My uncle Cadmus, as you will have by now guessed, had left me the collection of infamous teeth that he had buried under a beautiful mango tree on the outskirts of Potrero. In a note, he explained that the ground was going to be expropriated by the government within a few months in order to build a power station. So he charged me with digging up the sacred teeth and seeking a brighter future for them. Here we find ourselves, dear parishioners, and here we find the final tooth of the collection. The respected Mr. Vila-Matas’s molar. Who will open the bidding?
The honest truth is that I don’t remember how much I got for it. I was at the very peak of the stupor brought on by the almost toxic atmosphere of an, up to that point, successful auction. Auctioning is, for me, a highly addictive activity, just as gambling, certain drugs, sex, or lying is for others. When I was young, I used to come out of public sales with the desire to sell off everything: the cars I saw in the street, the traffic lights, the buildings, the dogs, people, the insects that distractedly crossed my field of vision.
The parishioners were equally intoxicated by the stupefying humors of the auction. They wanted more. It was obvious: they wanted to go on buying. And I like to please people, not out of submissiveness and an excess of deference, but because I’m a considerate, affable sort. For want of more pieces, I decided, in a stroke of genius that can be attributed to the zeal that had taken hold of me, to auction off myself.
I am Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, I said. I am the peerless Highway. And I am my teeth. They may seem to you to be yellowed and a little worse for wear, but I can assure you: these teeth once belonged to none other than Marilyn Monroe, and she needs no introduction. If you want them, you will have to take me along too. I gave no further explanation.
Who will open the bidding? I asked in a quiet, calm tone, catching Siddhartha’s eyes, fixed on me.
Who will open the bidding for me and my teeth? I repeated to an undaunted audience. A hand went up. Exactly what I’d imagined occurred. For the price of 1,000 pesos, Siddhartha bought me.
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Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.
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BOOK III. The Parabolics
Call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object. . Of course, we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds. . A designator rigidly designates a certain object if it designates that object wherever the object exists.
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MY UNCLE MARCELO SÁNCHEZ-KHARMSSJJ once wrote in his diary:
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers, but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.
I never feel confused or break anything when I wake up. I’m unbreakable and unconfoundable, like all simple men. Every day, I return to the waking world with the beautiful, uncomplicated certainty of my modest but firm early morning erections.
And I’m not unusual. Quite the reverse. Recent scientific studies show that the very first thing the great majority of men notice on waking up in the morning is the turgidity and rigidity of their sexual organs. There is no mystery in this. During the night, the body pumps blood to the male member to maintain the temperature needed for its health and normal functioning. As a consequence, many men wake up with a powerful, proud erection, the intensity of which also acts as a first anchor to the world during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Women don’t experience anything like that, and so often feel completely disoriented when they open their eyes. They don’t have that gentle Charon to mark out the road from one world to the other.
This phenomenon of the male constitution, known in common parlance as “the tent effect,” is a biological event, and in no way psychological. But like so many other biological phenomena, it can quickly become a matter of mental and spiritual health. If the erection is left unattended and has to go down on its own — during the first sips of coffee or under the shower — a man accumulates malignant humors that engulf him in resentment and rage throughout the day. He becomes circumspect, taciturn, secretly aggressive, and can even begin to harbor perfidious thoughts toward his fellow citizens, including members of his family and his colleagues. However, if the person who sleeps beside him shows empathy and frees the organ from the accumulation of bodily fluids, the man remains mild and self-controlled the whole day, one might even say easygoing and philanthropic. End of explanation.
My uncle Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, who had many theories about many things, used to say that a man should marry a woman who had an understanding attitude toward this natural condition of men. “You have to find a madame,” he would say, “who tempers the fury that accumulates during the long sleepless hours of men who are sensitive to the elasticity of time.” Whatever that might have meant, he would go on to add that that was why he had married my aunt Nadia and remained faithful to her until death did them part (the poor woman died of angina pectoris, like our founding father Benito Juárez). It may be that Aunt Nadia hid her light under a bushel, and though she might have dressed like a teacher in an orphanage, she was, undoubtedly, a virtuoso of early-morning fornication.
I, in contrast, never had any luck in that department — perhaps because the luck of a lucky man, as is my case, is distributed so that it doesn’t quite reach the most recondite corners of human experience. Like the bell curve theory. Flaca did her duty by me until she got pregnant; that is, for approximately two weeks. And after that, zilch. She was always rather lacking in generosity in relation to other people’s needs, above all mine. But neither did I find early-morning solace with the other women in my life. Angelica, who was far from ugly, used to wake up with her mouth smelling of chicken, so it was me who refused physical contact. Erica, on the other hand, had a strange resemblance to the ex-president Felipe Calderón while she was sleeping, I think because her face became a little swollen, particularly the lips, nose, and eyebrows. Much as I would have liked to dissipate my pent-up humors inside her, as soon as I saw her there, puffed up and deformed by sleep, identical to the president of those dark years in Mexico, I would be so terrified that I’d get silently out of bed and tiptoe away to make myself a cup of strong coffee. And Esther, finally, was extremely bad tempered in the mornings. I never dared to snuggle up to her for fear she’d set about me with the chain she kept handy in her drawer. So I used to let her make the first move, which usually consisted of giving me — chain in hand — a difficult-to-interpret polysyllabic command along the lines of Highway, onyerknees an’ givittongue. Or maybe: Highway, muffdivintime. Or simply: Highway, satisfyme. But as — thankfully — Esther almost never made the first move, I learned to resign myself to my fate. I’ve got an unparalleled talent for resignation, like all Catholic men.