I'll Sell You a Dog

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  ‘I want you to help me get hold of a whisky they make in Tlalnepantla.’

  I ended up offering him a beer and later, three or four beers later, I told him to wait and went to my room, where I took the box of fortune cookies out from under the bed.

  ‘Pick one,’ I ordered him.

  ‘Superstition is a bourgeois invention to manipula—’

  ‘Relax, Mao, it’s a tradition from your home town.’

  He picked one. After opening it, he ate the cookie and put the little piece of paper in his trouser pocket.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I’m not telling you. If we’re going to follow a tradition let’s at least do it properly.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Otherwise it won’t come true.’

  ‘It’s not like it’s a birthday wish. What did it say on the bit of paper?’

  He put his hand back in his jeans pocket and, before fishing out the paper, removed two cables and a phone charger. Finally, he read it out:

  ‘Only the future gives the past a meaning.’

  ‘And that was what wouldn’t have come true?’

  ‘I didn’t know the Chinese were revisionists.’

  He put the prediction back in his pocket and, as if wanting to repay me for the beers and the cookie with a surge of indulgence, looked around into the corners of my apartment and said:

  ‘I’ve got a lethal solution for roaches. Want me to bring it over?’

  ‘Don’t bother, they’re invincible, they’re more powerful than the Yankee army.’

  ‘Exactly. Have you got a CD player?’

  ‌

  Marilín was in the same place I’d seen her last, sitting in a corner of my memory, on the edge of my bed, in my teenage fantasies, only she was still fifteen and I was an old man: women know some amazing tricks for combating the passage of time. Gingerly, I sat down next to her, trying to conceal what was going on under my fly.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ I told her.

  ‘You have.’

  ‘I know, I’m old.’

  ‘What year are you from?’

  ‘2013.’

  ‘Wow. So? Did you become an artist in the end?’

  ‘You know I didn’t.’

  ‘I do? How could I know that?’

  ‘We were neighbours until 1985.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘How could I, I live in 1953.’

  I gave her a stern look, thought about demanding she stop messing with me once and for all, and then I realised she was wearing her school uniform.

  ‘So we didn’t get married, then,’ she said, with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Of course we didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  My outrage made her laugh out loud, satisfied that her future self had had the gall to turn me down just as she was already doing back then.

  ‘And what happened in ’85?’ she wanted to know. ‘Did it take you more than thirty years to lose hope?’

  ‘My mother and my sister died and the council used the fact that the rental contract was in Mum’s name to get me out of the house. I had to find somewhere else to live.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know they’d died.’

  ‘Yes you did, I spoke to you the day it happened.’

  ‘So it was just mental masturbation.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Marrying me; being an artist.’

  ‘What’s wrong with masturbation?’

  ‘You’re right, I’d forgotten what a pervert you were. Just look at your trousers, they’re wet already.’

  At that moment, as if reality was produced by her words, I felt a dampness spread across my groin and, when I looked down to confirm the evidence of ejaculation, a shadow rose up between us suddenly, a gigantic shadow that covered everything. I looked up and saw the Sorcerer, looming menacingly – how tall was he? Sixty feet? 250? He opened his mouth to speak, or rather to shout, and it was as if he was getting ready to spit fire.

  ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU? WHAT DID I TELL YOU? JUST LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENING TO YOUR NOVEL. I HAVE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST. I HAVE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST. I HAVE SUFFERED…’

  I woke up amid the shouting and left the warmth of my bed immediately, taking care not to fall onto the floor again. I was so shaken I even thought I heard noises in the living room. I left my bedroom and switched on the lights: there were the cockroaches, focused on their activities. I poured myself a whisky to calm myself and, as if it was an exorcism, opened my notebook and started writing furiously:

  They said that María Izquierdo was afraid of him. That Juan O’Gorman liked his paintings. That Diego looked down on him from on high, scaling the arrogance of ladders and the scaffolds of his murals. That Lola Álvarez Bravo took some photographs of him that mysteriously came out blurred. That Frida didn’t remember him. Or did a good job of pretending she didn’t. That José Luis Cuevas didn’t know if he was for him or against him. They said he came from a town where families with money diligently practised inbreeding until they overcame deformity, imbecility and madness. That he had been married twice. That he was like a seminarian who had the Devil inside him. They said he’d had smallpox, syphilis, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, measles, parvovirus. That he used to repeat over and over again: I have suffered more than Christ, I have suffered more than Christ. That he pretended to be from a family with money who had lost their wealth in the Cristero War. They said that Agustín Lazo told him that history’s quota of tormented artists had already been filled. That he never took classes at La Esmeralda after that. They said he had schizophrenia, that he’d been committed to every single one of Mexico City’s lunatic asylums, that he’d been given electroshock therapy, that he’d had a lobotomy. That he used to go to the openings of shows to scare the stuck-up old women, like someone scaring children in a park. They said his paintings looked like Giorgio de Chirico’s. That he painted the landscape of the Apocalypse and that in his still lifes, the fruits made you think of necrophilia. They said he had never travelled, that he was a hick. That he’d been born in Lagos de Moreno.

  The next morning, as I left my apartment more sleep-deprived and hung-over than usual, Francesca was standing guard over the landing from her own half-open door and she yelled out:

  ‘At last, the protagonist appears!’

  ‌

  A telegram had come: a wave from the Pacific Ocean had swallowed up my father. Mum didn’t want to know anything and shut herself up in her room with Market. Along with a thousand other things, closed doors drove Market mad. He wouldn’t stop whining; it was almost as if my mother had hired him as a professional mourner. My sister and I took a bus and, sixteen hours later, we got to Manzanillo. My father was waiting for us at the bus station. For a dead man, he looked pretty good. For a living one, abysmal.

  He took us out for seafood at a little palm-covered shack by the beach. The sea smelled putrid. My father apologised, as if this, too, was his fault. We started eating our prawns and ceviche, pretending he’d never been dead. Not in reality or in our minds. Meanwhile, Dad interrogated us. Were we at university, did we have jobs. Our answers disappointed him.

  ‘I thought you were going to be a painter,’ he said to me.

  ‘I did too,’ I replied. ‘I was taking classes at La Esmeralda.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Mum’s got arthritis, I had to get a job.’

  ‘Do you make good tacos?’

  ‘Really good, I’m famous all over town.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, with the fragile resolve of the white liar.

  Then he asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I told him I was going to get married in a few months. It was the time of my supposed marriage. He asked to see a picture of my fiancée. I didn’t have one on me. He asked what she was called. I told him she was called Marilín, but m
y sister cut in and said she was actually called Hilaria. My father tried to interrogate my sister, too, but she kept quiet, pretending to be very busy enjoying the view: she was seeing a married man on the sly. When it was time for dessert he recommended we try the mango in syrup and eventually asked us how our mother was. I enumerated her ailments for him.

  We finished our dessert and it began to grow dark, and all our blood went to our stomachs to work. Then we really did have the impression we’d been eating with a ghost, that our father had died and we were in a dream. The only thing we didn’t know was who was having the dream: my mother, me or my sister.

  ‘Are you ill?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he replied. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’

  ‘That you’re alive and you’ve got cancer, or that you’re not dead?’ my sister asked.

  My father sighed, as if having cancer gave him permission to respond to reproaches by sighing and changing the subject.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘That’s why I called you here. Can I count on you two?’

  ‘No,’ my sister said.

  ‘It depends,’ I said.

  He looked at my sister one last time, before focusing on me: I knew perfectly well he’d only asked both of us so his request for help would seem like a shared burden and wouldn’t weigh me down with responsibility.

  ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I want you to cremate me, mix my ashes with paint, and give them to an artist.’

  It most definitely wasn’t a dream, and my father wasn’t dead: this kind of thing, so utterly nonsensical, only happened in real life.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ my sister said. ‘Didn’t you tell us you wanted us to throw your ashes into a museum? Do you not think that’s eccentric enough? Has your last screw finally come loose?’

  ‘He’s not mad,’ I interrupted her. ‘He’s just changed his mind.’

  My father looked down at the leftover mango on his plate, pre-emptively tired of having to give an explanation that at the same time was a confession of his failure.

  ‘All I wanted to do in life,’ he began, ‘was to make a piece of transcendental art and I couldn’t do it. I lacked talent; I lacked imagination, technique, even money. Money means time to paint, peace of mind, you can’t be an artist if you have to work. But while I didn’t manage to create a truly great work of art, what I can do is become one myself, become ashes stuck to a canvas, become powder paint, artistic texture.’

  ‘I’m calling the loony bin,’ my sister said.

  ‘Son,’ my father said, to exclude my sister from the conversation, ‘I want you to cremate me and give my ashes to Gunther Gerzso.’

  He put his right hand into his pocket and took out a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled the painter’s name.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘I know him.’

  ‘You do?’ my father asked, excited for the first time.

  ‘I mean, I know who he is. I don’t know him personally, but one of my old friends from La Esmeralda might know him. And if not him, I can probably ask José Luis Cuevas.’

  ‘No, no, no. Cuevas is figurative, it has to be an abstract painter. The Rupture was necessary to break once and for all with muralism, you see? But that was just an intermediary phase; the trend now is towards abstractionism.’

  ‘What about Vicente Rojo?’

  ‘Yes, Vicente’s all right. Felguérez would do, too. But try Gerzso first.’

  ‘You’re a real chip off the old block,’ my sister interrupted us. ‘My mother was right: you’re both as frustrated as each other.’

  Back at the bus station, as we said our goodbyes, my father asked if we had a dog. I told him we did.

  ‘Watch out,’ he warned us, ‘you want to be careful with that.’

  ‌

  And then, just when it seemed like nothing else could happen, everything shifted, as if some joker had moved it all around, and suddenly there were stockings in the fridge, broken light bulbs under my pillow, the cockroaches were reading Proust, the dead grew tired of being dead and the past was no longer what it had been.

  ‌

  ‌Notes to Literature

  ‌

  The incident was front-page news in all the papers, the radio was repeating it over and over and it was the main item on all the TV bulletins that day: the ground around the esplanade to the Monument to the Revolution was cracking. There were thousands of jokes on the internet about it, photomontages showing a dinosaur bursting up out of the ground. Juliet showed me some of them on her phone. We’d missed our chance to go and desecrate Madero’s tomb – we were about to head over there but the area had been cordoned off. Two days later, the experts appointed to find an explanation delivered their verdict and the dinosaur story suddenly seemed tame. It was the Revolutionaries’ moustaches, which hadn’t stopped growing and had got all tangled up in the sewer system. The experts’ assessment was so exact it set out who was responsible: the fault lay with Villa and Cárdenas. Madero, Calles and Carranza were absolved.

  I copied down in my notebook the conversations I had over those days with Juliet, all our speculations, to make Francesca jealous.

  ‘The Revolution’s really coming this time,’ Juliet announced, beaming. ‘It’s just like in ’85! People here only wake up when the ground opens up under their feet.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Juliette,’ I countered. ‘All that’s going to happen is they’ll change the names of a few streets, take down a few statues. Just look at who they’re blaming! If the Monument falls down completely they’ll say that Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas were terrorists.’

  ‘The people won’t let themselves be manipulated now, Teo, you’ll see: when the underground’s involved the gods of death and destruction all rise up, the monsters from the subsoil. Think about 1985. It took an earthquake swallowing part of Mexico City, thousands of deaths for people to wake up. Just like now. They’re waking up Coatlicue, our mother of the subsoil! You know who that is?’

  ‘Of course I do, she’s Huitzilopochtli’s mother.’

  ‘Our temple-sweeping mother, miraculously impregnated like the Virgin Mary, except by a little ball of feathers instead of a dove, and who forms with her son a duality: darkness and light, waste and fertility, death and life. Do you know what happened when they found the figure of Coatlicue that’s in the Anthropology Museum now? They put her back in the ground! And not just because they were frightened by such a terrible image – this was in 1790 and the Church ordered that it be buried again because they were worried about the influence it might have on young people. If they hadn’t put her back I guarantee Coatlicue would have speeded up the start of Independence by twenty years!’

  ‘Coatlicue my arse! Young people nowadays don’t know anything about Aztec mythology.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, you don’t need to know it, we all carry it inside us. And anyway, who said it’s young people who are going to start the Revolution? What if we’re the ones who have to do it? We’ve got nothing to lose, we’ve barely got any future left.’

  ‘But we’ve got a lot of past. Don’t kid yourself, Juliette, the only ones who’ve got nothing to lose are the dead.’

  ‘Or the living dead.’

  In the lift, I don’t recall whether going up or going down, Francesca harangued me furiously: ‘This is plagiarism! I think it’s from a novel by García Márquez, except he has a woman’s hair that won’t stop growing, not moustaches.’

  ‘Really! And do you consider it plagiarism when reality starts imitating a novel? Run and tell the experts who wrote the report: if they sue a Nobel Prize-winner it’s going to cost them an arm and a leg!’

  ‌

  Papaya-Head stuck his papaya head into the bar on the corner, where I was on beer number six. It was barely two in the afternoon but as it was a Sunday I was working, earnestly and resolutely, to earn my weekly bread: free bar snacks. He walked over to the table where I was sitting alone, and I could almost
see him spitting out the black, gelatinous papaya seeds, except it was only spittle.

  ‘They said I’d find you here.’

  ‘They were right. You’ll find me here from nine until two and from four till eight Monday to Friday, and I’m also on duty weekends. You work on Sundays too?’

  ‘I’m not here on business. Can I sit down?’

  ‘Can I say no? What are you drinking? Tequila, mezcal? Or would you prefer something stronger?’

  ‘Stronger?’

  ‘Caustic soda, chlorine, turps…’

  ‘I’ll have a beer.’

  I shouted at the barman to bring us a large bottle of Corona and concentrated on trying to figure out why Papaya-Head would go around wearing such an extravagant combination of colours: a fluorescent yellow T-shirt with orange Bermuda shorts, a tropical kind of get-up, the opposite to the grey suit he’d been wearing when he’d visited me as a representative of the dog police. Did he know his head looked like a papaya?

  ‘You should be at the beach in that,’ I said. ‘Nice T-shirt, perfect for hiding from a sniper.’

  ‘It was a present.’

  Which I interpreted as: his wife was the one who, consciously or not, bought his clothes for him in accordance with the shape of his head.

  ‘Did your wife give it to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied.

  ‘Does “something like that” mean a girlfriend, a mistress?’

  ‘“Something like that” means something like that.’

  Our beer arrived and I poured out two glasses; Papaya-Head immediately took a loud gulp. Without the formal protocols of work, which covered up his social awkwardness, what remained was a civilised, twenty-miles-an-hour car crash, not at all fatal, but irritating nonetheless.

  ‘I want to ask for your help,’ he said.

  ‘Do you now! Let’s drink a toast first, though.’

  I held my glass of beer up towards the centre of the table.

  ‘To dogs!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Hey, that report was archived,’ he said, bristling.