Over the past two days the city has returned to a summer that, judging by the increasing heat, would naturally be called intense and, for the same reason, temporary. The rain earlier that week, on top of the humidity it brought with it, had given renewed life to the vegetation: first the water had cleansed the foliage, and then, penetrating the earth over two consecutive and almost full days and nights, had helped the sap to feed the branches, rising and extending to each leafy tip, to every tiny filament at the farthest ends from the trunk, and as a result of this secret, periodic trajectory between the earth and the water, the light and the air, appeared, in passing, traces of reddish or tender green buds, little flowers opened temporarily, and branches loaded, once again, with new, firm, and very green leaves. Even the people on the street have let themselves be conquered by this extension of the summer, and the deserted streets reveal that the sense to not be seen on the street until at least after six, when the sun begins to fall, is now intrinsic to the city’s inhabitants, always alert, though the summer may have passed, to the menace of the heat. Everyone who’s braved the outdoors, at least in the streets far from the city center, now walks on the western sidewalk, in the shade, and if they’re forced to cross they do so at the very last moment, risking as little time in the sun as possible. As he pulls out, the air conditioning starts to hum, and Nula advances slowly down the empty street, staying close to the curb, unsure yet which route he’ll choose to the hypermarket: because the space that separates him from it could roughly coincide with the surface of a right triangle, the two most direct options from his house are to travel the catheti, which is to say, drive straight to the boulevard, turn east, and drive the full length of the boulevard to the bridge and then continue along the straight highway that in a certain sense extends the boulevard all the way to the supercenter and beyond, to La Guardia and the Paraná fork, or he could choose the hypotenuse, which is to say the port road, and because it’s still before five he decides to drive through the center, and so, somewhat randomly, following the impulse of the moment, he turns at this or that street, always to the north or to the east, driving into the downtown that, in fact, for a sunny April day, around four thirty, is practically deserted. Because the fall business schedules are already in effect, most businesses are still open, though for the most part they’re empty, and very few people get off of the buses that come from the outskirts, advancing almost at a crawl, one behind the other, down particular streets. Nula knows that it’s not only the heat that drives the people from the downtown, but also the supercenter, which, though deserted during the first part of the week, is transformed, over the weekend, into the principal attraction in the region.
When he turns onto the avenue he accelerates slightly, passes a couple of trucks — the second one, painted red, has the words VISIT HELVECIA, FOR THE GOLDEN DORADO printed in large, black letters on the trailer — and moves ahead, alone, toward the bridge. Coming out of the bridge onto the highway, he looks, through the gap left by the suspension bridge after it fell during one of the last major floods, at the large circle of water known as the lagoon, which he was contemplating that morning from the empty bar in Guadalupe, and though, for the moment, the full length of the surface, seen from a distance, appears to be made of a luminous, fractured substance, the quality of the light has changed since this morning. Closer, on the opposite shore from the waterfront, at the Piedras Blancas beach, which had been deserted the past few weeks, he sees several bathers splashing in the water and others, stretched out on the sand, tanning in the sun. The short, dark green station wagon, bought second-hand a couple of years ago with the money he earned from selling wine, leaves behind the road bridge and, accelerating, starts down the four-lane asphalt road that everyone simply calls the highway, and which narrows over the next three or four kilometers until it splits to the right toward Paraná, and to the east, along the coastal road. But the hypermarket is right there, barely a kilometer from the bridge, on the right hand side of the road.
Though the parking lot isn’t yet full, he has to drive around a couple of times before parking because there isn’t a single spot left in the first three or four rows closest to the main entrance. There are lots of cars from around the region that have been parked there all day, while their owners run errands downtown, leaving the shopping at the supercenter, the movies, and other activities for later in the afternoon, and even that night. The specialists who built the supercenter—the autonomous society to which they belonged must have been headquartered in the United States, in Europe, or in Switzerland, for instance, or in some other fiscal paradise like Monte Carlo, Luxemburg, or the Canary Islands — were not concerned in the least with the swamp on which they constructed it; after all, Venice and Saint Petersburg had been built on swamps, and they hadn’t sunk yet. The primary function of the supercenter was to create a strategic point where customers from many points around the region could converge; although a couple of bus lines from the city extended their routes across the river for the first time in the history of local public transportation, the city’s inhabitants would be grossly mistaken if they thought that the supercenter was intended exclusively for their use. The strategists hoped to attract (and they were quite successful at it) clients from upward of sixty or seventy kilometers away, and even beyond, along the coastal road, the route that runs north along the west bank of the Paraná and its tributaries, but also, across the Colastiné bridge and the underwater tunnel, several kilometers after the fork, people from Entre Ríos province, on the eastern shore, not only from Paraná, the capital, but also from important cities to the south and east of the capital. From the other side of the city, to the north, to the south, and especially to the west, the towns and cities of the plain also send their processions of the faithful every weekend. Every social class sends its delegations; everyone that has something to spend, however little that may be, spends it at the supercenter, where even the most intimate desires are anticipated, given that the hypermarket is intended to replace, by incorporation, every kind of business, large or small. Every new product that appears on the market has a place there, and unlike specialized businesses, in the supercenter every novelty is like a new song added to a performance. When, for instance, endives appear in the produce section, the customers rejoice and offer their commentary; and when a product that’s usually in stock is missing, the winds of dismay, if not panic, begin to blow, as they say, among the customers. For those who have nothing to spend, which is practically the majority, the hypermarket also has a feast prepared: every so often, tired of seeing the circus from outside, they take it by force, attempting, diligently, to demolish it, and, ultimately, it’s overrun.