walked towards the men's wear area while I went to the book section. The book that I wanted was there. Of course it was there. There were fifty copies on the shelves, and, according to what they told me, a hundred more in storage and a thousand in the publisher's warehouse. It was another one of those books that would never disappear.

I turned around towards the guard lady and saw her across the store, with someone named Juan or Joan or something like that. She was helping him try on a coat. The game was beginning. Furious, I strode over and faced her.

"Where is my five thousand dollars?" I burst out.

"In the register ... please," she answered without turning to look at me.

"The service here is worse every day. I want a book and you have the nerve to sell suits. And you don't even have my five thousand dollars."

"They'll give it to you at the register."

I snorted a few times and turned around indignantly. At the register I was attended to by another woman, even older. I asked for my money and she extended a ten thousand dollar bill.

"Five thousand," I told her refusing the note. "Mine is five thousand and I won't take anything else."

She searched without any hurry and gave it to me, with two one hundred dollar bills stuck to it with gum. I returned to the book section to turn the book I wanted into the day's bestseller. There was nobody else in the area. Only one clerk was in the toy department, and the manager was strolling through the atrium. With Juan or Joan and I, there were six people in the huge department store, designed to hold as many as six thousand people during Christmas season. I left with the book. Without paying, of course. I waved to the old saleswoman on the way out and she responded with a smile.

That night Marquez decided that we'd eat out. When it's his turn to cook, he often decides we should eat out. I don't like to, but on the other hand Perro loves restaurant meals. We loaded everyone up and left so we'd arrive exactly at eight. There were already other parties at the tables, and Marquez disappeared into the kitchen promising a surprise. He had already told me about a recipe exchange he had made with a friend. I feared the worst, because Marquez was capable only of the simplest meals.

There were five parties and, for them, five chefs. It was odd to think how everyone had formed groups after. In general terms, we were five or ten intermingling clusters. Each independent except in food. Our cleanliness, our tastes, they weren't a group matter. But we'd get together to eat communally, like the herds have done forever. That's why we lived close together, often in the same hotel or in a mansion. And on the big nights everyone would go to a restaurant and cook for various groups and talk--always about the same stuff--and we drank, almost always plenty.