Quesadillas
Page 11
‘You weren’t in the right.’
‘Nor were they. The land belonged to the council. It wasn’t earmarked for housing.’
‘And who earmarks it? The council!’
‘Exactly!’
‘Yeah, exactly! You weren’t in the right and you never will be. They’re the ones who are always in the right, so what does it matter? Go to Pueblo de Moya. You can hold out for a good few years there.’
‘We’re not going to do any illegal building. I’ll put the house right here on Grandfather’s land.’
The conclusion my father had arrived at, taking advantage of the argument of my grandfather’s madness, was that he would never even notice. The one sign of solidarity my uncles displayed was to agree they would pretend they didn’t know, and that if there was any sort of setback – the return of my grandfather’s lucidity, for example – they would do their utmost to seem as surprised and indignant as possible.
‘It’s your lookout,’ one of them said.
‘You’re stubborn. Do what you like,’ said another.
‘What are you asking us for if you’re going to go and do what you’ve already decided anyway? You’re just wasting your time and making us waste ours,’ moaned his youngest brother, the resentment still throbbing along with the bruise on his forehead.
Grandfather went to the plot every day at around ten in the morning and stayed for a couple of hours, which he spent interrogating his two employees about the health of the watermelons and making an inventory of the materials stored in the storehouse – fertilisers, tools, insecticides – to make sure no one was robbing him. Before he left, without exception, and without a trace of the modesty that had characterised him in his pre-dementia life, he would drop his trousers, ask one of the labourers to help him squat down and position his backside in the open air, and shit in the middle of the watermelons.
‘It’s the best fertiliser there is!’ he would shout happily, still squatting, but now face to face with his most recent, still-steaming production.
He took his leave of his employees with a phrase that proved my father had been wrong about the nature of his madness – in fact he was paranoid-obsessive and highly competitive when it came to covering up secrets.
‘Keep a close eye on this lot for me. They’ve already had a run-in with the law.’
Making the most of the fact that Grandfather’s legs had begun to let him down long ago, condemning him to an exasperating slowness, and mentally calculating the number of days it would take him to cover the 200 metres from the smallholding’s entrance to the bottom of the plot, my father chose the south-eastern corner to build our house, the furthest away from the gate. It was a location at once defiant – at its eastern coordinate, due to the threat of flooding – and resigned – at its southern coordinate, due to the stink from the pigs.
The wild card in my father’s plan was the pair of labourers – two wild cards, in fact. He didn’t know how they would react; we’d not had a chance to get to know them because they were so taciturn. No matter how much my father tried, he hadn’t managed to strike up a conversation with them, so he decided to say nothing to them now, to give them no warning and to find out later exactly how much loyalty they felt towards his father.
The evening following a day in which my mother had not addressed a single syllable to my father, he decided to execute his plan as soon as the labourers had gone home. First we went to the storehouse to find the tools we’d need, which operation called for the use of a screwdriver to break a very flimsy padlock and generated an impressively clandestine atmosphere.
My father measured out the fifty square metres in strides, five by ten, without obsessing about accuracy, and stuck a branch in each corner of the terrain. Archilochus, Callimachus and I took charge of tracing four dotted lines in stones, making the relationship between the branches obvious. Next, Archilochus and Callimachus harvested the watermelons. There weren’t 180 of them, only thirty or so, which meant one of two possibilities: either Grandfather’s agricultural knowledge had been knocked off-kilter too or else we’d been devalued by 83 per cent. Meanwhile, my father and I pulled up the plants with the aid of rakes. We pushed the teeth into the soil and pulled upwards, hard, to see if by doing so we could put an end to so much lousy confusion. The rakes were inanimate objects made of metal, which meant we didn’t have to worry about the thickness of the plants’ stalks and leaves. Just to encourage an increase in slacker culture, it turned out that the roots of the watermelon plants didn’t grow very deeply at all and their desire to stay clinging to the subsoil was weak. Once Archilochus and Callimachus had placed the watermelons safely in my mother’s arms they were assigned the task of using gloves to throw the prickly plants down the riverbank. The light was starting to fade when my father decided our task was finished.
We returned the things to the storehouse, so my father could demonstrate to his children that he wasn’t a total swine. He even took care to respect the original décor: he closed the door and returned the broken padlock to its place. Back in the shack, my mother and Electra had been entertaining themselves by cutting open the watermelons. To one side was a pile of discarded fruits whose pallid interiors betrayed the abortion we had subjected them to. At random, we started to eat the reddest ones we could find.
At least weeding the land had restored my father’s right to be scolded by my mother.
‘Tomorrow the labourers will tell your father and he’ll kick us out. Where will we go then?’
‘They won’t say anything to him, you’ll see.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘He makes them smell his excrement. Do you think they have any respect for him?’
‘Respect, I don’t know, but fear …’
‘Fear of what? Have you not seen my dad? He’s a total wreck and he’s a lunatic.’
‘Don’t talk like that in front of the children.’
‘The children have seen their grandfather take a shit and they can hear all the crap he talks. Don’t you think that’s enough?’
They would have carried on arguing if it wasn’t for the fact that suddenly the watermelons started to taste really good: delicious, in fact. Sweet. Juicy. Their sweet juice ran down our chins and we trapped it with our fingers to scoop it back into our mouths, so as not to lose a drop. My father lit a fire so we could gaze at the wondrous pulp we were ingesting.
It was Electra who suddenly asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘What?’ we said, not looking where she was pointing, concerned only with savouring the taste of the watermelon.
‘That! That! That! That!’
And then we looked.
‘It’s Castor!’ cried Callimachus.
‘And Pollux!’ completed my mother, as if the phrase, just like the pretend twins, could not be pronounced separately.
Castor was riding a horse and spinning circles around his head with a lasso. Had he become a charro? Just what we needed.
‘What’s that?’ my father asked before going to greet the twins.
‘Your sons, it’s your sons!’ replied my mother.
‘No, behind them, behind them!’
‘Cows, they’re cows,’ I had to intervene, being the only one specialised in this subject.
But the clarification lacked many scientific details that might explain the behaviour of these black and white beasts. This was an orgy of hysterical cows. They wouldn’t stay still for a moment but ran back and forth, chasing each other, rubbing themselves against each other, sniffing each other’s vaginas, mounting and being mounted. The intermingled moos produced a constant sound, a kind of audible signal. What were the cows trying to tell us? Whom or what were they summoning?
‘Don’t worry. They’re in heat. It’s normal,’ I said when I saw my father trying to hide the erotic spectacle from the women in the family.
‘Normal? Do you think it’s normal for there to be a thousand cows in heat on your grandfather’s land? Where have they escaped from?’ my fa
ther shot back, initiating a reactionary movement in defence of reality and the status quo.
‘Who wants normal quesadillas?’ offered my mother, inspired by the free association of ideas.
We all put our hands up.
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
Everyone wants normal quesadillas.
The cows’ clamour found an echo: a stampede of bulls prepared to satisfy the bovine demands. Standing before the animals, Castor made a visual selection of the candidates, eliminating any specimens who were not up to his standards by dealing out charro moves, manganas and piales. The bulls that passed the test pushed their way in among the flanks and without delay unsheathed their immense cocks. The mooing stopped and gave way to the sound of friction and frottage, the rhythm of the in and out.
‘Why can we see everything so clearly?’ asked Callimachus, who was ignorant of the mechanisms of pornography. ‘Wasn’t it night-time a minute ago?’
It was true, the clarity couldn’t be coming from the fire; someone had turned on a light in the sky. We all looked up to check the phenomenon: a massively powerful light was emerging from the arse of a giant interplanetary ship.
‘It can’t be true,’ my father said quickly, eager to dash our hopes.
And why not?
Why not, Dad?
Didn’t we live in the country we lived in?
Weren’t fantastic, wonderful things meant to happen to us all the time? Didn’t we speak to the dead? Wasn’t everyone always saying we were a surrealist country?
‘It can’t be true. It must be a hallucination, some sort of delirium. We’ve got dengue fever! It must be dengue fever!’
Shut up, Dad, shut up!
Didn’t we believe that the Virgin of San Juan had cured thousands of people without any knowledge of medicine? Hadn’t we put borders around a territory just to screw ourselves over? Didn’t we still hope that one day things would change?
It can’t be true, Dad? Are you sure?
A hatch opened in the ship and, phlegmatically, accentuating his customary air of smugness, Aristotle floated down out of it. His feet touched the ground in the middle of the circle we had formed to receive him.
‘What’s happened, arseholes?’
We embraced each other to prove we weren’t dreaming.
‘Castor! Pollux!’ my mother shouted, wanting to complete the embrace.
But the pretend twins were not ready for affection yet. Pollux raised his right arm, calling for silence, and only then did we realise he had become a boxer. His power of conviction was so great that the bulls stopped screwing the cows.
‘Achaean forces! Prepare arms!’
Arms? What for?
Behind us advanced the enemy army: priests, anti-riot police and more officers headed up by Officer Mophead and Jaroslaw. Castor began dealing out manganas and piales left, right and centre. Pollux knocked out his opponents at the first right. Some of the satisfied, resentful bulls had fun goring the men in uniform. Protected by a contingent of soldiers, the tie man appeared with a megaphone.
‘No, Oreo, not like that! Didn’t I teach you anything? Not like that! That’s useless! It’s a load of crap!’
‘Look, Dad. That’s the tie man!’
‘That guy? It can’t be!’
‘He can’t be true either? Why not? It’s him! I’m sure!’
‘Because that’s Salinas!’
‘Salinas? Who’s Salinas?’
‘No, wait, it’s López Portillo! It’s Echeverría! It’s Díaz Ordaz!’
‘Who are they?’
‘Sons of bitches!’
‘So finish them off!’
Castor lassoed the tie man’s tie and tied it to the tail of the most insatiable of the bulls, who disappeared over the horizon of bovine backs at a frantic trot. Where were they taking him? To La Chingada!
In the heat of the battle, Jaroslaw and Officer Mophead came over to negotiate a ceasefire. The battle was also being fought on Officer Mophead’s head, where the curls were mercilessly torturing the straight hairs.
‘We have an eviction order.’
‘The land is my father’s, so talk to him. We have a right to be here,’ my father defended us, faithful to his reality in spite of appearances.
‘You’re just not getting it.’
‘So help me out.’
‘You have to leave this.’
‘This, what is this?’
‘This!’
‘It’s in contempt of reality.’
‘There is prison without bail.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Get out!’
But Pollux was already standing in front of the two men. He planted an uppercut on Officer Mophead’s jaw, while Jaroslaw got a jab on the temple. How he had managed to hit them in the face, given his small stature, was something that neither Officer Mophead nor Jaroslaw would have been able to explain. Their two bodies flew across the smallholding and were lost beyond the river.
‘Quickly!’ said my father, mobilising us. ‘Now’s our chance!’
‘For what?’
‘To build the house!’
We ran like maniacs across the land, falling over as we went, getting tangled up in the stumps of the watermelons. It would almost have been better to crawl along. When finally we reached the area we had cleared, my father began hurriedly to organise the construction.
‘One or two floors?’
‘Two!’
‘Two!’
‘OK. What shall we put on the first floor?’
‘The kitchen.’
‘The lounge.’
‘My room in the kitchen,’ demanded Electra, ‘to be near the quesadillas.’
‘And a bathroom in Electra’s room!’
‘And a room for watching TV in the bathroom!’
‘And a garden in the TV room!’
‘No, no, not like that!’
Why not, Dad, why not?
What’s the house made of?
Then I remembered that in my trouser pocket I still had the little device with the red button.
‘Wait!’ I ordered.
And I pressed it.
Two floors.
Click.
A lounge.
Click.
A kitchen.
Click.
Electra’s room.
Click.
A bathroom.
Click.
A TV room.
Click.
A garden with acacia trees! So we don’t forget where we’re from.
‘What else, what else?’
A room for my mother to cry in?
We finished the house and put in a mesquite door, a heavy, resistant door, which would keep watch over the passing of the years and the centuries. It was a magnificent house. It had a watchtower and there were bridges linking the rooms.
‘Dad, we could do what they did on the hill.’
‘What?’
‘Make another neighbourhood.’
‘A neighbourhood fifty metres square?’
‘Or another country.’
‘Another country!’
‘Poland!’
‘Poland.’
And then my father said to me, ‘Recite.’
And so I did:
‘Suave Patria, gentle vendor of chía,
I want to bear you away in the dark of Lent,
riding a fiery stallion, disturbing
the peace, and dodging shots from police,
etc.’
We were about to go inside and to bed when the door opened and out came Uncle Pink Floyd. Outside jail now, he stretched up to his true height. He was enormous. He came and stood next to us to admire the building. His head was reflected in the glass of the second-floor windows. He raised his hand to check that the watchtower was real.
‘You’ve made it look really nice.’
We all smiled delightedly: we had perfect sets of brilliant whi
te teeth.
‘Thanks.’
But he immediately realised what was going on: ‘Hey, you bastards, don’t eat my watermelons.’
This is our house.
This is my house.
Now try and tear it down.
Glossary
charro
a traditional Mexican horseman, somewhat like the North American cowboy. Charros take part in charreadas (a little like rodeos) and wear very distinctive colourful clothing, including a wide-brimmed hat.
chía
a species of flowering plant from the mint family that is native to Mexico. Its seeds are used to make a refreshing drink.
chicharrón
fried pork rinds.
chilaquiles
a breakfast dish made from fried corn tortillas mixed with salsa and simmered, then topped with cheese, cream and refried beans.
El Cerro de la Chingada
most commonly understood as ‘the hill in the middle of (fucking) nowhere’, the name of this fictional hill makes oblique reference to La Chingada (or La Malinche), a well-known Mexican figure who acted as both interpreter and lover to Hernán Cortés during the Spanish colonisation of Mexico and whose name has become a way of swearing, insulting people or expressing strong positive feelings. The name humorously implies that Orestes’ family home is in a godforsaken place. Sending someone to La Chingada is not unlike telling them to fuck off.
gordita
a cornmeal cake filled with cheese, meat or other ingredients, then fried or baked. It is a little like a Cornish pasty.
huarache
popular Mexico City street snack made of an oblong-shaped fried corn dough base with various toppings, such as salsa, minced beef and cheese.
huitlacoche
sometimes called corn smut, this is a harmless fungus that grows on corn and is sometimes used as a filling in quesadillas.
ISSSTE (Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers) shops
a series of state-run supermarkets in Mexico selling goods at below-market prices.
nixtamal
corn soaked in lime, then hulled before being ground to form masa (corn dough), which is used to make tortillas, tacos, quesadillas, tamales etc.