He walked away from me with his eyes fixed on the floor, making a slight movement with his index finger, as if he wanted to shush someone but felt too humiliated to do it. I was going to tell him how there was just an old armchair in the storage room to sleep on, and to give him some advice about the toilet handle, but I didn’t want to bother him anymore. I let him be and left without saying goodbye.
The next day, I got to the store a few minutes early; I was relieved to see that the shop’s shutters were up. Only once I was inside did I realize that leaving Duvel there alone had been a tremendous mistake. Nothing was where it belonged. If at that moment a customer had come in and asked for a particular superhero figure, it would have taken me all morning to find it. I remember thinking about Mirta and how I would explain this to her, and also the sudden exhaustion I felt as I calculated the hours it would take me to reorganize everything. Then I realized something else, something so strange that, for a moment, I couldn’t take it in: Duvel had reorganized the store chromatically. Modeling clay, decks of cards, crawling baby dolls, pedal cars—they were all mixed together and arranged by color. In the display cases, along the aisles, on the shelves: a subtly shifting rainbow stretched from one end of the store to the other. I still remember that sight as the beginning of disaster. He has to go, I thought. I have to get this man out of the store right now.
Duvel was looking at me. He was very serious, standing there in front of his great rainbow. I was trying to find the words to say what I wanted when his eyes lit on something behind me. I turned toward the street to see what it was. Outside the window, a woman and her two children were looking into the store. Their hands were pressed to the glass like visors as they talked excitedly about what they saw inside, as if something marvelous were moving through the aisles. It was the start of the school day, and at that hour the block was full of children and parents in a hurry. But they couldn’t help stopping in front of the windows, and a crowd grew. By noon, the store was packed: never had business been as good as it was that morning. It was hard to find the things that people asked for, but soon I discovered that I had only to name an item and Duvel would nod and run to get it. He located things with an efficient ease I found disconcerting.
“Call me by my first name,” he told me at the end of that long day of work, “if that’s all right with you.”
* * *
The color arrangement drew attention to items that had never stood out before. For example, the green swimming flippers followed the squeaky frogs that occupied the final ranks of turquoise, while the puzzles depicting glaciers—maroon at the earthen base of the photograph—brought the rainbow full circle by joining their snowy peaks with volleyballs and stuffed white lions.
The store didn’t close for siesta that day, or any of the following days, and little by little, we started pushing back our closing time. Enrique slept in the store from then on. Mirta agreed that we should set up a space for him in the storage room. At first he had to make do with a mattress on the floor, but soon we found a bed. And once or twice a week, during the night, Enrique reorganized the store. He set up scenes with the giant building blocks; he modified the interior light by constructing intricate walls of toys against the windows; he built castles that stretched across the aisles. It was useless to offer him a salary; he wasn’t interested. “It’s best if I just stay here,” he’d say. “Better than a salary.”
He didn’t leave the store, or, at least, not that I ever saw. He ate what Mirta sent him: packed meals that started out as slices of bread with cold cuts in the evenings, and later became elaborate lunches and dinners.
Enrique no longer went near the model kits he used to love so much. He put them on the store’s highest shelves and there they stayed, always. They were the only things that remained in one spot. Now he preferred puzzles and board games. In the mornings, if I arrived early, I’d find him sitting at the table with a glass of milk, playing with two colors of Chinese checkers or fitting the last pieces of a large fall landscape into place. He’d grown quieter, but he never lost his attentiveness toward the customers. He got into the habit of making his bed in the mornings and cleaning the table and sweeping the floor after he ate. When he was done, he came over to me or to Mirta—who, because of the extra business, had started working behind the counter—and said, “I made my bed,” or “I finished sweeping,” or even “I finished what I had to do.” And it was that manner of his—obsequious, as Mirta called it—that made us start to worry, somehow.
* * *
One morning, I found that he had built a small zoo on the table using dolls, farm animals, and Legos. He was drinking his glass of milk while he opened the gate for the horses and made them gallop, one by one, over to a dark sweater that served as a mountain. I greeted him and went to the counter to start working. When he came over to me he seemed embarrassed.
“I already made the bed,” he said, “and I finished what—”