Valeria Luiselli - The Story of My Teeth

Let’s go, Voragine, I said, leaving a twenty on the table, Benito Juarez face up. I’ve got my new bicycle here outside. A friend just gave it to me.

My bicycle’s outside too, he said.

Perfect. We can pick up your things, and I’ll take you to Disneylandia.

I’m in.

Great. Say no more. Shall we go?

Right now?

This very instant.

End of conversation.

TACITO’S FORTUNE COOKIES:

The man atop the mountain does not fall.

The motionless dragon in deep waters becomes the prey of the crabs.

Fortune never comes with a parallel, and misfortune never comes alone.

When two brothers work together, the mountains turn to gold.

Not hearing is not as good as hearing, hearing is not as good as seeing, seeing is not as good as mentally knowing, mentally knowing is not as good as acting; true learning continues up to the point of action.

When the wind changes, some people build walls, others windmills.

The tongue resists because it is soft; the teeth yield because they are hard.

Put your words in the mouth of the stomach.

I AM NOT SURE IF THIS should be in the story, because it’s a part that seems to start folding over on itself, so that I become confused and agitated and lose my way. But I don’t see how it can be ignored either.

When Voragine and I got back to Disneylandia, we found that my house and warehouse had been broken into. My collection was gone, every single item. I first felt tremendous relief. Then, a little sadness. Then disbelief, and anger. Then, again, a deeper form of sadness and relief fused together, almost a weightlessness.

The following days were confusing and difficult, and I’d rather not speak about them. I attended group therapy. I watched Formula 1. I considered Catholicism. I was lost like a swallow in Antarctica, as Napoleón says.

One morning, while we were drinking coffee, Voragine tried to persuade me to go to the dentist and get a temporary set of dentures, so I could at least begin eating proper food. I resisted a little, but the boy was right, and I’m a reasonable man despite a certain stubbornness. As soon as I’d gotten the new dentures — cheap and a bit too tight, but functional — I began dictating my dental autobiography. It took me some time to find the right structures, but Voragine pointed out that there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that helped me to get started.

A MONTH LATER, AS I had promised him, we began the “Education of the Voragine Artist.” Our first lesson: to pick up and recycle some objects that my son left for me in the gallery next to the juice factory. Around one in the morning on a particularly quiet Sunday, my friend El Perro, who still worked as a driver for the factory, came to pick us up in a handsome truck. We took the back road, where there wasn’t a single security checkpoint. El Perro parked in an alley, handed me a set of keys, and Voragine and I went into the small building adjacent to the factory, where the gallery is located. We started in the office to the right of the entrance of the gallery. We didn’t find much there, but Voragine took a catalog from the desk, which later came in handy. I requisitioned some pencils, which would also come in handy, as Voragine was doing a lot of writing.

We walked around carefully, because the gallery was quite dark, and we’d decided not to turn the main lights on, in case there were cameras. The only illumination came from the spots directed onto the objects. I have to say that, in this particular light, they looked more beautiful than I remembered from when I had first seen them on the morning of my brief captivity. I first recognized the plush costumes, the musical score on its podium, the prosthetic leg.

I am not the crying sort, not even in movies. When I suddenly saw my old teeth — the ones that I’d sold off at the auction in the church — I didn’t cry. I neighed with joy. They were arranged in a little pile, lit vertically from above, and placed on a white wooden pedestal. They were truly something. I gathered them together with my two hands and placed them in my jacket pocket.

The rest of the operation went quickly and smoothly. The only object that gave us any trouble was the medium-sized billboard with a horse, but together we managed to drag it to the truck, and El Perro helped us to get it inside. A couple of hours later, the three of us were back in my warehouse, studying the new collection of objects and swigging from a bottle of Aguardiente, which El Perro had contributed. “Better the lucky man than the lucky man’s son,” El Perro said before he fell asleep in the Acapulco chair. You can’t help but love a man like that.

The following morning I woke Voragine at 7:00 a.m. and led him to the kitchen. El Perro had gone home — he’s a man who never gives others trouble. I handed my young apprentice a cup of coffee and a series of Scribe notebooks. I’d had a good idea for an auction, and good ideas don’t come on wheels, so I wanted to get it down on paper immediately.

The series would be called “Allegorics of Ecatepec,” and would recycle our new collected objects by telling stories that used collected names of my friends and acquaintances from the neighborhood — giving due credits to the artists who had made the works and using the catalog we had requisitioned as our guide. No complications. The best ideas, like the finest objects, are simple.