ABSTRACT
Ariel is sitting in the living room of the small house he occupies with his mother, his two sisters and one brother. His other brother, the youngest, currently lives with their aunt in Paraguay, where he has started primary school. Ariel’s mother and elder sister are working together in the little sewing studio next door. They are doing commissioned work for the local textile market. By the following morning they must deliver a commission of evening dresses to one of their regular clients, an expensive boutique on Avenida Santa Fe. Ariel’s mother has been sewing nonstop for almost two days. Her daughters take turns in helping her. Meanwhile, Ariel is flipping through the available Argentinean TV channels, muted so as not to disturb his sister, when he is suddenly transfixed by pictures of a burning building that somehow seems familiar to him. He turns on the sound and, from the distraught voice of the reporter, learns that the burning building is a supermarket of the Ycua Bolaños chain in the capital of his home country Paraguay. Absolutely horrified, Ariel discovers that crowds of people appear to be locked into the building. Between thick black clouds of smoke, which pour from all crevices of the building, he can see soot-covered arms and hands reaching through the fencing of the supermarket’s main gate. From the outside, vendors (who usually offer their goods in front of the supermarket) are using sticks and stones trying to break the glass bricks on the ground floor so that the desperate people inside can leave the deadly trap. They are screaming at the top of their lungs: “Open the doors, open the doors!” Ariel wakes up his sister, grabs the telephone and dials the number of his cousin, who lives very close to the supermarket. While he waits for his cousin to answer the phone, he informs his sister about what he has just seen. As she looks at him anxiously, he says, “There’s no reply.” Both of them know that after church on Sundays their cousin usually takes her family for lunch in the restaurant of this supermarket. Ariel and his sister sit in shocked silence. Then he turns to his computer, logs into the instant messaging client 5 and retrieves one by one the webpages of the Cibervalle Forum as well as the online version of ABC Color, a Paraguayan daily newspaper. Although he has no problem entering the Forum, an error message appears instead of the webpage of ABC Color. He tries again to no avail, but immediately finds a Tópico with the title “Tragedy in the supermarket Ycua Bolaños” in the “Recent News” category of the Forum.
