The silence carried on as usual, building on its already overvalued status as the essential companion to serious moments. This was no silence for reflecting in, but one of those absolute silences in which time seems to stop altogether. The sounds of the city entered the truck, and the truck itself had become an inexhaustible source of creaking as it headed towards the final collapse. This could only be called silence because the two of us were sitting there with our damn mouths shut. Suddenly it seemed to me that the game consisted of seeing who would give in and speak first, that what my father wanted was for me to beg him to stop being silent, to beseech him to put me in my place. To demand my own punishment.
‘Sorry, Dad, I’m really sorry.’
My father’s right hand left the steering wheel for a minute and gently squeezed my neck, as if he was trying to wring it using a technique designed to kill chickens without their realising. I imagined a chicken farm staffed by a caring executioner. He started to tell me what Lagos was like when he was a boy, when everyone knew each other and said hello in the street; that in the rainy season people would swim in the river (which wasn’t yet polluted back then), that you could work in the fields in exchange for free fruit, that they used to hunt wood pigeons and roast them on bonfires, and that he had met my mother when he was my age, at a moonlit barbecue party, eating charred sweetcorn.
I was unable to enjoy my father’s story because I was waiting for the twist that would turn it into a lesson, from which the punishments and the ultimatums would be drawn. It was a gargantuan qualitative leap from the literal to the allegorical, without stopping off at the metaphorical, which was what happened when parents thought you had grown up. Did he mean that the town was a better place before, when there were no Polish people? Was he suggesting I look for a job on a farm? Should I hurry up and find a wife?
We got home and, as he parked the truck, my father gave my neck another loving squeeze; thousands of chickens died at that moment in order to feed humanity.
‘Starting on Monday you’re going to work with Jaroslaw, until you go back to school.’
Of course, the agreement was that Jaroslaw would not pay me. I would work to pay back the psychological damage I had caused them and, above all, for my own good: so that I learned how to work, so that I learned the value of things. This was what my father said to me — and what Jaroslaw repeated to me, almost to the letter, on my first day. I was going to get my first taste of good old-fashioned economic exploitation. Oh, Pink Floyd, how I wish you were here.
My mother agreed too. In fact she hoped that the trauma of my fleeting incarceration would be to her benefit.
‘You learn from everything in life, Oreo.’
Really, Mum? Is it really worth accumulating so much useless lousy knowledge?
And so I went back to loafing about, although this was motorised loafing with a commercial objective: visiting ranches to oversee the cows’ heat cycles, handing out doses of semen, refilling hydrogen tanks and, occasionally, carrying out the insemination. We left at five in the morning and covered four different routes, one on the road to León, as far as La Ermita on Mondays; another on the road to Aguascalientes, up to La Chona on Tuesdays; the one out towards Puesto on Wednesdays; and the one along the San Juan road on Thursdays. On Fridays the route depended on whatever jobs from the week were still outstanding. We stopped for breakfast at eight, lunch at two and started out for home at around five. As if that wasn’t torment enough, I had to put up with Jaroslaw’s sermons.
‘I was poor once, like you. My father had a hairdresser’s in Mexico City. Ordinarily I would have stayed there, learning how to cut hair, but I wanted to study. I went to university and studied veterinary science. I got a job in a dairy plant, supervising the ranches we bought milk from. I could have stayed there, nice and secure with my salary coming in every fortnight, but I wanted more. I started the business with a mountain of debt, the first few years were awful, but I put my back into it, I worked incredibly hard, and look at me now.’
I looked at him. There is only one thing worse than a poor man’s pride: the pride of the poor man who has become rich. He told me his story over and over again, from different perspectives, removing or adding details, falling prey to a few inconsistencies. Sometimes it seemed he was trying to tell me that he expected me to do the same, as if he were advising me. At others it seemed as if he was saying that the two of us had different characters; that he was telling me his story so I’d understand why I would never be able to triumph in life, so I would give up. For the time being, all I understood was that the economic system was incredibly complex, given that it was possible to get rich by impregnating cows.
In technical terms, the most important part of the business was accurately detecting when the cows were in heat. You had to learn to interpret the psychosexual behaviour of the black-and-white creatures. It was a thankless, arduous task, plagued by haste, for the bovine heat cycle has a maximum duration of twenty-four hours; it was almost as if Mother Nature didn’t like cows, or, spinning the roulette wheel of evolution, had put all her money on their prompt extinction. When they were in heat, the cows grew restless, mooing endlessly; they lost their appetite, their tails and anuses moved rhythmically back and forth, a crystalline, mucus-like discharge appeared and they experienced so-called ‘standing and mounting reflexes’: impulses to seek out, sniff, pursue and mount other cows.
Jaroslaw said it repeatedly: there was nothing worse than inseminating a cow when she was not in heat. The cattle rancher was prostrate in the face of uncertainty — that motherfucking enemy of scientists — who, as ever, was a source of time-wasting, where time equals money. Such an obstacle justified the application of monstrous techniques. Nature might be a bitch, but she was a wise one and she had decided that the one with the ability to detect when the female was in heat would be the male. However, modernity had found a problem with the efficiency of instinct, because the male could not fulfil his obligation without becoming randy, mounting the female and penetrating her to deposit his filthy, unwanted semen.
Science had yet to develop reasonable bulls that would inform the cattle ranchers of exactly which were the specimens in heat. Explained thus, one might even think that the bulls were solely responsible for the torment they went through, because of being so impulsive. They couldn’t be trusted, so the farmer had to resort to surgical repression: either attaching the bull’s penis to its abdomen or diverting the course of its trajectory. In the first case, the bull mounted the female but was doomed to make do with frottage — which is exquisite, let’s not deny it, but when you’re so close … The second case was a bad joke in a bedroom farce: the bull tried and tried but never hit the target.
Just imagine the opinion modern cows must have of bulls.
There was a third, more disturbing possibility: androgynous cows. The procedure consisted of injecting the females with hormones to turn them into lesbians. Cows mounting cows: could there be anything more erotic?
Once oestrus had been detected, all that remained was the boring part: depositing semen of proven genetic quality inside the cows. This was Jaroslaw’s business: selling Canadian bull semen. The catalogues detailed the genealogy of each bull and his daughters’ vital statistics. The quality of their udders, hoofs, haunches, what their milk was like. Some bulls had produced over a million doses and had daughters in fifty countries. There was a film that Jaroslaw would show his clients, Masters of Semen. It was a eulogy to the three best specimens from the Canadian company: you saw them grazing in verdant fields, with snow-capped mountains in the background, and then you saw them furiously attacking artificial vaginas, receptacles designed to capture their precious semen.