Down the Rabbit Hole Read Online Free Page A

and it’s back to the secrets and disappearing.
    The most enigmatic time is when we all sit down together to eat on the terrace: Yolcaut, Quecholli, Mazatzin and me. The first time, Mazatzin asked Quecholli if she was from León or Guadalajara or wherever. Quecholli didn’t say a thing. She looked at Mazatzin for a second and then Yolcaut shouted that she was from the motherfucking house of the rising sun.
    It might seem like Quecholli is blind too, because you almost never know which direction she’s looking in. But she’s not blind: I’ve seen her looking at my hats. Another strange thing is that she only eats salad. Her favourite is a salad with lettuce, tomato, broccoli, onion and avocado. Then she adds lime juice and salt with those long thin fingers she has. Covered in rings. But Quecholli’s rings are delicate and really tiny, not like Yolcaut’s, which are thick and have gigantic diamonds on them. She’s not a millionaire like us.
    Over dinner Yolcaut and Mazatzin talk about politicians. It’s a funny conversation because Yolcaut laughs a lot and tells Mazatzin he’s so fucking gullible. Mazatzin doesn’t laugh as much, because he thinks we should have a government of left-wing politicians. He says: ‘If the left was in power this wouldn’t happen.’ Yolcaut laughs some more. Some days Mazatzin says the names of politicians to Yolcaut and, depending on the name, Yolcaut replies:
    ‘Mm-hmm.’
    Or:
    ‘Uh-uh.’
    Sometimes Mazatzin looks surprised and laughs and says I knew it, I knew it. Other times he shouts Liar, liar, and Yolcaut tells him he’s so fucking gullible.
    While Quecholli eats her salad the rest of us eat whatever delicacy Cinteotl has made. Mazatzin loves her cooking. When he’s finished he shouts for Cinteotl and tells her that was the best mole of his life, if we ate mole , or the best tampiqueña , or whatever it was. Pathetic. Yolcaut thinks being hungry is in Mazatzin’s genes. Quecholli, since she’s mute, says nothing. Mazatzin says she’s a vegetarian. I say she’s like the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, a herbivore. But Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses don’t like lettuce salads, they like alfalfa salads. If Quecholli wasn’t mute I’d ask her opinion on the hot lettuce in the pozole.
     
    This is what was on the news today on the TV: the tigers in the zoo in Guadalajara ate a woman all up, apart from her left leg. Maybe her left leg wasn’t a very juicy bit. Or maybe the tigers were already full up. I’ve never been to the zoo in Guadalajara. Once I asked Yolcaut to take me, but instead of taking me he brought more animals to the palace. That was when he bought me the lion. And he said something to me about a man who couldn’t go to a mountain and so the mountain came to him.
    The eaten woman was the head zookeeper and she had two children, a husband and international prestige. That’s a pretty word, prestige. They said it might have been suicide or murder, because she never used to go into the tigers’ cage. We don’t use our tigers for suicides or for murders. Miztli and Chichilkuali do the murders with orifices made from bullets. I don’t know how we do the suicides, but we don’t do them with tigers. We use the tigers for eating the corpses. And we use our lion for that too. But we mainly use them for looking at, because they’re strong and really well-proportioned animals and they’re nice to look at. It must be because they’re so well fed. I’m not supposed to know these things, because they’re secrets Miztli and Chichilkuali do at night. But in that way I do think I’m precocious, in discovering secrets.
    At the end of the report the man on the news looked very sad and said he hoped the head zookeeper would rest in peace. How stupid. She was already chewed up inside the tigers’ tummies. And she’s only going to stay there while the tigers digest her, because she’ll end up being turned into tiger poo. Rest in peace, like hell. At the most her left