I'll Sell You a Dog Read online

  First published in English translation in 2016 by

  And Other Stories

  High Wycombe – Los Angeles

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Juan Pablo Villalobos, 2014

  English-language translation copyright © Rosalind Harvey 2016

  First published as Te vendo un perro in 2014 by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Lines by James Hillman were reprinted with permission from The Dream and the Underworld (HarperCollins Publishers, 1979) and Re-Visioning Psychology (HarperCollins Publishers, 1992). Lines by Francisco de Quevedo were taken from Dreams and Discourses, translated by RK Britton (Aris and Phillips). Lines from the Bible were taken from the authorised King James Version (Oxford University Press). Lines from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory were reprinted with permission from translations by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Bloomsbury, 2013). Lines from Adorno’s Notes to Literature were reprinted with permission from the translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Copyright © Columbia University Press, 1993). Lines by Marcel Proust were taken from CK Scott Moncrieff’s translation, Remembrance of Things Past (Chatto & Windus). Lines from Juan O’Gorman’s interviews in La luz de México by Cristina Pacheco (Estado de Guanajato), Daniel Sada’s Registro de causantes (Planeta) and from Silvio Rodríguez’ song ‘Al final de este viaje en la vida’ (Ojalá Records) were translated by Rosalind Harvey. Permission has been sought from all rightsholders.

  ISBN 9781908276742

  eBook ISBN 9781908276759

  Editor: Sophie Lewis; copy-editor: Tara Tobler; proofreader: Laura Willett; typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; cover design: Elisa von Randow.

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

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  Contents

  Aesthetic Theory

  Notes to Literature

  Acknowledgements

  ‌

  For Andreia

  ‌

  Her pink dress unsettles me. It won’t let me die.

  JUAN O’GORMAN

  Perhaps I’ll understand in the next life; in this one I can only imagine.

  DANIEL SADA

  There isn’t a stomach that wouldn’t howl with hunger if all the dogs you’ve thrust down them were suddenly brought back to life!

  FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

  ‌

  ‌Aesthetic Theory

  ‌

  In those days, as I left my apartment each morning, number 3-C, I would bump into my neighbour from 3-D in the hall, who had got it into her head that I was writing a novel. My neighbour was called Francesca, and I, it goes without saying, was not writing a novel at all. You had to pronounce her name Frrrancesca, really rolling the ‘r’s, so it sounded extra trashy. After greeting each other with a raise of the eyebrows, we’d stand and wait in front of the doors to the lift, which divided the building in two, ascending and descending like the zip on a pair of trousers. It was comparisons like this that made Francesca go around telling everyone else who lived in the building that I was forever coming on to her. And because I called her Francesca, which wasn’t her real name but the name I’d given her in this so-called novel of mine.

  There were days when the lift would take hours to arrive, as if it didn’t know the people using it were old and assumed we had all the time in the world ahead of us, as opposed to behind. Or as if it did know, but couldn’t care less. When the doors finally opened, we’d get in and begin the agonisingly slow descent, and the colour would begin to rise in Francesca’s face purely from the effect of the metaphor. The contraption moved so slowly it seemed it was being operated by a pair of mischievous hands that were taking their time on purpose so as to enhance the arousal and delay the consummation, when the zip finally reached the bottom. The cockroaches infesting the building would take advantage of our trip and travel downstairs to visit their associates. I used the dead time in the lift to squash a few of them. It was easier to chase after them in there than at home, in the corridors or down in the lobby, although it was more dangerous, too. You had to step on them firmly but not too hard, or else you ran the risk of the elevator plummeting sharply down from the force. I told Francesca to stand still. Once, I stamped on her toe and she made me pay for her to get a taxi to the podiatrist.

  Waiting for her in the lobby were her minions, the poor things: she ran a literary salon in which she forced residents to read one novel after another. They spent hours down there, her ‘salonists’, as they called themselves, from Monday through to Sunday. They’d purchased some little battery-powered lights – Made in China – from the street market, which they clipped to the front covers of their books together with a magnifying glass, and looked after them with a care so obscene you’d think they were the most important invention since gunpowder or Maoism. I slunk through the chairs, arranged in a circle like in rehab or a satanic sect, and when I reached the main door and sensed the proximity of the street with its potholes and stench of fried food, I shouted a goodbye to them:

  ‘Lend me the book when you’ve finished! I’ve got a table with a wonky leg!’

  And without fail, Francesca would reply:

  ‘Francesca sounds like an Italian prostitute, you dirty old man!’

  The literary salon had ten members, plus the chair. From time to time one would die or be declared unable to live unassisted and move to a home, but Francesca always managed to hoodwink the new resident into joining up. Our building consisted of twelve apartments arranged over three floors, four on each storey. It was widowers and bachelors who lived there, or rather I should say widows and spinsters, because women made up the majority. The building was at number 78 Calle Basilia Franco, a street like any other in Mexico City, by which I mean as filthy and flaking as any other. The only anomaly on it was this place, this ghetto of the third age, the little old people’s building as the rest of the neighbourhood called it, as decrepit and shabby as its inhabitants. The number on the building was the same as my age, the only difference being that the numbering on the block didn’t increase with every year that passed.

  Proof the salon was actually a sect lay in the fact that they spent such a long time on those chairs. They were folding aluminium chairs, bearing the logo of Corona beer. I’m talking about literary fundamentalists here, people capable of convincing the brewery’s marketing manager to give them chairs as part of their cultural sponsorship programme. As unlikely as it seems, the subliminal advertising worked: I would leave the building and head straight for the bar on the corner, for the first beer of the day.

  The salon wasn’t the only blot on the building’s weekly routine. Hipólita, from 2-C, imparted classes in bread-dough modelling on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Then there was an instructor who came on Mondays and Fridays to do aerobics classes round the corner, in the Jardín de Epicuro, a park filled with bushes and shrubs and where there were more nitrogen and sulphur oxides, more carbon dioxide and monoxide than oxygen. Francesca, who had been a language teacher, gave private English lessons. And then there were classes in yoga, IT and macramé, all organised by the residents themselves, who seemed to think retirement was like preschool. You had to put up with all of this as well as the lame
ntable state of the building, but the rent had been frozen since the beginning of time, which made up for it.

  Trips to museums and places of historical interest were also organised. Every time someone stuck a leaflet up in the lobby about an excursion to some exhibition, I would jab a finger at it and ask:

  ‘Anyone know how much beer costs in this dump?’

  It wasn’t an idle question: I’d paid as much as fifty pesos for a beer in a museum café once. The price of a month’s rent! I couldn’t afford that kind of luxury; I had to survive on my savings, which, according to my calculations, would last another eight years at this rate. Long enough, I thought, before old lady death came to pay me a visit. This rate, by the way, was what they called a stoic life, although I called it a crappy life, plain and simple. I had to keep track of the number of beers I had each day so as not to go over budget! And I did keep track, methodically – the problem was that I lost track come the evening. So those eight years were perhaps miscalculated and were only seven or six. Or five. The thought that the sum of drinks I had each day might go into subtraction and end up becoming a countdown made me pretty nervous. And the more nervous I was, the harder I found it to keep track.

  At other times, as the lift descended, Francesca would start giving me advice on writing the novel which, like I said before, I wasn’t writing. Going down three floors at that speed gave her time to cover two centuries of literary theory. She said my characters lacked depth, as if they were holes. And that my style needed more texture, as if she were buying fabric to make curtains. She spoke with astonishing clarity, articulating each syllable so carefully that no matter how outrageous the ideas she put forward they sounded like gospel. It was as if she reached the absolute truth via correct pronunciation and employed hypnosis techniques on top of that. And it worked! This was how she had come to be dictator of the salon, chair of the Residents’ Association, the ultimate authority on the subject of gossip and slander. I stopped paying attention and would close my eyes to concentrate on the descent of my fly. Then the lift would give a jolt as it reached the lobby and Francesca knitted together one final phrase, whose loose end I clutched at, having lost the thread of her rant:

  ‘You’re as bad as the Yucatecs, who have the same word for searching and finding.’

  And I would reply:

  ‘If you do not seek, you will not find.’

  This was a phrase of Schoenberg’s that reminded me of my mother seventy years earlier, when I had lost a sock. I searched and searched and then it turned out that the dog had eaten the sock. My mother died in 1985, in the earthquake. The dog beat her to it by over forty years and in his haste he never discovered how the Second World War ended: he swallowed a pair of nylon tights, incredibly long ones, as long as my father’s secretary’s legs.

  ‌

  I’d come to live in the building one summer afternoon a year and a half ago, carrying a suitcase with some clothes, two boxes of belongings, a painting and an easel. The removal company had brought the furniture and a few appliances that morning. As I crossed the lobby, dodging the bulky forms that made up the salon, I repeated:

  ‘Don’t trouble yourselves, don’t trouble yourselves.’

  Of course, no one did trouble themselves and they all just pretended to carry on reading, although what they were actually doing was looking sidelong at me. When I finally got to the lift doors, I heard the rumour that began on Francesca’s lips and spread from mouth to ear like a party game:

  ‘He’s a painter!’

  ‘He’s a waiter!’

  ‘He’s a baker!

  ‘He’s a Quaker!’

  I took everything I could fit up in the lift and, ten minutes later, as I returned to the lobby to carry the rest up, like an oh-so-slow Sisyphus, I found that the salonists had organised a cocktail party to welcome me with fizz from the state of Zacatecas and savoury crackers spread with fish paste and mayonnaise.

  ‘Welcome!’ Hipólita shouted, handing me a bottle of DDT spray. ‘It’s just a little something, but you’ll need it.’

  ‘You must forgive us,’ said Francesca, ‘we didn’t realise you were an artist! We would have put the champagne on ice if we’d known.’

  I took the plastic cup she handed me, full to the brim with warm fizzy wine, and held out my arm to make a toast when Francesca exclaimed:

  ‘To art!’

  I’d extended my arm a little too horizontally, so instead of making a toast it looked like I was trying to give them the cup back, which was, in fact, what I wanted to do. They then asked me to speak, to say a few words in the name of art, and what I said, peering sadly at the furious bubbling coming from the disposable cup, was:

  ‘I’d prefer a beer.’

  Francesca took a crumpled twenty-peso note from her purse and ordered one of her minions:

  ‘Go to the shop on the corner and get the artist a beer.’

  Somewhat bewildered, I just managed to head off the jumble of questions trooping towards me in an attempt to dispel my anonymity:

  ‘Excuse me but how old are you?’

  ‘Are you a widower?’

  ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’

  ‘Where did you live before?’

  ‘Are you a bachelor?’

  ‘Why don’t you brush your hair?’

  I stood stock-still and smiled, my cup of fizz untouched in my right hand, the DDT spray in my left, until there was a silence when I could reply.

  ‘So?’ Francesca said.

  ‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said, unfortunately before the guy who was going to fetch the beers had left the building. ‘I’m not an artist.’

  ‘I told you! He’s a baker!’ Hipólita shouted triumphantly, and I noticed her mouth was crowned with a fine dark fuzz of hairs.

  ‘Actually, I’m retired,’ I continued.

  ‘A retired artist!’ Francesca crowed. ‘No need to apologise, we’re all retired here. All of us except those who never did anything.’

  ‘I retired, from my family,’ Hipólita chipped in.

  ‘No, no, I was never an artist,’ I assured them so vehemently even I was suspicious.

  One of the salon members who was heading over to offer me a plate of crackers stopped in his tracks and put it down on one of the chairs.

  ‘Shall I get the beer or not?’ the other minion called from the doorway.

  ‘Wait,’ Francesca ordered, then asked me: ‘What about the easel and the painting?’

  ‘They were my father’s,’ I replied. ‘He liked to paint. I used to like painting too, but that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Just what we need, a frustrated artist!’ Francesca exclaimed. ‘And from a long line of them, too! May I ask what you used to do?’

  ‘I was a taco seller.’

  ‘A taco seller?’

  ‘Yeah, I had a taco stand in the Candelaria de los Patos.’

  The salon members started pouring the fizzy wine back into the bottle and, since their hands were shaking, half the liquid spilled onto the floor. Francesca looked over at the man awaiting the denouement in the doorway and commanded him:

  ‘Give me the twenty pesos.’

  I felt the weight of the cup in my right hand disappear, felt Hipólita grab the DDT spray from my left hand, watched Francesca’s minion return the crumpled note to her and the entire salon pull the plug on the cocktail party, handing out the remaining crackers and putting the cork back in the bottle before taking up their books again. Francesca still stood there, looking me up and down, down and up, etching my shabby figure onto her mind’s eye, before declaring:

  ‘Impostor!’

  I looked closely at her too, taking in her figure, her long, svelte, rake-like body, noticing that she had let down her hair and undone the first few buttons at the front of her dress while I’d been going up and down in the lift, felt the rare twinge in my crotch and, realising pretty quickly what she was about, gave the first of many shouts that, from that day forth, would be the catc
hphrase of our shtick:

  ‘Well, I beg your pardon for having been a taco seller, Madame!’

  ‌

  My mother had demanded an autopsy for the dog and Dad was attempting, fruitlessly, to prevent it.

  ‘What use is it knowing what the dog died of?’ he asked.

  ‘We have to know what happened,’ my mother replied. ‘Everything has an explanation.’

  The creature had spent the previous night trying to be sick, without success. Mum counted the socks: every pair was complete. This is when she became suspicious, because my father used to take the dog out for a walk every day after dinner. She paid the butcher to slit the animal open. They carried the carcass out to the little patio in the back where we hung out the washing and which my mother had carpeted with newspapers. While the preparations went on, Dad followed my mother around, saying over and over:

  ‘Is this necessary? Is it really necessary? Poor animal, it’s barbaric.’

  I tried to calm him down:

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad, he can’t feel anything any more.’

  I was about to turn eight at the time. The preparations continued and, instead of trying to halt the operation, my father promised to paint a portrait of the dog that they could hang in the living room, so Mum would never forget him.

  ‘A figurative portrait,’ Dad hastened to add; ‘none of that avant-garde stuff.’

  My mother didn’t even reply to such a proposition. There was an outstanding, that is to say, never-ending dispute over a cubist portrait of Mum my father had painted when they were courting and which he had given her as a wedding present. She hated the picture because, depending on the mood she was in, she said it made her look like a clown, a monster or a deformed whale.

  ‘Is it really necessary?’ my father asked again.

  ‘I don’t want it to happen again and to stop it from happening again we have to know what happened,’ my mother explained.