Quesadillas Read Online Free PDF Page A

disaster into family disgrace, and condemn all politicians – regardless of rank or responsibility – for patently wallowing in their ineptitude at finding my little brothers. What he’d lost in professionalism and objectivity he had gained in poetic intensity. When Officer Mophead announced they were going to close the case, my father reached for a phrase that expressed perfectly the misfortunes of fate: ‘Life was just waiting to serve me up an arsehole like him.’
    As if all these advantages weren’t enough, which I’m not ashamed to admit, my siblings and I had awoken to a new and most convenient reality: we now got more quesadillas apiece in the nightly allocation. An unhealthy age dawned in which the truly significant difference was that I started noticing some things in my life for the first time. Up until then, the excess of stimuli had taught me distraction, generalisation, the need to act extremely quickly when I had the chance, before someone beat me to it. I hadn’t had time to stop and notice details, analyse characteristics or personalities, because things were always happening: fights, shouts, complaints, accusations, games with incomprehensible rules (to make sure that Aristotle won); a glass of milk would be knocked over, someone would break a plate, someone else would bring a snake they’d caught out on the hillside into the house. Chaos imposed its law and provided tangible proof that the universe was expanding, slowly falling apart and blurring the edges of reality.
    Now things were changing; we’d abandoned our status as an indiscriminate horde and moved from the category of multitudinous rabble to that of modest rabble. I only had four brothers and sisters left, and now I was able to look at them carefully, notice that two were very like my mother, that Aristotle had a pair of enormous ears that explained all his nicknames, that Archilochus and Callimachus were the same height despite being different ages; I even learned to tell us all apart by the stains on our teeth, assiduously imparted by the town’s fluoridated water. And, what’s more, we suddenly had a little sister who was making her damp debut aged seven by regressing to nightly bed-wetting.
    I took advantage of things getting back to normal to start up my sociological research once again.
    ‘Is it possible to stop being poor, Mamá ?’
    ‘We’re not poor, Oreo, we’re middle class,’ replied my mother, as if one’s socio-economic status were a mental state.
    But all this about being middle class was like the normal quesadillas, something that could only exist in a normal country, a country where people weren’t constantly trying to screw you over. Anything normal was damned hard to obtain. At school they specialised in organising mass exterminations of any remotely eccentric student so as to turn us into normal people. Indeed, all the teachers and the priests complained constantly: why the hell couldn’t we act like normal people? The problem was that if we’d paid attention, if we’d followed the interpretations of their teachings to the letter, we would have ended up doing the opposite, nothing but sheer bonkers bullshit. We did what we could, what our randy bodies demanded of us, and we always pretended to ask for forgiveness, because they made us go to confession on the first Friday of every month.
    To avoid confessing the number of times I jerked off every day, I tried to distract the priest who heard my confession.
    ‘Father, forgive me for being poor.’
    ‘Being poor is not a sin, my child.’
    ‘Oh, really?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘But I don’t want to be poor, so I’ll probably end up stealing things or killing someone to stop being poor.’
    ‘One must be dignified in poverty, my child. One must learn to live in poverty with dignity. Jesus Christ our Lord was poor.’
    ‘Oh, and are you priests poor?’
    ‘Times have changed.’
    ‘So you’re not?’
    ‘We don’t concern ourselves with material questions.