Authors: Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos
Tags: #contemporary fiction, #literary fiction, #novel, #translation, #translated fiction, #satire, #comedy, #rite of passage, #Mexico, #pilgrims, #electoral fraud, #elections, #family, #novella, #brothers, #twins, #Guardian First Book Award, #Mexican food, #quesadillas, #tortillas, #politicians, #Greek names, #bovine insemination, #Polish immigrants, #middle class, #corruption, #Mexican politics, #Synarchists, #PRI, #Spanish, #PEN Translates!, #PEN Promotes!, #watermelons, #acacias, #Jalisco, #Lagos, #Orestes, #Winner English Pen Award, #Pink Floyd, #Aristotle, #Archilocus, #Callimachus, #Electra, #Castor, #Pollux
Speaking of rivers and water shortages, in our town we have a ridiculous river, which for most of the year is minuscule, although it stinks to high heaven. It’s where the ranches, the chicken farms and the Nestlé factory all dump their waste, and is the origin of a horrific, pestilential cloud of mosquitoes. In the rainy season it turns into a majestic torrent that keeps the entire population on tenterhooks over the threat of flooding. The river is always at the heart of any political debate, whether it’s for having destroyed another neighbourhood or having caused the latest epidemic of dengue fever.
My mother put on the face she loved to wear every time she suffered one of her regular resounding defeats, and the rest of us resigned ourselves to the prospect of remaining kind of dirty, but it seemed we shone with dignity. After asking my father twice more to see reason
–
that is, to help him out
–
Jaroslaw took advantage of the snub to turn it into an insult and leave. He said goodbye with a level of formality inversely proportional to that of his initial greeting, dragging his family behind
him.
My father didn’t even wait for the door to close before passing judgement: ‘Three tankers a week, in that house with so many rooms for just three of them … Those people are constitutionally prone to extravagance.’
He was right, it was crystal clear, and we were the opposite: people prone to parsimony.
Despite the disagreement, the next day Jarek knocked on our door to invite me round to his house. He just stood there, a metre away from the door, waiting for me to come out and making it absolutely clear that he would never enter our house again. My mother insisted he come in, have some iced tea, but having been in the shoebox once had been traumatising enough for
him.
Jarek showed me his house and I had to try damned hard to act surprised, because instead of surprise what turned my stomach was the disappointment, the anticlimax on realising that our speculations had been wrong: that instead of the ten bedrooms for ten children my father had suggested, it turned out that they were all rooms for sewing in or for playing games in, offices, or a room for watching TV. The ultimate insult was that one of the rooms turned out to be the maid’s. The worst thing wasn’t being poor; the worst thing was having no idea of the things you can do when you have money.
We went into the games room so that Jarek could train me to kill Martians on the Atari. His precise instructions demonstrated the crushing logic the makers of the game had given their machines: if you moved the control to the right the spaceship moved to the right, if you moved it to the left it went to the left, up and down meant the same; if you pressed the button once you shot once, if you pressed it twice you shot twice, and three times, three. The world was ruled by a band of incredibly dull Aristotelians. I didn’t understand where the fun was, other than in verifying that the device always did what you told it to. Was it the paradox of having invented a contraption whose fantasies served to verify the rules of reality?
‘Isn’t all that poetry-reciting stuff embarrassing?’ asked Jarek, without wavering in his manipulation of the joystick.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. It’s stupid, isn’t
it?’
‘It’s a contest, like football.’
‘But they don’t show it on
TV.’
They didn’t show Atari championships on TV either, but so what? Our session of galactic extermination was interrupted by Heniuta, who had brought us each a different afternoon snack: chocolate cake and Coca-Cola for Jarek, and for me a plate with steak, rice and salad, and a lemonade. The truth is, the meal looked quite like the one I’d eaten at home three hours earlier, except with steak instead of chicken and salad instead of beans. I wanted chocolate cake, but before I could complain, Heniuta fired off a nutritional threat.
‘You need to eat properly, you’re too thin.’
I wasn’t hungry, but I still adhered to the philosophy of opportunistic exploitation, which states that one attacks without thinking about it whenever the occasion arises, because the future is like a woman with abrupt mood swings who sometimes says yes, sometimes no, and pretty often hasn’t even got a clue. Despite having been downgraded to the category of pretend large family, there are some things one learns that cannot and should not be forgotten. I ate at the speed I always did at home, and my display of skill impressed Jarek so much that he rewarded me with a look of disgust and gave me his chocolate cake, pity having overcome his appetite. It’s touching that the rich can feel class guilt at such an early age, poor little things. Even so, compassion can quite happily coexist with impertinence.
‘Didn’t you have lunch?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you
eat?’
‘Rice, beans and chicken.’
‘Chicken?’
‘Uh
huh.’
‘So why were you so hungry?’
‘I wasn’t hungry.’
‘And so why did you eat that food as if you were starving?’
‘I always eat like that. It’s a habit.’ Children with no siblings eat at a snail’s pace, although without dribbling, let’s make that clear. I wouldn’t want to cause any clan resentment.
‘But I don’t get it. Why eat if you’re not hungry?’
‘So it doesn’t go to waste.’
Suspicion made Jarek shoot out a little dotted beam, like the ones fired by the Martian ships, between his eyes and mine. My answer didn’t fit in with his system of prejudices and he began to suspect I was a fraud, a pretend poor person, a middle-classer who pretended to be poor to steal from the rich. What if it turned out that, just as my mother said, we were middle class?
‘And why the hell didn’t you tell my mum you weren’t hungry?’
‘She wouldn’t let me, and anyway she said I was thin.’
‘But you’re not thin because you’re hungry, you’re thin because that’s just what you’re like.’
It was my turn, but I kept my upper and lower molars clamped shut
–
what could I say, apologise for my genes?
‘Well, next time you tell her you’ve already eaten.’
‘The cake’s nice.’
‘My dad gets it from León.’ Telling the poor and the middle classes apart might be an esoteric riddle but it was the wealthy who were really easy to spot: they ate cakes imported from the lowlands.
‘Your dad goes to León to buy this cake?’
‘Don’t be an idiot. He buys it when his route takes him past León.’
‘What route?’
‘His route for the ranches.’
‘Have you been to León?’
‘Of course! We go there all the time to go to the cinema and the shopping centre.’ More defining characteristics of the rich: access to culture.
There are only three things worth mentioning about León: they make shoes there, the people are unreasonably smug and they have a football team that is capable only of either winning the league or being relegated.
‘Haven’t you been to León?’
‘No.’
‘Really? But it’s really close, just half an hour away!’
‘My dad doesn’t like travelling.’
‘What about Aguascalientes?’
‘No.’
‘Irapuato?’
‘No.’
‘Guadalajara?’
‘No.’
I was losing points spectacularly in this socio-economic survey. I needed to do something quickly before I ended up out on the margins of society.
‘Guanajuato?’
‘I went to La Chona once.’
‘Where’s that?’
Our family outing to La Chona had taken place during a burst of opportunism on the part of my father
–
he did have a genuine phobia of leaving the town’s limits. On Sunday evenings we used to drive down the hill to my grandparents’ house, where we got together with my aunts and uncles and cousins. Well aware of the incompatibility of our various traumas and paranoias
–
which reached its most dangerous manifestation in the militant division between ophidiophobes and ophidiophiles
–
my parents and aunts and uncles understood that they should only keep in touch infrequently, to prevent the friction in our relationships from causing actual lacerations. An hour a week seemed to be the limit: specifically, Sundays from four to five o’clock. They had even considered the advantages of this time from a biological point of view, as it was the period
par excellence
of laziness and docility, the hour after Sunday lunch, the time of a general decrease in the metabolic functions.
That Sunday, after a bout of communal hibernation at my grandparents’ house, we found the road back home blocked by a milk truck that had ran out of fuel. We had to turn around and came out on to the highway leading to Aguascalientes, from where we could rejoin the road we needed a bit further on. My father, however, kept on going, driving very slowly and carefully, because all seven of us children were in the back of the truck, including the pretend twins, who at that point still deigned to grace us with their presence. Fifteen minutes later we entered La Chona and my father parked the truck in the main square, next to the parish church, which was smaller than
ours.
‘You see? It’s exactly the same as Lagos,’ my father said, revealing his motive, his desire to demystify the world, represented rather pathetically at that moment by La Chona.
But it was a lie, because instead of the plague of sparrows we had in Lagos, La Chona had a shitload of starlings. Our half-hour sojourn in La Chona, where we had an ice cream that divided opinion, gave my father the excuse he needed to refuse every time we asked him to take us to León or San
Juan.
‘Why do you want to go there?’ he would repeat. ‘It’s all the same. You’ve already been to La Chona. All cities are the same; some are bigger, some are smaller, or uglier or prettier, but basically the same.’ This fallacy was so shaky that it only served to expose
him.
Because of all this I knew that no one had stolen the pretend twins; they had simply decided to take off, to escape the limits of our claustrophobic existence. Jarek had never thought of running away from home. No matter how much they said on the
telenovelas
on TV about the rich crying too, to me they looked very comfortable, very content, very satisfied with their exclusive happiness.
‘Where’s La Chona?’
‘It’s a city on the way to Aguascalientes. It’s imposing.’
‘Imposing? Well, I’ve been to Aguascalientes loads of times and I’ve never seen La Chona.’
‘That’s because it’s called Encarnación de Díaz, but we call it La Chona for short.’
‘You’re kidding. I do know it. It’s ugly as hell! We stopped off there once for a fruit juice and we all got diarrhoea.’
‘Have you been to Poland?’
‘No.’
I knew it: a pretend Pole. Your dad was probably a serial killer. Or a lousy con artist.
‘Have you been to Disneyland?’ Jarek fired
back.
Yeah, right: we flew there from La Chona’s international airport. As far as I knew, Disneyland was a fairy-tale castle where what mattered was to behave well, whatever happened and whatever you saw. Sometimes, when no one was watching, some Mickey Mouse would take you somewhere dark and grab your dick, or put his finger up your arse. But you had to keep quiet, not complain, and not do the same, not try and feel up Daisy or Minnie’s tits, oh no, because there were some really violent policemen who would beat you to a pulp with their truncheons if you did. You see? Best not to talk about Disneyland in front of the
poor.
I knew what was going to happen now; I’d heard these conversations dozens of times, especially after the summer or Easter holidays, when my more prosperous classmates would start describing the paradise, that promised land we Mexicans had on the other side of the fucking border.
In the United States there was no rubbish; everything gleamed, just like on TV. The people weren’t dirty; they didn’t leave their rubbish in the street; they all put it in the right place, in these brightly coloured bins for sorting waste. A bin for banana skins. A bin for red fizzy drinks cans. A bin for Kentucky Fried Chicken bones. A bin for toilet paper covered in shit. Some enormous bins for old objects that had gone out of fashion and become an embarrassment to their ex-owners. It was so impressive that even people like us, who were only on holiday, didn’t leave our rubbish in the street.
What’s more, it was impossible to get ill from eating in a restaurant there. It wasn’t like here, where you went to get tacos and they gave you dog-meat tacos and the taco seller wiped his armpits with the same hand he picked up the tortillas with. There were restaurants in the States where you paid for a drink and then served yourself as many times as you liked. It was unbelievable: you had eighty Coca-Colas for the price of one. And they gave you free sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce; little sachets you could take back home to give as presents to your friends or to that poor little kid next door you’d been dying to humiliate because he’d never even been to León, the peasant.
But you had to speak English. Yes siree, even though there were fuckloads of Mexicans over there, the important thing was to speak English so they knew you were on holiday and wanted to spend money, because the gringos knew perfectly well how to tell the difference between invaders and tourists. You could see their expression change when your dad got out his wallet full of dollars, because one thing’s for sure, they weren’t racists. It didn’t matter if you were dark-skinned, the only thing that counted over there was money: if you were hard-working and had earned lots of money they respected you. That’s why they were a proper country, not like here, where everyone was trying to screw you over the whole
time.
To my disappointment, it turned out that rich people liked routine too. I knew we poor people were condemned to repeat every day the programme of events that guaranteed the greatest economic efficiency, but I had supposed that rich people’s days were devoted to surprise, to experiencing continually the euphoria of discoveries, the frisson of first times, the optimism of new beginnings. I hadn’t imagined the force of attraction imposed by the need to feel safe: a second law of gravity, the power of inertia calling its children to the warm bosom of boredom. In short, Jarek liked to do the same things every day; the afternoons we spent together were identical. We played on the Atari, had a snack, he talked about America, about Puerto Vallarta or his friends from Silao. Of all the disappointments of this friendship, the most depressing was that Jarek turned out to be a couple of years behind me in terms of hormonal confusion. His world was still one of toys and cartoons, his insipid pranks those of an overgrown child.