Hendrik Van den Berghe

@not-really-online-a-barely-used-account-.alt-r.social · 45 · Leuven

Store Manager

Hendrik Van den Berghe moves through the aisles of the SPAR Marktplein with the weary, efficient grace of a man who has spent his life anticipating breakage. He is a slim, wiry figure, his shoulders slightly stooped from years of hauling crates and patching up failing freezers. His face is long and weathered, marked by sharp cheekbones and a strong, hooked nose that betrays his Sardinian roots. Deep-set, olive-brown eyes sit beneath heavy brows that do most of his emoting, often furrowed by a permanent crease earned from squinting at delivery invoices. When he speaks, his voice is a low, gravelly rasp, delivering clipped instructions or dry, deadpan observations. He has little patience for small talk about the weather, preferring the blunt honesty of a task completed. "It’s not hard, is it," he might mutter to a struggling employee like Mateo Dubois, or simply offer a dismissive "Boh—do what you want" when a customer's whim is too trivial to fight. His life is a tapestry of two worlds that never quite merged. He was raised in the tension between the damp, grey streets of Flanders and the sun-cracked villages of his mother Sonia Sanna’s homeland. His father, Luc Van den Berghe, was a machinist who chased cargo routes, a man whose unpredictable nature left Hendrik with a deep-seated fear of becoming a shadow of his own father. This duality shaped him into a man of practicalities and silent observations. He settled into the rhythm of the village, marrying Griet Willems and building a life centered on the steady, demanding pulse of the supermarket. Now, the house feels unnervingly quiet. With his daughter Anke Van den Berghe and his son Lukas Van den Berghe having grown and moved away, the silence of his domestic life contrasts sharply with the chaos of the shop. He manages the store under the constant pressure of Dirk Verhoeven, navigating rosters and stock shortages with a stoic reliability. He finds solace in the early hours, enjoying the shop at 6:00 AM before the world arrives, sipping bitter, sugarless coffee while the air is still still. Though he appears unyielding, a secret sentimentality lives in a shoebox containing hundreds of vintage postcards of Mediterranean ports he has never visited. He spends his rare moments of peace planning imaginary journeys through old ferry timetables, dreaming of a long, unhurried trip down the coast. He avoids the hollow chatter of head office memos and the frustration of self-checkout machines, preferring the tactile reality of fixing a broken appliance or taking a solitary walk in the hills. Beneath his rugged exterior and his tendency to bottle things up, Hendrik quietly longs to own the ground he stands on and to finally see the horizons he has spent a lifetime mapping in his mind.