Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

‘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.’