I finish the trilogy of anecdotal columns about an Italian in Bolivia, with some amenities of my little-known facet of “pharmacist”. In fact, my wife Sonia’s family (RIP) owned the oldest pharmacy in La Paz and, as a collaborating husband, I did not refuse to help at certain times, essentially with the cash register (so as not to be accused of illegally exercising the profession).
But, as much as I tried to blend in behind the counter, the idiosyncrasies of our people were stronger. On the one hand, the pharmacy staff kept calling me “doctor,” which created a certain ambiguity, and more importantly, my European accent and behavior inspired more attraction to customers than honey did to flies. In short, many wanted to be served by the “doctor” and if he passed the prescription to a clerk or pharmacist, this was interpreted as if that transcription were so trivial that it did not require the doctor’s intervention.
Faced with this situation, in order not to disappoint the audience and to suggest correctly, I made a “scam”: a list of remedies for the most common discomforts (colds, aches and pains of all kinds, among others) that I strategically kept at my sight under the counter. So, to the question: “Doctor, which is good for…?”, I had the correct answer ready, moreover pronounced with all the seriousness of a “gringo doctor”. And since the “doctor” used to do things right (as any employee would), there was a vicious circle that suggested me that I stay as far away from the pharmacy as possible.
One day a nice and uninhibited young lady arrives, asking for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. In that case, the clarifying question, following protocol, was “of what concentration?”. The answer was not the expected one (10% or 20%) but: “you give me, it’s to paint my fleece. Do you want me to show them to you?” I was amazed.
On another occasion, in the middle of a shift, that quarterly torture that lasted 24 hours for a week straight, a domestic worker came to buy rat poison. I sold it to her, but then she asked me how she was supposed to administer it. Distracted and tired of the shift, I replied like an automaton: “give it to him three times a day with a little water”. Up today, I can’t get out of my mind the little mouse that was captured to die poisoned little by little with the fatal preparation.
Speaking of those inhumane shifts, more than once I woke up in the middle of the night with my head resting on the counter and a prescription in my hand, until the screams of the patient, tired of waiting for his prescription outdoors, through the service door, brought me back to reality.
The first time I interacted with the pharmacy was when, as a newlywed, I had to replace my sick father-in-law in the task of transcribing the prescriptions of bank employees: the company’s financial liquidity depended on those invoices. With the help of an antediluvian “typewriter”, I had to report the names of the doctor and the patient and the prescription total amount. But there was a problem: the doctors’ handwriting (illegible, by definition) and my total ignorance of the spelling of patients’ uncommon surnames delayed that transcription considerably, for fear that my invoice would be rejected because the employee’s surname was not “Gassman”, like the endearing Vittorio, but Guzmán. The solution was given to me by the Telephone Cooperative, which at that time distributed that big book called the “telephone directory” and which for me became the most precious dictionary of Bolivian surnames.
Years later, I had the satisfaction of presenting those invoices, prepared with a Commodore 64 computer brought back from a trip, to the banks that still continued to do the math with mechanical calculators and record their transactions by hand on cards