The other day I went to buy paper from a stationery store near my house and found that it was no longer there. A sign was telling me that a store would open there very soon. “Sculpture Nail Salon”. go for god I really liked that stationery, or rather, I really like all stationery. I don’t know if stationery fetishism is listed as a diagnosed disorder in psychiatry guidelines, but if it does – and I’m sure it does – I suffer from this honorable pathology. I like stores filled with stationery with shelves filled with felt-tip pens, printer cartridges, erasers, paper clips, staples, file folders, folders, envelopes, labels, and sharpeners (oh, stores where you can still get a nice metallic pencil sharpener!). That stationery was: modest, small, dark, comfortable. Although I have never seen the photocopier, I still made a photocopy. It didn’t have a huge range of equipment – not a place where a fetishist could get instant ecstasy by playing a musical instrument.Petrus 224 to the stapler or a little Milan 430 tires-, but there was what you were looking for. And they had very good hours, including on the weekends.
Two Argentines, father and son, carried stationery. They were sullen, not very talkative, introverted people, but they took very good care of you and ran their business efficiently. They certainly didn’t waste words or greet you enthusiastically. They greeted you with a dry “Good morning” and dismissed you with an equally dry “Good morning”. They didn’t waste their time talking about the heat or the rain or the tourists. They were there to sell office supplies, not to entertain the idle and unemployed. But they were there near the corner, with the metal shutters closed, when most of the shops on the street were already closed. Baba always wore a dark tie, which he only took off on the hottest days of summer. His son, who was more modern—or less respectful of the rules of business—would wear a checkered shirt.
As far as I know of father and son, they emigrated from Argentina a few years ago—fifteen, twenty—when things went bad in their country. Those who mocked and despised immigrants must have experienced some of the things that I thought this father-son went through. I don’t know if they have a stationery shop in Argentina and if they want to keep the business there, but it seems to me they have. These things appear in the way they name the textures of the erasers or the colors of the felt-tip pens. “That Edding 1200 pen only has red, magenta or neon pink,” My dad once said we were looking for a felt-tip pen in a shade that wasn’t in the catalogs (fetishist stuff I guess). “Neon pink?” I replied. “What’s that?” The man shrugged. It was clear he wasn’t going to waste his time explaining such an obvious thing to an idiot.
Even so, they managed to open their small stationery shop in the country where they were going to start their new lives. The job took five or six years, as I recall, until I found him in broad daylight with the shutters closed and the sign announcing the Sculpture Nail Salon. What about father and son now? Neither was young, and neither should have much confidence or energy. How many times in life can you start from scratch? And where can you go when you realize that you failed the second time and this time will be the last? Now that his father had become one of those vagrants who pissed him off so much, would he still wear his job-honored dark tie to go buy bread?
It’s funny, but there is no romantic epic in the life of this father and son. After all, they were – or rather they were – petty-bourgeois merchants, people famous for being vile and insignificant (the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism, such people). This is exactly why writers, film directors and playwrights will tell thousands of stories about slums, the expelled from their homes, the disabled and illegal immigrants, but this lost stationery will not attract anyone’s attention. There are very few novels that actually talk about the lives of people who have a small business. I can only think of “l’adroguer Antoni” diamond square or store owner dependantBy the great Bernard Malamud, who was inspired by the grocery store his father, a Jewish immigrant, owned in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. No, there is nothing epic in the life of a man who still wears a dark tie to take care of clips, cartridges, and felt-tip pens. So if they want, they can go to the “Carved Nails Salon”.