A NOT SO GOOD SALESMAN

This is the City Hall building of Guayaquil, a jewel of 19th century architecture.



The year 1959 went by quickly. My school performance was only OK, I still did not do very well in Inorganic Chemistry (my brain was almost locked to this kind of science), but I passed it anyway, and, by May 1960, I started my Fifth year of high school. Soon I was going to be 18, I felt that I really was a man by age and responsibilities, and, at the end of that year, my year end resolution was that I was going to return to my high academic standards as had been the case until 1957. I was going to really take studying seriously. I had disappointed my mom in the first place by flunking my fourth year in high school, I had no excuses and neither I tried to find one, but more than anything else, I disappointed myself, I couldn’t live with the fact that I flunked, I still don’t feel comfortable when I have to talk about it, I still feel ashamed of it, I still feel like I shouldn’t have done it that bad, I could have done it better if I had just taken this matter a bit more seriously, but I didn’t. I feel like I still have a nail in my shoe. Maybe after I have made my confession in this memoir I may feel a little better about it. I hope so, anyway. The fact of the matter is that the years 1958 and 1959 where, perhaps, the years I matured the most in many ways, but mainly in the way I got to see and perceive the world around me and my own role in the context. I did mature in these two years, perhaps not in all ways, but in many ways that have come to be very important in my life.

In May 1961 I was promoted from the position of collector, to the position of book salesman in the book store. It was an honor that I appreciated but that proved not to be what I expected in terms of pay and peace of mind. As a salesman, I had to dress up with a suit and tie (which was expensive, to begin with), but it also proved to me that among my many limitations, I did not have the capacity to convince people to buy the books I was selling, at least not to the upper and mid class people of Guayaquil. At the end of my first quarter as a book salesman, I had made commissions on sales about one half worth of what I was making as a collector, while I had doubled my expenses. After two quarters as a books salesman I came to the conclusion that “selling was not my line of business;” I was just not the type of person who could make a living from selling things, at least not selling books, period. But, since I had to make enough money to survive, and after trying almost everything else, I decided that I was not going to sell books in Guayaquil, but that I would have to find a different market to sell in, and so I found one. It was Manabí, a mostly rural province north of Guayaquil, with a predominantly coffee-growing peasants’ population with little access to the civilized world of Guayaquil and Quito, the two largest cities in the country.

I found it much easier to sell my encyclopedias to the Manabí peasants for two reasons, (1) During harvesting times, a lot of manabas (as we called the people from Manabí) had much more money than they could handle; and (2) I didn’t need that much selling academic knowledge to sell them my 20-volume UTHEA encyclopedias (much like the better known Encyclopedia Britannica). I basically just needed to show them my fancy brochures with the colored pictures and make good use of my street smart techniques. My selling strategy consisted of visiting the largest coffee-producing farmers in their homes, at harvesting times, and asking them to allow me to show and discuss my brochures with their entire families. I didn’t have much of a problem convincing these noble but quasi naïve people to let me in and have a chat with them. They would receive me in the ample living rooms of their well ventilated wooden houses where the first thing I noticed was there was no library, and therefore no books to be seen. After the introductory conversation which would normally be about the family, the harvest, the weather, and so on, I’d start my speech by congratulating the head of the household for his nice home, the beautiful furniture, and making a note that “an important member of this community, like you, must have some sort of library in your living room, with books to show your education and knowledge of the world, books which would be a mine of knowledge the young ones in the family could dig into” and added “your friends and other members of the community would surely be impressed by this show of sapience”. The argument was almost infallible. I’d show how nice the encyclopedia would look in their ample living areas by propping up the large brochure on the dining table as all the members of the family nodded and marveled at each one of my points. In less than one hour, typically, I would be closing the sale and therefore making a commission of about 500 Sucres (equal or better than a one month’s salary as a collector). I did that with four or five families in each town, and by the end of my two to three-week tour of Manabí, I had made enough money to keep me going for the rest of the year. I used to feel a little ashamed of my sales strategy afterwards, but my full pockets immensely contributed to reduce my remorse.

On one occasion, I went to the small city of Bahia de Caraques (“Bahia”) where at the end of two days’ work I had sold zero encyclopedias (my great friends, the Salames, from Bahia, would not believe this). Continuing with my book selling tour, I decided to go to the city of Chone, about 30 miles away and connected to Bahia by an old railway, with one single-bus type railcar running back and forth. When I went to the so-called train station, I asked the guy in the ticket booth about the rail car schedule and the tickets’ cost. He answered “There is a car scheduled to leave at 8 AM, but you can come and buy the ticket at 9 AM, the car may actually leave between 9:30 and 10.” Confusing as it was, I insisted in getting the ticket in advance and he said “it’s five Sucres for the first class ticket and two Sucres for the second class ticket.” “Fine,” I said, “please give a first class ticket,” and paid the man for it. Finally, the rail car took off at about 10:30 AM, and it was full. I noticed that all the passengers sat in the same car with no visible division or noticeable differences between seats. I started wondering if I had made a mistake paying for first class, but about 20 minutes later as we approached a hilly area, the car started to slow down and finally it came to a full stop. For about five minutes the driver tried to get his car to get over the hill, to no avail, at which point he shouted “all second class passengers, please get down to push the car!” All of a sudden, I was the only passenger left in the car, while everybody else got down and started pushing the car. Five minutes later, pushed by about 20 people, the car made it over the hill and started running on its own. This was the first and only one time in my life that I have traveled first class while paying my own ticket.

Three book selling tours to Manabí when I was on School holidays were enough to provide me with cash for almost two years sustenance. As a result, I ended up having more than enough time to study. The income I made allowed me to save enough money to buy new cloths, pay for all my expenses and finance my first year at Architecture School in 1963.

In my next posting: EXPOSED TO POLITICS