Quesadillas

by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rosalind Harvey, Neel Mukherjee

  My mother maintained that the size of the kitchen was ludicrous, but she said it from her phoney middle-class perspective. Sure, why the hell would we want a gigantic kitchen – to hold quesadilla-throwing tournaments? After counting up the bedrooms and the bathrooms, my father had arrived at the conclusion that our neighbours would be a large family, a genuinely large one, with nine or ten children. This conclusion was nothing but an aspirational syllogism, because it implied it was possible to be rich in a large family, which would imply stratospheric quantities of cash. Here was another hole in this senseless story, also of interplanetary proportions, because the rich didn’t want to live on the Cerro de la Chingada; the rich lived in the centre. What was this enormous, luxurious house doing next to our little shoebox?

  Our speculations spread like the flames from a lazy inferno, gradually taking over every corner of the house, firing up our daily conversations, until one day, halfway through the summer holidays, someone knocked at the door and there were our neighbours with their fireman’s hose. Right from the start we were faced with a very serious arithmetical problem, since no matter how hard we looked we could only see three people, who, according to our calculations, must be a father, a mother and one son. As he opened the door to say hello, my father stuck his head out and peered towards the infinite horizon to see if he could glimpse the rest of the family.

  In an attempt to size up the neighbours and rescue them from the gloom of anonymity, my first approach was to imagine that they looked like teddy bears. All three were sturdy, ever so slightly fat, but not obese, just chubby – they enjoyed that excess of weight usually considered a sign of good taste in families with money. They smelt nice, their clothes were perfectly ironed, their shoes were shiny and their eyes were blue. They could easily be bears in a children’s story; they made you want to sneak into their house to steal their soup and have a siesta in their beds.

  We offered them a seat on the sofa in the living room, my mother and father brought chairs in from the kitchen and the rest of us spread ourselves out on the floor on our behinds. Our neighbours snubbed us by sitting on the edge of the sofa, perching, barely touching it. Technically they weren’t sitting down, because to be sitting down the weight of one’s body must be touching the surface on which the behind is placed. At the most you might say that they were sitting on themselves, which is exhausting and has painful consequences for the back. It was obvious they didn’t plan on staying long, that the state of the sofa fabric disgusted them or perhaps they were suffering from piles – if this had been the case, then perhaps we would have been able to forgive them.

  Making a great show of our status as a psychologically middle-class family, we offered them iced tea and cheap María cookies. My father and his new neighbour took the encounter very seriously, as if they were at an interview for a really lucrative job – one of those jobs where you don’t work for your salary – or asking for the hand of a rather delectable girlfriend whom they hadn’t yet managed to feel up.

  When it came to the introductions, the father informed us that they used to live in Silao and were taking advantage of the summer break to move, and announced that their names were Jaroslaw senior, Jaroslaw junior and Heniuta. He told us that they called their son Jarek for short, but also to distinguish him from his father when people needed to yell at them from afar. My parents contained their onomatological astonishment as best they could; my siblings and I kept quiet as mice. We’d received military training for this sort of thing; this had been our social education: shutting our damn traps. Finally the explanation arrived, just before we came to the charming conclusion that our new neighbours were are crazy as we were.

  ‘We’re Polish,’ apologised Jaroslaw senior.

  ‘How lovely. Just like the Pope,’ my mother broke in, immediately regretting it when she remembered the atrocities the Communists used to commit hidden behind the iron curtain.

  More than a country, Poland was the perfect alibi. Where was Poland? Did anyone know a Pole? What scandal were the three little bears trying to hide by inventing a Slavic ancestry for themselves? Poland allowed the family to annex any fantasy they liked on to their past, because Poland was nowhere.

  Making use of the geopolitical hiatus, Jarek interrupted the ceremony to examine a María cookie up close.

  ‘Don’t you have any Oreos?’

  Heniuta gave his arm a gangrene-inducing squeeze. The level of pressure she applied could only mean one thing, which she didn’t say but which we all heard loud and clear, despite my siblings’ silent roars of laughter at the coincidence.

  ‘Hush, they’re poor!’ her whispered glare seemed to shout.

  My father introduced us, proudly pronouncing our fabulous Greek names: Aristotle, Orestes, Archilochus, Callimachus and Electra. We were more like the index of an encyclopaedia than a family. So as not to sully the solemnity of the moment with drama, he decided to substitute the newly non-existent existence of the pretend twins for a nostalgic pause after the mention of my sister, who was now the youngest. But they knew our family had been mutilated, of course they knew; that’s why they nodded with a feigned expression of pity, and we all observed a minute’s silence. By way of compensation, Jaroslaw congratulated my father for having picked this piece of land on the Cerro de la Chingada. He said that he knew lots of people, that he’d been asking around, that the urban sprawl was heading in this direction and in a few years this would be one of the most prosperous neighbourhoods of Lagos.

  ‘Great investment. You, sir, are a visionary,’ concluded Jaroslaw, evidently unaware of the means by which we, and the rest of the people who lived in the houses dotted around the hillside, had ‘bought’ the land.

  The shock forced my father to speed the conversation forward into the CV-comparison phase.

  ‘I teach citizenship at the local state school.’

  He launched immediately into talking about the importance of citizenship in this age of axiological chaos, when no one adhered to the principles of coexistence, starting with the government and its institutions, which adhered only to the principles of fraud, demagoguery and theft. Wasting no time and completely out of the blue, he began describing the systems of government in the city-states of ancient Greece, but his entire speech was spoiled by the spots of iced tea that had spattered across his shirt, hopelessly discrediting him. It was something we were always doing at home, staining our clothes and dropping things all over ourselves, each other and the floor; it was the cross my mother had to bear.

  Then it was Jaroslaw’s turn; he claimed to inseminate cows for a living. Things were drifting dangerously towards bovine eroticism and the two mothers started dying of embarrassment. It really wasn’t the time or the place to start pondering the quality of imported bull semen, no matter how Canadian those poor horny beasts might be.

  Let’s take advantage of the bovines’ reappearance to establish, once and for all and in one sentence, the quaint nature of the place where we lived: in Lagos, we inseminated the cows and we pulled the bulls’ tails. Luckily I’d only been to a charreada once in my life; it was for a school trip, a session of nationalist indoctrination. What if our bovine and equine friends found out that as well as constantly bugging the hell out of them we used them as a symbol for our traditions too? Try asking a horse or a cow if it knows what a country is. So, an unsuspecting bull would run out into the arena and the charro would chase after it on horseback. As the bull tried to take in the existence of the terraces and the audience, the charro would grab it by the tail and try to bring it down. If he managed it: applause. If he didn’t: murmurs. If the bull fell down beautifully: standing ovation. The mistreatment of an animal as an aesthetic category. This was how the hours were spent in the coleadero or steer-tailing event. There were other kinds too: a bull would trot absent-mindedly out into the arena and the waiting charro tried to lasso it. If he lassoed the creature’s back legs this was called a pial. If he lassoed its forefeet, a mangana. If the charro failed to lasso the animal it
was because he was an idiot. I suppose the excitement lay in the danger, in the fact that something might go wrong and the charreada could end in tragedy. The bull might charge the charro and gore him. The horse might panic and break the charro’s neck. The bull and the horse might get together and plot the charro’s bloody end – when they found out about the existence of Mexico, for instance. The charro might lose control of the lasso and garrotte a spectator – a child, to make it more scandalous and worthy of decades of gossip, passed down from generation to generation. And all this for the sheer pleasure of keeping traditions alive.

  Heniuta demonstrated that, like my mother, she too knew how to divert attention away from her husband: she asked us how old we were and the name of the school our parents had chosen, so they’d stop traumatising us. If the possibility had existed, if only in a parallel universe, that my mother might become friends with her new neighbour, it vanished when the Polish woman expressed shock at the fact we didn’t go to a state school.

  ‘You must be kidding!’ said my mother indignantly, prepared to renounce everything except the possibility, also minute, perhaps in the same parallel universe, that her children might have a brilliant future.

  ‘I’m sorry. I only said that because your husband teaches at a state school.’

  ‘And that means we have to settle for second best too?’

  Jarek went to a different school from ours, one also run by priests, but by rich priests, not like ours, whose cassocks had threadbare collars and sleeves. Suddenly Heniuta looked straight at me, singling me out with a movement of her chin, and these two simple gestures, plus the phrase that served them as an epilogue, separated me from the rest of my siblings.

  ‘You’re the same age as Jarek.’ She said it mischievously – did she know how much we liked jerking off?

  ‘And he can recite poetry! He’s the school champion,’ said my mother, anxious to sell me, as if Heniuta was considering adopting me or my oratory skills could make us equal from a socio-economic point of view.

  ‘Really? Go on then, let’s hear him.’

  So there I was:

  ‘Patria, your surface is the gold of maize,

  below, the palace of gold medallion kings,

  your sky is filled with the heron’s flight

  and green lightning of parrots’ wings,

  etc.’

  And that was how I gained a friend for the first time in my life. Up until then I hadn’t needed friends; I had six brothers and sisters, then I had four. In terms of company and entertainment I was quite self-sufficient. And that was without counting the lousy logistical complications of living on the Cerro de la Chingada: if I wanted to invite a schoolfriend round I had to devise a plan for getting them here and back, plus think about what to do if we ended up having to evacuate them. In any case, I didn’t want to invite anyone back to mine. It was better that way, in fact, because at school I spent my time trying to be invisible, making sure no one noticed I was there, which was the methodology I had adopted to keep myself safe from the bullies, who for some inexplicable reason didn’t like poetry, no matter how anonymous it was.

  The two mothers only agreed to stop with their pretence when they saw that their husbands had changed the subject and were now getting bogged down in the muddy terrain of domestic survival technology on the Cerro de la Chingada. Jaroslaw was explaining his work schedule to my father, saying it would be impossible for him to take delivery of the water tanker that would fill their stratospheric cistern with water three times a week. My father replied that we only needed two tankers of water a month and his new neighbour proposed that if we helped him out by opening his door and overseeing the filling up of the cistern, in return he would give us the water that was left over in the tanker for free.

  ‘We can’t do that, and we don’t need any more water,’ declared my father, robbing us of the much-dreamed-of scenario that a few hateful phrases would disappear from our vocabulary for ever: don’t flush the toilet, turn off the tap, don’t wash it, it’s not dirty, you’ve just had a drink of water, and a lengthy etc, as long and as wide as the River Amazon.

  Speaking of rivers and water shortages, in our town we have a ridiculous river, which for most of the year is minuscule, although it stinks to high heaven. It’s where the ranches, the chicken farms and the Nestlé factory all dump their waste, and is the origin of a horrific, pestilential cloud of mosquitoes. In the rainy season it turns into a majestic torrent that keeps the entire population on tenterhooks over the threat of flooding. The river is always at the heart of any political debate, whether it’s for having destroyed another neighbourhood or having caused the latest epidemic of dengue fever.

  My mother put on the face she loved to wear every time she suffered one of her regular resounding defeats, and the rest of us resigned ourselves to the prospect of remaining kind of dirty, but it seemed we shone with dignity. After asking my father twice more to see reason – that is, to help him out – Jaroslaw took advantage of the snub to turn it into an insult and leave. He said goodbye with a level of formality inversely proportional to that of his initial greeting, dragging his family behind him.

  My father didn’t even wait for the door to close before passing judgement: ‘Three tankers a week, in that house with so many rooms for just three of them … Those people are constitutionally prone to extravagance.’

  He was right, it was crystal clear, and we were the opposite: people prone to parsimony.

  Despite the disagreement, the next day Jarek knocked on our door to invite me round to his house. He just stood there, a metre away from the door, waiting for me to come out and making it absolutely clear that he would never enter our house again. My mother insisted he come in, have some iced tea, but having been in the shoebox once had been traumatising enough for him.

  Jarek showed me his house and I had to try damned hard to act surprised, because instead of surprise what turned my stomach was the disappointment, the anticlimax on realising that our speculations had been wrong: that instead of the ten bedrooms for ten children my father had suggested, it turned out that they were all rooms for sewing in or for playing games in, offices, or a room for watching TV. The ultimate insult was that one of the rooms turned out to be the maid’s. The worst thing wasn’t being poor; the worst thing was having no idea of the things you can do when you have money.

  We went into the games room so that Jarek could train me to kill Martians on the Atari. His precise instructions demonstrated the crushing logic the makers of the game had given their machines: if you moved the control to the right the spaceship moved to the right, if you moved it to the left it went to the left, up and down meant the same; if you pressed the button once you shot once, if you pressed it twice you shot twice, and three times, three. The world was ruled by a band of incredibly dull Aristotelians. I didn’t understand where the fun was, other than in verifying that the device always did what you told it to. Was it the paradox of having invented a contraption whose fantasies served to verify the rules of reality?

  ‘Isn’t all that poetry-reciting stuff embarrassing?’ asked Jarek, without wavering in his manipulation of the joystick.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s stupid, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a contest, like football.’

  ‘But they don’t show it on TV.’

  They didn’t show Atari championships on TV either, but so what? Our session of galactic extermination was interrupted by Heniuta, who had brought us each a different afternoon snack: chocolate cake and Coca-Cola for Jarek, and for me a plate with steak, rice and salad, and a lemonade. The truth is, the meal looked quite like the one I’d eaten at home three hours earlier, except with steak instead of chicken and salad instead of beans. I wanted chocolate cake, but before I could complain, Heniuta fired off a nutritional threat.

  ‘You need to eat properly, you’re too thin.’

  I wasn’t hungry, but I still adhered to the philosophy of opportunistic exploitation, which
states that one attacks without thinking about it whenever the occasion arises, because the future is like a woman with abrupt mood swings who sometimes says yes, sometimes no, and pretty often hasn’t even got a clue. Despite having been downgraded to the category of pretend large family, there are some things one learns that cannot and should not be forgotten. I ate at the speed I always did at home, and my display of skill impressed Jarek so much that he rewarded me with a look of disgust and gave me his chocolate cake, pity having overcome his appetite. It’s touching that the rich can feel class guilt at such an early age, poor little things. Even so, compassion can quite happily coexist with impertinence.

  ‘Didn’t you have lunch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you eat?’

  ‘Rice, beans and chicken.’

  ‘Chicken?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘So why were you so hungry?’

  ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘And so why did you eat that food as if you were starving?’

  ‘I always eat like that. It’s a habit.’ Children with no siblings eat at a snail’s pace, although without dribbling, let’s make that clear. I wouldn’t want to cause any clan resentment.

  ‘But I don’t get it. Why eat if you’re not hungry?’

  ‘So it doesn’t go to waste.’

  Suspicion made Jarek shoot out a little dotted beam, like the ones fired by the Martian ships, between his eyes and mine. My answer didn’t fit in with his system of prejudices and he began to suspect I was a fraud, a pretend poor person, a middle-classer who pretended to be poor to steal from the rich. What if it turned out that, just as my mother said, we were middle class?