I'll Sell You a Dog E-Book

Juan Pablo Villalobos

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

Long before he was the taco seller whose 'Gringo Dog' recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building's lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos's old man can't help but misbehave. He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a beer. A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I'll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation in2016by And Other Stories High Wycombe – Los Angeleswww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Juan Pablo Villalobos,2014 English-language translation copyright © Rosalind Harvey2016 First published asTe vendo un perroin2014by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, Spain

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Lines by James Hillman were reprinted with permission fromThe Dream and the Underworld(HarperCollins Publishers,1979) andRe-Visioning Psychology(HarperCollins Publishers,1992). Lines by Francisco de Quevedo were taken fromDreams and Discourses, translated by RK Britton (Aris and Phillips). Lines from the Bible were taken from the authorised King James Version (Oxford University Press). Lines from Theodor Adorno’sAesthetic Theorywere reprinted with permission from translations by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Bloomsbury,2013). Lines from Adorno’sNotes to Literaturewere reprinted with permission from the translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Copyright © Columbia University Press,1993). Lines by Marcel Proust were taken from CK Scott Moncrieff’s translation,Remembrance of Things Past(Chatto & Windus). Lines from Juan O’Gorman’s interviews inLa luz de Méxicoby Cristina Pacheco (Estado de Guanajato), Daniel Sada’sRegistro de causantes(Planeta) and from Silvio Rodríguez’ song ‘Al final de este viaje en la vida’ (Ojalá Records) were translated by Rosalind Harvey. Permission has been sought from all rightsholders.

ISBN9781908276742 eBook ISBN9781908276759

Editor: Sophie Lewis; copy-editor: Tara Tobler; proofreader: Laura Willett; typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; cover design: Elisa von Randow.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas.www.englishpen.org

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Contents

Aesthetic TheoryNotes to LiteratureAcknowledgements

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For Andreia

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Her pink dress unsettles me. It won’t let me die.

JUAN O’GORMAN

Perhaps I’ll understand in the next life; in this one I can only imagine.

DANIEL SADA

There isn’t a stomach that wouldn’t howl with hunger if all the dogs you’ve thrust down them were suddenly brought back to life!

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

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‌Aesthetic Theory

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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:

‘You’re as bad as the Yucatecs, who have the same word for searching and finding.’

And I would reply:

‘If you do not seek, you will not find.’

This was a phrase of Schoenberg’s that reminded me of my mother seventy years earlier, when I had lost a sock. I searched and searched and then it turned out that the dog had eaten the sock. My mother died in 1985, in the earthquake. The dog beat her to it by over forty years and in his haste he never discovered how the Second World War ended: he swallowed a pair of nylon tights, incredibly long ones, as long as my father’s secretary’s legs.

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I’d come to live in the building one summer afternoon a year and a half ago, carrying a suitcase with some clothes, two boxes of belongings, a painting and an easel. The removal company had brought the furniture and a few appliances that morning. As I crossed the lobby, dodging the bulky forms that made up the salon, I repeated:

‘Don’t trouble yourselves, don’t trouble yourselves.’

Of course, no one did trouble themselves and they all just pretended to carry on reading, although what they were actually doing was looking sidelong at me. When I finally got to the lift doors, I heard the rumour that began on Francesca’s lips and spread from mouth to ear like a party game:

‘He’s a painter!’

‘He’s a waiter!’

‘He’s a baker!

‘He’s a Quaker!’

I took everything I could fit up in the lift and, ten minutes later, as I returned to the lobby to carry the rest up, like an oh-so-slow Sisyphus, I found that the salonists had organised a cocktail party to welcome me with fizz from the state of Zacatecas and savoury crackers spread with fish paste and mayonnaise.

‘Welcome!’ Hipólita shouted, handing me a bottle of DDT spray. ‘It’s just a little something, but you’ll need it.’

‘You must forgive us,’ said Francesca, ‘we didn’t realise you were an artist! We would have put the champagne on ice if we’d known.’

I took the plastic cup she handed me, full to the brim with warm fizzy wine, and held out my arm to make a toast when Francesca exclaimed:

‘To art!’

I’d extended my arm a little too horizontally, so instead of making a toast it looked like I was trying to give them the cup back, which was, in fact, what I wanted to do. They then asked me to speak, to say a few words in the name of art, and what I said, peering sadly at the furious bubbling coming from the disposable cup, was:

‘I’d prefer a beer.’

Francesca took a crumpled twenty-peso note from her purse and ordered one of her minions:

‘Go to the shop on the corner and get the artist a beer.’

Somewhat bewildered, I just managed to head off the jumble of questions trooping towards me in an attempt to dispel my anonymity:

‘Excuse me but how old are you?’

‘Are you a widower?’

‘What’s wrong with your nose?’

‘Where did you live before?’

‘Are you a bachelor?’

‘Why don’t you brush your hair?’

I stood stock-still and smiled, my cup of fizz untouched in my right hand, the DDT spray in my left, until there was a silence when I could reply.

‘So?’ Francesca said.

‘I think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said, unfortunately before the guy who was going to fetch the beers had left the building. ‘I’m not an artist.’

‘I told you! He’s a baker!’ Hipólita shouted triumphantly, and I noticed her mouth was crowned with a fine dark fuzz of hairs.

‘Actually, I’m retired,’ I continued.

‘A retired artist!’ Francesca crowed. ‘No need to apologise, we’re all retired here. All of us except those who never did anything.’

‘I retired, from my family,’ Hipólita chipped in.

‘No, no, I was never an artist,’ I assured them so vehemently even I was suspicious.

One of the salon members who was heading over to offer me a plate of crackers stopped in his tracks and put it down on one of the chairs.

‘Shall I get the beer or not?’ the other minion called from the doorway.

‘Wait,’ Francesca ordered, then asked me: ‘What about the easel and the painting?’

‘They were my father’s,’ I replied. ‘He liked to paint. I used to like painting too, but that was a long time ago.’

‘Just what we need, a frustrated artist!’ Francesca exclaimed. ‘And from a long line of them, too! May I ask what you used to do?’

‘I was a taco seller.’

‘A taco seller?’

‘Yeah, I had a taco stand in the Candelaria de los Patos.’

The salon members started pouring the fizzy wine back into the bottle and, since their hands were shaking, half the liquid spilled onto the floor. Francesca looked over at the man awaiting the denouement in the doorway and commanded him:

‘Give me the twenty pesos.’

I felt the weight of the cup in my right hand disappear, felt Hipólita grab the DDT spray from my left hand, watched Francesca’s minion return the crumpled note to her and the entire salon pull the plug on the cocktail party, handing out the remaining crackers and putting the cork back in the bottle before taking up their books again. Francesca still stood there, looking me up and down, down and up, etching my shabby figure onto her mind’s eye, before declaring:

‘Impostor!’

I looked closely at her too, taking in her figure, her long, svelte, rake-like body, noticing that she had let down her hair and undone the first few buttons at the front of her dress while I’d been going up and down in the lift, felt the rare twinge in my crotch and, realising pretty quickly what she was about, gave the first of many shouts that, from that day forth, would be the catchphrase of our shtick:

‘Well, I beg your pardon for having been a taco seller, Madame!’

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My mother had demanded an autopsy for the dog and Dad was attempting, fruitlessly, to prevent it.

‘What use is it knowing what the dog died of?’ he asked.

‘We have to know what happened,’ my mother replied. ‘Everything has an explanation.’

The creature had spent the previous night trying to be sick, without success. Mum counted the socks: every pair was complete. This is when she became suspicious, because my father used to take the dog out for a walk every day after dinner. She paid the butcher to slit the animal open. They carried the carcass out to the little patio in the back where we hung out the washing and which my mother had carpeted with newspapers. While the preparations went on, Dad followed my mother around, saying over and over:

‘Is this necessary? Is it really necessary? Poor animal, it’s barbaric.’

I tried to calm him down:

‘Don’t worry, Dad, he can’t feel anything any more.’

I was about to turn eight at the time. The preparations continued and, instead of trying to halt the operation, my father promised to paint a portrait of the dog that they could hang in the living room, so Mum would never forget him.

‘A figurative portrait,’ Dad hastened to add; ‘none of that avant-garde stuff.’

My mother didn’t even reply to such a proposition. There was an outstanding, that is to say, never-ending dispute over a cubist portrait of Mum my father had painted when they were courting and which he had given her as a wedding present. She hated the picture because, depending on the mood she was in, she said it made her look like a clown, a monster or a deformed whale.

‘Is it really necessary?’ my father asked again.

‘I don’t want it to happen again and to stop it from happening again we have to know what happened,’ my mother explained.

A child of eight could have drawn his own conclusions, because it couldn’t happen again. The dog couldn’t die twice. My sister, who was a year older than me but maturing as fast as a papaya, took me into a corner and said:

‘Look at Dad’s face: he looks like he’s the one whose guts they’re going to cut open.’

My father was the colour of the sheets on my bed, which although old and worn were pretty white still, thanks to the gallons of bleach my mother used. The butcher asked if my father was going to faint, if he was scared of blood. It was a very warm summer evening and it would be wise to hurry up, before the dog began to stink. With the regal sangfroid typical of her whenever she was settling a family dispute, my mother replied:

‘You may proceed.’

The butcher made a cut from chin to belly. The blood ran out onto a photo of President Ávila Camacho, his hands raised as if being attacked, although presumably he was actually being applauded. Mum bent down to peer into the dog’s entrails, like some Etruscan mystic trying to see the future – and she did see it, quite literally, because the future is always a fateful consequence of the past. An endless nylon stocking had coiled itself along the entire length of the dog’s intestines. It was like what Schoenberg said, but backwards, which meant the same in the end: my mother had found her explanation. Dad protested, claiming the dog had been sniffing around downtown, near Alameda Central park. My parents’ house was also in a neighbourhood in the centre.

‘The doghouse is too good for you,’ said my mother.

I laughed and my father gave me a slap. My sister laughed and my mother pinched her arm. We both began to cry. By dinner time, Dad could take it no longer: with no excuse to go out, he simply left and never came home again. The butcher had taken the dog’s corpse away and promised to bury it. My sister had followed him and told me she’d seen him cutting a deal with the taco vendor on the corner. She also told me not to tell our mother, because she’d been very fond of the dog. This is what she spent her life doing, growing fond of dogs.

The next day, Mum was so upset she didn’t feel like making dinner. To conceal this from us, she took us out for tacos. She said it was the start of a new life. My sister said that if that was the case then she’d rather have pozole for dinner. I fancied enchiladas. It was impossible to change her mind – tacos were the cheapest option. When the taco seller saw us heading for his stand he shook his head like we were depraved. It wasn’t as if it was unheard of. Weren’t there people who grew fond of their chickens and then cooked them in mole sauce, and on their birthday of all things?

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Several theories about the origins of my novel had occurred to me. What I mean is, about how Francesca had got it into her head that I was writing a novel. The most logical thing would be to blame it all on how ridiculously thin the walls in the building were, practically imaginary, which led to the immense popularity of espionage as a recreational activity. But she must also enjoy telling tales and be harbouring some kind of hidden agenda. Otherwise what was the point of going around telling everyone I was writing a novel if I wasn’t writing one?

I had a few notebooks I used to scribble in, that at least was true, especially late at night, as I let the last beer of the day slide down my throat, a beer which sometimes became the second-to-last. Or the third-to-last. I would draw and write down things that occurred to me. I drew and wrote and gradually nodded off, until the pen slipped from my hand and I slipped over towards my bed. But between this and writing a novel there was a huge stretch, an abyss that could only be crossed with a great deal of will power and naivety. Where had Francesca got the idea that what I was writing in my notebook was a novel?

What really intrigued me was how the woman had managed to find out the contents of my notebook, because her knowledge of what was in it was eerily detailed, and she would recount it to everyone who attended her salon as if it was the new chapter in a long-running serial. I played up to this and began sending her messages. Beneath a drawing of a male dog mounting a little female, I wrote in my shaky hand like a long-legged spider:

Francesca–I’ll wait for you tomorrow in my apartment, at9p.m. I’ll pop a pill at half past eight so we’ll have plenty of time to have a couple of beers and get to know each other. Let me know if you’d prefer something stronger. Tequila? Mezcal? Or would you rather a whisky? I’ve got a really good one from Tlalnepantla. Wear something pretty, a leather miniskirt or that red dress you were wearing when we went to see the courtyard at the Colegio de San Ildefonso.

The next morning, the entire salon was waiting for me down in the entrance hall spoiling for a fight. They began to lob rotten tomatoes at me from the greengrocer’s stand outside, clamouring:

‘That’s no way to write a novel!’

‘You dirty old man!’

‘That’s not a novel!’

And I replied:

‘I told you!’

The following day, just to drive them mad, I copied out whole paragraphs from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory into my notebook:

The demand for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden of their guilt; therefore this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the antithetical demand for irresponsibility. The latter is reminiscent of the element of play, without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory… A solemn tone would condemn artworks to ridiculousness, just as would the gestures of grandeur and might… In the artwork the unconditional surrender of dignity can become an organon of its strength.

Troy burned: they bought two pounds of tomatoes each.

I had acquired the bad habit of trying to resolve all quarrels by reciting paragraphs from Aesthetic Theory. So far I’d dispatched more than one telemarketing agent, several street sellers, dozens of insurance salesmen and someone who wanted to sell me a plot for my own grave in six instalments. I’d found my edition in a library funded by the foundation of a bank four blocks from where I lived. I stuffed the book down my trousers and underneath my shirt, and arranged my face to look like I was wearing a colostomy bag. A thief robbing a thief. On the first page, a blank one, was a stamp from the faculty of philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. A thief robbing a thief robbing a thief. On page 22, without looking, I found the phrase of Schoenberg’s that reminded me of my mother: if you do not seek, you will not find. My Aesthetic Theory had been shoved in between the memoirs of the gay writer and intellectual Salvador Novo and Fray Servando, the priest. Schoenberg wouldn’t have liked this, nor would have Adorno, and nor would my mother: if you do not seek, you can find, too.

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And on the third day, when expediency had tempered her disappointment, Francesca knocked at the door to my apartment. It was a very hot day and the neckline of her dress led me to cherish unwonted hopes, as if it were possible to win the Battle of Puebla without actually going to Puebla. She wore her hair down and around her neck hung a slender gold necklace from which, in turn, hung an equally slender ring, apparently an engagement ring.

‘May I come in?’ she asked.

I stepped aside to let her in and followed this with the mechanical courtesy of telling her to make herself at home. It occurred to me that I should have gone to the pharmacist. I made a mental note: go to pharmacist.

‘Would you like a beer?’ I asked.

‘I’d prefer something else,’ she replied. ‘An anisette. Or an almond liqueur.’

‘I’ve only got beer. Or water.’

‘Some water, then.’

‘Please, have a seat.’

I went over to get her some water while she sat down in the chair, my only chair, which I’d installed in front of the television. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her inspect my apartment in detail, pausing when she came to the painting hanging on the opposite wall and the little shelf by the door where I’d piled up all my notebooks and a few other volumes, not a novel among them. There was little else to look at: the little dining table, two boxes I had yet to unpack and – naturally – the cockroaches.

After I’d handed her the water I stood in front of her, leaning against the table because there was nowhere for me to sit, and watched as she took a microscopic sip. The truth was that, my intentions aside, the only place the two of us could have been comfortable was on the bed. I crossed my arms to let her know I was waiting. She waited for a few seconds before speaking, as if first she needed to make sure, in her mind, of the construction of the phrase she was about to enunciate. Finally she opened her mouth, and what she said was: ‘I’ve come to formally invite you to join the literary salon.’

The tune echoed around my head in the moment that followed, as Francesca took another tiny sip of her water: I’ve come to formally invite you to join the literary salon. This pause appeared to be studied so the phrase had time to take effect, so I would have time to come to the conclusion that this was an honour. An undeserved honour, naturally, and – were I to accept – the source of Francesca’s power over me from this moment onwards.

‘Thank you very much,’ I told her, ‘but I’m not interested. I don’t read novels.’

The glass in her right hand trembled; she’d drunk so little water that she almost spilled it down herself. She directed her gaze to the shelf by the door.

‘Those books aren’t novels,’ I added, to clear up any confusion seeing them from a distance might have occasioned her.

Francesca turned back to me and took another breath to resume her attack, this time employing an unusual strategy.

‘But you’re writing a novel, and if you want to write a novel the best thing to do is to read, to read a lot.’

‘What?!’ I said, a reply and a question.

‘Yes: you have to be very aware of literary tradition, otherwi—’

‘I am not writing a novel; where on earth did you get that idea from?’

‘Don’t lie, everyone knows everything in this building, we’re a very close-knit community.’

‘A very nosy one, you mean.’

She flinched in irritation and held out her glass for me to put it down on the table.

‘Have you forgiven me for being a taco seller yet?’ I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Do you think a taco seller is fit to write a novel?’

‘If you have a good ear, then yes, you must have heard lots of interesting conversations. But it’s a long way from listening to writing; if you like I can help, the salon could be very useful for you.’

‘That’s nice, but I don’t read or write novels.’

‘Everyone comes to the salon.’

‘Not me.’

‘The previous tenant did.’

‘And that’s how he died! You think I don’t know what happened to him?’

The previous occupant of my apartment had dropped dead, in the middle of reading Carlos Fuentes’ last novel, of a heart attack right out there in the lobby, where a wooden cross had been hung in his memory under the mailboxes, as if Fuentes himself had run him down in a sports car.

‘I know you and I have got off on the wrong foot,’ said Francesca, leaning forward so that the ring on her necklace dangled in the air and the neckline of her dress revealed another centimetre of cleavage. ‘The salon is a chance for us to fix this.’

It seemed to me that the ring on her necklace was spinning around and I was afraid she was trying to hypnotise me.

‘There’s nothing to fix,’ I replied, looking away towards a little patch of sky I could see outside the balcony. ‘We’re not broken.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean I don’t hold grudges, so never mind.’

‘We’ll see you tomorrow, then? We start at ten. I’ve got a copy of the novel we’re reading all ready for you. We’re only on the second chapter, you’ll catch us up in no time. I can give you the previous tenant’s little reading light, if you’re not morbid about such things?’

‘Don’t insist, please – I’m not going to come.’

She stood up, brushing a heap of imaginary crumbs from her dress.

‘Which doesn’t mean that you and I can’t be friends,’ I continued. ‘Come and have a drink with me in the bar on the corner, and on the way I can buy some pills I need – what do you say?’

‘You can’t write a novel without reading novels!’ she declared.

‘Perfect! Two birds with one stone!’

She left without responding to my invitation. When I investigated the interest concealed behind her insistence, as well as her political strategies for controlling the building, I discovered a slightly more trivial yet undoubtedly more decisive motive: the bookshop where she ordered the novels gave her a special discount for buying a dozen copies.

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Whenever there was an argument at home, my mother would win it by saying that Dad had an artistic temperament. Given the tone of voice she used and the context in which she said it, it sounded like a physical defect. In actual fact, it was slander that my father never quite learned how to refute: he tried to do so verbally, but his actions betrayed him, time and again, and the examples my mother stored up to confirm her diagnosis multiplied.

Months before he abandoned us, he had the idea of painting a rotting papaya. He had brought a small, slightly wrinkly one home from the market and had placed it, sliced in half and accompanied by a white carnation in a glass of water, on a table by his easel. He changed the position of the fruit and the angle of the flower several times and, when he was satisfied with the composition, he warned us:

‘No one is to touch anything. And don’t eat the papaya. My painting will be a study on death, decadence, decay and the finite nature of life.’

Of course, the next day, before the papaya went off and to prevent the proliferation of swarms of mosquitoes fascinated by the composition, my mother cut the papaya into cubes and fed it to me and my sister, while Dad was out. I couldn’t bring myself to eat the fruit, so I hid it and gave it to my father when he came back from work. When he reproached my mother for betraying him, she replied: ‘If you’re going to waste a papaya, you have to have enough money to buy two.’

This was before Dad got his job as a sales manager, where they even gave him a secretary, which turned out to be an advancement with unfortunate consequences for the family. My father held up the plate with the little cubes of papaya in the palm of his hand, surrounded by a halo of mosquitoes, and lamented: ‘The boy’s the only one who understands me.’

My mother replied: ‘You’re a terrible example to him. The last thing we need is for him to end up an artist too! Why don’t you draw the little cubes of papaya? You can make it a cubist painting. It’ll be a study of the incomplete, the fragmentary, the finite nature of the resources of a family whose sole breadwinner spends his time with his head in the clouds, revelling in the frustration caused by his artistic temperament.’

Dad gave the papaya back to me.

‘You can eat it now,’ he said.

But I still couldn’t eat it: I hid the plate under my bed and only threw it away when the flies tried to lay their eggs in my ears.

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I escaped from the volley of tomatoes as best I could and headed straight for the greengrocer’s, where I was greeted with a hearty laugh:

‘Good and ripe, were they?’ she’d ask. ‘I saved the best ones for you, they’re from the Hyatt Hotel!’

‘You shouldn’t give that sanctimonious lot ammunition!’ I protested.

‘Everyone has the right to rebel, even them!’