Free Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos Page A

was the mysterious thing, because Mazatzin wasn’t with the guerrillas. He was with us teaching me things from books.
    If I was Mazatzin I’d have fled to the empire of Japan. And over there I would have ordered a sword to be made for me so I could be a real samurai. Instead he went to the country of Honduras, and now because of him my fingers really hurt from playing on the Playstation 3 so much.
     
    Today I met the sixteenth person I know and her name is Alotl. According to Cinteotl, Alotl’s bottom is this big: two metres. Alotl isn’t a herbivore like Quecholli, because she doesn’t just eat salads with lettuce, she also eats alphabet soup and enchiladas and meat. And she’s not mute, just the opposite, she says lots of things. She says:
    ‘Little man, don’t you think it’s a bit late to be walking around dressed like that? This is not the time to be wearing a dressing gown.’
    She also says to Cinteotl and Itzpapalotl:
    ‘What a big house and how lovely it is, and what good taste you have, such pretty vases!’
    Because she doesn’t know this isn’t really a house, it’s a palace. If she knew it was a palace she’d realise that it isn’t really a very good palace, because it’s not immaculate. The vases she’s talking about are the Chinese vases in the living room with the armchairs. The vases have dragons on them breathing fire from their snouts and the truth is they are pretty. And later, out on the terrace, she said:
    ‘Oh, a tiger in a cage, so big and so beautiful, what good taste to have a tiger in the garden!’
    Then the tiger roared. I think the tiger wanted to eat her. She didn’t realise, she just said Oh oh oh, what a fierce little kitty, and asked me if the tiger had a name.
    Alotl talked so much I was embarrassed to carry on being a mute, because she kept asking me about the dressing gown, about the samurai hat, about the animals’ names and saying how did I get to be so handsome? And she was always stroking my head and laughing and saying Oh, oh, oh, the little mute. I had to explain to her about the samurai and why I’m a samurai and how I need a sword to be a real samurai. She also made me show her my collection of hats. She’s a nationalist, because the hats she liked best were the charro sombreros, even though I showed her all my three-cornered hats and my authentic safari hats.
    When we sat down to eat on the terrace it wasn’t an enigmatic moment like before, because Alotl spent the whole time talking about her village and making jokes. Her village is in the north, in Sinaloa. I think Yolcaut liked Alotl, because he even asked her questions and laughed at her jokes. The jokes were about how good-looking Yolcaut and I are and how much we look like each other, just as handsome. Alotl made the names of everyone at the table with her alphabet soup, but she wrote ours like this: ‘toshtli’ and ‘llolcau’.
    The good thing was that Alotl didn’t spend the whole day going on and on, because she disappeared a lot with Yolcaut, four times. Miztli was also surprised they disappeared so many times and he was happy because he was the one who’d brought Alotl to the palace. When I asked him why they were disappearing so much he laughed and told me a secret, something super-enigmatic:
    ‘Thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score, Tochtli, thirty-six, twenty-four, perfect score.’
     
    Now Alotl comes every day and not just two or three times a week. One day as a present she brought me a straw hat with a ribbon on it with a picture of a palm tree that says: Souvenir from Acapulco . Another day she was wearing a skirt that was so short Cinteotl didn’t want to serve her any food. The truth is, the straw hat from Acapulco is the worst hat in my collection, I’d throw it away if it was up to me. The problem is I feel sorry for Yolcaut, who was really pleased with the present. And the skirt really was very short, so short that twice I managed to see her knickers, which were yellow.
    The