Juan Pablo Villalobos - Quesadillas

‘There are three kinds of aliens.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m just letting you know so you can prepare yourself. I don’t know what kind we’re going to see.’

It was the perfect conversation to accompany the consumption of tuna with dust.

‘They might be lizards, arthropods or humanoids. The lizards and the arthropods come from planets where evolution followed a different path from here on Earth. Imagine that instead of monkeys winning the war of the species, there it was crocodiles or spiders. The humanoids are like us, just shorter. Their heads are bigger, their eyes stick out more, they’ve got no hair and they’re all grey.’

Other than their features, the fundamental difference between us and them lay in the digestive system, the way in which the aliens obtained nourishment, using all kinds of resources to generate energy, not just food. Would they eat soil? Aristotle explained it to me as if, in addition to knowing the contents of Epi’s magazines off by heart, he also understood the functioning of the human digestive system. It seemed that in the boredom championships my brother was in the lead, absolutely shitloads of points ahead of me.

‘Now pay attention; this is very important. If there are any problems, if we’re in danger, you have to press here. Don’t be scared, but remember, if we need help you have to press here.’

He was showing me his friend’s little gadget for epileptic fits, which now turned out to have alternative uses in the case of encounters with hostile species. He handed it to me so I could get a good look at it. It was a little black plastic square with a red button, nothing more, but Aristotle wanted me to study it so as to be sure I’d know how to use it if the situation arose.

‘How can it save us if it’s only got a reach of twenty metres?’

The whole school knew this; one day they’d tested just how far Epi could move from the headmaster’s office, which was where the receiver was kept.

‘Don’t be stupid. We’ve rigged it.’

‘What’s the headmaster meant to do? Guess where we are and figure out that the aliens are fucking with us?’

‘Epi knows everything. He’ll send help.’

I looked at the little device, pretending I was studying its complicated mechanisms, but really I was thinking about my parents. Typical. I’d finally managed to run away from home and now I was having pangs of guilt. Those lousy priests really had done a fantastic job. But seriously, my poor parents, who just couldn’t manage to keep their family together. The thing is there were a shitload of cracks in their system of promises.

‘Our poor parents.’

‘Why?’

Why? You have to be the older brother to have the monopoly on insensitivity.

‘First the twins go missing and now we’re leaving.’

‘But we’re going to come back, with the twins.’

‘And what are they going to tell the police now? They’ll think that it’s our parents’ fault we’re missing. They might even accuse them of having disappeared us themselves.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. I left a note explaining everything.’

‘And what did it say?’

‘What do you think it said, arsehole — not to come looking for us or tell the police, that we’re fine, that we’re going to look for the twins and we’ll come back when we’ve found them.’

The wind had stopped blowing and a cloud that belied the sun’s inclemency stationed itself over our heads. Beneath my buttocks I felt the cushion of the now-settled dust; it was pleasant if one could just keep it tamed. I lay down slowly, to avoid disturbing the particles, which were slowly sneaking out to the sides, fleeing from the imprint of my body’s silhouette. I closed my eyes and, as the screen of my eyelids projected an orangey film, I listened to the voice of Aristotle, persistent in his arrogance.

‘You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? Did you really think I wasn’t going to tell our parents? You arsehole, did you really think I was going to let them worry? You really are an arsehole.’

And suddenly I had a vision. It wasn’t the Virgin or the aliens; it was even more implausible. I appeared to myself. I saw myself trapped in a cardboard box, which had a few holes in it to make sure I didn’t suffocate. I was urinating, ashamed, my back to a crowd whose only occupation was to ignore me, although I thought they were spying on me. The box lay on an enormous rock that was floating in a universe without reason or sense, and I was wondering what would have happened if I’d never been born. With my right hand I was shaking my dick and with the left I was eating quesadillas, one quesadilla after another, one after another, just to stay alive. The quesadillas tasted of urine. The foul taste ejected me from the vision and I sat up as if propelled by a spring.

‘I’m not going back.’

‘What?’

‘I said I’m not going back, and I’m not going to walk up that damn hill with you either.’

‘Don’t be an arsehole …’

‘No, don’t you be an arsehole. You’re the one who believes in aliens. You’re the one who wants to walk up a fucking hill to wait for a stupid spaceship. Who’s the arsehole? Eh, arsehole? Who’s the arsehole? Arsehole! Arsehole! Arse-hole!’

Unfortunately his right arm obeyed the impulse, without giving his stunted conscience time to intercede: he opened a deep gash in my cheek with an empty can of tuna. A piece of my left cheek, just below the eye socket, was split open and simply hung there. I felt the warmth of the blood as it ran down towards my jaw, mixed up with the oil from the tuna; the mixture made its way towards my Adam’s apple. I grabbed the chunk of flesh and smoothed it back over the wound, but it came off and returned to its new precarious location.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘Fuck you, arsehole.’

‘I’m sorry. Wait … let me fix it.’

‘Fuck off, arsehole, go to hell.’

I pressed the red button and the acacias disappeared. Up sprang willows, elms, eucalyptus, beeches. My feet trod heavy, rebellious red earth that defied the wind, which had to look for other allies in its dusty little tricks. I saw feral dogs of unlikely colours, roads and streets carpeted with their squashed bodies. I came across rich people, people who foolishly persisted in thinking that the middle class existed; and poor people, poorer people, even poorer people, infinitely poor. And thanks to my ruse, I ate quesadillas for free in filthy joints, at street stalls with improbable architecture. I developed a subtle technique for detecting where they served the best quesadillas, inflationary quesadillas, which on the street had turned into second-to-last-chance quesadillas.

The trick was to avoid places with obsequious, smartly turned-out owners, the personification of the country’s false prosperity; they were the suppliers of so-called normal quesadillas — the illusion of normality was pretty widespread. And years later it was to increase massively during ‌Carlos Salinas’ government, when we all started eating normal quesadillas, optimistic quesadillas even (this was the term we started to use when inflation went down), but always with borrowed money — they’d even give you credit for buying a kilo of tortillas, and we all know where that ended up.

It wasn’t a case of identifying the shabbier proprietors either, because the only thing they were guaranteed to give you was diarrhoea. The key was to track down the temporary hard workers, the ones who had woken up that morning with the crazy conviction that that very day their lives would change. To find the ones who had set themselves ambitious challenges as they left the house, who had decided to believe their own, home-grown delusion that they would conquer the world just because they had made up their minds to do it. They would be smartly dressed but betrayed at the last moment by a poorly scrubbed stain or the excessive amounts of polish they had rubbed on to their shoes. And this was where the damned difference between intention and reality suddenly became glaringly obvious. Where there’s a will but no way. Where there’s a really strong will but still no way. There’s no easier business than that spun from the threads of someone else’s impotence.