Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

by Julián Herbert

  We were together for less than five minutes. Since he didn’t want to enter the building, he parked on the corner and asked me to come out to hand over the merchandise. I climbed into the front passenger seat beside him, feeling scared shitless. He looked even more paranoid than I felt. When I’d closed the door, he gave me a slap that almost took my head off. That’s when I was sure he wasn’t going to kill me: it was the nicest gesture of affection he was capable of showing.

  “What’s up, you bastard? Your mom told me you joined NA.”

  I felt ridiculous saying yes, it was true, as I slid an eight ball of coke across the seat. Pop took the bag, did two key bumps, and then sat in silence, waiting for the stuff to take effect. He nodded approvingly. But he never once, during the whole conversation, looked me in the eyes.

  “So,” he said, holding out his right hand, “as the elephant said to the ant: ‘Bless your soul and fuck off to some other hole.’”

  I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  “I love you, Pop.”

  He nodded his approval once more without looking at me. We shook hands.

  “Better now than when I’m dead,” he said.

  I got out of the pickup. As he pulled away, I caught a glimpse of his face. He was crying.

  I walk out of the Roman Wedding as though I want to get some air. The only person to catch on to my real intention is Bebito: we look each other straight in the eyes before I cross the threshold, and I think he’s going to stop what he’s doing and come over, but in the end he just gives a vague gesture of farewell. I return it and leave.

  The night’s good: the temperature has fallen slightly and there’s a breeze that’s almost cool, a strange thing in high summer. Standing beside Urko’s van, I light a cigarette. Vic is snoring in the driver’s seat. I think about how simple it would be to go around the corner to Nelson’s unlocked Cutlass, take the automatic he keeps in the glove compartment, return to the door of the Wedding, and shoot Vic first, keeping my free hand over my eyes to protect them from the shards of glass, slip the rod behind my back, go inside, pretending to be alarmed, run to my cousin Urko to explain, put one, two, three bullets into his mug, hand the weapon to Bebito like a scepter (“Say it was the filth”), and leave, never to return.

  (I wonder if my father would ever have been capable of doing something similar.)

  I think all that in much less time than is needed to write it: less time than you’d need to take a drag on a cigarette. Then I walk along Marco Polo toward Vicente Guerrero in search of a cab to take me to the bus station.

  After a few blocks I come across six or seven vagrants swigging Caguamas in a doorway. Two of them step onto the sidewalk, barring my way and looking like their intentions are anything but innocent. I remember that beneath my boxers I’m wearing a money belt holding twenty thousand pesos. I pull up my sleeves and square my shoulders, preparing myself for the blows.

  From the darkest corner of the doorway comes a voice:

  “Quit it, you morons. It’s Manitas.”

  The two bums move closer. They recognize me—or pretend to—in the shadows and move apart to let me pass. “Sorry, sir,” one of them says.

  “My most sincere condolences, Manos Torpes,” says the other. Like I was the heir to … what? A nickname, nothing more.

  I walk to the limits of Treviño, the cars zooming past with their windows down and music blasting out. At the junction of Guerrero and Colón, I turn to take one last look at my neighborhood: a dense darkness sparsely dotted with colored lights. Then I hail a cab and ask to be taken to the bus station. And that’s it; that’s the last of Monterrey, the last of the Kingdom for me.

  There Where We Stood

  Did I see him first, or was it Cristina? I’m not completely sure. I do remember that we were tired, hungry, and hadn’t slept: we’d taken a red-eye from Mexico to Santiago, and Cris had been detained for an hour at the airport because she forgot to declare a bag of granola at customs (Cristina told me that the very well-groomed, handsome young man from the Chilean agency had asked her if she’d forgotten to declare it before or after she was given the customs form), and then when we got to the hotel, it was the usual thing:

  “Very sorry, but your rooms aren’t ready yet. Check-in is at midday. In the meantime, we’d like to offer you a courtesy aperitif.”

  I think I saw him first: we were sipping pisco sours at ten in the morning in the bar of the Panamericana Hotel Providencia, 146 Francisco Noguera, Santiago de Chile, and I was talking about the book I was writing, a crónica on the subject of the massacre of the Chinese community in Torreón in 1911, and Cristina was talking about the book she was writing, a lecture-essay-crónica-novel on the subject of Juan Rulfo, or something like that, and we got deeply involved in describing black-and-white photos and journeys to Mexico Profundo, to pre-Hispanic Mexico, and discussing the economic history of automobile tire plants in our country (some of them financed by Nazi money; that was where my story and Cristina’s overlapped), and I thought: I know that man.

  He’d taken a seat a couple of tables away from us. From that distance, he looked quite sober: very smartly dressed with a neat wide knot in his necktie, his slightly wavy hair combed back off his face, a clear brow that was also an alexandrine tercet of wrinkles, pronounced but not heavy bags under his eyes, a cigarette in his down-turned mouth, and a gaze that left you unsure if it expressed mere mockery or the desire to kill you. That’s Juan Rulfo, I said to myself. And then, idiotically—as if Rulfo was alive or some joker had refused to grant him an exit visa—No way, man. It can’t be him. I mean, we’re in Santiago.

  Cristina was talking about a photograph of a wagon traveling up a steep slope or some oxen or something. She stopped midsentence, looked over my shoulder at the man with the smartly knotted necktie, downed her pisco sour in one gulp, and said:

  “Let’s go. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere else.”

  “But …,” I stammered.

  “It’s just that he’s here again. He never lets me get deep into a conversation.”

  We stood up and took our drink credits to the cashier. Behind us, Rulfo also got to his feet, and strangely enough, he didn’t have that smooth, slightly hoarse voice you hear in his recordings but a rancorous croak with only the slightest of fricative echoes.

  “Where are you going? Wait, girl.”

  Cristina had already passed through the main door of the Panamericana Hotel Providencia and was hailing a cab. I didn’t know whether to speed up, as she had done, like someone fleeing from a ghost, or to be polite to the man: after all, he was elderly, my compatriot, and, above all, one of the writers I most admire in the whole world.

  Juan Rulfo took advantage of my hesitation to grab my arm: clearly it wasn’t me he was interested in, but Cristina. He pulled me close to his chest and said:

  “I’m the devil and I love her. Go after the girl and tell her that, please.”

  Caries

  For Valeria Luiselli

  One day Ramón Rigual discovered sheet music in his teeth. This was a peculiar but not extraordinary event. At that time, Ramón was a conceptual artist, so he was accustomed to such offbeat occurrences.

  Naturally, the first thing he did was visit a dentist. After a brief, thorough routine examination, the dentist declared:

  “I haven’t seen a case like this in years. You have a very unremarkable yet perfectly rotten set of teeth. And you’ve never had them checked before?”

  Ramón had stopped visiting dentists twelve years before, when a dental assistant had praised the health of his ivories, which she believed could be credited to the very high pH value of his saliva. From that moment on, Ramón lost interest in the annual checkups his mother scheduled.

  “Djuno unthin bow mushi?” he politely asked his new dentist.

  No, the man knew nothing about music.

  So Ramón Rigual gave up on his dental health for the second time. He went out into the street in numb pursuit of the most profound of aesth
etic experiences.

  His next move would consist of undertaking an objective reconstruction: translating his individual perception of the human and the transcendent into the language of the arts. Opening his mouth very wide, he took a series of digital photographs.

  The following step, he decided, would be to learn to read the notes: he’d recognized them as such immediately; deciphering them was another matter. Not only was he illiterate with respect to music, but since his quarrel with Bobo Lafragua, he’d felt a deep disgust for anything to do with the subject: Bobo was, or had been, a music producer, and having to lower himself to the level of a rival seemed to Ramón the greatest of indignities.

  He and Bobo had been friends and collaborators for years, and Ramón had even had a cameo in one of the many youthful projects Lafragua initiated but never completed. What led to the final, bitter divorce was their very different attitudes toward originality: Rigual mistrusted retinal art but had a blind faith in his own point of view, in his aesthetic conscience. Lafragua, on the other hand, believed firmly in appropriation, recycling, and pastiche. This divergence became extreme the fourth or fifth time Bobo plagiarized ideas or projects his colleague had mentioned during casual conversations. Furious, Ramón protested. Bobo Lafragua, with a highbrow expression and lowbrow language, replied by paraphrasing his favorite cinema antihero:

  “I am your father, you bastard.”

  The paradox, as Ramón began to realize, was that he was on the verge of achieving fame—he was certain of this: what he had in his teeth was his magnum opus—precisely by means of the unconscious (but well-chewed) drawing of a piece of music. Not by plagiarism but, as Cai Guo-Qiang would say, by “borrowing your enemy’s arrows.” Bobo Lafragua, he thought, would die of jealousy (the phrase was metaphorical; the desire for such an outcome was not).

  After long months of arduous and disciplined study (more than one of his neighbors complained to the tenants’ association or snuffled doggedly at the door of his apartment in a run-down building in Doctores, trying to work out if the awful smell was due to an inclement accumulation of trash or a human body in the process of decomposition), Ramón Rigual emerged from his rooms holding a jewel: six sheets of lined paper.

  By that time, his curator had everything ready: in a small, exclusive gallery in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood he had hung—in large format on acrylic—the photos of Rigual’s teeth, plus the pages of his score. To add the finishing touch to the exhibition, they hired two musicians to play the short piece (barely a minute and a half in duration) forty times during the opening.

  The show would have been one of the most stunning parties (read: cultural events) in Mexico City that autumn if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate incident. While “Caries” was being played for about the twentieth time, a young music lover in the crowd exclaimed with unshakeable authority,

  “I’ve got it! That’s J. Zimmerman’s ‘All Fours.’”

  Predictably enough, word of the scandal spread much faster and more widely than any artistic work or manifestation could aspire to: “Caries,” the masterpiece by the conceptual creator Ramón Rigual, was nothing more than a collection of revolting dental selfies accompanied by the uninspired plagiarism of the best-known piece by a New York disciple of the minimalist composer Steve Reich. Those commenters with the greatest thirst for blood identified two sources of ridicule: the repeated defense of originality that Rigual had expressed over the years in interviews, articles, and panels, which now sounded fraudulent; and the artist’s ignorance of music, since, they said, what he’d filched didn’t even have the grace of obscurity—it was available on iTunes.

  For his part, Ramón suffered less from the public tongue-lashing than from what he considered a betrayal by Nature. If anyone could be certain that no such illegal appropriation had ever occurred, it was he. Yet the document that had emerged from his mouth and Zimmerman’s piece were identical down to the last note. Rigual had always opted for a confrontational, even irreverent approach in his modes of expression, but deep down his basic concept of art was not so different from that of the Romantics: uniqueness, creative originality. And pure shit: if this needed daily confirmation, he had only to look at his teeth in the mirror. That image held him so deeply in its spell that it pushed him—in some gradual, subtle way—into the arms of psychosis.

  One evening, after spending hours in front of the mirror, poking about in his mouth with a curette, Ramón Rigual broke into the office of the dentist who knew nothing about music, hijacked his surgical equipment, fled back to his decaying apartment in Doctores, and, in an attempt to exorcise from his body the concept of beauty as an idée fixe, he pulled out his teeth one by one. The police officers assigned to investigate the theft found him several hours later, lying on his bed, covered in blood, vomit, and urine. He was sent to a psychiatric clinic.

  When he awoke, Rigual recognized at his bedside the features of his former rival Bobo Lafragua, who, stroking his hair, simply said: “My poor idiotic friend.”

  The story has a less somber epilogue. On Bobo Lafragua’s instructions, Miguel Oriflama, the curator of the exhibition, recovered Rigual’s scattered teeth and included them in the catalog of Whole Garden, Lactose-Free Garden, a group exhibition of mutilation art at the Monterrey Contemporary Art Museum.

  J. Zimmerman flew in from New York to view the remains of a story that had come to his ears in luminously equivocal snippets. The piece itself didn’t seem to him particularly impressive. But when he carefully explored the broken teeth, a shiver ran down his spine. In an interview, he described the experience as follows:

  “I was able to read the score immediately: only a novice could have missed it. It was perfectly clear to me that the score wasn’t mine. Or at least, not at that point. Maestro Rigual’s failure was never of an aesthetic nature; it was rhetorical. He transcribed what was written in his mouth in a painfully clumsy manner. What is more unsettling is that, by coincidence, that nonsensical transcription turned out to be identical to one of my works.”

  In vindication of the Mexican conceptual artist, J. Zimmerman agreed to make a correct transcription of the piece, asking as his only recompense that he be credited as coauthor of the work. As a tribute to his toothless ghostly interlocutor, he called the composition “Curette.”

  The recording has sold well, especially in the United States. So well that, with a portion of his royalties, J. Zimmerman has been able to buy an expensive present: the complete set of Ramón Rigual’s teeth.

  The two have now become almost friends (they never speak, just sit opposite each other for hours at a time). Zimmerman brought the teeth back, gift-wrapped. At first Ramón Rigual refused to accept them: he opened the wooden box in which they came and threw the fragments onto the table. J. Zimmerman patiently gathered them in the palm of his hand and imitated Rigual’s gesture, casting down the pieces of tooth as if the act were a form of divination. A few hours later, Zimmerman and Rigual embarked on what appears to be a game of dice (it is still in progress and, on certain afternoons, draws us to the table they occupy in this park); they lay their bets in cash, throw the former contents of Ramón Rigual’s mouth (he now has dentures) onto the table, and depending on how the decay falls, one of them takes the money in the pot.

  The only people in the world who are capable of reading the ciphers formed by the dental fragments are those two men.

  (Written in collaboration with Jorge Rangel)

  The Dog’s Head

  I’d found a job as a stocker in Wilhelm-Kabus-Straße. For over two weeks, at rush hour, I boarded the S2 at Südkreuz station, that impersonal bastion of Schöneberg, with its transmodern-whale interior, in which half the world speaks Slovakian, hundreds of signs inform you that you are being filmed, and you can even enjoy a traditional dish called Burger King. Every evening after work I had to travel—unticketed—from the south of Berlin to Pankow, on the northernmost point of the Hundekopf circular line, where I’d pitched my tent: a gay couple had offered
me space in their yard when, during a party, I’d shown them how to light the coals of their barbecue in the old Coahuila style, with a napkin, a pinch of sugar, a little oil, and a match.

  Sometimes, if I had to change platforms, I’d go out to a kiosk and buy a beer for a euro. If not, I just waited. From Potsdamer Platz to at least Nordbahnhof, the journey was disgusting: packed trains.

  On the day of my last commute (I was unaware that the gay couple had thrown me out after a jealous quarrel), I managed to get a seat right in the corner of one of the train cars, next to a woman who was talking on her cell phone in an extraterrestrial language, or maybe it was Hungarian. Opposite us were two vacant seats. Or almost vacant: across the narrow space between them lay—very demure, proper, and pretty—a croissant with a single bite taken out of it. At a glance, it looked like a splendid pile of pale shit.

  The public outcry against the confection began at Anhalter Bahnhof. Every passenger assumed a jubilant expression on spotting that there were two empty seats ahead, by the door at the end of the car, while so many other people were standing. But then, when they had made their way to sit opposite me and the Hungarian woman talking to a speakerphone voice, they saw the horn-shaped dough that had clearly been in contact with someone’s saliva and turned their faces away in disgust, or just stood there staring at the croissant with slightly ridiculous expressions of distaste as they clung to the handrail. After a few moments of referential vacuum, they moved to another part of the car.