The Story of My Teeth (13 page)

BOOK V

The Allegorics

My speculations led me to conclude that I had to go back to basics and rethink not just the semantics of names, but their very syntax, the metaphysics of words: How should words be individuated? What is the nature of a word?

Names are a special kind of word, so special that some have thought them not to be a part of a language at all. I disagree with this and will emphasize ways in which names are like other words, but I do not disagree that names are special in several ways.

—
DAVID KAPLAN

I
AM NOT SURE IF THIS
should be in the story, because it’s a part that seems to start folding over on itself, so that I become confused and agitated and lose my way. But I don’t see how it can be ignored either.

When Voragine and I got back to Disneylandia, we found that my house and warehouse had been broken into. My collection was gone, every single item. I first felt tremendous relief. Then, a little sadness. Then disbelief, and anger. Then, again, a deeper form of sadness and relief fused together, almost a weightlessness.

The following days were confusing and difficult, and I’d rather not speak about them. I attended group therapy. I watched Formula 1. I considered Catholicism. I was lost like a swallow in Antarctica, as Napoleón says.

One morning, while we were drinking coffee, Voragine tried to persuade me to go to the dentist and get a temporary set of dentures, so I could at least begin eating proper food. I resisted a little, but the boy was right, and I’m a reasonable man despite a certain stubbornness. As soon as I’d gotten the new dentures—cheap and a bit too tight, but functional—I began dictating my dental autobiography. It took me some time to find the right structures, but Voragine pointed out that there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that helped me to get started.

A
MONTH LATER, AS
I had promised him, we began the “Education of the Voragine Artist.” Our first lesson: to pick up and recycle some objects that my son left for me in the gallery next to the juice factory. Around one in the morning on a particularly quiet Sunday, my friend El Perro, who still worked as a driver for the factory, came to pick us up in a handsome truck. We took the back road, where there wasn’t a single security checkpoint. El Perro parked in an alley, handed me a set of keys, and Voragine and I went into the small building adjacent to the factory, where the gallery is located. We started in the office to the right of the entrance of the gallery. We didn’t find much there, but Voragine took a catalog from the desk, which later came in handy. I requisitioned some pencils, which would also come in handy, as Voragine was doing a lot of writing.

We walked around carefully, because the gallery was quite dark, and we’d decided not to turn the main lights on, in case there were cameras. The only illumination came from the spots directed onto the objects. I have to say that, in this particular light, they looked more beautiful than I remembered from when I had first seen them on the morning of my brief captivity. I first recognized the plush costumes, the musical score on its podium, the prosthetic leg.

I am not the crying sort, not even in movies. When I suddenly saw my old teeth—the ones that I’d sold off at the auction in the church—I didn’t cry. I neighed with joy. They were arranged in a little pile, lit vertically from above, and placed on a white wooden pedestal. They were truly something. I
gathered them together with my two hands and placed them in my jacket pocket.

The rest of the operation went quickly and smoothly. The only object that gave us any trouble was the medium-sized billboard with a horse, but together we managed to drag it to the truck, and El Perro helped us to get it inside. A couple of hours later, the three of us were back in my warehouse, studying the new collection of objects and swigging from a bottle of Aguardiente, which El Perro had contributed. “Better the lucky man than the lucky man’s son,” El Perro said before he fell asleep in the Acapulco chair. You can’t help but love a man like that.

The following morning I woke Voragine at 7:00 a.m. and led him to the kitchen. El Perro had gone home—he’s a man who never gives others trouble. I handed my young apprentice a cup of coffee and a series of Scribe notebooks. I’d had a good idea for an auction, and good ideas don’t come on wheels, so I wanted to get it down on paper immediately.

The series would be called “Allegorics of Ecatepec,” and would recycle our new collected objects by telling stories that used collected names of my friends and acquaintances from the neighborhood—giving due credits to the artists who had made the works and using the catalog we had requisitioned as our guide. No complications. The best ideas, like the finest objects, are simple.

But if we use the artists’ real names, Voragine said, we’ll get caught.

Yes, good thinking young man. We will have to modify them.

But if we modify them, he went on, the objects will lose their value.

No, they won’t.

Yes, they will.

Voragine, please shut up and write this down:

ALLEGORIC LOT NO. 1: BILLBOARD FEATURING HORSE

Artist: Doug Sánchez Aitken

Listing: 1M

Everyone knows that horses have no compassion, I told Alan Pauls. If a horse sees you standing in front of it, crying, it just chews its hay and blinks. You start crying harder, your eyes overflowing with tears and pain, and the horse lifts its tail and lets out a long, silent fart. There is no way to stir its feelings. I once dreamed that a horse was persistently licking my face. But that doesn’t count, because it happened in a dream.

I can assure you that the horses working in Central Park on the island of Manhattan suffer from depression, Alan Pauls responded after I’d ventured to propose my theory to him. We were both waiting for the bus, next to Rubén Darío Jr.’s newspaper stand. I noticed that Alan Pauls was contemplating, with a tinge of melancholy, the spectacular hoarding before us, on the other side of the street. On it was an advertisement with a photo of a horse—perhaps, indeed,
a rather sad horse—standing next to a bed in a New York hotel.

And how do you know that the horses in Central Park are depressed?

He told me that he’d just been reading a short article on the psychology of New York horses.

In which newspaper? I challenged.

He had read it in the newspaper he’d bought at the stand. He had it in his briefcase if I happened to be interested—it’s from one of those cheap but trustworthy publications, he explained. The horses in New York’s Central Park, the reporter of the free but reliable newspaper had said, get depressed.

And how do they know? I asked.

There’s empirical, scientific proof, he said, his patience perhaps wearing a little thin. Then he took the newspaper out of his briefcase, opened it, and searched for the article. He quickly located it and began to read aloud, making opportune pauses and raising his eyes every so often to meet mine and to check that I was giving him my full attention. The horses of that city: 1) run at full speed and smash their muzzles and heads against the walls of buildings; 2) have manes that fall out in handfuls; 3) bite their hooves until they fall off; 4) defecate lying down instead of while walking, as all
normal
horses do; 5) some, eventually, commit suicide.

When he had finished reading the short article, he folded the newspaper again and settled it under his arm. He smiled vaguely at me. We went on waiting for the
bus together, silently staring at the billboard on the other side of the street.

ALLEGORIC LOT NO. 2: WINDOW MADE OF LIGHT

Artist: Olafur Sánchez Eliasson

Listing: 5M

The retired seamstress Margo Glantz didn’t wake her son until after dinner. During the preceding week, Margo Glantz, who suffered from insomnia, had been feeling irritated by the presence of her son, David Miklos, who, for his part, suffered from narcolepsy. David Miklos had lost his job at the checkout in the Farmacia del Ahorro because he’d fallen asleep on more than one occasion. For the last week, he’d spent the whole day taking sudden naps in odd corners of the house. Since she wasn’t aware of his condition, Margo Glantz considered him to be an idler, a layabout, and a sluggard. Secretly, she envied his ability to sleep at any hour of the day.

On Monday afternoon, while David Miklos was having another inopportune nap in the armchair, Margo Glantz stuck a row of postage stamps on his forehead, licking each one with the tip of her tongue, and carried him to the post office. She set him down gently on the counter and asked the assistant to send him to Surinam. The girl looked down her nose at her and said that it was impossible to carry out her request as she was four
stamps short—Africa needed nine stamps and the parcel only had five.

But Surinam’s in South America, you idiot, she retorted.

Then it’s twelve stamps, corrected the girl.

She also said that the post office was about to close, so she would have to come back the following day.

Margo Glantz returned the next day and the next, with David Miklos sleeping peacefully in her arms. But she always needed something else—a stamp, a notarized letter for oversized packages, more money, official identification, the full zip code for the address she had given in Paramaribo. The girl—who, though not the same one each time, appeared to be so due to the robotic demeanor and characteristic affectation of all post-office girls—would give her a disparaging look and ask her to come back the following day.

On the morning of the seventh day, a Sunday, Margo Glantz decided to let David Miklos sleep on. She woke up early, had a warm bath, and went to the pet shop. As there were no dogs for sale, she made do with a secondhand rabbit. She named it Cockerspaniel. The rabbit was very old, almost venerable, so when she tried to put a lead on it to take it out of the store, it resisted. She carried it home in her arms and set it down on the living room floor, at the foot of the armchair in which David Miklos was still sleeping.

Margo Glantz—slowly, and making as much noise as possible—dragged a chair from the kitchen to the living
room. She put on a record by the singer Taylor Mac, sat down, crossed her legs, and, singing at the top of her voice, stared at Cockerspaniel, who in turn looked at her with an air of extreme peevishness until he closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep. She noticed that Cockerspaniel had chosen a sunny patch of floor to sleep in and felt intensely envious. She thought about taking him straight to the post office and sending him to Surinam—or wherever. But she immediately rejected the idea when she remembered that the disgusting, ridiculous, inefficient post office didn’t open on Sundays. Later, she attempted to wake the rabbit, but he just briefly fluttered an eyelid and went back to sleep.

The afternoon went by with Margo Glantz watching her son and Cockerspaniel sleep, noting how the animal’s small, furry body slid almost imperceptibly across the room as the sun sank in the sky and the parallelogram of light entering through the window and falling onto the floor moved toward the wall, indicating, in this way, the passage of the hours.

When the sun had finally set, and the patch of light had completely disappeared, Cockerspaniel opened his eyes. Margo Glantz was standing above him, holding a saucepan by the handle. Using the base of the pan, she hit him five times on the head. Once Cockerspaniel was dead, she carefully skinned the rabbit and cooked it in rosemary, bay leaf, and white wine. After she’d finished her dinner, she tenderly woke her son and opened the living room window wide, letting in the cool, damp night air.

ALLEGORIC LOT NO. 3: RAT AND MOUSE COSTUMES

Artist: Peter Sánchez Fischli

Listing: 3M

The young lady Valeria Luiselli, a mediocre high school student, stammered and overused the suffix
-ly.
As her parents, Mrs. Weiss and Mr. Fischli, wanted her to give a speech at her fifteenth birthday party, they sent her to singing, elocution, and public speaking classes. Her party was to be a very elegant celebration in the neighborhood dance hall, and the girl needed to prepare herself for the occasion.

For the elocution and public speaking classes, they hired the famous teacher Guillermo Sheridan. The first sentence that Professor Guillermo Sheridan taught Valeria Luiselli to say was: “Titus Livy had a conk like a coconut and Octavio Paz was a big head.” Despite the shortness and simplicity of the sentence, it took the young girl a lot of effort to pronounce it correctly. Every time she made a mistake, Professor Guillermo Sheridan would hit her on the palm of the hand with a cane. The girl had to repeat the same sentence 112 times before her teacher called an end to the first session.