The Story of My Teeth (8 page)

BOOK III

The Parabolics

Call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object. . . . Of course, we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds. . . . A designator rigidly designates a certain object if it designates that object wherever the object exists.

—
SAUL KRIPKE

M
Y UNCLE MARCELO SÁNCHEZ-KHARMSSJJ
once wrote in his diary:

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers, but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

I never feel confused or break anything when I wake up. I’m unbreakable and unconfoundable, like all simple men. Every day, I return to the waking world with the beautiful, uncomplicated certainty of my modest but firm early morning erections.

And I’m not unusual. Quite the reverse. Recent scientific studies show that the very first thing the great majority of men notice on waking up in the morning is the turgidity and rigidity of their sexual organs. There is no mystery in this. During the night, the body pumps blood to the male member to maintain the temperature needed for its health and normal functioning. As a consequence, many men wake up with a powerful, proud erection, the intensity of which
also acts as a first anchor to the world during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Women don’t experience anything like that, and so often feel completely disoriented when they open their eyes. They don’t have that gentle Charon to mark out the road from one world to the other.

This phenomenon of the male constitution, known in common parlance as “the tent effect,” is a biological event, and in no way psychological. But like so many other biological phenomena, it can quickly become a matter of mental and spiritual health. If the erection is left unattended and has to go down on its own—during the first sips of coffee or under the shower—a man accumulates malignant humors that engulf him in resentment and rage throughout the day. He becomes circumspect, taciturn, secretly aggressive, and can even begin to harbor perfidious thoughts toward his fellow citizens, including members of his family and his colleagues. However, if the person who sleeps beside him shows empathy and frees the organ from the accumulation of bodily fluids, the man remains mild and self-controlled the whole day, one might even say easygoing and philanthropic. End of explanation.

My uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, who had many theories about many things, used to say that a man should marry a woman who had an understanding attitude toward this natural condition of men. “You have to find a madame,” he would say, “who tempers the fury that accumulates during the long sleepless hours of men who are sensitive to the elasticity of time.” Whatever that might have meant, he would go on to add that that was why he had married
my aunt Nadia and remained faithful to her until death did them part (the poor woman died of angina pectoris, like our founding father Benito Juárez). It may be that Aunt Nadia hid her light under a bushel, and though she might have dressed like a teacher in an orphanage, she was, undoubtedly, a virtuoso of early-morning fornication.

I, in contrast, never had any luck in that department—perhaps because the luck of a lucky man, as is my case, is distributed so that it doesn’t quite reach the most recondite corners of human experience. Like the bell curve theory. Flaca did her duty by me until she got pregnant; that is, for approximately two weeks. And after that, zilch. She was always rather lacking in generosity in relation to other people’s needs, above all mine. But neither did I find early-morning solace with the other women in my life. Angelica, who was far from ugly, used to wake up with her mouth smelling of chicken, so it was me who refused physical contact. Erica, on the other hand, had a strange resemblance to the ex-president Felipe Calderón while she was sleeping, I think because her face became a little swollen, particularly the lips, nose, and eyebrows. Much as I would have liked to dissipate my pent-up humors inside her, as soon as I saw her there, puffed up and deformed by sleep, identical to the president of those dark years in Mexico, I would be so terrified that I’d get silently out of bed and tiptoe away to make myself a cup of strong coffee. And Esther, finally, was extremely bad tempered in the mornings. I never dared to snuggle up to her for fear she’d set about me with the chain she kept handy in her drawer. So
I used to let her make the first move, which usually consisted of giving me—chain in hand—a difficult-to-interpret polysyllabic command along the lines of Highway, onyerknees an’ givittongue. Or maybe: Highway, muffdivintime. Or simply: Highway, satisfyme. But as—thankfully—Esther almost never made the first move, I learned to resign myself to my fate. I’ve got an unparalleled talent for resignation, like all Catholic men.

T
HAT MORNING, THE MORNING
of my brief captivity after the day of the auction, the first thing I noticed was the erection, whose faithful, shield-bearer presence returned me daily to the consciousness of the world. I tried to ignore it, and fell back to sleep. I don’t know how much time passed—seconds, perhaps minutes. When I began to regain my senses once again, the first thing I noticed was a pungent smell, like newly varnished wood, and I immediately felt an unbearable burning sensation between my eyes. I was lying on a hard, wooden surface, but was sweating profusely at the temples. My head was throbbing hard and fast, like a bird’s tiny heart. I then felt a strange swelling in my tongue, and, at the back of my mouth, the slightly metallic taste of blood. In a silence that only accentuated the irregular palpitations in my chest, I heard a faint purring, perhaps a muffled snore, almost a groan. I figured that I must be in a room where other people were asleep. I preferred not to open my eyes, thinking I’d perhaps been put in an old people’s home or a jail, and tried to get back to sleep, without quite succeeding.

The only thing I remembered after the auction in the church was having gone out into the street holding Siddhartha’s hand. At that moment, it crossed my mind that the last time I’d held it, his hand had fit inside mine. But I immediately stifled that thought, because it made me want to hug him, and I sensed he wouldn’t want to be hugged. We walked across the square, hand in hand, toward a car that was waiting for us on the corner, me trying to explain to Siddhartha how the hilarious inverted Red Riding Hood story worked. Siddhartha looked straight ahead and completely ignored me, the way parents ignore their children when they’re trying to explain complicated things to them. And that was all I remembered; everything else was a white effasure.

With my eyes still closed and trying to doze on, I slowly passed the tip of my tongue over the roof of my mouth. At that moment I went to pieces. When I attempted to move my tongue along the crescent of my teeth, as sacred, graceful, and hallowed as Bernini’s St. Peter’s Colonnade, I found a large, empty space. Nothing. Not a single tooth. Oh, Marilyn! I raised one hand to my mouth and opened my eyes. I sat up and noticed I had been lying on a bench. With the tip of my fingers, I felt my lips, my tongue, my palate, my naked gums. Nothing, not a single tooth. What would the great architect of St. Peter’s have done if he’d turned up at the Vatican one day and noticed that the awe-inspiring Doric columns forming a semicircle around the atrium that heralds the even more glorious heights of the monument to Catholicism were simply not there?

I looked around me, surveying the room where I’d been sleeping, and discovered a hell worse than the one that had installed itself inside my mouth. A clown of superhuman dimensions, projected onto a screen, was contemplating me with a vaguely gentle expression. I was overcome by fear, and though the most logical thing would have been to stand up from the bench and make a run for the half-open door of the small room, my modesty stopped me. My stubborn and—given the circumstances—inexplicable erection made it impossible for me to get to my feet. I scanned the room. From the screens on the four walls, four catatonic clowns were looking at me. I became certain I’d lost it, all my popcorn burnt. The other option, that I had perhaps been kidnapped and was being tortured, was much more ominous, given that this is a country where a human life is worth less than a ticket from Mexico City to Acapulco on the miserable Estrella de Oro line.

Straight in front of me was the enlarged image of a clown with his face painted white, a smile drawn in black around the mouth, and an undersized Chaplinesque bowler perched on top of his bald pate. I turned my head to the right. An image of the same exaggerated proportions showed a clown dressed in a brightly colored bodysuit, the greater part of his face painted blood red, and a bush of yellow hair sprouting from the sides of a huge, chunky noggin. The clown to my left wore a white bodysuit and a yellow duck-feather boa; his face was painted pink, and above his natural eyebrows was a spectrum of unnatural ones that ran up his forehead like a flight of differently colored stairs to a predominantly
bald scalp. Needless to say, all three had the characteristic, forbidding button nose. I only gave the clown behind me a quick look, but was able to make out a black shoe with a broad sole, and a face painted red and black. Glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, he appeared to be the most sinister of the four, so I turned my head to the clown in front of me—the one with the white face and undersized bowler. Then, to my deep discomposure, this clown blinked.

I waited a few moments, gripping the edge of my bench, to see if he would repeat the action or if it was just that I was disoriented to the point of hallucination. Not only did the clown blink again, but suddenly, without him opening his mouth, a voice sounded from above my head:

Don’t you think that most things are so lovely, Fancioulle?

I didn’t reply, as he evidently couldn’t be referring to me. Highway, you’re an imbecile, I thought to myself. Speaking aloud, I managed—if weakly—to repeat: Imbecile.

I didn’t recognize my own voice. Without the solid frame of my teeth, the words issuing from my mouth were light, burbling puffs of air, the voice of an old man brought low. Then, that voice sounded again—slow, calm, almost cynical. It mimicked what I’d just said:

Im-be-cile.

Who are you? Where are you? I asked in alarm.

Give it up, Fancioulle.

Pardon?

Give up playing the imbecile, Fancioulle.

You’re confusing me with someone else. I am Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, Highway, at your service.

Give it up, you bastard. Just tell me where you’ve hidden the makeup removal cream.