Quesadillas (5 page)

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.

‘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 from 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.

As well as thinking about our escape
–
sketchy, disjointed thoughts, to match the puzzle
–
and concentrating hard on trying to control my erratic cardiovascular functions, I couldn’t stop thinking about my younger siblings, the ones still at home. Now they’d be a svelte, three-child family, the lucky bastards; they’d be up to their necks in quesadillas and they hadn’t even done anything to deserve it. Would they be middle class at
last?

Instead of heading straight down to the road that led to the town
–
a continuation of the San Juan highway
–
we walked cross-country, to avoid human contact, which meant we had to push our way through thousands of acacia trees. The town was so Catholic it was encircled with thorns. When we finally rejoined the road that would take us down to the highway, we saw the floods of people filling the road and heard the dishevelled racket of their chants. This was the first impression they gave, one we verified immediately: that such a racket could only come from a mob with dishevelled
hair.

‘
I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise my Lord.

‘
It’s the grieeeeevances and praaaaaaaayers of your chiiiiiiildren of San Juaaaaaaaaaan.
’

‘Pilgrims
–
perfect!’ exclaimed Aristotle, delighted at the idea of joining the tuneless procession.

‘You like pilgrims?’

‘Don’t be stupid. This way no one’ll see us. We just slip in among them and walk to the bottom of the Mesa Redonda, then branch
off.’

We joined the crowd of pilgrims, although to me it seemed we’d slipped in among a crowd of smells: a stink of sweat and another of urine, a belch of rotten egg and another of rancid beans. I looked to one side and saw the stumps of an old man with no arms who was crawling along on his knees. I looked down and found a mangy dog trying to jump up and steal my Oreos. Babies wrapped in rags hung from their mothers’ backs. Moving through the images and the smells, floating on another plane of supernatural discord, was the disparate drone of dozens of different chants. It was incomprehensible that the pilgrims weren’t all chanting the same thing, that each person was following his or her own inspiration; could it be some kind of mystical rapture? If so, it was extremely out of
tune.

I didn’t have a mirror with me so I couldn’t see my own face, but it must have been a fucking expressive
one.

‘What is it, man? Haven’t you ever seen poor people before?’

‘Poor people? We’re poor.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ To this day I still find the reality check that this admonishment was supposedly meant to prolong simply delightful. ‘We’re middle class.’

My brother didn’t like being poor, but the poverty of the pilgrims all around us didn’t modify our own. At the most it left us classified as the least poor of this group of poor people, which merely proved that one could always be poorer and poorer still: being poor was a bottomless
well.

On leaving Lagos, the first impression one had was that the apologists of journeys and nomadism had not passed this way. The landscape was the same as on our Cerro de la Chingada: acacias and more acacias, flocks of wood pigeons, dust clouds. Every few kilometres the monotony would suffer the appearance of a tyre repair shop or a garage, precariously constructed from planks of wood and metal sheets. Their signs and adverts managed an average of two spelling mistakes in words of five and a half letters. Nagged by the memory of the highway to La Chona, which was identical, an insatiable anxiety began to consume me: did the whole world look the
same?

Were there acacia trees in Poland?

What about Disneyland?

Aristotle had no doubts about the probable homogeneity of planet Earth; that was why he was the older brother. Or perhaps he did but he was avoiding them by keeping himself entertained, from one conversation to the next; indeed, his strategy for going unnoticed looked highly illogical to me. He was repeating to all and sundry that we were on our way to San Juan to ask the Virgin to make the pretend twins appear, and that in exchange we were offering the sacrifice of our pilgrimage.

‘You see?’ he whispered in my ear after giving me a wink that was meant to show what a genius he was. ‘It’s perfect, because it’s not true yet, but it’s not a lie yet either.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, man, when we turn off it’ll be a lie that we’re going to see the Virgin, but in the meantime it could be true. I’m not telling lies, you get me, arsehole?’

At that moment a whole load of Greeks were spinning in their graves. The pilgrims said yes, surely the Virgin would perform a miracle for us, and they declared this with such absolute determination that it was almost possible to see the pretend twins already, to tousle their hair or hear how they stayed completely silent just like they always did. One devout old woman cried that the dear Virgin had cured her dengue fever, another that the
virgencita
hadn’t saved her husband but she had taken him to heaven, even though he didn’t deserve it for being an argumentative drunk. You never know! You never know when you might need the
virgencita
, repeated the walkers representing current misfortunes, those who at that very moment had a relative at death’s door. There was a group that specialised in mourning those who’d crossed over to the other side
–
but not to death, just to the United States: Look after them,
virgencita
! Give them work! Bring them home soon! Disneyland, pure and fucking simple, right? Quite a few of them were pre-emptive pilgrims, who up to now hadn’t needed a big miracle, just little ones, favours (which they could easily have requested from entities of a less noble pedigree; just asking for a boyfriend wasn’t a matter to bother the Virgin with, there were a shitload of saints for that). These pilgrims were gradually accumulating credits for when life played one of its classic dirty tricks on them. There was also an army of children, who were wasted because they weren’t asking for anything. They didn’t know how, they hadn’t yet been taught how to invoke other-worldly figures; they just acted like stray dogs, following crowds with fanatical obedience. In any case, it was impossible to tell if the dogs were praying, but it was clear they were loving the chaos.

Confusion is essentially lazy and opportunistic; it doesn’t bother turning up in controlled environments but instead comes begging around propitious scenes and never wastes a crowd. And it wasn’t about to now: it started sprouting furiously, like a watermelon plant twisting around the pilgrims’
feet.

‘Two twins have gone missing!’

‘They don’t look alike, but they are twins!’

‘O
virgencita
, find them!’

‘Stop! We must find the little ones!’

‘Oh, oh, oh, why did you take them, O Lord!’

‘Take me, I’m old! Why do you always take the innocent ones?’

Aristotle attempted to quell the voluble clamour all around us with his explanations, but he was at a marked numerical and, above all, temperamental disadvantage: no one takes any notice of a spoilsport.

‘No, listen, you’ve got it all wrong. They haven’t
just
gone missing, they’ve been missing for ages.’

It was too late. The scandal protocol had already been implemented, something crowds don’t like to abandon as quickly as all that, at merely the first few clarifications; no matter how coherent or credible they might be, they’ll never have the prestige required to challenge the fantasies of melodrama. Mobs are like aliens: they don’t give a damn about logic.

A very nervous man appeared wearing a name badge that, in large black felt-tip letters, identified him as
Juan de Irapuato
. He started shaking Aristotle, demanding a verbal description of the twins, quickly, before it was too late. Before my brother forgot what they looked like, did he mean? We were experiencing one of those moments of false urgency when it seems as if it’s
too late
for lots of things, but can the present be too late with regard to anything? Nothing but a self-satisfied sophistic exercise.