I'll Sell You a Dog Read online

  I went to the fridge and took out a big bottle of Victoria I’d saved for this moment. Mao flopped down onto the little chair and began flexing his arms like he was warming up at the gym.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now we wait,’ I said. ‘Now the negotiations begin. Did they see you take the haul?’

  ‘No, they ran out into the street and the cockroaches went after them. Didn’t you see them from the balcony?’

  ‘Yeah, they turned down Avenida Teodoro Flores and headed for the Jardín de Epicuro.’

  As I poured two glasses of beer, the roaches started coming in under the door, at first timidly, the vanguard made up of four or five creatures, and then, brazenly, came the rest, the sheep, the cockroach-sheep.

  ‘No way!’ said Mao. ‘Where are they coming from?’

  ‘Cockroaches,’ I told him, ‘are an army with infinite reserves, like an endless nation of robots.’

  ‘Shall we play them the music?’

  ‘No, leave them be.’

  ‘Hey, what are you going to do with those bricks?’ he asked, pointing at the tower of Lost Times.

  ‘I told you: negotiate the handover.’

  ‘I need to borrow them off you.’

  ‘So now you’ve got a literary salon. Didn’t you tell me the novel was a bourgeois invention?’

  ‘I don’t want to read them. I’ve just had an idea.’

  ‘Take them, I can’t risk having them here for long in any case.’

  I handed him a glass of beer and raised my own:

  ‘To the Revolution!’

  ‘No, to Revolutionary Literature.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‌

  A long time had passed since Willem had buzzed at the main door and he still hadn’t managed to get to the door to my apartment. Doubly mystified, because it wasn’t even a Wednesday or a Saturday, I went out onto the balcony: nothing. I heard the intercom buzz again straight away.

  ‘What’s going on? Why don’t you come up?’ I asked.

  ‘We have him,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We have your little friend. We’re not going to let him go until you give us back our Lost Times.’

  ‘I don’t have your Lost Times.’

  ‘Don’t lie, I know you planned it all with the help of that ragamuffin.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That kid who leaves our lobby stinking of sweaty feet.’

  ‘I don’t have your Lost Times, I’ve told you already.’

  ‘I heard you. Either you give them back or we won’t let your friend go.’

  ‘Are you sure? Do you know what kidnapping a gringo could cost you?’

  The pause at the other end of the line confirmed my threat was having the desired effect.

  ‘I’m going to hang up, Frrrancesca, I have to make a call to the North American embassy.’

  ‘On your own head be it,’ she warned me.

  I put the phone down and went and stood by the door to wait for Willem. He took only the five obligatory minutes and then appeared in the doorway with the face of a martyr mid-torture.

  ‘My parents want me to come home,’ he said.

  ‘Come on in.’

  He came in, his rucksack full of woe, or at least that’s what it looked like: a rucksack that pushed his shoulders downwards, emphasising his dejection.

  ‘A tequila, Villem?’

  ‘A glass of wahder, please.’

  ‘Did they scare you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They tried to kidnap you.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What were you doing down there? Why did you take so long?’

  ‘They wanted me to talk to them about the word of the Lard. I was reading my Bible to them far a while.’

  I held out his glass under the water dispenser and, as I filled it up, I saw that, uncharacteristically, Willem had left his rucksack by the door and had sat down in the little chair without his Bible.

  ‘What is it,’ I asked, ‘family problems?’

  ‘My parents are afraid,’ he replied. ‘They say there’s goin’ to be a big earthquake.’

  ‘How do they know? Did Jesus Christ tell them?’

  ‘They saw the news.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘The crack that’s openin’ up in the ground. They say it’s a worning, that there’s goin’ to be a big earthquake any moment.’

  I handed him a glass of water and pulled the Corona chair over to sit opposite him.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with anything,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘You can’t predict earthquakes. And anyway, they already explained that crack, didn’t you hear? The revolutionaries’ moustaches?’

  He took a few little sips of water and rested the glass on the seat, squeezing it between his legs so it didn’t spill.

  ‘That’s a dumb lie nobody believes,’ he said angrily, losing the peace of the Lord. ‘They say they got that stary from a book. And Darotea told me it’s not true.’

  ‘Dorotea is Mao’s girlfriend,’ I replied, ‘and he is the king of conspiracy theories. Don’t pay any attention. How long were you planning on staying?’

  ‘Two yeahs altogether.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  I waited for him to continue, keeping an eye on the glass he was balancing between his legs.

  ‘Darotea isn’t Mao’s girlfriend any more,’ he said.

  ‘Oh really! Let me guess… that’s why you don’t want to leave.’

  He looked up and into my eyes and I felt almost proud he’d matured to the extent that he’d at least stopped blushing.

  ‘If you’re going to stay,’ I said, ‘let it be for the right reasons. Stay because you want to, don’t stay because of Dorotea.’

  ‘I do want to stay because I want to, and if I want to stay it’s because of Darotea.’

  ‘Have you slept with her yet?’

  ‘Sex before marr—’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know,’ I interrupted him. ‘So are you going to stay to screw her or to marry her?’

  He looked away and over towards the door, towards his rucksack, where his Bible lay, in which perhaps, I imagined he was thinking, on one of its hundreds of pages, was the answer.

  ‘I should go,’ he said.

  He stood up resolutely and the water spilled all over his crotch. He caught the glass before it fell to the floor and began to brush at his trousers with his hand. I handed him a roll of toilet paper to dry himself with. The liquid spread a dark patch all across the fabric, now decorated with a pattern of little white spots, the remnants of the loo roll.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, and went to my room.

  I knelt down to take out the box of Chinese fortune cookies and came back into the lounge. Willem had already slung his woe over his shoulder, and it looked even heavier now.

  ‘Pick one,’ I said.

  He put his hand in doubtfully but without making a fuss, as he wasn’t programmed to disobey anyone in any circumstances. He fished out the little parcel, unwrapped it and split open the cookie.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The helping hand you need is at the end of your orm.’

  ‘Bingo!’

  He put the scrap of paper in his shirt pocket, behind the badge with his name on, at the level of his heart.

  ‘If you do leave, come and say goodbye,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not goin’ to leave,’ he replied.

  ‘Good.’

  I watched him go, weighed down with a determination that filled him with guilt. I shut the door and began imagining the scandal down in the lobby when they saw him walk past with his trousers in such a state.

  ‌

  No one gives out medals or erects statues to taco sellers, but a taco seller, especially a taco seller in the ce
ntre of Mexico City, can achieve recognition, too. I reached the height of fame in the eighties, when my taco stand in the Candelaria de los Patos was frequented by the cream of metropolitan society, not to mention the whey and the curds as well. One of my regular customers was the mayor: he came escorted by his minders, who also ate, taking turns so they never dropped their guard. Their most important job was stopping the other customers from coming over to the mayor with petitions that would end up giving him indigestion. Another customer who came at least once a week was El Negro Durazo, who back then was the chief of police in the capital, before we had a change of presidents and people realised, miraculously, that he was the Devil’s envoy to Mexico City. He was not a customer I was proud of, but he was one of the most loyal. He stopped coming only when they tried to put him in prison and he had to flee.

  Once José Luis Cuevas came; by then already an acclaimed artist, he was trawling the centre with Fernando Gamboa trying to find a site to build his museum. I was too embarrassed to tell him we’d met before, to ask him if he remembered me. Another regular customer was Alberto Raurell, who was the director of the Museo Tamayo and had organised a Picasso exhibition. Even though he was half-gringo, or precisely because of this, he adored tacos. When he came to eat at my stand, I would pester him so much chatting to him that his tacos would grow cold and I’d have to keep serving him fresh ones. The coterie of daily diners – locals, office workers and night owls of all descriptions – would tease me: ‘The taco guy fancies himself an art critic!’

  And Raurell, smiling but serious, always came to my defence: ‘This is what we need, taco sellers who are interested in art.’

  I told him of my buried aspirations to be an artist, of my fleeting passage through La Esmeralda, said that I still went to museums, to galleries, but didn’t think there was anything interesting to look at any more, that the great art from the first half of the century completely eclipsed that of the second half, and nothing really new was being made. Raurell didn’t accept my views, he’d hold his taco with the fingers of his right hand intertwined, in that strange way of those who didn’t learn how to do it as children, and started giving me lessons in aesthetic theory between mouthfuls, very patiently.

  ‘Of course new art’s being made,’ he’d say again and again. ‘New art’s being made all the time. Do you know what a German theorrrist used to say? That the new is the desire for the new. You see? Imagine there’s a child in front of a piano looking for a new tune, one that’s never been played. This child is doomed to fail, to be frustrated, because this tune doesn’t exist, all possible melodies have already been considerrred on the keyboard, due to the simple fact that a keyboard exists with a determinate combination of keys. You see? But the new is what the child does, he wants to make something new. The new is the desire for the new. The new is the child’s stubbornness. This is the parrradox of art. You have to seek out the new. If you don’t seek, you don’t find.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The German guy who said that.’

  ‘Theodor Adorno. Read Adorno, you’ll like him.’

  Before the crowd started ridiculing me again I got myself off the hook: ‘When do you think I’ve got time to read, boss? I’ve got to work, you’ve no idea how lousy the life of a taco seller is.’

  Raurell winked at me, raised his left hand, the right one busy trying to keep hold of the taco disintegrating between his fingers, and waved his index finger in the air as he spoke in a loud voice, so everyone could hear him: ‘I’ve had better conversation about art at this taco stand than in Harvard, I swear!’

  Later on, Raurell was killed; he was eating in a restaurant in the centre of town, not far from my stand, when there was an armed robbery; he put up a fight and they shot him. It was in all the newspapers. He was thirty-four years old. In the Museo Tamayo there was an exhibition on Matisse that he had curated, so colourful and joyous it seemed like a macabre joke. The following year they captured El Negro Durazo. He was accused of extortion, possession of illegal weapons, smuggling and corruption, and was sent to rot in jail. He was one customer I wasn’t sad to lose.

  ‌

  The intercom buzzed as I laboured away at my notebook and drained the dregs of what until then I had thought would be the final beer of the day.

  ‘I’ve come from the BDD,’ said Mao’s voice on the phone.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an emergency.’

  ‘Broken-hearted Drunks Delivery?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘The tone of your voice says it all. Did you get the whisky?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Have you got anything with you?’

  ‘A couple of beers and a packet of peanuts.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘And a joint.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so before? Come on up.’

  He arrived after the obligatory five minutes the lift took to complete its ascent, which gave me time to put the Cuban torture into action.

  ‘The roaches will never leave at that volume,’ Mao said as he came in.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I replied. ‘Francesca’s in her apartment now, supposedly sleeping, and I don’t want her to hear us.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a little over the top?’

  ‘Have you seen how thin these walls are?’

  He handed me the two warm cans of beer to put in the fridge and took a little packet out of his pocket that contained, quite literally, three peanuts.

  ‘I got hungry on the way,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘And the joint?’ I asked.

  He unzipped his rucksack then undid another zip inside the bag, and eventually extracted half a deformed, squashed little roll-up. As I took it from him I noticed it was warm.

  ‘Did you fancy a quick toke on the way too?’ I asked. ‘Have you got a lighter? I haven’t smoked for quite a while.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Just the way you hold the spliff, I’ve only ever seen that in a film about The Doors.’

  I took the lighter from him and walked over to the fridge. Behind me, Mao had discovered the sketchbook I’d left open, carelessly, on the armchair. Out of the corner of my eye I saw he had started to flick through it, pausing, it seemed to me, at the drawings.

  ‘Your pics are awesome,’ he said. ‘Do you only draw dogs and women? If you drew them together it’d be full-on perversion. You’d better watch out, you know, the last guy they caught with that fetish was accused of murdering Luis Donaldo Colosio. Remember the Eagle Knight? He had a sketchbook just like this.’

  ‘Did the Maoists teach you how to snoop as well or are you just rude?’

  ‘Hey, chill out, Grandpa, you’re so touchy. You’d better not go writing anything about me, now.’

  ‘As if – you’re not exactly very interesting.’

  ‘I’m serious, it’d put me in danger, and you too.’

  From the depths of the fridge I rescued a can of Tecate beer I’d been saving since the day the lights went out for several hours. Then, from its hiding place, I took out the half-litre of whisky I had left.

  ‘So Dorotea’s left you, lover boy?’ I said, to change the subject.

  As I expected, he lost interest in the sketchbook, putting it down on the table, and switched to concentrating on his woes.

  ‘You know about that?’ he asked. ‘Did the Mormon kid tell you?’

  ‘And there I was thinking you were trying to infiltrate the Mormons.’

  ‘Well, that was the idea.’

  ‘And it really backfired, didn’t it! You didn’t reckon with our good friend Villem’s charms, did you.’

  ‘I’m gonna punch his lights out, that little fucking gringo son of a bitch.’

  ‘Calm down, Mao, I thought you’d had a proper education.’

  ‘You’re offended by swear words, Grandpa? Well whaddya k
now.’

  ‘I’m talking about your sentimental education. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.’

  I passed him a can of beer and flopped down on the armchair with a glass of whisky in one hand and the joint, now lit, in the other. I raised my glass to make a toast.

  ‘To mariachis everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘If you’re going to take the piss I’m leaving,’ he complained.

  ‘Seriously, relax kiddo, sit down. The world doesn’t end because of a woman, not even one like Dorotea. Didn’t the Maoists teach you anything about love? The next thing you know you’ll end up risking the Revolution for it.’

  ‘What the hell has love got to do with the Revolution?’ he asked, dragging the Corona chair over to sit down next to me.

  ‘It’s got everything to do with it. A true combatant shouldn’t have any ties. Have you ever, in the history of humanity, seen a real revolutionary with a wife and kids? Can you imagine a terrorist in love? Love makes you vulnerable, it makes you feel like you’ve got a lot to lose, it changes your priorities, takes away your freedom – want me to go on?’

  He knocked back a long gulp of beer.

  ‘It’s flat.’

  ‘Oh is it now! Unlucky for you.’

  ‘And what was your Revolution? ’68, the Tlatelolco Massacre? You never had a family – or did you?’

  ‘In ’68 I was thirty-three, kiddo – the only revolution I fought was giving tacos away to the students who showed up at my stand.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Just for a few days. Then word got around and I had to stop. You know what they say: charity is a bottomless dish.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So why did you end up alone? There must have been a reason, no one ends up alone just because.’

  ‘Go and ask people why they got married, why they had kids. The world is full of people who get married just because, get divorced and remarry just because – what’s so strange about ending up alone just because?’

  ‘Pass it on, will you?’

  I handed him the diminutive joint and, as I was out of the habit, I burned his fingers.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Kill that reefer, buddy.’

  ‘You sound like someone in a William Burroughs novel.’