I'll Sell You a Dog Read online

  ‘I know it was, but that was all Dorotea’s doing.’

  ‘And it was totally illegal, it violated all the procedures of the Society for the Protection of Animals and I could revoke it at any moment if I wanted.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘No, I’m asking you for help.’

  I was worried that Papaya-Head had found out Dorotea was an undercover agent in the Society for the Protection of Animals and that now, taking advantage of my friendship with Juliet, he had come to ask me to infiltrate the group that had organised the infiltration. This worry, which rose up rapidly like a pang of paranoia in my liver, was substituted just as rapidly for horror, when Papaya-Head announced:

  ‘I want to write a novel.’

  ‘You don’t!’

  I looked straight into his eyes, the pupils a dull brown like the bruises on a papaya just past its best, and there I verified that, unfortunately, there was no spark of a joke or a lie in them.

  ‘It’s more serious than I thought,’ I said. ‘We’re going to need something stronger.’

  I raised my right arm to call the waiter over, like in school when you ask permission to go to the toilet, an angle twenty degrees off a fascist salute, and shouted out my order: ‘Two tequilas! Urgently!’

  I tried to stop seeing the papaya in the papaya-shaped head of Papaya-Head and started analysing the tautness of the peel of his face, the weariness of his gaze, the nature of the expression formed by the outermost folds of his lips, closer to melancholy than sarcasm, and miles away from cynicism, in order to calculate his age. He was around forty. Perhaps he was thirty-nine, and this tale about writing a novel was nothing more than a manifestation, albeit a quaint one, of a midlife crisis, particularly serious in the case of papayas.

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  I knew it! I recalled that in the mid ’70s, it had hit me very hard: I’d rented an apartment I never moved into, I’d proposed to a hooker on Calle Madero, I’d thought I had cancer and, in a moment of madness, I’d bought a load of canvases which then sat stacked on top of a wardrobe in my mother’s house, which I hadn’t moved out of because I didn’t have enough money left to buy the paint or the brushes, never mind to actually start painting or stop believing I was a substitute for my father. Or to really believe it and do the same thing he’d done all those years before: abandon my family. My inner turmoil had, at least, been the necessary crucible for the inspiration of my ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe, the taco filling that had made me famous in the eighties. But it was one thing to invent a taco filling and quite another to write a novel, so I hastily started trying to discourage Papaya-Head. Better to kill off a novel now before it intoxicated a hopelessly hopeful author than to condemn ourselves to the torture it would be, for him, to write it, and for me, to have to read it.

  ‘Now listen here,’ I said, employing my best pedagogical tone, a mishmash of pity, indulgence, weariness and the useless superiority we elderly folk insist on believing we have over the young. ‘I’ve already told you I’m not writing a novel. You shouldn’t listen to my neighbours, they’ve got too much time on their hands – they spend their whole lives gossiping and, besides, they read far too many books. You don’t understand this yet because you’re still young, but at our age people make things up not because they have to or as some kind of strategy, they do it just because, for the fun of it, they invent stuff so as to tangle things up and so they then have to untangle them afterwards. Untangling tangles is very entertaining, that’s how we spend our time.’

  ‘I know you’re writing a novel,’ he replied, as if papayas didn’t have ears. ‘You’re forgetting I found the proof in your apartment.’

  I arched my eyebrows up, halfway between the well-worn path that leads from incomprehension to misunderstanding. Since he failed to comprehend, I had to translate my expression into a question.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The notebooks! What else?’

  I sighed, or huffed, or puffed, or a bit of all three at once, before contradicting him.

  ‘That’s not a novel, they’re drawings, notes, things that occur to me; I write them down out of sheer boredom. You’re young, you don’t need to write things down, life is out there, the world’s your oyster.’

  ‘If it wasn’t a novel, you’d have let me see the notebooks,’ he reasoned.

  He knocked back the last of his tequila, ignoring my soothing speech and taking as a given what he’d already decided: that I was lying.

  ‘Let me tell you about the story I’ve thought of,’ he said. ‘It’s a detective novel. It’s about a serial dog-killer, he works in pest control, actually, and he has a business supplying every taco stand in Mexico City. It’s inspired by a real case I dealt with in my job, a butcher’s that used to supply dog meat to taco stands.’

  ‘Well I never.’

  ‘They’d been doing it for years and we managed to expose them, we put the owner in jail and tightened up the health and safety inspection procedures in butchers’ shops.’

  ‘Now I understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why tacos have been so bad recently.’

  He picked up his glass of beer and slurped noisily, trying to show me he was coming to the end of his tether.

  ‘Why do you insist on playing the fool?’ he said. ‘You’re like a little child.’

  ‘Only to convince you that I can’t help you write your novel.’

  ‘You’re the perfect person, not only because you know how to write a novel, but because you were a taco seller too.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I’m going to write the novel from the point of view of a taco seller.’

  ‘I wasn’t a taco seller.’

  ‘You told the butcher you were! It’s all in the report! Or have you forgotten already that you tried to sell a dog to the butcher around the corner? Why do you think they assigned me to your case? I’m an expert in the illegal dog-meat trade.’

  It was this sort of thing that made me feel like I’d been born in the previous century, a twentieth century that was looking more and more like the nineteenth century; this was the bewilderment that led me to call for drinks at shorter and shorter intervals in bars, that meant my whisky ran out sooner than I’d anticipated, the bewilderment that was diminishing my savings and which, day by day, was cutting short my life.

  ‘What harm will it do you to help me write a novel?’ Papaya-Head insisted in a conciliatory tone, picking up on my consternation. ‘If you help me I promise that report won’t cause you any problems. If you refuse I’ll destroy the medical certificate Dorotea got hold of, the one that says you’re an alcoholic suffering from dementia, and if I do that the report will be active again. By the way, do you have any idea what sort of punishment you’d receive?’

  ‘The electric chair?’

  ‘It’s quite a hefty fine.’

  He then pronounced an astronomical figure, an amount of money I’d be able to live on for three years, if I was careful, or two, if I continued at the present rate. My life shortened by two or three years!

  ‘That’s the minimum,’ he added, ‘and, I assure you, you wouldn’t get away with it. Do you realise who the man who filed the complaint is? He’s a very influential person.’

  ‘So influential that when he realises the case has been closed he can force you to open it again?’

  ‘The trick is to palm them off until they get bored; people like this get bored quickly. But if the case is open and it progresses, you can be sure they’ll have no qualms about bringing you to justice.’

  I necked my tequila in one to try and forget that a quarter of my savings might soon line the pockets of the richest man in the world and his family. And worst of all: to atone for my supposed role in their misery.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ said Papaya-Head.

  I made one last, desperate attempt.

  ‘Aren’t you
ashamed to blackmail an old man?’

  ‘You want my pity? You don’t want anyone’s pity.’

  ‘Don’t try and psychoanalyse me. Do you at least know how to write? What did you study?’

  ‘Veterinary science.’

  ‘And you want to write a novel?’

  ‘I told you already: I don’t know how to write a novel, but I’ve got the most important thing.’

  I raised my eyebrows into an obvious question mark, with no room for misinterpretation.

  ‘Experience,’ he said.

  ‘There are writing workshops,’ I suggested.

  ‘At impossible times for me. I can only go on Sundays, at this time.’

  ‘Don’t you have to see to your wife and kids on Sundays?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t have a family.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me anything, all you did was mention a mysterious “something like that”. Maybe you’re bent? It wouldn’t matter, it might even work in your favour, there’re tons of gay writers.’

  ‘That’s prejudice.’

  ‘You’re wrong, O writer, that’s statistics.’

  He fell silent, his silence consenting for him. Then he returned to the only topic that interested him:

  ‘Shall we start next Sunday?’

  ‘I guess there’s nothing for it.’

  ‘Do I need to bring anything?’

  ‘It’s a writing workshop, not a knitting class.’

  ‘But I ought to bring something, right? Material to work on, I don’t know.’

  ‘Bring a ball of wool.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Bring along what you’ve got of your novel, I mean.’

  Before he left, three large bottles of beer and two tequilas later, my tongue and attitude looser, and feeling wildly impertinent (as well as content, because Papaya-Head had paid for every round), I asked him:

  ‘Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but has anyone ever told you your head looks like a papaya?’

  ‘You’re confusing me with someone else,’ he replied, amused, with the deceptive, false camaraderie brought on only by tequila. ‘That’s my brother.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yeah, my older brother, everyone calls him The Big Papaya.’

  ‌

  My sister had announced she had a new job: she was going to be a secretary at a dog-food factory. It wasn’t one of life’s little ironies; her boss had switched companies and was taking her with him, as a reward for her supposed efficiency. My mother was about to say: Well he’s obviously got the wrong end of the stick. Before she could, my sister announced she’d be getting a discount on dog biscuits. Mum wanted to know how much. Fifty per cent, my sister replied. My mother said it was still extortionate considering Market ate our leftovers, which didn’t cost a thing, following the principle that there was always room for one more at the dining table, especially if one of the extra diners was a dog. Back then, towards the end of the fifties, dog biscuits were a novelty and a source of great wonderment as they seemed so modern: if a handful of dry cereals could fulfil all the needs of an animal, it was as though dogs had suddenly become more advanced than humans, who still had to resort to all sorts of complicated recipes. My sister said that Market’s breath stank (this was true) and that the biscuits would put an end to it. My mother said nothing, because the truth was that up to now the mutt’s foul-smelling mouth had prevented her from growing fond of him. Actually, she did say something. She said:

  ‘Well, we’ll see.’

  Which meant that she accepted my sister’s new job and would put her suspicions aside while we tested the effect of the biscuits on the dog.

  My sister began bringing sacks of dog food home, one a fortnight. And, just as she’d said, not only did Market’s breath stop smelling but his coat turned all silky and shiny. All our neighbours wanted to stroke the animal, which became the most handsome specimen on the block. My mother was over the moon.

  Until one day, Market started choking at dinner time. Miraculously, he didn’t die. Miraculously – and because Mum stuck her fingers down his windpipe, from where she rescued a piece of paper, folded up small. An obscene message that had been deposited there for my sister, inside the bag of dog biscuits. It said – I can still remember it – among declarations of a forbidden love: your legs are longer than the road to Cuernavaca. And: your curves are like the ones on the road to Puerto Vallarta. The company my sister and her boss used to work for provided services to the Ministry of Communications and Transport. It could have been worse: had the new job made similar inroads in her boss’s imagination, his similes could have been further enriched. It was all written in red ink on a sheet of the company’s headed notepaper.

  Mum shut herself up in her room with Market, who wouldn’t stop whining, as if he foresaw a return to a diet of rice, stale tortillas, beans and old bones. She emerged later, as if nothing had happened, and no one spoke of the matter again. There were no punishments, no demands, no prohibitions; there was silence, and something new that came with adult life: pretence. There was too much suffering in the family as it was to go and ruin the dog’s coat as well.

  ‌

  I had been flicking through my Hillman, reading fragments here and there like a chicken pecking randomly, and without even looking I’d come across an oh-so-long, oh-so-fat, succulent worm. I copied the phrase into my notebook with all the bad intentions in the world: As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal. The hermeneutical skirmish in the salon lasted a week. Just as they were about to come to an agreement about what they all thought they’d understood, I walked through the lobby, as if by chance, and dropped this bombshell on them:

  ‘You’re confusing the imaginal with the imaginary. They’re two different things. The imaginary is merely reproductive, while the imaginal has a productive power, as an organ of knowledge.’

  I’d learned it off by heart, it was on page 59. They were so perplexed that they went back to their Lost Times and put the argument on the back-burner for a couple of days, while their stomachs digested the sticky mess. Then they returned to the fray. Francesca was the first to reach a conclusion, which she rubbed my nose in one morning while we went down in the lift together.

  ‘I’ve got half a mind to think you’re suffering from delirium tremens.’

  ‘Oh really!’

  ‘Productive fictions only happen when you’re hallucinating. Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’

  ‘How little you’ve lived, Frrrancesca, that’s your problem. Perhaps if you didn’t read so much…’

  I ended up giving Hillman’s book to Juliet, who I thought would appreciate his revolutionary theories about the underworld. As the beers came and went I presented her with it and, in order to head off her surprise at the gift, I read her the phrase that had made me think of her: the underworld is the mythological style of describing a psychological cosmos.

  ‘Well thank you, Teo,’ she said, ‘but next time you could at least give me something written in Spanish.’

  ‘It’s just what you said the other day,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh Lord, how many had I had?’

  ‘This explains the earthquake in ’85, and the crack in the Monument to the Revolution.’

  ‘Well it explains it so badly you’re going to have to explain it to me again.’

  ‘What it’s saying is that there’s a connection between mythology and the psychology of the masses. When the earth cracks open, the mythological gods wake up in people’s minds and they rebel. It’s exactly what you said the other day!’

  ‘Are you accusing me of being intellectual?’

  ‘I’m accusing you of being intelligent.’

  In return, softened more by the gesture than the gift itself or the compliment, Juliet announced she was going to show me her treasures. She invited me to come into her room, at the back of the shop. I said I’d swing by the pharmacy first and that we’d have to wait a little while for the magic
to take effect.

  ‘You really are a clown, Teo,’ she said.

  Out the back of the shop there was a little patio and then a little further on, her bedroom, with no windows or ventilation, like a cave. Inside, the bed and all the junk you could possibly imagine and possibly fit into thirty square feet. Juliet turned on a lamp with a white light that dazzled all the cockroaches, who ran to hide behind or beneath the knick-knacks. From inside a trunk she took out two delicate little glass boxes. The first one she handed to me contained a transparent flake, of an orangey colour, stuck to what I supposed was the lower part. I stood and observed all four sides of the thing. All six: from above and below, too. I had no idea what it might be, if it still was something. Or what it had been, if it had ceased to be it. Or even what it might come to be, in the event it was growing, evolving, changing. And I had even less of an idea why it was in a little glass box and Juliet considered it a treasure. I told her I was going to step out onto the patio to look at it in daylight.

  ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve got no idea what it is. It’s not a riddle. It’s a tomato, a tomato from 1988. This tomato touched our engineer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano on the sixteenth of July. Remember that day? The earthquake of ’85 had a deadly aftershock: a tremor in society. That was the day the Revolution was going to start. It was going to, but the Engineer stopped it. People were itching to take the National Palace and he calmed us all down. He said no, no, no. Was he prudent, as history records, or had he made a pact with the government? What do you think?’

  She held the other box out to me, and here it was easier to make out that the contents had once been a tomato, not just by comparing it to the previous one, but because it hadn’t yet been reduced to a flake: it had been a tomato in more recent times.

  ‘This one’s from 2006,’ the greengrocer said. ‘Do you know how many people there were in the Zócalo on that day? Over a million, they say. Can you imagine what would have happened if López Obrador had said the right words? He forgot to finish off that phrase about “to hell with institutions”. Crowds can’t start interpreting things – crowds, like armies, need orders. Another lost opportunity.’