Mario Bellatin - Jacob the Mutant

It seems important to me that any interested party, having arrived at this point of the book Jacob the Mutant as of the text that attempts to respond to the relevance of having written it, keep in mind a set of elements that I, as author, hold under consideration.

When my grandfather would refer to Master Porcupine at the zoo, he would always give me some new explanation or other about the Mariotic Theory being developed by that teacher.

Master Porcupine always wore a black felt hat.

In my memories my grandfather would refer to that hat with precision.

He would describe its particularities with such detail.

I found it curious that he would do this — with such precision, no less — given that my grandfather always walked around bareheaded.

This is why the blond fuzz that grew from his ears was so visible.

On more than one occasion he said that from the time he arrived in the city where we were living, he had come to lose every hat that he had tried to start wearing.

It seemed as though his inability to wear a hat was some sort of a vengeance.

I think he even expressed as much to me on one occasion.

That thought — my grandfather’s embarrassment for not wearing a hat, as was the custom — came to me fleetingly in one instant of the prayer I was immersed in.

At that moment I thought of something that seemed absurd: that my grandfather had slowly gone about losing his hats as a sort of vengeance for not having been able to ever pronounce a word in his mother tongue.

In that curious instant that took over me in my prayer cell I would have liked to have learned not just the reasons why my grandfather would constantly lose his hats, but also with what exact words my grandfather made his plea to God — lying in an open field sown with wheat — for Him to assist him in dying.

Perhaps these words do not exist, but if they possessed some kind of materialization, it would certainly be found represented in the hats that my grandfather endlessly lost.

My grandfather told me that Master Porcupine was unexpectedly fired from the elementary school where he worked.

He was accused of not following the program of studies, as well as using his students as guinea pigs to test what the school administrators felt was a strange theory, with the goal of systematizing it.

At the end of each month, Master Porcupine answered the questions on his students’ exams himself.

He would also do their homework.

He would then turn in the papers to the administration as a progress report for his class.

The Mariotic Theory, according to Master Porcupine:

Something that occurs each time a minimal, isolated incident breaks with an established order, followed by the emergence of a chain of uncontrollable chaos and increasingly absurd acts.

As my grandfather told me many times in front of the camels, it seems that Enter the Dragon was Bruce Lee’s most successful film.

Macaque had never seen it.

No matter how many times her lover, the martial arts fighter, insisted she do so.

The movie was so successful that it continued showing for months at one movie theater downtown.

Macaque always answered the fighter, saying that she didn’t enjoy movies with violence.

She had already had enough of that in the marriage that she had had to flee from behind her husband’s back.

In those days Macaque and the martial arts fighter lived in the room they rented in that boarding house.

It was there that the news came of the death of her lover.

Macaque immediately walked out to the street.

The shoemaker’s workshop was a few blocks away.

The corpse had already been taken to the city morgue.

Some police officers were still around.

Some were carrying handkerchiefs tied over their noses.

It was the first time that Macaque visited the workshop.

The shoemaker had forbidden it.

Macaque saw that it had two roofed sections and a small patio.

The first part was for displaying the shoes.

They were outdated models, simple, that nevertheless sought to respect a certain classic style.

They were displayed on wooden shelves.

At that time there were six pairs lined up.

In the same room were the working tools: a harness maker’s tools, enormous scissors, thread, and sewing materials.

On the floor, stacked on top of each other, there was a pile of soles of various sizes.

The back room was set up as a bedroom for those nights when the fighter wasn’t let in to the boarding house.

In one corner there was a bed covered with tulle netting that hung from the ceiling.

Opposite that a thread that hung from one side of the wall to the other.

Approximately one-and-a-half meters away from that thread some pieces of raw meat were hanging.

Below each piece there were some metal boxes, each with a hatch on top and a thin metal tube that went from the piece of meat to the cage’s opening.

At the slightest movement the meat fell, bringing with it the entire animal and instantly closing the opening to the cage.

Rats, whose skin we know was used to make the shoes, would crawl in at night to eat those bits of meat, and they would fall into the boxes without any chance of escape.

Each night the fighter captured four or five animals.

The next morning he would butcher them on the back patio.

He would bring them out alive, and with a wooden stick he gave them a light blow to the snout that would kill them instantly.

He would then open their stomachs with a special knife, and with his pinky finger — whose nail he kept quite long for this sole purpose — he would rip out their entrails.

In that particular state of perception, doubtlessly motivated by the thousands of times I had already repeated the names of God, it occurs to me that my grandfather would have never accepted a pair of shoes made by a martial arts fighter.

My grandfather was an incredibly scrupulous dresser.

He was one of those people who only have one change of clothing, but of the highest quality.

Enter the Dragon had not only been the most commercially successful film, it was also that fighter-turned-shoemaker’s favorite.

Macaque even believed that her lover had been involved in the creation of the film.

On more than one occasion that fighter had made references to personal details of the actor’s life.

He spoke about the contacts he maintained with the Chinese mafia, one of the bloodiest mafias known.

Aside from the gated rattraps, in one corner of the patio there was a series of regular traps.

Some skins in the process of being treated were kept on a table.

Macaque was summoned to the morgue to identify the body.

One of the officers accompanied her.

On the way back to the boarding house she suddenly saw her dead lover’s face in the middle of the sidewalk.

That face was there, on top of a pile of martial arts movie posters.

When she approached the vendor to ask about it, they told her it was the actor Bruce Lee.

Macaque found the portrait identical to her lover.

She had never seen Bruce Lee’s face before.

She purchased the poster, and it is that poster that now hangs in the camper where she lives.

On a certain occasion I remember having asked my grandfather if the zoo had a closing time.

My grandfather answered that of course it did, for it was strange to come across someone who could focus on nature while working in the dark.

I remember that he told me this while throwing a candy into the seal pool.

One should never visit a zoo at night , was what he told me at first.