He saw the sign one afternoon, hanging from a yellow iron gate. He stopped to read it and immediately felt as though he were looking in a mirror. The sign hung at a bit of a slant from a string attached to a hook. They were looking for a sereno, a guard. He muttered to himself, confirming his aptitude, that he was a serene person; it was the word that suited him best. He thought of his salvation and even promised that, if they would have him, he would make the ultimate sacrifice: giving up sex and the bottle. They took him, though it was to perform a task whose routine offered no chance of any real change. On the other hand, he thought almost immediately, nothing about it required him to give anything up, nor was anyone asking him to; later on, if the opportunity arose, he would think about it. It was a storehouse that served as a depot. Upon entering, one would have to wait for his eyes to adjust in order to make out the stacked boxes of food, hidden in the dark. On days when the sun was strong, a brutal heat would descend from the metal roof, while in the mornings that same structure was filled with the crispness of a hangar, to all appearances incapable of heating up. At first, they only stored noodles, in cases of twenty-five packets or in sixty-pound bags, to be sold by weight; later they expanded their scope and began to carry tomatoes, grains, and canned goods.

The calm would be interrupted on certain afternoons. In the midst of the silence, Grino would hear an unusually loud noise: an approaching truck. For a moment, the sound of the brakes would drown out the noise of the motor. The driver would get out, knock two times on a panel on the gate, and turn to face the street while he waited to be let in. Grino would slide the doors open and, when it was a big delivery, would help the driver back his truck in. Then they would slowly unload it all, carrying the cases to the back of the storehouse, where there was some space along the wall. They would pass each other halfway, one coming and the other going, but their eyes would not meet. Once they were done unloading, Grino would do the count — twice: once horizontally and once vertically. If the numbers matched, he was satisfied. Then they would climb into the cab and would have a cigarette while they looked forward, that is, at the street in front of them and the house across the way, through which — when the door was open — Grino could always see a girl climbing a tree. As soon as he put out his cigarette, the driver would start the engine; since Grino smoked more slowly, he would throw the butt out the window and sign a sheet of paper with the number of cases that had just been delivered. A busy day presented events like these, but this kind of bustle was uncommon: mostly, his days were spent waiting.

He left at six, when the next shift arrived. At that hour, in the winter, the neighborhood was getting ready for nightfall. Despite the lack of activity, Grino never got bored: laying back against a mat tarp or a stack of boxes, or sitting in the only chair, opposite a small table where he would rest his mate and whatever undated magazine he was reading, he spent his days thinking about the same things, usually from the past; events or memories that did not necessarily belong to him, but which could have happened to his relatives, neighbors, acquaintances. There comes a time at which it becomes pointless to situate memories; later, it becomes impossible. Grino found that the clearest memories, those that offered the greatest promise of revelation and which ended up having the greatest eloquence, were the most unexpected ones; a scene, an image that secured its place among the clutter of his mind by virtue of patience and languor, until it emerged from the disorderly tangle of the past and imposed itself with concise simplicity. His memories were not separated from anyone else’s; though they did not share a common past, origins are so concealed by memory that the ownership, the origin, of one event or another represented only a trivial nuance. Sometimes he also wondered about the cases of noodles, which would sometimes arrive with one packet too many or one too few. It was a mystery that left him paralyzed — all possible explanations seemed hypothetical and unconvincing — but whose repetition, like the persistent unevenness of the table on which he leaned, signaled the existence of a message directed at him, and him alone.

Grino was also a secret alcoholic; he only drank at home. “You wouldn’t really understand,” M’s father said. Though at first he had been ashamed, his secretiveness was not due entirely to this. He felt that alcohol was incompatible with company, that drinking only worked in solitude. His house, the walls of which he had indifferently been covering for years, cluttering them with clippings from old magazines, almanacs, and with little images of saints — a graphic tangle, the exact meaning and names of which escaped him — echoed the abandon with which he tried, night after night, to disappear into the naively clandestine nature of his drinking. A force from within him allowed this squalor to remain as it was; as such, it was critical that it never manifest itself completely. (They say that people have reserves of hope, of will, of dignity, et cetera, but it would be more accurate to say that they have reserves of malevolence, indolence, and degeneration.) If one saw him as a desperate man, it would seem obvious that he teetered on the verge of desperation, yet that word vanishes as soon as he is seen in another light: simply as a worker.

He drank the same thing for years: the same amount of the same drink. He thought back on the children as they were growing up; the neighbors’ kids, whose heads he would pat every morning, and who would get a coin or two from him every now and then. They were adults now, many of them had their own children, and when he would run into them they would speak as equals, with a slight air of mystery. And yet, he thought, clutching the neck of the bottle at midnight, they grew up and I’m still here, drinking the same amount. These associations were arbitrary and had an element of self-pity to them, but he also felt — though this was a product of desperation — that his consistency deserved to be rewarded, and that this reward should be the prolongation of his routine. He buried his empty bottles out behind the house. Later, when there was no space left under the ground, or when he lacked the strength or the motivation to dig, he began to leave them scattered against the wire fence. The bottles formed fairly tall mounds with broad bases; during the summer, mosquitoes would breed in the water that collected inside them. It was unsettling to see so many, with the same faded label and the same colored glass, making up an undefined — but nonetheless clear and uniform — mass. In this way, something as intangible as a routine would manifest itself with all the materiality of a habit. “Just imagine: one bottle every day, over years and years of drinking,” M’s father elaborated. Grino started in shortly after coming home from dinner. He walked the five blocks from the diner thinking about whatever came to mind, a series of provisional ideas and associations absorbed and shaped by the certainty that, no matter what he might think, what he would do when he got home was open — naturally, as though it were an accidental deflection of his will — his flask, as he called it, assigning benign powers to each new bottle.

There was one fantasy that sometimes calmed him down: that of controlling reality, saying that he didn’t need to drink, that he just wanted to. This allowed him to get up and walk around, to see himself as something else or, rather, something better. After about two hours, when he reached the height of his arousal, he would masturbate. Bitches, bitches, he would repeat, rubbing himself violently and brandishing the bottle in his free hand. At those moments, just as on his walks or in the storehouse, he thought of nothing in particular. He fixed his gaze straight ahead without actually looking at anything. It had been a long time since he had pictured a specific woman; he thought instead about something at once precise and undefined: a parahuman category, part of reality, a universal female type. Bitches, bitches, he would mutter, meaning no offense; he imagined, suspended in the air, a savage femininity in stark contrast to his restrained masculinity. When he finished, he would let out a few deep breaths, less from pleasure than confusion, and the alcohol would gradually stop splashing around in the bottle; the movements of his arm were nervous, electric twitches of the pressure that had finally been relieved. And yet, strangely, he drank from a glass. “I say strange the way one might say peculiar, because during his drinking hours he never let go of that bottle, though every now and then he would forget about the glass.” He did not let go of it because he saw in it a genuine importance: the glass was circumstantial — the way one might say, “There are plenty of glasses”—but the bottle was unique. Long before, Grino had read something in one of his illustrated magazines that had stayed with him: the number of bowls, vessels, and containers used by a kitchen was a function of its complexity. Glass, bottle, and sex formed, for him, a complex system that was one part private ceremony and one part daily ritual. The vague charm of the night arose from this duality and continued its work anonymously in the crystalline mounds out back. Between swigs, he might put the glass down on the table half full, but he never let go of the bottle. He went to bed when the liquor ran out. Weighed down by depression and listlessness, he stretched out on his bed and slowly relaxed his fingers, letting the bottle fall to the floor, where it stayed. In the morning, the first thing he would do after waking up was cast his eyes over empty container from the night before: he needed to verify the memory, the guide to the past. He experienced the fleeting clarity that prefigures a moment of recognition: once it has come into being but before it is fully formed. He would see the bottle and immediately remember. There was a kinship between him and the air that had replaced the liquid inside it: a solidarity that joined his confusion to the transparency contained within the glass, which seemed to render it illusory.