Juan Pablo Villalobos - I'll Sell You a Dog

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In those days, as I left my apartment each morning, number 3-C, I would bump into my neighbour from 3-D in the hall, who had got it into her head that I was writing a novel. My neighbour was called Francesca, and I, it goes without saying, was not writing a novel at all. You had to pronounce her name Frrrancesca , really rolling the ‘r’s, so it sounded extra trashy. After greeting each other with a raise of the eyebrows, we’d stand and wait in front of the doors to the lift, which divided the building in two, ascending and descending like the zip on a pair of trousers. It was comparisons like this that made Francesca go around telling everyone else who lived in the building that I was forever coming on to her. And because I called her Francesca, which wasn’t her real name but the name I’d given her in this so-called novel of mine.

There were days when the lift would take hours to arrive, as if it didn’t know the people using it were old and assumed we had all the time in the world ahead of us, as opposed to behind. Or as if it did know, but couldn’t care less. When the doors finally opened, we’d get in and begin the agonisingly slow descent, and the colour would begin to rise in Francesca’s face purely from the effect of the metaphor. The contraption moved so slowly it seemed it was being operated by a pair of mischievous hands that were taking their time on purpose so as to enhance the arousal and delay the consummation, when the zip finally reached the bottom. The cockroaches infesting the building would take advantage of our trip and travel downstairs to visit their associates. I used the dead time in the lift to squash a few of them. It was easier to chase after them in there than at home, in the corridors or down in the lobby, although it was more dangerous, too. You had to step on them firmly but not too hard, or else you ran the risk of the elevator plummeting sharply down from the force. I told Francesca to stand still. Once, I stamped on her toe and she made me pay for her to get a taxi to the podiatrist.

Waiting for her in the lobby were her minions, the poor things: she ran a literary salon in which she forced residents to read one novel after another. They spent hours down there, her ‘salonists’, as they called themselves, from Monday through to Sunday. They’d purchased some little battery-powered lights — Made in China — from the street market, which they clipped to the front covers of their books together with a magnifying glass, and looked after them with a care so obscene you’d think they were the most important invention since gunpowder or Maoism. I slunk through the chairs, arranged in a circle like in rehab or a satanic sect, and when I reached the main door and sensed the proximity of the street with its potholes and stench of fried food, I shouted a goodbye to them:

‘Lend me the book when you’ve finished! I’ve got a table with a wonky leg!’

And without fail, Francesca would reply:

‘ Francesca sounds like an Italian prostitute, you dirty old man!’

The literary salon had ten members, plus the chair. From time to time one would die or be declared unable to live unassisted and move to a home, but Francesca always managed to hoodwink the new resident into joining up. Our building consisted of twelve apartments arranged over three floors, four on each storey. It was widowers and bachelors who lived there, or rather I should say widows and spinsters, because women made up the majority. The building was at number 78 Calle Basilia Franco, a street like any other in Mexico City, by which I mean as filthy and flaking as any other. The only anomaly on it was this place, this ghetto of the third age, the little old people’s building as the rest of the neighbourhood called it, as decrepit and shabby as its inhabitants. The number on the building was the same as my age, the only difference being that the numbering on the block didn’t increase with every year that passed.

Proof the salon was actually a sect lay in the fact that they spent such a long time on those chairs. They were folding aluminium chairs, bearing the logo of Corona beer. I’m talking about literary fundamentalists here, people capable of convincing the brewery’s marketing manager to give them chairs as part of their cultural sponsorship programme. As unlikely as it seems, the subliminal advertising worked: I would leave the building and head straight for the bar on the corner, for the first beer of the day.

The salon wasn’t the only blot on the building’s weekly routine. Hipólita, from 2-C, imparted classes in bread-dough modelling on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Then there was an instructor who came on Mondays and Fridays to do aerobics classes round the corner, in the Jardín de Epicuro, a park filled with bushes and shrubs and where there were more nitrogen and sulphur oxides, more carbon dioxide and monoxide than oxygen. Francesca, who had been a language teacher, gave private English lessons. And then there were classes in yoga, IT and macramé, all organised by the residents themselves, who seemed to think retirement was like preschool. You had to put up with all of this as well as the lamentable state of the building, but the rent had been frozen since the beginning of time, which made up for it.

Trips to museums and places of historical interest were also organised. Every time someone stuck a leaflet up in the lobby about an excursion to some exhibition, I would jab a finger at it and ask:

‘Anyone know how much beer costs in this dump?’

It wasn’t an idle question: I’d paid as much as fifty pesos for a beer in a museum café once. The price of a month’s rent! I couldn’t afford that kind of luxury; I had to survive on my savings, which, according to my calculations, would last another eight years at this rate. Long enough, I thought, before old lady death came to pay me a visit. This rate , by the way, was what they called a stoic life , although I called it a crappy life, plain and simple. I had to keep track of the number of beers I had each day so as not to go over budget! And I did keep track, methodically — the problem was that I lost track come the evening. So those eight years were perhaps miscalculated and were only seven or six. Or five. The thought that the sum of drinks I had each day might go into subtraction and end up becoming a countdown made me pretty nervous. And the more nervous I was, the harder I found it to keep track.

At other times, as the lift descended, Francesca would start giving me advice on writing the novel which, like I said before, I wasn’t writing. Going down three floors at that speed gave her time to cover two centuries of literary theory. She said my characters lacked depth, as if they were holes. And that my style needed more texture, as if she were buying fabric to make curtains. She spoke with astonishing clarity, articulating each syllable so carefully that no matter how outrageous the ideas she put forward they sounded like gospel. It was as if she reached the absolute truth via correct pronunciation and employed hypnosis techniques on top of that. And it worked! This was how she had come to be dictator of the salon, chair of the Residents’ Association, the ultimate authority on the subject of gossip and slander. I stopped paying attention and would close my eyes to concentrate on the descent of my fly. Then the lift would give a jolt as it reached the lobby and Francesca knitted together one final phrase, whose loose end I clutched at, having lost the thread of her rant: