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Mazatzin has been reading me bits from an old futuristic book. It’s a book a man wrote many years ago imagining the time we live in now. And so it’s really funny, because the author guessed lots of things that happen today, like hair transplants and cloning. But Mazatzin thinks the things the author didn’t guess are funnier, like the thing about hats. In the book everyone wears hats. Mazatzin thinks it’s really funny how the writer was able to imagine difficult things and couldn’t imagine that people would stop wearing hats. And he said it’s as if we were all walking around today wearing sombreros like charro horsemen. Poor Mazatzin. Educated people really do know a lot of things from books, but they know nothing about life. This wasn’t the writer’s mistake. It was humanity’s mistake.
I’ve got lots of charro sombreros, six. One of them is a famous sombrero because a charro wore it in a really old film. Yolcaut bought me the sombrero for my birthday last year and then we watched the film to look for the sombrero. The film’s about two charros fighting over a woman. It’s a really ridiculous film. Instead of fighting with bullets the two horsemen fight with songs. And they’re not even macho songs, like “The King.” That’s what I don’t understand: If they’re charros and macho why do they sing love songs as if they were faggots? Maybe that’s why no one wants to wear a hat anymore, because people used to do ridiculous things like wearing charro sombreros and being faggots. That’s when hats stopped being prestigious. At the end of the film the two charros both end up happy, each with a different woman. They even make friends and live happily ever after: totally ridiculous.
The problem with this film is that it’s Yolcaut’s favorite and he makes me watch it with him whenever he feels like it. We’ve seen it loads of times, easily twenty. I’ve already learned it by heart without meaning to. The worst part is when one of the charros goes up to the woman’s window and says things about love to her. He says: “Your eyes are like starlight, two bright orbs that light up my darkness. I know I don’t deserve you, but without you life is a torment, an eternal dying.” Pathetic. The other charro sombrero I’ve got was a present from Miztli, also for my birthday last year. My birthday last year was disastrous. I got so many charro sombreros it was as if I were a nationalist. This other sombrero was made in Miztli’s village, which according to him is a charro village. But it’s a lie. In charro villages there have to be at least 1,000 horsemen.
One day, a long time ago, Miztli took me to his village and we didn’t see one horse. And there were zero people wearing charro sombreros, zero. There were lots of shops selling charro sombreros and things for horses. One of the shops was called El Charro, another was called Charro World, another Charro Gear, and another one Charrito’s. But there weren’t any charros, there were people taking photos and buying key-rings and postcards. The only charro I saw was a statue at the entrance to the village. He was a suspect charro, because it looked like he was dancing ballet like a faggot. And he didn’t even have a hat. Miztli said someone had stolen it, that one morning the charro woke up without his hat. The thief must have been one of those people who think charros shouldn’t be faggots.
In any case Miztli was really happy to show me his so-called charro village. Pathetic. The truth is, there were more churches than anything else in the village. There were so many churches that instead of a charro village it was a priest village. Miztli thought this was really funny. He said yes, it was a priest village, but they were macho priests. And then he pointed out a little boy who was walking down the street and said:
“Look, look, that’s the bishop’s son.”
The problem with charro sombreros is they’re only for charros. The thing is that the brim is very wide, they might even have the widest brim of all the hats in the world. I think if there were a hat with a wider brim it wouldn’t be a hat anymore. It would be a parasol.
If you’re not a charro and you put on a charro sombrero you might get dizzy and fall over. Then, with your charro sombrero on, it’s really difficult to get up off the floor. Other people put on charro sombreros and they go mad. But not mad for invading countries, like with the three-cornered hats. Really just for shooting bullets into the sky and shouting nationalist slogans.
But the charros don’t fall over or go mad. They stay in the shadow of their sombreros, very mysterious and enigmatic.
Who knows what the charros are hiding from.
Who knows what they’re plotting.
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Today there was an enigmatic corpse on the TV: they cut off his head and he wasn’t even a king. It didn’t look like it was the work of the French either, who like cutting off heads so much. The French put the heads in a basket after cutting them off. I saw it in a film. They put a basket just under the king’s head in the guillotine. Then the French let the blade fall and the king’s head is cut off and lands in the basket. That’s why I like the French so much, they’re so refined. As well as taking off the king’s crown so it doesn’t get dented, they take care that his head doesn’t roll away from them. Then the French give his head to some lady to make her cry. A queen or a princess or something like that. Pathetic.
We Mexicans don’t use baskets when we cut off heads. We hand over the severed heads in a crate of vintage brandy. Apparently this is very important, because the man on the news repeated over and over that the head had been delivered in a crate of vintage brandy. The head was from the corpse of a policeman, the chief of all the policemen or something like that. Nobody knows where the other parts of the corpse went.
On the TV they showed a photo of the head and the truth is he had a really bad hairstyle. He had long hair with a few strands dyed blond, pathetic. Hats are good for that too, for hiding your hair. Not just when it’s a bad hairstyle, because it’s best to hide your hair all the time, even with supposedly nice hairstyles. Hair is a dead part of the body. For example: when you get your hair cut it doesn’t hurt. And if it doesn’t hurt it’s because it’s dead. It does hurt when someone pulls it, but it’s not the hair that hurts, it’s your scalp. I researched it in my free time with Mazatzin. Hair is like a corpse you wear on your head while you’re alive. And it’s a devastating corpse that grows and grows without stopping, which is very sordid. Maybe when you turn into a corpse your hair isn’t sordid anymore, but before, it is. That’s the best thing about Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses: they’re bald.
I don’t have hair for that reason. Yolcaut shaves it with a razor as soon as it starts to grow. The razor is the same as the machine Azcatl uses to cut the grass, but small. And hair is like the weeds you have to fight. Sometimes Yolcaut gets annoyed because I ask him to shave my head really often. Bald people are definitely very lucky.
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These are the things you can hide under a detective hat: your hair, a baby rabbit, a tiny little gun with minuscule bullets, a carrot for the baby rabbit. Detective hats aren’t very good hiding places. If you need to put a rifle with gigantic bullets in there it won’t fit. The best hats for hiding things in are top hats, like the ones magicians wear. But detective hats are good for solving enigmas and mysteries. I’ve got lots of detective hats, three. I put them on whenever I find out mysterious things are going on in the palace. And I start to investigate, stealthily. It’s not like the research I do with Mazatzin, because I do that with books. Books don’t have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. This is one of the biggest defects of books. Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That’s why they don’t exist. And that’s why I have to go and investigate reality.