Quesadillas (2 page)

From our strategic position high up on the Cerro de la Chingada, we could hear random detonations and shootouts, and glimpse new plumes of smoke. From the phone calls my parents made to my uncles and aunts, who lived in the centre like normal people, not right in the middle of the shit, we knew it was pointless to risk leaving the house, since all the shops were shut. According to my father, the families who lived in the centre had regressed to walking on all fours and were crawling around in their houses, eating lying down and sleeping under their beds. Such a display of circus skills served only to avoid the stray bullets, a waste of talent and energy, considering that without exception we were all going to die one day anyway.

Despite the precariousness and the risk of starvation we experienced in those days, they were a relief for my father, who was finally able to justify his hermit-like decision to build our house on the edge of town
–
but on top of a hill? You’ve got to be kidding! He went around saying that while people were praying for their lives in the centre, we were safe, nothing was going to happen to us, which led me to consider the possibility that we’d end up being the only survivors, with the subsequent responsibility of having to repopulate the highlands
–
my imagination was conditioned by the teachings of the Old Testament.

Two days after the conflict began, the nine o’clock news found us in the distressing situation of one poor man’s quesadilla per
head.

‘Just like in Cuba,’ my mother kept saying.

‘They don’t have quesadillas in Cuba,’ my father replied.

‘Well, that’s their loss, the poor things,’ my mother concluded, and turned to stare out of the kitchen window, wishing someone would just bomb the damned town hall once and for
all.

My mother’s wish for genocide was not going to be granted, although it almost was: the newsreader informed us that at that very moment a shitload of anti-riot vans were arriving in Lagos to reinstate democracy. As if by a stupid cosmic connection, at that very moment we heard a distant rumble and rushed over to the living-room window, which provided a better view of the town’s events, veiled, it must be said, by a discreet curtain. We drew the curtain back so as to get a good view and were able to witness a ramshackle procession of trucks down below, on the road that came out in the centre.

‘That’s right! Fuck them up! That’ll obviously solve the problem, as if they were rabid dogs
–
bastards! Sons of bitches!’ my father rebuked them, while my mother tugged at his arm to bring him back into the decency of silence, just in case the police had superpowers and managed to overhear
him.

We were awake until very late, because the light and sound show was really something. My father finally resigned himself to silence and sadness. His only activity was to ruffle the hair of each of us in turn, but instead of calming us down he upset us, because he was concentrating so hard on being affectionate that it seemed as if the end of the world was approaching.

‘What was that?’

‘Gunfire,’ replied my father, never one to attempt to sweeten reality.

‘Are they going to kill them, Daddy?’

‘No, it’s just to scare them,’ my mother quickly intervened, knowing what my father would have said:
That’s what the police are for, killing people
, or something along those lines.

‘And what are they going to do to the rebels?’

‘They’ll put them in jail and they’ll
…’

‘Then they’ll let them go, when they say sorry for the bad things they
did.’

‘No, no, no! They haven’t done anything wrong. The elections were stolen from them. They have a right to protest.’

‘The children don’t understand that.’

‘The children are old enough to tell right from wrong.’

‘You’ll confuse them.’

‘Better confused than deceived.’

In the early hours of the morning, when the city too returned to silence, my mother, flaunting her military knowledge, started making devaluation quesadillas with the last of our reserves.

‘We’re going shopping first thing tomorrow,’ she said to my father, who refused to eat the quesadilla and a half he was due and out of which we got seven little pieces.

We rose very early to go panic-buying. We’d slept so little that the crust in our eyes hadn’t even had time to develop. We drove down to the centre of town in my parents’ pickup truck, my siblings and I lying in the back, wrapped in blankets and trying to play cards to pass the time, although the wheels sliding around on the uneven dirt road made the car jolt so much that all our cards kept getting jumbled as we played. In town we stared at the scorched car tyres, the heaps of rubbish piled up at the side of the road, a few anti-riot police swapping stories, and the walls where the rebels had painted their lonely slogan:
Justice for Lagos
. It looked as if the synarchists had bought up all the supplies of spray paint in the town. The government held the rebels and the threat they posed in such low regard they never bothered to repaint the walls. You can still read that slogan here and there today, on dirty, flaking walls whose owners sympathise with the cause or simply don’t have the money to repaint.

‘Which ones are the rebels?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t you understand what Dad said? Those arseholes are fucked already,’ said Aristotle self-righteously.

My father was trying really hard not to crash the truck, an almost impossible task because, as well as the legions of furious drivers, the streets were rammed with kamikaze milk trucks. The cattle ranches near the town hadn’t been able to distribute their quotas in the last few days and now they needed to get rid of all the semi-rancid milk. Never underestimate the size of our dairy herds: it was a shitload of milk. There are very few milk trucks around these days, since the town’s industrial estate opened in the 1990s, with its big dairy companies who consume tons of milk and save farmers the hassle of looking for retailers. Most people buy their milk in the supermarket nowadays and many of them even choose to consume dairy products from the major milk-producing region of Comarca Lagunera, betraying our own
cows.

In the state-owned ISSSTE shop, there was an apocalypse taking place. Never-ending queues of haggard, badly dressed beings surged towards the opening doors, as if instead of buying supplies they wanted to be crushed to death and put an end to so much senseless damned suffering once and for all. We split into two units: four of my siblings went with my father to the tortilla bakery and the rest of us, the pretend twins and I, stayed to accompany my mother on her suicide mission. The division obeyed a logic imposed in principle by our age, but in effect mainly by the distinction between hysterical and melancholy personalities: Aristotle with my father, as he was the eldest and the most hysterical and violent, so my father could control him better; me, the second eldest at thirteen, with my mother, for being the second and the saddest, and also because my survival strategies were verbal, which meant (at most) potential psychological damage for my victims
–
a matter of little importance when we left the house and the aim was to avoid massive loss of life, our own or other people’s; Archilochus, Callimachus and Electra went with my father, for being at ages that carried high risks of vandalism and self-inflicted injury
–
eleven, nine and seven respectively; the pretend twins, together, with my mother and under my supervision, which they didn’t need because they were five years old and absent from the world the whole time, concentrating on photosynthesising and concerned only with staying next to each other, as if they were Siamese rather than pretend twins.

My mother wasn’t afraid of crowds: they were her natural habitat. She herself had grown up in a large family, a genuine one, like they used to be, with eleven legally acknowledged brothers and sisters, plus three more who materialised when my grandfather died to claim their microscopic portion of the estate. She was a specialist in multitudes, capable of pushing in so as to be third in line at the deli when there were hundreds of people yelling at the pig slaughterer. I guarded the trolley into which my mother was gleefully throwing cheese, ham and mortadella. My mother’s skill at getting them to cut her the most ethereal slices ever had to be seen to be believed: thinner, thinner, she ordered the assistant menacingly. When we’d finished our cold-meat purchases, we confirmed that for every measly little victory in this life you get a real bastard of a disaster: the pretend twins had disappeared.

The search grew incredibly complicated due to the pretend twins’ appearance. We had to explain what they looked like to the police and the staff of the ISSSTE shop, and my mother insisted on starting off her description in an irresistibly polemical fashion.

‘They’re twins, but they don’t look the same. They’re nothing like each other.’

‘If they don’t look the same, then they’re not twins,’ they objected, ignorantly deducing that our entire story was a lie, as if we enjoyed playing hide-and-seek with non-existent family members.

I tried to put a stop to the investigators’ attempts to uphold the iron defence of Aristotelian logic before starting to look for the twins, completing my mother’s explanation with the help of an attack of nervous hiccups, the aim of which was to fracture my breastbone.

‘They are twins, but they’re just not real ones.’

‘Not real? So they’re invented?’ replied a bold officer who seemed to have decided it would be simpler to expose our falsehoods than to find the twins.

‘They’re biovular twins, dizygotic twins!’ my mother shouted, tearing at her hair, fully involved with the tragedy now, given that the situation had ended up in ancient Greece.

The officer took me aside, stared at me with immense pity and, stroking my back like a little dog, asked me, ‘Is your mum crazy?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I wasn’t absolutely sure. I’d never really had to consider
it.

Since there still wasn’t enough excitement, we added the issue of the twins’ indistinguishable apparel, because it really was difficult to tell us all apart. I don’t just mean for other people; even we found it hard. My parents contributed to the standardisation with their approach to economies of scale: they bought us all the same clothes so that they could haggle the price down, jeans and coloured T-shirts, always the same clothes, one size too big so they’d last longer, which had the hideous effect of making us all look permanently badly dressed. When the clothes were new they looked as if we’d borrowed them from someone else and by the time they fitted us perfectly they were worn out. And that’s without taking into account that the rags were passed down from old to young by means of a synchronised system of inheritance.

Luckily my father turned up and the arguments stopped, although some employees continued to throw us suspicious glances that betrayed some highly serious ontological aspersions. We scoured every corner of the shop, combed the surrounding streets and didn’t find the pretend twins. The only thing the search achieved was to prove to me that we were poor, really poor, because in the shop there were a shitload of things we’d never bought.

‘
Mamá
, are we ever going to stop being poor?’ I asked, looking up at her as the tears dripped from her chin and landed in my hair. I made use of them to give my hair a brush, smoothing down a few stray tufts.

‘Your little brothers have gone missing! This is not the time to ask that question!’

To me, however, the two things were equally important: finding the pretend twins and ascertaining our family’s hopes for socio-economic advancement.

Two policemen accompanied us home to collect the twins’ birth certificates and some photographs of them taken a few days ago at school. The officer who had questioned me about my mother’s mental health turned out to be the local police chief, despite his lack of tact
–
or because of it, most probably. He looked carefully at the photos and his suspicions were confirmed.

‘I knew it. They’re not twins.’

He had a great deal of hair on his head, different kinds of hair: straight, frizzy, wavy, curly; there were even several degrees of curls. You had the impression that up there, among such capillary chaos, his ideas were getting tangled up. He tried to introduce himself with a surname
–
like this: Officer
Surname
–
but it was one of those surnames that millions of people have, really hard to tell apart. We needed anything that would save us from the panic we felt at that moment, and among the possibilities that presented themselves we found nothing better than a childish joke, which helped us to believe that what was happening wasn’t so serious after all, that it would be sorted out, that we were allowed to laugh in the midst of such distress. And so we nicknamed him Officer Mophead.

The stellar strategy of the police consisted of plastering every wall in town with posters showing a photo of the twins. Underneath the photo screamed the word ‘MISSING’ in capital letters. Immediately below, the details were given in lower case: the names of my MISSING brothers, Castor and Pollux, the run-of-the-mill names of my parents (my grandparents hadn’t had the imagination to screw them up), the telephone number of the police and our home number. At the very bottom it said: ‘THINK THEY ARE TWINS’. We didn’t even offer a reward; we’d decided to take advantage of our new-found fame to broadcast our poverty, and my father’s Greek delusions, to all and sundry.

The days went by and we didn’t find them. At first we looked for them eagerly; it was the only thing we did. My father didn’t go to work, and as soon as we got back from school all we did was worry. Meanwhile, Aristotle concentrated wholeheartedly on another essential task: blaming
me.

‘It’s your fault, arsehole,’ he would repeat, and my remaining siblings delighted in imitating
him.

I was able to ignore them without anxiety because I was an expert in matters of guilt. It was in order to weather situations like this that it had fallen to me to live in this town, be born into this family and go to a school where they specialised in doling out sins to us. I used my rhetorical skills to formulate an irrefutable defence: ‘No one goes missing unless they want
to.’