‘This is real life, not literature. And don’t act dumb, all you ever wanted to do was go to bed with me.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Is that going to happen?’
She put both hands to her waist, to the silk tie that served as a belt for the robe, and gently pulled at the knot, so gently that, instead of a no, the gesture had the vague air of a promise.
‘We’ll see,’ she replied. ‘First, write the novel. Write about us. Everything that happened to us. Write our story.’
I showed her the door with a matador’s flourish and watched her go, propelled by her customary smugness and leaving behind her a faint scent of lemons. So I was going to have to write a novel. Francesca didn’t know who she was dealing with. The next day I summoned Mao to an emergency meeting and, using the techniques he had learned for seizing public buildings, we installed a system for blocking the door to my apartment. That night I poured myself the last beer of the day, which turned out to be the third one before the second-to-last, and started to think about a novel whose author doesn’t want to write it, a novel about something no one is sure has happened, a novel about what hasn’t been experienced and, it goes without saying, a novel that would be like a plate of dog-meat tacos. I began flicking through the Aesthetic Theory at random, rereading the underlined passages, taking them as an inspiration, and then I opened my notebook, picked up my pen and started to write: In those days, as I left my apartment each morning, number 3-C, I would bump into my neighbour from 3-D in the hall, who had got it into her head that I was writing a novel. My neighbour was called Francesca, and I, it goes without saying, was not writing a novel at all.
Author’s Acknowledgements
To the members of the ICL, the Intimate Circle of Readers, whose evaluations significantly improved the manuscript of this noveclass="underline" Andreia Moroni, Teresa García Díaz, Cristina Bartolomé, Rosalind Harvey, Iván Díaz Sancho, Javier Villa and Luis Alfonso Villalobos.
In some imprecise period of adolescence, in between sips of tequila, Óscar Serrano talked to me for the first time about his great uncle, Manuel González Serrano.
Patrick Charpenel was generous enough to give me a masterclass in twentieth-century Mexican art via Skype. Any inaccuracies there might be in this book are the responsibility of the novelist’s brain.
Between sips of red wine and Barça goals, Manuel Silva tirelessly repeated to me that it wasn’t possible to write, reflect upon art or even to breathe if one hadn’t read Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
It was Carmen Cáliz who, in her course on mythology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, introduced me to James Hillman’s excellent and disquieting (and totally trippy) oeuvre.
The (lightly edited) text from the exhibition on Manuel González Serrano come from articles published in La Jornada by Argelia Castillo and Alondra Flores Soto.
María Elena González Noval was the curator of the exhibition La naturaleza herida (Wounded Nature), first shown at Mexico City’s Museo Mural Diego Rivera in 2013.
Some of the characters in this novel are real; most are fictional. Some of the events described are real; most are fictional. The dogs are all fictionaclass="underline" not one was killed in the making of this novel.
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Rosalind Harvey would like to thank the Emerging Translators Network for help with elusive quotes and several thorny issues.
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