Quesadillas (3 page)

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 with 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.

‘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.

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.