Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel
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Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel
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Overview
"A brief and majestic debut." —Matías Néspolo, El Mundo
Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines, and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants, and the odd corrupt politician or two. Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award, Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374709037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Sales rank: | 342,239 |
| File size: | 304 KB |
About the Author
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He is the author of books including Down the Rabbit Hole and Quesadillas. He lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Read an Excerpt
Down the Rabbit Hole
By Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rosalind Harvey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2010 Juan Pablo VillalobosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70903-7
CHAPTER 1
Some people say I'm precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, and devastating. There aren't really that many people who say I'm precocious. The problem is I don't know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I'm precocious. They say I look older. Or the other way around: that I'm too little to know words like that. Or back-to-front and the other way around, sometimes people think I'm a dwarf. But I don't think I'm precocious. What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except I pull words out of the dictionary. Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary. My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest. Yolcaut doesn't think I'm precocious either. He says I'm a genius, he tells me:
"Tochtli, you're a genius, you little bastard."
And he strokes my head with his fingers covered in gold-and-diamond rings.
Anyway, more people say I'm odd: seven. And just because I really like hats and always wear one. Wearing a hat is a good habit immaculate people have. In the sky there are pigeons doing their business. If you don't wear a hat you end up with a dirty head. Pigeons have no shame. They do their dirty business in front of everyone, while they're flying. They could easily do it hidden in the branches of a tree. Then we wouldn't have to spend the whole time looking at the sky and worrying about our heads. But hats, if they're good hats, can also be used to make you look distinguished. That is, hats are like the crowns of kings. If you're not a king you can wear a hat to be distinguished. And if you're not a king and you don't wear a hat you end up being a nobody.
I don't think I'm odd for wearing a hat. And oddness is related to ugliness, like Cinteotl says. What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don't cry all the time because I don't have a mum. If you don't have a mum you're supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don't cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I'm sad Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:
"Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man."
Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn't like it when I call him Daddy. He says we're the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometers. Yolcaut is a realist and that's why he doesn't say we're the best gang in the universe or the best gang for 8,000 kilometers. Realists are people who think reality isn't how you think it is. Yolcaut told me that. Reality is like this and that's it. Tough luck. The realist's favorite saying is you have to be realistic.
I think we really are a very good gang. I have proof. Gangs are all about solidarity. So solidarity means that, because I like hats, Yolcaut buys me hats, lots of hats, so many that I have a collection of hats from all over the world and from all the different periods of the world. Although now more than new hats what I want is a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. I've already written it down on the list of things I want and given it to Miztli. That's how we always do it, because I don't go out much, so Miztli buys me all the things I want on orders from Yolcaut. And since Miztli has a really bad memory I have to write lists for him. But you can't buy a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that easily, in a pet shop. The biggest thing they sell in a pet shop is a dog. But who wants a dog? No one wants a dog. It's so hard to get a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus that it might be the only way to do it is by going to catch one in Liberia. That's why my tummy is hurting so much. Actually my tummy always hurts, but recently I've been getting cramps more often.
I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.
* * *
I nearly always get on well with Mazatzin. He only annoys me when he's strict and makes me stick to our study plan rigidly. Mazatzin, by the way, doesn't call me Tochtli. He calls me Usagi, which is my name in Japanese, because he loves everything from the empire of Japan. What I really like about the empire of Japan are the samurai films. I've seen some of them so many times I know them off by heart. When I watch them I go on ahead and say the samurai's conversations out loud before they do. And I never get it wrong. That's because of my memory, which really is almost devastating. One of the films is called Twilight of the Samurai and it's about an old samurai who teaches the way of the samurai to a little boy. There's one bit where he makes the boy stay still and mute for days and days. He says to him: "The guardian is stealthy and knows how to wait. Patience is his best weapon, like the crane who does not know despair. The weak are known by their movement. The strong by their stillness. Look at the devastating sword that knows not fear. Look at the wind. Look at your eyelashes. Close your eyes and look at your eyelashes." It's not just this film I know off by heart, I know lots more, four.
One day, instead of teaching a lesson, Mazatzin told me his life story and it's really sordid and pathetic. What happened is that he used to do really good business in TV advertising. He earned millions of pesos by making up adverts for shampoo and fizzy drinks. But Mazatzin was always sad, because he'd actually studied to be a writer. This is where it gets sordid: someone earning millions of pesos being sad because they're not a writer. That's sordid. And so in the end, because he was so sad Mazatzin went to live very far away, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain I think. He wanted to sit down and think and write a book about life. He even took a computer with him. That's not sordid, but it is pathetic. The problem was that Mazatzin didn't feel inspired and meanwhile his business partner, who was also his best friend, scammed him out of his millions of pesos. He wasn't a best friend at all but a traitor.
That's when Mazatzin came to work for us, because Mazatzin is educated. Yolcaut says that educated people are the ones who think they're great because they know lots of things. They know things about science, like the fact that pigeons transmit disgusting diseases. They also know things about history, such as how the French love cutting the heads off kings. That's why educated people like being teachers. Sometimes the things they know are wrong, like if you want to write a book you have to go and live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain. That's what Yolcaut says, that educated people know lots of things about books, but nothing at all about life. We live in the middle of nowhere too, but we don't do it for inspiration. We do it for protection.
Anyway, since I can't go to school, Mazatzin teaches me things from books. At the moment we're studying the conquest of Mexico. It's a fun topic, with war and blood and dead people. The story goes like this: On one side there were the kings and queens of the Spanish empire and on the other side there were the Indians who lived in Mexico. Then the kings and queens of Spain wanted to be the kings and queens of Mexico, too. So they came and they started killing all the Indians, but only to scare them and make them accept their new kings. Well, the truth is they didn't even kill some of the Indians, they just burned their feet. This whole story makes Mazatzin furious, because he wears calico shirts and leather sandals as if he was an Indian. And he starts with one of his lectures. He says:
"They stole our money, Usagi, they plundered our country!"
It's almost as if the dead Indians were his cousins or his uncles. Pathetic. By the way, the Spanish don't like cutting the heads off kings. They still have living kings and queens with their heads stuck on their shoulders. Mazatzin showed me a photo in a magazine. That's really pathetic, too.
* * *
One of the things I've learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don't turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they'll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It's a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.
"One bullet in the heart."
"Corpse."
"Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot."
"Alive."
"Three bullets in the pancreas."
"Too early to tell."
And we carry on like that. When we run out of body parts we look up new ones in a book that has pictures of all of them, even the prostate and the medulla oblongata. Speaking of the brain, it's important to take off your hat before you put bullets into somebody's brain, so it doesn't get stained. Blood is really hard to get out. This is what Itzpapalotl, the maid who does the cleaning in our palace, always says.
Yes, our palace: Yolcaut and I are the owners of a palace and we're not even kings. The thing is we have a lot of money. A huge amount. We have pesos, which is the money of Mexico. We also have dollars, which is the money of the United States. And we also have euros, which is the money of the countries and kingdoms of Europe. I think we have thousands of millions of all three kinds, although the 100,000-dollar bills are the ones we like the most. And as well as money we have all the jewels and the gems. And lots of safes with secret combinations. That's why I don't know very many people, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Because if I knew more people they'd steal our money or they'd scam us like they did to Mazatzin. Yolcaut says we have to protect ourselves. Gangs are about this, too.
The other day a man I didn't know came to our palace and Yolcaut wanted to know if I was macho or not. The man's face was covered in blood and, the truth is, I was a bit scared when I saw him. But I didn't say anything, because being macho means you're not scared and if you are scared you're a faggot. I stood there very solemnly while Miztli and Chichilkuali, who are the guards in our palace, gave him some devastating blows. The man turned out to be a faggot because he started to scream and shout, Don't kill me! Don't kill me! He even wet his pants. The good thing is that I did turn out to be macho and Yolcaut let me go before they turned the faggot into a corpse. They definitely killed him, because later I saw Itzpapalotl go past with her mop and bucket. I don't know how many bullets they put in him though. I'd say at least four in the heart. If I counted dead people I'd know more than thirteen or fourteen people. Seventeen or more. Twenty, easily. But dead people don't count, because the dead aren't people, they're corpses.
There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices, too. If your blood comes out there's a point when your heart or your liver stops working. Or your brain. And you die. Another way of making corpses is by cutting, which you can also do with knives or with machetes and guillotines. You can make little cuts or big ones. If they're big they separate the body parts and make corpses in little pieces. The most normal thing to do is to cut off the head, although, actually, you can cut anything. It's because of the neck. If we didn't have a neck it would be different. It might be normal to cut bodies in half down the middle so as to have two corpses. But we have a neck and this is a really big temptation. Especially for French people.
* * *
To be honest, sometimes our palace doesn't look like a palace. The problem is it's really big and there's no way of keeping it immaculate. For a long time Itzpapalotl has been wanting Yolcaut to hire one of her nieces to help her with the cleaning. Itzpapalotl says she's trustworthy, but Yolcaut doesn't want any more people in our palace. Itzpapalotl grumbles because our palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut's bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcaut's business room, and five more empty rooms we don't use. And then as well as that there's the kitchen, the living room with the armchairs, the TV room, the cinema room, my games room, Yolcaut's games room, Yolcaut's office, the inside dining room, the dining room out on the terrace, the small dining room, five bathrooms we use, two we don't, the gym, the sauna, and the swimming pool.
Miztli says Yolcaut is paranoid and that this is a problem. The problem has to do with keeping the palace clean and also with Miztli's time off. Because Miztli and Chichilkuali are in charge of protecting our palace with their rifles twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-four hours means that sometimes Miztli doesn't sleep and other times Chichilkuali doesn't sleep. Even though we have a really high wall to protect us. And even though on top of the wall there are bits of glass and barbed wire and an alarm with a laser beam that sometimes makes a noise when a bird flies close to it. And even though we live in the middle of nowhere.
* * *
Around our palace we have a gigantic garden. It's looked after by Azcatl, who is mute and spends the whole day surrounded by the noise of the machines he uses. The noise is deafening if you go really close. Azcatl has machines to cut the grass, machines to cut the weeds, and machines to cut the trees and the bushes. But his main enemy is the weeds. The truth is Azcatl is losing the battle, because our garden is always full of weeds. By the way, Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses are silent machines that devour weeds. That's what's called being an herbivore, a plant-eater.
In the garden, opposite the dining room on the terrace, we also have cages with our animals, which are divided into two groups: the birds and the big cats. For birds we have eagles, falcons, and a cage full of parakeets and brightly colored parrots, macaws, and that sort of thing. For cats we have a lion in one cage and two tigers in another. On the same side as the tigers there's a space where we're going to put the cage for our Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Inside the cage there'll be a pond, but it won't be a deep pond, it'll just be for squelching around in the mud. Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses aren't like other hippopotamuses, which like to live submerged in the water. This is all going to be arranged by Itzcuauhtli, who looks after our animals: he gives them their food, cleans their cages, and gives them medicine when they get ill. Itzcuauhtli could tell me lots of things about animals, like how to make them better and things like that. But he doesn't tell me anything: he's mute, too.
I know a lot of mute people: three. Sometimes, when I tell them something, they look as if they want to talk and they open their mouths. But they stay quiet. Mutes are mysterious and enigmatic. The thing with silence is you can't give explanations. Mazatzin thinks the opposite: he says you can learn a lot by being silent. But those are ideas from the empire of Japan that he loves so much. I think the most enigmatic and mysterious thing in the world must be a Japanese mute.
* * *
Some days everything is disastrous. Like today, when I got the stabbing pain in my belly again. It's a sharp stab that feels like you're being electrocuted. Once I stuck a fork in an electric socket and electrocuted my hand a little bit. The stabbing is the same, but in my stomach.
To comfort me Yolcaut gave me a new hat for my collection: a three-cornered one. I have lots of three-cornered hats, eleven. Three-cornered hats are hats shaped like a triangle with a very small crown. I have three-cornered hats from France, from the kingdom of United, and from the country of Austria. My favorite is a French one from a revolutionary army. At least that's what it said in the catalog. I like French people because they take off the crown before they cut off their kings' heads. That way the crown doesn't get dented and you can keep it in a museum in Paris or sell it to someone with lots of money, like us. The new three-cornered hat is from the kingdom of Sweden and it has three little red balls, one on each point. I love three-cornered hats, because they're mad soldiers' hats. You put one on and you feel like running off all on your own to invade the nearest kingdom. But today I didn't feel like invading countries or starting wars. Today was a disastrous day.
In the afternoon Mazatzin didn't give me any homework and let me research a subject of my choice. It's something we do sometimes, mainly when I'm ill and find it hard to pay attention. I researched the country of Liberia. According to the encyclopedia, Liberia was founded in the nineteenth century by people who used to work as slaves in the country of the United States. They were African American people. Their bosses set them free and they went to live in Africa. The problem was that there were already other people living there, the African people. And so the African American people formed the government of the country of Liberia and the African people didn't. That's why they spend their whole time fighting wars and killing each other. And now they're all pretty much dying of hunger.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rosalind Harvey. Copyright © 2010 Juan Pablo Villalobos. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE,
Glossary,
Praise for Down the Rabbit Hole,
About the Author,
Copyright,