Juan Pablo Villalobos - Quesadillas

Confusion is essentially lazy and opportunistic; it doesn’t bother turning up in controlled environments but instead comes begging around propitious scenes and never wastes a crowd. And it wasn’t about to now: it started sprouting furiously, like a watermelon plant twisting around the pilgrims’ feet.

‘Two twins have gone missing!’

‘They don’t look alike, but they are twins!’

‘O virgencita , find them!’

‘Stop! We must find the little ones!’

‘Oh, oh, oh, why did you take them, O Lord!’

‘Take me, I’m old! Why do you always take the innocent ones?’

Aristotle attempted to quell the voluble clamour all around us with his explanations, but he was at a marked numerical and, above all, temperamental disadvantage: no one takes any notice of a spoilsport.

‘No, listen, you’ve got it all wrong. They haven’t just gone missing, they’ve been missing for ages.’

It was too late. The scandal protocol had already been implemented, something crowds don’t like to abandon as quickly as all that, at merely the first few clarifications; no matter how coherent or credible they might be, they’ll never have the prestige required to challenge the fantasies of melodrama. Mobs are like aliens: they don’t give a damn about logic.

A very nervous man appeared wearing a name badge that, in large black felt-tip letters, identified him as Juan de Irapuato . He started shaking Aristotle, demanding a verbal description of the twins, quickly, before it was too late. Before my brother forgot what they looked like, did he mean? We were experiencing one of those moments of false urgency when it seems as if it’s too late for lots of things, but can the present be too late with regard to anything? Nothing but a self-satisfied sophistic exercise.

‘They haven’t gone missing,’ my brother tried to explain. ‘Well, they have, but not just now. They’ve been missing for a while.’

It was fascinating the capacity that everything relating to the pretend twins had for heading straight down the path of goddamn misunderstanding. At the same time, this capacity exacerbated our own incapacity for getting people to understand us. We were sorely in need of a class of applied rhetoric. In reply to Aristotle’s pre-logical babbles, Juan de Irapuato began to demonstrate that he knew how to dole out a good old-fashioned beating. Four blows to the face. Take that! And that! And that! And that! My brother’s complexion was not ashamed to change its hue straight away, in front of its assailant, giving him the pleasure of confirming the graphic effects of his pugilistic feat.

‘Stop talking crap. Come on! What are they called?’

‘Castor and Pollux.’

‘Like hell they are! Don’t you want us to find your brothers?’

‘I’m just trying to tell you that they haven’t gone missing right this minute.’

‘What d’you mean, right this minute? What the hell does that mean? What are you hiding, eh? Seems to me you’ve done something to them. Go on, you little sod, confess!’

One thing we did know how to do damn well when our epistemological skills failed us: run like mad! We stumbled out of there as fast as we could, stepping on feet and pushing people out of the way, until we reached one of the edges of the procession from where we could push towards the front without obstacles. We stopped only when we were sure that word of mouth had got up to its usual tricks and the conversations had been sufficiently distorted to save us. Up ahead, where we were now walking, a story was being told of two twins who had discovered they weren’t brothers and had come to ask the Virgin to help them find their real parents.

‘But if they’re twins how can they not be brothers?’

‘Because they’re pretend twins. They’re identical, but they’re not brothers.’

Perhaps the same thing was happening with the chants: at the front of the procession the first pilgrims, who had not only already arrived in San Juan but were already on their way back home, had started to sing one song, a tune that on its journey to the back of the line had been gradually, relentlessly twisting and bifurcating, until it caused the current harmonic chaos.

I tried to have the satisfaction of reproaching Aristotle — on few occasions in life is a younger brother given such a wonderful chance to get one up on his older brother.

‘Maybe now you’ll shut up, arsehole.’

‘They’re the arseholes, arsehole. They’re a lousy bunch of idiots.’ It was my brother in his favourite mode: Aristotle against the world.

Close to the turning for Mesa Redonda we came across a scrapyard with piles of cars forming strange-shaped mountains. The pilgrims increased the volume of their chants, because they had to compete with the din from a crane hurling cars from one side to another. They had swelled with zeal at the sight of the scrap metal, irrefutable proof that all human vanities are rubbish and the only destiny of matter is to decay. What the pilgrims didn’t know was that our relationship with matter is based on substitution, its perishable quality not mattering shit: there is always a new car to replace a discarded piece of junk.

Such a shameless display of fervour made one wonder which of the methods for finding the pretend twins would be the more outlandish: praying to an apparition in the basilica of San Juan or waiting for extraterrestrials on top of Mesa Redonda? Judging by the size of the procession the aliens were losing by quite a long way, at least in terms of popularity. However, Aristotle was the one who thought these things through and made the decisions, refusing to let go of his interplanetary certainties; the ten kilometres or so we’d walked this far had not yet crushed his fantasies.

We left the highway and headed down the dirt track that led to Mesa Redonda. The track was covered by a thick layer of very fine dust with the consistency of talcum powder, dust that was excited by our footsteps and followed wicked trajectories just to get inside our nasal cavities and eyes. Stupid crappy dust. The track also served as a border between the various plots of land belonging to a series of small ranches. We were surrounded by — guess what! — acacia trees, thousands of millions of acacia trees. It was enough to make you kill yourself. And I would have done so if my sadness had been of a more romantic bent, if it hadn’t been that grey sadness that neither drove me over the edge nor allowed me simply to resign myself to life. It would have been so easy to cut myself an acacia branch, one with long, thick thorns; so comforting to have the balls to slit my veins and bleed to death in that maddening dust. Unfortunately, as well as guts I needed imagination — I would have needed to have read lots and lots of books for such a thing to occur to me, and I’d only ever read schoolbooks, which never glorified suicide as a way of solving the problem of existence. Religious education was rather selfishly biased in favour of preserving life.

Before we could faint and grant the wishes of the vultures circling above us, we sat down in the shade of — what else? — an acacia tree.

From our rucksacks we took oranges, bread, tins of tuna, juice. That day I learned that the invention of the tin-opener was a reactionary moment in the history of mankind’s progress, an essential response to the invention of tinned food. We used sharp stones, like anachronistic Neanderthals, and managed to fill the tins’ contents with dust. If this was the life that awaited us, biting the dust as we ate, it would be better to go back to the comfort of our paltry quesadillas. Running away had forced us to step down a rung in the class struggle and now we were skulking around in the marginal sector of people who eat dirt in handfuls.