Juan Pablo Villalobos - Down the Rabbit Hole

“Oh, a tiger in a cage, so big and so beautiful, what good taste to have a tiger in the garden!”

Then the tiger roared. I think the tiger wanted to eat her. She didn’t realize, she just said, Oh, oh, oh, what a fierce little kitty, and asked me if the tiger had a name.

Alotl talked so much I was embarrassed to carry on being a mute, because she kept asking me about the dressing gown, about the samurai hat, about the animals’ names, and saying how did I get to be so handsome? And she was always stroking my head and laughing and saying, Oh, oh, oh, the little mute. I had to explain to her about the samurai and why I’m a samurai and how I need a sword to be a real samurai. She also made me show her my collection of hats. She’s a nationalist, because the hats she liked best were the charro sombreros, even though I showed her all my three-cornered hats and my authentic safari hats.

When we sat down to eat on the terrace it wasn’t an enigmatic moment like before, because Alotl spent the whole time talking about her village and making jokes. Her village is in the north, in Sinaloa. I think Yolcaut liked Alotl, because he even asked her questions and laughed at her jokes. The jokes were about how good-looking Yolcaut and I are and how much we look like each other, just as handsome. Alotl made the names of everyone at the table with her alphabet soup, but she wrote ours like this: “toshtli” and “llolcau.”

The good thing was that Alotl didn’t spend the whole day going on and on, because she disappeared a lot with Yolcaut, four times. Miztli was also surprised they disappeared so many times and he was happy because he was the one who’d brought Alotl to the palace. When I asked him why they were disappearing so much he laughed and told me a secret, something super-enigmatic:

“Thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score, Tochtli, thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score.”

* * *

Now Alotl comes every day and not just two or three times a week. One day as a present she brought me a straw hat with a ribbon on it with a picture of a palm tree that says: Souvenir from Acapulco . Another day she was wearing a skirt that was so short Cinteotl didn’t want to serve her any food. The truth is, the straw hat from Acapulco is the worst hat in my collection, I’d throw it away if it were up to me. The problem is I feel sorry for Yolcaut, who was really pleased with the present. And the skirt really was very short, so short that twice I managed to see her knickers, which were yellow.

The best day of all was the day Alotl brought a samurai film I hadn’t seen. She said it was to show me that real samurai don’t wear dressing gowns. We even made a bet: if I won she’d buy me a samurai costume and if she won I’d stop wearing the dressing gown. It turned out that some of the samurai were wearing dressing gowns and others weren’t, because they were wearing trousers and armor on their chests. Yolcaut said the dressing gown the samurai wore wasn’t a checked one like mine. Theirs were black. So they stopped the film and we didn’t carry on watching it until I’d taken off the dressing gown.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun watching the film, especially the part with the fights. We also had fun watching the part with the conversations, because the samurai didn’t speak Japanese, but a funny kind of Spanish. Yolcaut said they spoke like Spaniards and started calling me what one samurai had been calling one of the baddies: rascal.

At the end of the film one samurai cut off the head of another samurai who was his best friend. He wasn’t a traitor, it was the opposite. He did it because they were friends and he wanted to save his honor. Then I don’t know what got into Yolcaut, because when the film was over he took me into the room with the guns and rifles. He told me that there weren’t any secrets between us and let me look at all the weapons and explained what their names were, the countries where they’d been made, and the calibers.

For pistols we have Berettas from the country of Italy, Brownings from the kingdom of United, and lots from the country of the United States: mainly Colts and Smith & Wessons. By the way, you can put a silencer on the guns, to make them mute. The rifles are nearly all the same. We have some called AK-47s, from the country of Russia, and other ones called M-16s, from the country of the United States. Although we’ve mostly got Uzis from the country of Israel. Yolcaut also showed me the name of the rifle with the gigantic bullets, which isn’t really a rifle, it’s a weapon called a bazooka.

Before I went to bed Yolcaut asked me if I’d paid attention to the samurai film and if I’d understood the ending properly. I said I had. Then he said the most enigmatic and mysterious thing he’s ever said to me. He said:

“One day you’ll have to do the same for me.”

* * *

Today when I woke up there was a really big wooden box next to my bed. It had lots of stickers and labels on it that said: FRAGILE and HANDLE WITH CARE. I ran to ask Yolcaut what it was and to ask him to help me open it, because it was nailed shut.

We opened the box and inside there were lots of little polystyrene balls, thousands. I started taking them out until I found the stuffed heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria, our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. The truth is, the people who stuffed them had done a very immaculate job. The severed heads have their snouts open so you can see their tongues and their four tusks. And they’re shiny, because they’ve been varnished with clear paint. Their eyes are made of white marbles with a brown pupil. And their minuscule ears are intact. Their necks are attached to a board that has a little golden plaque with their names. Louis XVI’s head, which is a very big head, says LOUIS XVI. And underneath: Choeropsis liberiensis . Marie Antoinette of Austria’s head, which is a smaller head, says: MARIE ANTOINETTE. And it also says: Choeropsis liberiensis .

Together Yolcaut and I hung the heads on the wall in my bedroom: Louis XVI on the right and Marie Antoinette of Austria on the left. Really it was Yolcaut who put the nails in and arranged the heads. I just told him whether they were wonky or straight. Then I got up on a chair and tried lots of different hats on them. The ones that look best are the African safari hats. So I left the African safari hats on them, but I’ll only leave them there for a bit. Soon the gold-and-diamond crowns we ordered to be made for them will get here.

On the day of the coronation, me and my dad will have a party.

Tochtli — his name means rabbit in Nahuatl, Mexico’s main indigenous language (and Usagi is Japanese for rabbit). All the characters, apart from Cinteotl the cook, have Nahuatl names that translate as the name of some sort of animal: Yolcaut means rattlesnake; Mazatzin, deer; Miztli, puma; Quecholli, flamingo; Chichilkuali, red eagle; Itzpapalotl, black butterfly; Itzcuauhtli, white eagle; Azcatl, red ant; and Alotl, macaw.

pozole — a traditional Mexican soup or stew of pre-Colombian origin, generally prepared with maize, pork, and chili. According to research by Mexican and Spanish academics, the original recipe included the flesh of human sacrifices on special occasions. This was banned after the Spanish conquest.

tacos al pastor — literally, shepherd-style tacos, this is a very popular Mexican version of the Middle Eastern street snack of spit-roasted meat, probably brought over by Lebanese immigrants. Similar to the Turkish döner kebab, it consists of slices of spit-roasted pork in a tortilla with a garnish of onions, coriander, and pineapple.

“The King” (“El Rey”) is a well-known ranchera (a song sung by one person with a guitar during the Mexican Revolution, associated with mariachi groups), composed and most famously sung by José Alfredo Jiménez. The lyrics in Spanish are “No tengo trono ni reina, ni nadie que me comprenda, pero sigo siendo el rey” (“I don’t have a throne or a queen, or anyone who understands me, but I’m still the king”). Villalobos has changed the lyrics slightly, as this was how he used to sing it as a child.