Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

‘They said I’d find you here.’

‘They were right. You’ll find me here from nine until two and from four till eight Monday to Friday, and I’m also on duty weekends. You work on Sundays too?’

‘I’m not here on business. Can I sit down?’

‘Can I say no? What are you drinking? Tequila, mezcal? Or would you prefer something stronger?’

‘Stronger?’

‘Caustic soda, chlorine, turps…’

‘I’ll have a beer.’

I shouted at the barman to bring us a large bottle of Corona and concentrated on trying to figure out why Papaya-Head would go around wearing such an extravagant combination of colours: a fluorescent yellow T-shirt with orange Bermuda shorts, a tropical kind of get-up, the opposite to the grey suit he’d been wearing when he’d visited me as a representative of the dog police. Did he know his head looked like a papaya?

‘You should be at the beach in that,’ I said. ‘Nice T-shirt, perfect for hiding from a sniper.’

‘It was a present.’

Which I interpreted as: his wife was the one who, consciously or not, bought his clothes for him in accordance with the shape of his head.

‘Did your wife give it to you?’ I asked.

‘Something like that,’ he replied.

‘Does “something like that” mean a girlfriend, a mistress?’

‘“Something like that” means something like that.’

Our beer arrived and I poured out two glasses; Papaya-Head immediately took a loud gulp. Without the formal protocols of work, which covered up his social awkwardness, what remained was a civilised, twenty-miles-an-hour car crash, not at all fatal, but irritating nonetheless.

‘I want to ask for your help,’ he said.

‘Do you now! Let’s drink a toast first, though.’

I held my glass of beer up towards the centre of the table.

‘To dogs!’ I exclaimed.

‘Hey, that report was archived,’ he said, bristling.

‘I know it was, but that was all Dorotea’s doing.’

‘And it was totally illegal, it violated all the procedures of the Society for the Protection of Animals and I could revoke it at any moment if I wanted.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘No, I’m asking you for help.’

I was worried that Papaya-Head had found out Dorotea was an undercover agent in the Society for the Protection of Animals and that now, taking advantage of my friendship with Juliet, he had come to ask me to infiltrate the group that had organised the infiltration. This worry, which rose up rapidly like a pang of paranoia in my liver, was substituted just as rapidly for horror, when Papaya-Head announced:

‘I want to write a novel.’

‘You don’t!’

I looked straight into his eyes, the pupils a dull brown like the bruises on a papaya just past its best, and there I verified that, unfortunately, there was no spark of a joke or a lie in them.

‘It’s more serious than I thought,’ I said. ‘We’re going to need something stronger.’

I raised my right arm to call the waiter over, like in school when you ask permission to go to the toilet, an angle twenty degrees off a fascist salute, and shouted out my order: ‘Two tequilas! Urgently!’

I tried to stop seeing the papaya in the papaya-shaped head of Papaya-Head and started analysing the tautness of the peel of his face, the weariness of his gaze, the nature of the expression formed by the outermost folds of his lips, closer to melancholy than sarcasm, and miles away from cynicism, in order to calculate his age. He was around forty. Perhaps he was thirty-nine, and this tale about writing a novel was nothing more than a manifestation, albeit a quaint one, of a midlife crisis, particularly serious in the case of papayas.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Thirty-nine.’

I knew it! I recalled that in the mid ’70s, it had hit me very hard: I’d rented an apartment I never moved into, I’d proposed to a hooker on Calle Madero, I’d thought I had cancer and, in a moment of madness, I’d bought a load of canvases which then sat stacked on top of a wardrobe in my mother’s house, which I hadn’t moved out of because I didn’t have enough money left to buy the paint or the brushes, never mind to actually start painting or stop believing I was a substitute for my father. Or to really believe it and do the same thing he’d done all those years before: abandon my family. My inner turmoil had, at least, been the necessary crucible for the inspiration of my ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe, the taco filling that had made me famous in the eighties. But it was one thing to invent a taco filling and quite another to write a novel, so I hastily started trying to discourage Papaya-Head. Better to kill off a novel now before it intoxicated a hopelessly hopeful author than to condemn ourselves to the torture it would be, for him, to write it, and for me, to have to read it.

‘Now listen here,’ I said, employing my best pedagogical tone, a mishmash of pity, indulgence, weariness and the useless superiority we elderly folk insist on believing we have over the young. ‘I’ve already told you I’m not writing a novel. You shouldn’t listen to my neighbours, they’ve got too much time on their hands — they spend their whole lives gossiping and, besides, they read far too many books. You don’t understand this yet because you’re still young, but at our age people make things up not because they have to or as some kind of strategy, they do it just because, for the fun of it, they invent stuff so as to tangle things up and so they then have to untangle them afterwards. Untangling tangles is very entertaining, that’s how we spend our time.’

‘I know you’re writing a novel,’ he replied, as if papayas didn’t have ears. ‘You’re forgetting I found the proof in your apartment.’

I arched my eyebrows up, halfway between the well-worn path that leads from incomprehension to misunderstanding. Since he failed to comprehend, I had to translate my expression into a question.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The notebooks! What else?’

I sighed, or huffed, or puffed, or a bit of all three at once, before contradicting him.

‘That’s not a novel, they’re drawings, notes, things that occur to me; I write them down out of sheer boredom. You’re young, you don’t need to write things down, life is out there, the world’s your oyster.’

‘If it wasn’t a novel, you’d have let me see the notebooks,’ he reasoned.

He knocked back the last of his tequila, ignoring my soothing speech and taking as a given what he’d already decided: that I was lying.

‘Let me tell you about the story I’ve thought of,’ he said. ‘It’s a detective novel. It’s about a serial dog-killer, he works in pest control, actually, and he has a business supplying every taco stand in Mexico City. It’s inspired by a real case I dealt with in my job, a butcher’s that used to supply dog meat to taco stands.’

‘Well I never.’

‘They’d been doing it for years and we managed to expose them, we put the owner in jail and tightened up the health and safety inspection procedures in butchers’ shops.’

‘Now I understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why tacos have been so bad recently.’

He picked up his glass of beer and slurped noisily, trying to show me he was coming to the end of his tether.

‘Why do you insist on playing the fool?’ he said. ‘You’re like a little child.’

‘Only to convince you that I can’t help you write your novel.’

‘You’re the perfect person, not only because you know how to write a novel, but because you were a taco seller too.’

‘And what’s that got to do with it?’

‘I’m going to write the novel from the point of view of a taco seller.’