The Story of My Teeth by Luiselli Valeria

Author:Luiselli, Valeria [Luiselli, Valeria]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781566894104
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2015-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

THE FIRST TIME I felt horror in the presence of a clown was at the age of fifteen or sixteen. I was in Balderas metro station with my friend El Perro. It was just after eleven at night, and we were coming back from playing dominoes on a friend’s rooftop in downtown Mexico City. There was no one else in the station, just El Perro and I, waiting for the last train. At some point, we heard a sort of deep grunting sound, immediately followed by a huff. And again: grunt, huff, grunt. We looked around us—nothing, not a single soul in the station. El Perro went over and looked up the stairs connecting the platforms with the concourse. He stood there for a moment, frozen in astonishment. Then he beckoned me over and put his finger to his lips to indicate that I do so in silence. I moved cautiously toward him. Squatting on the top step, his pants at half-mast, a clown was taking a leisurely shit. I tried to stifle the laugh I felt rising up through my lungs like a nervous reflux, but was too slow. I emitted a sort of sneeze: a laugh passed through the muffler of self-constraint. The clown raised his head and looked into my eyes—he seemed to me like a defenseless animal looking straight at a possible predator, quickly realizing that the stalker is, in fact, its prey. He pulled up his pants and lunged at us. We ran, faster than we had ever before.

Terrified and disoriented, we retraced our path through the labyrinth of passages in Balderas station, looking for an unlocked exit. Rounding the corner of one passage, the clown came within grabbing distance and tackled me. I fell to the ground. He threw himself onto me, like a man throws himself onto a woman who is resisting him. Pinning me down by my lower legs, the clown let his head fall and pushed it into my belly, his button nose embedding itself in my navel. He buried his makeup-plastered face in my white shirt and, to my surprise, burst into tears—I never knew if from shame or natural sadness.

A few seconds later, having gotten my breath back, I managed to slide from under his exhausted body, and El Perro and I continued on—now slowly and in silence—through the empty passages, until we found a way out that was open. End of memory.

For a long time, we made all kinds of jokes about that day, and told increasingly exaggerated versions of the story to our acquaintances. But beneath the laughter and buffoonery accompanying the anecdote, I felt a hot weight in my stomach every time the topic came up. I suppose the embers of humiliation I discovered burning in that clown’s eyes had never left me.

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