Although we didn’t intend this, the ultimatum together with the religious zeal and the political meetings at home meant that our nights of quesadillas began to grow sad once again. We grew full very quickly — there was even one night when there were quesadillas left over! My mother turned off the heat at the griddle and came over to the table to see a tortilla dish quite free from wrangling.
‘You’re wasting your time. It won’t do any good,’ she told my father, the executioner giving the deceased chicken’s neck just one more twist.
‘All I need is for them to be here on the day,’ my father replied, because to him what mattered was that we had an audience for our execution.
The night prior to the ultimatum, a family committee showed up at our house, made up of three of my father’s brothers and one of his brothers-in-law. They had made some enquiries and said that the council had already hired two bulldozers. Two bulldozers to knock down our house? It must be a precaution, just in case one broke down, so that the other could take over; there’s nothing worse than an anticlimax.
They tried to convince my father, but it was too late. It had always been too late, right from the start. Time had actually become distorted, because in each and every present moment that went by, from the arrival of the ultimatum up to the denouement, it was always too late, as if the end had occurred at the beginning and all that remained after that was to implement protocol. Faced with my father’s refusal and my mother’s tears — which were truly moving (if they were for us, who saw her cry every day, I can’t imagine what my relatives must have felt) — the committee moved from words to action. They all held my father down and dragged him out of the house. Aristotle was shouting, ‘Leave him alone, leave him alone,’ and the rest of us were so frightened that all we could do was channel our fear by crying noisily.
My father was a chicken for whom one executioner was not enough, nor four; an entire system of injustices was required, the foundation of a country eternally organised around fraud, in order to execute him.
Before they got to the door it became clear that none of my uncles wanted to play the role of executioner either; my father escaped from their eight arms and dealt a blow to the face of the man closest to him. An enormous bruise appeared over the right eyebrow of my father’s youngest brother, then my father approached him again, this time to embrace him.
‘You’re being a real arsehole, man.’
My uncles went, leaving behind them a state of emergency that was appropriate for what happened next. My father took advantage of the atmosphere’s going from tense calm to hysteria to remind us of the following day’s agenda, which he announced as if he was the general in a war of chickens. We would have to get up at four thirty in the morning, the synarchists would arrive at five, we’d have to give them breakfast, coffee and eggs, and organise the cordon around the house. And then wait. And then wait some more. And some more. And some more.
The huge number of eggs we’d bought, however, turned out to be unnecessary. At midnight the roar of the bulldozers woke us from tossing and turning in nervous sleep. It was Sunday already.
We left the house without putting up any resistance, escorted by the police. My mother handed out the few bits of luggage she’d been packing in her feverish obstinacy. We knew none of the policemen; the plan for our destruction was so rigorous they’d even thought of the possibility that if they used policemen who were repeat offenders, who could have been involved in our prior disgraces, they might end up taking pity on us. Not a trace, not one hair, of Officer Mophead.
My father didn’t kick, didn’t struggle to get away; he couldn’t, because he was walking all on his own without anyone needing to help him. He went back into the house a few times to bring out the few remaining piles of belongings, which we slowly arranged in the back of the truck. He asked for five minutes to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. Inside was our furniture, the windows and walls, my mother’s plants.
The TV was still in there!
How would we know we were miserable now?
It seemed as if this was exactly what my father had been trying to do: to construct a defence destined to fail and to fail just as he had planned, to the letter, conceding defeat with the certainty intact of having been ridden roughshod over.
It took the bulldozer two attempts to tear our shoebox apart. The first one knocked the asbestos lid down the slope, making a racket that grew fainter as the lid slid on down towards the foot of the hill. The second destroyed the façade and wall on the left, the one furthest away from the Poles’ house. They left the bulldozer with its blade halfway through the house and parked the other one — which had stayed on the sidelines — out front. The clean-up could wait until tomorrow.
Before they cleared off, one of the policemen asked who Aristotle was: Jaroslaw didn’t give a monkey’s about Greek gods. They explained the charges to my father while putting Aristotle in the patrol car, and my mother stopped crying because she needed to use her eyes to verify that so much lousy bad luck really was happening at once. When they were sure that the fallout from our humiliation was harmless, they all left: police, bulldozer drivers, inspectors of public works, everyone.
There were lights on in the Poles’ house, not because they had woken up to come and watch the demolition — they weren’t at home; they had been tactful enough to go and sleep somewhere else — but because they had left a few bulbs on to make it look like there was someone at home.
It was my mother who threw the first stone, which was actually a little piece of brick from our house. Everyone began to imitate her. The glass in the windows shattered, while the bricks smashed to smithereens against the outside walls, covering them in orange marks. Electra was throwing tiny stones laden with immense symbolic value.
No one noticed I was doing the same, throwing stones and more stones without stopping. But I was aiming somewhere else.
I was aiming at the ruins of our house.
This is My House
They cleared the hill in a few weeks, painstakingly eradicating each and every one of the acacia trees. To complete the process of divestment, a letter authorising everything was signed and the municipal government officially announced the creation of a new neighbourhood: Olympus Heights.
We didn’t know it, but we’d been living in another town our whole lives.
The neighbourhood of Olympus Heights was made up of just the twenty hectares on the hill’s western side, so that its constituents would be exclusively inhabitants of the new housing development — when they had moved in — thus thwarting the risk that a change in the governing party might compromise the happiness they deserved, especially considering how much the people of the now neighbouring area enjoyed opposing the PRI.
The news descended the hill, crossed the town and reached us, all twisted, at Grandfather’s smallholding, where we had found a place to camp out in the night watchman’s ‘house’, which luckily was vacant in those days. As it travelled, the news lost its negative aspect and became magnificent news, optimistic news, slick with the sheen of the novel. If it wasn’t for the fact that a short time ago we had been protagonists in that story, we would have thought — like most people — that high up there, on the hill, urgent restructuring work that had needed doing for decades was being carried out.
Grandfather’s land was bordered to the west by the railway line, to the north by the Nestlé factory, to the east by the river and to the south by a pig farm. A perimeter of misfortunes. In addition to the discomfort of our all living crammed together in one room, there were also the mosquitoes, the stench of the pigs, the 3.30 a.m. train and the whistle from the Nestlé factory that signalled the shift changeovers every eight hours.