The Story of My Teeth (7 page)

The fact that only one piece of Rousseau’s has been preserved is not due to his hygienic practices, which were those of a decent man, but to his bad luck. Mr. Rousseau spent a good part of his life walking. The good-for-nothing rambler walked as if the welfare of mankind depended on his steps. One day, he went out for a stroll and was knocked over by a dog. Apparently, the animal approached him at great speed and got tangled up in his legs for an instant; our infamous man went flying toward the ditch bordering the road and lost an item, possibly the very one that we have here today. It is so horrible that it deserves a monument. This piece, in particular, is like a spiral staircase to a skylight once covered in plaque. Who will open the bidding for this solitary, furry tooth of Rousseau?

People are morbid and sordid, even when they don’t mean to be. I believe that it was only in order to be able
to inspect the battered tooth that the bidders offered more than ever. After a heated round of bidding, the tooth was bought by a man with a foreign accent, a complete set of teeth, but a cryptic smile, for 7,500 pesos.

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 6

There has never been a man with such a protruding lower jaw than Mr. Charles Lamb, who suffered from such a severe prognathous that he had to keep his lips slightly parted all the time. If he didn’t, one of his canine teeth rubbed against his tongue and upper lip, causing a collection of extremely painful sores and ulcers. It would not be unreasonable to imagine that everything Mr. Lamb wrote—which was a lot and very good—was the product of the tortuous disposition of his teeth. He had a schoolboy stammer, and his writing was equally stuttering. He once wrote a stuttering letter to his friend Wordsworth, saying, “I have just now a jagged end of a tooth pricking against my tongue, which meets it half way, in a wantonness of provocation, and there they go at it, the tongue pricking itself like the viper against the file, and the tooth galling all the gum inside and out to torture, tongue and tooth, tooth and tongue, hard at it, and I to pay the reckoning, till all my mouth is as hot as brimstone.”

Eight hundred pesos for Lamb’s stuttering tooth! Who will open the bidding? Who will give me more?

Not a single hand was raised, so I continued with the next lot.

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 7

We have before us here the tooth of the greatest of the ne’er-do-well sluggards, Mr. G. K. Chesterton: 5 feet 11 inches tall, 310 pounds. He was as broad as the barrels in which cheap wine is aged. The flesh at the nape of his neck hung over his collar, his cheeks were bulging, and his eyes hooded from an almost perpetual frown. He drank astonishing quantities of milk.

The tooth may be in a lamentable condition, but it is a truly charismatic one. It is thought that the damage to this tooth was caused by Mr. Chesterton’s self-confessed inclination for chewing marbles. I quote from memory: “We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were stronger.”

There is one story about this gentleman that I like particularly. He left his house one day, possibly chewing a marble, with the single, firm intention of drawing with chalk on a sheet of brown paper. He put six very brightly colored sticks of chalk in his pockets, slipped a few sheets of brown paper under his arm, and went out—hat, stick, and jacket—to depict the world around him. At a given moment, when the hippopotamic idler had reached the
gentle countryside of the downs, he was approached by a domestic cow—incidentally, the second-most imbecilic member of the animal kingdom, the first being, obviously, the giraffe, and the third the Australian kangaroo.

Mr. Chesterton made a couple of dispassionate attempts to sketch the cow in chalk, but he soon noticed that his talent came to an end where the hind legs of the quadruped began. After weighing the matter up for a moment, he resolved to draw, clenching the piece of chalk between his teeth, the soul of the mammal instead of its external appearance. He depicted it in purple with silver highlights. End of story. Who will open the bidding?

There was a long silence.

Who will open the bidding? I repeated.

The tooth of the ne’er-do-well layabout went for only 2,500 pesos.

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 8

Some teeth are tormented. Such is the case of this one, the property of Mrs. Virginia Woolf. When she was just thirty years old, a psychiatrist posited the theory that her emotional ills were due to an excess of bacteria around the roots of her teeth. He decided to extract the three most seriously affected ones. Nothing changed. During the course of her life, several more teeth were extracted, but it made no difference. None at all, rien de
rien. Mrs. Woolf died by her own hand, with many false teeth in her oral cavity. Her acquaintances only ever saw her smile at her funeral. It’s said that, lying dead in her half-open coffin in the center of the living room, her lips were spread in a smile that lit up her sharp, intelligent features. Who will offer 8,000 pesos for this tortured tooth? Anyone?

After a heavy silence, an elderly man, with a stubborn but respectable face, bought it for 8,900 pesos. As soon as I had called the final “gone,” letting the head of my gavel fall onto the inclined surface of the pulpit, I heard the squawking of a bird among the congregation.

Shut up, Jacinto, someone immediately yelled.

But the squawk repeated. I then noticed that a small man in the third row was standing on one of the pews. Taking off his hat, he looked at me from some distant interior place and slowly opened his mouth to utter another squawk. An indistinguishable murmur crackled from the mass of the audience.

Shut up and sit down, Jacinto, said the voice again.

A number of others seconded the command. But the gentleman ignored the attempts of his fellow pensioners to stop him, and I, with the authority conferred on me by the pulpit, ordered them to let him finish. He squawked again, this time more loudly and with greater aplomb. The murmuring died down. Then, with the grace of a professional ballet dancer, the man raised his arms to shoulder level and, without ceasing to squawk, began to slowly flap
them. I’m not one of those people who cry easily, but a lump of sadness stuck in my throat. There was something sad and beautiful in the simulated flight of this elderly parishioner.

When the gentleman had finished, he sat down again in his pew and put his hat back on his head. I found it difficult to pick up the thread of the hyperbolics again. Something in the temporal suspension produced by the impossible flight of that old man in the pew of the parish church had touched me.

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 9

Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, was a man of average height. His short, thin legs supported a torso, which was at once solid and svelte. His head was the size of a small coconut, and he had a slender, flexible neck. He was a pantheist. His eyes used to flit from side to side, useless, impenetrable to sunlight but ready to receive the light of beautiful, good ideas. He spoke slowly, as if searching for adjectives in the darkness. How much will you bid?

To my great disillusion, they offered just 2,500 pesos for Borges’s melancholy tooth.

HYPERBOLIC LOT NO. 10

Our final collectible lot, ladies and gentlemen, is a molar. Its owner still walks this earth with the parsimony of a mythological animal and the ungrounded spirit of an eternal phantom. The tooth belonged to Mr. Enrique Vila-Matas, and before it existed, it was written. Let me explain. The aforementioned Mr. Vila-Matas once dreamed that one of his molars fell out while he was asleep and that a man named Raymond Roussel came into the bedroom, woke him up by shouting like a sergeant major, providing him with a series of unreasonable bits of advice related to his eating habits. Before going back out through the door, Raymond Roussel picked up the tooth lying among the sheets and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

The following morning, Mr. Vila-Matas felt his teeth to check if he had in fact lost one. They were all present and correct. Being a somewhat superstitious man, he then decided to write a story to avoid the possibility of this loss ever happening in real life.

Several years later, while eating king prawns with his friend Sergio Pitol, in the town of Potrero in Veracruz State, Mr. Vila-Matas told Pitol about the episode with the tooth. However, in the middle of his story, a molar did in fact come loose, and fell into his plate of king prawns. Mr. Sergio Pitol, who is a man of great wisdom and mysticism, asked Vila-Matas to give him the molar, as he knew a shaman in the town who buried the
teeth of the best men and women, and with them conducted a white magic ritual that guaranteed they would be preserved for sweet eternity in human memory. Mr. Vila-Matas handed it to him with a degree of reluctance, but finally trusting that his friend would keep his word.

That Potrero shaman was my uncle, the illustrious Cadmus Sánchez, son of my paternal great aunt Telefasa Sánchez. When my uncle Cadmus died a few years ago, his son, my cousin, an idiot who deserves no further mention, rang to tell me that his father had left me something in his will and that if I wanted to claim my inheritance, I should come to Potrero at once. I boarded a bus that same night.

My uncle Cadmus, as you will have by now guessed, had left me the collection of infamous teeth that he had buried under a beautiful mango tree on the outskirts of Potrero. In a note, he explained that the ground was going to be expropriated by the government within a few months in order to build a power station. So he charged me with digging up the sacred teeth and seeking a brighter future for them. Here we find ourselves, dear parishioners, and here we find the final tooth of the collection. The respected Mr. Vila-Matas’s molar. Who will open the bidding?

The honest truth is that I don’t remember how much I got for it. I was at the very peak of the stupor brought on by the almost toxic atmosphere of an, up to that point, successful auction. Auctioning is, for me, a highly addictive
activity, just as gambling, certain drugs, sex, or lying is for others. When I was young, I used to come out of public sales with the desire to sell off everything: the cars I saw in the street, the traffic lights, the buildings, the dogs, people, the insects that distractedly crossed my field of vision.

The parishioners were equally intoxicated by the stupefying humors of the auction. They wanted more. It was obvious: they wanted to go on buying. And I like to please people, not out of submissiveness and an excess of deference, but because I’m a considerate, affable sort. For want of more pieces, I decided, in a stroke of genius that can be attributed to the zeal that had taken hold of me, to auction off myself.

I am Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, I said. I am the peerless Highway. And I am my teeth. They may seem to you to be yellowed and a little worse for wear, but I can assure you: these teeth once belonged to none other than Marilyn Monroe, and she needs no introduction. If you want them, you will have to take me along too. I gave no further explanation.

Who will open the bidding? I asked in a quiet, calm tone, catching Siddhartha’s eyes, fixed on me.

Who will open the bidding for me and my teeth? I repeated to an undaunted audience. A hand went up. Exactly what I’d imagined occurred. For the price of 1,000 pesos, Siddhartha bought me.

Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.