Down the Rabbit Hole

naco – a derogatory Mexican term, quite close to the English slang word ‘chav’. It means a vulgar person with no class, style or education, and tends to be used by people from the dominant class to refer to those of the lower class, although it is malleable and can also be used about ‘new money’.

When we sat down to eat on the terrace it wasn’t an enigmatic moment like before, because Alotl spent the whole time talking about her village and making jokes.

It’s to do with being a Gringo, arrogant people who think they own the world. At least that’s what Mazatzin says in his lectures.

And I won’t stop being a Japanese samurai just because Yolcaut wants me to be a cowboy like Paul Smith.

I think if they sold severed heads in the supermarket people would use them to make pozole. But first you’d have to take off their hair, just like you take the feathers off chickens. Bald people like me would be more expensive, because we’d already be ready to go in the pozole.

I’m not ill and what’s more: since I’ve been a samurai my tummy doesn’t hurt. Well, it does hurt, but I concentrate like the Japanese and it stops hurting.

We paid for all these things with our dollars and we could have bought loads more, because we have millions of dollars. But we didn’t buy more things because they wouldn’t fit in our suitcases

The joke was about a competition between the policemen in the FBI from the country of the United States, the KGB from the country of Russia, and the Mexican police, to see who would be the first to find a pink rabbit in the forest. In the end the Mexican policemen turned up with a hippopotamus painted pink saying:

‘I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit.’

This was funny, but it was also a little bit true. That’s why I liked this joke so much: because it wasn’t really a joke. Everyone knows pink rabbits don’t really exist.

The French servant girls on the plane said their ‘r’s really strangely, as if they had a sore throat or the ‘r’ was stuck in it. Pathetic. Maybe the French have sore throats because of cutting off their kings’ heads.

With a guillotine, you can cut off a head in just one slice. Whereas with a machete you have to do lots more slices, at least four. And with the guillotine you can make immaculate cuts, you don’t even splatter blood around.

We rabbits do poos like pellets.

Perfect little round pellets, like the ammunition for pistols.

We rabbits shoot poo bullets with pistols.

Mazatzin asked me if we could speak by writing. Then I decided to be deaf, and mute with writing too

But I didn’t become mute because of that, it was Yolcaut’s lies.

Once, according to Miztli, the doctor told Yolcaut it wasn’t really my stomach making me ill, but that the pains came from not having a mummy, and what I needed was a psychology doctor. Supposedly this is what’s called a psychosomatic illness, which means the illness is in the mind. But my mind isn’t ill, my brain has never hurt.

According to the doctor, there was something wrong with my psychology, not my tummy.

Other people put on charro sombreros and they go mad. But not mad for invading countries, like with the three-cornered hats. Really just for shooting bullets into the sky and shouting nationalist slogans.

But Mazatzin thinks the things the author didn’t guess are funnier, like the thing about hats. In the book everyone wears hats. Mazatzin thinks it’s really funny how the writer was able to imagine difficult things and couldn’t imagine that people would stop wearing hats. And he said it’s as if we were all walking around today wearing sombreros like charro horsemen. Poor Mazatzin. Educated people really do know a lot of things from books, but they know nothing about life. This wasn’t the writer’s mistake. It was humanity’s mistake

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.

But the Gringos are better customers. The Mexicans are not good customers for Yolcaut, because Yolcaut refuses to do business with them. One of the corpses I met was a security guard who used to do what Chichilkuali does, but he decided to start doing business in Mexico. Yolcaut doesn’t want to poison the Mexicans. Mazatzin says that’s what’s called being a nationalist.

That’s where it explains the things you need in order to be king: a throne, a queen and someone to support you. Although when you sing the song you don’t have any of this, not even money, and you’re still king, because your word is law. That’s because the song’s really about being macho. Sometimes macho men aren’t afraid and that’s why they’re macho. But also sometimes macho men don’t have anything and they’re still kings, because they’re macho.