Down the Rabbit Hole

For Mateo

If the international but anglophone reader tries to sketch a quick history of sudamericano fiction following the Boom of Márquez and Cortázar & Co, then two things become visible on this improvised map. On the one hand, it is now possible to see this Boom as having a past and a future. Its past was Borges, sure, but also Roberto Arlt and Felisberto Hernández and Macedonio Fernández; while the future is the fiction of Roberto Bolaño and Alan Pauls, Rodrigo Fresán and Ricardo Piglia. The past and future of this Boom represents a sequence of deft experiments. But there is something else to this sudamericano map: a sequence of market forces. As well as an array of experiments, there is also an array of pulp genres. And the most conspicuous of these is the one called narcoliteratura. Narcoliteratura is druglords and guns and girls. It is a corrupt and lurid politics.

And while it might at first look like this miniature novel by the Mexican novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos belongs to the second category of literary history – the pulp category of narcoliteratura, since its protagonists are a druglord and his psychopathic minions – it really belongs to the first: the history of experiments.

And so then: this is it.

This novel is narrated by a kid called Tochtli, the son of a druglord. And I suppose that the usual story, in this narco era, would be a story of drugs and police and gangs. But since this is a story narrated by a kid, it is therefore not at all a contribution to narcoliteratura. Instead, this novel tells the story of how Tochtli acquired a pair of Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Or at least: this is the story Tochtli thinks he is telling. But no story, in the end, is only the story it tells. Even Tochtli's story can't help leaking. Through his permutations of a limited set of perceptions and vocabularies, a devastated world emerges.

This novel is a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective. And so its essence is in its opening lines:

Those five difficult words – sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, devastating – represent the elements of Tochtli's fugue. They represent its outline. Because he has crazes, this kid – like hats, and hippopotamuses, and words, and the Samurai. But these are the crazes he knows about. A person is not just a collection of conscious crazes; a person is overtaken by crazes of which they are unaware. So Tochtli's words, which seem to him to be a sign of his absolute freedom, are really a sign of his absolute entrapment.

Tochtli is a portrait of innocence; but he is also a portrait of absolute loneliness. This novel discovers innocence as loneliness. It discovers innocence as incomprehension.

There are precedents, I suppose, that the anglophone reader could consider, when considering this kind of machine: there is Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
, with its reversals of proportion and perspective; and there is Henry James's
What Maisie Knew
, which recounts an adult story through the perspective of a child. But this novel represents something else.

In its investigation of innocence and knowledge, it is a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature. Because literature, after all, prides itself on knowledge. It prides itself on depth. But knowledge is infinite, and so every depth is just another form of surface.

Tochtli's twin or shadow in this story isn't the demented figure of his father: no, his shadow is Mazatzin – his tutor. The life story of Mazatzin, says Tochtli, is ‘really sordid and pathetic'. He was in TV advertising and he was rich: a man with millions of pesos. But since he always wanted to be a writer, Mazatzin

This short biography is a kind of anamorphic projection thrown by Tochtli's own story. This is partly because of its theme of treachery, but really because of its subject: that dream of a book about life. For Tochtli is rightly if cutely scornful of Mazatzin's life story – a story which in his opinion only proves that ‘educated people know lots of things about books, but nothing at all about life'. So when Tochtli strays once more into literary criticism, he is again rightly if cutely scornful:

Yes, it is true, and it is also cute. Because Tochtli may be precise in his scorn, but he is no more intimate with life than Mazatzin: he is no more able to investigate reality. The child and the novelist are inversions of each other: they are both bereft of the inside dope.

And yet … This is not the final lesson of this small novel. For Tochtli possesses something similar to knowledge, though not quite the same – his love of Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. And this, in the end, is an advance. It is, possibly, a future. And the international, anglophone reader can measure this future by remembering a miniature moment in this miniature book about how miniature this thing called life can be. Early on, Tochtli presents a true and uncomprehending summary of killing – an unintended exercise in the deadpan: ‘There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out.' The rest of this novel represents a confirmation of this sentence, but a confirmation that becomes a refutation: the deadpan is transformed into grief. Or, in other words, the matte linguistic surface of this novel – so limited, so inarticulate! – is converted into a form of truth.

Yes: something deadpan, innocent, damaged, matte, devastated: this, I think, is the great invention of Juan Pablo Villalobos in this tiny, comical space; and this is what might represent one future for an adequate fiction – a fiction adequate to what's happening. And not only in Sudamerica.

Adam Thirlwell

London, June 2011

Some people say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious. They say I look older. Or the other way around: that I’m too little to know words like that. Or back-to-front and the other way around, sometimes people think I’m a dwarf. But I don’t think I’m precocious. What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except I pull words out of the dictionary. Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary. My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest. Yolcaut doesn’t think I’m precocious either. He says I’m a genius, he tells me:

‘Tochtli, you’re a genius, you little bastard.’

And he strokes my head with his fingers covered in gold and diamond rings.

Anyway, more people say I’m odd: seven. And just because I really like hats and always wear one. Wearing a hat is a good habit immaculate people have. In the sky there are pigeons doing their business. If you don’t wear a hat you end up with a dirty head. Pigeons have no shame. They do their dirty business in front of everyone, while they’re flying. They could easily do it hidden in the branches of a tree. Then we wouldn’t have to spend the whole time looking at the sky and worrying about our heads. But hats, if they’re good hats, can also be used to make you look distinguished. That is, hats are like the crowns of kings. If you’re not a king you can wear a hat to be distinguished. And if you’re not a king and you don’t wear a hat you end up being a nobody.

I don’t think I’m odd for wearing a hat. And oddness is related to ugliness, like Cinteotl says. What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m sad Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:

‘Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.’

Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn’t like it when I call him Daddy. He says we’re the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometres. Yolcaut is a realist and that’s why he doesn’t say we’re the best gang in the universe or the best gang for 8,000 kilometres. Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is. Yolcaut told me that. Reality is like this and that’s it. Tough luck. The realist’s favourite saying is you have to be realistic.

I think we really are a very good gang. I have proof. Gangs are all about solidarity. So solidarity means that, because I like hats, Yolcaut buys me hats, lots of hats, so many that I have a collection of hats from all over the world and from all the different periods of the world. Although now more than new hats what I want is a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. I’ve already written it down on the list of things I want and given it to Miztli. That’s how we always do it, because I don’t go out much, so Miztli buys me all the things I want on orders from Yolcaut. And since Miztli has a really bad memory I have to write lists for him. But you can’t buy a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that easily, in a pet shop. The biggest thing they sell in a pet shop is a dog. But who wants a dog? No one wants a dog. It’s so hard to get a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that it might be the only way to do it is by going to catch one in Liberia. That’s why my tummy is hurting so much. Actually my tummy always hurts, but recently I’ve been getting cramps more often.

I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.

I nearly always get on well with Mazatzin. He only annoys me when he’s strict and makes me stick to our study plan rigidly. Mazatzin, by the way, doesn’t call me Tochtli. He calls me Usagi, which is my name in Japanese, because he loves everything from the empire of Japan. What I really like about the empire of Japan are the samurai films. I’ve seen some of them so many times I know them off by heart. When I watch them I go on ahead and say the samurai’s conversations out loud before they do. And I never get it wrong. That’s because of my memory, which really is almost devastating. One of the films is called
Twilight of the Samurai
and it’s about an old samurai who teaches the way of the samurai to a little boy. There’s one bit where he makes the boy stay still and mute for days and days. He says to him: ‘The guardian is stealthy and knows how to wait. Patience is his best weapon, like the crane who does not know despair. The weak are known by their movement. The strong by their stillness. Look at the devastating sword that knows not fear. Look at the wind. Look at your eyelashes. Close your eyes and look at your eyelashes.’ It’s not just this film I know off by heart, I know lots more, four.

One day, instead of teaching a lesson, Mazatzin told me his life story and it’s really sordid and pathetic. What happened is that he used to do really good business in TV advertising. He earned millions of pesos by making up adverts for shampoo and fizzy drinks. But Mazatzin was always sad, because he’d actually studied to be a writer. This is where it gets sordid: someone earning millions of pesos being sad because they’re not a writer. That’s sordid. And so in the end, because he was so sad Mazatzin went to live very far away, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain I think. He wanted to sit down and think and write a book about life. He even took a computer with him. That’s not sordid, but it is pathetic. The problem was that Mazatzin didn’t feel inspired and meanwhile his business partner, who was also his best friend, scammed him out of his millions of pesos. He wasn’t a best friend at all but a traitor.

That’s when Mazatzin came to work for us, because Mazatzin is educated. Yolcaut says that educated people are the ones who think they’re great because they know lots of things. They know things about science, like the fact that pigeons transmit disgusting diseases. They also know things about history, such as how the French love cutting the heads off kings. That’s why educated people like being teachers. Sometimes the things they know are wrong, like if you want to write a book you have to go and live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain. That’s what Yolcaut says, that educated people know lots of things about books, but nothing at all about life. We live in the middle of nowhere too, but we don’t do it for inspiration. We do it for protection.

Anyway, since I can’t go to school, Mazatzin teaches me things from books. At the moment we’re studying the conquest of Mexico. It’s a fun topic, with war and blood and dead people. The story goes like this: on one side there were the kings and queens of the Spanish empire and on the other side there were the Indians who lived in Mexico. Then the kings and queens of Spain wanted to be the kings and queens of Mexico too. So they came and they started killing all the Indians, but only to scare them and make them accept their new kings. Well, the truth is they didn’t even kill some of the Indians, they just burned their feet. This whole story makes Mazatzin furious, because he wears calico shirts and leather sandals as if he was an Indian. And he starts with one of his lectures. He says:

‘They stole our money, Usagi, they plundered our country!’

It’s almost as if the dead Indians were his cousins or his uncles. Pathetic. By the way, the Spanish don’t like cutting the heads off kings. They still have living kings and queens with their heads stuck on their shoulders. Mazatzin showed me a photo in a magazine. That’s really pathetic too.

One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.

‘One bullet in the heart.’

‘Corpse.’

‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’

‘Alive.’

‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’

‘Too early to tell.’

And we carry on like that. When we run out of body parts we look up new ones in a book that has pictures of all of them, even the prostate and the medulla oblongata. Speaking of the brain, it’s important to take off your hat before you put bullets into somebody’s brain, so it doesn’t get stained. Blood is really hard to get out. This is what Itzpapalotl, the maid who does the cleaning in our palace, always says.

Yes, our palace: Yolcaut and I are the owners of a palace and we’re not even kings. The thing is we have a lot of money. A huge amount. We have pesos, which is the money of Mexico. We also have dollars, which is the money of the United States. And we also have euros, which is the money of the countries and kingdoms of Europe. I think we have thousands of millions of all three kinds, although the 100,000-dollar bills are the ones we like the most. And as well as money we have all the jewels and the gems. And lots of safes with secret combinations. That’s why I don’t know very many people, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Because if I knew more people they’d steal our money or they’d scam us like they did to Mazatzin. Yolcaut says we have to protect ourselves. Gangs are about this, too.

The other day a man I didn’t know came to our palace and Yolcaut wanted to know if I was macho or not. The man’s face was covered in blood and, the truth is, I was a bit scared when I saw him. But I didn’t say anything, because being macho means you’re not scared and if you are scared you’re a faggot. I stood there very solemnly while Miztli and Chichilkuali, who are the guards in our palace, gave him some devastating blows. The man turned out to be a faggot because he started to scream and shout, Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! He even wet his pants. The good thing is that I did turn out to be macho and Yolcaut let me go before they turned the faggot into a corpse. They definitely killed him, because later I saw Itzpapalotl go past with her mop and bucket. I don’t know how many bullets they put in him though. I’d say at least four in the heart. If I counted dead people I’d know more than thirteen or fourteen people. Seventeen or more. Twenty, easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.

There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too. If your blood comes out there’s a point when your heart or your liver stops working. Or your brain. And you die. Another way of making corpses is by cutting, which you can also do with knives or with machetes and guillotines. You can make little cuts or big ones. If they’re big they separate the body parts and make corpses in little pieces. The most normal thing to do is to cut off the head, although, actually, you can cut anything. It’s because of the neck. If we didn’t have a neck it would be different. It might be normal to cut bodies in half down the middle so as to have two corpses. But we have a neck and this is a really big temptation. Especially for French people.

To be honest, sometimes our palace doesn’t look like a palace. The problem is it’s really big and there’s no way of keeping it immaculate. For a long time Itzpapalotl has been wanting Yolcaut to hire one of her nieces to help her with the cleaning. Itzpapalotl says she’s trustworthy, but Yolcaut doesn’t want any more people in our palace. Itzpapalotl grumbles because our palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcaut’s business room and five more empty rooms we don’t use. And then as well as that there’s the kitchen, the living room with the armchairs, the TV room, the cinema room, my games room, Yolcaut’s games room, Yolcaut’s office, the inside dining room, the dining room out on the terrace, the small dining room, five bathrooms we use, two we don’t, the gym, the sauna and the swimming pool.

Miztli says Yolcaut is paranoid and that this is a problem. The problem has to do with keeping the palace clean and also with Miztli’s time off. Because Miztli and Chichilkuali are in charge of protecting our palace with their rifles twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-four hours means that sometimes Miztli doesn’t sleep and other times Chichilkuali doesn’t sleep. Even though we have a really high wall to protect us. And even though on top of the wall there are bits of glass and barbed wire and an alarm with a laser beam that sometimes makes a noise when a bird flies close to it. And even though we live in the middle of nowhere.

Around our palace we have a gigantic garden. It’s looked after by Azcatl, who is mute and spends the whole day surrounded by the noise of the machines he uses. The noise is deafening if you go really close. Azcatl has machines to cut the grass, machines to cut the weeds and machines to cut the trees and the bushes. But his main enemy is the weeds. The truth is Azcatl is losing the battle, because our garden is always full of weeds. By the way, Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses are silent machines that devour weeds. That’s what’s called being a herbivore, a plant-eater.

In the garden, opposite the dining room on the terrace, we also have cages with our animals, which are divided into two groups: the birds and the big cats. For birds we have eagles, falcons and a cage full of parakeets and brightly coloured parrots, macaws and that sort of thing. For cats we have a lion in one cage and two tigers in another. On the same side as the tigers there’s a space where we’re going to put the cage for our Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Inside the cage there’ll be a pond, but it won’t be a deep pond, it’ll just be for squelching around in the mud. Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses aren’t like other hippopotamuses, which like to live submerged in the water. This is all going to be arranged by Itzcuauhtli, who looks after our animals: he gives them their food, cleans their cages and gives them medicine when they get ill. Itzcuauhtli could tell me lots of things about animals, like how to make them better and things like that. But he doesn’t tell me anything: he’s mute too.