But you had to speak English. Yes siree, even though there were fuckloads of Mexicans over there, the important thing was to speak English so they knew you were on holiday and wanted to spend money, because the gringos knew perfectly well how to tell the difference between invaders and tourists. You could see their expression change when your dad got out his wallet full of dollars, because one thing’s for sure, they weren’t racists. It didn’t matter if you were dark-skinned, the only thing that counted over there was money: if you were hard-working and had earned lots of money they respected you. That’s why they were a proper country, not like here, where everyone was trying to screw you over the whole time.
To my disappointment, it turned out that rich people liked routine too. I knew we poor people were condemned to repeat every day the programme of events that guaranteed the greatest economic efficiency, but I had supposed that rich people’s days were devoted to surprise, to experiencing continually the euphoria of discoveries, the frisson of first times, the optimism of new beginnings. I hadn’t imagined the force of attraction imposed by the need to feel safe: a second law of gravity, the power of inertia calling its children to the warm bosom of boredom. In short, Jarek liked to do the same things every day; the afternoons we spent together were identical. We played on the Atari, had a snack, he talked about America, about Puerto Vallarta or his friends from Silao. Of all the disappointments of this friendship, the most depressing was that Jarek turned out to be a couple of years behind me in terms of hormonal confusion. His world was still one of toys and cartoons, his insipid pranks those of an overgrown child.
My visits to Jarek’s house were a bottomless well of worries for my mother, who was terrified I would wreak havoc like I did at home, getting us into debt with the neighbours in similar proportions to the country’s foreign debt. Every time I set off for Jarek’s house she would warn me, ‘Don’t break a vase, please.’
She didn’t know that our lack of motor coordination and absent-mindedness, the source of so many domestic accidents, were not personality traits but rather the consequences of our family’s chaotic interactions. Our tendency to disaster was existentialist. I had never broken a vase, because we didn’t have vases at home, but my mother had seen that kind of thing happen lots of times on television, on programmes and films that use people tripping over as a gimmick to get a laugh. Who knows why the reckless seem to be interested exclusively in vases when there are so many other receptacles and ornaments made of fragile materials that are fond of getting smashed to pieces.
In actual fact, Don’t break a vase was the metaphor my mother had chosen to disguise her innermost fears. Behind this innocuous phrase lay a literal cruelty, the words my mother didn’t dare say to me: Don’t steal anything. Don’t embarrass us. Don’t humiliate us.
Whenever I came home from the Poles’ mansion, my mother would demand I empty my pockets, turn my trousers inside out and take off my shoes.
‘How was it?’ she would ask, still doubting my innocence.
‘Fine. Do you know Jarek has a drawer for his socks?’ I would reply as I took off my own socks to prove there was nothing hidden there either.
‘What?’
‘Yup, a drawer just for putting socks in.’
‘Did you break anything?’
‘No, Mamá, I didn’t break anything.’
Once I was allowed past the threshold, my brothers and sisters would be waiting for me at the second customs barrier.
‘What did you bring us?’ Aristotle would interrogate me, feeling that I ought to pay them all a tax for having access to a different kind of boredom.
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t be an arsehole.’
And they would repeat the inspection, but without bothering to be as gentle as my mother, who watched us without intervening since thwarting her children’s greedy fantasies was impossible. As revenge, I would tell them about one of the Poles’ extravagances: that they had a room just for knick-knacks, or that the maid’s room had its own toilet.
‘I don’t like you going,’ my mother kept saying to me.
‘I won’t go again, don’t worry.’
But I kept on going, at least while the summer lasted. My relationship with Jarek would not cross this threshold, as was to be expected. I had known from the start that when he went to school he’d choose his own friends, with whom he could talk about the experiences they had in common from the convenient position of not having to explain things all the time, like he did with me. He had to explain everything to me: not just how to play on the Atari or what the United States was like, but also details such as why mayonnaise was eaten in great heaped spoonfuls and not spread in thin layers.
Showing off might be satisfying, but it gets tiring after a while.
Little Grey Men
‘The twins were abducted by aliens.’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t you speak Spanish, arsehole?’
This was the big surprise of the new school term: Aristotle wanted to become independent and he was going to attempt to do so in the most absurd way he could imagine.
‘Why do you think the police didn’t find them?’
‘Because the police are arseholes,’ I said, repeating my dad’s version of events.
‘Because they didn’t look properly, that’s why they didn’t find any clues. They didn’t find them because they didn’t look where they should have.’
‘And what were they supposed to do, go and search on other planets?’
I thought it was impossible for the twins to have been abducted in the supermarket. This was my main reservation: not so much the existence of aliens, which I was prepared to incorporate into my system of fictions, but rather the plausibility of a methodology that allowed for the abduction of humans in overcrowded spaces in broad daylight. Surely it would have been more logical for them to have been stolen away one night from our house, up on the Cerro de la Chingada? According to Aristotle, the aliens had no reason to obey human logic. The aliens didn’t come from Greece.
‘But there was no spaceship in the ISSSTE,’ I replied weakly, feigning resistance to my brother’s aggressive attempts to convince me.
‘Don’t be stupid. They probably used telepathy to control them, ordered them to leave the shop and then took them to the place where the spaceship could pick them up.’
‘What place?’
‘Mesa Redonda.’
In other words, they came down one hill to go up another one — the Round Table — poor things. We called it the Round Table because, after a brief, gentle incline, Mesa Redonda was cut off at the top, as if neatly sliced like a boiled egg. The hill’s uniformity produced an almost perfect circumference at the summit. The truth is, even without imagined conspiracies, it had a highly suspicious artificial appearance. Indeed, years later a trip was organised to analyse the hill with metal detectors and other contraptions, and half of Lagos turned up to volunteer. And the other half had to believe afterwards, in spite of the lack of evidence, that ‘strange things’ had been discovered.
Aristotle’s theory proposed that the pretend twins had walked ten kilometres from the ISSSTE shop along the San Juan highway, and then covered 4,000 metres of dirt road leading to the foot of the hill, and then — phew! — climbed all the way up it. And all without anyone seeing them.