‘Very good! Now you’re getting it. People love this sort of thing. What was the fight about?’
‘A quesadilla.’
‘What?’
‘We only had money for one quesadilla.’
‘And didn’t you share it, like good brothers?’
‘We beat each other up to see who would get to eat it.’
‘Excellent. Do you want to work for me?’
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a politician.’
‘Do you earn money?’
‘What do you think?’
‘My dad says politicians are stupid.’
‘That’s part of the deal, letting people think we’re idiots. Where’s our damn food? That bastard’s fucking with us.’
At the same time as the tie man was preparing to end all relations with the waiter, the supreme creeper blossomed: on the TV a photo of my parents appeared. It was a recent picture, as you could see quite clearly that their sadness had acquired an aristocratic look, as if they’d been sad for generations. The sound on the TV was turned down, but at the bottom of the screen you could read the headline: PARENTS LOSE 7 CHILDREN.
I pressed the red button and picked up the tie man’s Coke to show him the shit he was drinking. The movement was complicated enough in itself: putting my right hand into my pocket to press the button, while at the same time picking up the bottle with my left. There was an additional difficulty: I was the one performing the movements. Our motor coordination might not have been genetic, but my mother was right: it was real, it existed. The Coca-Cola traced a somersault in the air and hit the tie man on his jaw, the creamy dregs splashed on to his lapels, his shirt and — oh, too bad — his tie. I ran out into the street this time without looking back, or forward; I ran across roads without looking, knocking into people as I went, I ran between cars and buses, upsetting bicycles and motorbikes.
I ran as if I were a stray dog fleeing from the blandishments of the town dog-catcher.
Bovine Eroticism
‘Tell me the truth.’
This was why I’d come home: to be forced into sincerity. I explained what had happened to me, but to every story I told them, my parents always responded the same way.
‘Tell us the truth.’
I insisted on telling them the same thing once more, with more details, and then they would interrupt me.
‘Don’t tell lies.’
‘Lies?’
‘Lies,’ my father confirmed. ‘If you say that something is what it isn’t or something isn’t what it is, you’re lying.’
They asked one of my uncles to pay us a visit. He was an electrical engineer and worked in a factory that made crop dusters. I had to tell them about the red button again.
‘Tell me the truth,’ said my uncle. ‘What you’re telling us is impossible. How can an audio signal interfere with a blender?’
‘I don’t know. I just pressed the little button.’
They switched on the TV and I pressed the button: nothing happened. They turned the blender on: nothing. The radio: still nothing. The little gadget didn’t even work on audio devices, and the third time wasn’t lucky: in my parents’ house logic always prevailed over popular belief. They abandoned the experiment because we didn’t have any other electrical appliances at home.
‘Tell us the truth.’
‘It must have been a miracle — maybe it was the Virgin,’ I argued, just to say something that was the tiniest bit related to what had happened. They were pestering me so much I didn’t know what to say any more.
That story interested no one because it didn’t really fit the established pattern. Tales of miracles had been codified since the Middle Ages and had to obey certain rules of which I was unaware. What’s more, with so much on her plate, the Virgin had to establish a few priorities, performing spectacular and necessary miracles that served to spread the faith and encourage worship of herself. She wasn’t going to waste her time helping some idiot get hold of a few quesadillas.
‘Don’t be stupid. The Virgin doesn’t know about analogue signals,’ my uncle said firmly, based on the conjecture that the Virgin lived a long time ago, before the advent of electronics, and suggesting, heretically, that celestial beings are not omni-know-it-alls.
They were also most intrigued to know what had happened to my face. And they didn’t believe my explanation of that either, this time not due to technical reasons (they were prepared to accept the tin of tuna) but rather due to paternal and emotional flaws of discrimination.
‘Your brother can’t have done that to you,’ they repeated. ‘Who attacked you?’
They didn’t tell me what they wanted me to confess; they were genuine passive Socratics, trying to extract the information from within me. What they were asking me to do was to start making up some lies that tallied with their ideas of the world, damn it. But I hadn’t come home to tell the truth, or to learn to lie. I had come back because the class struggle had worn me out and I wanted to eat quesadillas for free. In the end, for whatever reason, one always comes home, or one never really leaves, and everything ends up being about settling old scores with memory, or, rather, with language.
I’d had a terrible disappointment as soon as I’d arrived home. It was Electra who opened the door. As if that weren’t enough, behind her were Archilochus and Callimachus. Hadn’t they all gone missing? The little fibbers. Theirs had been a fake disappearance, invented by a reporter from León who wanted a good story to tell. So the sadness my parents had accumulated, which I had sensed in the photo on the telly, was all my fault, and Aristotle’s, who still hadn’t shown up, stubborn in his mission to make contact with the aliens and bring back the pretend twins.
This was my parents’ other big concern: ‘Where’s your brother?’
And I returned to the story of our fight, of the tuna tin cutting my face. I showed off my wound again and told them it had been then that we had separated. And they told me again not to tell lies.
But let’s not get distracted from the really big news: now I was the eldest brother. Look out, punks.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t like the prodigal son. My parents didn’t forgive me unconditionally, they hadn’t given me an inheritance to squander and on top of this I still had a shitload of brothers and sisters. The only thing we agreed on was that I’d fallen on hard times and come home with my tail between my legs, stinking like a stray dog. If I wanted them to accept me again, if I really wanted to belong to this family — I swear this is what my mother said to me and you wouldn’t believe the look on her face — I would have to pay the price for my parents’ dignity: I’d have to say sorry to the Poles. Sometimes dignity is achieved by humiliating oneself. It seems confusing, but it’s not: it’s the life we poor people have to live.
‘You have to tell them the truth,’ my mother demanded again; we were starting to sound like a stuck record.
I had to make a list of the things we’d stolen. We went to the ISSSTE shop to buy the replacements, including two packets of María biscuits that I put on the list instead of the Oreos. Get this, Jarek: screw you, arsehole. After paying the bill, my father showed me the total on the receipt: it had seven figures. He told me I was going to pay him back this amount, that I would have to find myself a job. I’d missed a year of school and ever since I’d come back my father had been goading me with the threat that I’d have to find something useful to do. Since he didn’t mention indexing the balance for inflation, it was a steal. All I had to do was wait a couple of weeks for the currency to be devalued 8,000 per cent and then I’d pay him back.
My mother and I went to the neighbours’ house at a time we were sure Jaroslaw wouldn’t be home. These things are best sorted out between mothers, my mum must have thought, perhaps fearing that Jaroslaw would call the police. Heniuta stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance and ignoring my mother’s apologies.