Читать онлайн "The Story of My Teeth" - Luiselli Valeria - RuLit

and that you’re in prison,

and that I wasn’t the best of fathers.

I also didn’t get round to finding

all the things you requested.

But here are my teeth,

and your glass of water.

You can also keep

all my collectibles, and

the Marylin Monroe teeth,

which were false anyway.

~ ~ ~

1. GOWER BICYCLE PAVILION

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

— H. G. WELLS

~ ~ ~

2. EL RINCÓN CULTURAL

My notebooks. So sadly full, this one with impotence, the other with empty, pointless waiting. The most difficult of waits, the most painfuclass="underline" the wait for oneself. If I were to write something in it, it would be the confession that I too have been waiting for myself for a long time, and I haven’t turned up.

— JOSEFINA VICENS

~ ~ ~

3. DISNEYLANDIA

Objects in themselves disagreeable or indifferent often please in the imitation.

— WILLIAM HAZLITT

~ ~ ~

4. HIGHWAY’S HOUSE

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

— JEAN BAUDRILLARD

~ ~ ~

5. ECATEPEC JUNKYARD

The Spanish language is an old wedding dress that is handed down to us by our ancestors, and which we are obliged to preserve intact. . but antique wedding dresses are only good for putting on to see ourselves as skeletons. It’s much better to cut them up for shirts than to keep them in mothballs.

— JORGE IBARGÜENGOITIA

~ ~ ~

6. UGO RONDINONE, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

Fancioulle made me see that the intoxicating powers of Art are more effective than any others for shrouding the terrors of the abyss; that genius can represent a comedy while standing on the edge of the tomb, with a joy that prevents it from seeing that tomb, lost as it is in a Paradise, which refuses to admit any idea of death and destruction.

— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

~ ~ ~

7. NEUROTICS ANON. & GUN REPAIRS

Neurasthenia / is a gift that came to me with my earliest work.

— RUBÉN DARÍO

~ ~ ~

8. SECRET OF NIGHT

Originality is nothing more than judicious imitation; the most original writers borrowed one from another.

— VOLTAIRE

~ ~ ~

9. PACHUCA MEDIAN STRIP & FIBERGLASS DINOSAURS

You take nothing with you when you go.

— JOSÉ MARÍA NAPOLEÓN

~ ~ ~

BOOK VII. The Chronologic BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY

1938 President Lázao Cárdenas announces the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum reserves.

May 7, 1945 War ends in Europe.

1945 Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is published.

Circa 1945

Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, better known as “Highway,” is born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City.

His family moves to Ecatepec de Morelos.

1940 Production at the United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Company in Pachuca declines, causing many residents to leave in search of employment.

Circa 1945 Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus passes into the care of Theodor Adorno after its owner, Walter Benjamin, commits suicide in Portbou.

1945 Fifty years since Mr. Hoopdriver set out on a cycling tour of southeast England in H. G. Wells’s The Wheels of Chance.

1950 Virginia Woolf’s essay “Gas,” which details her experience of having several teeth extracted in 1922 and 1923, is published in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays.

1948 Centennial of the birth of German logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege.

1954 Author Francisco Goldman is born in Boston, Massachusetts.

1956 Julio Cortázar meditates on the metamorphosis of an axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in his short story “Axolotl.”

Circa 1953

Highway starts his first job in Rubén Darío’s newspaper stand and begins a collection of straws.

1951 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is first published in the United States and later helps inspire the hippie generation.

1955 Fifty years since Miguel de Unamuno, upon receiving the Gran Cruz de Alfonso x, said to Alfonso xiii, “I am honored, Your Majesty, to receive this cross, which I so justly deserve.”

1957 Penguin publishes Robert Graves’s translations of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.

1962 Centennial of the publication of the first fifty prose poems of Le Spleen de París by Charles Baudelaire, which includes an account of the heroic death of the court jester Fancioulle.

1962 In her biography of Robert de Montesquiou, Cornelia Otis Skinner reports that Marcel Proust often copied Montesquiou’s laugh and his habit of not showing his teeth.

1965 Work begins on the construction of Mexico’s first Volkswagen plant.