I'll Sell You a Dog

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  ‘Did you cancel your bread-dough-modelling classes?’ I asked.

  ‘Wo, nhy do you ask?’

  ‘Your hand,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that. I’ve ween borking like this, with one hand. Would you sike to lee?’

  She didn’t wait for a reply and went into the room we used as a dumping ground. She came back out with a washing-powder box, from which she started removing the little figures with dire dexterity. They were brightly coloured deformed little lumps, violently aborted birds, expelled from the egg and fried in a pan before they could let out a peep. I could tell they were birds because Hipólita and her students had one-track minds; otherwise it would have been possible to imagine they were anything or nothing at all.

  ‘They don’t have bittle leaks yet,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m going to make those when my hinjury has eeled.’

  I peered at a sticky blue mess by the light in the lobby.

  ‘That’s a fittle linch,’ she explained. ‘There’s a lot of them in Veracruz.’

  The art of modelling with bread dough, which throughout history had been fervently naive and figurative, had just entered, rather abruptly, its abstract period. Hipólita had skipped all previous stages, and thus her contribution would in all likelihood go unacknowledged. Not even art, which is considered a realm of liberty, is open to anomalies: bread-dough modelling would need first to go through impressionism and cubism, at the very least, in order to be able to understand Hipólita’s figures as evolution.

  ‘What’s that red stuff?’ I asked, because I’d noticed all the figures were covered in red blotches.

  ‘That?’ she said, pointing at the belly of the supposed finch.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s blood.’

  ‘Are they dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Cow han they be dead if they’re made of dread bough?’ said Hipólita. ‘Do you thike lem?’

  She began placing the figures carefully back into the detergent box, as I searched for the appropriate words for the situation.

  ‘I think you should keep taking those painkillers you’re on.’

  ‌

  I’d signed up in secret for painting classes at La Esmeralda. My sister, who had always been more practical than me and ate papayas instead of looking at them, had gone off to study business. I am able to recognise this only now, almost sixty years later: now my mother was the one who would be punished, in quite a cruel manner. Everything pointed to my sister becoming a secretary. This, along with the length of her legs, horrified my mother. I, meanwhile, was about to repeat the same mistake as my father, who had driven her so mad: confusing passion with vocation. As if it was a matter of genetics, a physical defect or an incurable disease, I was convinced I’d inherited his artistic temperament.

  I had gone along to La Esmeralda and discovered very quickly that what really interested me was happening beyond its walls, in the bohemian lives of the students. We used to meet nearby and when the contingent was complete, we’d head for the dingy old bars in the centre. I was enjoying life, I’d found my vocation, until early one morning Turnup stuck his nose into the pocket of the trousers I’d thrown onto the floor by the bed. The next day the dog wouldn’t wake up; his breathing was almost imperceptible and he didn’t respond, no matter how much my mother shook him. In the afternoon she took him to the vet, who diagnosed him with marijuana poisoning. It was a simple diagnosis, you had only to smell his nose, and if my mother hadn’t discovered this earlier it was because she’d never smelled weed. That night, when I got back from ‘taking classes’ at La Esmeralda, Mum was waiting up for me, sitting in the living room, to tell me what the vet had said. It was a clear accusation, but since I had arrived home in a good mood, a little tipsy, and was in no way about to admit my guilt, I tried to play down the drama.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said. ‘How did the dog manage to light the spliff?’

  Mum said only one thing:

  ‘You do dishearten me.’

  I suppose she could have said that I was breaking her heart, but that would have implied a weakness of the muscle in her chest, as if she had a defect that meant she couldn’t deal with disappointments and the disheartening was partly her fault. Instead, she was using the verb with an Aztec sensibility: to dis-hearten, as in to rip out someone’s heart. This way, the fault lay entirely with me. My mother would end up dying from an attack on the heart, which is not the same as dying from a heart attack. She was in the National Medical Centre when part of the cardiology unit collapsed, on 19 September 1985. She was seventy-three years old and, the day before, a heart specialist from another hospital had assured her she was healthy, but she was convinced she was going to die. She kept saying she wasn’t ready yet; the possibility of re-encountering my father terrified her (my father wasn’t dead yet, but she didn’t know this). She insisted on going to the hospital the following day to get a second opinion. As she didn’t have an appointment, she went early so they’d be able to see her: she arrived before 7.19 a.m. She would have survived and lived for a few more years if only she’d paid heed to Schoenberg, whom she had obviously never read: he who doesn’t seek doesn’t find. But does one seek death or is it simply found?

  Turnup woke up later and spent the next few hours watching the shadows that things project onto the surfaces of the world. He spent a whole afternoon observing an ant, studying its habits. Meanwhile, I was followed by someone my mother had sent, a colleague from the post office who owed her a favour, because Mum used to cover for him when he missed work. The spy managed to find out that I was going to La Esmeralda and, to jack up the value of the favour and thus clear all his debts, he told her all sorts of scandalous details, specifically that my classmates were a bunch of scruffy, gay, communist stoners. And that we’d learned all this from the finest – the teachers themselves. My mother banned me from ever going near the school again, on pain of being left an orphan, with her still alive. The same reproaches she used to hurl at my father were heard at home once more: Art is useless. You’ll starve to death. It’s a luxury we can’t afford. I thought: the luxury of being an artist, or of starving to death, or the luxury of doing something useless? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the worst dig of all: Art is for spoilt little rich kids.

  I tried to tell her about my supposed vocation, giving examples to refute what she said, made-up stories of imaginary painters who had overcome poverty and had their names carved into posterity in gilded letters.

  ‘Don’t you come to me with stories about French artists,’ she interrupted. ‘You’re just like your father and I won’t put up with it. Look at him. All he ever got from having a vocation was frustration, pure and simple. Just look how we ended up.’

  Then, when I threatened to leave home, even if it was to live on the streets, to prove to her I was going to be an artist no matter how much she opposed it, she called my sister in and, with the solemnity of categorical lies, the ones there’s no turning back from and which oblige those who’ve told them to be loyal until death, she announced that she was suffering from arthritis and that the doctor had prohibited her from working.

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ she said, as if her batteries had run out: ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  From that day on, Mum devoted all her time to two things: going to the doctor and looking after her dogs. My sister got her first job as a secretary and I never returned to La Esmeralda. My adventure hadn’t even lasted a year, but I had at least taken advantage of the life-drawing classes to see some naked women. Under the pretext of ‘capturing their essences’, I’d stared so hard at them, retaining in my mind each and every one of their folds, and had masturbated so much and so diligently that, at times of visual and carnal exhaustion, I’d reach a gloomy conclusion: the suspicion that perhaps the mystery of women was not quite so wondrous as to make it worth devoting one’s life to them.

  My wings clipped, I took the easiest option: I asked my uncle for work on his taco stand. Now that I had to give up my supposedly true
vocation, it seemed as good a job as any; better, even, than some of the ones whose systems of slavery were so badly disguised. To be honest, perhaps being a taco seller appealed to me more because I’d developed a grudge against dogs. My uncle’s stand was in the Candelaria de los Patos and he opened at night, which meant we started work at half past five. I chopped the onion and coriander, kept an eye on the tortillas, served the hibiscus tea and cinnamon rice milkshakes and gave the punters their change and a free mint. During the week the stall shut at midnight, and at the weekend, one-thirty in the morning. I gradually grew used to spending hours on my feet, going back and forth, joining in with the regular customers’ banter. The only thing that annoyed me and to which I never resigned myself was the stench on my hands, my artist’s hands, which now smelled of a mixture of onion, coriander, mint, sweaty notes and coins.

  Tacos came and went, and I waited patiently until, early one morning, I pulled my little trick with the nylon stocking. It was my sister’s, who, when she discovered in the morning that someone had been rummaging around in her chest of drawers, looked at me suspiciously until she saw Turnup lying stiff on the floor. Then she said: ‘You took your time.’

  To my surprise, my mother didn’t request an autopsy. She went out for a walk and came back with a mutt she’d found roaming around outside the market. That’s what she called him, Market, even though that wasn’t even a dog’s name. When my sister pointed this out, Mum refused to give him another name, playing dumb. It was something else she pretended to do around that time, as well as stopping work: pretending she didn’t understand and sometimes, pretending to be mad, with no warning. Now that my sister and I were adults she seemed to have discovered that she could change the way she manipulated us, switching from her habitual intransigence, which by now was wearing thin, to an absent-minded attitude with which she gradually and heedlessly transferred to us the weight of her responsibilities.

  I promised my mother I would bury Turnup and took his body to an early morning taco stand near our house. They gave me five pesos for it: the price of four beers. The next day I took her out for breakfast to cheer her up. When the taco seller saw me approach and order two tacos with everything, his hair bristled in shock, as if imagining we’d involved him in some kind of black magic ritual.

  ‘Are they good?’ I asked Mum as she chewed diligently.

  With her left hand she made the sign for ‘so-so’ and then, once she’d swallowed her mouthful, whispered in my ear so as not to offend the stallholder: ‘The meat’s a bit tough.’

  ‌

  I went to the Chinese restaurant practically every other day to have a beer. I always took a newspaper and occasionally, my notebook. But really what I was doing was analysing the Chinese as they went back and forth, trying to figure out their secret. One day I saw them sprinkling water in the corners of the restaurant. I went back to my apartment and copied them. The cockroaches clapped their antennae together: hydrated. Another time, I wrote down in my notebook the brands of the cleaning products I saw them use, bought the same ones and gave them to the girl who came twice a week to clean the apartment, along with a series of strict instructions: apply this one neat, dilute that one with water… The smells changed, and the shine on the surfaces was different, too. The cockroaches, blithely unaware. I invested in some plastic plants: the cockroaches started using them as a holiday resort. I put paper shades over every light bulb, which I then had to take down again in the middle of the night: the sound of their little feet walking over them kept me awake.

  I started collecting fortune cookies in a box I kept under the bed. I thought that receiving a prediction every day was excessive. Dangerous, even. Occasionally, especially when I grew desperate and was about to throw in the towel, I would open one in search of a sign, which did about as much good as a few pats on the back.

  Some Wednesdays, or Saturdays, I would bring Willem along with me, and he came up with the most bizarre theories: that it was the smell of the Chinese that scared off the cockroaches. That they fried them and ate them. That the decor in the place was so horrendous that not even roaches would enter the restaurant. There was an element of truth to this last claim: the restaurant was always empty. He even bought me one of those cats with an endlessly waving little paw. A china figurine, I mean. The cat became one more ride in our cockroach theme park.

  Juliet took pity on me and claimed she had a comrade who spoke Chinese, a Maoist who had learned Mandarin in Peru.

  ‘I’ll ask him to help you out,’ she said, ‘but you have to promise you won’t ask him anything or tell anyone about him: he’s undercover.’

  She organised the meeting one afternoon in the shop, so she could explain the situation to him. The guy turned out to be a twenty-three-year-old kid who showed up wearing a filthy red Shining Path T-shirt. He had dreadlocks and his fingertips were stained with something that might have been ink, tobacco or gunpowder. Undercover meant that he had been living for four years in a makeshift camp run by the CAH in the faculty of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The CAH: the Alternative Strike Council. I’d come prepared, carrying my Aesthetic Theory, just in case, should things start to get ugly. His eyes went straight to the book.

  ‘Woah, Grandpa’s into the hard-core stuff,’ he said.

  Once we’d given him the low-down on what I needed, we crossed the road and he went into the restaurant alone to talk to the Chinese. I stayed outside to wait for him. He’d said it was better that way: the Chinese love conspiracies. He came back out in less than two minutes, his face doing its best attempt (which was terrible) at imitating a patronising expression.

  ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘These Chinese are Koreans.’

  He tried to charge me 200 pesos and in the end I gave him twenty. He took another look at the Aesthetic Theory growling in my right hand.

  ‘If that’s the kind of stuff you’re into I can get more,’ he assured me. ‘There’s a bank around here that I supply, a bank library, you know it?’

  ‘You do business with a bank?’

  ‘It’s a postmodern form of extortion: what matters is putting capital to work in favour of the Revolution.’

  ‘By stealing from the university?’

  ‘The university’s budget comes from the government. It’s a morally right crime squared. Are you interested or not? Come on, twenty pesos a book, bargain basement!’

  ‘I get them for free, I nick them from the library.’

  ‘Woah! A thief stealing from a thief stealing from a thief stealing from a thief. You’ve earned infinite forgiveness. But in the library there is what there is, you can’t choose – I’m offering you a personal delivery service.’

  ‘Get me Notes to Literature.’

  ‘Shit, only snuff films are more hard-core than that.’

  ‘It’s a present.’

  ‘Man, well, if you put poison on the corners of the pages it’s the perfect gift. I’ll get it for you.’

  He shook my hand in a strange fashion and our fingers got entangled. I asked him what his name was.

  ‘Mao,’ he replied.

  ‘Your real name.’

  ‘Mao is my real name. You know what they say, Grandpa, name is destiny.’

  ‘Don’t call me Grandpa. I’m not anybody’s grandpa, I don’t have grandchildren.’

  ‘Who said you have to have grandchildren to be a grandpa? You shouldn’t read so much Adorno, you’ll blow a fuse.’

  It was that time of the evening when people were rushing to get to the shops before they closed and which in Calle Basilia Franco could be identified by the queue in the bakery and the sound of Hipólita’s pleas as she begged for crumbs among the customers. Mao had walked off nonchalantly, to the rhythm of an imaginary song, taking care to avoid the hurrying crowds. On the corner, Dorotea was waiting for him. I saw them share a long kiss and then, arm in arm, they went into the ice-cream parlour.

  ‌

  Willem brought me a DVD as a peace offering: a do
cumentary about the life and work of Juan O’Gorman.

  ‘What are you apologising for?’ I asked him. ‘For having betrayed me or because your convictions are stronger than our friendship?’

  He thought for a minute, confused.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise,’ I comforted him, ‘but I am grateful for the present. Where did you buy it?’

  ‘In the morket.’

  ‘They’re pirating documentaries on Juan O’Gorman? That really is a symbol of progress in this country. O’Gorman’s my favourite.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘By pay’n attention to what yuh say. To reach the Lard, yuh must learn to listen to your fellow man.’

  I took the disc from its case and walked over to the machine on top of my TV.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘the girl from the dog police asked me about you. Want me to set you up? I’ll lend you the apartment if you like, all you’d have to do is bring your own sheets.’

  He flushed.

  ‘Sex befare marriage is a sin,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t say! Well, marry her then!’

  On the TV screen a black-and-white photo appeared, frozen: Juan O’Gorman, his hands resting on the balustrade of a mezzanine in what appeared to be the Casa Azul. In his left hand he held a rolled-up architectural plan, in his right, a cigar. He wore a suede jacket and a pair of woollen trousers, his hair combed back and, behind his glasses, that tormented look that presaged the sadness that would befall him, if it hadn’t already. Willem sensed my fascination.

  ‘Why d’yuh like these programmes so much?’

  ‘I’ve told you before: I knew all these guys, well, most of them. Some better than others, but I knew them, I could have been one of them.’