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
Luckily, the town’s criminality had not yet reached a sufficient level or prestige to merit a jail of its own, never mind stretching to a juvenile detention centre. Our lawbreakers were only acting out of hunger, in romantic desperation, because they were drunk or because in fact they were mad and there wasn’t a psychiatric hospital nearby either. There was a police station in the centre of town where there were five lock-ups referred to rather grandly as
cells
. When the staff found their paperwork was growing unmanageable, the cells’ residents would be transferred to the jail in Puente Grande. This hardly ever happened, because Puente Grande was clogged up with real criminals, and because ours inspired pity due to the sheer number of extenuating circumstances that came out when one started to investigate their misdeeds. Nothing but lousy shoddy crooks. These days there is a jail in Lagos which serves as the perfect pretext for the townspeople
–
especially the priests
–
to declare sententiously, over and over and over again, that the old values are
dead.
They put me in a cell to provide company for a down-and-out drunkard who hadn’t been able to find anywhere better to sleep off his hangover and
–
what a surprise
–
a cousin of my father who had a reputation for being a stoner and whose nickname was Pink Floyd. It was the one courtesy Officer Mophead extended to my father, granting us a family
cell.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ said my father to Pink Floyd, relieved at the coincidence of our legal entanglements.
‘Yeah, no, totally, pleasure’s all mine,’ replied my uncle.
‘You can look after him for
me.’
My father might as well have said: he’s not an expert at living in the slammer. On the other hand, I was an expert at living in a shoebox.
‘I’ll be right here, don’t you worry.’
My father went to the neighbours’ house to try and convince Jaroslaw to withdraw his accusation. Officer Mophead had told him that this was the simplest solution; otherwise there was a risk that I’d be transferred to the juvenile detention centre in Guanajuato.
‘They’ll take him to Guanajuato. Jaroslaw knows people there.’
‘But that’s illegal.’
‘Going into someone else’s house and stealing is what’s illegal.’
For a minute I thought: finally, I’ll get to see León. But I couldn’t concentrate on that possibility because Pink Floyd was distracting me from my misfortune. It turned out that my grandfather had discovered Pink Floyd’s marijuana crop on his plot of land. He’d kept it hidden for years down at the bottom of the field, beyond the sweetcorn, but one day it had suddenly occurred to Grandpa to have the vegetables dug up to make way for watermelons.
‘Watermelons?’
‘Yeah, watermelons. Your grandpa’s old and he has a few loose screws.’
The difference between this new uncle of mine, Pink Floyd, and other adults was that when I told him how I’d ended up in jail he didn’t correct me or tell me it was a lie or demand I tell him the truth. He wasn’t Aristotelian or Socratic, he was a radical don’t-give-a-fucker, which is the national version of relativism. The only fault he found in my story was our choice of destination for the encounter with the aliens.
‘Mesa Redonda? That’s where you screwed up. It’s Cuarenta that the aliens go
to.’
It seemed the most normal thing in the world to my uncle that Jaroslaw had reported me. He said that he’d done it to make me learn my lesson; that the hardest job of the rich was controlling the poor, to make sure they didn’t rebel.
‘What you have to do is make sure you don’t learn your lesson. They let you go and you go and steal from them again, let them learn
their
lesson. They’re the thieves, the ones who control the means of production, like old man Marx used to say. Have you seen the price of milk? One day you go to the shop and a litre costs 200,000 pesos. You have a Chocomilk, a bowl of cereal and you make yourself a milkshake. Go back to the shop the next day. How much is a litre now? Seven million pesos! The milk is the same, the cows are right over there! And who do the cows belong to? No one! The cows don’t belong to anyone. The cows belong to everyone. You follow me? So the next day you get up at five in the morning, you go to a ranch and you milk one of your cow comrades. And what happens if they catch you? They throw you in jail, man! The rich send people to jail like a teacher sends a kid to stand in the corner. Your grandfather
too.’
‘But my grandfather’s poor.’
‘Your grandfather, poor? He’s got two hectares of land! And anyway, you’re not poor. I don’t know what you’re complaining about
–
you’re from the wealthy side of the family.’
In this my uncle Pink Floyd and Aristotle were in agreement: according to my older brother, we were practically millionaires compared to the pilgrims and, according to Pink Floyd, I was rich simply by dint of having a few miserable cousins who really were genuinely poverty-stricken.
‘They screwed you over with your name. I’ve got a gringo pal who told me that in the States black people who try to act like they’re white get called Oreos. Like the cookies: black on the outside, white on the inside. That’s your karma, man, you’ll never be happy with who you are. You know the first thing you’re gonna do when you have money? Fix your teeth.’
Why pay for a psychoanalyst when you have a stoner uncle? An uncle, what’s more, who is not ashamed to show you a stain exactly the same shape as the African continent imprinted on his upper incisors. The solution, however, was simpler, and cheaper: to learn to talk, to laugh, to chew, in short, to learn to use one’s mouth without showing one’s teeth.
My father turned up accompanied by Jaroslaw, who started signing forms authorising my liberation. Anyone who didn’t know my father would think he had come to a reasonable agreement with Jaroslaw and that he had, moreover, managed to steer the situation back to the serenity that a mutual interest in keeping up appearances always guarantees. Jaroslaw was telling him about a project to divide up the land on the Cerro de la Chingada and they looked exactly like what they were not: a couple of neighbours talking about what was going on in the neighbourhood. That’s what appearances are like, treacherous motherfuckers.
Pink Floyd knew my father pretty well and he interpreted the scene perfectly: ‘He’s good, your dad; it doesn’t even look like he’s licking his
ass.’
Jaroslaw was low enough to wait for me to emerge from my cell before slapping me on the back and confirming my uncle’s theories.
‘It’s for your own good, kiddo, you’ll see
–
one day you’ll thank me for
it.’
It was like having your gangrenous right leg cut off and then, years later, a glass falling from your hands, smashing to pieces on the floor, just in the place where your right foot should have been, and you saying, ‘Wow, it’s lucky they cut off my
leg.’
I didn’t have time to reply because Jaroslaw returned to the attack with a puzzling remark: ‘See you on Monday.’
On the way home, my father used our silence as a way of punishing me. I didn’t know how to react to this strategy. A silence aimed specifically at me
–
I wasn’t sure if I was meant to contribute by being mute myself or if I should interrupt him with apologies or evasive conversation. It wasn’t that I was having a hard time exactly; I just didn’t understand what was going on. When was he going to start telling me off, threatening me, explaining the consequences of my actions to me? And what was this business about Monday? I decided to wait, to hold back and let my father believe his muteness was having an effect.
The silence carried on as usual, building on its already overvalued status as the essential companion to serious moments. This was no silence for reflecting in, but one of those absolute silences in which time seems to stop altogether. The sounds of the city entered the truck, and the truck itself had become an inexhaustible source of creaking as it headed towards the final collapse. This could only be called silence because the two of us were sitting there with our damn mouths shut. Suddenly it seemed to me that the game consisted of seeing who would give in and speak first, that what my father wanted was for me to beg him to stop being silent, to beseech him to put me in my place. To demand my own punishment.
‘Sorry, Dad, I’m really sorry.’
My father’s right hand left the steering wheel for a minute and gently squeezed my neck, as if he was trying to wring it using a technique designed to kill chickens without their realising. I imagined a chicken farm staffed by a caring executioner. He started to tell me what Lagos was like when he was a boy, when everyone knew each other and said hello in the street; that in the rainy season people would swim in the river (which wasn’t yet polluted back then), that you could work in the fields in exchange for free fruit, that they used to hunt wood pigeons and roast them on bonfires, and that he had met my mother when he was my age, at a moonlit barbecue party, eating charred sweetcorn.
I was unable to enjoy my father’s story because I was waiting for the twist that would turn it into a lesson, from which the punishments and the ultimatums would be drawn. It was a gargantuan qualitative leap from the literal to the allegorical, without stopping off at the metaphorical, which was what happened when parents thought you had grown up. Did he mean that the town was a better place before, when there were no Polish people? Was he suggesting I look for a job on a farm? Should I hurry up and find a
wife?
We got home and, as he parked the truck, my father gave my neck another loving squeeze; thousands of chickens died at that moment in order to feed humanity.
‘Starting on Monday you’re going to work with Jaroslaw, until you go back to school.’
Of course, the agreement was that Jaroslaw would not pay me. I would work to pay back the psychological damage I had caused them and, above all, for my own good: so that I learned how to work, so that I learned the value of things. This was what my father said to me
–
and what Jaroslaw repeated to me, almost to the letter, on my first day. I was going to get my first taste of good old-fashioned economic exploitation. Oh, Pink Floyd, how I wish you were
here.
My mother agreed too. In fact she hoped that the trauma of my fleeting incarceration would be to her benefit.
‘You learn from everything in life, Oreo.’
Really, Mum? Is it really worth accumulating so much useless lousy knowledge?
And so I went back to loafing about, although this was motorised loafing with a commercial objective: visiting ranches to oversee the cows’ heat cycles, handing out doses of semen, refilling hydrogen tanks and, occasionally, carrying out the insemination. We left at five in the morning and covered four different routes, one on the road to León, as far as La Ermita on Mondays; another on the road to Aguascalientes, up to La Chona on Tuesdays; the one out towards Puesto on Wednesdays; and the one along the San Juan road on Thursdays. On Fridays the route depended on whatever jobs from the week were still outstanding. We stopped for breakfast at eight, lunch at two and started out for home at around five. As if that wasn’t torment enough, I had to put up with Jaroslaw’s sermons.
‘I was poor once, like you. My father had a hairdresser’s in Mexico City. Ordinarily I would have stayed there, learning how to cut hair, but I wanted to study. I went to university and studied veterinary science. I got a job in a dairy plant, supervising the ranches we bought milk from. I could have stayed there, nice and secure with my salary coming in every fortnight, but I wanted more. I started the business with a mountain of debt, the first few years were awful, but I put my back into it, I worked incredibly hard, and look at me
now.’
I looked at him. There is only one thing worse than a poor man’s pride: the pride of the poor man who has become rich. He told me his story over and over again, from different perspectives, removing or adding details, falling prey to a few inconsistencies. Sometimes it seemed he was trying to tell me that he expected me to do the same, as if he were advising me. At others it seemed as if he was saying that the two of us had different characters; that he was telling me his story so I’d understand why I would never be able to triumph in life, so I would give up. For the time being, all I understood was that the economic system was incredibly complex, given that it was possible to get rich by impregnating
cows.
In technical terms, the most important part of the business was accurately detecting when the cows were in heat. You had to learn to interpret the psychosexual behaviour of the black-and-white creatures. It was a thankless, arduous task, plagued by haste, for the bovine heat cycle has a maximum duration of twenty-four hours; it was almost as if Mother Nature didn’t like cows, or, spinning the roulette wheel of evolution, had put all her money on their prompt extinction. When they were in heat, the cows grew restless, mooing endlessly; they lost their appetite, their tails and anuses moved rhythmically back and forth, a crystalline, mucus-like discharge appeared and they experienced so-called ‘standing and mounting reflexes’: impulses to seek out, sniff, pursue and mount other
cows.
Jaroslaw said it repeatedly: there was nothing worse than inseminating a cow when she was not in heat. The cattle rancher was prostrate in the face of uncertainty
–
that motherfucking enemy of scientists
–
who, as ever, was a source of time-wasting, where time equals money. Such an obstacle justified the application of monstrous techniques. Nature might be a bitch, but she was a wise one and she had decided that the one with the ability to detect when the female was in heat would be the male. However, modernity had found a problem with the efficiency of instinct, because the male could not fulfil his obligation without becoming randy, mounting the female and penetrating her to deposit his filthy, unwanted semen.