Juan Pablo Villalobos - I’ll Sell You a Dog

First published in English translation in 2016 by
And Other Stories
High Wycombe Los Angeles
www.andotherstories.org

Copyright Juan Pablo Villalobos, 2014
English-language translation copyright Rosalind Harvey 2016
First published as Te vendo un perro in 2014 by 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 from The Dream and the Underworld (HarperCollins Publishers, 1979 ) and Re-Visioning Psychology (HarperCollins Publishers, 1992 ). Lines by Francisco de Quevedo were taken from Dreams 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 Adornos Aesthetic Theory were reprinted with permission from translations by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Bloomsbury, 2013 ). Lines from Adornos Notes to Literature were reprinted with permission from the translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Copyright Columbia University Press, 1993 ). Lines by Marcel Proust were taken from CK Scott Moncrieffs translation, Remembrance of Things Past (Chatto & Windus). Lines from Juan OGormans interviews in La luz de Mxico by Cristina Pacheco (Estado de Guanajato), Daniel Sadas Registro de causantes (Planeta) and from Silvio Rodrguez song Al final de este viaje en la vida (Ojal Records) were translated by Rosalind Harvey. Permission has been sought from all rightsholders.

ISBN 9781908276742
eBook ISBN 9781908276759

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 PENs 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

For Andreia

Her pink dress unsettles me. It wont let me die.

JUAN OGORMAN

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

DANIEL SADA

There isnt a stomach that wouldnt howl with hunger if all the dogs youve thrust down them were suddenly brought back to life!

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

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 rs, so it sounded extra trashy. After greeting each other with a raise of the eyebrows, wed 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 wasnt her real name but the name Id given her in this so-called novel of mine.

There were days when the lift would take hours to arrive, as if it didnt 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 couldnt care less. When the doors finally opened, wed get in and begin the agonisingly slow descent, and the colour would begin to rise in Francescas 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. Theyd 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 youd 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 youve finished! Ive 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 peoples 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 didnt 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. Im talking about literary fundamentalists here, people capable of convincing the brewerys 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 wasnt the only blot on the buildings weekly routine. Hiplita, 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 Jardn 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 macram, 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.