The ‘house’ didn’t have a kitchen, a deficiency my father made up for with a portable coal-fired stove for my mother to make the quesadillas on. This new methodology meant an initial training period, in which the tortillas were burned and the cheese remained unmelted — or uninfused, if you like. My mother channelled her anger towards the stove and her failed meals, but after a few days her technique became more refined, and in the end it turned out that, cooked over mesquite wood, the quesadillas were much tastier than before. And what was my mother to do with her emotions now? It wouldn’t do anyone any good if she were to focus on the misery of having lost two children, the frustration of having her house pulled down and the distress of her eldest son’s being incarcerated. There were too many Greek precedents in this story to underestimate what would happen if she were given one of those time-honoured leading maternal roles.
The shack — let’s drop the euphemisms and call things by their proper names — didn’t have a toilet either, which was less serious than it might have seemed as we found a simple stand-in, using our commodious imaginations to pretend that all the land beyond the river was a commode, and reviving the validity of medieval European ideas according to which it was sufficient to wash oneself two or three times a year.
Every night we did jigsaw puzzles with our mattresses to try and get comfortable under the roof. In the morning we freed up the space so the building could provide us with shade, now that there were no trees on the land — my grandfather had ordered not only that all the vegetables be dug up but also all the fruit trees — and the plot had become two exotic hectares of creeping vines. In terms of how we occupied ourselves there, suffice it to say that we saved up all our free time to scratch our mosquito bites.
Despite the unrivalled disadvantages to the terrain, my father had tried to get Grandfather to give him his share of the inheritance early.
‘Fifty square metres,’ he had begged, still covered in brick dust from the demolition of our house, ‘all I’m asking for is fifty metres.’
But Grandfather really did have a screw loose.
‘Are you crazy? In fifty metres you can grow 180 watermelon plants, 180! And what do I gain with you lot? Just mouths to feed — and you’ll eat my watermelons. And anyway, I’ve already given you a table! A mesquite wood table! Those things last for ever.’
This was true, although the table had been left behind to keep the ruins of our ex-house company. My father had at least managed to use our state of helplessness to force him to accept the fact that meanwhile we would be living on his land.
While what, was the question — while more bad luck happened to us? No one knew.
Aware that my mother was hovering on the verge of a hysterical outburst, my father had tried to convince his brothers to have Grandfather declared legally unfit due to senile dementia, so as to get access to his material possessions. The problem was that my uncles hadn’t ended up on the street, which meant that, even as poor as they were, they still had plenty of pride and respect for the macabre.
‘Wait until he dies,’ they all kept saying. ‘How long can it be?’
But it could be a long time, the family statistics suggested — our life expectancy was long, extremely long, our great-grandfathers had died at around a hundred years of age; even our great-great-grandfathers lived to over eighty, and they’d had to live through the turbulent and unhygienic nineteenth century!
‘Years and years; we should hope he lives for a great many more,’ my father retorted, testing the rhetorical potential of emotional blackmail, and he was right too: Grandfather would last for ages yet, even making it to the end of the century, just.
‘So go to Pueblo de Moya, there’s lots of land there,’ advised my uncles, who were up to date on the best places to build a house illegally.
However, if our experience on the hill had done anything for us — besides making us suffer — it was to destroy my father’s desire to prove the impossibility of impossible things.
‘We’re not going to steal land. If they screw you over when you’re in the right, imagine what they’ll do when you’re not.’
‘You weren’t in the right.’
‘Nor were they. The land belonged to the council. It wasn’t earmarked for housing.’
‘And who earmarks it? The council!’
‘Exactly!’
‘Yeah, exactly! You weren’t in the right and you never will be. They’re the ones who are always in the right, so what does it matter? Go to Pueblo de Moya. You can hold out for a good few years there.’
‘We’re not going to do any illegal building. I’ll put the house right here on Grandfather’s land.’
The conclusion my father had arrived at, taking advantage of the argument of my grandfather’s madness, was that he would never even notice. The one sign of solidarity my uncles displayed was to agree they would pretend they didn’t know, and that if there was any sort of setback — the return of my grandfather’s lucidity, for example — they would do their utmost to seem as surprised and indignant as possible.
‘It’s your lookout,’ one of them said.
‘You’re stubborn. Do what you like,’ said another.
‘What are you asking us for if you’re going to go and do what you’ve already decided anyway? You’re just wasting your time and making us waste ours,’ moaned his youngest brother, the resentment still throbbing along with the bruise on his forehead.
Grandfather went to the plot every day at around ten in the morning and stayed for a couple of hours, which he spent interrogating his two employees about the health of the watermelons and making an inventory of the materials stored in the storehouse — fertilisers, tools, insecticides — to make sure no one was robbing him. Before he left, without exception, and without a trace of the modesty that had characterised him in his pre-dementia life, he would drop his trousers, ask one of the labourers to help him squat down and position his backside in the open air, and shit in the middle of the watermelons.
‘It’s the best fertiliser there is!’ he would shout happily, still squatting, but now face to face with his most recent, still-steaming production.
He took his leave of his employees with a phrase that proved my father had been wrong about the nature of his madness — in fact he was paranoid-obsessive and highly competitive when it came to covering up secrets.
‘Keep a close eye on this lot for me. They’ve already had a run-in with the law.’
Making the most of the fact that Grandfather’s legs had begun to let him down long ago, condemning him to an exasperating slowness, and mentally calculating the number of days it would take him to cover the 200 metres from the smallholding’s entrance to the bottom of the plot, my father chose the south-eastern corner to build our house, the furthest away from the gate. It was a location at once defiant — at its eastern coordinate, due to the threat of flooding — and resigned — at its southern coordinate, due to the stink from the pigs.
The wild card in my father’s plan was the pair of labourers — two wild cards, in fact. He didn’t know how they would react; we’d not had a chance to get to know them because they were so taciturn. No matter how much my father tried, he hadn’t managed to strike up a conversation with them, so he decided to say nothing to them now, to give them no warning and to find out later exactly how much loyalty they felt towards his father.
The evening following a day in which my mother had not addressed a single syllable to my father, he decided to execute his plan as soon as the labourers had gone home. First we went to the storehouse to find the tools we’d need, which operation called for the use of a screwdriver to break a very flimsy padlock and generated an impressively clandestine atmosphere.