Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

In the lobby, the copies of In Search of Lost Time lay face down, abandoned on the chairs with their legs spread open. I opened the Aesthetic Theory ’s legs and placed it on top of one of the Lost Times , face down. It was things like this that at times made me wonder whether it might not be a bad idea to stop drinking, or at least to cut back a little. I went over to Francesca’s throne, the chair that presided over the circle, positioned at an angle from which she could observe both the lift and the main door. I hefted the brick up to within sight of my failing eyes, turned on the little light, used the magnifying glass to focus, and read:

However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned be — or be thought to be — so difficult as to oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them…

The salon members were a bunch of wanton hypocrites. I looked around and found a red pen, which I used to underline the passage. In the left-hand margin of the page, and along the top, because the message wouldn’t fit, I wrote: Exactly! Are you going to let me give you one or just carry on being a prim old prick-tease?

This done, my plans changed. I went back up to my apartment, poured myself a glass of beer and settled myself into the Corona chair on the balcony to wait for the moment when the salon returned. It took them about twenty minutes, which was the time it took for an ambulance to arrive and take away one of the drivers, who’d broken a leg (I only learned this later, when Juliet told me). Just as they walked under my balcony, I shouted:

‘Went out to give your piles an airing, did you?’

Once they’d disappeared from view and were back in the lobby, I counted the seconds and didn’t even get to thirty. Francesca appeared out on the pavement again and, lifting her flushed and furious face up at the balcony, screamed: ‘You brute!’

‘You forgot the mariachi band!’

‘Pervert!’

‘Me? I’m not the one reading smutty books!’

‘It’s literature!’

‘Oh, well you should have said so!’

‘Come down and read it if you’re so brave!’

‘Why don’t you come up here? Forget about literature, let’s try experience for a change!’

She stuck her tongue out, blew a raspberry and went back into the building. I went to the fridge to get another beer, smug and content as you like, whistling ‘Ode to Joy’, when the disaster dawned on me: I’d left my Aesthetic Theory in the lobby. I ricocheted downstairs like a frantic firework, trapped in the elevator’s exasperating slowness, and burst into the lobby shouting:

‘Hands up! Nobody move!’

Against her nature, Francesca kept her mouth shut, and the obedient, passive stance did not bode well. By now it was almost night and, in the darkness, the salon with its little lights looked like a group of miners exploring a cave. I located the chair where I remembered, or thought I remembered, having left the Aesthetic Theory with its legs open: Hipólita’s seat. As I went over to her she shyly removed her glasses, the cast on her right hand accentuating her usual clumsiness, and placed them in her lap with exaggerated care, as if they were a tiny bird whose bones she was trying not to crush.

‘Good evening, Hipólita,’ I said.

‘Night,’ she replied. ‘Wood night.’

The painkillers were now causing linguistic disorders of the most creative sort.

‘Would you be so kind as to give me back the book I left on top of your Lost Time ?’

She looked over at Francesca, asking for help, and with her left hand nervously squeezed her glasses, almost crushing the tiny bird. Francesca was undaunted and ordered Hipólita to resist with an imperceptible movement of her eyebrows; imperceptible, that is, to those who are not experts in the semiotics of the supercilium.

‘I don’t know what you’re squawking about,’ she replied.

The dictator was wielding admirable control over the salon, capable even of imposing her will over that of a highly powerful drug. I looked around me, at the other salon flunkies, who were pretending this was nothing to do with them, and they were right: it was never to do with them. Idly, I looked underneath the chairs, on top of the letter boxes, in every corner of the lobby, knowing even as I did so that I wasn’t going to find anything.

‘So this is what it’s come to, is it?’ I exclaimed. ‘If you want war you’d better be ready for it.’

Francesca, who’d been holding back so as to carry out her satanic plan, replied: ‘Hipólita’s already told you we don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not our problem you’ve lost your book. Perhaps if you didn’t drink so much…’

‘If I didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t be such a bunch of thieves?’

‘If you didn’t drink so much you wouldn’t have lost your book. Look for it, but see that you look hard. He who doesn’t seek does not find.’

Since I didn’t know what love was, I confused it with an elevator that went up and down between my legs, powered, complete with a remote control, by Marilín’s voice during our chats. On the long tram journey back home from Coyoacán I was doomed to suffer one of two calamities, both equally humiliating: testicular pain, or getting my trousers all wet.

‘What did you do?’ I asked her.

‘I posed,’ she replied.

‘Nude?’

‘What do you think? You men are all the same.’

‘Nothing else? You didn’t do anything else?’

‘What else would I do? What have you been imagining?’

‘And what’s he doing, a painting?’

‘Sketches, he says they’re studies for a mural.’

I was barred from whatever was going on inside the house, in the studio, despite the fact that Marilín’s mother had given her permission only on the condition that I accompany her daughter at all times. When we got there, the door to the house would open and, without fail, Diego Rivera’s brilliant hand, the same hand with which he commanded the history of art in Mexico, would hand me a peso and order me to come back in two hours. I would leave and walk around the block, but I came back immediately and stationed myself across the road trying to get a glimpse of something through a half-open window, watching people coming and going from the house, a stream of characters that made one imagine all sorts of conspiracies. More than once, my suspect presence attracted the attention of the police, who assumed I must be planning some kind of atrocity. Until at last, two and a half, three hours later, never the promised two, the door would open and Marilín would cross the threshold that returned her to the street, to the tram and to my questions:

‘What did you do?’

‘You know what — I posed.’

‘Naked?’

‘What do you think? Does it turn you on, Teo?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t go.’

‘Oh really! You’re far too pushy, if Frida heard you she’d castrate you for sure.’

‘Frida? Who’s Frida?’

‘What do you mean, who’s Frida? She’s Diego’s wife.’

The tram continued on its way, and when finally we reached our neighbourhood, I’d ask her: ‘Are you going to let me draw you?’

‘Tomorrow.’

I began carrying my sketchbook with me, hoping to show it to Diego one day to ask his advice, and also to keep myself occupied as I waited for Marilín. When the door opened, I’d hold out my pad to Diego and the door would slam in my face, in my ridiculous potato-nose, I mean. As the days came and went, one of the regular visitors to the house, a man who wore a pair of very sad spectacles, came over one afternoon to where I was standing.