Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos Page B
Tags: spanish, Mexico, Family, Satire, Twins, Contemporary Fiction, translation, Literary Fiction, Novel, Brothers, politicians, Comedy, Novella, Elections, Corruption, Middle class, Translated fiction, Rite of passage, pilgrims, electoral fraud, Guardian First Book Award, Mexican food, quesadillas, tortillas, Greek names, bovine insemination, Polish immigrants, Mexican politics, Synarchists, PRI, PEN Translates!, PEN Promotes!, watermelons, acacias, Jalisco, Lagos, Orestes, Winner English Pen Award, Pink Floyd, Aristotle, Archilocus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, Pollux
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finally rejoined the road that would take us down to the highway, we saw the floods of people filling the road and heard the dishevelled racket of their chants. This was the first impression they gave, one we verified immediately: that such a racket could only come from a mob with dishevelled hair.
‘ I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise my Lord.
‘ It’s the grieeeeevances and praaaaaaaayers of your chiiiiiiildren of San Juaaaaaaaaaan. ’
‘Pilgrims – perfect!’ exclaimed Aristotle, delighted at the idea of joining the tuneless procession.
‘You like pilgrims?’
‘Don’t be stupid. This way no one’ll see us. We just slip in among them and walk to the bottom of the Mesa Redonda, then branch off.’
We joined the crowd of pilgrims, although to me it seemed we’d slipped in among a crowd of smells: a stink of sweat and another of urine, a belch of rotten egg and another of rancid beans. I looked to one side and saw the stumps of an old man with no arms who was crawling along on his knees. I looked down and found a mangy dog trying to jump up and steal my Oreos. Babies wrapped in rags hung from their mothers’ backs. Moving through the images and the smells, floating on another plane of supernatural discord, was the disparate drone of dozens of different chants. It was incomprehensible that the pilgrims weren’t all chanting the same thing, that each person was following his or her own inspiration; could it be some kind of mystical rapture? If so, it was extremely out of tune.
I didn’t have a mirror with me so I couldn’t see my own face, but it must have been a fucking expressive one.
‘What is it, man? Haven’t you ever seen poor people before?’
‘Poor people? We’re poor.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ To this day I still find the reality check that this admonishment was supposedly meant to prolong simply delightful. ‘We’re middle class.’
My brother didn’t like being poor, but the poverty of the pilgrims all around us didn’t modify our own. At the most it left us classified as the least poor of this group of poor people, which merely proved that one could always be poorer and poorer still: being poor was a bottomless well.
On leaving Lagos, the first impression one had was that the apologists of journeys and nomadism had not passed this way. The landscape was the same as on our Cerro de la Chingada: acacias and more acacias, flocks of wood pigeons, dust clouds. Every few kilometres the monotony would suffer the appearance of a tyre repair shop or a garage, precariously constructed from planks of wood and metal sheets. Their signs and adverts managed an average of two spelling mistakes in words of five and a half letters. Nagged by the memory of the highway to La Chona, which was identical, an insatiable anxiety began to consume me: did the whole world look the same?
Were there acacia trees in Poland?
What about Disneyland?
Aristotle had no doubts about the probable homogeneity of planet Earth; that was why he was the older brother. Or perhaps he did but he was avoiding them by keeping himself entertained, from one conversation to the next; indeed, his strategy for going unnoticed looked highly illogical to me. He was repeating to all and sundry that we were on our way to San Juan to ask the Virgin to make the pretend twins appear, and that in exchange we were offering the sacrifice of our pilgrimage.
‘You see?’ he whispered in my ear after giving me a wink that was meant to show what a genius he was. ‘It’s perfect, because it’s not true yet, but it’s not a lie yet either.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, man, when we turn off it’ll be a lie that we’re going to see the Virgin, but in the meantime it could be true. I’m not telling lies, you get me, arsehole?’
At that moment a whole load of Greeks were spinning in their graves. The pilgrims said yes, surely the Virgin would perform a miracle for us, and they
‘ I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise, I will praaaaaise my Lord.
‘ It’s the grieeeeevances and praaaaaaaayers of your chiiiiiiildren of San Juaaaaaaaaaan. ’
‘Pilgrims – perfect!’ exclaimed Aristotle, delighted at the idea of joining the tuneless procession.
‘You like pilgrims?’
‘Don’t be stupid. This way no one’ll see us. We just slip in among them and walk to the bottom of the Mesa Redonda, then branch off.’
We joined the crowd of pilgrims, although to me it seemed we’d slipped in among a crowd of smells: a stink of sweat and another of urine, a belch of rotten egg and another of rancid beans. I looked to one side and saw the stumps of an old man with no arms who was crawling along on his knees. I looked down and found a mangy dog trying to jump up and steal my Oreos. Babies wrapped in rags hung from their mothers’ backs. Moving through the images and the smells, floating on another plane of supernatural discord, was the disparate drone of dozens of different chants. It was incomprehensible that the pilgrims weren’t all chanting the same thing, that each person was following his or her own inspiration; could it be some kind of mystical rapture? If so, it was extremely out of tune.
I didn’t have a mirror with me so I couldn’t see my own face, but it must have been a fucking expressive one.
‘What is it, man? Haven’t you ever seen poor people before?’
‘Poor people? We’re poor.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ To this day I still find the reality check that this admonishment was supposedly meant to prolong simply delightful. ‘We’re middle class.’
My brother didn’t like being poor, but the poverty of the pilgrims all around us didn’t modify our own. At the most it left us classified as the least poor of this group of poor people, which merely proved that one could always be poorer and poorer still: being poor was a bottomless well.
On leaving Lagos, the first impression one had was that the apologists of journeys and nomadism had not passed this way. The landscape was the same as on our Cerro de la Chingada: acacias and more acacias, flocks of wood pigeons, dust clouds. Every few kilometres the monotony would suffer the appearance of a tyre repair shop or a garage, precariously constructed from planks of wood and metal sheets. Their signs and adverts managed an average of two spelling mistakes in words of five and a half letters. Nagged by the memory of the highway to La Chona, which was identical, an insatiable anxiety began to consume me: did the whole world look the same?
Were there acacia trees in Poland?
What about Disneyland?
Aristotle had no doubts about the probable homogeneity of planet Earth; that was why he was the older brother. Or perhaps he did but he was avoiding them by keeping himself entertained, from one conversation to the next; indeed, his strategy for going unnoticed looked highly illogical to me. He was repeating to all and sundry that we were on our way to San Juan to ask the Virgin to make the pretend twins appear, and that in exchange we were offering the sacrifice of our pilgrimage.
‘You see?’ he whispered in my ear after giving me a wink that was meant to show what a genius he was. ‘It’s perfect, because it’s not true yet, but it’s not a lie yet either.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, man, when we turn off it’ll be a lie that we’re going to see the Virgin, but in the meantime it could be true. I’m not telling lies, you get me, arsehole?’
At that moment a whole load of Greeks were spinning in their graves. The pilgrims said yes, surely the Virgin would perform a miracle for us, and they
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