The Story of My Teeth (19 page)

August 3, 1992
Five hundred years since Christopher Columbus set out to find a westward passage to the Orient and accidentally discovered the Caribbean islands.

1998
Bicentennial of the publication of Charles Lamb’s poem “The Old Familiar Faces,” in which describes his “day of horrors.”

Circa 1998
Fifteen-year-old Valeria Luiselli buys a copy of Sergio Pitol’s
Vals de mefisto
in a bookstore in San Cristóbal de las Casas and imagines him to be a dead Eastern European or Russian writer.

October 27 and 28, 1999
Christie’s auctions Marilyn Monroe’s personal property, including a collection of eleven assorted Mexican soda glass tumblers.

2000
Approximately 2,400 years since the Greek dramatist Euripides, who depicted mythical characters as ordinary people, retired to a cave on the island of Salamis to write his tragedies.

December 3, 2001
Mexican experimental short-story writer Juan José Arreola dies.

2002
The number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States is estimated to be 5.3 million.

2002
Visual artist Terence Gower installs
Bicycle Pavilion
in the grounds of the Fundación/Colección Jumex in Ecatepec, Mexico City.

2003
Olafur Eliasson represents Denmark in the Venice Biennale.

2004
Short-story writer and essayist Vivian Abenshushan is inspired by a piece of stencil art in Buenos Aires that reads, “Kill your boss: resign.”

2000
Approximately 3,000 years since Cadmus, son of Telephassa, sowed a dragon’s tooth and was surprised to see armed warriors spring from the earth.

2000
The United Nations launches its eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015.

2002
The 150th anniversary of the death of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.

2002
Approximately 1,900 years since Tacitus wrote Dialogus de oratoribus.

2004
Posthumous publication of Uruguayan author Mario Levrero’s
La novela luminosa,
which includes a 450-page prologue recounting how the writer spent the grant awarded to him by the Guggenheim Foundation.

2005
One hundred years since the Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms was born twice; the author claims that his father and the midwife tried to push him back into the womb when he appeared four months prematurely.

2006
Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s novel
Bonsái
is published in Spain by Anagrama.

2007
Mexican critic Guillermo Sheridan begins to write his blog
El minutario,
hosted by Letras Libres.

2007
Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez becomes editor of the literary magazine
El perro.

2009
El Dinoparque opens in the Museo El Rehilete in Pachuca.

2010
Author Carlos Yushimito is described by
Granta
as “a Peruvian of Japanese forbears who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and who writes about Brazil.”

2009
Sexto Piso publishes Emiliano Monge’s novel
Morirse de memoria.

2010
At age twenty-seven, while in Wisconsin, Mexican writer Laia Jufresa learns how to ride a bicycle.

2005
The 100th anniversary of the publication of G. K. Chesterton’s essay “A Piece of Chalk.”

October 13, 2006
Two hundred years since German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw Napoléon ride through the streets of Jena.

2006
El buscador de cabezas,
by Guadalajara-born Antonio Ortuño, is selected as the best debut novel of the year by the newspaper
Reforma.

2007
Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim is reported to be the world’s richest man.

2008
In his essay “El arte de vivir en arte,” Argentine writer and critic Alan Pauls states that fiction can be understood as “a map based on coincidences and divergences.”

July 29, 2010
Winston Churchill’s “world saving” teeth are sold for £15,200 in auction in Norfolk, England.

2010
Rubén Gallo publishes Freud’s
Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis.

2010
Mexican artist Damián Ortega creates a new artwork every day for a month for his exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery.

2011
Conceptual artist Abraham Cruzvillegas installs
Autoconstrucción,
which contains sheep, shit, and clumps of hair, at the Tate Modern.

2012
Christie’s sells Andy Warhol’s 1984 screen print
Saint Apollonia: one plate
at auction.

April 27, 2012
David Weiss, half of the artistic duo Fischli/Weiss, dies at age sixty-six.

June 2012
Javier Rivero posts a photograph with the caption “Kitty proofreading Jean-Paul Sartre” on his blog,
Writers and Kitties.

November 2011
The Manhattan Guggenheim Museum describes the Italian hyperrealist artist Maurizio Cattelan as a provocateur and prankster.

March 2011
The murder of poet Javier Sicilia’s son leads to mass protests throughout Mexico against drug-related violence.

2011
Article entitled “The Musical Brain” by prolific Argentine writer César Aira appears in
The New Yorker.

2012
Julián Herbert wins the Premio Jaén de Novela Inédita for the autobiographical novel Canción de tumba, which recounts the death of his mother—a former prostitute—from leukemia.

2012
Mexican poet, essayist, and translator Tedi López Mill publishes her collection of poems
El libro de las explicaciones.

2013
Álvaro Enrigue’s novel
Muerte súbita
wins the Premio Herralde de Novela.

2013
A red fish called Oblomov dies of some kind of depression in Guadalupe Nettel’s collection of short stories
El matrimonio de los peces rojos.

2012
Paula Abramo publishes her collection of poems
Fiat Lux.

March 2012
New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone curates an exhibition that includes Hans Schärer’s
Madonna,
in which the teeth are replaced by yellowing pebbles.

April 8, 2013
The Fundación/Colección Jumex opens its exhibition
El cazador y la fábrica.

2013
A two-Euro coin is minted to celebrate the 2,400th anniversary of the foundation of Plato’s Academy.

Afterword

T
HIS BOOK IS THE RESULT
of several collaborations. In January 2013, I was commissioned to write a work of fiction for the catalog of
The Hunter and the Factory
, an exhibition curated by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán at Galería Jumex, a gallery located in the marginalized, wasteland-like neighborhood of Ecatepec outside Mexico City. The idea behind the exhibition, and my commission, was to reflect upon the bridges—or the lack thereof—between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery formed part.

The Jumex Collection, one of the most important contemporary art collections in the world, is funded by Grupo Jumex—a juice factory. There is, naturally, a gap between the two worlds: gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice. How could I link the two distant but neighboring worlds, and could literature play a mediating role? I decided to write tangentially—even allegorically—about the art world, and to focus on the life of the factory. I also decided
to write not so much
about
but
for
the factory workers, suggesting a procedure that seemed appropriate to this end.

In mid-nineteenth century Cuba, the strange métier of “tobacco reader” was invented. The idea is attributed to Nicolás Azcárate, a journalist and active abolitionist, who put it into practice in a cigar factory. In order to reduce the tedium of repetitive labor, a tobacco reader would read aloud to the other workers while they made the cigars. Emile Zola and Victor Hugo were among the favorites, though lofty volumes of Spanish history were also read. The practice spread to other Latin American countries but disappeared in the twentieth century. In Cuba, however, tobacco readers are still common. Around the same time this practice emerged, the modern serial novel was also invented. In 1836, Balzac’s
La Vieille Fille
was published in France, and Dickens’s
The Pickwick Papers
was published in England. Distributed as affordable, serialized chapbooks, they reached an audience not traditionally accustomed to reading fiction. I realized I could combine these two literary devices that had once proven adequate in contexts not too different from the one I was facing. In order to pay tribute to and learn from these reading and publishing practices, I decided to write a novel in installments for the workers, who could then read it out loud in the factory.

The Jumex team was supportive and enthusiastic, and set up a space and the necessary conditions for the readings to take place. I wrote the first installment, which was printed as very low-budget, simple chapbooks that were distributed to the workers. A few workers became interested,
and the curatorial assistant, Lorena Moreno, helped form and moderate a small reading club that met each week to read and discuss the pieces. I started sending new installments each week; the team at the Jumex Foundation printed the chapbooks and distributed them. With everyone’s consent, the reading sessions were recorded and sent back to me in New York. I would listen to them, taking note of the workers’ comments, criticisms, and especially their informal talk after the reading and discussion. I’d then write the next installment, send it back to them, and so on. They never saw me; I never saw them. I heard them, and they read me. Two members of the Jumex team, Javier Rivero and El Perro, also helped me take and collect pictures of the artwork, the gallery, and the neighborhood, which enabled me, virtually at least, to move around and explore the spaces I was writing about. The formula, if there was one, would be something like Dickens +
MP
3 ÷ Balzac +
JPEG
. With the last installment, I also sent the workers an
MP
3 recording of my voice, thanking them for their time and input. I had been writing under the pseudonym Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, and I thought it was important to close the circle of intimacy we had created by letting them hear my real voice. Their reaction to my spoken voice was probably similar to my reaction when, months later, two of the workers appeared at the book launch in Mexico City at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. That is when the circle really closed.

Many of the stories told in this book come from the workers’ personal accounts—though names, places, and details are modified. The discussions between the workers
also directed the course of the narrative, pushing me to reflect upon old questions from a new perspective: How do art objects acquire value not only within the specialized market for art consumption, but also outside its (more or less) well-defined boundaries? How does distancing an object or name from its context in a gallery, museum, or literary pantheon—a
reverse
Duchampian procedure—affect its meaning and interpretation? How do discourse, narrative, and authorial signatures or names modify the way we perceive artwork and literary texts? The result of these shared concerns is this collective “novel-essay” about the production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature.

For their input and dedication, I would like to thank many people, but more than anyone, I’d like to thank the factory workers who read and somehow wrote this story with me: Evelyn Ángeles Quintana, Abril Velázquez Romero, Tania García Montalva, Marco Antonio Bello, Eduardo González, Ernestina Martínez, Patricia Méndez Cortés, Julio Cesar Velarde Mejía, and David León Alcalá.