Dear Don Julio,
Yesterday I stopped by the hardware store, as I almost always do on Tuesday afternoons, and your son Sebastián told me that after more than twenty years of service you've decided to retire. You had already mentioned to me that you were considering a change, a complete shift in the daily conditions of your existence. So many years running the neighborhood hardware store is a lot, of course, but I didn't know your retirement would be so sudden. Sebastián's words reassure me: you're not sick, far from it. I would have liked us to have said goodbye with a bit more time, in person. Anyway, I hope you don't mind this sincere farewell letter.
The first time I came to the hardware store four years ago, you'd already been there many more years, watching the wave of urban change sweep through this neighborhood like a tornado. I had a simple request: I needed a flathead screwdriver and a hammer. I suppose all beginners come to buy exactly the same thing: the basic tools for human life. The second week I came for the Phillips head screwdriver, which was what I really needed. You looked at me with paternal understanding.
The week after that I went to look for a lightbulb for a lamp, because the light switch in my kitchen wasn't working. Since I didn't know the model and couldn't find it on the old peeling socket of the lamp, I brought the whole lamp. It amused you, and that's when we introduced ourselves, first and last names. You, Don Julio, were my first anchor in this neighborhood. I don't know how this time passed so quickly, but there you always were, busy with your accounts and distributing screws in boxes of different sizes.
Later, when I had gained some confidence, I dared to do more. I came to buy wire, pliers, adhesive. I wanted to fix the lamp, because when I took it back from the hardware store I dropped it on the sidewalk on my way home, and the wires got a bit bent.
You asked me if I had a ventilated place to work with the adhesive, if I lived in a house with a patio. Of course not, Don Julio, I confessed—I live in a three-room apartment on the fourth floor. My grandmother left it to me; she died right there in the chair where I sit to watch television, surrounded by her old woman's furniture. Surely you must have met her at some point, or who knows, because she didn't go out much. I'm very sorry about your grandmother, you told me. I wasn't so sorry.
I grew up alone with her, because my mother abandoned us and whoever was my father never appeared, not even in name. We were alone on the planet. My grandmother wasn't an affectionate person, but honestly I had no one to compare her to. You can imagine, Don Julio, that I grew up taking care of all my own needs, I never had anyone to ask for anything, I don't know how to ask for help. I find it hard to trust others, and that's why this trust I have in you is deep, it's lasting, it's enough for me to confess all these intimacies that you perhaps didn't want to know, because your job was just to sell me the door stops and brushes I needed to fix my apartment, which seemed to be falling apart.
The old woman kicked me out of the house as soon as I turned eighteen, she said "what do you plan to do?" and of course I hadn't thought about anything, in fact I was resigned to taking care of her for the rest of her life. But it turned out my grandmother didn't need anyone to take care of her. I know you wouldn't have done that because I see Sebastián and he's a good man, one who someone took care of and who will therefore take care of you now that you've retired. Later I understood that was the pact many children make with many parents, one I could never enter into. Instead, I looked for a job in the classified ads of another province, and as soon as I found one I left here, and didn't return until they called me from the police station to come take care of the death and the apartment.
After the lamp incident I came to ask you for a nail, to hang a small picture. You gave it to me as a gift, of course. The following week I stopped by for another nail, because the first one bent when I was trying to hang the only thing I've had in my entire life, a small landscape from the province that my boss gave me on Secretary's Day, when I worked in a dental office. I liked that job. I went every day very well groomed and in medium-heeled shoes, and at my small desk I organized files, received mail, called patients to remind them of their appointments. It was at that small desk that somehow the call from the police station reached me, as if a hole opened in the floor insisting on sucking me back toward the past. I had no choice but to open a new file on the computer and start writing my resignation letter.
A few weeks later I remember coming for wood sealant and sandpaper, to repair the multiple inexplicable holes in the dining room table. In addition to the death chair I already mentioned, the apartment contained the table with holes and a giant sideboard full of heavy antique ceramic plates. My grandmother had left everything arranged with the neighborhood funeral home, all paid for. I came to sign papers, nothing more. As soon as I opened the apartment door I felt I was profoundly alone again, that this house full of lonely old lady things.
I was able to get work in the city center, because where there's a dentist there's always a need for a secretary. And with that resolved, I set out to make another life for myself in this same space where I'd already been unhappy once. The day I was taking out my grandmother's clothes in a big garbage bag I met the neighbor from the apartment across the hall. She gave me some plants for the balcony that faces the central courtyard, so I stopped by your hardware store to buy a barrier so the rats wouldn't get in and eat my bulbs, now that I had bulbs. You recommended a very good fertilizer that has the advantage of killing rats.
In the summer I came to buy a doorstop, to leave it open so the breeze could flow through the rooms, gradually getting rid of the dampness. Just two weeks later I bought a fan from you, because it wasn't enough to remove so many years of misery.
After a few months I dared to ask you, Don Julio, if there might be a way to remove that horrible sideboard from my living room. The next day Sebastián arrived with his small truck, and he and two other young men took the enormous moth-ridden monstrosity out of my life, four floors down to the street. I invited the neighbor from across the hall to throw each of those horrible plates on the floor with me, and then I swept up the pieces in a pleasant silence.
That same day I decided I would fix the two bathroom tiles that had broken. You had some that weren't exactly the same as mine, but they would work. I was very grateful that you explained carefully how to remove the broken ones, how to apply the adhesive, how to make sure the separations between the tiles were right. I was so proud of my work that the following Tuesday I stopped by the hardware store determined to buy a gallon of rose-colored paint to paint my bedroom, so it would no longer be the same room where I had slept as an abandoned girl.
You very prudently dissuaded me from fixing the mechanism of my toilet pump myself when it stopped working, and begged me to call the plumber again the time I arrived determined to fix an explosive leak under the kitchen sink myself. Those pieces of advice of yours, Don Julio, have possibly been the only ones anyone has given me, and I thank you for them as if you were guiding me on what to do with my destiny, on how not to die like a lonely old woman in this chair in front of the television.
Don Julio, I can tell you with complete sincerity that between my desire to be happy and your wise advice, I have rebuilt my entire life in practical and easy steps, with simple tools and a bit of a "do it yourself" spirit. That at night I sleep alone in my pink-walled bedroom, that the kitchen light switch works, the balcony door closes without drafts. I feel that the apartment has stopped deteriorating, one repair at a time. Now I have coffee with my neighbor, I work in the dentist's office, I'll keep stopping by to greet Sebastián on Tuesdays and I'll ask him about you. That was all, Don Julio. I wish you much rest, and if I send you that hug, imagine it as if it came from a daughter who found you when she needed you.