Quesadillas

by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rosalind Harvey, Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Which ones are the rebels?’ I asked.

  ‘Didn’t you understand what Dad said? Those arseholes are fucked already,’ said Aristotle self-righteously.

  My father was trying really hard not to crash the truck, an almost impossible task because, as well as the legions of furious drivers, the streets were rammed with kamikaze milk trucks. The cattle ranches near the town hadn’t been able to distribute their quotas in the last few days and now they needed to get rid of all the semi-rancid milk. Never underestimate the size of our dairy herds: it was a shitload of milk. There are very few milk trucks around these days, since the town’s industrial estate opened in the 1990s, with its big dairy companies who consume tons of milk and save farmers the hassle of looking for retailers. Most people buy their milk in the supermarket nowadays and many of them even choose to consume dairy products from the major milk-producing region of Comarca Lagunera, betraying our own cows.

  In the state-owned ISSSTE shop, there was an apocalypse taking place. Never-ending queues of haggard, badly dressed beings surged towards the opening doors, as if instead of buying supplies they wanted to be crushed to death and put an end to so much senseless damned suffering once and for all. We split into two units: four of my siblings went with my father to the tortilla bakery and the rest of us, the pretend twins and I, stayed to accompany my mother on her suicide mission. The division obeyed a logic imposed in principle by our age, but in effect mainly by the distinction between hysterical and melancholy personalities: Aristotle with my father, as he was the eldest and the most hysterical and violent, so my father could control him better; me, the second eldest at thirteen, with my mother, for being the second and the saddest, and also because my survival strategies were verbal, which meant (at most) potential psychological damage for my victims – a matter of little importance when we left the house and the aim was to avoid massive loss of life, our own or other people’s; Archilochus, Callimachus and Electra went with my father, for being at ages that carried high risks of vandalism and self-inflicted injury – eleven, nine and seven respectively; the pretend twins, together, with my mother and under my supervision, which they didn’t need because they were five years old and absent from the world the whole time, concentrating on photosynthesising and concerned only with staying next to each other, as if they were Siamese rather than pretend twins.

  My mother wasn’t afraid of crowds: they were her natural habitat. She herself had grown up in a large family, a genuine one, like they used to be, with eleven legally acknowledged brothers and sisters, plus three more who materialised when my grandfather died to claim their microscopic portion of the estate. She was a specialist in multitudes, capable of pushing in so as to be third in line at the deli when there were hundreds of people yelling at the pig slaughterer. I guarded the trolley into which my mother was gleefully throwing cheese, ham and mortadella. My mother’s skill at getting them to cut her the most ethereal slices ever had to be seen to be believed: thinner, thinner, she ordered the assistant menacingly. When we’d finished our cold-meat purchases, we confirmed that for every measly little victory in this life you get a real bastard of a disaster: the pretend twins had disappeared.

  The search grew incredibly complicated due to the pretend twins’ appearance. We had to explain what they looked like to the police and the staff of the ISSSTE shop, and my mother insisted on starting off her description in an irresistibly polemical fashion.

  ‘They’re twins, but they don’t look the same. They’re nothing like each other.’

  ‘If they don’t look the same, then they’re not twins,’ they objected, ignorantly deducing that our entire story was a lie, as if we enjoyed playing hide-and-seek with non-existent family members.

  I tried to put a stop to the investigators’ attempts to uphold the iron defence of Aristotelian logic before starting to look for the twins, completing my mother’s explanation with the help of an attack of nervous hiccups, the aim of which was to fracture my breastbone.

  ‘They are twins, but they’re just not real ones.’

  ‘Not real? So they’re invented?’ replied a bold officer who seemed to have decided it would be simpler to expose our falsehoods than to find the twins.

  ‘They’re biovular twins, dizygotic twins!’ my mother shouted, tearing at her hair, fully involved with the tragedy now, given that the situation had ended up in ancient Greece.

  The officer took me aside, stared at me with immense pity and, stroking my back like a little dog, asked me, ‘Is your mum crazy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I wasn’t absolutely sure. I’d never really had to consider it.

  Since there still wasn’t enough excitement, we added the issue of the twins’ indistinguishable apparel, because it really was difficult to tell us all apart. I don’t just mean for other people; even we found it hard. My parents contributed to the standardisation with their approach to economies of scale: they bought us all the same clothes so that they could haggle the price down, jeans and coloured T-shirts, always the same clothes, one size too big so they’d last longer, which had the hideous effect of making us all look permanently badly dressed. When the clothes were new they looked as if we’d borrowed them from someone else and by the time they fitted us perfectly they were worn out. And that’s without taking into account that the rags were passed down from old to young by means of a synchronised system of inheritance.

  Luckily my father turned up and the arguments stopped, although some employees continued to throw us suspicious glances that betrayed some highly serious ontological aspersions. We scoured every corner of the shop, combed the surrounding streets and didn’t find the pretend twins. The only thing the search achieved was to prove to me that we were poor, really poor, because in the shop there were a shitload of things we’d never bought.

  ‘Mamá, are we ever going to stop being poor?’ I asked, looking up at her as the tears dripped from her chin and landed in my hair. I made use of them to give my hair a brush, smoothing down a few stray tufts.

  ‘Your little brothers have gone missing! This is not the time to ask that question!’

  To me, however, the two things were equally important: finding the pretend twins and ascertaining our family’s hopes for socio-economic advancement.

  Two policemen accompanied us home to collect the twins’ birth certificates and some photographs of them taken a few days ago at school. The officer who had questioned me about my mother’s mental health turned out to be the local police chief, despite his lack of tact – or because of it, most probably. He looked carefully at the photos and his suspicions were confirmed.

  ‘I knew it. They’re not twins.’

  He had a great deal of hair on his head, different kinds of hair: straight, frizzy, wavy, curly; there were even several degrees of curls. You had the impression that up there, among such capillary chaos, his ideas were getting tangled up. He tried to introduce himself with a surname – like this: Officer Surname – but it was one of those surnames that millions of people have, really hard to tell apart. We needed anything that would save us from the panic we felt at that moment, and among the possibilities that presented themselves we found nothing better than a childish joke, which helped us to believe that what was happening wasn’t so serious after all, that it would be sorted out, that we were allowed to laugh in the midst of such distress. And so we nicknamed him Officer Mophead.

  The stellar strategy of the police consisted of plastering every wall in town with posters showing a photo of the twins. Underneath the photo screamed the word ‘MISSING’ in capital letters. Immediately below, the details were given in lower case: the names of my MISSING brothers, Castor and Pollux, the run-of-the-mill names of my parents (my grandparents hadn’t had the imagination to screw them up), the telephone number of the police and our home number. At the very bottom it said: ‘THINK THEY ARE TWINS’. We didn’t even offer a reward; we’d decided to take advantage of our new-found fame to broadcast our poverty, and my fath
er’s Greek delusions, to all and sundry.

  The days went by and we didn’t find them. At first we looked for them eagerly; it was the only thing we did. My father didn’t go to work, and as soon as we got back from school all we did was worry. Meanwhile, Aristotle concentrated wholeheartedly on another essential task: blaming me.

  ‘It’s your fault, arsehole,’ he would repeat, and my remaining siblings delighted in imitating him.

  I was able to ignore them without anxiety because I was an expert in matters of guilt. It was in order to weather situations like this that it had fallen to me to live in this town, be born into this family and go to a school where they specialised in doling out sins to us. I used my rhetorical skills to formulate an irrefutable defence: ‘No one goes missing unless they want to.’

  This reply made a profound impression on my siblings, as it did on me, because deep down – where the words made their impression – we all admitted that we’d love to be in the pretend twins’ place, to go missing, to leave this lousy house and the damn Cerro de la Chingada behind once and for all.

  Our sadness peaked one night when they interviewed Officer Mophead on the nine o’clock news. From what we could see on the screen, the make-up department had worked hard at trying to shape his hair into some sort of style. The result was alarming.

  ‘What’s happening to Officer Mophead’s mop?’ asked Electra, cementing for good the nickname we’d assigned him.

  After carrying out the obligatory tasks of describing the twins’ physical features and giving their names – which led to a brief digression into Graeco-Roman mythology – the presenter and his interviewee agreed to prolong the evening’s programme and fulfil their lifelong ambition of starring in the ten o’clock telenovela. Judging by the exceptionally high standard of hyperbole they were coming out with, they’d been born to do melodrama or, if their talents were not innate, at least the country had prepared them thoroughly.

  ‘So tell me, how are the parents?’ asked the presenter, contemptuously putting to one side the notes he had been tidying on his desk, making his intentions clear: right, let’s stop this fannying around and talk about what really matters.

  ‘They’re totally devastated, as you can imagine. De-va-stat-ed.’ He pronounced the word syllable by syllable, with repeated shakes of the strange form on top of his head.

  ‘Understandably – it must be hard to get over something like this.’ The presenter gave Officer Mophead a hideously pitying look, as if he was talking to the pretend twins’ father, although perhaps it was a ‘genuine moment’ and what happened was that the policeman’s hair suddenly seemed worthy of sympathy to him.

  ‘No one gets over this, no one,’ replied Officer Mophead in a fatalistic tone, shaking off his sadness because it wasn’t worth it. Why bother, if everything was hopeless, like his hair?

  ‘It’s true, no one gets over this,’ concluded the presenter, picking up his notes again to return to other news without a solution, such as the national economy.

  I looked at my parents and it was like the time when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw the columns of smoke that were also on the TV, except that now, instead of smoke, what I saw on their faces was the shadow – the threat – of everlasting unhappiness.

  As the weeks went by we grew used to disappointment; our despair was gradually tempered and started flirting timidly with resignation, until one day the two of them went to bed and the next morning only the second one woke up, the little slut, the one the priests had been trying to instil in us since the beginning of time.

  Another big relief was finally to be able to ascribe a motive to my mother’s recurring weeping sessions. It was something she used to do before, especially over the washing-up, and whenever we had asked her what was wrong she’d always replied that it was nothing. What did she mean ‘nothing’? In that case why was she crying? We stopped asking her, took a break from our worrying, as now we knew she was crying for her missing children, for having bartered her place in the queue at the meat counter for the pretend twins.

  Something similar happened with my father’s nervous exhaustion. Mercifully he now had a way to channel his insults, to translate national disaster into family disgrace, and condemn all politicians – regardless of rank or responsibility – for patently wallowing in their ineptitude at finding my little brothers. What he’d lost in professionalism and objectivity he had gained in poetic intensity. When Officer Mophead announced they were going to close the case, my father reached for a phrase that expressed perfectly the misfortunes of fate: ‘Life was just waiting to serve me up an arsehole like him.’

  As if all these advantages weren’t enough, which I’m not ashamed to admit, my siblings and I had awoken to a new and most convenient reality: we now got more quesadillas apiece in the nightly allocation. An unhealthy age dawned in which the truly significant difference was that I started noticing some things in my life for the first time. Up until then, the excess of stimuli had taught me distraction, generalisation, the need to act extremely quickly when I had the chance, before someone beat me to it. I hadn’t had time to stop and notice details, analyse characteristics or personalities, because things were always happening: fights, shouts, complaints, accusations, games with incomprehensible rules (to make sure that Aristotle won); a glass of milk would be knocked over, someone would break a plate, someone else would bring a snake they’d caught out on the hillside into the house. Chaos imposed its law and provided tangible proof that the universe was expanding, slowly falling apart and blurring the edges of reality.

  Now things were changing; we’d abandoned our status as an indiscriminate horde and moved from the category of multitudinous rabble to that of modest rabble. I only had four brothers and sisters left, and now I was able to look at them carefully, notice that two were very like my mother, that Aristotle had a pair of enormous ears that explained all his nicknames, that Archilochus and Callimachus were the same height despite being different ages; I even learned to tell us all apart by the stains on our teeth, assiduously imparted by the town’s fluoridated water. And, what’s more, we suddenly had a little sister who was making her damp debut aged seven by regressing to nightly bed-wetting.

  I took advantage of things getting back to normal to start up my sociological research once again.

  ‘Is it possible to stop being poor, Mamá?’

  ‘We’re not poor, Oreo, we’re middle class,’ replied my mother, as if one’s socio-economic status were a mental state.

  But all this about being middle class was like the normal quesadillas, something that could only exist in a normal country, a country where people weren’t constantly trying to screw you over. Anything normal was damned hard to obtain. At school they specialised in organising mass exterminations of any remotely eccentric student so as to turn us into normal people. Indeed, all the teachers and the priests complained constantly: why the hell couldn’t we act like normal people? The problem was that if we’d paid attention, if we’d followed the interpretations of their teachings to the letter, we would have ended up doing the opposite, nothing but sheer bonkers bullshit. We did what we could, what our randy bodies demanded of us, and we always pretended to ask for forgiveness, because they made us go to confession on the first Friday of every month.

  To avoid confessing the number of times I jerked off every day, I tried to distract the priest who heard my confession.

  ‘Father, forgive me for being poor.’

  ‘Being poor is not a sin, my child.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be poor, so I’ll probably end up stealing things or killing someone to stop being poor.’

  ‘One must be dignified in poverty, my child. One must learn to live in poverty with dignity. Jesus Christ our Lord was poor.’

  ‘Oh, and are you priests poor?’

  ‘Times have changed.’

  ‘So you’re not?’

  ‘We don’t concern ourselves wi
th material questions. We take care of the spirit. Money doesn’t interest us.’

  My father said the same thing when, in order to prove my mother was lying, I asked him if we were poor or middle class. He said that money didn’t matter, that what mattered was dignity. That confirmed it: we were poor. Our economic advances caused by the twins’ disappearance led me to start fantasising about slimming down the family still more so as to leave poverty behind altogether. How much better off would we be if another one of my siblings went missing? What would happen if two or three of them disappeared?

  Would we be rich?

  Or middle class, at least?

  It all depended on the flexibility of the family economy.

  ‌Poland is Nowhere

  ‘I smell a rat,’ my father started to say from the moment the bulldozers arrived, swiftly followed by an army of builders. Every day the trucks went back and forth, bringing building materials or taking waste away.

  My father mentally calculated the resources required to organise such a spectacle.

  ‘I smell a rat,’ he said again, because he could smell the petrol being burned by the machines, the cement being prepared by the mixers. It smelt of paint and soldering; it smelt of money, loads of money.

  All in all, it took our neighbours six months to build their insult to our humble little house. Every night during this period, before going to sleep, we would visit the building site to carry out a critical evaluation of the architectural advances. Nothing but sheer, lousy envy. This mansion wasn’t ashamed of the existence of the hill – unlike our house, which purported to be poised ‘evenly’ thanks to an artificial terrace – quite the opposite: the architect had taken full advantage of the hill to lay out the rooms on different levels. It wasn’t that the house had two or three floors, but rather that it was built at different heights.