Read Online Quesadillas by Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos - Free Book Online Page A

he knew how to dole out a good old-fashioned beating. Four blows to the face. Take that! And that! And that! And that! My brother’s complexion was not ashamed to change its hue straight away, in front of its assailant, giving him the pleasure of confirming the graphic effects of his pugilistic feat.
    ‘Stop talking crap. Come on! What are they called?’
    ‘Castor and Pollux.’
    ‘Like hell they are! Don’t you want us to find your brothers?’
    ‘I’m just trying to tell you that they haven’t gone missing right this minute.’
    ‘What d’you mean, right this minute? What the hell does that mean? What are you hiding, eh? Seems to me you’ve done something to them. Go on, you little sod, confess!’
    One thing we did know how to do damn well when our epistemological skills failed us: run like mad! We stumbled out of there as fast as we could, stepping on feet and pushing people out of the way, until we reached one of the edges of the procession from where we could push towards the front without obstacles. We stopped only when we were sure that word of mouth had got up to its usual tricks and the conversations had been sufficiently distorted to save us. Up ahead, where we were now walking, a story was being told of two twins who had discovered they weren’t brothers and had come to ask the Virgin to help them find their real parents.
    ‘But if they’re twins how can they not be brothers?’
    ‘Because they’re pretend twins. They’re identical, but they’re not brothers.’
    Perhaps the same thing was happening with the chants: at the front of the procession the first pilgrims, who had not only already arrived in San Juan but were already on their way back home, had started to sing one song, a tune that on its journey to the back of the line had been gradually, relentlessly twisting and bifurcating, until it caused the current harmonic chaos.
    I tried to have the satisfaction of reproaching Aristotle – on few occasions in life is a younger brother given such a wonderful chance to get one up on his older brother.
    ‘Maybe now you’ll shut up, arsehole.’
    ‘They’re the arseholes, arsehole. They’re a lousy bunch of idiots.’ It was my brother in his favourite mode: Aristotle against the world.
    Close to the turning for Mesa Redonda we came across a scrapyard with piles of cars forming strange-shaped mountains. The pilgrims increased the volume of their chants, because they had to compete with the din from a crane hurling cars from one side to another. They had swelled with zeal at the sight of the scrap metal, irrefutable proof that all human vanities are rubbish and the only destiny of matter is to decay. What the pilgrims didn’t know was that our relationship with matter is based on substitution, its perishable quality not mattering shit: there is always a new car to replace a discarded piece of junk.
    Such a shameless display of fervour made one wonder which of the methods for finding the pretend twins would be the more outlandish: praying to an apparition in the basilica of San Juan or waiting for extraterrestrials on top of Mesa Redonda? Judging by the size of the procession the aliens were losing by quite a long way, at least in terms of popularity. However, Aristotle was the one who thought these things through and made the decisions, refusing to let go of his interplanetary certainties; the ten kilometres or so we’d walked this far had not yet crushed his fantasies.
    We left the highway and headed down the dirt track that led to Mesa Redonda. The track was covered by a thick layer of very fine dust with the consistency of talcum powder, dust that was excited by our footsteps and followed wicked trajectories just to get inside our nasal cavities and eyes. Stupid crappy dust. The track also served as a border between the various plots of land belonging to a series of small ranches. We were surrounded by – guess what! – acacia trees, thousands of millions of acacia trees. It was enough