TUNNEL BOOKS

Short the Seven Nightmares

with Alebrijes

CARLOS LABBÉ

translated from Spanish

by Ruy Burgos-Lovece

TUNNEL
BOOKS
 We give special thanks to
Will Vanderhyden
for his translation counseling

SHORT THE SEVEN NIGHTMARES WITH ALEBRIJES

© Carlos Labbé
Translation © Ruy Burgos-Lovece
© Editorial Paroxismo
Tunnel Books Collection

ISBN-10
0692523928

www.editorial-paroxismo.com

Cover, design and composition by FLC

Printed in the United States of America

MADE WITH THE HEART IN MEXICO!

CARLOS LABBÉ was born in Santiago de Chile
in 1977. He has published the hypernovel
Pentagonal: incluidos tú y yo (2001), the novels Libro
de plumas (2004), Navidad y Matanza (2007),
Locuela (2009), Piezas secretas contra el mundo (2014)
and La parvá (2015), and the short story collection
Caracteres blancos (2010 and 2011). Open Letter
Books has published Navidad & Matanza (2014)
and Loquela (2015), both translated by Will
Vanderhyden.
He was a member of the music bands Ex
Fiesta and Tornasólidos. His soloist albums are
Doce canciones para Eleodora (2007), Monicacofonía
(2008), Mi nuevo órgano (2011) and Repeticiones
para romper el cerco (2013). He was the
co-scriptwriter of the films Malta con huevo (2007)
and El nombre (2015). He holds a B.A. and an
M.A. in Literature. He collaborated with the
research site Archivodramaturgia.cl and his works
of literary criticism can be found at Sobrelibros.cl.
He is also the co-editor, with Mónica Ríos and
Martín Centeno, of Sangría Editora.
RUY BURGOS-LOVECE was born in Viña del
Mar, Chile, in 1957. His family moved to
Venezuela when his father died in 1973. At the
time, he was an exchange student in West
Memphis, Arkansas. He joined his family in
August that year. Eleven years later he arrived back
in the US. Dr. Burgos-Lovece obtained a degree as
a teacher of high school physics in 1980 in
Venezuela. By 1987, he had an M.A. in French
from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He
taught high school Physics and French in Fort
Smith, Arkansas until 1993. By 2001, he had a
Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1994, he started
translating freelance and has been doing it
assiduously ever since. In 2003, Dr. Burgos-Lovece
was hired as a lecturer at UNC-CH. He currently
teaches Spanish grammar, composition and
translation at UNC-CH.
I can’t understand love but for dead people.
Gabriela Mistral
1.

Sometimes you look like an old lady.

Other times, like a little boy. I’ve been
told the former so many times!the
tired hair and the raspy voice!for my
overfamiliar manners, for my tricks. It’s
because I teach, because I’m inflexible.
But the latter no, I’ve never been told
such a thing. A little boy! Another boy
walks by, he’s carrying a Papier-mâché
cross on his shoulder and around him

! -1-
everyone else is painting themselves,
someone spits out mescal, the orchestra
cuts through the air with its metallic
silence, over there the Pope is wearing a
horrendous mask and offering his candy
ring for the tourists to kiss, a simple
phosphorescent costume of a skeleton
with its cock in the air, dancing and
spilling liquid, glaring with severity at
someone who offers him tortilla chips
because they have meat on them,
meanwhile a lady shows up and takes
the cross away from the boy, and some-
one breaks a bottle over her head, when
it’s his groups’ turn to carry the cross:
the drunks, the solemn, and the disre-
spectful all stop doing what they’re

! -2-
doing on top of the tomb, that we
recently watered with hibiscus infusion.
But tell me, do you prefer old
ladies or children? Women, he replies.
Men, she replies.
They look at each other and
struggle to repress their laughter. He
carries a bag in his hand. What did you
buy? Some artesanía? A sleeping cat,
look. Its little leg is hanging. That’s not
a cat, and she takes it away from him. It
is an alebrije. A piece of wood and
nothing more. They keep walking. No
one accepts the coins they offer, better
just to hold each other around the waist
and go get a beer, because someone is
crying over there and we’re all tourists,
without any dead to offer a piece of this

! -3-
tlayuda or even a little pisco if you
brought any.
And so, what do you like, how
do you like it?
But they’re not talking right
here. There’s thousands of kilometers
between them, one in Brooklyn, one in
Oaxaca; she is drunk on top of the tomb
of the other, in the cloisters; a silver god
in the five upper levels and an ice ser-
pent four levels under this piece of earth
fall in love; he procured a magic mush-
room that he’d eat to weep for the other
in a nighttime cemetery on the Day of
the Dead; they were a tourist couple
who had a fight in their hotel, she ran
off to a bar to be alone, just when a

! -4-
narco shot a gringa who had insulted
him in the bathroom.
Choose any story of distancing,
he said. Any story. All that matters is
that right now there are people on the
other side who are celebrating the
Night of the Living.
They looked at each other. They
didn’t look at each other, he said. All
that matters is that this alebrije is made
of wood and not of notebook paper.

! -5-
2.

I wanted it all to be a nightmare, but it

wasn’t.
My name is Pedro Linares now.
Her name is Pedro Linares. Pedro Li-
nares was twelve years old when she
learned about the Papier-mâché arte-
sanía. In those years, with her sisters,
she made carnival masks, piñatas and
Judases that were later sold at La
Merced market, in the main square,

! -6-
outside the mescal bars, following the
güerito all day and all night on the Day
of the Dead, The Guelaguetza, the
Calenda Festival, and Holy Week. One
day Pedro Linares, the girl, got a fever
because of an infection in her dusty
right foot.
Then came what came behind
the copal tree.
One day Pedro Linares, 37 years
of age, got a fever due to an infection in
his right hand, where he had cut him-
self with his knife. One day Pedro Li-
nares, the girl, from all the aged liquor
that the güerito had given her, aggravat-
ed her ulcer and was stricken with long-
lasting fever. Her mother and sisters

! -7-
gathered together around her bed, they
lit the candles and began the litany.
At last without hunger, free and
laughing, Pedro Linares wandered in a
forest of Montezuma pines. Suddenly
he found himself in front of a copal
tree. He looked for his knife, but he
didn’t have fingers. His swollen eyes
were all he had left. The tree gave him
new life, revealing itself to him and then
moving aside. Pedro Linares entered
the next forest where day and night
moved extraordinary beings, indescriba-
ble if not for the long words of creaky
sounds that came out of him as he
walked; they wanted to devour some-
thing of his, but Pedro Linares had
nothing to offer them. Then the crowd

! -8-
began to shout at him «alebrije, alebrije,
alebrije». The uproar was such that he
felt afraid and wanted to leave that
place. That’s how she woke up in the
middle of her own funeral.
When she tried to describe the
fever to her sisters as they were walking
along the muddy track towards the city,
she realized that they didn’t understand
her words. She knew that no one would
be able to imagine those winged blue
donkeys, those feline serpents with huge
jaws, golden crests, and speckled
rooster’s feet.
I wanted it all to have been a
nightmare, but it wasn’t. That is what
Pedro Linares would tell me.

! -9-
 So he sat in front of the forest of
Montezuma pines, pulled out his knife
and began to carve. Later we’ll paint
them, he added. And we baptized them
with the name of his fever, so the entire
region could replicate them, falsify
them, transform them, invent them
again, so that the güerito could buy
them from us and we could sell them to
him; so that later we’ll be able to go by
his place to shop even if it’s more
expensive.
These ones I made are real
pretty, she replies, and passes me the
knife. The ones from my fever looked
horrendous.

! -10-
3.

It also looks like a cat, yet more like an

ocelot, but pure yellow, like a flute. The
one that wakes me every morning with
its blowing before the roosters and the
sun. The first thing I do is splash water
on my feet, hands, and face, telling my-
self it’s working time. I feed the fire, stir
the mixture in the metal, and fetch
more water. I wake my daughter, my
other daughter, my son as well, so they

! -11-
can help me put the tortillas in bags;
one of my children puts the other in a
small sack and I carry all of them on my
back, sometimes I bring a few weavings
that the girl or her sister or the boy fin-
ished before spending time on alebrijes,
I might also throw in some grasshop-
pers that I find on the third path, the
one without soil, and along we go,
chewing, if we have any limes left. We
continue across the platforms and, on
the other side of the hill, we run into
our neighbor with her son and her other
son and her daughter who, because
they’re all taller, carry their grandma on
their backs, and the grandma gets fruit
from an old friend with a truck who
gives us a ride to the crossing, I carry

! -12-
grandma’s fruit in a basket on my head
until the bees come and sometimes we
follow them to find honey once we’ve
gotten off the truck, then I give three
tlayudas to the driver of the other truck
who drops us off; in this way the sun
rises over the line of the hills, and we
walk and walk without even thinking of
dancing because it’s working time, none
of us imitates any kind of animal, all we
have is the hardness of the soles of our
feet that keep on walking, and each of
us alone with our silence in the desert
city, people without fever, the güerita,
the güerito, the güerita and the güerito
who doesn’t answer me, buy from me so
I sell, buy from me so I sell. Okay?
There are a few mild ones that see me

! -13-
as rock and not as bone, they don’t even
look at me, but I accompany them until
a sound comes out that isn’t mine ei-
ther, because it’s working time, silence,
the stone of the street, and I go along
and come to the road on the other side
again; once a demon offered to take me
to the sea if I gave him all my tlayudas,
my clothes, and my hair, another time
the demon wasn’t there when I wanted
to sell those things because it was a bad
day. When the light is gone I count the
coins in the bag that I keep inside the
other bag, I buy flour and meat for an-
other working time, I stash them in the
bag, I find my daughter, my son, my
daughter and her daughter, each goes
inside their little sack; we put their

! -14-
coins in a different bag, we manage to
give the old tlayudas to the other truck
driver, then we give away the honey we
gathered to our new friend so he’ll drop
us off at the crossing, we drag our feet
across lands that suddenly are breaking
open because we hear music of storms,
meowing, blowing, scratching from the
bushes reaching for our bags. And we
give them. Later I go looking for wood
to keep the fire alive, I sit beside the fire
with my daughter and my son and my
daughter and her daughter and the
daughter of her daughter, I close my
eyes because in that very moment I feel
on my lap the iguana with flowers on its
back that seems to me like a bird, I feel
the sting of the red donkey with snakes

! -15-
on its skin, the silver frog with antennae
and wings comes near with its serpent
shape to dance, eyeless black rooster,
Nahual that I cannot see because it’s too
dark, laughter of small animals, even the
one that turns into a cat, pure yellow
ocelot, like a flute.

! -16-
4.

Be convinced: the dead can’t communi-

cate with the living. She wrote that
before dying. Just today I got her letter.

! -17-
5.

A pale ocelot with fine long rosy spots,

irregular purple feet, orange claws, the
interior of the ears purple and white in
the center. On the forehead, a hexago-
nal shape with diamonds; on the back,
the same shape widening to six mirrors
across a weaving with green and violet
lines and borders that also reflect the
light, leading to a tail of gold, indigo,
and fuchsia strips running towards the

! -18-
tip that’s coiled in the same frightened
position, the head bent and yet in its
brown eyes with white pupil there’s no
fear, only the following wisdom:

A yellow ocelot with a homogenous

pattern of black stains that resem-
ble human bones. Its huge body is
crouched and, between its
teeth!the mouth wide open!it
holds the stiff neck of a thin deer of
ceramic skin with long and light
lime-colored brushstrokes; chest
and neck are both brown, those
hanging pieces contrast with the
tension of its front paws that strug-
gle to keep life from escaping, and
also with the unworried expression

! -19-
 of the ocelot, for whom this is the
game:

A cream!almost canary yel-

low!colored Ocelot. Its equine
articulations are fragile but not
its white-tipped raccoon tail,
just like its feet and snout,
which remain steady, and thro-
ugh those open jaws we can
make out the carmine between
the snow-white fangs, blue eyes
with black that resemble the
eyes of that girl; its thighs shine
with garnet arabesques and on
its back a colorless shape where,
if you stare, you’ll see a sunset at
high sea, a mirror or an

! -20-
 important memory that will
soon cease to be:

A straight hare, Egyptian, fu-

rious, seductive. Its face is
emerald, its eyelashes are yel-
low under black eyelids, over
the greenish-white eyes with
red and beige pupils. In the
space between the eyebrows,
eight barely visible gray dots
and the forehead traversed by
an indigo blue path along
which the sunflower shadows
of eight iguanas from the
spine to the tail, flanked by
infinite other minuscule
white dots, violet orange

! -21-
 flames, red stripes and two
parallel lines, stitches of sil-
very drops that on the
tail!similar to an aquatic
flower!open into more spots
of vermillion of varying in-
tensity, detached petals that
culminate in a sun that could
also be pollen of the mari-
gold. In her arms!wide
open in their own blood with
iron nails, more flames and
right-angle sequences spread-
ing across the stomach and
legs!she takes its left ear, so
fleshy and so long; she takes
it as if she were stretching it
out, to show off the flaming

! -22-
 zephyr along its border, lilac
hieroglyphs, scrawls that
catch fire while the other
immense ear sticks up in the
air and twists towards the
sky, a jumble that becomes
hollow while also revealing
turquois and mandarin
brush-strokes to hear me tell-
ing you that its feet, its
bloody claws, bedaubed, look
like mine or like those of
someone already immersed in
the coming moment, and it’s
terrible that I don’t remem-
ber her:

! -23-
 A hippopotamus that
looks like a sandpainting,
the back of an ancient
stone painted in concen-
tric circles, triangles, cu-
bes, pyramidal patterns
that fool the eye the same
way that copper rusts;
pinks, greens, citruses,
runes and pixels up to its
clay face, white-rimmed
bloodshot eyes with im-
mense black pupils, in the
yellow shadow of its body,
around which a serpent is
coiled, a serpent with
scales of igneous gilding,
whose eyes are even

! -24-
 whiter, its size is even
greater than its guest’s,
and its two huge mouths
completely open show the
same contour, one is
grape-color and the other
reddish, four fangs in eve-
ry scream, smile, or growl,
and they speak to me. I
don’t know. All I manage
to comprehend is that the
ribbon-like mammalian
tail of alternating brick
and mustard color has
mortally tangled with the
reptilian stinger, and be-
tween the rim of the anus
and the thigh of that

! -25-
 muscular beast that point
will remain embedded, as
if next time they were go-
ing to caress each other:

! -26-
6.

We danced, you and I, swollen with

desire to a shouted song in the middle
of the dance floor.
We pressed against each other
and pushed ourselves toward the edge,
in a place where no one else fit and,
though the chorus was repetitive, clear,
and in Diidxazaá!prayer for a snail in
nightclub, they shouted!who the fuck
were we: a couple, one of my voices

! -27-
superimposed over another voice falsely
yours and one more, foreign inside the
dream; three friends!you, me, this
whole mass of names lost, there, amid
Senegalese drums!woke up in English,
soaking wet. And yet there was only one
in the bed, naked, feverishly writing
this: when I was a baby, in a delirium, I
saw that you were the snail and I was
the shell just as someone discovered us
shouting in the middle of the dance
floor and carried us out to the patio in
her sweaty pocket so no one stepped on
us, even if I didn’t know the Diidxazaá
word for snail, I write in Tchilean: we’re
so far from the water and our whole
body is sea.

! -28-
7.

My dear daughter,

It calms me to know that you made it to

Oaxaca so quickly. And what about the
short story in seven parts you were
telling me about? Is it going to be about
great aunt or about the life of
her father?
The truth is that I don’t know
more than what I told you about that

! -29-
horrible episode that was mentioned a
few years ago at the dinner table. When
I imagine her there, locked inside the
bank’s safe with the old gringos, right
when the police started to shoot at the
teachers in the main square, the pencil
slips from my fingers and I want to ask
the nurse to shut the curtains.
For years I’ve been hearing from
my sister, and she heard it from my
mother, that our great aunt left us some
shares from Banco Mercantil, which
disappeared a few years ago because,
after changing owners, it turned into
Banamex. Yes. The damned Banamex
bank, my dear daughter. So be careful:
everything you publish, do so under
other names, and I hope that you write

! -30-
with great complexity, as you know well
how to do, so that only that one man
understands and he gives them the
alebrije once and for all.
I confess that since the surgery I
spend sleepless nights thinking about
the two of you. Don’t worry, this is in-
finitely better than continuing to dream
horrors like the ones you heard me ut-
tering on Christmas Eve. You have a
very risky plan, my beloved daughter.
Over there they don’t tolerate relation-
ships like the two of you have, and the
authorities don’t react well to questions.
As soon as they learn that someone has
come with old documents to investigate,
they give the order to put a bullet in her
head. So I insist that you stick to your

! -31-
plan of publishing the little Oaxacan
short story in that Mexican-American
book. Believe me: if the book reaches
the bookstore owned by the paper com-
pany, it’ll surely end up in the hands of
a Zapotec professor linked to the
artisan union.
I think the information that I
now include in this letter was sleeping
in my memory. I hadn’t recalled it until
your cousin, urgently searching the
Internet following her nose for money,
found some database called Banking
Credit Balance, information that by law
has to be issued annually. That database
contains all stocks, bonds, and shares
that, under the power of one institution
or another, haven’t been requested. All

! -32-
of that is public. You search by name
and surname of the interested party, and
when we entered ours, the eight thou-
sand shares estate appear, in my name
and your aunt’s. We fell off our chairs.
It’s public and no one realized. I didn’t
pay much attention to it until last year,
when we saw the bill from the Mayo
clinic and we got an inkling of the
money problems that were on the way.
Daughter: I have so little time
left that I ask you only to pay the debts
and invest the remaining money. Get
the alebrije back. This brings hope to
my hours of nightmares: I imagine day-
to-day life in a region without over-
lords, villages free from bureaucratic
corruption, cleansed of commerce that

! -33-
sees little girls selling sex to big boys
who never grow up.
Before I forget, your first ques-
tion: your great aunt was single her en-
tire life, but that doesn’t mean she
didn’t have daughters. Since she was a
kid, she sold grasshoppers and tlayudas
in the markets until her mother, who
was very skilled, began to make the
alebrijes. Back then no one called them
that, apparently your great-grandfather
gave them that name and made all his
daughters carve until he became famous
for being the inventor of alebrijes. Some
people from New Jersey even went to
interview him, and he took advantage of
the recognition to fight the union and
make tons of money. In the hacienda

! -34-
you’ll find the alebrije of igneous gild-
ing. Look for it. Perhaps it’s still there.
Perhaps it’s among the ones kept by the
museum. Perhaps it’s for sale at an ex-
orbitant price in one of the exclusive
boutiques that have been installed in
recent years. Inside the serpent is hid-
den the key to the safe that she was
unable to use. I recall an image of that
alebrije among the hundreds that deco-
rated the hallway of the house where
your great aunt lived, taking care of us.
She used to say that we were the daugh-
ters of her sisters who were studying at
Harvard, at the UNAM, and at La Sor-
bonne. I have no idea how many of us
spent our childhood there.

! -35-
 I hope, beloved little daughter,
that you find the safe and with the
money inside, which belongs to all, you
can finance the uprising. The plan is
good. And if your cousin is right, and
the fact is that you all invented this
story to sustain my enthusiasm, God
bless you all.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to
write again to answer your last question.
I can’t tell anyone about my nightmares,
but no: the alebrijes don’t appear there.

! -36-
 Tunnel Books Collection
First Series

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by Alberto Chimal

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by Carlos Labbé

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by Claudia Salazar-Jiménez

Avalanche, Diptych, and Homologous Parts

by Leila Guenther

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by Mónica Ríos

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BOOKS