In the evening, Yolcaut and Miztli came back to the palace. Yolcaut wouldn’t let me watch TV with him. He pretended nothing was wrong and sent me away with Miztli to distract me. Anyway now I know why Yolcaut didn’t want me to watch TV. Miztli told me, because Miztli is really good at secrets. What I mean is Miztli’s really good if you want to find out secrets, and really bad if you want him to keep them. And you don’t even have to say a thing to him. What normally happens is that to find out secrets you have to ask lots of times or even give people devastating blows to make them tell you. But not with Miztli. As I’m a mute I didn’t ask him anything but even so he told me that they’re talking about Yolcaut on the TV, about Yolcaut’s business. Although they don’t actually call him Yolcaut, they call him the King. Miztli says that now we’re really in the shit. He says:
“Just think, he won’t even let you watch TV anymore. Get ready, now the paranoia’s really going to start.”
I thought Yolcaut’s paranoia had been around for a while and now it looks like it’s only just started. In the dictionary it says that to be paranoid you have to think about just one thing. That is, paranoid people are mad. It’s as if I only thought about hats. But I think about lots of things: hats, samurai, swords, Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, lettuce, tiny little pistols with minuscule bullets, guillotines, the French, bullets, corpses, hair transplants … Just for the sake of thinking I even think about the Spanish, and they don’t even like cutting off kings’ heads. The thing is, I’m not paranoid. Who knows what it is Yolcaut thinks about all the time?
* * *
I knew it, I knew it: Mazatzin isn’t a saint at all, he’s a pathetic traitor. He’s written an article in a magazine where he reveals all our secrets, our enemies, and our mysteries. The article has photos of our palace and the title is: “Down the King’s Rabbit Hole.” It talks about our millions of pesos, our millions of dollars, our millions of euros, the gold-and-diamond rings the King wears, the guns and rifles, Miztli and Chichilkuali, the politicians, even Quecholli. And on the cover there’s a photo of our tigers’ cage.
The magazine doesn’t say the author is Mazatzin, but it’s him, we know it is. It can’t be anyone else. He hasn’t come to give me my lessons for two days. And the name at the end of the article is Chimalli, which means shield. And the meaning of names is very important to Mazatzin, that’s why he used to call me Usagi and not Tochtli. That’s also why he doesn’t call Yolcaut Yolcaut in the article, but the King, like they call him on the TV. Shields are for protection. In other words, Mazatzin must have given himself a name to protect himself because he’s scared of Yolcaut.
I know about the article because of Miztli, because Yolcaut doesn’t tell me anything. It’s as if he’s gone mute as well, mute just with me. He talks to other people. Actually he talks to everyone to give orders. I think he’s tired of giving me presents to stop me being mute now, and as I haven’t stopped being mute he must be taking his revenge. Gangs aren’t about revenge, and they’re not about lies or hiding the truth either. At this rate we won’t be the best gang for eight kilometers anymore. In fact, we won’t be a gang at all.
The thing with the article meant I stopped being mute just a bit because I had to talk to Miztli. It was to find out what it said in the magazine and to ask him what was going to happen to Mazatzin. By the way, 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 honor 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 center 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 organize 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 organize 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 was the mysterious thing, because Mazatzin wasn’t with the guerrillas. He was with us teaching me things from books.
If I were 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 meters. Alotl isn’t an 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: