I'll Sell You a Dog Read online

  ‘You’re even more cracked than you look,’ he said. ‘If you don’t beat it now I’m going to call the police.’

  I walked out and mentally ran through my daily stroll to see if I could recall another butcher. Nothing. I sat down to think on a bench in the Jardín de Epicuro; it seemed to me some sort of conclusion had to be drawn from what had just happened. How was it possible that a specimen weighing at least thirty kilos, strong, healthy and well-fed, could end up on the rubbish heap or, even worse, buried? All of a sudden I felt infinitely old, as old as the world. The country had changed, it wasn’t the same any more, it was a place I no longer recognised: this was why the tacos were so bad.

  I was about to get up from the bench to plod slowly back home when I heard the shout: ‘Here he is, ma’am!’

  A maid in uniform was crouching near the bush where the dog’s corpse lay. Behind me, a 4 x 4 pulled up with a squeal of tyres, one of those cars made by gringos for one of their endless wars. There were potholes the size of trenches in the road, but even so this was over the top: Iraq was a long way off. A young couple got out and ran towards the park, with three children following them. The maid shouted again: ‘No! Not the children!’

  The mother, or the woman I guessed was the mother, turned and encircled them in an embrace to stop them coming any further. The man came over to the dog’s corpse.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  And then he shouted:

  ‘Take the kids, take them away!’

  I suddenly became sixty years younger. I stood up and, with an energetic, almost military gait, marched over to the greengrocer’s. I could almost hear the strains of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in my head and I easily broke the world record for urban hiking for the over-sixties.

  I found Juliet spraying tomatoes with water and covering them with plastic so as to speed up and complete the rotting process. I called out from the door:

  ‘I’ve got news! A great victory for the Revolution!’

  ‘Calm down, Bakunin. Want a beer?’

  ‘A tequila’d be more appropriate.’

  Three tequilas later and, thanks to the story of my feat, I was about to convince her to come up to my apartment. I failed at the last moment: ‘I’ll nip to the chemist and pick you up on the way back.’

  I stared hard at her mouth, at her full upper lip which, when she smiled, formed a little pout beneath her nose: a second smile.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.

  ‘Why do you think?’ I replied.

  She pursed her lips and the double smile disappeared.

  ‘Let’s leave it there,’ Juliet said, with all the gentleness sincere rejections tend to have. ‘You and I have more important deeds awaiting us. Let’s not jeopardise the Revolution for a shag.’

  ‘Isn’t it the other way round, Juliette?’

  ‘What do you mean, the other way round?’

  ‘That it’s not worth jeopardising a shag for the Revolution?’

  ‘You’re such a clown.’

  I went back home and had to make do with the company of Willem, who was waiting for me in the lobby, sitting on the floor in front of the lift doors, behind the circle of the salon.

  ‘What are you doing here? Who let you in?’

  ‘They did.’

  We got into the lift and I waited for the doors to close and the contraption to start moving before asking: ‘What did they say to you?’

  ‘They assed me lats of questions.’

  ‘Who, Francesca?’

  ‘Yeah, she talked to me in English.’

  ‘What did she want to know?’

  ‘Why I come to see yuh.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I said I come to talk. To talk about the word of the Lard. And sometimes we watch TV.’

  ‘Good. Hey, how does she speak?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How well does she speak English?’

  ‘She speaks as if she wus teaching a child.’

  ‘Just like in Spanish!’

  ‘Why are they so innersted in me coming?’

  ‘They probably think you’re a poof.’

  His eyebrows reached his shoulder blades.

  ‘They read a lot of novels,’ I explained.

  ‌

  Everyone attended the meeting, as was customary: meetings took place in the lobby and all the residents, except me, spent their lives down there. Depending on the topic, sometimes I showed up and sometimes I didn’t. I went just enough so as not to fall foul of an administrative rule that meant Francesca would report me to the management committee. On this occasion I had decided to go because the matter affected me directly: the local supermarket had replaced our delivery boy, who had been helping us carry our shopping for over a year, and the entire building considered it an outrage. They said that the new boy refused to do anything other than leave the shopping bags at the entrance to the apartments. The previous one had always been happy to change a light bulb, kill a particularly insidious cockroach, move a piece of furniture, stand on a chair and get something down from the top of a wardrobe…

  The new boy was cocky and, instead of helping, he delivered speeches from the Mexico City Union of Deliverymen and alleged that what we asked him to do was not included in the job description drawn up by the union. He kept a folded copy in his trouser pocket, and was always quoting huffily at us from it. Then he would take offence because he didn’t get a tip, or the tip wasn’t big enough. As if that wasn’t enough, the previous delivery boy had been a first-rate spiv. I’d bought a microwave oven off him, a DVD recorder, a little radio with headphones and a cordless phone. And most importantly: he used to supply me with a whisky distilled in Tlalnepantla that cost thirty pesos a litre. When I asked the new boy if he could get it for me, he replied indignantly that he was from Iztapalapa.

  In response to the residents’ furious complaints comparing the new delivery boy to the old, the manager of the supermarket had said that we would soon become accustomed to the change, as if the prevailing economic model had transformed capacity for adaptation into a corporate form of resignation. Then someone on the ground floor accused the new delivery boy of stealing a tin of jalapeños, and the cup of patience spilled over.

  The committee drew up a petition to sign, demanding the new delivery boy be dismissed and the old one be immediately reinstated. The discussion about whether the letter should ‘demand’ or ‘request’ took two whole afternoons which I, if I’m honest, spent going back and forth between the lobby and the bar, between the bar and the greengrocer’s, and the greengrocer’s and the lobby, and around again. Juliet said:

  ‘Typical intellectuals, trying to put the world to rights with letters. If they just kidnapped one of the cashiers, the supermarket would give the old delivery boy his job back within twenty minutes!’

  The manager of the supermarket replied, the moment he was handed the letter, that no matter how much he wanted to he was unable to meet our demands because the previous delivery boy had simply stopped showing up for work one day. To demonstrate his goodwill, he gave us the boy’s address and promised us that if we could persuade him to return, as long as he could provide some kind of documentation justifying his absence, then he, the manager, would give the kid his job back.

  An expedition was organised to visit him: Francesca, in her role as president of the committee, and me, in my role as customer with an urgent need to ensure a supply of provisions. We crossed the city by metro, taxi, local train, bus, another taxi. A journey of three and a half hours, during which Francesca gave me a lesson in Aristotelian hypokrisis, for having committed the error of asking her where she’d learned to hold forth the way she did. She then classified fifty Mexican novels, dividing them into urban and rural, expounded upon what she called ‘the fallacies of structuralism’, which put me in a dark mood as I recalled buildings collapsing in earthquakes, and finished by explaining (by which point I had, for a change, lost concentration) an approach to narration
known as ‘free indirect style’, at which point I no longer knew if we were talking about literature or swimming. Until at last we arrived at the door of an apartment in a complex in Tlalnepantla, which I began desperately pounding on.

  The door was opened by the boy’s mother, drying her hands on a checked apron, even though they appeared to be dry. The apartment looked a lot like the one we each had back home, including the cockroaches: a bedroom, a kitchenette, a bathroom and a room that served as living and dining room. Except that four people were living here, not one. Three now: the delivery boy’s father, mother and younger brother. Three now – because the delivery boy had disappeared. His mother told us what she knew, that he had simply not come home from work one day. From the kitchen, a cockroach peeped out, waving its antennae: I could have sworn I’d seen it in my apartment. We asked her if she’d reported the disappearance, what she’d said to the police. The mother turned to look at a calendar on the wall, from 2009, with photos of dogs and the red logo of a dog-food manufacturer where my sister had worked over fifty years ago. She dried her hands on her apron again, even though they were dry, looked at the dog on the calendar and said: ‘They told us he was mixed up in drugs, that he was selling drugs.’

  She started to cry as if her son had been accused of stabbing a thousand puppies to death. Francesca tried to console her: she told her that the police always said that when someone disappeared, so they didn’t have to look for them. That the delivery boy was a good kid and the proof was that we had come looking for him. That everyone in our building missed him, we’d grown very fond of him. It sounded as if she was talking about a dog. She paused so I could back her up.

  ‘Very fond,’ I said.

  ‘How old was your son?’ Francesca asked.

  And immediately corrected herself, making things worse: ‘How old is he, I mean?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ his mother replied.

  ‘He looked older,’ Francesca said.

  ‘Yes, he looks older,’ I said.

  ‘Life’s not easy round here,’ said his mother.

  She was apologising because her son had had to grow up quicker than she would have liked, hinting, as she did so, that she believed the police’s version of events and ultimately justifying the boy’s actions as inevitable. The boy’s younger brother came out of the bedroom where he’d been, behind the closed door, until now. His mother introduced him, said he was fifteen, was at college, a smart kid who would probably go to university. At that moment I saw my chance and I wasn’t going to let it go: I asked the boy’s mother if I could speak to him alone. I winked, hoping the mother and Francesca would realise what my intentions were. The false ones, not the actual ones.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the mother said.

  I stood up and walked over to the door. The boy followed me, obediently. We left the apartment and moved a few yards away down the hallway.

  ‘Are you selling?’ I asked him.

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  ‘Three litres.’

  ‘Litres? How many grams, Grandpa?’

  ‘I want to buy whisky, kid, and don’t call me Grandpa. Can you get hold of it?’

  ‘Hang on,’ he replied.

  He walked to the end of the hall and knocked on the last door. I watched him wait outside. Then he returned, carrying a bag. I gave him a hundred-peso note and he gave me the three bottles.

  ‘You’re twenty pesos short,’ he said.

  ‘Your brother used to sell it to me for thirty.’

  ‘I charge forty.’

  I gave him the twenty pesos.

  ‘Do you know what happened to your brother?’ I asked.

  ‘They say he got whacked.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘People here, in the building.’

  I put the bottles in the rucksack I’d brought along for the purpose.

  ‘Hey, don’t tell my mother,’ the boy said.

  Don’t tell her what, I thought: that you know your brother’s dead or that you’re headed the same way?

  ‘Could you deliver to my apartment?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not likely, I’m not going all that way just to earn ten pesos. My brother was a pushover.’

  The manager of the supermarket fired the new delivery boy after accusing him of having stolen the tin of jalapeños and a new new delivery boy was hired. After he got wise to what had happened to his predecessor, the new new delivery boy gave us a wide berth, and when we did get hold of him, we had to beg him to come in with us on the plan. In the end he set a condition: seizing upon some small print in the union’s collective agreement that the other boy hadn’t read, he refused to cross the threshold of the building.

  ‌

  Willem had decided to exterminate the cockroaches. One day he had brought along a piece of chalk and traced around the outline of the apartment and all the rooms, as if he were drawing a blueprint on top of reality. The theory was that the cockroaches wouldn’t be able to cross the line and would remain outside.

  ‘And the ones that are already inside won’t be able to leave?’ I asked him.

  He promised he’d bring another solution for the ones inside. Logically, the cockroaches crossed the line as if nothing had changed: since when did borders work? Another day Willem had gone round the whole house with a spray gun. That day, while the poison took effect, we had gone to have a coffee in the Chinese restaurant over the road. Actually, my coffee was a beer. They gave us fortune cookies. Willem’s said: You will be recompensed for your good deeds. Mine said: He who seeks, finds.

  ‘I knew it!’ Willem said.

  All that Bible study just to end up interpreting everything literally. Then it dawned on me that there weren’t any cockroaches in the Chinese restaurant. We tried to talk to the owner, the guy who looked like the owner, and to the waiters. Impossible: they only spoke Chinese. I tried to take one of them over to my building to show him a cockroach, to see if I could get him to understand that way, but when I tugged at his arm they all took fright and locked themselves in the kitchen. Willem said: ‘Perhaps if yuh didn’t drink so much.’

  ‘If I didn’t drink so much I’d understand Chinese? Yeah, right!’

  ‘If yuh didn’t drink so much yuh wouldn’ have scayud them.’

  ‘Don’t you preach at me, Villem.’

  When we got back to the apartment, the cockroaches were merrily strolling about on the ceiling. Another time, Willem had installed traps in every corner of the place, these little black plastic boxes. I never understood how they worked: were the cockroaches going to lift up the little boxes and get inside? That idea didn’t work either, but at least it was intriguing. It kept my brain occupied for a whole week. Just as mysterious were the plug-ins, which in theory gave off a substance that would flush out the critters. Equally ineffective. A yellow powder you had to smear on the filler between the tiles on the floor turned out to be the worst of the fiascos: the cockroaches ate it and started flying madly around like rockets. I suggested to Willem that we try it ourselves.

  Failures came and went, until finally, one Wednesday afternoon, Willem turned up with his head bowed.

  ‘I’ve run out of ideas, Teodooruh,’ he said.

  I had one: we set to smashing them with books.

  He, with his Bible, and I with my Aesthetic Theory.

  ‌

  The woman next door had got a job and her hours prevented her from collecting her daughter after school, so she had asked if my mother could help get her home safe and sound. The woman was a widow and the little girl her only daughter, and she took classes in the afternoon. I had all my classes in the morning. The girl was fourteen, nearly fifteen.

  ‘Can she not she walk home on her own?’ my mother asked.

  ‘You have no idea what an ordeal that would be,’ explained our neighbour.

  I did: queues would form down the street to follow her long-legged walk home. The street was full of dangers, you only had to open your eyes to the canine show going on to imagine what might
end up happening to her. Lines of dogs waiting patiently to mount a little bitch in heat. Or not so patiently: sometimes there were furious fights in the queue. Growls. Fangs. Bloodied hackles. Unwanted pregnancies.

  My mother replied that she could count on us, or rather, on me, and told me I could take Turnup out for a walk at the same time. Our neighbour was satisfied: she didn’t know that until now I had been one of her daughter’s most ardent stalkers.

  The girl was called Hilaria, despite evidence to the contrary.

  ‘Why did they call you Hilaria?’ I asked her.

  ‘Why do you think?’ she replied. ‘Listen to my laugh, it’s hilarious.’

  And she growled.

  Every afternoon I waited for her on a bench outside school; Hilaria would cross the road and, before doing anything else, she would walk over to the mirror in a nearby shop window, where she would apply make-up, let down her hair and hitch her skirt up to her knees. Things only got worse: if she already caused an uproar when she walked along dressed like a nun with her mother, now it was like the procession of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December. It was a walk of nine blocks and it took us twenty minutes going at the slow pace Turnup obliged us to walk at, pissing here and there, grubbing about in the rubbish in the gutter, seeing what he could stick his snout into. My mother had got it into her head that if we tired the dog out he’d do less damage. When her hypothesis failed, she said that tiring the dog out made him hysterical. What was certain was that, if he was out in the street for a long time, the damage would at least be caused to other people’s property.

  Sometimes it took us longer, if we had to stop on the way, if we crossed paths with a bitch on heat. Then there was nothing for it: the first few times we’d tried to walk on by and Turnup had snapped at our ankles. Knowing full well how uncooperative he was, we had to wait our turn with the other dogs. I looked beyond Hilaria, at the other queue, the queue of guys ogling her. Until at last, it was our dog’s turn. Turnup was medium-sized, a big dog by the street’s standards. He mounted bitches easily, skilfully. Hilaria watched the spectacle and asked me: ‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’