Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole

* * *

The mutest person I know is Quecholli. Miztli brings her to our palace two or three times a week. Quecholli has really long legs, according to Cinteotl this long: one and a half meters. Miztli says something else, something enigmatic:

“Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six.”

It’s a secret, he says it to me when no one’s listening. Everything about Quecholli is a secret. She walks around the palace without looking at anyone, without making a sound, always clinging to Yolcaut. Sometimes they disappear and then reappear, really mysterious. They spend hours like that, the whole day, until Quecholli leaves. Then Miztli brings her back again and it’s back to the secrets and disappearing.

The most enigmatic time is when we all sit down together to eat on the terrace: Yolcaut, Quecholli, Mazatzin, and me. The first time, Mazatzin asked Quecholli if she was from León or Guadalajara or wherever. Quecholli didn’t say a thing. She looked at Mazatzin for a second and then Yolcaut shouted that she was from the motherfucking house of the rising sun.

It might seem like Quecholli is blind too, because you almost never know which direction she’s looking in. But she’s not blind: I’ve seen her looking at my hats. Another strange thing is that she only eats salad. Her favorite is a salad with lettuce, tomato, broccoli, onion, and avocado. Then she adds lime juice and salt with those long thin fingers she has. Covered in rings. But Quecholli’s rings are delicate and really tiny, not like Yolcaut’s, which are thick and have gigantic diamonds on them. She’s not a millionaire like us.

Over dinner Yolcaut and Mazatzin talk about politicians. It’s a funny conversation because Yolcaut laughs a lot and tells Mazatzin he’s so fucking gullible. Mazatzin doesn’t laugh as much, because he thinks we should have a government of left-wing politicians. He says: “If the left were in power this wouldn’t happen.” Yolcaut laughs some more. Some days Mazatzin says the names of politicians to Yolcaut and, depending on the name, Yolcaut replies:

“Mm-hmm.”

Or:

“Uh-uh.”

Sometimes Mazatzin looks surprised and laughs and says I knew it, I knew it. Other times he shouts Liar, liar, and Yolcaut tells him he’s so fucking gullible.

While Quecholli eats her salad the rest of us eat whatever delicacy Cinteotl has made. Mazatzin loves her cooking. When he’s finished he shouts for Cinteotl and tells her that was the best mole of his life, if we ate mole, or the best tampiqueña, or whatever it was. Pathetic. Yolcaut thinks being hungry is in Mazatzin’s genes. Quecholli, since she’s mute, says nothing. Mazatzin says she’s a vegetarian. I say she’s like the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, an herbivore. But Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses don’t like lettuce salads, they like alfalfa salads. If Quecholli weren’t mute I’d ask her opinion on the hot lettuce in the pozole.

* * *

This is what was on the news today on the TV: the tigers in the zoo in Guadalajara ate a woman all up, apart from her left leg. Maybe her left leg wasn’t a very juicy bit. Or maybe the tigers were already full up. I’ve never been to the zoo in Guadalajara. Once I asked Yolcaut to take me, but instead of taking me he brought more animals to the palace. That was when he bought me the lion. And he said something to me about a man who couldn’t go to a mountain and so the mountain came to him.

The eaten woman was the head zookeeper and she had two children, a husband, and international prestige. That’s a pretty word, prestige. They said it might have been suicide or murder, because she never used to go into the tigers’ cage. We don’t use our tigers for suicides or for murders. Miztli and Chichilkuali do the murders with orifices made from bullets. I don’t know how we do the suicides, but we don’t do them with tigers. We use the tigers for eating the corpses. And we use our lion for that, too. But we mainly use them for looking at, because they’re strong and really well-proportioned animals and they’re nice to look at. It must be because they’re so well fed. I’m not supposed to know these things, because they’re secrets Miztli and Chichilkuali do at night. But in that way I do think I’m precocious, in discovering secrets.

At the end of the report the man on the news looked very sad and said he hoped the head zookeeper would rest in peace. How stupid. She was already chewed up inside the tigers’ tummies. And she’s only going to stay there while the tigers digest her, because she’ll end up being turned into tiger poo. Rest in peace, like hell. At the most her left leg will rest in peace.

Yolcaut watched the news with me and when it was over he said some enigmatic things to me. First he said:

“Ah, they suicided her.”

And then, when he’d stopped laughing:

“Think the worst and you’ll be right.”

Sometimes Yolcaut speaks in enigmatic and mysterious sentences. When he does that it’s pointless to ask him what he means, because he never tells me. He wants me to solve the enigma.

Before I went to sleep I looked up the word prestige in the dictionary. I learned that prestige is about people having a good idea about you, and thinking you’re the best. In that case you have prestige. Pathetic.

* * *

Today I’m devastatingly desperately bored. I’m bored because I don’t leave the palace and because every day is the same.

I get up at eight o’clock, I wash and I have breakfast.

From nine to one I have lessons with Mazatzin.

I play on the PlayStation from one to two.

Between two and three we have lunch.

From three to five I do my homework and research my own subjects.

From five to eight I do whatever I can think of.

At eight o’clock we have dinner.

From nine to ten I watch TV with Yolcaut and then after ten o’clock I go to my room to read the dictionary and go to sleep.

The next day is the same. Saturdays and Sundays are the worst, because I spend the whole day waiting to see what I can think of to do: going to see our animals, watching films, talking about secret things with Miztli, playing on the PlayStation, cleaning my hats, watching TV, making lists of the things I want so Miztli can buy them for me … Sometimes it’s fun, but also sometimes it’s disastrous. Because of Yolcaut’s paranoia I haven’t been out of the palace for quite a few days, eleven.

It all began when they showed soldiers looking for drugs on the news. Chichilkuali said to Yolcaut:

“Problems, boss.”

Yolcaut told him not to be an asshole. The next day on the TV they said that some men who were in prison in Mexico had been sent to live in a prison in the country of the United States as a surprise. Yolcaut started to pay really close attention to the news and he even asked me to be quiet. On the TV they were showing a list with the names of the men who now lived in the prison in the country of the United States. When the report was over Yolcaut said one of his enigmatic and mysterious phrases. He said:

“The shit’s really hit the fan now.”

It was a really enigmatic phrase, because even Chichilkuali went quiet with a face like he wanted to decipher the mystery.

* * *

Since then there’ve been corpses on the TV every day. They’ve shown: the corpse in the zoo, corpses of policemen, corpses of drug traffickers, corpses from the army, corpses of politicians, and corpses of fucking innocent people. The Governor and the president went on TV to tell all us Mexicans not to worry, to stay calm.

Yolcaut hasn’t been out of the palace either. He spends all his time talking on the phone giving orders. Miztli and Chichilkuali have been out of the palace. Miztli says it’s fucking chaos outside. Chichilkuali says there are fuckloads of problems. Yolcaut wants us to go on a trip to a faraway place for a while, for protection. He asked me where I wanted to go and promised me we’d go wherever I wanted. Mazatzin advised me to ask to go to the empire of Japan. If we went there I could meet a Japanese mute. But I want to go to the country of Liberia to go on safaris and catch a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus.