My father measured out the fifty square metres in strides, five by ten, without obsessing about accuracy, and stuck a branch in each corner of the terrain. Archilochus, Callimachus and I took charge of tracing four dotted lines in stones, making the relationship between the branches obvious. Next, Archilochus and Callimachus harvested the watermelons. There weren’t 180 of them, only thirty or so, which meant one of two possibilities: either Grandfather’s agricultural knowledge had been knocked off-kilter too or else we’d been devalued by 83 per cent. Meanwhile, my father and I pulled up the plants with the aid of rakes. We pushed the teeth into the soil and pulled upwards, hard, to see if by doing so we could put an end to so much lousy confusion. The rakes were inanimate objects made of metal, which meant we didn’t have to worry about the thickness of the plants’ stalks and leaves. Just to encourage an increase in slacker culture, it turned out that the roots of the watermelon plants didn’t grow very deeply at all and their desire to stay clinging to the subsoil was weak. Once Archilochus and Callimachus had placed the watermelons safely in my mother’s arms they were assigned the task of using gloves to throw the prickly plants down the riverbank. The light was starting to fade when my father decided our task was finished.
We returned the things to the storehouse, so my father could demonstrate to his children that he wasn’t a total swine. He even took care to respect the original décor: he closed the door and returned the broken padlock to its place. Back in the shack, my mother and Electra had been entertaining themselves by cutting open the watermelons. To one side was a pile of discarded fruits whose pallid interiors betrayed the abortion we had subjected them to. At random, we started to eat the reddest ones we could find.
At least weeding the land had restored my father’s right to be scolded by my mother.
‘Tomorrow the labourers will tell your father and he’ll kick us out. Where will we go then?’
‘They won’t say anything to him, you’ll see.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘He makes them smell his excrement. Do you think they have any respect for him?’
‘Respect, I don’t know, but fear …’
‘Fear of what? Have you not seen my dad? He’s a total wreck and he’s a lunatic.’
‘Don’t talk like that in front of the children.’
‘The children have seen their grandfather take a shit and they can hear all the crap he talks. Don’t you think that’s enough?’
They would have carried on arguing if it wasn’t for the fact that suddenly the watermelons started to taste really good: delicious, in fact. Sweet. Juicy. Their sweet juice ran down our chins and we trapped it with our fingers to scoop it back into our mouths, so as not to lose a drop. My father lit a fire so we could gaze at the wondrous pulp we were ingesting.
It was Electra who suddenly asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘What?’ we said, not looking where she was pointing, concerned only with savouring the taste of the watermelon.
‘That! That! That! That!’
And then we looked.
‘It’s Castor!’ cried Callimachus.
‘And Pollux!’ completed my mother, as if the phrase, just like the pretend twins, could not be pronounced separately.
Castor was riding a horse and spinning circles around his head with a lasso. Had he become a charro? Just what we needed.
‘What’s that?’ my father asked before going to greet the twins.
‘Your sons, it’s your sons!’ replied my mother.
‘No, behind them, behind them!’
‘Cows, they’re cows,’ I had to intervene, being the only one specialised in this subject.
But the clarification lacked many scientific details that might explain the behaviour of these black and white beasts. This was an orgy of hysterical cows. They wouldn’t stay still for a moment but ran back and forth, chasing each other, rubbing themselves against each other, sniffing each other’s vaginas, mounting and being mounted. The intermingled moos produced a constant sound, a kind of audible signal. What were the cows trying to tell us? Whom or what were they summoning?
‘Don’t worry. They’re in heat. It’s normal,’ I said when I saw my father trying to hide the erotic spectacle from the women in the family.
‘Normal? Do you think it’s normal for there to be a thousand cows in heat on your grandfather’s land? Where have they escaped from?’ my father shot back, initiating a reactionary movement in defence of reality and the status quo.
‘Who wants normal quesadillas?’ offered my mother, inspired by the free association of ideas.
We all put our hands up.
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
Everyone wants normal quesadillas.
The cows’ clamour found an echo: a stampede of bulls prepared to satisfy the bovine demands. Standing before the animals, Castor made a visual selection of the candidates, eliminating any specimens who were not up to his standards by dealing out charro moves, manganas and piales. The bulls that passed the test pushed their way in among the flanks and without delay unsheathed their immense cocks. The mooing stopped and gave way to the sound of friction and frottage, the rhythm of the in and out.
‘Why can we see everything so clearly?’ asked Callimachus, who was ignorant of the mechanisms of pornography. ‘Wasn’t it night-time a minute ago?’
It was true, the clarity couldn’t be coming from the fire; someone had turned on a light in the sky. We all looked up to check the phenomenon: a massively powerful light was emerging from the arse of a giant interplanetary ship.
‘It can’t be true,’ my father said quickly, eager to dash our hopes.
And why not?
Why not, Dad?
Didn’t we live in the country we lived in?
Weren’t fantastic, wonderful things meant to happen to us all the time? Didn’t we speak to the dead? Wasn’t everyone always saying we were a surrealist country?
‘It can’t be true. It must be a hallucination, some sort of delirium. We’ve got dengue fever! It must be dengue fever!’
Shut up, Dad, shut up!
Didn’t we believe that the Virgin of San Juan had cured thousands of people without any knowledge of medicine? Hadn’t we put borders around a territory just to screw ourselves over? Didn’t we still hope that one day things would change?
It can’t be true, Dad? Are you sure?
A hatch opened in the ship and, phlegmatically, accentuating his customary air of smugness, Aristotle floated down out of it. His feet touched the ground in the middle of the circle we had formed to receive him.
‘What’s happened, arseholes?’
We embraced each other to prove we weren’t dreaming.
‘Castor! Pollux!’ my mother shouted, wanting to complete the embrace.
But the pretend twins were not ready for affection yet. Pollux raised his right arm, calling for silence, and only then did we realise he had become a boxer. His power of conviction was so great that the bulls stopped screwing the cows.
‘Achaean forces! Prepare arms!’
Arms? What for?
Behind us advanced the enemy army: priests, anti-riot police and more officers headed up by Officer Mophead and Jaroslaw. Castor began dealing out manganas and piales left, right and centre. Pollux knocked out his opponents at the first right. Some of the satisfied, resentful bulls had fun goring the men in uniform. Protected by a contingent of soldiers, the tie man appeared with a megaphone.