I'll Sell You a Dog

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  ‘So, where did you leave the intellectuals?’

  ‘Back there – they ran out of tomatoes and went back to their little books.’

  ‘And to think how much they’re needed out here in—’

  Our chats were interrupted by some trucks arriving to unload past-their-best vegetables: from the restaurants and hotels of Polanco, from the branch of Superama on Avenida Horacio, from the Las Américas racetrack; even from a greengrocers up in the fancy neighbourhood of Las Lomas. Instead of throwing the rotting produce away and, above all, to stop the beggars from hanging around their premises to collect it, they had been persuaded to donate it to the greengrocer so she could sell it at ‘community prices’ to those most in need. This was what she had told them and, in a way, she hadn’t lied. In her shop, the price of a pound of tomatoes was one per cent of market price. For the price of one pound of fresh tomatoes, rioters could get a hundred pounds of ammunition. It was a truly community-minded act, although not the one the donors had imagined: they would receive the vegetables that their exquisite palates had rejected smack in the face.

  We sipped our beer and by the second glass, without fail, it was Francisco I Madero’s turn. Always Madero: the nation’s fate had gone downhill because of Madero. Things would have been very different, the greengrocer said, if Flores Magón had led the Revolution instead.

  ‘You know what we should do?’ she asked, not waiting for me to answer. ‘What we should do is put a few bullets into Madero.’

  ‘They did that already, right there by the Palacio de Lecumberri,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Well, let’s do it again, then! Do you know where he’s buried?’

  We made plans to go and desecrate Madero’s tomb in the Monument to the Revolution. It was close by, three metro stops away. Along with Madero were buried Pancho Villa and José Venustiano Carranza, Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, all of them sworn enemies. The only thing they had in common was that they all had moustaches. The greengrocer shouted:

  ‘That’s what dialectic’s for: building monuments!’

  Madero had been killed exactly one hundred years ago, in February 1913, but in the greengrocer’s head it was as if it had happened yesterday. She lived in a time when all the misfortunes of the nation, from the murder of Zapata to the electoral fraud committed against López Obrador, happened simultaneously, or were placed right up close to each other like a series of rocks encircling the planet and then heading out into space, all the way to Pluto.

  The greengrocer had another theory about my novel, or rather about how Francesca knew what was in my notebook. According to this hypothesis, Francesca was a CIA agent. I refused to accept this, because experience had taught me that reality does not bow to ideology.

  ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about her? Whether she’s widowed or divorced, whether she’s got kids, whether she’s a spinster, what she used to do?’

  ‘I know she was a language teacher,’ I replied.

  ‘You see! English teachers work for the CIA, everybody knows that. It was even in a film. How do you think she ended up in your building?’

  ‘She entered the draw, like the rest of us.’

  ‘No one ends up there that way. Did you enter a draw to get a place there? Only influential people get an apartment in that building. Skint, but influential.’

  Despite the saying that silence speaks volumes, I kept my mouth shut; I didn’t like to reveal how I’d got the apartment. You were supposed to fill in a load of forms and pray to every saint under the sun, first for one of the current residents to die or be declared incapable of living unassisted, and then for the bureaucrats to awaken from their superannuated torpor and set the process in motion. On top of this you had to be selected by lottery and the probability of success was one in thousands. Barring the part when the dead resident was carried out, leaving the apartment available, this procedure was never adhered to.

  ‘She came to the building because she’s on a mission,’ said the greengrocer.

  ‘But she’s retired.’

  ‘A CIA agent never retires!’ she would repeat. ‘Do you think if she was retired she’d need to live in that shabby old place, that stuck-up old thing? If she was retired she’d be living in Tepoztlán or Chapala, somewhere fancy like that. I’m telling you, she’s on a mission, that’s why she’s spying on you and brainwashing everyone in her salon at the same time. Think about it: all she needs is a glass tumbler, she holds it up against the wall and then puts her ear against it.’

  ‘But I don’t write out loud!’

  ‘You wouldn’t even need to! These people can decipher your writing by listening to the pen scratching away in your notebook.’

  She suggested that when I wrote in the book I should use some kind of device that made a noise to foil Francesca’s attempts to spy on me. So the next time I grew bored of drawing, I switched on the blender, which I never used, and wrote some things down in my notebook that I’d remembered:

  Five hundred riot police were sent to capture Alejandro Jodorowsky for crucifying a chicken. José Luis Cuevas painted a temporary mural and invented the Pink Zone. The bones of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Dr Atl and Siqueiros ended up in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men. Juan O’Gorman took cyanide, put a rope around his neck and then put a bullet in his brain. His bones ended up in the same place. La Esmeralda art school was moved to the neighbourhood of Colonia Guerrero. One of Rufino Tamayo’s paintings was auctioned off for seven million dollars, one of Frida’s for five, another of Diego’s for three. The Rotunda’s name was changed: where it had said ‘Men’ they changed it to ‘Persons’. They moved María Izquierdo’s remains to the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons.

  The next morning, Francesca was waiting out in the hallway and when I left my apartment she ran over to confront me.

  ‘That’s the last thing we need! Taco sellers who think they’re art historians.’

  ‘Do you know what a customer once said to me?’ I replied. ‘That that was precisely what we needed: taco sellers who knew about art, who were interested in art.’

  ‘Who was your customer? Gorky?’

  ‘If Gorky were alive he’d be shocked at the price of beer in museum cafés.’

  I complained to the greengrocer that her theory had failed.

  ‘All I managed to do was blow up my blender.’

  ‘It must be telepathy, then.’

  ‘I knew it! You’re mad.’

  ‘That’s precisely what the CIA’s strategy is – don’t you get it? They use crazy techniques so that no one believes it when they are discovered.’

  ‘So what does she get out of spying on me?’

  ‘You should know, you’re probably a danger to the system.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  ‘Well, I’ve always thought you were suspicious, you know? All that clowning around’s got to be a ploy to distract people. Who knows what secrets you’re hiding… Or perhaps the future of the human race depends on your notebook, just imagine!’

  With the help of a comrade who was undercover, she’d gone so far as to get hold of a list of names of supposed CIA agents in Mexico. We couldn’t find Francesca’s.

  ‘But that’s not her real name!’ the greengrocer said.

  So we looked for her real name, or at least, the one the salon members called her by, the same one her post was addressed to and with which she signed the minutes of the Residents’ Association meetings. That one wasn’t on the list, either.

  ‘You see?’ I said.

  ‘That only proves one thing: that name’s false, too. You really think she’s going to use her real name? I’m telling you, she’s on a mission! Actually, now I think of it, we shouldn’t be using our real names either.’

  ‘What do you want to be called?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know, can you think of a name? Pick a pretty one.’

  ‘What about Juliet?’

  ‘Juliet?’

  ‘Y
eah, but pronounced the French way, Juliette, so it packs more of a punch.’

  ‘I like it! What about you?’

  ‘I want to be called Teo.’

  ‘Mateo?’

  ‘As if!’

  ‘Well what, then?’

  ‘Teodoro, but just call me Teo.’

  You had to say her name Juliette to make Francesca jealous. Then Juliet would dare me to force my way into 3-D, Francesca’s apartment, to confirm her theory. This usually happened around the third beer, when I would wisely take my leave. I needed to rest a little in order to get through the rest of the day. On my way back from the greengrocer’s shop, when I crossed the lobby and looked around at the salon members, all hypnotised by their books, perfectly pacified, I’d call out:

  ‘Still here? How are your piles doing?’

  And Francesca would shout:

  ‘Juliette is the name of a French whore!’

  ‌

  One morning the salon was cancelled because a poet had died and everyone rushed off to mourn the dead man. Everyone except Hipólita, whose varicose veins prevented such exertion. I was about to shoot off like a rattletrap rocket to the bar on the corner when I ran into her, putting her hand into the letter boxes to deposit a piece of paper: she was organising an exhibition of little birds modelled out of bread dough down in the lobby. I folded up the invitation to the vernissage and put it in my back pocket, and was almost at the door when Hipólita intercepted me.

  ‘You’re an ungrateful wretch.’

  I turned around to face her. She had come close enough to the entrance that the morning light accentuated the down on her upper lip. Away from the lobby’s deceptive gloom it was a proper moustache.

  ‘I don’t get a mention in your novel,’ she explained.

  ‘You know it’s not a novel.’

  ‘You must think I’m so insignificant.’

  ‘My dear, you talk like one of Frida Kahlo’s paintings: nothing but moaning. Hey, did you see that?’

  I pointed at the right-hand wall of the lobby, covered in damp patches, and then fled as fast as my bunions allowed. That night I wrote in my journal about a childhood memory: my mother’s brother, a bachelor who had been the first taco seller in the family, had a moustache so outrageous he used to get bits of food stuck in it.

  ‘It’s a northern thing,’ my mother would say, excusing him.

  Her family was from San Luis Potosí which, technically speaking, wasn’t even in the north. If anything it was the south of the north. I had seen him spend an entire Sunday afternoon with the tail end of a jalapeño pepper entangled in his whiskers.

  The next day there were new chairs in the lobby. Reclining wooden ones, with cushioned backs and seats, super comfortable. They’d nicked them from the poet’s funeral. These were truly dangerous people: they’d lugged them all the way from Bellas Artes, six stops on the metro. The new chairs didn’t fit in the room we used as a dumping ground, where the folded Corona beer chairs were stored. They started leaving the new ones lined up on either side of the lobby, like in a waiting room. The salon members considered them the pinnacle of elegance. The cockroaches rather liked them, too.

  Posterity decreed that the dead poet was only mediocre: he failed to merit a statue or even an avenue named after him, never mind a place in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. They named a dirt road after him in Irapuato, where he’d been born. Then another poet died (poets were always dying). The salon members seized the opportunity to steal another chair for Hipólita. This poet had a statue erected to him in a park. The pigeons were over the moon.

  ‌

  The building was fumigated and we had to stay out for a whole day. The council started cutting the water off regularly because there was a drought. The canapés from the private view for the exhibition of bread-dough birds went off, and there was an outbreak of diarrhoea. The supermarket delivery boy was replaced; the new one was accused of stealing a tin of jalapeño peppers. The bulb on the third floor went. Someone left the main entrance open and let in the Mormons, who started going from door to door. The salon read In Search of Lost Time in a commemorative edition which included all seven volumes of Proust’s novel. Four thousand, two hundred and thirty pages long, hardback, with leaves thin as tracing paper and weighing in at almost three and a half kilos (those with arthritis were excused). Signatures were collected to bring back the previous supermarket delivery boy. The bulb on the first floor went. The cockroaches, cool as cucumbers.

  ‌

  My mother had taken less than a week to find a substitute for the dog: an insufferable mutt she had christened Turnup, because it just turned up one day at the front door and started to scratch it. Turnup would eat anything within reach of his muzzle, not just stockings, but my mother imagined it was the reincarnation of that other dog she had loved so much. She didn’t say this, of course, but she didn’t need to: she would regularly forget herself and call Turnup by the deceased dog’s name. Over the ten years he was alive, that dog managed to eat every object in the house that wasn’t nailed down, including clothes pegs, refrigerator seals and tons of tubes of toothpaste, which were his weakness: if someone left the bathroom door open, he would jump up and knock over the glass where we kept them. Despite this he never got fat, and remained skeletal until the end of his days. My mother forgave him everything while punishing me and my sister for the slightest offence. We really had it in for that dog. Mum would ground us for a week for any misdemeanour, as this was how she solved everything in life, by locking us up. This meant being condemned to evenings of tedium, spent begging my mother to lift the punishment. In retrospect, the faith placed by that generation in punishment as a way of building character seems astonishing.

  Mum worked in the post office in the mornings and in the afternoons she took washing in at home. When we were grounded, we set to following her around, like two little street hawkers, asking: ‘What are we supposed to do shut up at home all day? What are we supposed to do shut up at home all day?’

  Everything was said in duplicate, like the paperwork for some sort of official procedure, and in a way it was: an official procedure doomed to failure because the bureaucrat on duty, my mother, had an endless supply of patience.

  ‘Go and do your homework,’ she ordered us.

  We scribbled down our homework and went back to the other work, trying to wear my mother down so she’d let us go and play in the street.

  ‘What are we supposed to do now? What are we supposed to do now?’

  ‘Study.’

  ‘We’ve studied already,’ we lied.

  ‘Go and play.’

  ‘Play what?’

  ‘I don’t know, whatever you like.’

  We walked around the house, fiddling with things; I started kicking a ball about and it went whizzing past the china cabinet, my sister pulled her doll’s head off and said she needed to go to the shop to buy some glue. We returned to the attack.

  ‘What are we supposed to do now? What are we supposed to do now?’

  Then my mother would fetch some blank sheets of the paper she used to bring home from the post office, a pack of colouring pencils that had been Dad’s and which she kept on top of a wardrobe, and pronounced the final sentence:

  ‘Go and do some drawing.’

  Drawing was an activity that never ran out, you could do it for hours and hours, and my mother was very careful to ensure there were always adequate supplies of paper. She grounded us so often that it became a habit, and the day came when Mum had to replace the colouring pencils and then we started drawing even when we weren’t being punished. We went out into the streets and began drawing outside, which was something we remembered having seen Dad do.

  Punishments came and went, and in the end I asked my mother at least to buy me a sketch pad to give some focus to my endless drawing. I began walking about, up and down, carrying that damn sketchbook, which gave me a reputation for being an artist – and a drifter – in the neighbourhood. For a time it even turn
ed into a lucrative activity: people would pay me to paint portraits of their girlfriends and I would swap the drawings for marbles, initially, and then later on, for my first cigarettes. Then the neighbours grew bored of the artist and my sketchbook lost its cachet, and finally turned into a dreadful burden.

  ‌

  It hadn’t rained for almost two months, the Río Lerma was not much more than a stream and the lack of water in our building was making the pipes grumble. In the lobby they were saying that the pipes were squealing and, claiming that they couldn’t concentrate, the members of the salon decided to go and read in the Jardín de Epicuro. They paid a boy to bring their copies of In Search of Lost Time back and forth in a wheelbarrow. From the balcony of my apartment I saw the procession that spanned two blocks of Calle Basilia Franco, each person carrying a foldable Corona chair and turning left at Avenida Teodoro Flores, where they still had three blocks to go, and the little boy sweating and stopping to catch his breath after five steps. I yelled out to them: ‘The weight of literature! You’re going to kill the poor little squirt!’

  The entire salon then had to leave the Jardín de Epicuro because there was a dog that kept hurling itself at them. The mutt was running between the salon members’ legs, scratching their ankles with its claws and trying to sharpen its teeth on the covers of the Lost Times. The final straw was when the animal tried to mount Francesca, clinging on and rubbing its genitals against her leg: it took the intervention of a passing kid to free her from the canine embrace. In an attempt to keep the salonists away from our block, I suggested they give the dog a stocking. The stocking came back; the dog had refused to eat it. I asked them to show me the hosiery: it was one of Hipólita’s, who wore special varicose-vein stockings. I told them to give the dog a normal stocking, made of nylon, and they went off to buy a pair in the haberdashery store. They returned, and the dog still wouldn’t go for it. I suggested they stuff one stocking with meat and roll it into a ball, without knotting it, so it would unroll in the mutt’s intestines. The butcher gave them a load of skins for free. Problem solved.