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.