In this story, there is a man who keeps a labyrinth in his pants pocket. Such a feat might have seemed sufficient to turn him into the protagonist of the story; our minds, however, were elsewhere. If we’d been two years younger, perhaps the most important thing in the world would have been figuring out how it was possible for a labyrinth to fit in someone’s pocket. But we were two years older and had grown arrogant. The labyrinth thing had to be a scam, or a trap, a moneymaking strategy of some sort. If you wanted to see the labyrinth, the man would probably try and sell you a time-share or something. This was what had happened to one of us—he had gone one summer to the beach for free with his family, only to have to put up with the constant harassment of the tourist reps. Another possibility, just as repugnant, was that the man was a pedophile and the labyrinth functioned as bait. This last conjecture was supported by the frequency with which the man kept putting his right hand into his pocket. We were old enough by that point to know what this meant.
And so we decided, unanimously, that the man with the labyrinth was not the protagonist of the story. Mainly because, at around that time, Bambi came to live in the town. We should explain the commotion: there were very few girls our age in the town, and Bambi came imported from the United States, with the same name as a deer from a movie with skinny little legs and winsome eyes. What’s more, we should not rule out the reason for the commotion being the penchant for bestiality common in towns such as ours.
Bambi spoke a truly glamorous Spanglish, awash with charming disagreements, especially those of gender and number. And she had that utterly adorable way of using the infinitive. The courtiers—us—lined up to be her boyfriend. We put ourselves in order of age, oldest first, and the line stretched around the corner. The town only had three streets; it was quite the scandal. But Bambi was an Americanized Mexican and didn’t believe in hierarchies of any species. She had absorbed the meritocracy of North American society very well, and so she handed us each a piece of paper with a test on it. A test of love: on the paper was a knight who had to pass through a labyrinth to get to a castle, where a princess awaited him. The labyrinth was incredibly convoluted. She counted to three and whoever finished it first would win first place in the line.
Finished! one of us who was halfway down the line shouted out, a nanosecond later. He had drawn a straight line from the knight to the castle, bursting through the walls of the labyrinth as if his pencil were a tunneling machine.
Not fair! we all shouted (except for the smartass), as we had seen people do in movies about the great injustices in the history of humanity, with a combination of rage and hope. Bambi looked at the boy’s piece of paper, stroked its author’s cheek, and announced that she liked men who made up their own rules. This constituted a tremendous global disappointment, at least for those of us in the town, because it showed us that movies lied, a fact that became the focus of all our discussions until one morning a boy was reported missing, a boy who had been seen talking to the man with the labyrinth in his pocket the previous afternoon.
Could the man have kidnapped him? Could it be that in his eagerness to protagonize, he would end up becoming the protagonist of the story? The police from the nearest city arrived, because towns with three streets don’t even have a police station. They interrogated the man, and the man showed them the labyrinth and, in the labyrinth, the boy’s fingerprints and, in some part of the labyrinth, the lost boy, trying to find his way out. You see? the man told them. He’s not missing, he’s just lost. The gossip that came out of this interrogation was sufficiently dramatic to become the motive for a story, a novel even, but at that moment a glittering announcement from the town hall arrived. (Because, although it couldn’t be justified from any administrative or budgetary-control perspective, towns with three streets do have a town hall. Not a police station, but a town hall for sure. How would they pilfer all the money if there wasn’t a town hall?!)
The announcement: an industrial park would be built in the town.
This announcement and the mere erection of the perimeter walls of the park were enough to start making the immigrants turn up. All of them poor. All of them carrying their belongings, including venereal diseases and canaries. They came from the north, contradicting all accepted theories about flows of migration. How could they not contradict them if not one of them had been to university or had heard of the conclusions reached by sociologists! They started building shacks in any old place, with pieces of wood and sheet metal, waiting for the factories to open.
Bambi protested, because she had spotted the threat: a raft of young girls with skinny legs, although without the added appeal of having a deer’s name. Labyrinth man also protested, saying he was sick of the little boy, who was tickling him between the legs. He couldn’t keep the labyrinth in his pocket anymore and now carried it in his hand the whole time, in full view of everyone.
Since there was nothing fun to do in the town, no cultural facilities of any sort, people began to place bets on what would become of the little boy in the labyrinth. They bet that he would get out, or not. Or they bet on how long it would take him. Or whether he would turn left or right when he got to a bend in the path. It was the only topic of conversation in the town and the betting system was such a success that it turned into a powerful mechanism of wealth redistribution (something that neither agrarian reform nor education nor government subsidies had managed to achieve).
Suddenly we were rich whenever our parents won, and then the next day, poor again. That was how large the amount of money circulating in the town was. The economic fluctuations made us cynical, and the constant contemplation of the girls who had arrived from the north, contradicting all the theories about migration flows, etc., hinted at a terrible hypothesis about the future: Maybe women were not, after all, a mystery so wondrous it was worth letting our lives be ruled by it?
And now?
Now school was about to finish—that is, the school grades that were offered in the town—and anyone who wished to continue studying would have to go to the neighboring city. We held a secret meeting, and after strenuous deliberations, with the help of a dictionary of rhetoric, we got it: the labyrinth was a metaphor. The labyrinth was the town. The little lost boy who couldn’t get out was all of us. The man with the labyrinth in his pocket didn’t exist! He was a symbol—he represented the future, that future our parents were speculating on, as if they were spinning a wheel of fortune. It wasn’t an entirely clear metaphor, and it still remained to be established where the boy who had disappeared had got to, but something was certain: labyrinth man was not going to be the protagonist of the story. At any rate, the future might be the subject of the story, but not its protagonist.
We packed our bags under the tearful gazes of our mothers and of Bambi, who kept repeating guilelessly: Please, you not go! She even promised she would marry each and every one of us, as if the town were in a country where polyandry was the norm.
At the final crossroads of the labyrinth, however, the first factory of the town’s industrial park was built: it was going to produce screws and it was to be expected that, sooner or later—sooner, preferably—a washer factory would be built next to it. Then things to screw would be required, tools and people to screw them. It was the most ambitious economic plan the town had ever known. The promise included not just the work, but also the temptation that, thanks to the resulting prosperity, the girls with the skinny legs who had come from the north, etc., would put on a little weight and acquire the quality of consorts.
Some of us unpacked our suitcases. Others started walking behind labyrinth man.
It is yet to be seen what it is he wants in exchange for having shown us the way.
Will he really take us on a free holiday to the beach?
Or is he waiting in some dark corner to put his hand between our legs? 
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He has written articles for international publications, short stories, and six novels, including Down the Rabbit Hole, which was translated into twenty languages and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Quesadillas, I’ll Sell You a Dog, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me and Invasion of the Spirit People. He lives with his wife and their two sons in Barcelona, Spain, where he teaches literature and creative writing.
Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator who has worked on many acclaimed books, including Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), and Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Arts Foundation Fellow, and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network, a lively online community for early-career literary translators.
Illustration: Karen Lynch
