A couple of years ago I experienced one of the worst creative blocks of my life. I couldn’t write, and in my fits of despair I wondered whether this streak of bad luck would ever come to an end. So I did the only thing there was to be done and flew to Tijuana, hoping to escape from the daily bustle and find some inspiration.
I rented a shabby and charmless room in a hotel downtown taken over by prostitutes. I spent some days wandering between cantinas and food stalls, eating whatever I pleased and smoking pot in the basements of shady establishments with no signs on their doors. I bought a gram of coke from a guy by the pissing stalls in a hostess bar and drunkenly stumbled through alleyways doing lines off of my hotel keys, greeting people along the way and listening to the corridos played by the bands in front of the taco stands in Zona Río. I had stopped in front of a group of mariachis howling in a square when a man in a gabardine jacket came up to me and, after staring me down, signaled with his head and whispered:
“What are you looking for, bro?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got all I need, thanks.”
“I can get you anything you want,” he says.
What a grand offer.
“Anything?” I ask.
“Anything,” he says. “What do you want?”
“What do you have?”
“Chicks,” he says as he hands me a leaflet for a brothel, “coke, guns . . .” He holds out a baggie of coke between his fingers, while he opens his jacket and reveals a tiny .22 caliber. “Whatever you want.”
“What else?” I say. “What else do you have?”
“What else do you want?” he says. “You can get anything here in Tijuana.”
“No shit. Anything, really?”
“Anything. You want a car? I have one around the corner, straight out of the factory. You want a curse to secure your mistress, or to bury your boss? A pre-Hispanic vase? An AR-15, a Kalashnikov? No? Perhaps your aunt needs a kidney, or maybe your wife? I can get it for you. Ready to be transplanted. Even the whole corpse if you want. Lots of people want them, to experiment on. No questions asked. What do you say?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Look,” he says, “do you want a crocodile’s skin?”
The man pulls out a black garbage bag from inside his jacket, snaps a quick look around us, and opens the bag. He uncoils a piece of cold and scaly leather that he hands to me to inspect. It’s a lizard’s skin.
“Great for a pair of boots,” he says. “Come on, buddy.”
“No, you know what? Thanks a lot. I don’t need any of this. Maybe next time.”
“A monkey’s paw?” he says, putting away the garbage bag and pulling out what looks like a stuffed toy from his other pocket. “It’s got three wishes left . . .”
“No, really,” I tell him. “Thanks a lot . . .”
I start to walk away but the guy follows me. He insists:
“What do you need, buddy? Everybody wants something. Go on, you can tell me. What are you after?”
I stopped. I had spent the whole night thinking about my creative difficulties, and since I was drunk and feeling bold, after hesitating for a moment I went ahead and asked him:
“You know what? The only thing I’m looking for is a good story. Do you have one of those?”
“That’s what you want? A story?”
“That’s right. I’m willing to pay good money. You got one?”
He thinks for a moment.
“See, that I don’t have,” he says. “I don’t do stories.”
I thank him and I’m about to keep on walking, when the man stops me.
“I don’t, but I know a guy who does,” he says.
“No shit?” I say.
“Sure thing . . . He’s got what you’re looking for. I can take you to him.”
This all sounds like a scam to me but I’m feeling sort of reckless and I don’t have anything to lose, so I tell him, “Sounds good, take me.” We set off and I follow him through the dark alleys of Calete, the little streets and tunnels to get to the Obrera district, and meanwhile the guy’s on the phone with a buddy of his. He tells him to meet us next to a streetlamp in an alley just off the speedway, which we tread in a sepulchral stillness.
When we get to the meeting point, there’s a blond guy with jeans and a denim jacket leaning on an ’89 Oldsmobile convertible. He’s smoking a cigarette, patient, next to the only lit streetlamp in the whole alleyway. He looks American but his accent is neutral, and it’s impossible to tell where he’s from.
“This is the homie I told you about,” says the guy in the gabardine jacket while I shake the blond guy’s hand. He stares at me with piercing blue eyes and says with a smile:
“Matthews, pleasure to meet you. You wanna see the merchandise?”
I say yes and we walk over to the Oldsmobile’s trunk. The guy holds his cigarette in his mouth, looks around to make sure no one’s watching, and when he opens the trunk, I can’t believe what I see.
The car trunk is full of stories. It swarms and shudders with the presence of a whole fauna of creatures of different sizes and textures trapped in that little space, vibrating and sliding from one end of the trunk to the other. They emit patterns of light and ethereal melodies—some attempt to break into flight while others crawl, viscous, or spring erratically from one place to the other like gigantic fleas.
“You can take a look, no hassle,” the blond guy says. “Watch out, some of them look slow and sort of dead, but they can bite a finger off.”
I grab one of them and look at it. It’s translucid, you can see its structure: the sublime arrangement of lines and spirals that give shape to it, the dance of colors and intertwined shapes of its body, and inside it you can see a tiny heart beating rapidly.
“They’re alive,” I tell the salesman.
“Of course they’re alive.”
“Where do you get them from?”
“Oh well, you know . . . From lots of places. Better not to ask. That one right there is a fairy tale, it’s only good for putting kids to sleep. If you want something more serious, I have an Assyrian origin myth—over four thousand years old. That right there is an urban legend . . . What kind of thing were you looking for?”
“Well, you know . . . A novel, to be honest.”
“Sure,” he says while he digs around the trunk, “I have a shitload of those.”
He starts taking out different stories and handing them to me to examine.
“This is an existentialist detective novel. That right there is a romance about gravediggers, and over there you have your psychedelic thrillers . . .”
“Damn.”
The guy smiles.
“You just tell me, man. What do you wanna write? What are you into? Borges, Carver, Bolaño . . . ? I bet you like Bolaño. Every chilango likes Bolaño.”
“Well, yeah. I like him, sure.”
“Of course you do,” he says. “The kid was a client too.”
“But you see, my real idol is Juan Rulfo . . .” I say.
“Rulfo? Say no more. I’ve got the perfect thing for you.”
He hands me a story.
“This one is about a dopehead who arrives in a ghost town to find his death. Just what you’re looking for.”
“For real?”
“Of course, man. Try it on,” he says, and I do just that: I try it on. “What did I tell you? Nice, isn’t it? It suits you just right.”
“You think so?”
“I know it.”
“Alright,” I say, “I’ll take it. How much?”
The salesman exchanges a quick look with the guy in the gabardine jacket, who has just been staring at us all this time, smiling like a child. Now he becomes serious again.
They both look at me and the blond one goes:
“Here’s the thing, my guy. You gotta give me a piece of your soul.”
“A piece?” I ask. “How much of it?”
“Just a little bit, that’s all,” he says, still smiling, “less than half, not even a third. Actually, less than a tenth. But I get to keep that piece.”
I thought about it. This all sounded like something I’d already heard before.
“Look here, man,” I say, “I don’t believe in all this soul business, so it’s alright with me. If you want, you can have the whole thing. Actually, let’s put it this way: if I give you my entire soul, all of it, how many stories can I have?”
The guy looks me over and then looks inside the trunk, his eyes half-closed and head cocked, estimating costs and profits.
“Well . . . quite a few, I guess,” he says.
“You’re on,” I reply. “Give me all I can afford.”
His blue, electric eyes shine with satisfaction and he heads to the back door of the car. He opens it, takes out an empty leather briefcase that he places on the ground before me, and tells me to fill it up with all the stories I can fit.
You know how it is: I took what I could. Filled the briefcase up to the brim. It was strange to me that this guy, who looked so sly, was just another hippie who believed in souls, UFOs, and probably Bigfoot, and that he would let me take all the stories from his trunk without asking for a single cent in exchange for them. But in the end I just shook his hand and walked away, feeling really good about myself. The blond guy stayed with the man in the gabardine jacket, and they both looked pretty satisfied.
I traveled back to the city with my stories. Smuggling them was a breeze. At the airport a security guard saw something move inside my bag and stopped me. I bet he thought I was smuggling turtles, or some endangered species of marsupial. He asked me to open my bag, but when he saw the stories he had no clue what they were.
“What’s this?” he asked me.
“They’re stories, officer.”
“You’ve got quite a few, don’t you think?”
“They’re harmless, sir. You want one?” I say. “Take one, really. You can give it to your wife.”
“No, no, no. I couldn’t . . .”
The cop just examined the stories and looked at me all amazed, like I was making fun of him, but finally he had to give up and admit he was at a loss.
“Go on, then. Just go straight ahead.”
So I did just that. Shortly after, I published a novel, and I still have a few stories, living in my fridge. They write themselves; I haven’t been able to put a single word on the page from that day. I haven’t fallen in love in years, I can’t feel the breeze against my face, and even flowers have lost their smell, but I try to convince myself that it’s just my seasonal allergies, plus some existential dread. Who would’ve thought that you needed a soul to do all those things? How was I supposed to know that’s what stories are made of? Right now they must be tearing my soul apart in some junkyard in the middle of the desert, turning it into newspaper headlines and juicy news segments, into placid dreams for politicians and businessmen, into tales they can sell at a bargain to gurus, filmmakers, taxi drivers, and all sorts of other charlatans.
Ah, Tijuana. I left my soul there. Sometimes I think about going back and searching for it. Perhaps I would find pieces of it strewn across the streets, abandoned in alleyways or crawling hungrily and in pain through the sidewalks. You can see anything there, find anything; no doubt about it. Especially stories, and the lost souls of naïve writers, like I used to be back then. If anyone sees it, I beg you to bring it back. I’m willing to pay a good price for it. 
Mateo García Elizondo (Mexico City, 1987) is a screenwriter and author, and grandson of legendary Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. His work has appeared in magazines such as Nexos, Revista Casa de las Américas, Quimera, Origami, and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. He has written scripts for film and graphic narrative, including the screenplay for the feature film Desierto (2015), which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. His debut novel, Last Date in El Zapotal, won the City of Barcelona Award for fiction written in Spanish.
Nicolás Maurokefalidis (Chaco, 2001) is an Argentinian writer and translator. He has lived in London, Mexico City, and New York.
Illustration: Sam Hadley.
