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Narrated by Armando Durán, Thom Rivera
Valeria LuiselliUnabridged — 4 hours, 7 minutes
Narrated by Armando Durán, Thom Rivera
Valeria LuiselliUnabridged — 4 hours, 7 minutes
The story of “Highway” Sánchez-bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer-and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico.
“I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.”
Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous,” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf.
Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.
…Ms. Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family.
Unlike much fiction, whose purpose is to mesmerize a reader, this book is porous. It allows the world and its readers to enter its conception…Valeria Luiselli is as much a cartographer as a writer, interested in finding areas still unmapped. As in her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, she combines fictional narrative with historical and intellectual points of reference, and the result is writing without preconceptions, as airy and open as a soccer field…The Story of My Teeth is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. It's Walter Benjamin without tears—sunnier, more casual and more nimble. Luiselli is an exciting writer to watch, not only for this book, but also for the fresh approach she brings to fiction, one that invites participation and reaction, even skepticism—a living, breathing map.
★ 03/09/2015
One of the most unforgettable images in any book this year is that of Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez, the protagonist of Luiselli’s delightfully unclassifiable novel, walking around the streets of Mexico City, smiling at people with the teeth of Marilyn Monroe installed in his mouth—teeth he won at an “auction of contraband memorabilia in a karaoke bar in Little Havana.” Auctioneering is Highway’s trade, and, according to him, he’s the best at what he does because he’s a “lover and collector of good stories, which is the only honest way of modifying the value of an object.” Luiselli’s novel takes the same liberties with traditional storytelling as Highway: this isn’t so much a novel as a contorted collection of narrative yarns. In one section, Highway auctions 10 of his original teeth (remember, he has Marilyn Monroe’s in his mouth), passing them off as the teeth of Virginia Woolf, Plato, and G.K. Chesterton, among others. In another section, Highway creates allegories using various auction lots, including a prosthetic leg, as starting points, which quickly spin out and feature a who’s who of real Spanish-language writers. In one, the Argentine writer Alan Pauls talks about horse depression; in another, Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera is a policewoman; Luiselli’s parents put on rat and mouse costumes and have “outlandish, noisy, uninterrupted coitus.” These off-the-wall turns are surprising and charming, but, above all, there is an insatiable hunger for storytelling in these pages. Luiselli’s (Faces in the Crowd) novel so completely buys into its conceit—the author herself makes an appearance in an allegory as a 15-year-old “mediocre high school student stammered and overused the suffix -ly”—that it’s difficult not to follow wherever it takes you. (Sept.)
“Valeria Luiselli’s Story of My Teeth, a comic memoir of an auctioneer — part Gogol and part Steven Millhauser — dares to throw in a lesson or two on formal logic into each lot.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“One of the most unforgettable images in any book this year is that of Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez, the protagonist of Luiselli’s delightfully unclassifiable novel, walking around the streets of Mexico City, smiling at people with the teeth of Marilyn Monroe installed in his mouth . . . surprising and charming . . . It’s difficult not to follow wherever it takes you.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Come for the absurdist comedy, stay for the references to great writers and philosophers and see how in on the joke you really are." —Vulture
“...I found [in the United States] a very open, generous and exhilarating literary community and that community has really modified the way I think about the world, the way I write. But I also found a very strong sense of community and commitment to community.” —NPR, interview
“The Story of My Teeth is a novel as playful as it is profound.” —The Believer Logger
“The Story of My Teeth is more than just a novel . . . as all novels that impact our lives are. It is a testament to not only the work that goes into translation, but also to the value of storytelling in a world that sometimes seems to commodify authenticity through our all-access lifestyle.” —Three Percent, “Valeria Luiselli and the Transformative Power of Translated Storytelling”
“[The Story of My Teeth is] an austere tale that offers some wry observations about art and the art world in Mexico City. Highly recommend.” —Los Angeles Times
“[Luiselli] has. . .conjured one of the most remarkable novels of 2015, a novel that illuminates the familiar problems of identity and selfhood by re-presenting them in a bracingly defamiliarized light.” —Kenyon Review
“[The Story of My Teeth] was a joy to read.” —Kaaterskill Basin Literary
“Forms and genres collide in this often hilarious experimental fiction from one of our most consistent young writers.” —Flavorwire, “The 50 Best Independent Press Books from 2015”
“Playfully brilliant.” —BuzzFeed, “The 24 Best Fiction Books of 2015”
“Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is a brilliant fable from one of the most talented storytellers writing today.” —Largehearted Boy
“This boggling and enchanting collaborative novel about a man who believes he has had Marilyn Monroe’s literal teeth implanted into his mouth began as a bit of art gallery catalog copy sponsored by a large juice company.” —National Post Canada
“It’s not every writer who is brave enough to share stage in her own work with her translator—and a group of employees at a juice factory—but Valeria Luiselli’s got balls as well as serious talent.” —Brightest Young Things
“Though playful and unruly, her fiction feels surprisingly warm and old-fashioned.” —Kirkus, cover feature
“A lively, loopy experimental novel rich with musings on language, art, and, yes, teeth. . .the whole book is a kind of extended commentary on how possessions acquire value largely through the stories we tell about them. . . A clever philosophical novel that, as the author puts it, has "less to do with lying than surpassing the truth.” —Kirkus starred review
“The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary influences.” —Shelf Awareness
“[The Story of My Teeth] is brilliant, and has a great story; it began as a commissioned work written in collaboration with workers at a Jumex juice factory in Mexcio.” —Publishers Weekly
“There’s big buzz from booksellers around a small press hit, translated from the Spanish, The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House, Sept.) by Valeria Luiselli. Jeremy Garber, events coordinator, Powell’s in Portland, Ore., casts a vote for The Story of My Teeth. ‘It’s dazzling, it’s tremendous.’” —Publishers Weekly
“The Story of My Teeth is a rich, provocative meditation on authenticity, heritage and personality.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“This highly inventive novel is narrated by a garrulous auctioneer who invents “hypertrue” stories for the objects he sells. . . . a work of immense charm and originality, written in vivid, witty prose.” —The New Yorker
“Training as an auctioneer, Highway hopes these and other skills will help him find the perfect set of teeth. If that sounds like an odd plot, I can only promise you that things get delightfully odder. . . . Luiselli’s novel arrives in the United States from tiny Coffee House Press with considerable momentum behind it.” —The Guardian
“Luiselli’s unstintingly imaginative tale perhaps works as a parable for the way works accrue value in the art world.” —The Guardian (UK)
“Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christina MacSweeney, is the most inventive and invigorating book I have read this year. . . . It manages to be intelligent and experimental without an ounce of pretension.” —Three Percent
“Besides its engaging characters and plot, there’s the equally compelling backstory of this book, which Luiselli wrote in collaboration with employees of Mexico’s Jumex, an industrial giant that produces and distributes juice.” —The Guardian
“Prefigured by her excellent book of essays, Sidewalks, The Story of My Teeth is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. It’s Walter Benjamin without tears—sunnier, more casual and more nimble.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“This giddy, witty, idiosyncratic novel . . . is a jubilant celebration of the act of storytelling. . . Ms. Luiselli persuasively suggests that our lives would be empty vessels, hardly worth bidding on, without the “stories that give them value and meaning.” —Wall Street Journal
“The Story of My Teeth’s playful re-contextualizations and detours are bound to leave you puzzled at some point—perhaps even many. . . . the book is a delightfully weird meander into art, salesmanship, Mexican culture, and experimental dentistry.” —Beijing Bookworm
“The Story of My Teeth is a playful, philosophical funhouse of a read that demonstrates that not only isn’t experimental fiction dead, it needn’t be deadly, either.” —NPR
“The story of Luiselli’s teeth is positively constructive, even warm. Instead of collapsing and decomposing fragments, The Story of My Teeth reaches toward a world composed of fragments, the creative process which Highway calls — in a moment of clarity — a “postcapitalist, radical recycling . . . that would save the world from its existential condition as the garbage can of history.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Although buoyant, Luiselli’s work never seems flippant, perhaps because of her precise prose style . . . Linear at first glance, it soon opens out into a world of stories, like a mouth with one tooth from every artist in the world.” —Chicago Tribune
“[The Story of My Teeth is] proof that Valeria Luiselli is one of the most exciting new writers working today.” —Los Angeles Times
“This charmingly slippery slip of a book, packed with fantastical allusions, reminds us that the world’s great stories can be ours for a very reasonable price.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“A perfectly defined universe” —Clash
“If her novel is a map, the route it will suggest for a reader who possesses few existing landmarks to Mexican culture will be quite different than that laid out for a reader with many, firmly planted ones. But maybe those routes will all lead to a similar place – one of shared enjoyment, if not shared concerns about a particular place, a Mexico made more of fiction than of fact.” —Americas Quarterly
“What Highway (and Luiselli) is really hawking is fantasy, a sort of shared experience of faith in the improbable – the art of storytelling, essentially, to which The Story of My Teeth pays manic veneration.” —The Globe and Mail (Canada)
“Wonderful, unusual…” —The Paris Review Daily
“The Story of My Teeth defies classification, and underscores the power of storytelling and the importance of reading.” —Virginia Quarterly Review
“This boggling and enchanting collaborative novel about a man who believes he has had Marilyn Monroe’s literal teeth implanted into his mouth began as a bit of art gallery catalog copy sponsored by a large juice company.” —National Post (Canada)
“In a delicately layered, wryly funny fashion, Luiselli is exploring the actual value of telling made-up stories.” —Huffington Post
“When reading it, I had no idea of where it was going, in the best possible way. I mean I felt like it encompassed such a wide shift in tone. There were comic moments; there were incredibly tragic moments; there were surreal moments.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“The ever inventive, always incisive Valeria Luiselli presents a mosaic of fable, comedy, drama, and essay.” —Largehearted Boy
“Luiselli riffs on art, literature, and city life; the result is a warm, deeply unpredictable, and very humanistic novel, with a fascinatingly memorable character at its heart.” —Men's Journal
"As strange and beautiful as the novel itself is the backstory to its creation — a tale that involves a juice factory, a world-class art collection, and a rather unlikely collaboration.” —Studio 360
"This kind of writing—direct and gentle, affectionate and satirical, precise and imaginative, memorable and efficient—appears throughout, and the character of Gustavo is brought to life with exquisite imaginative power and beautifully judged tics and cadences. . . . It is a sad, beautiful and brilliant book. It will endure." —The National (UK)
"As Mexico takes centre stage at London's Book Fair Matthew Sweet talks to two of the country's award-winning writers. Valeria Luiselli's new novel The Story of My Teeth explores the meaning of home through the antics of an auctioneer, told in his own hyperbolic fashion, who has decided views on the meaning of value and worth in life and art." —BBC
“Luiselli's delightfully bizarre novel follows Highway, a world traveler and renowned auctioneer, who collects teeth — specifically, the teeth of influential thinkers, like Plato, Marilyn Monroe and Virginia Woolf.” —MPR
"It’s not every writer who is brave enough to share the stage in her own work with her translator – and a group of employees at a juice factory – but Valeria Luiselli’s got balls as well as serious talent.” —Brightest Young Things
“Luiselli offers a bright new voice in fiction, exploring the role of story in art through her quirky protagonist, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez . . . . Playing with different ways to tell story, The Story of My Teeth is sly, endearing, refreshing, and ever broadening.” —Bookshop Santa Cruz
“The Story of My Teeth will leave you wanting more of Luiselli’s sense of humor and grace, her perfect ear for entertainment and epiphany. But more importantly, this novel will change the way you look at writing and stories—and will reveal that in the end, what is imagined is as important as anything else.” —BookPage
“Wonderful and strange, The Story of My Teeth transgresses against straightforward storytelling by witnessing and remixing to make something so fresh and new that it defies easy description. Just know that it dazzles on every page. I love this book.” —Brazos Bookstore
“[The Story of My Teeth] reminds us of the power and sway of great stories, especially those we tell ourselves that, by sheer persistence, we come to believe!” —Green Apple Books on Park
"The hero of this ambitious fun-house of a novel set in Mexico is Gustave 'Highway' Sanchez Sanchez, an auctioneer, journeyman, and fabulist who's had Marilyn Monroe's teeth implanted in his mouth. Chew on that." —O Magazine
“If you've found yourself in a reading rut, this just might be one of the most interesting books you have yet to read.” —Princeton Library
“Luiselli has proven in both her novels that she’s willing to break novelistic conventions to simultaneously tell and deconstruct her stories. If you don’t mind some post-postmodernism with your misadventures, The Story of My Teeth is well worth bidding on.” —PANK
“Shuttling between the quotidian and the transcendent, between the earthly and the intellectual, all the while disrupting those very tenuous categories, is precisely what makes The Story of My Teeth so engaging.” —Slant Magazine
“A fundamental openness and curiosity make Luiselli’s work fresh and exciting. She is serious in her engagement with art, literature, and society without being arrogant or sententious—she is part of all those games, and is happy to acknowledge it.” —World Literature Today
08/01/2015
The year 2014 was a good one for Mexican-born author Luiselli: her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, was released to much acclaim, and she was chosen as one of 5 Under 35 by the National Book Foundation. Her second novel, though ingenious and affecting in parts, is more of a metanarrative exercise than a straightforward narrative. Written partly under commission from the Galeria Jumex, a contemporary art gallery funded by a juice factory in Ecatepec, Mexico, it describes the life and exploits of Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez. Highway starts off as a lowly security guard and ends up the world's best auctioneer, traveling the globe to sell things and curate his own collection of unusual objects. One such acquisition is Marilyn Monroe's teeth, which he has implanted to replace his own. Later in life, he ends up trapped in an art installation by his estranged son and takes a neighborhood boy as an apprentice to tell his story. The novel's experimental structure is full of literary allusions and bon mots from across the ages. VERDICT Readers hungry for more from Luiselli will be happy with a clever variation on her style, but its quirkiness may turn off others. Recommended for fans of metafiction and Latin American literature junkies.—Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA
★ 2015-07-01
A lively, loopy experimental novel rich with musings on language, art, and, yes, teeth. Each section of the second novel by Mexican author Luiselli (Faces in the Crowd, 2014) opens with an epigram about the disconnect between the signifier and signified. If you dozed off during lectures on semiotics in college, fear not: though the author is interested in the slippery nature of description, this novel's style and tone are brisk and jargon-free. The narrator, Gustavo, has decided late in life to become an auctioneer ("to have my teeth fixed"), a job he thrives at in part by skillfully overhyping the values of the objects on offer. Not that he's immune to being oversold himself: did the new set of teeth he buys at auction really once belong to Marilyn Monroe? The skeletal plot focuses on Gustavo's hosting an auction to benefit a church outside Mexico City, his hoard of prized objects, and his reunion with his son. But the book lives in its offbeat digressions, like an extended discussion of literary eminences' lives via their teeth. (St. Augustine was inspired to write his Confessions due to a toothache; G.K. Chesterson had a marble-chewing habit; false teeth were recommended to calm Virginia Woolf's inner turmoil.) But all this dental chatter isn't precisely the point. "We have here before us today pieces of great value, since each contains a story replete with small lessons," Gustavo tells a group of auction attendees, and the whole book is a kind of extended commentary on how possessions acquire value largely through the stories we tell about them. (In an afterword, Luiselli explains that this "novel-essay" was inspired by such questions and was first written for workers in a factory outside Mexico City that has a gallery connected to it.) A clever philosophical novel that, as the author puts it, has "less to do with lying than surpassing the truth."
| BN ID: | 2940169807257 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
BOOK I
The Story
(beginning, Middle, and end)
A man may have been named John because that was the name of his father; a town may have been named Dartmouth, because it is situated at the mouth of the Dart. but it is no part of the signification of the word John, that the father of the person so called bore the same name; nor even of the word Dartmouth, to be situated at the mouth of the Dart.
— J. S. Mill
I'm the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I'm a discreet sort of man. My name is Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, though people call me Highway, I believe with affection. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I know how to count to eight in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back.
This is the story of my teeth, and my treatise on collectibles and the variable value of objects. As any other story, this one begins with the Beginning; and then comes the Middle, and then the End. The rest, as a friend of mine always says, is literature: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics, and elliptics. I don't know what comes after that. Possibly ignominy, death, and, finally, postmortem fame. At that point it will no longer be my place to say anything in the first person. I will be a dead man, a happy, enviable man.
Some have luck, some have charisma. I've got a bit of both. My uncle, Solón Sánchez Fuentes, a salesman dealing in quality Italian ties, used to say that beauty, power, and early success fade away, and that they're a heavy burden for those who possess them, because the prospect of their loss is a threat few can endure. I've never had to worry about that, because there's nothing ephemeral in my nature. I have only permanent qualities. I inherited every last jot of my uncle Solón's charisma, and he also left me an elegant Italian tie. That's all you need in this life to become a man of pedigree, he said.
I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start, because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming. When my father first saw me, he claimed his real son had been taken away by the new mother in the next room. He tried by various means — bureaucracy, blackmail, intimidation — to return me to the nurse who had handed me over. But Mom took me in her arms the moment she saw me: a tiny, brown, swollen blob fish. She had been trained to accept filth as her fate. Dad hadn't.
The nurse explained to my parents that the presence of my four teeth was a rare condition in our country, but one that was not uncommon among other races. It was called congenital prenatal dentition.
What kind of races? asked my father, on the defensive. Caucasians, sir, said the nurse.
But this child is as dark as the inside of a needle, Dad replied.
Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sánchez.
That must have consoled my father. He finally resigned himself to carrying me home in his arms, wrapped up in a thick flannel blanket.
Not long after my birth, we moved to Ecatepec, where Mom made a living cleaning other people's houses. Dad didn't clean anything, not even his own nails. They were thick, rough, and black. He used to pare them with his teeth. Not from anxiety, but because he was idle and overbearing. While I was doing my homework at the table, he would be silently studying them, stretched out by the fan in the green velvet armchair Mom inherited from Mr. Cortázar, our neighbor in 4-a, after he died of tetanus. When Mr. Cortázar's progeny came to take away his belongings, they left us his macaw, Criteria — who suffered a terminal case of sadness after a few weeks — and the green velvet armchair where Dad took to lounging every evening. Lost to the world, he would study the damp patches on the ceiling while listening to public radio and pull off pieces of nail, one finger at a time.
Starting with his little finger, he'd press a corner of the nail between his upper and lower central incisors, detach a tiny sliver, and, in a single motion, tear off the half moon of excess nail. After he'd detached the sliver, he'd hold it in his mouth for a moment or two, roll his tongue, and blow: it would shoot out and land on the notebook I was using to do my homework. The dogs would be barking outside in the street. I'd contemplate the piece of nail lying there, dead and dirty, a few millimeters from the point of my pencil. Then I'd draw a circle around it and go on doing my writing exercises, carefully avoiding the circle. Bits of nail would keep falling from the heavens onto my ruled Scribe notebook like meteorites propelled by the current of air from the fan: ring, middle, index, and, finally, the thumb. And then the other hand. I'd go on fitting the letters around the small circumferenced craters left on the page by Dad's airborne trash. When I was finished, I'd gather up the nails into a small pile and put them in my trouser pocket. Afterwards, in my bedroom, I'd place them in a paper envelope I kept under my pillow. During the course of my childhood, the nail collection got to be so large that I filled several envelopes. End of memory.
Dad no longer has any teeth. Or nails, or a face: he was cremated two years ago, and, at his request, Mom and I scattered his ashes in Acapulco Bay. A year later, I buried Mom next to her sisters and brothers in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City. It's always raining there, and there's hardly a breath of air. I travel to Pachuca to see her once a month, usually on Sundays. But I never go as far as the cemetery, because I'm allergic to pollen and there are lots of flowers there. I get off the bus not far from the gates, at a lovely median strip with life-size dinosaur sculptures, and I stay right there among the gentle fiberglass beasts — getting soaked, saying Our Fathers — until my feet swell up and I feel tired. Then I go back across the street, carefully dodging the puddles — round as the craters in my childhood notebook — and wait for the bus to take me back to the station.
My first job was at the Rubén Darío newspaper stand, on the corner of Aceites and Metales. I was eight years old and all my milk teeth had already fallen out. They had been replaced by others, as wide as shovels, each pointing in a different direction. My boss's wife, Azul, was my first true friend, even though she was twenty years older than me. Her husband kept her locked up in the house. At eleven every morning, he sent me there with a set of keys to see what Azul was doing and to ask if I could fetch her anything from the shops.
Azul would generally be lying on the bed in her underwear, with Mr. Unamuno all over her. Mr. Unamuno was a pigeon-chested old codger who had a program on public radio. His show always opened with the same line: "This is Unamuno: modestly depressed, engagingly eclectic, and sentimentally political." Idiot. When I came into the room, Mr. Unamuno would spring up, tuck in his shirt, and clumsily button up his trousers. I, in the meanwhile, would be looking at the floor and, sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, at Azul, who would still be lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, passing the tips of her fingers over her bared midriff.
When he was finally fully dressed and with his glasses on, Mr. Unamuno would come over and give me a rap on the forehead with the palm of his hand.
Weren't you taught to knock, Turnpike?
Azul used to come to my defense: He's called Highway, and he's my friend. And then she'd give a deep and simple laugh, showing disconcertingly long canine teeth with flattened points.
After Mr. Unamuno had finally slipped out — all anxious — through the back door, Azul would wrap the sheet around herself like a superhero's cape and invite me to jump on the bed. When we got tired of jumping, we'd lie down and play pocket billiards. She was always very gentle. When we'd finished that, she'd give me a slice of bread and a pouch of mineral water with a straw, then send me back to the newspaper stand. On the way, I'd drink the water and put the straw in my pocket for later. I eventually accumulated more than ten thousand straws, word of honor.
What was Azul doing? Mr. Darío would ask when I returned to the stand.
I'd cover for her, inventing the details of some innocent activity:
She was just trying to thread a needle to mend her cousin's new baby's christening gown.
Which cousin?
She didn't say.
It must be Sandra, or Berta. Here's your tip, and now off to school with you.
I finished primary, middle, and high school and passed unnoticed with good grades, because I'm the sort that doesn't make waves. I never opened my mouth, not even to answer at roll call. My silence wasn't for fear of them seeing my crooked teeth, but because I'm a discreet sort. I learned many things at school. End of beginning.
At the age of twenty-one, I was offered a job as a security guard in a factory on Vía Morelos, due to that selfsame discretion, I believe. The factory produced juices. And the juices, in turn, produced art. That is to say, the profits from the juice sales funded the largest art collection in the continent. It was a good job to have since, although I was only in charge of guarding the factory entrance and was never allowed into the gallery where the art was shown, I was in a sense the gatekeeper of a collection of objects of real beauty and truth. I worked there for nineteen years. Setting aside six months when I was off sick with hepatitis, three days for an ominous case of tooth decay that ended up needing a double root canal treatment, and my annual leave, I spent exactly eighteen years and three months as a factory security guard. They weren't bad years, but they weren't good either.
But one day Fortuna spun her wheel, as Napoleón, the singer, says. On the very day of my fortieth birthday, the Pasteurization Operator got a panic attack while he was attending to a dhl messenger, a plump man of medium height. The Polymer Supervisor's Secretary had never witnessed a panic attack before and thought the messenger of medium height was assaulting the Pasteurization Operator, because her workmate had put his hands to his throat, gone purple as a plum, turned his eyes up, and let himself fall backwards, collapsing spread-eagled on the floor.
The Customer Services Manager ordered me to apprehend the messenger of medium height. Following his command, I made straight for the suspected criminal. My old friend and workmate, El Perro, one of the factory drivers, was just coming in through the door; he ran toward us and helped me to pin the messenger of medium height down. But when I then hit the messenger at the base of his spine with the tip of my truncheon — not even very hard — he started to cry inconsolably. El Perro let him go, of course, because he's not a sadistic type. While I was hustling the messenger to the exit, I asked, in a more gentle tone, for his id. With one hand raised high, he put the other in his pocket and took out his wallet. Then, with the raised hand, he extracted his driver's license and handed it to me, unable to look me straight in the eyes: Avelino Lisper — a ridiculous name. The Customer Services Manager told me to go back immediately to help my moribund companion, because he was still lying on the floor and couldn't breathe. I told the messenger of medium height that he could go — though, in fact, what he did was to just stand there crying, bathed in tears you might say — and ran to the Pasteurization Operator, using the tip of my truncheon to clear a path through the curious onlookers. I knelt down by him, took him in my arms, and, for want of a better solution, silently cradled him until the attack had passed. El Perro, in the meantime, had to comfort the dhl messenger until he too calmed down.
The next day, the Manager called me into his office and told me that I was going to be promoted.
Guards are second class, he explained to me in private, and you're a first-class man.
The Senior Executives had decided that, from then on, I would have a chair and a desk of my own, and my job would consist of comforting any member of staff who required this service.
You're going to be our Personnel Crisis Supervisor, said the Manager, with the slightly sinister smile of those who have paid many visits to the dentist.
Two weeks went by, and, as the Pasteurization Operator was on temporary leave of absence, there was no one in need of comforting. The factory had employed a new guard: a fat, overeager little lovemedo sort of guy who went by the name of Hochimin and spent the whole day trying to chat with people. Discretion is a quality that few people appreciate. I eyed him condescendingly from my new position. I'd been given an adjustable swivel chair and a desk with a drawer containing a divine assortment of rubber bands and paperclips. Every day, I'd put one of each in my trouser pocket and take them home. I managed to build up a good collection.
But it wasn't all velvet petals and marshmallow clouds, as Napoleón says. Some employees at the factory, particularly the Customer Services Manager, began to complain that I was now being paid to bite my nails and look at the ceiling. Some of them even hatched a conspiracy theory according to which the Pasteurization Operator and I had worked out the little scam so that he'd be given a month's paid sick leave and I'd get promoted — typical cock-and-bull stories and skullduggery of miserable wretches who can't deal with other people's good fortune. After a general meeting, the Manager arranged for me to be sent on specialized courses, to keep me busy while, incidentally, acquiring the skills needed for managing possible crises among the staff.
I began to travel. I became a man of the world. I attended seminars and participated in workshops the length and breadth of the Republic, even the Continent. You could say that I became a collector of courses: First Aid, Anxiety Control, Nutrition and Dietary Habits, Listening and Assertive Communication, DOS, New Masculinities, Neurolinguistics. That was a golden age. Until it all came to an end, like everything glorious and good. The beginning of the end started with a course I had to take in the Department of Philosophy and Letters of the National University. It was given by the Manager's son, so I couldn't refuse without putting my job at risk. I accepted. The course was called — to my horror, shame, and consternation — "Contact-Improv Dance."
The first exercise in the workshop involved inventing a dance routine, in pairs. My partner turned out to be a certain Flaca, who, though indeed thin, was neither pretty nor ugly. This Flaca used me as a pole, dancing around me in the style of that curvaceous, exotic artiste of the sixties, Tongolele, while I just snapped my fingers, trying to follow the difficult rhythm of the song, which she totally disregarded. She slid her hands over my body, ran her fingers through my hair, undid buttons. I continued snapping my fingers conscientiously. By the time the song had finished, Flaca's femininity was in full bloom and I was deflowered, converted into a contact-improv dancer, standing half-naked on a parquet-floored stage in the Department of Philosophy and Letters, my balls the size of two tadpoles. End of memory.
To save face, I had no choice but to marry Flaca a few months later. Et cetera, et cetera, and she got pregnant. I left my job in the juice factory, because she thought I had a real talent for dance and possibly theater, and shouldn't waste any more time. I became her personal project, her social service, her contribution to the nation. Flaca was brought up in an all-girl Catholic school, and was as perverted as any of those rich white Mexican girls. But she had rebelled, or so she said, and was studying to become a Buddhist. As she had saved enough from her earnings — lies: it was her father's money — she offered to support me if the dance-theater thing didn't turn out to be particularly remunerative. I was ready to go along with that. I moved into her oversized apartment in Polanco and lived the life of a prince. Then, as always happens, after a pretty short time, Flaca got fat.
For all the élan I put into it, and despite the material perfection of my corporality, I couldn't find work as a contemporary dancer or actor. I auditioned for the Icarus Fallen Dance Company, Alternative Dimension, Cosmic Race, and even the Open Space group, which, as its name suggests, is very open and accepts anyone. Nothing. I was almost accepted by FolkArt, but in the end a shorty with the body of a shrimp and the ridiculously pretentious name of Brendy got the spot.
Excerpted from The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, Christina MacSweeney. Copyright © 2015 Valeria Luiselli. Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
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