A little boy grows up in his gangster father's fortress, surrounded only by henchmen. Beautiful and heartbreaking.
This tiny novel is narrated by Tochtli (his name means 'rabbit' in Nahuatl, Mexico's major indigenous language), a precocious, seven-year-old boy. He lives, with thirteen or fourteen other people, in a fortress he thinks is a palace with his gangster father whom he thinks is a king; the 'palace' has a room full of money and jewels and even four crowns. We see his claustrophobic world through his eyes. Of course his perceptions are distorted by what he has been told and his limited experience. Sometimes this is darkly funny: he rather likes the French because they have a habit of cutting off heads. Sometimes it is worrying: his dad has to shave Tochtli's head because "hair is like a corpse you wear on your head while you're alive ... that grows and grows without stopping, which is very sordid." (Ch 1) Sometimes it is downright sinister: he plays a question-and-answer game with his dad where "one person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell." (Ch 1) What he knows is disturbing: “There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too.” (Ch 1) Unsuprisingly, his belly hurts all the time which a doctor diagnoses as a psychosomatic illness but "my mind isn't ill, my brain has never hurt." (Ch 1)
'Macho' is good, 'faggots' are bad. He doesn't like things that are 'sordid' or 'pathetic'.
Tochtli's discovery of room full of armaments disturbs him because his dad told him the room was empty and being in a gang means that he and his dad shouldn't lie to one another. Tochtli resolves the situation by becoming mute (there are several examples in his little world of people who don't speak aloud, at least in front of Tochtli). So his father, who presumably needs to get out of Mexico for a while, takes Tochtli and his teacher, under false names, to Liberia to collect for Tochtli what the little boy wants: the (endangered) Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. And the adventure becomes funnier, more sinister, and sadder.
This is an astonishing book. In its child narrator with a restricted perspective it reminded me of the first part of Emma Donoghue's Room. In the way much of the humour (and the sadness) derives from the reader understanding so much more than the narrator, it reminded me of the Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend.
Adam Thirlwell, in the Introduction to the & Other Stories edition of the Rosalind Harvey translation of this novel, describes this book as a fugue: "through his permutations of a limited set of perceptions and vocabularies, a devastated world emerges." It is a beautiful piece of writing.
Selected quotes:
- “What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don't cry all the time because I don't have a mum ... because people who cry are faggots.” (Ch 1)
- “The realist's favourite saying is you have to be realistic.” (Ch 1)
- “The best thing about being a king is that you don't have to work.” (Ch 1)
- “To be a king in Africa you have to kill lots of people. It's like a competition: the one who wears the crown is the one who's made the most corpses.” (Ch 1)
- “Today there was an enigmatic corpse on the TV: they cut off his head and he wasn't even the King. it didn't look like it was the work of the French either, who like cutting off heads so much.” (Ch 1)
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