pepsi challenge

Yesterday the daughters of Diego arrived. Ages nine and fourteen, they are bucktoothed and brighteyed. This means that Diego was a mere twenty-two or twenty-three years of age when he became a father. It is difficult to imagine him more boyish than he his. Their presence, however, renders him more youthful and goofy than any conjurable image. He is giddy. Heartbreakingly so. He can´t believe they are here and can´t seem to think of what to say. I had dinner with the usual crowd (eugenio, cris, mariana, diego) and the two quiet daughters. Diego cut their meat into small pieces and then watched them eat. Throughout the meal, he stroked their bushy hair and touched their elastic cheeks. His hands seemed unaccustomed to such delicate subjects. The girls clumsily ate their meat without looking up and then asked for dessert. They might have asked for anything and he would have complied.
Prior to their arrival, Diego was very nervous. He ran around collecting bedding, mattresses, pillows. He washed clothes, sheets, towels. He was out of breath and upset about the musty smell of the old mattresses. The girls will sleep (for the next few weeks) on these mattresses on the floor of Diego´s tiny room inside the tiny house just on the other side of the chicken coop from my little house. It is a two-week long slumber party.
But Diego must have been preoccupied, as he forgot to buy Pepsi-lite on his weekly shopping trip. This would normally not be a problem. We have stacks upon stacks of 24-packs of Coca-Lite in the storeroom. And who really drinks pepsi anyways? But today Pepsi-Lite was in very high demand. We are hosting the Argentine chapter of the PepsiCo Group. They come here once a year to do corporate bonding activities, watch power-point presentations, listen to motivational speakers and consume a lot of Pepsi products.
And so today I spent a good deal of time running around looking for Pepsi-Lite in all of the various refrigerators and storerooms. We had just about everything else made or owned by pepsi--Lays potato chips, Quaker cereal, Gatorade, 7-up, some diet drink called H2-oh-- but no Pepsi-Lite. This greatly upset the brand-loyal and calorie concious group. It was also quite difficult to explain, in my limited Spanish, that there was simply no Pepsi-Lite on the premises. They assumed it was my inability to speak spanish that was the problem, which in fact had nothing to do with the absence of the the zero-calorie soda. The staff and I discussed the possibility of serving Coca-Lite instead, a real Pepsi Challenge. Marcelo (general manager) found the test too risky, our jobs were on the line. He explained to me that they must not know that we serve any products made by Coca-cola. This was why I had spent the afternoon prior to their arrival looking for and then hiding products baring the Coca-cola logo. I discovered that pretty much everything is owned by either Pepsi or Coca-Cola.
And so, the dissapointed Pepsi employees drank the normal 150-calorie-per-can version of the soda. They drank a lot of them too. I wondered if they all liked pepsi before they started working for the company. And do any of them every slip up, drink a coke?

And so tomorrow poor sweet Diego will have to take an emergency run to the store, this time accompanied by his two daughters, in order to purchase Pepsi-lite. They group leaves the following day and so I suspect that most of that pepsi-lite, along with the normal pepsi and the H2-oh will go undrunk. Coke will come back to the front of the shelves and the blue and silver cans will grow warm and collect dust.