Quesadillas (6 page)

‘They haven’t gone missing,’ my brother tried to explain. ‘Well, they have, but not just now. They’ve been missing for a while.’

It was fascinating the capacity that everything relating to the pretend twins had for heading straight down the path of goddamn misunderstanding. At the same time, this capacity exacerbated our own incapacity for getting people to understand us. We were sorely in need of a class of applied rhetoric. In reply to Aristotle’s pre-logical babbles, Juan de Irapuato began to demonstrate that he knew how to dole out a good old-fashioned beating. Four blows to the face. Take that! And that! And that! And that! My brother’s complexion was not ashamed to change its hue straight away, in front of its assailant, giving him the pleasure of confirming the graphic effects of his pugilistic
feat.

‘Stop talking crap. Come on! What are they called?’

‘Castor and Pollux.’

‘Like hell they are! Don’t you want us to find your brothers?’

‘I’m just trying to tell you that they haven’t gone missing right this minute.’

‘What d’you mean, right this minute? What the hell does that mean? What are you hiding, eh? Seems to me you’ve done something to them. Go on, you little sod, confess!’

One thing we did know how to do damn well when our epistemological skills failed us: run like mad! We stumbled out of there as fast as we could, stepping on feet and pushing people out of the way, until we reached one of the edges of the procession from where we could push towards the front without obstacles. We stopped only when we were sure that word of mouth had got up to its usual tricks and the conversations had been sufficiently distorted to save us. Up ahead, where we were now walking, a story was being told of two twins who had discovered they weren’t brothers and had come to ask the Virgin to help them find their real parents.

‘But if they’re twins how can they not be brothers?’

‘Because they’re pretend twins. They’re identical, but they’re not brothers.’

Perhaps the same thing was happening with the chants: at the front of the procession the first pilgrims, who had not only already arrived in San Juan but were already on their way back home, had started to sing one song, a tune that on its journey to the back of the line had been gradually, relentlessly twisting and bifurcating, until it caused the current harmonic chaos.

I tried to have the satisfaction of reproaching Aristotle
–
on few occasions in life is a younger brother given such a wonderful chance to get one up on his older brother.

‘Maybe now you’ll shut up, arsehole.’

‘They’re the arseholes, arsehole. They’re a lousy bunch of idiots.’ It was my brother in his favourite mode: Aristotle against the world.

Close to the turning for Mesa Redonda we came across a scrapyard with piles of cars forming strange-shaped mountains. The pilgrims increased the volume of their chants, because they had to compete with the din from a crane hurling cars from one side to another. They had swelled with zeal at the sight of the scrap metal, irrefutable proof that all human vanities are rubbish and the only destiny of matter is to decay. What the pilgrims didn’t know was that our relationship with matter is based on substitution, its perishable quality not mattering shit: there is always a new car to replace a discarded piece of
junk.

Such a shameless display of fervour made one wonder which of the methods for finding the pretend twins would be the more outlandish: praying to an apparition in the basilica of San Juan or waiting for extraterrestrials on top of Mesa Redonda? Judging by the size of the procession the aliens were losing by quite a long way, at least in terms of popularity. However, Aristotle was the one who thought these things through and made the decisions, refusing to let go of his interplanetary certainties; the ten kilometres or so we’d walked this far had not yet crushed his fantasies.

We left the highway and headed down the dirt track that led to Mesa Redonda. The track was covered by a thick layer of very fine dust with the consistency of talcum powder, dust that was excited by our footsteps and followed wicked trajectories just to get inside our nasal cavities and eyes. Stupid crappy dust. The track also served as a border between the various plots of land belonging to a series of small ranches. We were surrounded by
–
guess what!
–
acacia trees, thousands of millions of acacia trees. It was enough to make you kill yourself. And I would have done so if my sadness had been of a more romantic bent, if it hadn’t been that grey sadness that neither drove me over the edge nor allowed me simply to resign myself to life. It would have been so easy to cut myself an acacia branch, one with long, thick thorns; so comforting to have the balls to slit my veins and bleed to death in that maddening dust. Unfortunately, as well as guts I needed imagination
–
I would have needed to have read lots and lots of books for such a thing to occur to me, and I’d only ever read schoolbooks, which never glorified suicide as a way of solving the problem of existence. Religious education was rather selfishly biased in favour of preserving
life.

Before we could faint and grant the wishes of the vultures circling above us, we sat down in the shade of
–
what else?
–
an acacia
tree.

From our rucksacks we took oranges, bread, tins of tuna, juice. That day I learned that the invention of the tin-opener was a reactionary moment in the history of mankind’s progress, an essential response to the invention of tinned food. We used sharp stones, like anachronistic Neanderthals, and managed to fill the tins’ contents with dust. If this was the life that awaited us, biting the dust as we ate, it would be better to go back to the comfort of our paltry quesadillas. Running away had forced us to step down a rung in the class struggle and now we were skulking around in the marginal sector of people who eat dirt in handfuls.

‘There are three kinds of aliens.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m just letting you know so you can prepare yourself. I don’t know what kind we’re going to
see.’

It was the perfect conversation to accompany the consumption of tuna with
dust.

‘They might be lizards, arthropods or humanoids. The lizards and the arthropods come from planets where evolution followed a different path from here on Earth. Imagine that instead of monkeys winning the war of the species, there it was crocodiles or spiders. The humanoids are like us, just shorter. Their heads are bigger, their eyes stick out more, they’ve got no hair and they’re all grey.’

Other than their features, the fundamental difference between us and
them
lay in the digestive system, the way in which the aliens obtained nourishment, using all kinds of resources to generate energy, not just food. Would they eat soil? Aristotle explained it to me as if, in addition to knowing the contents of Epi’s magazines off by heart, he also understood the functioning of the human digestive system. It seemed that in the boredom championships my brother was in the lead, absolutely shitloads of points ahead of
me.

‘Now pay attention; this is very important. If there are any problems, if we’re in danger, you have to press here. Don’t be scared, but remember, if we need help you have to press here.’

He was showing me his friend’s little gadget for epileptic fits, which now turned out to have alternative uses in the case of encounters with hostile species. He handed it to me so I could get a good look at it. It was a little black plastic square with a red button, nothing more, but Aristotle wanted me to study it so as to be sure I’d know how to use it if the situation arose.

‘How can it save us if it’s only got a reach of twenty metres?’

The whole school knew this; one day they’d tested just how far Epi could move from the headmaster’s office, which was where the receiver was
kept.

‘Don’t be stupid. We’ve rigged
it.’

‘What’s the headmaster meant to do? Guess where we are and figure out that the aliens are fucking with
us?’

‘Epi knows everything. He’ll send help.’

I looked at the little device, pretending I was studying its complicated mechanisms, but really I was thinking about my parents. Typical. I’d finally managed to run away from home and now I was having pangs of guilt. Those lousy priests really had done a fantastic job. But seriously, my poor parents, who just couldn’t manage to keep their family together. The thing is there were a shitload of cracks in their system of promises.

‘Our poor parents.’

‘Why?’

Why?
You have to be the older brother to have the monopoly on insensitivity.

‘First the twins go missing and now we’re leaving.’

‘But we’re going to come back, with the twins.’

‘And what are they going to tell the police now? They’ll think that it’s our parents’ fault we’re missing. They might even accuse them of having disappeared us themselves.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. I left a note explaining everything.’

‘And what did it
say?’

‘What do you think it said, arsehole
–
not to come looking for us or tell the police, that we’re fine, that we’re going to look for the twins and we’ll come back when we’ve found them.’

The wind had stopped blowing and a cloud that belied the sun’s inclemency stationed itself over our heads. Beneath my buttocks I felt the cushion of the now-settled dust; it was pleasant if one could just keep it tamed. I lay down slowly, to avoid disturbing the particles, which were slowly sneaking out to the sides, fleeing from the imprint of my body’s silhouette. I closed my eyes and, as the screen of my eyelids projected an orangey film, I listened to the voice of Aristotle, persistent in his arrogance.

‘You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? Did you really think I wasn’t going to tell our parents? You arsehole, did you really think I was going to let them worry? You really are an arsehole.’

And suddenly I had a vision. It wasn’t the Virgin or the aliens; it was even more implausible. I appeared to myself. I saw myself trapped in a cardboard box, which had a few holes in it to make sure I didn’t suffocate. I was urinating, ashamed, my back to a crowd whose only occupation was to ignore me, although I thought they were spying on me. The box lay on an enormous rock that was floating in a universe without reason or sense, and I was wondering what would have happened if I’d never been born. With my right hand I was shaking my dick and with the left I was eating quesadillas, one quesadilla after another, one after another, just to stay alive. The quesadillas tasted of urine. The foul taste ejected me from the vision and I sat up as if propelled by a spring.

‘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.’

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 times 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.