When my turn came, I had to say, ‘I’m sorry, forgive me.’
Heniuta said nothing, just stood there, communicating an eloquent silence. My mother was expecting recriminations. She thought her neighbour would shout in my face for being a traitor — what did we ever do to you? We’ve always been good to you! This was the complaint my mother assumed would be directed at me. She was prepared for it, to defend her son, who deep down was a good boy, just a little confused, but she had failed to understand something fundamental. The neighbours were not going to react like that; they had cable TV and were accustomed to foreign fiction. Jarek came out from behind his mother’s skirts to look at the contents of the rucksack we’d brought with us. He took out the packets of María biscuits and held them out to me.
‘There, you can have them.’
Heniuta embraced him, not out of any tenderness induced by this humanitarian gesture but simply relieved to know that at last her son was prepared to face adulthood. My mother apologised again, this time, however, for the inconvenience of having rudely awakened them from their peaceful, leisurely afternoon to initiate them into the awkwardness of class conflict. They shut the door in our face, discreetly, with a naturalistic gesture, which instantly set my mother off crying because we weren’t even worthy of having the door slammed in our faces properly. She made use of the ten-metre walk to our front door to go from indignant weeping to hysterical hiccups. She managed to repeat six times, ‘Never have I felt so humiliated.’
It was not, however, the time to feel sorry about my mother’s hurt feelings. There were more important things to do. She would have to stop distracting herself by suffering over my minor faults and start suffering due to sorrows that were actually worth it. Weren’t three of her children still missing? I had to take advantage of the opportunity destiny had awarded me on becoming the eldest brother.
For my reign of terror I chose a hard-hitting slogan intended to stifle any possible rebellion by my younger siblings: ‘You guys don’t know anything, arseholes.’
The slogan allowed for a few variations, depending on the circumstances: ‘You guys haven’t seen anything, arseholes’ and also ‘You guys haven’t lived, arseholes.’
Callimachus was the most curious to discover what the world was like beyond La Chona. Archilochus was too busy channelling his frustration at no longer being the second eldest, and Electra was too small to be interested in anything other than working out why her dolly and her little classmates’ dollies were so different.
‘Tell me!’ Callimachus begged me.
‘Pegueros is imposing,’ I told him. ‘There are some really tall buildings, a hundred storeys high, and all the houses have swimming pools. The problem is the crocodiles.’
‘Crocodiles?’
‘Yeah, there are crocodiles everywhere.’
In exchange I made him my slave. He fetched me things that were far away; I demanded he address me formally — sir, yes, sir — and he did the chores I was meant to do around the house, which weren’t many, or particularly difficult, due to my mother’s compulsive cleaning, but I had to keep my slave busy all the time, so he didn’t have a moment to think and rebel. Archilochus bided his time, exuding an exaggerated indifference stripped of any idleness; it was a most interested indifference. When it was time for the quesadillas, he would try to expose me as soon as he got the chance, in the relative tranquillity we’d achieved with the deduction of thirty fingers from the teatime machinations.
‘Dad, did you know that in Pegueros there are crocodiles in all the swimming pools?’
‘There aren’t any crocodiles in Pegueros,’ I said quickly, taking advantage of my father’s delayed reaction due to the astonishment the news was still causing him — it was almost as if he was a foreigner and didn’t yet understand what sort of country he lived in, although, in his defence, it had to be said that the politicians really were displaying extremely high levels of ingenuity when it came to screwing people over. And he still didn’t know how badly Salinas was going to take the piss!
‘The place where I said I saw crocodiles was Guadalajara Zoo.’
The commotion caused by my mention of the zoo gave me a chance to look my father straight in the eye, so the fucker would finally understand the nature of my rebellion. Even though I’d come home, for reasons of convenience, I wasn’t the same any more. I’d changed; my world view had broadened beyond the confines of our town and was now a state-wide vision. If he said that the whole world was the same, I would argue that acacia trees didn’t even exist.
The average number of quesadillas per person and their weight per unit had increased because of the reduction in the family, it’s true, but not in the way I had hoped. On the news they were forever talking about pacts: growth pacts, solidarity pacts. It was the current government’s method of choice for fulfilling its mission of screwing up our lives. My father remained loyal to his healthy habit of insulting all politicians, applying a level of hostility in direct proportion to the 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.