‘Well, I’ve got nothing to say to that man.’
‘It’s about money. He wants to buy our house and he says Dad doesn’t want to sell it. He says if we don’t sell it they’ll send some bulldozers to tear it down.’
‘And you think I don’t know that?’
‘I dunno. I just wanted to give you the message, that’s all.’
She didn’t know, or at least not the whole story. It was easy to tell, because if she had she would have trotted out the family’s official line, repeated my father’s opinion on the matter.
‘Go and tell him to come over tomorrow at four, but not to be late, because your father gets home at five.’
My first attempt at manipulating family betrayals was turning into a fiasco; I had been demoted to the tame role of messenger. Perhaps they should have called me Hermes instead.
The result of the secret meeting between Jaroslaw and my mother was that that very night my mother declared a quesadilla strike and confronted my father with the TV switched off.
‘You’re going to go and find Jaroslaw right now and tell him we’re selling him the house.’
‘How did you find out? Did he come and see you behind my back? I’m going over there right this minute, but to kick his arse.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic. Heniuta told me. We had a little chat when I was hanging out the washing.’
Don’t be dramatic: the chicken criticising someone else’s clucking. And, of course, my mother was an abysmal liar, because due to the height of our neighbours’ wall only two possibilities presented themselves: either Heniuta was a giraffe or she had climbed up an enormous stepladder to spy on us, which wasn’t exactly the best way to start a conversation with one’s neighbour.
‘They want to buy us, don’t you get it?’
‘No, they don’t want to buy us. They want to buy our house.’
‘No, they don’t. They want to force us to sell them our house.’
‘Force us? Have you asked me what I think?’
‘It’s my house and I decide. We’re not going to sell it. We’re not moving from here.’
My father was right: it was 1987. In Los Altos de Jalisco. Just who did my mother think she was?
My father’s final refusal received an eviction order in reply, based not only on the wrongful appropriation of council-owned land — which was the argument (or threat) with which the rest of the hill’s inhabitants had been blackmailed — but also on a ruling that declared the house an uninhabitable dwelling, being built on a terrace where the hillside had not been sufficiently stabilised. Given our poverty, this was most likely true — even though no architect or engineer had come to the house to carry out an assessment. In short, we were being thrown out for two reasons: for being thieves and for our own good. They couldn’t let the house fall down on top of us and have us deny them the pleasure of pulling it down. There was an ultimatum: we had ten days to clear off.
My father went through a first stage of denial, during which he kept saying, ‘Nothing’s going to happen. They’re just trying to scare us. It’s illegal. They can’t do it.’
This stage lasted fifteen minutes, the time it took to read and re-read the eviction order several times and remember which country we lived in. This was why we watched the news every night, so as not to let our guard down and remain permanently on the defensive.
One of the effects of the anxiety that began to consume us was the reinterpretation of several facts in our recent history: suddenly I was the pariah of the family for having worked with Jaroslaw, as if it hadn’t been my father who’d forced me to do it, as if chickens chose to live on farms.
‘You’re a lousy traitor,’ said Aristotle again and again, and the rest of my siblings joined in with a loyalty as great as the indignities I had meted out to them during my fleeting reign.
The beatings came naturally: they were a way for my sister and brothers to de-stress and for me to disguise myself as a victim and forget my true role in this mess. You deserve it, I said to myself, you deserve it, you traitor, not so much for my conspiracy with the Poles, but rather for something I would never admit to my family: I wanted them to destroy this lousy house.
My father framed the colonisation of the Cerro de la Chingada within the local power struggle between the opposition — the Little Rooster’s people — and the PRI. He thought that things were being done at breakneck speed so as to have the land parcelled up and sold before the following year’s elections, in which the opposition would probably win again and would in all likelihood also have the elections stolen from them again. He thought that the solution would be to mobilise the synarchists, to organise a sit-in of cripples and religious old ladies who would stop them tearing down our house. As if these people had won a single battle in the last hundred years. The strategy seemed more designed to sow vines of confusion than to save us from misfortune.
While my father was organising the resistance, my mother was packing, against the paternal will. In the evenings some of my father’s colleagues, teachers at the state high school, started coming to the house. And the Little Rooster’s activists came too, demanding to say a Vía Crucis before or after the meeting, an entire Vía Crucis, with all its fourteen stations. We started praying because my father said we really needed their support, but to me the activists looked so skinny, so despondent, so ragged that I could only imagine them falling flat on their backs at the first whisper from the police. And anyway, how was it meant to spur us on if out of the fourteen stations, Jesus Christ lost in twelve? And as if that wasn’t enough, when he did finally win he was already dead.
The discussions on how to proceed didn’t fill us with confidence either. The synarchists were experts in using archaic terms and their interpretations were really dull, because they didn’t have TVs. They formulated minimalist sentences with no hidden meanings, which were condemned to the most empty literalness. Back in the good ole days, they would recall; Tha’s it, tha’s it, they would advise. They spoke without inflection, gesticulating or using their hands. And they couldn’t do body language at all!
The contrast with the talks between my father and his colleagues was grotesque. They earned a paltry living by talking, reading fragments of books aloud, transmitting meaning even when they were silent, listening to their students. They used rulers or batons to emphasise their hand movements, they had tics such as brushing imaginary dust off their shoulders or rolling up their sleeves, they pursed their lips and screwed up their eyes; at the absolute peak of semiotic exaggeration not even their eyebrows were wasted in the communication of meaning. Worse still, they had seen tons of political speeches, on TV and first-hand, during the campaigns. They were cultivators of creeping vines without fruit, weeds that didn’t need tending because they grew all on their own, wild. One called for sedition, which his colleagues condemned as incendiary and the synarchists didn’t even understand. What’s sedition? Isn’t it a sin? Another wished for the emergence of a republic in which it was the people who became institutionalised. To complete the confusion, my father suddenly asked for silence and ordered me, ‘Now recite.’
And off I went: ‘When the tyrant offers guarantees, he entertains only the intention of claiming proselytes, this ruse serving as a way of tricking ignorant fools who tomorrow, when his famous government collapses, might serve him as a shield to flee easily abroad, to enjoy the monies stolen from the Mexican people, abandoning this cannon fodder to their fate, etc, etc.’
Who knows what good these nightly sessions would do? To cut a long story short, the only motivation we had was an act of vandalism: one day a huge piece of graffiti with the rebels’ slogan appeared on the wall of the Poles’ house: Justice for Lagos.