“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter if you make the bed or not. It’s your room, Enrique.”
I thought we were understanding each other, but he looked down at the floor, even more embarrassed, and said, “Sorry, it won’t happen again. Thank you.”
After a while, Enrique also stopped reorganizing the puzzles and board games. He placed the boxes on the upper shelves alongside the model kits, and retrieved them only if a customer asked for them specifically.
“You have to talk to him,” Mirta said. “People are going to think we don’t have puzzles anymore. Just because he doesn’t use them doesn’t mean they’re not for sale.”
But I didn’t say anything. Things were going well with the business, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
Over time, he started to reject certain foods. He would eat only meat, mashed potatoes, and pasta with simple sauces. If we gave him anything else, he would push it away, so Mirta started cooking only the things that he liked.
Every once in a while the customers would give him coins, and when he had saved enough he bought from the store a blue plastic cup with a convertible car in relief. He used it at breakfast, and in the morning, when reporting the state of his bed and his room, he began to add, “I also washed my cup.”
Mirta told me worriedly that one afternoon she’d been watching Enrique play with a boy who’d come into the store, and he suddenly grabbed a superhero figure and refused to share it. When the boy started to cry, Enrique stomped off and locked himself in the storage room.
“You know how much I care about Enrique,” my wife said that night, “but we just can’t let him get away with things like that.”
Although he still had his genius when it came to reorganizing the merchandise, over time he also stopped playing with the little articulated dolls and the Legos, and he archived them, along with the board games and model kits, on the now overcrowded upper shelves. The range of toys that he still reorganized and kept within the customers’ reach was so small and monotonous that it barely attracted the youngest children.
“Why do you put those things up so high, Enrique?” I asked him.
He looked disconsolately at the shelves, as if, in effect, they were too high for him as well. He didn’t answer; he was quieter all the time.
Little by little, sales went back down. Enrique’s rainbows, displays, and castles lost the splendor of those first days, when almost all the toys participated in his radical remodeling. Now everything happened at knee-level and below. Enrique was almost always hunched over or kneeling in front of a new pile of toys that was ever smaller and more amorphous. The place had started to empty of customers. Soon we didn’t need Mirta’s help anymore, and Enrique and I were left alone.
I remember the last afternoon I saw Enrique. He hadn’t wanted his lunch, and he was wandering up and down the aisles. He looked sad and lonely. I felt, in spite of everything, that Mirta and I owed him a lot. I wanted to cheer him up, so I climbed the moving ladder—which I hadn’t used since Enrique had started helping me in the store—to reach the highest shelves. I chose a model kit for him, an imported one of an old-fashioned train. The box said that it had more than a thousand pieces, and, if you added batteries, its lights worked. It was the best model train we had, and it cost a fortune. But Enrique deserved it, and I wanted to give it to him. I climbed down with the gift and called to him from the counter. He was coming back from the farthest shelves, a violet stuffed animal—I think it was a rabbit—hanging from his right hand. Head down, he stopped and looked at me. He looked small among the shelves. I called to him again but he suddenly crouched down, as though startled, and stayed there. It was a strange movement that I didn’t understand. I left the train on the counter and approached him slowly to see if something was wrong.
“Enrique, are you all right?”
He was crying, hugging his knees. The rabbit had fallen to one side, facedown on the floor.
“Enrique, I want to give you—”
“I don’t want anyone to hit me anymore,” he said.
I wondered if something had happened that I hadn’t seen—if some customer had given him trouble or if he’d had another fight with a child.
“But Enrique, no one . . .”
I knelt beside him. I wished I had the model train right there; I was sure it would be something special and it hurt me to see him so upset. Mirta would have known what to do, how to soothe him. Then the door to the street opened violently, almost slamming against the wall. Both of us froze. From the floor, we saw, under the shelves, two high heels advancing down the next aisle.
“Enrique!” It was a strong, authoritative voice.
The high heels stopped and Enrique looked at me in fear. He seemed to want to tell me something, and he grabbed my arm.
“Enrique!”