The Story of My Teeth (17 page)

Authors: Valeria Luiselli

BOOK: The Story of My Teeth

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He always began in roughly the same way: My name is Highway, and I’m the best auctioneer in the world. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies. I know how to count to eight in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back.

Highway died in the Buenos Días Motel, next door to the bar, in the company of three gorgeous ladies after conducting an allegoric auction that finished, as an encore, with an imitation of Janis Joplin singing “Mercedes Benz.” I received a call from the concierge the morning of his death and immediately went over there with El Perro. We honored his last request and scattered his ashes at the feet of the fiberglass dinosaurs in the median strip of a street in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City [
figure 9
]. I kept my word, and in the months that followed put together his dental autobiography. El Perro made sure Highway’s son got the note that we found on the night table next to his deathbed, under the glass of water where he soaked his dentures:

I’m sorry I got you into trouble,

and that you’re in prison,

and that I wasn’t the best of fathers.

I also didn’t get round to finding

all the things you requested.

But here are my teeth,

and your glass of water.

You can also keep

all my collectibles, and

the Marylin Monroe teeth,

which were false anyway.

1. GOWER BICYCLE PAVILION

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

—
H. G. WELLS

2. EL RINCÓN CULTURAL

My notebooks. So sadly full, this one with impotence, the other with empty, pointless waiting. The most difficult of waits, the most painful: the wait for oneself. If I were to write something in it, it would be the confession that I too have been waiting for myself for a long time, and I haven’t turned up.

—
JOSEFINA VICENS

3. DISNEYLANDIA

Objects in themselves disagreeable or indifferent often please in the imitation.

—
WILLIAM HAZLITT

4. HIGHWAY’S HOUSE

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

—
JEAN BAUDRILLARD

5. ECATEPEC JUNKYARD

The Spanish language is an old wedding dress that is handed down to us by our ancestors, and which we are obliged to preserve intact . . . but antique wedding dresses are only good for putting on to see ourselves as skeletons. It’s much better to cut them up for shirts than to keep them in mothballs.

—
JORGE IBARGÜENGOITIA

6. UGO RONDINONE,
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

Fancioulle made me see that the intoxicating powers of Art are more effective than any others for shrouding the terrors of the abyss; that genius can represent a comedy while standing on the edge of the tomb, with a joy that prevents it from seeing that tomb, lost as it is in a Paradise, which refuses to admit any idea of death and destruction.

—
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE