Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

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?’

I tried to put my hand over my crotch so she couldn’t see what was going on underneath it, and she thumped me on the back with a petulant smile and said: ‘Pervert.’

The days came and went, and I took advantage of the routine to carry out my own pursuit, armed with my sketchbook.

‘Will you let me draw you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I want to make a portrait of you, I’m an artist.’

‘I know that, everyone knows that, they say your mum ended up with a right dud with you, that you’re a fat lot of good to her. I meant how do you want to draw me, how would you do it?’

‘A nice portrait, nothing avant-garde.’

‘Nude?’

Beneath my fly I suddenly felt my erection, rising up and up, leaving me without an answer.

‘Does it turn you on, Teo?’

I swallowed hard and started to imagine her long naked legs and everything else, which, truth be told, I didn’t even know how to imagine, so inexperienced was I.

‘Tomorrow,’ she promised, ‘before my mum gets home.’

‘A portrait takes several days.’

‘I knew it! You’re a sleazebag.’

The following day, I told her:

‘I’ve got a new sketchbook.’

‘And how are you going to draw me?’

I was slowly growing less timid, emboldened by her provocations, and getting used to discussing these things with a great deal of blood in my groin and very little in my head.

‘First I’ve got to look at you for a long time to concentrate, I have to find a style, it’s not just about copying your figure.’

‘Look at me for ages, eh? With my legs open?’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, my trousers wet.

‘I knew it! You’re sick. I can’t do it today, my mother’s coming home early. Tomorrow.’

The hours came and went, long as years, and eventually the next day arrived.

‘Have you got any ice?’

‘Ice? What for?’

‘No ice, no portrait.’

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why? I need ice to put on my nipples so they stand up nice and stiff.’

Under my fly, my erection howled.

‘Get some ice. Tomorrow.’

Tomorrow, of course, never came; what did come was the day one of her pursuers emerged from anonymity. He wasn’t one of the usual ones, although he did seem vaguely familiar and I was sure I’d seen him before. We were at Hilaria’s front door when he called at us to wait for him. He was an older guy, fat, who wore his trousers pulled up to his chest. Literally: it looked like he needed to clamp his arms close to his body to keep the trousers in place. He took a while to reach us, panting, and he had a spot of paint on his left shoe. He bent down with great difficulty to pat Turnup, who seized his chance to steal and then eat a paintbrush out of the man’s overcoat pocket. When the man stood up, even though the dog’s lead led to my hand, he acted as if I didn’t exist.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked Hilaria.

‘Marilín,’ she replied, putting the accent on the last syllable.

He asked if she lived there, pointing over to the entrance to our building with his chin. She said she did.

‘I’d like to speak to your mother,’ the man said.

She said that her mother was working and would get home later.

‘How long will she be?’ he asked.

‘About an hour,’ she replied.

The man looked around until he spotted a cheap little restaurant across the road. He said he’d go and have a coffee there, pointing with his chin again at the place, and that when her mother got home to tell her to go and find him there and not to forget. Then he added:

‘Tell your mother Diego Rivera wants a word with her.’

The people from the Society for the Protection of Animals came to the building and started going from door to door, downstairs then upstairs, left to right, until they got to mine, the last but one. Interrogations came and went, and by now I was the mastermind of a crime. There were two inspectors: a short young woman with hair down to her waist and a full bust, and her boss, who had a head shaped like a papaya. I didn’t make that up, Hipólita pointed it out a little later; she was from Veracruz and familiar with the fruit. She even specified that it looked like a Maradol papaya and Juliet, who was the nearest thing we had to a botanist, corroborated this: you simply had to place the fruit upright with the part that had been connected to the stalk pointing downwards, for the chin.

I tried to defend myself, arguing that the dog’s death was related to the literary salon which I was not a member of — besides, I didn’t even read novels.

‘Don’t lie,’ Papaya-Head said. ‘I know you’re writing one as we speak.’

‘I am not writing a novel, who told you that?’

‘Everyone, from 1-A to 3-B. That’s how they refer to you, didn’t you know? They call you “the one who’s writing a novel”.’

I was going to reflect that Francesca’s obsession had now turned into collective psychosis, but there was no time: Papaya-Head was set on reprimanding me. He claimed he had talked to the local butcher and that my appearance matched the description of an old man who had tried to sell him a dog. The same appearance, to make matters worse, as that described by the man who had filed the complaint, who purported to have seen an old man whistling the ‘Ode to Joy’ in a euphoric manner in the Jardín de Epicuro while he and his family wept over the death of their dog. He took a sheet of paper from a bulging file and announced: ‘Here is the report.’

Then he read out: ‘Dark-skinned man over eighty years of age, mestizo, messy white hair, average height, tubercular nose, light brown eyes, rat-like ears, contemptuous, cynical expression, no identifying marks or scars.’

He paused and uttered the last word emphatically, as if in the document it were underlined in red ink: ‘ Drunk. ’

‘I’m seventy-eight!’ I protested.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied Papaya-Head. ‘People are terrible at calculating ages. And, no offence, but you do look pretty decrepit.’

‘And what’s all that about a “tubercular nose”?’ I asked.

‘Like a potato,’ Papaya-Head said.

‘It looks more like a turnip,’ the young woman said.

‘Tubercular comes from tuberculosis,’ I said, trying to correct them.

‘Well in this case it comes from tuber,’ Papaya-Head said.

‘Well that’s not right, how can you trust the description of someone who doesn’t even know how to use adjectives? And anyway, a turnip is not a tuber.’

Papaya-Head turned to look at the young woman indulgently, excusing her mistake. It was clear he saw himself as her mentor, the one responsible for teaching her how to pester people.

‘Writers, eh?’ he said to her.

‘I’m not a writer!’ I complained.

‘So tell us what these notebooks are, then.’

He pointed an accusing finger towards the shelf by the front door and continued: ‘If, as you say, you’re not writing a novel, you won’t mind if we analyse the contents of your notebooks, will you?’

‘Do you have a search warrant?’ I replied.

‘I knew it!’ he cried, clapping his hands together gleefully at the same time.