Free Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Mazatzin didn’t write anything about me, he pretended I didn’t exist. Miztli thinks it was to protect me. Pathetic. I’m a samurai and we samurai don’t need anyone to protect us. At the most we might need another samurai to protect us, especially when our honour is in danger. But a samurai never needs a pathetic traitor to protect him.
    In any case Mazatzin wanting to protect me is useless. Because no one’s going to read his article. I used to think the only thing you could kidnap was people. Well it turns out it’s not, you can kidnap other things too, like magazines. That’s what Yolcaut did when he found out about the article. He phoned up and gave orders to buy up all the magazines with Mazatzin’s article in them. Miztli says that Chichilkuali went to a factory where they do recycling: all the magazines will be put in a machine and the machine will turn them into paper for wrapping tortillas in. Poor Mazatzin, Miztli says he’d do well to go very far away. I think Mazatzin’s gone to the empire of Japan. Yolcaut’s definitely going to drop at least four atomic bombs on him.
     
    Yolcaut really is a paranoid madman. First he went mute with me and wouldn’t let me watch TV and now he’s shouting at me to run, come quick, Mazatzin’s on the TV. I’ve got a theory: educated people go to jail because they’re really idiots. Like Mazatzin, who’s not only a traitor to us but it turns out is also a traitor to the country of Honduras. In the country of Honduras forging official documents is a serious crime. Crime: it’s a nice word. It turns out the Hondurans are nationalists and they get annoyed if someone tries to be a fake Honduran. If you want a Honduran passport there are two options: you’re either a real Honduran or you go to jail.
    The worst thing for Mazatzin is that the men from the government of the country of Honduras think he’s made fun of the country of Honduras. That’s what the vice-president said, that he also made fun of them by trying to use the ridiculous name of Franklin Gómez. The vice-president was called Elvis Martínez. I think only idiots flee to the country of Honduras with a fake Honduran passport. Mazatzin was caught going through the centre of Tegucigalpa, which is the capital of the country of Honduras, a country that’s only for real Hondurans.
    A man from the government of Mexico said they couldn’t do anything for Mazatzin, that Mexico respected the sovereignty of our brothers in the country of Honduras. Are Mexicans and Hondurans brothers? Politicians really do make complicated deals. Yolcaut was really enjoying himself laughing at Mazatzin when he decided to say one of his enigmatic phrases. He said:
    ‘Think the worst and you’ll be right.’
    And he carried on laughing like a paranoid madman who only thinks about one thing, about laughing.
    Not only was this phrase not really enigmatic at all, but it also helped me to solve other mysteries. In other words, this phrase means that what’s happening is Yolcaut’s fault. That’s what the orders are for, to organise the enigmas. But then a very enigmatic thing really did happen: there was a news report on the TV about Mazatzin’s life and they were saying he was dangerous. All because he’d gone to live very far away, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain covered with rebel Indians who wanted to shoot the men from the government dead. That’s why Mazatzin went to the country of Honduras too, to organise the Indians of the country of Honduras to kill the men from the government of the country of Honduras. Now the government of the country of Honduras has a long list of crimes that will put Mazatzin in jail for many years. Yolcaut says at least twenty-five. And he laughs again. After the news report the people on TV rang up the man who’d been Mazatzin’s partner in his advertising business and he said he hadn’t seen him for two years, since he went to live on the mountain with the guerrillas. That