Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

‘What’s your name?’

‘Virgilio.’

And then one day, as was to be expected, as was normal, Dad really did die. A woman from the Manzanillo Forensic Medical Service explained it to me over the phone and, though it seemed more than likely to be true upon calculating my father’s age, I wasn’t prepared to fall into the same old trap again. I assured her I needed the death certificate so I could fill in some forms before I headed up there, and they faxed it over, to the stationer’s outside the building I’d moved to and now lived in, alone. The ironies of life: before Dad’s real death, I’d lived through the disappearance of my mother and my sister. The fax had come through all blurry, the image smudged and out of focus, but I made out the emblem of the local government of Colima and half my father’s name. A half-truth, for the moment, that obliged me to confirm it.

I got on a bus and twelve hours later arrived in Manzanillo. At the station no one was waiting for me. I headed for the morgue to discover that my father really was dead and that he’d killed himself. He had taken cyanide, as well as a preserving formula that supposedly delayed the onset of decay in the body. He explained this in a note he’d left for me, the suicide note. In red ink and cramped, shaky letters leaning so far to the right that the words looked like they’d beaten him to dying, my father’s message took me hours to decipher, sitting in the waiting room of the morgue as I waited for the body to be released.

The time has come. It’s perfect. Take me with you to Mexico City and give me to SEMEFO. The art collective, mind you, not the actual forensic medical service. I saw a fantastic exhibition they put on in Colima last week: there were jars of human blood and drawings of corpses. Talk to Teresa Margolles, she’ll think of something.

That same night I managed to cremate his body, and the next day I paid a fisherman to take me out to sea. When we were far enough away from the coast, I delivered my father’s ashes to the Pacific Ocean.

‘Who was he?’ the fisherman asked me.

‘My father,’ I replied.

The man moved to the rhythm of the rocking boat, man and boat synchronised through the solitary routine of fishing. I closed my eyes to try and recall my father when he was young, but the only thing that came into my head was the image of a glass with a beer logo on that he used to rinse his paintbrushes in, the water forever murky. The fisherman interrupted my musings:

‘Don’t look now.’

Naturally, I opened my eyes and looked down at the surface of the ocean: a shoal of fish was devouring my father’s remains.

‘Do you mind?’ asked the fisherman.

He was unfurling a net.

I told him I didn’t.

And he began to fish.

Standing in front of the paintings in the exhibition, flanked by Willem and Dorotea, who had stayed to keep me company, I started to read the texts accompanying the pictures hanging on the walls: little pinches that were nonetheless failing to wake me up.

Born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, in 1917, Manuel González Serrano belonged to the Other Side of the Mexican School of Painting , also known as La Contracorriente . His most prolific period was during the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s and, after a life characterised by numerous stays in psychiatric hospitals, he died homeless, on the streets in the centre of Mexico City.

The museum was filled with an agitated buzz because it was about to close, and every room overflowed with the usual affluence: haughty old ladies with no discernment who didn’t miss a single show, school children copying the titles of the works into their sketchbooks to prove to their teachers they’d come, groups of retired people ticking off an activity on the weekly agenda, foreign tourists hungry for their dose of exoticism and predisposed to misinterpretation, young couples who would go to eat an ice cream together afterwards. I slipped through the crowds grouped in front of the paintings, more concerned with getting to the next text, as if they were the last chapter in a book where the meaning of history, the meaning of my life, would be explained.

As a result of his near-total exclusion from public museographical archives, curatorial guides to temporary exhibitions and the literature on Mexican painting from the first half of the twentieth century, the Sorceror remains largely unknown.

Dorotea and Willem could see how troubled I was and they followed me, asking over and over: ‘Are you ok?’

‘Do yuh want me to gert you a glass of wahder?’

And I said: ‘Look, Villem, read this.’

And he read: Once he had settled in the capital during the first half of the 1930s, he soon left his sporadic studies as an unregistered student at San Carlos and La Esmeralda.

‘And what does that mean?’ Willem asked.

‘Sporadic means occasional, from time to time,’ I replied.

‘Not that. I mean what does it all mean, the exhibition, everything. Does it mean everyone gerts to be remembered? That histary corrects its mistakes?’

‘I don’t know, Villem, this isn’t a novel, this is real life, it’s not that simple to explain.’

We left the museum when the guards threw us out and we began to walk — I staggered — following the instructions Virgilio had given us, towards the metro station. On the way, both my hands squeezed the exhibition guide, which I’d brought with me to prove, the next day, and the next one and the next, that this had really happened. We walked in silence, broken every now and again by the loud smacking kisses the two lovebirds were bestowing on each other.

The throng was visible two blocks away: the station appeared to be shut. In the crowd we found the salon members debating the best way to get back to our building.

‘What’s going on?’ we asked.

‘The metro’s shut,’ Hipólita informed us.

‘The whole metro,’ Francesca added. ‘They say the city’s in total chaos.’

We started eavesdropping on the conversations going on here and there, until we had a compendium of rumours. People said that the earth had split and the crack in the Monument to the Revolution had spread, criss-crossing the entire length of Avenida Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma. They said that a crowd had gathered around the statue, at first to gossip, but that things then edged closer to an uprising. They said that the Monument to the Revolution had collapsed. That the metro was closed for safety and would not be opening soon.

‘I know how to walk back,’ Virgilio assured us, and we set off, following him.

It took us almost an hour, at the doleful pace imposed upon us by the women’s varicose veins, the men’s bunions, several people’s palpitations and everyone’s shortness of breath. We witnessed a traffic jam, spanning the entire city, that was impossible to avoid save for abandoning one’s car. We saw people pouring out into the street and we heard the subterranean clamour of something waking up.

When we got to our building, around 8 p.m., there were three lorries collecting rotten tomatoes from the greengrocer’s. Juliet came out and called to me:

‘The day has come, Teo, the day has come!’

Willem took me aside and spoke discreetly, his little name badge trembling next to his heart:

‘Can I barrow your aportment?’

I gave him the keys and watched him cross the lobby, holding tight to Dorotea’s hand, and couldn’t help but feel a tingle go through me: history was about to write a glorious chapter. The door closed and I was left standing outside on the pavement.

‘Are you coming?’ Juliet asked, as she got ready to shut the shop.