Juan Pablo Villalobos - Quesadillas

A simpler tactic was to identify the new places, the ones that were changing hands, or reopening after illness or financial problems. To take advantage of the optimism of new starts and recidivism. That was where they served the best quesadillas, second-to-last-chance quesadillas, overflowing with promises of a magnificent future, a future where it was easy as pie to imagine that if things were done well, sooner or later the comforts of success would arrive. However, this would only happen in another life, or at the least in another country, and so one couldn’t put one’s faith in the consistency of the quesadillas. Where yesterday one ate the best second-to-last chance quesadillas, today it would be devaluation quesadillas and tomorrow poor man’s quesadillas. That was life; that was what this lousy country was like, a specialist at shattering illusions. But the poverty of the many could turn into the fortune of the few, of those who knew how to interpret the signs, like me, who managed not to starve to death thanks to the simple method of exploiting people’s technological naivety. All because of the trick with the red button: the magic of that little device I had taken with me as revenge when I turned my back on Aristotle.

Coincidence is closely related to confusion and the two she-devils require the same conditions to arise: chaos, blessed chaos. Just as there is no confusion when nothing is happening or when everything’s nice and quiet, so there are no coincidences either. All you have to do is resignedly entrust your life to the stream of events, absent-mindedly surrender yourself to the game of cause and effect, and the watermelons will start to mature. That’s when we’re surprised, when the vine twists around our ankles, but at the same time we enjoy the sweet juice of its fruits as we spit out the little seeds: how confusing! Wow, what a coincidence! In other words, I don’t know how it happened; it was a coincidence that I discovered the red button’s powers. I suspect I didn’t even notice them the first time around. That’s typical of coincidences: they have to materialise time and time again before you spot them, and then yet more times until they’re classified as such. How many coincidences must have been lost because their victims weren’t paying attention? Life might be a festival of coincidences!

I was in a cheap little restaurant in San Juan, begging among the pilgrims, when I figured out the link between pressing the button and the functioning of the TV playing in a corner — a masterly strategy to numb the customers’ brains and distract them from the quality of the quesadillas, still in widespread use today. I pressed the button and the signal went. That telenovela The Rich Cry Too had just come on — uh-oh! Everyone was stuck wondering whether the rich would cry once and for fucking all. I pressed it again and the signal came back, to general relief. I did it again, and again. And again. I wanted to verify that coincidence had passed into the realms of causality. There was an exaggerated outbreak of despair perfectly in keeping with what had caused it. Taking advantage of her proximity, people implored the Virgin to solve the technical problem. I sent the signal back into the stratosphere and went up to the owner of the little place, who was wiggling the antenna with a vigour more suited to beating egg whites into stiff peaks.

‘I can fix it. I know what’s wrong.’

Her answer was to ignore me, thanks to my filthy appearance and to the prejudice that the masses have about teenagers’ knowledge of electronics.

‘My dad’s an electrician. It’s his job and I help him in his workshop.’

My defiance broke through her despair, transforming it into defensive indignation. A murmur of ‘What can this damn brat know!’ started to go round. They didn’t want to sell their hope so cheaply, but all the middle-aged women in the place were on the brink of hysteria, not knowing if the foolish Mariana was finally going to realise the bastard Luis Alberto was cheating on her. The show was on something like its third repeat, they all knew what happened in the end by heart, but even so people fucking love experiencing other people’s suffering again and again.

‘If I fix it you give me dinner — five quesadillas; no, better make it six. If I don’t fix it you don’t give me a thing.’

‘I’ll give you three if you get a move on.’

‘Four, and make them big ones.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Go on, then, but hurry up.’

As luck would have it, causality spread, and what worked for televisions worked just the same for electric whisks, blenders, radios, videos and any electrical device. Causality was not a creeper, it was a leafy tree that handed out its fruits punctually; all one had to do was keep an eye on them as they matured and not let them fall to the ground.

The work consisted of disguising my technical skills in a convincing way. The first few times I limited myself to disconnecting the device in question and giving it a few well-aimed little thumps, a technique my mother had taught me. Although I made sure I never performed my feats twice in the same place, later on my style gradually became more baroque. I pretended I couldn’t fix it the first time, or the second; I said it was a complicated case and so was able to negotiate a higher fee. The third time always worked, as I didn’t want to contradict popular consensus: don’t bite the hand that feeds you! Most of the time I was paid in kind, although for more daring attempts I demanded cash payments. I invested part of my earnings and bought a set of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers and some coloured cables; my presentations gradually became more sophisticated as time went on.

‘Oh dear, I was afraid of this.’

‘What?’

‘This is happening to all Moulinex blenders.’

My victim looked at the apparatus as if it was a sister-in-law who’d just stabbed her in the back.

‘So what now?’

‘I’ll have to change the diffuser.’

‘The diffuser?’ Sometimes it was the diffuser, sometimes the combi gauge, the check valve or the axis.

‘Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll get it cheap for you. There’s a place where they sell used ones.’

Until the day came when my fame was such the people started coming to me to fix devices that I hadn’t broken. What’s more, so many coincidences occasionally raised suspicions that began to acquire an air of menace. I decided it was time to hit the road. Jalos, San Miguel El Alto, Pegueros, Tepatitlán; in four months I was in Zapotlanejo, right on the doorstep of Guadalajara. I said goodbye to each town with a spectacular performance, an immensely complicated operation I was immersed in for hours and for which I charged the amount I needed for the bus ticket and expenses for the following few days, which I would spend exploring my new territory. I had a crisis in Pegueros, where the little device stopped working, but I quickly discovered that all I had to do was change the batteries. In Tepa a policeman interrogated me: where did I live, who were my parents; but there were so many kids on the street it soon became obvious how useless his humanitarian efforts were and he left me in peace.

It turned out that my dad was partly right: cities might be bigger or smaller, uglier or prettier, but they were all the same damn thing, at least in this part of the world. In any case, surviving was a hobby that left no spare time for ontological speculations. It was like at home, except the competition had multiplied exponentially. All over the world there were a fuckload of grabbing hands, millions of hands with their ten times millions of fingers, struggling to pilfer its fruits. At least the fruits were more varied. Instead of just a few measly quesadillas, there were gorditas and huaraches, tamales and tacos de canasta . Of course, I still preferred quesadillas, because I couldn’t afford a psychoanalyst, but from time to time I ventured into the uncharted territory of diversification. The world of nixtamal was broad and wide.