Everyday on my way home I stop in at a grocery store on Valdemara St.
It's open until 11 p.m., so it's a useful place for me to pick up the essentials, which mostly consist of red wine and cigarettes, although I would also add avocados, oranges, walnuts and milk (two percent fat) to this list.
The store is entirely staffed by women. Indeed, as far as I can figure it out, there is a permanent staff of five women, who work on alternating week-long shifts. In truth, two women could probably manage to run the place, since most of them never seem to do anything much except hang out by the fish counter and gossip.
I rather like one of the women who works there and I always gaze meaningfully into her eyes, while weighing up two different kinds of baked beans at the same time.
She's probably in her mid-20s, reads gossip magazines and watches mindless television shows every evening. Or maybe not. Maybe she avidly reads Heiddeger when she gets home, after listening to a Bartok string quartet or two, that is.
To tell the truth, I have something of a fetish for shop workers. There is something sublime, in the Kantian sense of the word, in the non-contact that occurs at the cash register. Without wishing to sound absurd, I actually greatly look forward to my evening visit to the store. Yes, I even sometimes prolong it by a few minutes, by carefully studying different spices that I have no wish to buy or examining different brands of corn flakes that I will never eat.
And I know Julia (yes, I learned her name) enjoys it too. In the tedium of her day, there is doubtless a stream of familiar faces that she and her colleagues can gossip and laugh about.
As for me, I am doubtless the "weird foreigner." I recently wanted to buy a bottle of wine, although it was about 10:06 p.m. But Julia adamantly refused to break the law on my behalf. I tried to convince her that time was but an abstraction, a cyclical narrative of no real consequence, but she just looked at me strangely. "No," she said with a smoldering look. I even tried to bribe her, but she wouldn't have a santim of it.
I hope that Julia is happy. I certainly enjoy our moments of nonexistent contact, and it's fascinating to imagine what she makes of it. I believe that the moral onus is on us to be extremely kind to store workers, considering how abysmally they are paid. Perhaps I should see if they have any job openings for me on my way home from work tonight.
