Valeria Luiselli - The Story of My Teeth

THE NEXT FEW DAYS, after discovering that he’d lost everything, were difficult ones for Highway. He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear?” I urged him to get temporary dentures so he could start eating properly, and we could begin the transcription of his dental autobiography. Though he resisted at first, he finally consented, and we got down to work.

But Highway still had not fully recovered, and he existed in a kind of gray haze. Around those same days, he joined motu proprio the Serenity Group of Neurotics Anonymous, on Calle Pensadores Mexicanos, next door to the El Buho Firearm Repair Workshop [figure 7]. His four weeks with the Serenity Group ended first badly and then well. Badly, because the first meetings left Highway convinced that he was a sick man, which he was not, and he was almost convinced to lock himself in a Catholic monastery. But well, because in his second week there, he met a veteran union boss, La Elvis, who, after hearing Highway’s story during his third session with the group, persuaded him that he wasn’t the least neurotic, but was in fact an honorable man, mentally and emotionally sound, whose bastard of a brat of a son had dispossessed him of what was rightfully his. She told him that she had seen a mound of teeth displayed in a gallery next to the juice factory, as if it was someone’s work of art, and urged him to take action. Highway felt vindicated.

The following day we went to the gallery in the factory and took back what rightfully belonged to him, plus a few extra objects, which we thought we could sell at some future auction. We never did get far with the idea of that future auction, but Highway found and kept his teeth, and had them fit into dentures by his old friend Luis Felipe Fabre. Eventually, he thought, when he had amassed enough money, he would have them implanted individually. But for the time being, he just wore the dentures as the mood took him. That is to say, sometimes in, sometimes out.

With his new teeth, Highway recovered his will to live his final months in peace. Every night, we had “Education of the Voragine Artist” sessions in the neighborhood bars. We particularly took a liking to one called Secret of Night [figure 8], where we met a young singer-songwriter called Juan Cirerol, with whom Highway performed for a few weeks, every night. I saw them the night they did a, frankly inspired, duet of Johnny Cash’s classic “Highwayman,” followed by Cirerol’s now famous “Metanfeta.” When the bar was starting to close, the owner would let Highway auction his stories. It was at Secret of Night that Highway finally put into practice the now full-fledged theory of his famous allegoric method, where it is not objects that are sold, but the stories that give them value and meaning. The allegorics were, according to Highway, “postcapitalist, radical recycling auctions that would save the world from its existential condition as the garbage can of history.”

In his final performances, Highway, who was by no means lacking in ingenuity, learned to take advantage of the moments when his teeth slipped from his control to take them out altogether. He would hold them between his fingers, like the castanets used for flamenco dancing and, depending on the occasion, make them speak or chant and tell fascinating stories of the lost objects that had once formed part of his collectibles. Increasing numbers of people came to see him and were enthralled by the spectacle of Highway’s now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t dentures and the stories he told and sold with them.

He always began in roughly the same way: My name is Highway, and I’m the best auctioneer in the world. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies. I know how to count to eight in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back.

Highway died in the Buenos Días Motel, next door to the bar, in the company of three gorgeous ladies after conducting an allegoric auction that finished, as an encore, with an imitation of Janis Joplin singing “Mercedes Benz.” I received a call from the concierge the morning of his death and immediately went over there with El Perro. We honored his last request and scattered his ashes at the feet of the fiberglass dinosaurs in the median strip of a street in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City [figure 9]. I kept my word, and in the months that followed put together his dental autobiography. El Perro made sure Highway’s son got the note that we found on the night table next to his deathbed, under the glass of water where he soaked his dentures:

I’m sorry I got you into trouble,

and that you’re in prison,

and that I wasn’t the best of fathers.

I also didn’t get round to finding

all the things you requested.

But here are my teeth,

and your glass of water.

You can also keep

all my collectibles, and

the Marylin Monroe teeth,

which were false anyway.

1. GOWER BICYCLE PAVILION

© Francisco Kochen

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

— H. G. WELLS

2. EL RINCÓN CULTURAL

© Javier Rivero and El Perro

My notebooks. So sadly full, this one with impotence, the other with empty, pointless waiting. The most difficult of waits, the most painful: the wait for oneself. If I were to write something in it, it would be the confession that I too have been waiting for myself for a long time, and I haven’t turned up.

— JOSEFINA VICENS

3. DISNEYLANDIA

© Guía Roji

Objects in themselves disagreeable or indifferent often please in the imitation.

— WILLIAM HAZLITT

4. HIGHWAY’S HOUSE

© Valeria Luiselli

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

— JEAN BAUDRILLARD

5. ECATEPEC JUNKYARD

© Javier Rivero and El Perro

The Spanish language is an old wedding dress that is handed down to us by our ancestors, and which we are obliged to preserve intact. . but antique wedding dresses are only good for putting on to see ourselves as skeletons. It’s much better to cut them up for shirts than to keep them in mothballs.

— JORGE IBARGÜENGOITIA