Juan Pablo Villalobos - Down the Rabbit Hole

“They stole our money, Usagi, they plundered our country!”

It’s almost as if the dead Indians were his cousins or his uncles. Pathetic. By the way, the Spanish don’t like cutting the heads off kings. They still have living kings and queens with their heads stuck on their shoulders. Mazatzin showed me a photo in a magazine. That’s really pathetic, too.

* * *

One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.

“One bullet in the heart.”

“Corpse.”

“Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.”

“Alive.”

“Three bullets in the pancreas.”

“Too early to tell.”

And we carry on like that. When we run out of body parts we look up new ones in a book that has pictures of all of them, even the prostate and the medulla oblongata. Speaking of the brain, it’s important to take off your hat before you put bullets into somebody’s brain, so it doesn’t get stained. Blood is really hard to get out. This is what Itzpapalotl, the maid who does the cleaning in our palace, always says.

Yes, our palace: Yolcaut and I are the owners of a palace and we’re not even kings. The thing is we have a lot of money. A huge amount. We have pesos, which is the money of Mexico. We also have dollars, which is the money of the United States. And we also have euros, which is the money of the countries and kingdoms of Europe. I think we have thousands of millions of all three kinds, although the 100,000-dollar bills are the ones we like the most. And as well as money we have all the jewels and the gems. And lots of safes with secret combinations. That’s why I don’t know very many people, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Because if I knew more people they’d steal our money or they’d scam us like they did to Mazatzin. Yolcaut says we have to protect ourselves. Gangs are about this, too.

The other day a man I didn’t know came to our palace and Yolcaut wanted to know if I was macho or not. The man’s face was covered in blood and, the truth is, I was a bit scared when I saw him. But I didn’t say anything, because being macho means you’re not scared and if you are scared you’re a faggot. I stood there very solemnly while Miztli and Chichilkuali, who are the guards in our palace, gave him some devastating blows. The man turned out to be a faggot because he started to scream and shout, Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! He even wet his pants. The good thing is that I did turn out to be macho and Yolcaut let me go before they turned the faggot into a corpse. They definitely killed him, because later I saw Itzpapalotl go past with her mop and bucket. I don’t know how many bullets they put in him though. I’d say at least four in the heart. If I counted dead people I’d know more than thirteen or fourteen people. Seventeen or more. Twenty, easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.

There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices, too. If your blood comes out there’s a point when your heart or your liver stops working. Or your brain. And you die. Another way of making corpses is by cutting, which you can also do with knives or with machetes and guillotines. You can make little cuts or big ones. If they’re big they separate the body parts and make corpses in little pieces. The most normal thing to do is to cut off the head, although, actually, you can cut anything. It’s because of the neck. If we didn’t have a neck it would be different. It might be normal to cut bodies in half down the middle so as to have two corpses. But we have a neck and this is a really big temptation. Especially for French people.

* * *

To be honest, sometimes our palace doesn’t look like a palace. The problem is it’s really big and there’s no way of keeping it immaculate. For a long time Itzpapalotl has been wanting Yolcaut to hire one of her nieces to help her with the cleaning. Itzpapalotl says she’s trustworthy, but Yolcaut doesn’t want any more people in our palace. Itzpapalotl grumbles because our palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcaut’s business room, and five more empty rooms we don’t use. And then as well as that there’s the kitchen, the living room with the armchairs, the TV room, the cinema room, my games room, Yolcaut’s games room, Yolcaut’s office, the inside dining room, the dining room out on the terrace, the small dining room, five bathrooms we use, two we don’t, the gym, the sauna, and the swimming pool.

Miztli says Yolcaut is paranoid and that this is a problem. The problem has to do with keeping the palace clean and also with Miztli’s time off. Because Miztli and Chichilkuali are in charge of protecting our palace with their rifles twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-four hours means that sometimes Miztli doesn’t sleep and other times Chichilkuali doesn’t sleep. Even though we have a really high wall to protect us. And even though on top of the wall there are bits of glass and barbed wire and an alarm with a laser beam that sometimes makes a noise when a bird flies close to it. And even though we live in the middle of nowhere.

* * *

Around our palace we have a gigantic garden. It’s looked after by Azcatl, who is mute and spends the whole day surrounded by the noise of the machines he uses. The noise is deafening if you go really close. Azcatl has machines to cut the grass, machines to cut the weeds, and machines to cut the trees and the bushes. But his main enemy is the weeds. The truth is Azcatl is losing the battle, because our garden is always full of weeds. By the way, Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses are silent machines that devour weeds. That’s what’s called being an herbivore, a plant-eater.

In the garden, opposite the dining room on the terrace, we also have cages with our animals, which are divided into two groups: the birds and the big cats. For birds we have eagles, falcons, and a cage full of parakeets and brightly colored parrots, macaws, and that sort of thing. For cats we have a lion in one cage and two tigers in another. On the same side as the tigers there’s a space where we’re going to put the cage for our Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Inside the cage there’ll be a pond, but it won’t be a deep pond, it’ll just be for squelching around in the mud. Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses aren’t like other hippopotamuses, which like to live submerged in the water. This is all going to be arranged by Itzcuauhtli, who looks after our animals: he gives them their food, cleans their cages, and gives them medicine when they get ill. Itzcuauhtli could tell me lots of things about animals, like how to make them better and things like that. But he doesn’t tell me anything: he’s mute, too.

I know a lot of mute people: three. Sometimes, when I tell them something, they look as if they want to talk and they open their mouths. But they stay quiet. Mutes are mysterious and enigmatic. The thing with silence is you can’t give explanations. Mazatzin thinks the opposite: he says you can learn a lot by being silent. But those are ideas from the empire of Japan that he loves so much. I think the most enigmatic and mysterious thing in the world must be a Japanese mute.