Second-to-last-chance Quesadillas
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. Thattelenovela 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.