Is it good to know the inner workings of things? To know what makes them tick?
I still don’t have an answer for that. I only know that when I went to the hardware store and asked for twenty twelve-millimeter nails and a hammer, brand-name Kramp, the shop assistant told me they hadn’t stocked them for years. The company had closed its local branch three or four years before; she couldn’t remember when exactly.
She started to list other brands, which I listened to as one listens to a far-off murmur. The rumbling of the sea, that’s what I thought of, and I asked her to sell me a couple of planks. If I could feel their weight, if I could hold them in my hands and take them home, it meant I was still a real person.
I walked home, and I have a distinct memory of how, on the way, the afternoon breeze kept messing up a length of my hair that fell across the left side of my forehead. I pushed it back in place a couple of times, and then I let it be.
When I arrived, I went straight to the rear patio. I left the planks on the ground and, leaning my back against the rear wall, sat down to gaze at the space between me and the house. How much breeze had blown across there? For how many millions of years had that space existed?
When finally I went inside, I told my mother I wasn’t hungry and went straight to my room.
XL
Just a few months earlier, I’d been with D, trying to sell products that no longer existed, which was the equivalent of saying that D had lied to me.
What I felt wasn’t anger.
I remembered him saying, so many times, that it was improbable that a house constructed from 80 percent Kramp products would collapse in the event of an earthquake or a tornado, and realized that mine was one of the unfortunate cases that fell within the improbability.
For the earthquake had come, the feared tornado, and my construction, made from 95 percent Kramp products, was now a pile of sticks.
What I felt wasn’t anger, but an emptiness that turned into a black hole. One that fit perfectly inside my other black hole, the one I’d carried within me since visiting D without knowing why. Now I knew.
I sat down to wait for the next call. I knew D was very organized and that, come December, he would look at his diary and see the note he’d jotted down at the beginning of the year: Call M.
On December 1st, at seven o’clock in the evening, the telephone sounded.
I was too tired to be original, so I repeated the same words from the time before. I would be there, in one month exactly, at the station.
D responded, with a similar weariness, that he would be waiting.
XLI
I stuffed only a few items of clothing into the backpack. It was summer, and something within me knew this would be a short trip.
When I got off the train, I saw D at the station and noted that, despite the heat, he was wearing winter clothing.
We went to his house to have some coffee.
I wanted to ask him why he’d said nothing about Kramp products disappearing, nothing about the pistol he’d bought, and nothing about the money he owed me.
But instead I lit a cigarette and said the coffee was excellent.
As if something was urging us on, before midday we took a bus southward and stepped off it in the first town we came to.
I told D that this time I wouldn’t go with him into the hardware store, that I had come solely to keep him company and would wait for him in the town square. I had brought a book with me: Gulliver’s Travels.
D went off with his sample case to try to sell his nonexistent products. Seen from a distance, the hardware store looked unreal to me too.
Half an hour later he came back and sat down beside me.
“How did you go?”
“I sold two-hundred door viewers and collected the amount owing for ninety saws.”
We were silent for a bit. And that was when I saw the mulberry tree and realized we were in the same town square where I’d collapsed from fear years before.
We lit a cigarette, and then another.
For hours that seemed like years, D and I stayed seated, silent.
“Keep it.”
“Keep what.”
“The money.”
And when I finished speaking, I understood I was telling him goodbye.
We had been deeply united by a catalogue of hardware store products: nails, hammers, door viewers, screws. But that catalogue no longer existed.
Everything kept on according to inner workings that we couldn’t stop.
We saw the first star of the night.
Billions of years before, on that same night, the big bang had taken place, and from then on everything drew apart, and continued to draw apart, irretrievably.
Up there, the waning moon was the same one that Neil Armstrong had walked on years before. But other things had changed forever.
My father left me at the station where I’d arrived the same morning. And we said goodbye knowing we would never see each other again.
Surprisingly, the train pulled away on time.
I rested my head on the window.
I fell asleep.
“How to Order the Universe is a dreamscape of a book. In an assured and striking voice, María José Ferrada tells the story of M, a girl who skips school to join her traveling salesman father on the road. Along the way, M witnesses tragedy, desire, secrecy, and grief as she finds her own truths and learns to separate her father’s disappointments from her own. I adored this compelling, wise, and utterly unique coming-of-age tale.”
—TARA CONKLIN, author of The Last Romantics
“Ferrada’s novel has the poetic simplicity and dark wisdom of a fairytale. In it, we experience the machinations of repression during Chile’s dictatorship through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl and, at the same time, through the adult version of this girl, who bears the burden of memory. Over the course of the story, both girl and woman attempt to understand the transience of existence and human connection. Ferrada gifts us with a story that is like an egg: complex in its simplicity, and full of life and mystery. I wanted to hold it close, and with great care.”
—FRANCES DE PONTES PEEBLES, author of The Aír You Breathe
PHOTO: © IGNACIO DE LA CUADRA
MARÍA JOSÉ FERRADA’s children’s books have been published all over the world. How to Order the Universe has been or is being translated into Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, and German, and is also being published all over the Spanish-speaking world. Ferrada has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the City of Orihuela de Poesía, Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía para Niños, the Academia Award for the best book published in Chile, and the Santiago Municipal Literature Award, and is a three-time winner of the Chilean Ministry of Culture Award. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
ELIZABETH BRYER is a translator and writer from Australia. Her translations include Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Americas Prize–winning Blood of the Dawn; Aleksandra Lun’s The Palimpsests, for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant; and José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper. Her debut novel, From Here On, Monsters, is out now through Picador.
READER’S GUIDE
1.Why do you think María José Ferrada wanted to tell this story from M’s precocious, though limited, perspective? If you could read this book from another character’s point of view, how would the story be different?
2.Why do you think the characters are only referred to by their initials?
3.Early on, M says that “my parents designed a learning plan that would allow me to comprehend the things that a child—a girl, in this case—needed in order to make her way in the world. Thus, I began early with a classification of things.” How does M’s relentless categorization of objects and the people around her help her cope with the changing world and challenges she is faced with?
4.How does the photographer, E, change the dynamic of the father/daughter relationship?
5.Much of the book’s prose is rooted in metaphor, such as D’s motto that “every li
fe has its own moon landing.” What does he mean by this, and how does it relate to his own life as a traveling salesman?
6.Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship looms in the background of the novel; how does it inform the everyday lives of the characters in the book?
7.Throughout the story, M’s mother is an “off-screen” character. Why do you think the author makes this choice?
8.M says she thinks of her excursions with her father as “an extension” of her schooling. What does she learn with him that she might not in school? Outside of school, where do you feel you learned the most valuable life lessons?
9.At one point in the book, salesmen share tall tales that get more outlandish with each retelling. In what ways do they, and M, mythologize their work, and how does it compare to reality?
10.Are there other narrators that M reminds you of? What are some of your favorite books narrated by younger voices?
Copyright © 2021 María José Ferrada
English Translation Copyright © 2021 Elizabeth Bryer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Ferrada, María José, 1977- author. | Bryer, Elizabeth, 1986- translator.
Title: How to order the universe : a novel / María José Ferrada ; translated by Elizabeth Bryer.
Other titles: Kramp. English
Description: Portland, Oregon : Tin House, [2021] | Originally published in Spanish as ‘Kramp’.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037761 | ISBN 9781951142308 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781951142315 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ8098.416.E77 K7313 2021 | DDC 863/.7--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037761
First US Edition 2021
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com
Cover image: © AlexRoz / Shutterstock
How to Order the Universe Page 6