Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos Page A
Tags: spanish, Mexico, Family, Satire, Twins, Contemporary Fiction, translation, Literary Fiction, Novel, Brothers, politicians, Comedy, Novella, Elections, Corruption, Middle class, Translated fiction, Rite of passage, pilgrims, electoral fraud, Guardian First Book Award, Mexican food, quesadillas, tortillas, Greek names, bovine insemination, Polish immigrants, Mexican politics, Synarchists, PRI, PEN Translates!, PEN Promotes!, watermelons, acacias, Jalisco, Lagos, Orestes, Winner English Pen Award, Pink Floyd, Aristotle, Archilocus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, Pollux
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devaluation of the peso.
‘Oh well, that’s all right, then, you fucking sons of bitches – didn’t you study maths?! How can you be such fucking idiots?! Can’t you see people are dying of hunger?! What damned planet do you live on?’
They increased salaries by 18 per cent, with inflation at 200 per cent and devaluation at 3,000 per cent. The vines grew like crazy, but this time they didn’t even produce one lousy watermelon. Well, sometimes one watermelon would appear, just one, but you had to share it between millions and it was dry and tasteless.
‘I met a politician.’
One night it occurred to me to tell my father this, to see if I could save him from imminent suicide. It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him; quite the opposite. I wanted him to survive and carry on living in this country – that was his punishment.
He stood up without letting go of the quesadilla in his right hand, dragged me away from the table and shut us both up in his room.
‘Was he the one who did that to your face?’ He touched the scar on my cheek with the edge of the quesadilla.
‘No. Aristotle did that, I’ve already told you.’
‘Why are you lying? Tell me the truth. Was it the politician?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘In Tonalá.’
‘Where? How?’
‘At a juice stand. He bought me breakfast.’
‘What did he ask you for in exchange?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t lie! What did he do to you?’
‘He didn’t do anything to me.’
‘Do you think I’m an idiot? What did he ask for in exchange? What did he do to you?’
‘Nothing. He wanted me to work for him, but I ran away.’
‘You ran away? Did he have you locked up?’
‘No. We were having breakfast when I ran away. Although we didn’t have breakfast, since they never brought us our food.’
‘Stop talking crap! This is important! What did he do to you? Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. He didn’t do anything to me, seriously.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He wore a tie.’
‘But what did he look like, physically?’
‘I don’t know. I never notice that kind of thing.’
From then on, my father started showing me photos from the newspaper. ‘Is this him? Is this him?’ he would ask me, but it was never the tie man. He was showing me yet another photo one afternoon when Officer Mophead came to visit us. Fuck me, I thought when I saw him in the doorway, the pretend twins have turned up. But the twins hadn’t turned up; he had come to arrest me. Jaroslaw had accused me of theft and breaking and entering. My parents could perhaps have detected a certain irony in the fact that in the end, instead of bringing their children back to them, the police were taking them away.
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
‘Oh well, that’s all right, then, you fucking sons of bitches – didn’t you study maths?! How can you be such fucking idiots?! Can’t you see people are dying of hunger?! What damned planet do you live on?’
They increased salaries by 18 per cent, with inflation at 200 per cent and devaluation at 3,000 per cent. The vines grew like crazy, but this time they didn’t even produce one lousy watermelon. Well, sometimes one watermelon would appear, just one, but you had to share it between millions and it was dry and tasteless.
‘I met a politician.’
One night it occurred to me to tell my father this, to see if I could save him from imminent suicide. It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him; quite the opposite. I wanted him to survive and carry on living in this country – that was his punishment.
He stood up without letting go of the quesadilla in his right hand, dragged me away from the table and shut us both up in his room.
‘Was he the one who did that to your face?’ He touched the scar on my cheek with the edge of the quesadilla.
‘No. Aristotle did that, I’ve already told you.’
‘Why are you lying? Tell me the truth. Was it the politician?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘In Tonalá.’
‘Where? How?’
‘At a juice stand. He bought me breakfast.’
‘What did he ask you for in exchange?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t lie! What did he do to you?’
‘He didn’t do anything to me.’
‘Do you think I’m an idiot? What did he ask for in exchange? What did he do to you?’
‘Nothing. He wanted me to work for him, but I ran away.’
‘You ran away? Did he have you locked up?’
‘No. We were having breakfast when I ran away. Although we didn’t have breakfast, since they never brought us our food.’
‘Stop talking crap! This is important! What did he do to you? Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. He didn’t do anything to me, seriously.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He wore a tie.’
‘But what did he look like, physically?’
‘I don’t know. I never notice that kind of thing.’
From then on, my father started showing me photos from the newspaper. ‘Is this him? Is this him?’ he would ask me, but it was never the tie man. He was showing me yet another photo one afternoon when Officer Mophead came to visit us. Fuck me, I thought when I saw him in the doorway, the pretend twins have turned up. But the twins hadn’t turned up; he had come to arrest me. Jaroslaw had accused me of theft and breaking and entering. My parents could perhaps have detected a certain irony in the fact that in the end, instead of bringing their children back to them, the police were taking them away.
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
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