Quesadillas
Page 4
‘And why the hell didn’t you tell my mum you weren’t hungry?’
‘She wouldn’t let me, and anyway she said I was thin.’
‘But you’re not thin because you’re hungry, you’re thin because that’s just what you’re like.’
It was my turn, but I kept my upper and lower molars clamped shut – what could I say, apologise for my genes?
‘Well, next time you tell her you’ve already eaten.’
‘The cake’s nice.’
‘My dad gets it from León.’ Telling the poor and the middle classes apart might be an esoteric riddle but it was the wealthy who were really easy to spot: they ate cakes imported from the lowlands.
‘Your dad goes to León to buy this cake?’
‘Don’t be an idiot. He buys it when his route takes him past León.’
‘What route?’
‘His route for the ranches.’
‘Have you been to León?’
‘Of course! We go there all the time to go to the cinema and the shopping centre.’ More defining characteristics of the rich: access to culture.
There are only three things worth mentioning about León: they make shoes there, the people are unreasonably smug and they have a football team that is capable only of either winning the league or being relegated.
‘Haven’t you been to León?’
‘No.’
‘Really? But it’s really close, just half an hour away!’
‘My dad doesn’t like travelling.’
‘What about Aguascalientes?’
‘No.’
‘Irapuato?’
‘No.’
‘Guadalajara?’
‘No.’
I was losing points spectacularly in this socio-economic survey. I needed to do something quickly before I ended up out on the margins of society.
‘Guanajuato?’
‘I went to La Chona once.’
‘Where’s that?’
Our family outing to La Chona had taken place during a burst of opportunism on the part of my father – he did have a genuine phobia of leaving the town’s limits. On Sunday evenings we used to drive down the hill to my grandparents’ house, where we got together with my aunts and uncles and cousins. Well aware of the incompatibility of our various traumas and paranoias – which reached its most dangerous manifestation in the militant division between ophidiophobes and ophidiophiles – my parents and aunts and uncles understood that they should only keep in touch infrequently, to prevent the friction in our relationships from causing actual lacerations. An hour a week seemed to be the limit: specifically, Sundays from four to five o’clock. They had even considered the advantages of this time from a biological point of view, as it was the period par excellence of laziness and docility, the hour after Sunday lunch, the time of a general decrease in the metabolic functions.
That Sunday, after a bout of communal hibernation at my grandparents’ house, we found the road back home blocked by a milk truck that had ran out of fuel. We had to turn around and came out on to the highway leading to Aguascalientes, from where we could rejoin the road we needed a bit further on. My father, however, kept on going, driving very slowly and carefully, because all seven of us children were in the back of the truck, including the pretend twins, who at that point still deigned to grace us with their presence. Fifteen minutes later we entered La Chona and my father parked the truck in the main square, next to the parish church, which was smaller than ours.
‘You see? It’s exactly the same as Lagos,’ my father said, revealing his motive, his desire to demystify the world, represented rather pathetically at that moment by La Chona.
But it was a lie, because instead of the plague of sparrows we had in Lagos, La Chona had a shitload of starlings. Our half-hour sojourn in La Chona, where we had an ice cream that divided opinion, gave my father the excuse he needed to refuse every time we asked him to take us to León or San Juan.
‘Why do you want to go there?’ he would repeat. ‘It’s all the same. You’ve already been to La Chona. All cities are the same; some are bigger, some are smaller, or uglier or prettier, but basically the same.’ This fallacy was so shaky that it only served to expose him.
Because of all this I knew that no one had stolen the pretend twins; they had simply decided to take off, to escape the limits of our claustrophobic existence. Jarek had never thought of running away from home. No matter how much they said on the telenovelas on TV about the rich crying too, to me they looked very comfortable, very content, very satisfied with their exclusive happiness.
‘Where’s La Chona?’
‘It’s a city on the way to Aguascalientes. It’s imposing.’
‘Imposing? Well, I’ve been to Aguascalientes loads of times and I’ve never seen La Chona.’
‘That’s because it’s called Encarnación de Díaz, but we call it La Chona for short.’
‘You’re kidding. I do know it. It’s ugly as hell! We stopped off there once for a fruit juice and we all got diarrhoea.’
‘Have you been to Poland?’
‘No.’
I knew it: a pretend Pole. Your dad was probably a serial killer. Or a lousy con artist.
‘Have you been to Disneyland?’ Jarek fired back.
Yeah, right: we flew there from La Chona’s international airport. As far as I knew, Disneyland was a fairy-tale castle where what mattered was to behave well, whatever happened and whatever you saw. Sometimes, when no one was watching, some Mickey Mouse would take you somewhere dark and grab your dick, or put his finger up your arse. But you had to keep quiet, not complain, and not do the same, not try and feel up Daisy or Minnie’s tits, oh no, because there were some really violent policemen who would beat you to a pulp with their truncheons if you did. You see? Best not to talk about Disneyland in front of the poor.
I knew what was going to happen now; I’d heard these conversations dozens of times, especially after the summer or Easter holidays, when my more prosperous classmates would start describing the paradise, that promised land we Mexicans had on the other side of the fucking border.
In the United States there was no rubbish; everything gleamed, just like on TV. The people weren’t dirty; they didn’t leave their rubbish in the street; they all put it in the right place, in these brightly coloured bins for sorting waste. A bin for banana skins. A bin for red fizzy drinks cans. A bin for Kentucky Fried Chicken bones. A bin for toilet paper covered in shit. Some enormous bins for old objects that had gone out of fashion and become an embarrassment to their ex-owners. It was so impressive that even people like us, who were only on holiday, didn’t leave our rubbish in the street.
What’s more, it was impossible to get ill from eating in a restaurant there. It wasn’t like here, where you went to get tacos and they gave you dog-meat tacos and the taco seller wiped his armpits with the same hand he picked up the tortillas with. There were restaurants in the States where you paid for a drink and then served yourself as many times as you liked. It was unbelievable: you had eighty Coca-Colas for the price of one. And they gave you free sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce; little sachets you could take back home to give as presents to your friends or to that poor little kid next door you’d been dying to humiliate because he’d never even been to León, the peasant.
But you had to speak English. Yes siree, even though there were fuckloads of Mexicans over there, the important thing was to speak English so they knew you were on holiday and wanted to spend money, because the gringos knew perfectly well how to tell the difference between invaders and tourists. You could see their expression change when your dad got out his wallet full of dollars, because one thing’s for sure, they weren’t racists. It didn’t matter if you were dark-skinned, the only thing that counted over there was money: if you were hard-working and had earned lots of money they respected you. That’s why they were a proper country, not like here, where everyone was trying to screw you over the whole time.
To my disappointment
, it turned out that rich people liked routine too. I knew we poor people were condemned to repeat every day the programme of events that guaranteed the greatest economic efficiency, but I had supposed that rich people’s days were devoted to surprise, to experiencing continually the euphoria of discoveries, the frisson of first times, the optimism of new beginnings. I hadn’t imagined the force of attraction imposed by the need to feel safe: a second law of gravity, the power of inertia calling its children to the warm bosom of boredom. In short, Jarek liked to do the same things every day; the afternoons we spent together were identical. We played on the Atari, had a snack, he talked about America, about Puerto Vallarta or his friends from Silao. Of all the disappointments of this friendship, the most depressing was that Jarek turned out to be a couple of years behind me in terms of hormonal confusion. His world was still one of toys and cartoons, his insipid pranks those of an overgrown child.
My visits to Jarek’s house were a bottomless well of worries for my mother, who was terrified I would wreak havoc like I did at home, getting us into debt with the neighbours in similar proportions to the country’s foreign debt. Every time I set off for Jarek’s house she would warn me, ‘Don’t break a vase, please.’
She didn’t know that our lack of motor coordination and absent-mindedness, the source of so many domestic accidents, were not personality traits but rather the consequences of our family’s chaotic interactions. Our tendency to disaster was existentialist. I had never broken a vase, because we didn’t have vases at home, but my mother had seen that kind of thing happen lots of times on television, on programmes and films that use people tripping over as a gimmick to get a laugh. Who knows why the reckless seem to be interested exclusively in vases when there are so many other receptacles and ornaments made of fragile materials that are fond of getting smashed to pieces.
In actual fact, Don’t break a vase was the metaphor my mother had chosen to disguise her innermost fears. Behind this innocuous phrase lay a literal cruelty, the words my mother didn’t dare say to me: Don’t steal anything. Don’t embarrass us. Don’t humiliate us.
Whenever I came home from the Poles’ mansion, my mother would demand I empty my pockets, turn my trousers inside out and take off my shoes.
‘How was it?’ she would ask, still doubting my innocence.
‘Fine. Do you know Jarek has a drawer for his socks?’ I would reply as I took off my own socks to prove there was nothing hidden there either.
‘What?’
‘Yup, a drawer just for putting socks in.’
‘Did you break anything?’
‘No, Mamá, I didn’t break anything.’
Once I was allowed past the threshold, my brothers and sisters would be waiting for me at the second customs barrier.
‘What did you bring us?’ Aristotle would interrogate me, feeling that I ought to pay them all a tax for having access to a different kind of boredom.
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t be an arsehole.’
And they would repeat the inspection, but without bothering to be as gentle as my mother, who watched us without intervening since thwarting her children’s greedy fantasies was impossible. As revenge, I would tell them about one of the Poles’ extravagances: that they had a room just for knick-knacks, or that the maid’s room had its own toilet.
‘I don’t like you going,’ my mother kept saying to me.
‘I won’t go again, don’t worry.’
But I kept on going, at least while the summer lasted. My relationship with Jarek would not cross this threshold, as was to be expected. I had known from the start that when he went to school he’d choose his own friends, with whom he could talk about the experiences they had in common from the convenient position of not having to explain things all the time, like he did with me. He had to explain everything to me: not just how to play on the Atari or what the United States was like, but also details such as why mayonnaise was eaten in great heaped spoonfuls and not spread in thin layers.
Showing off might be satisfying, but it gets tiring after a while.
Little Grey Men
‘The twins were abducted by aliens.’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t you speak Spanish, arsehole?’
This was the big surprise of the new school term: Aristotle wanted to become independent and he was going to attempt to do so in the most absurd way he could imagine.
‘Why do you think the police didn’t find them?’
‘Because the police are arseholes,’ I said, repeating my dad’s version of events.
‘Because they didn’t look properly, that’s why they didn’t find any clues. They didn’t find them because they didn’t look where they should have.’
‘And what were they supposed to do, go and search on other planets?’
I thought it was impossible for the twins to have been abducted in the supermarket. This was my main reservation: not so much the existence of aliens, which I was prepared to incorporate into my system of fictions, but rather the plausibility of a methodology that allowed for the abduction of humans in overcrowded spaces in broad daylight. Surely it would have been more logical for them to have been stolen away one night from our house, up on the Cerro de la Chingada? According to Aristotle, the aliens had no reason to obey human logic. The aliens didn’t come from Greece.
‘But there was no spaceship in the ISSSTE,’ I replied weakly, feigning resistance to my brother’s aggressive attempts to convince me.
‘Don’t be stupid. They probably used telepathy to control them, ordered them to leave the shop and then took them to the place where the spaceship could pick them up.’
‘What place?’
‘Mesa Redonda.’
In other words, they came down one hill to go up another one – the Round Table – poor things. We called it the Round Table because, after a brief, gentle incline, Mesa Redonda was cut off at the top, as if neatly sliced like a boiled egg. The hill’s uniformity produced an almost perfect circumference at the summit. The truth is, even without imagined conspiracies, it had a highly suspicious artificial appearance. Indeed, years later a trip was organised to analyse the hill with metal detectors and other contraptions, and half of Lagos turned up to volunteer. And the other half had to believe afterwards, in spite of the lack of evidence, that ‘strange things’ had been discovered.
Aristotle’s theory proposed that the pretend twins had walked ten kilometres from the ISSSTE shop along the San Juan highway, and then covered 4,000 metres of dirt road leading to the foot of the hill, and then – phew! – climbed all the way up it. And all without anyone seeing them.
‘Don’t be an arsehole.’ It was his preferred method of persuasion, calling me an arsehole. ‘They must have made them invisible, or used teleportation.’
Oh well, that changed everything. I allowed myself to be convinced out of pure, shameless self-interest. My brother was planning on moving from ideas to action and I had my plans too, lots of them. I was prepared to do anything to escape from home. This was the major temperamental difference between Aristotle and me: he needed a momentous project to justify what he was doing, while I made do with a lousy excuse.
In spite of his outrageous claims, Aristotle’s theories lacked originality. He had plagiarised them straight from the magazines his only schoolfriend lent him. This was the other big novelty in my brother’s life: he now had a friend, whose nickname was Epi, although he hardly counted because my brother was more his nurse than a friend; our teachers had enlisted Aristotle to go everywhere with the boy. Epi suffered from epileptic fits and Aristotle had been entrusted with a little device with a button he had to press in case of a seizure.
Epi’s magazines specialised in belittling the inhabitants of planet Earth. All of humanity’s advances and great works were explained by the presence of extraterrestrials. The Mayan and Egyptian pyramids, the Phoenician sailing routes, the great inventions of the Chinese, the philosophical systems of ancient Greece: all were gifts fr
om beings who had come from the stars. On the letters pages, readers told of abductions, UFO sightings and extraterrestrial genetic experiments. This was where Aristotle found the final piece for his jigsaw puzzle: the value our little brothers’ genes would have for the aliens, due to their being pretend twins.
‘They’re collecting all kinds of specimens. Tall people, short people, fair people, dark people, women, men, children, redheads, albinos, twins, triplets …’
‘And why do they take them?’
‘Why do you think? To cross them, to do experiments on them!’
The puzzle Aristotle had put together had pieces from many different places, forcibly assembled with the tenacity of desperation. The resulting image was chaotic, amorphous; disconnected shapes that instead of suggesting a meaning only sustained an absurdity. It was exactly what we needed: it was the map that would guide our footsteps.
It took us a while to put the plan into action because it depended on the coincidence of various external factors: on my father’s absence from home, on the relaxation of maternal supervision, on my younger siblings being otherwise entertained and on the neighbours being away. It seemed impossible, almost as impossible as the pretend twins having been abducted by aliens, but one day it happened, a day on which the law of probability decided to come down on our side. Before setting off, we jumped over the Poles’ garden wall, got into their house through the utility room and stole two rucksacks that we stuffed with provisions from the store cupboard. Oreos! Up yours, Jarek. We didn’t stick around to have a siesta, but we did at least take some blankets.
We fled the scene looking over our shoulders, practically running backwards. We could have gone without looking back, it would have had a more poetic impact, but it wouldn’t have been right: we had to make sure no one was following us. As a farewell view it was very depressing: our crummy little shoebox and the Poles’ mansion. Seen from a distance, our house looked like the Poles’ dog kennel – no, not even that. Or maybe, provided that the dog had died and hadn’t been replaced.