Juan Pablo Villalobos - Quesadillas

‘What happened to your face, arsehole?’

Playing dumb is usually pretty convincing and it would be my word against his, his status as older brother versus the bad rep I’d garnered for myself with the hoax of the little red button. You can’t fight for the truth when your rival’s name is Aristotle. Names are destiny. My father seemed to remember this for a moment; his face clouded over at the possibility that I would act up to my own namesake and start brutally murdering everyone. But I wasn’t cut out to do something like that, not even to commit suicide. What’s more, my sister was too young to incite me to deal out cruel revenge.

I chose to remain quiet and withdrawn, an attitude consistent with the trauma of having lost my pre-eminent position in the family. The small pleasure hadn’t even lasted three months, and had achieved next to nothing, considering the number of affronts I had accrued. And now, watch out, because Archilochus was whispering his verses into Aristotle’s ear.

We sat down to eat dinner. In order to have enough for Aristotle’s six quesadillas, my mother had to implement the rationing protocol. Each quesadilla lost around five grams. And there was fuck all we could do about it. As if that weren’t enough, my parents didn’t interrogate Aristotle, they didn’t demand he tell them the truth, or at least they preferred not to do so in front of the rest of us. What was Aristotle going to do? Tell us about his close encounters with the aliens? Instead of speculating, I decided to offer him up as a sacrifice in exchange for him telling us his version of events.

‘And the twins?’

‘They’re ok.’

‘Where are they?’

‘With them .’

‘With them?’

‘Yes, with them .’

‘And how do you know they’re ok?’

‘ They told me.’

‘They? You mean the twins, you saw them?’

‘Don’t be stupid, them , not them.’

Who were they ? My parents weren’t interested in analysing the ambiguity of the phrase and steering it back towards literalness; they pretended to be absorbed in the TV and the griddle pan. It was one thing to contradict me , to call me a liar, and another, very different thing to do so with Aristotle: our broken family urgently needed a bit of structure. It wouldn’t be my parents, of all people, who demolished the pillar that had just returned to shore up our derelict house.

Jaroslaw must have thought something similar, and he wasn’t worried about Aristotle’s well-being or about controlling the risk he might pose to the happy state of affairs; he didn’t think my brother needed to go and learn his lesson in a police cell. I was determined to convince him otherwise, but the dish of revenge was so cold by now I would have to get a move on. Jaroslaw had to realise that the intellectual author of the burglary had really been Aristotle, that I had merely jumped over the wall and shown him where the supplies were, coerced by his promises. I took advantage of my jaw’s lengthy period of unemployment one breakfast time to update him, since inevitably I always finished the two quesadillas I was given before Jaroslaw had eaten his seven gorditas .

‘I wanted to say sorry.’

‘What for? What have you done?’

‘No, nothing, nothing new. For the burglary, I mean.’

‘That’s behind us now. Don’t worry about it.’

‘But we didn’t really know each other before and now I want to say sorry again.’

‘All right, fine.’

‘But I wanted you to know that Aristotle was the one who planned it all.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.’

‘It was his idea to go in and steal things, and he made me explain what the house was like and where all the stuff was.’

‘I said don’t worry. Leave it.’

‘Aren’t you going to put him in prison like you did to me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘One of you was enough.’

Special offer: two-for-one justice — the only problem being my brother got it for free while I paid full price. And as for the education derived from my experience in jail, what was I supposed to do with it? Transmit to Aristotle the resentment it had caused me so that he would learn from it as well?

‘Doesn’t he have to learn too?’

‘What?’

‘You told me it was for my own good.’

‘That was your father’s idea.’

What was my father’s idea? That it was possible to become good through an empirical knowledge of trauma? That it’s valid to betray one’s son by organising a plot behind his back so that he learns a lesson? Or was he just the author of the phrase everyone had kept repeating to me that day?

‘Did my dad ask you to report me?’

‘I didn’t say that. What do you think?’

This is what I thought: that my dad and Jaroslaw were a couple of sons of bitches.

‘Your father is a good person.’

My plan had backfired. When we finished work I asked Jaroslaw to drop me off in town, with the excuse that I had to run some errands, when in actual fact I was just telling common-or-garden deceitful little tales.

I went to the police station to look for Officer Mophead. I found him engaged in the unnatural activity of reading a file.

‘Is my uncle here?’

‘No, of course not. It’s not like he lives here.’

‘Did you hear that Aristotle came back?’

‘From the dead? No shit!’

‘My brother, my older brother.’

‘I know what you mean. It was a joke. Your dad really took the piss with those godawful names he gave you.’

It could have been worse: having those names and Officer Mophead’s hair and his sense of humour. But you know what they say: God tightens the noose but doesn’t strangle you.

‘It was him.’

‘What?’

‘I said it was him.’

‘What was?’

‘He was the intellectual author of the burglary.’

‘Oh, damn, did you learn that from the telly? “Intellectual author” — how refined!’

‘He made me do it.’

‘Do you want to report your brother?’

‘No, that’s not it.’

‘What do you want, then?’

‘It’s for the investigation.’

‘What investigation?’

‘Into the burglary. I’m giving you information so you can solve the case.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? There is no case; Jaroslaw withdrew his accusation. Do you want them to screw your brother? It’s Jaroslaw you’ve got to convince.’

I looked at his hair, where at that moment the most tangled of the curls were taking control of the rest of the hairs, which had meekly retreated before the relentless advance of the frizz. I kept staring at his hair because I didn’t want to look at his face, at that expression I knew he was making to reproach me for betraying my family.

‘Hey, how old is Aristotle?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Whoa! So if you manage to get Jaroslaw to report him and he doesn’t withdraw the accusation quickly, then him they will send to a juvenile detention centre.’

Officer Mophead worried about Aristotle? It was as if I’d moved to another country. And on the news too: suddenly they were no longer interested in reporting the string of percentages that illustrated our eternal march towards economic collapse. There would be elections the following year and all that mattered now was speculating as to who was going to orchestrate our cataclysms for us when the new administration came in. It was as if the president — and the whole country with him — was desperate to palm off the hole he’d been digging so diligently for the last few years on to someone else. My father expended just two words on the best-positioned man in the presidential race: dwarf and baldy. Over the next six years, and forever more, he tried out all possible variations of the two. Lousy dwarf. Bald piece of shit. Bastard dwarf. Chicken-shit dwarf. Bald arsehole. Thieving dwarf. Cocky little dwarf. Lousy bald crook. Bald son-of-a-bitch. Dwarf son-of-a-bitch. Lousy bald bastard arsehole son-of-a-bitch. Without pausing for breath.