Quesadillas Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the living room, my mother and father brought chairs in from the kitchen and the rest of us spread ourselves out on the floor on our behinds. Our neighbours snubbed us by sitting on the edge of the sofa, perching, barely touching it. Technically they weren’t sitting down, because to be sitting down the weight of one’s body must be touching the surface on which the behind is placed. At the most you might say that they were sitting on themselves, which is exhausting and has painful consequences for the back. It was obvious they didn’t plan on staying long, that the state of the sofa fabric disgusted them or perhaps they were suffering from piles – if this had been the case, then perhaps we would have been able to forgive them.
    Making a great show of our status as a psychologically middle-class family, we offered them iced tea and cheap María cookies. My father and his new neighbour took the encounter very seriously, as if they were at an interview for a really lucrative job – one of those jobs where you don’t work for your salary – or asking for the hand of a rather delectable girlfriend whom they hadn’t yet managed to feel up.
    When it came to the introductions, the father informed us that they used to live in Silao and were taking advantage of the summer break to move, and announced that their names were Jaroslaw senior, Jaroslaw junior and Heniuta. He told us that they called their son Jarek for short, but also to distinguish him from his father when people needed to yell at them from afar. My parents contained their onomatological astonishment as best they could; my siblings and I kept quiet as mice. We’d received military training for this sort of thing; this had been our social education: shutting our damn traps. Finally the explanation arrived, just before we came to the charming conclusion that our new neighbours were are crazy as we were.
    ‘We’re Polish,’ apologised Jaroslaw senior.
    ‘How lovely. Just like the Pope,’ my mother broke in, immediately regretting it when she remembered the atrocities the Communists used to commit hidden behind the iron curtain.
    More than a country, Poland was the perfect alibi. Where was Poland? Did anyone know a Pole? What scandal were the three little bears trying to hide by inventing a Slavic ancestry for themselves? Poland allowed the family to annex any fantasy they liked on to their past, because Poland was nowhere.
    Making use of the geopolitical hiatus, Jarek interrupted the ceremony to examine a María cookie up close.
    ‘Don’t you have any Oreos?’
    Heniuta gave his arm a gangrene-inducing squeeze. The level of pressure she applied could only mean one thing, which she didn’t say but which we all heard loud and clear, despite my siblings’ silent roars of laughter at the coincidence.
    ‘Hush, they’re poor!’ her whispered glare seemed to shout.
    My father introduced us, proudly pronouncing our fabulous Greek names: Aristotle, Orestes, Archilochus, Callimachus and Electra. We were more like the index of an encyclopaedia than a family. So as not to sully the solemnity of the moment with drama, he decided to substitute the newly non-existent existence of the pretend twins for a nostalgic pause after the mention of my sister, who was now the youngest. But they knew our family had been mutilated, of course they knew; that’s why they nodded with a feigned expression of pity, and we all observed a minute’s silence. By way of compensation, Jaroslaw congratulated my father for having picked this piece of land on the Cerro de la Chingada. He said that he knew lots of people, that he’d been asking around, that the urban sprawl was heading in this direction and in a few years this would be one of the most prosperous neighbourhoods of Lagos.
    ‘Great investment. You, sir, are a visionary,’ concluded Jaroslaw, evidently unaware of the means by which we, and the rest of the people who lived in the houses dotted around the hillside, had