Given its enormity, the Central de Abasto resembles not so much a traditional market as a vast subterranean city. Little of it is actually underground, but the lighting, the dark concrete and the iron girders, and the passageways and ramps linking the seemingly endless, interconnected pavilions have the feel of subway stations and tunnels, or, beneath the high aluminum roofs and hanging fluorescent bulbs, of enormous ships’ holds. Obviously, no shopper would find it practical to walk among the sprawling pavilions. Which is where the diableros come in.
“This place wasn’t built with diableros in mind,” says Andrés Quintero, one of the market’s great merchants. “The idea was that you would park your truck at this or that bodega, go in, buy what you need, and go on to the next bodega, always in your vehicle.” If that were the case, the diablero would only have to go out each side entrance and load, say, tomatoes into the waiting car. The customer would pay him, and then he would go inside until another customer needed tomatoes brought out.
“But the customers,” says Quintero, “discovered it was much faster to leave their vehicles parked in one place and have the diableros bring everything to them.” And, of course, it was also safer, for that way they didn’t have to expose their produce-loaded truck or car to the threat of robbery at each stop.
So the diableros often go on long journeys, hauling the stacked loads of a buyer’s accumulated purchases down the long chain of bodegas. And time being money, they have every incentive to go as fast as they can, so even if that was all the obstacle they faced, there would still be the danger of collisions with other diableros and customers, especially at the intersections.
But the passageways all have puentes, or “bridges”—enormous humps in the pavement. Between every two bodegas there is one of these steep humps, beneath which run the roads that carry the trailer-trucks to the loading docks of the bodegas. This is the spectacular design flaw to which the diableros have had to adapt. Often loaded down with as much as half a ton of produce, they have to haul their diablos up one side of these bridges and somehow restrain the gathering speed and weight at their backs as the hand trucks roll down the other side. Pushing the hand trucks in front of them, or pulling them behind them like rickshaws, handles locked under their arms, the diableros take long runs to build up speed and momentum for the charge up one side of a puente. On the way back down, they stamp and skid their sneaker heels into the pavement, trying to slow down and control the lurching loads pressing down on them from behind. And then they have to do it all over again to get over the next bridge, all the way down the chain. They wear through the soles of their sneakers quickly.
Pinterest
