I'll Sell You a Dog

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘What do you think, Villem? Not everyone achieves posterity, the world’s memory wouldn’t be able to remember us all, there wouldn’t be enough streets to pay homage to us all, or parks to host our statues, or film-makers to make documentaries, or space for the tombs in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons. Life has to make a selection. And it does it ruthlessly.’

  ‘Gawd disposes.’

  The TV began talking about functionalist architecture.

  ‘God doesn’t exist, my boy, it’s something much more complicated, a mixture of circumstances, talent, chance, connections – genes, even! If you don’t have the winning combination you end up a taco seller. And I wasn’t the exception, by any means. I was the rule. How many of us who used to hang out at La Esmeralda became somebody? The minority!’

  ‘What’s La Esmeralda?’

  ‘It’s an art school. All Mexico’s artistic geniuses of the twentieth century passed through its doors, either as professors or students. And the rest of us passed through, too: the cannon fodder, the filler, the extras, the gatecrashers, the ones who didn’t have the combination that gives you a ticket to the history of art. We were there, the ones who one day had to renounce our aspirations, forced by circumstances or by accepting our own limitations. Then there were the ones who pressed on through mediocrity, made art their profession and condemned themselves to a life of ridicule. And on top of that were those who couldn’t do anything but keep on painting, no matter what, and who ended up mad or ill, or died when they were young, martyrs of art. I knew a handful of those ones, the city’s graveyards are full of them. There was one guy who had taken a few classes in La Esmeralda in the thirties and when I was studying there in 1953 he’d turn up at the gates sometimes looking for drinking buddies. I used to like the bohemian life too, so we ended up becoming friends, we were the terror of the bars in town. He showed me his paintings once, they were moving, heart-rending, brilliant. He had talent in spades, just as much as, more, even, than any of the ones who made it. Do you know what happened to him? He ended up destitute. I saw him again in 1960, at my taco stand in the Candelaria de los Patos, you know it? It’s down in the centre of town. He didn’t even recognise me, he was totally gone, he came to ask for some food and I gave him some tacos so he wouldn’t scare my customers off. One day they found him lying in the street where my stand was. He must have been around forty. He died in the street like a stray dog.’

  ‘What wus he called?’

  ‘I don’t even know, they used to call him the Sorcerer. I never asked him his real name and now it’s impossible to find out, he was swallowed up by history. Or oblivion, rather.’

  ‘Gawd has mercy on the fargotten ones.’

  ‘Are you going to let me watch the film?’

  Later on, after Willem finally left, I rewound the video until I spotted a photograph I’d seen out of the corner of my eye, while Willem prattled away, endeavouring to divert my attention from the screen. It was a portrait of Juan O’Gorman embracing a woman called Nina Masarov. I pressed pause and looked at the photo as I sipped my beer, then another beer, and another. Although it was a wedding photo, a postcard the artist had sent to Frida Kahlo from Europe, it was surely the saddest picture I had ever seen: to the artist’s habitual tormented expression was added the resigned, absent look of the bride, who seemed to be perfectly aware that this union had no future. Or worse: that nothing had any future. I guessed she must hail from one of the superpowers of sadness: some central European country, or Germany, Poland, Mother Russia. I looked at the portrait and thought about Marilín, and about all the women who could have been mine and who never, ever were. O’Gorman was right: sometimes life was so sad you had to kill yourself three times. I’d had too much to drink. I opened my notebook and started writing down everything I remembered about Marilín, the way she growled, the length of her legs, that hair of hers she’d never let me touch, just as she never let me touch any part of her.

  That night I had a dream: I was dancing a bolero with Marilín and, just as I was about to speak to her, to say one of those daft things lovers say to each other, I felt two light taps on my back. When I turned around I saw the Sorcerer holding a shoe in his right hand, an enormous great shoe he was holding up high and with which he started striking me in the face. Then everything went dark and I didn’t even feel the blow as my body hit the ground. When I awoke, in the dream, I was looking up at the Sorcerer from below, I was still on the ground but we weren’t in the place where I’d been dancing, we were in a bedroom. The walls of the room were covered in paintings of pigeons, dead pigeons, pigeons tied up, their feathers all plucked, their bodies bloody. There was an unmade bed, the rumpled sheets forming a tangled mass in the middle, and paintbrushes and canvases everywhere. It was the Sorcerer of the early days, with the excessive vitality of those who are unable to control the swings between joy and unhappiness, so different to the demented, emaciated Sorcerer at the end of his days. He came over to me and raised his foot, threatening to step on me, and then opened his mouth and said:

  ‘What’s going on, compadre? This novel’s starting to sound really cheesy.’

  ‘This isn’t a novel,’ I objected.

  ‘Oh really! Well that’s what it looks like.’

  ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘We were at a dance.’

  ‘We were, now we’re here.’

  ‘Where’s Marilín?’

  ‘Marilín, Marilín… I’VE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST! YOU HEAR? I’VE SUFFERED MORE THAN CHRIST! IF YOU THINK I’M GOING TO LET YOU STICK ME IN A ROMANTIC NOVEL OR A SELF-HELP BOOK THEN YOU’RE VERY, VERY WRONG!’

  At that moment I woke up, because, as well as the Sorcerer shouting in the dream, outside, in real life, I got a stabbing pain in my liver. It took me so long to get back to sleep that I memorised the whole dream.

  In the morning, a tense silence in the lift as it descended. The minute the apparatus juddered to a halt in the lobby, Francesca started correcting me.

  ‘Marilyn doesn’t have an accent on the last syllable. And you spell it with a “y”.’

  ‌

  An inspector from the Federal District department and the head of the street sellers’ association came to the taco stand. It was six in the evening and my uncle hadn’t arrived yet. I was standing on the corner, waiting for him. The inspector showed me his ID, making it clear that this authorised him to commit superior abuses. The other guy took out a little plastic case containing a filthy card from the National Confederation of Popular Organisations, which apparently was a passport to anywhere he could think of. I had seen this man before: he was the guy we paid our rates to. That’s what my uncle called him: the rates guy. They both carried folders stuffed with papers, pens behind their ears, paper clips stuck in the buttons of their shirts; they were dressed as itinerant jobsworths.

  ‘You’re the kid who helps old Bigotes out, aren’t you?’ the rates guy said, inserting the card back into its plastic holder as delicately as an antiques dealer.

  Bigotes was my uncle’s taco-selling nickname, on account of his large moustache, and also the name of his stand: Tacos Don Bigotes. I said that I was and that he was running late, that by now the stand should have been set up and I should be slicing the onions and the coriander.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what happened?’ the inspector asked.

  I shook my head from right to left and from left to right.

  ‘Old Bigotes kicked the bucket,’ the rates guy said.

  ‘What?’ I said, from shock, but they took it to mean that I wanted to know how it had happened.

  ‘They found him in La Alameda, he’d been stabbed five times, twice fatally,’ the inspector explained.

  ‘What?’ I said again, from shock once more, and this time they thought I wanted to know why.

  ‘Seems it was “girl trouble”,’ said the inspector, the tone of bureaucratic sarcasm in his voice adding s
care quotes.

  ‘Gay trouble, more like,’ the rates guy said, laughing.

  I raised my eyebrows as close to my hairline as I could: instinct told me it was better to pretend I knew nothing about this.

  ‘You didn’t know Bigotes was a faggot?’ the inspector said.

  I said that I didn’t. What I actually said was: ‘What?’

  ‘What about you?’ the rates guy asked.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Are you a faggot too?’

  I said I wasn’t, that I had a girlfriend.

  ‘Well everyone thinks you’re a faggot,’ he went on. ‘All Bigotes’ assistants were. He brought them all from a place on Calle Luis Moya. Do you know what I’m talking about? You’re not lying to us, are you?’

  I explained that Bigotes had given me a job because he was my uncle. They looked at each other, as if checking whether it was appropriate to offer condolences in this kind of situation, dealing with this sort of people. They concluded that it wasn’t.

  ‘But are you a faggot or not?’ the rates guy insisted.

  ‘No, I’ve told you, Bigotes was my uncle.’

  ‘Well, let’s just hope it’s not genetic,’ the inspector said.

  ‘Are you or aren’t you?’ the rates guy asked again.

  I said that I wasn’t, again.

  ‘Good,’ the inspector said. ‘You’ll be of more use to us that way.’

  ‘Are you interested in business, kid?’ the rates guy asked.

  ‘Business?’ I said, because I didn’t understand, but they thought I wanted to know how it worked.

  ‘We’ll let you have this corner and you give us ten per cent of what you make,’ the rates guy said. ‘Ten for me and ten for my associate here.’

  ‘Ten for the Confederation and ten for the Department,’ the inspector corrected him.

  ‘But I don’t have a stand,’ I said.

  They explained that they’d lease it to me, that it was part of the agreement and was already included in the ten per cent.

  ‘Twenty per cent,’ the rates guy said.

  ‘Are you in?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll have to talk to my mother.’

  They looked at each other as if suspecting for a moment they’d got the wrong person and it was all a misunderstanding. They asked me how old I was. I told them I was twenty-one.

  ‘And you have to ask your mum, kid?’ the inspector said. ‘What you need to do is help your mother. The stand’s a really good business, you’ll see.’

  ‘Bigotes was her brother, and she doesn’t know about any of this yet,’ I explained.

  ‘Even more reason not to ask her, then,’ the inspector said. ‘Just tell her you inherited it, she’ll be happy.’

  ‘You have to decide now,’ the rates guy said. ‘We’re giving you an opportunity. There’s a waiting list to get a spot on this corner.’

  I knew it really was a good opportunity; one of the ways I used to help my uncle was by counting the money when we closed up the stand. I said yes, thinking that if I said no I’d end up with nothing, and if I accepted and I didn’t like it, I could always give it up. The inspector handed me a card: on the back he’d written a code in numbers and letters.

  ‘If one of our colleagues from the Department comes, show him this card. Keep it in your wallet. Don’t lose it. Without this card you’re no one, got it?’

  I said yes.

  ‘Tonight I’ll come round to settle up.’ The rates guy said. ‘Everything had better add up, don’t you try and be smart. We wouldn’t want you to end up a faggot, now.’

  ‘Another thing,’ the inspector said.

  He turned and looked across the road stretching out his arm to signal to a guy leaning against the wall there. The individual crossed the road without looking and a car had to screech to a halt to avoid running him down. When the driver stuck his head out of the window to curse at him, the man showed him a pistol he had hidden under his shirt, tucked into his trousers. He tucked his shirt in again and came over to where we were. He had a scar criss-crossing his face and a toothpick between his teeth. He was spectacularly ugly, like the caricature of a despot drawn by an artist troubled by the atrocities of war, so ugly it was depressing, because it implied that beauty was a moral attribute.

  ‘Evening,’ he said.

  ‘Evening,’ I repeated.

  The rates guy put his right hand on the man’s shoulder and informed me:

  ‘My pal here’s the one who’ll sell you the meat.’

  ‌

  The doorbell rang and it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday. On the intercom, Mao’s lilting voice announced:

  ‘I have your order.’

  ‘Pizza? You’ve got the wrong apartment.’

  ‘I’m from the UPD: Unintelligible Philosopher Deliveries.’

  I told him to come up, pressed the button that opened the main door and, in the obligatory five minutes it took him get upstairs (almost ten, as it turned out), began to imagine the commotion going on down in the lobby caused by the combination of his dreadlocks, his gently swaying walk and the pong he gave off. Finally, Mao rapped at the door to my apartment as if typing out a telegram: first one rap on its own, then several little raps spaced out and finished off with a kind of samba flourish. When I opened the door, my eyebrows expressing bewilderment, he apologised.

  ‘It’s a habit.’

  I changed the position of my eyebrows to an interrogative one.

  ‘I’ve been in hiding a long time.’

  ‘You took ages, did you crawl on your knees all the way from China?’

  ‘It’s that lift, it took forever to come. I even started to think I’d miss the fall of the Yankee Empire while I was waiting.’

  I let him in and he began to inspect my apartment as if he was worried I’d set up an ambush. Once he’d verified that, aside from the cockroaches, there was no one else here, he went and stood in front of the painting hanging on the wall.

  ‘That’s one cool freak,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘That’s my mother,’ I told him.

  ‘And was she really that fat?’

  He was wearing a Shining Path T-shirt again, which even from where he was standing gave off a stench that made clear it was the same garment. Being in hiding always was a good excuse for soap-dodgers. It suddenly occurred to me that my only visitors were militants: boys in uniform, with rucksacks on their backs.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s up with the gang in the lobby? Is it a sect?’

  ‘Something like that. It’s a literary salon.’

  ‘Right on. And you don’t take part?’

  ‘As if! I don’t read novels.’

  ‘The novel is a bourgeois invention.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  He took off his rucksack, unzipped it and took out two books, which he handed me. I was disappointed to see that Notes to Literature came in two volumes and the one he had brought me, the second, was such a slim edition it might not be any use to me at all.

  ‘What about the other volume?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s gone, man, this was the only one left.’

  Then I took a look at the red-and-blue cover of the other book he’d brought me: The Dream and the Underworld, by James Hillman.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a present. To bring you a bit more up to date with the latest impenetrable shit that’s out there.’

  I took out my wallet and gave him the agreed-on twenty pesos before I, thanks to some surprise twist in the story (including this mysterious gift), ended up having to shell out more.

  ‘Hey, is Dorotea your girlfriend?’ I asked.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Juliet introduced us. And she and I had a run-in, in any case. Did you know your little lady-friend works for the system?’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Grandpa.’

  ‘I’m not confused, I saw you with her the other day. And I told you before, don’t call me Grandpa.’


  ‘But Dorotea’s not who you think she is.’

  ‘Oh, no? You’re not going to tell me she’s a spy?’

  He sniffed, as if sniffing meant yes in the coded language of the insurgency. He sniffed again, and it seemed I’d interpreted correctly.

  ‘My God, it’s true.’

  ‘Look, all you need to know is Dorotea’s closed the file on you, you don’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘Oh really? And how much is that going to cost me? Don’t think I’m going to pay you.’

  ‘Chill, Grandpa, Dorotea’s taken care of it, she’s a good chick. She did it as a special favour, because you’re a friend of her grandmother’s.’

  ‘And do you mind telling me what the hell you hope to achieve by infiltrating the Society for the Protection of Animals?’

  ‘It’s a gold mine of information. Have you got any idea who reports that kind of stuff? Bored, stuck-up old ladies with nothing better to do, the wives of businessmen and politicians – who else cares about animals in this country? You might laugh, Grandpa, but Dorotea just got the dope on the richest man in the world.’

  ‘Did she really?’

  ‘Everything: address, phone numbers, email.’

  ‘And what are you going to do with it all?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, it’ll compromise the operation.’

  Then it was my turn to start looking around, as if I feared that someone else might be listening in to our conversation in my own home and I was needlessly implicating myself in who-knew-what mischief. I changed the subject abruptly.

  ‘Did they ask you anything in the salon?’

  ‘Man, I haven’t been interrogated like this since the G-20 summit.’

  ‘What did they ask you?’

  ‘They asked me why I was here.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘That I was a supplier.’

  ‘Brilliant. They must be thinking you’re my dealer.’

  ‘Or that I bring you your Viagra.’

  ‘Actually, maybe you can help me out.’

  ‘You want me to get hold of the little magic pill for you?’