Quesadillas
Page 6
‘I’m not going back.’
‘What?’
‘I said I’m not going back, and I’m not going to walk up that damn hill with you either.’
‘Don’t be an arsehole …’
‘No, don’t you be an arsehole. You’re the one who believes in aliens. You’re the one who wants to walk up a fucking hill to wait for a stupid spaceship. Who’s the arsehole? Eh, arsehole? Who’s the arsehole? Arsehole! Arsehole! Arse-hole!’
Unfortunately his right arm obeyed the impulse, without giving his stunted conscience time to intercede: he opened a deep gash in my cheek with an empty can of tuna. A piece of my left cheek, just below the eye socket, was split open and simply hung there. I felt the warmth of the blood as it ran down towards my jaw, mixed up with the oil from the tuna; the mixture made its way towards my Adam’s apple. I grabbed the chunk of flesh and smoothed it back over the wound, but it came off and returned to its new precarious location.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘Fuck you, arsehole.’
‘I’m sorry. Wait … let me fix it.’
‘Fuck off, arsehole, go to hell.’
Second-to-last-chance Quesadillas
I pressed the red button and the acacias disappeared. Up sprang willows, elms, eucalyptus, beeches. My feet trod heavy, rebellious red earth that defied the wind, which had to look for other allies in its dusty little tricks. I saw feral dogs of unlikely colours, roads and streets carpeted with their squashed bodies. I came across rich people, people who foolishly persisted in thinking that the middle class existed; and poor people, poorer people, even poorer people, infinitely poor. And thanks to my ruse, I ate quesadillas for free in filthy joints, at street stalls with improbable architecture. I developed a subtle technique for detecting where they served the best quesadillas, inflationary quesadillas, which on the street had turned into second-to-last-chance quesadillas.
The trick was to avoid places with obsequious, smartly turned-out owners, the personification of the country’s false prosperity; they were the suppliers of so-called normal quesadillas – the illusion of normality was pretty widespread. And years later it was to increase massively during Carlos Salinas’ government, when we all started eating normal quesadillas, optimistic quesadillas even (this was the term we started to use when inflation went down), but always with borrowed money – they’d even give you credit for buying a kilo of tortillas, and we all know where that ended up.
It wasn’t a case of identifying the shabbier proprietors either, because the only thing they were guaranteed to give you was diarrhoea. The key was to track down the temporary hard workers, the ones who had woken up that morning with the crazy conviction that that very day their lives would change. To find the ones who had set themselves ambitious challenges as they left the house, who had decided to believe their own, home-grown delusion that they would conquer the world just because they had made up their minds to do it. They would be smartly dressed but betrayed at the last moment by a poorly scrubbed stain or the excessive amounts of polish they had rubbed on to their shoes. And this was where the damned difference between intention and reality suddenly became glaringly obvious. Where there’s a will but no way. Where there’s a really strong will but still no way. There’s no easier business than that spun from the threads of someone else’s impotence.
A simpler tactic was to identify the new places, the ones that were changing hands, or reopening after illness or financial problems. To take advantage of the optimism of new starts and recidivism. That was where they served the best quesadillas, second-to-last-chance quesadillas, overflowing with promises of a magnificent future, a future where it was easy as pie to imagine that if things were done well, sooner or later the comforts of success would arrive. However, this would only happen in another life, or at the least in another country, and so one couldn’t put one’s faith in the consistency of the quesadillas. Where yesterday one ate the best second-to-last chance quesadillas, today it would be devaluation quesadillas and tomorrow poor man’s quesadillas. That was life; that was what this lousy country was like, a specialist at shattering illusions. But the poverty of the many could turn into the fortune of the few, of those who knew how to interpret the signs, like me, who managed not to starve to death thanks to the simple method of exploiting people’s technological naivety. All because of the trick with the red button: the magic of that little device I had taken with me as revenge when I turned my back on Aristotle.
Coincidence is closely related to confusion and the two she-devils require the same conditions to arise: chaos, blessed chaos. Just as there is no confusion when nothing is happening or when everything’s nice and quiet, so there are no coincidences either. All you have to do is resignedly entrust your life to the stream of events, absent-mindedly surrender yourself to the game of cause and effect, and the watermelons will start to mature. That’s when we’re surprised, when the vine twists around our ankles, but at the same time we enjoy the sweet juice of its fruits as we spit out the little seeds: how confusing! Wow, what a coincidence! In other words, I don’t know how it happened; it was a coincidence that I discovered the red button’s powers. I suspect I didn’t even notice them the first time around. That’s typical of coincidences: they have to materialise time and time again before you spot them, and then yet more times until they’re classified as such. How many coincidences must have been lost because their victims weren’t paying attention? Life might be a festival of coincidences!
I was in a cheap little restaurant in San Juan, begging among the pilgrims, when I figured out the link between pressing the button and the functioning of the TV playing in a corner – a masterly strategy to numb the customers’ brains and distract them from the quality of the quesadillas, still in widespread use today. I pressed the button and the signal went. That telenovela The Rich Cry Too had just come on – uh-oh! Everyone was stuck wondering whether the rich would cry once and for fucking all. I pressed it again and the signal came back, to general relief. I did it again, and again. And again. I wanted to verify that coincidence had passed into the realms of causality. There was an exaggerated outbreak of despair perfectly in keeping with what had caused it. Taking advantage of her proximity, people implored the Virgin to solve the technical problem. I sent the signal back into the stratosphere and went up to the owner of the little place, who was wiggling the antenna with a vigour more suited to beating egg whites into stiff peaks.
‘I can fix it. I know what’s wrong.’
Her answer was to ignore me, thanks to my filthy appearance and to the prejudice that the masses have about teenagers’ knowledge of electronics.
‘My dad’s an electrician. It’s his job and I help him in his workshop.’
My defiance broke through her despair, transforming it into defensive indignation. A murmur of ‘What can this damn brat know!’ started to go round. They didn’t want to sell their hope so cheaply, but all the middle-aged women in the place were on the brink of hysteria, not knowing if the foolish Mariana was finally going to realise the bastard Luis Alberto was cheating on her. The show was on something like its third repeat, they all knew what happened in the end by heart, but even so people fucking love experiencing other people’s suffering again and again.
‘If I fix it you give me dinner – five quesadillas; no, better make it six. If I don’t fix it you don’t give me a thing.’
‘I’ll give you three if you get a move on.’
‘Four, and make them big ones.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Go on, then, but hurry up.’
As luck would have it, causality spread, and what worked for televisions worked just the same for electric whisks, blenders, radios, videos and any electrical device. Causality was not a creeper, it was a leafy tree that handed out its fruits punctually; all one had to do was keep an eye on them as they matured and not let them fall to the ground.
The work consisted of disguising my technical skills in a convincing way. The first few tim
es I limited myself to disconnecting the device in question and giving it a few well-aimed little thumps, a technique my mother had taught me. Although I made sure I never performed my feats twice in the same place, later on my style gradually became more baroque. I pretended I couldn’t fix it the first time, or the second; I said it was a complicated case and so was able to negotiate a higher fee. The third time always worked, as I didn’t want to contradict popular consensus: don’t bite the hand that feeds you! Most of the time I was paid in kind, although for more daring attempts I demanded cash payments. I invested part of my earnings and bought a set of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers and some coloured cables; my presentations gradually became more sophisticated as time went on.
‘Oh dear, I was afraid of this.’
‘What?’
‘This is happening to all Moulinex blenders.’
My victim looked at the apparatus as if it was a sister-in-law who’d just stabbed her in the back.
‘So what now?’
‘I’ll have to change the diffuser.’
‘The diffuser?’ Sometimes it was the diffuser, sometimes the combi gauge, the check valve or the axis.
‘Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll get it cheap for you. There’s a place where they sell used ones.’
Until the day came when my fame was such the people started coming to me to fix devices that I hadn’t broken. What’s more, so many coincidences occasionally raised suspicions that began to acquire an air of menace. I decided it was time to hit the road. Jalos, San Miguel El Alto, Pegueros, Tepatitlán; in four months I was in Zapotlanejo, right on the doorstep of Guadalajara. I said goodbye to each town with a spectacular performance, an immensely complicated operation I was immersed in for hours and for which I charged the amount I needed for the bus ticket and expenses for the following few days, which I would spend exploring my new territory. I had a crisis in Pegueros, where the little device stopped working, but I quickly discovered that all I had to do was change the batteries. In Tepa a policeman interrogated me: where did I live, who were my parents; but there were so many kids on the street it soon became obvious how useless his humanitarian efforts were and he left me in peace.
It turned out that my dad was partly right: cities might be bigger or smaller, uglier or prettier, but they were all the same damn thing, at least in this part of the world. In any case, surviving was a hobby that left no spare time for ontological speculations. It was like at home, except the competition had multiplied exponentially. All over the world there were a fuckload of grabbing hands, millions of hands with their ten times millions of fingers, struggling to pilfer its fruits. At least the fruits were more varied. Instead of just a few measly quesadillas, there were gorditas and huaraches, tamales and tacos de canasta. Of course, I still preferred quesadillas, because I couldn’t afford a psychoanalyst, but from time to time I ventured into the uncharted territory of diversification. The world of nixtamal was broad and wide.
My skill was not so great that I could escape the tangled sheets of poverty, but I didn’t go hungry. I ate every day, and occasionally I allowed myself a bath and a bed for the night in a hostel. I thought of Jarek every day; what would the poor little kid do in my situation? He wouldn’t even last three minutes in the dead-end alleys life sent me down. The teddy bears could do what they liked in their woodland fantasy, but the street belonged to men. Slowly, magnificently, my poor man’s pride was blossoming.
In most of the beings with whom I shared my condition – whether they were humans or dogs – the street had aroused a gregarious sentiment as a defensive formula for survival. They acted in groups, certain that in this way their chances would increase. However, the results always had to be divided and the equation wasn’t cost-effective: when the probability was multiplied by three, the results were divided by eight. I looked after myself, for mathematical reasons and above all because I was sick of taking part in cut-and-thrust negotiations. I could have stayed at home for that.
On my second day in each town, without fail, a ragged mob would confront me. They’d have been spying on me and in this they had an advantage: they knew all the streets and corners of the city by heart, so very quickly spotted any anomaly. The ringleader was always older, the street replicating the model of the family.
‘How do you do it?’
‘What?’
‘Fix the appliances.’
‘I know about electrical things.’
‘Teach us.’
‘No.’
‘Give us the money.’
‘I don’t have any. I work for food.’
‘Liar. We’ve seen you get money.’
‘It’s for parts.’
‘Give us some food.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t act dumb.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘We’re gonna fuck you up.’
‘What?’
My attitude wasn’t bluster. In the food chain I might have been an amoeba, but they were plankton.
‘Stop acting dumb.’
‘Do you know what I fixed yesterday? The police radio.’
The implicit threat never failed. It wasn’t greed that put an end to my survival strategy – as they teach you in telenovelas, which love to warn the poor how damn risky it is to try to get rich. It was coincidence again, the same bitch who had given me everything. One morning I was carrying out a routine operation at a juice stand in Tonalá when a man in a tie started watching me.
‘You’re good, you son of a bitch.’
‘Thank you, sir. My dad taught me. He has a workshop in San Miguel.’
‘Don’t act dumb. You don’t know shit about wiring. I don’t know how you do it, but it’s a good trick.’
I suddenly grew nervous and began to violate my own rules, to do things I never did. I dismantled one of the components, removed a cable.
‘Calm down, relax, finish up, and when you’re done we’ll talk.’
I took as long as I could. It was ridiculous, as I was working on a fucking juicer. I had to apologise and promise the juice-seller I wouldn’t charge her. I thought the tie man would get tired of waiting for me, but he seemed to have all the time in the world. He acted so calm, it was as if his minutes had a hundred seconds. I’d made such a hell of a mess that the parts didn’t fit any more; now I was even trying to stick an antenna into the machine. In the end I gave up and had to pay for my stupidity. It’s the guarantee, I kept saying to the woman, as if I was a representative from General Electric. A back-to-front world; that’s what happens when you get tangled up with coincidence. I tried to run away, but the tie man lassoed me with the prestige of his neckwear and dragged me off with an invitation to have breakfast in the restaurant on the corner.
It was the kind of place I’d never have dared to set foot in, not because of the quality of their quesadillas but because of the sad practice of self-imposed socio-economic levelling. I mean, there were two televisions, and what’s more, there were waiters. The one spying on us from afar was wavering between taking our order and calling the police. The place was full to bursting with men in ties and secretaries, so that it was impossible not to imagine the parallel phenomenon: empty reception desks and offices and large numbers of people forming long lines of pent-up exasperation. Queues are where resignation meets its match.
‘What do you want?’
‘Quesadillas.’
‘What kind?’
‘Cheese.’
‘Seriously?’
The tie man scanned the menu looking for culinary arguments to mock me with.
‘They have quesadillas with courgette flowers, with chicharrón, with chilli and onion, or with huitlacoche.’
‘Chicharrón.’
‘How many?’
‘Five.’
‘Three.’
‘Four.’
‘Three.’
He called the waiter over with an imperceptible telepathic nod, to which the other
man replied by gracing us with his presence, his head adorned with a little black bun pressed against the collar of his filthy white shirt. He adopted a diligent pose, shaking his notebook and pen so as to enact the urgency of the moment, as if we were going to dictate the next winning lottery number to him. But let’s not kid ourselves: his tip was at stake. It seemed everyone was constantly overacting, reading from a script full of clichés, which was understandable given the system of wealth distribution the country adhered to.
‘Two quesadillas with chicharrón, some chicken chilaquiles and two orange juices.’
‘We don’t have orange juice.’
‘So get some from the juice stand next door.’
A fast-paced battle broke out between the tie man and the little bun, which reached its climax when the tie man conjectured that if the waiter were living in the United States he would die in poverty, and was settled when the man agreed to walk fifty metres in exchange for resale rights. After agreeing on the percentage of the surcharge the waiter made off, promising to be quick, efficient and eternally loyal.
‘You’re even good when you fuck it up. What’s the trick?’
‘There is no trick.’
‘And I’m a fucking idiot. Make no mistake, I’m not like those fools you scam. Can’t you see who you’re talking to, you idiot?’
He seemed to be trying to tell me that there were two types of people in the world: those who wore ties and the idiots. Regardless of how smart the tie was, it shone with the lustre conferred only by regular use. The worn-out fabric was compensated for by the quality of the wearer’s performance, that of a man destined for intrigue, for the world of the abstract.