Down the Rabbit Hole E-Book

Juan Pablo Villalobos

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

Seitenzahl: 107

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants and the odd corrupt politician or two. Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.

Leseprobe

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated by Rosalind Harvey

Introduced by Adam Thirlwell

For Mateo

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationIntroductionOneTwoThreeGlossaryCopyright

INTRODUCTION

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:

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.’

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

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.

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:

Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That’s why they don’t exist. And that’s why I have to go and investigate reality.

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

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

ONE

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.