My mother ran into the kitchen and came back with her eyes full of tears and a quiver in her voice.
‘Darling,’ she announced to my father, and at home this affectionate opening gambit always served as a prologue to catastrophe, ‘we only have thirty-seven tortillas and 800 grams of cheese left.’
We entered a phase of quesadilla rationing that led to the political radicalisation of every member of my family. We were all well aware of the roller coaster that was the national economy due to the fluctuating thickness of the quesadillas my mother served at home. We’d even invented categories — inflationary quesadillas, normal quesadillas, devaluation quesadillas and poor man’s quesadillas — listed in order of greatest affluence to greatest parsimony. The inflationary quesadillas were thick in order to use up the cheese that my mother had bought in a state of panic at the announcement of a new rise in the price of food and the genuine risk that her supermarket bill would go from billions to trillions of pesos. The normal quesadillas were the ones we would have eaten every day if we lived in a normal country — but if we had been living in a normal country we wouldn’t have been eating quesadillas and so we also called them impossible quesadillas. Devaluation quesadillas became less substantial due to psychological rather than economic reasons — they were the quesadillas of chronic national depression — and were the most common in my parents’ house. Finally you had the poor man’s quesadillas, in which the presence of cheese was literary: you opened one up and instead of adding melted cheese my mother had written the word ‘cheese’ on the surface of the tortilla. We were yet to experience the horror of a total absence of quesadillas.
My mother, who had never voiced a political opinion in her life, came down on the government’s side and demanded that the rebels be routed and the human right to food be immediately reinstated. My father abandoned his stoicism and retorted that dignity could not be exchanged for three quesadillas.
‘Three quesadillas?’ my mother countered, despair inciting her to feminist sarcasm. ‘It’s so obvious you do nothing around here! This family gets through at least fifty quesadillas a day.’
Still more confusingly, my father insisted that the rebels were a bunch of idiots, even though he defended them. It would be ungrateful not to, since it had been they, during one of their sporadic periods in government over ten years ago, who had brought electricity and phone lines to the hill we lived on.
Basically, all the rebels did was shout ‘Long live Christ the king!’ and pray for time to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
‘These poor people want to die and they don’t know how. They’re trying to die of hunger but it takes ages — that’s why they like war so much,’ said my father by way of explaining to us that the rebels would not negotiate, would not accept any agreement with the government.
We called them ‘the Little Red Rooster’s men’, in part because their party logo was a red rooster, but mainly because they — like most political parties — were given to referring to themselves by unpronounceable acronyms. As there was no other party with a blue or yellow rooster, which would have created a source of ambiguity demanding the use of the adjective, a lot of the time linguistic economy — that is, laziness — led us to call them simply ‘the Little Rooster’s men’. They were cooperative farmers, small-scale ranchers and schoolteachers, always accompanied by a loyal circle of devout women of diverse origin. They called themselves synarchists and their mission was to repeat the defeats of their grandfathers and their fathers, who had waged war way back in the 1920s, when the government decided that the things in heaven belonged to heaven and the things on Earth belonged to the government.
Faced with this exciting scene, my siblings and I — semi-rational beings who ranged in age from fifteen (Aristotle, the eldest) to five (the pretend twins), meticulously separated from each other by two-year periods that suggested a disturbing sexual custom of my parents — set to acting out fist fights between the rebels and the government. I headed up the rebels, because Aristotle refused to be anything except the government — the forces of order, as he put it. The government always won in our battles, because Aristotle was already applying his fascist methodology, which combined using excessive force with buying off his opponents. As if that weren’t enough, he always had in his army the pretend twins, who didn’t bat an eyelid at anything; didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t blink. They liked to act as if they were two plants and, generally speaking, it’s impossible to force plants to surrender. They were a couple of ferns in their pots: we knew it was enough to reach out a hand and apply the minimum amount of force to hurt them, but we didn’t do it, ever, because we had the impression that the ferns wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I tried to wade in with my rhetorical skills, but was condemned to failure because no one understood me.
‘Fellow countrymen, there is still time to step back from the profound abyss, still time to return to the path of good and leave to our children that most precious inheritance: liberty, their inalienable rights and their well-being. You are still able to bequeath them an honourable name that they will remember proudly, merely by being addicted to revolution and not to tyranny …’ I exhorted my men, until Aristotle grew bored and curtailed my speech by thumping me.
It meant nothing that I’d won poetry contests at school for six consecutive years, improvising oratory pieces and reciting poems: my own, other people’s and anonymous ones. Sometimes the anonymous poems were properly anonymous, sometimes they were my own anonymous efforts and sometimes those of my father, who had — by a long stretch — a greater talent for vulgarity than he had for metaphor. The poems’ authorship was determined by the level of embarrassment they caused me as I read them.
From our strategic position high up on the Cerro de la Chingada, we could hear random detonations and shootouts, and glimpse new plumes of smoke. From the phone calls my parents made to my uncles and aunts, who lived in the centre like normal people, not right in the middle of the shit, we knew it was pointless to risk leaving the house, since all the shops were shut. According to my father, the families who lived in the centre had regressed to walking on all fours and were crawling around in their houses, eating lying down and sleeping under their beds. Such a display of circus skills served only to avoid the stray bullets, a waste of talent and energy, considering that without exception we were all going to die one day anyway.
Despite the precariousness and the risk of starvation we experienced in those days, they were a relief for my father, who was finally able to justify his hermit-like decision to build our house on the edge of town — but on top of a hill? You’ve got to be kidding! He went around saying that while people were praying for their lives in the centre, we were safe, nothing was going to happen to us, which led me to consider the possibility that we’d end up being the only survivors, with the subsequent responsibility of having to repopulate the highlands — my imagination was conditioned by the teachings of the Old Testament.
Two days after the conflict began, the nine o’clock news found us in the distressing situation of one poor man’s quesadilla per head.
‘Just like in Cuba,’ my mother kept saying.
‘They don’t have quesadillas in Cuba,’ my father replied.
‘Well, that’s their loss, the poor things,’ my mother concluded, and turned to stare out of the kitchen window, wishing someone would just bomb the damned town hall once and for all.
My mother’s wish for genocide was not going to be granted, although it almost was: the newsreader informed us that at that very moment a shitload of anti-riot vans were arriving in Lagos to reinstate democracy. As if by a stupid cosmic connection, at that very moment we heard a distant rumble and rushed over to the living-room window, which provided a better view of the town’s events, veiled, it must be said, by a discreet curtain. We drew the curtain back so as to get a good view and were able to witness a ramshackle procession of trucks down below, on the road that came out in the centre.