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

Children with no siblings eat at a snail’s pace, although without dribbling, let’s make that clear. I wouldn’t want to cause any clan resentment.
    ‘But I don’t get it. Why eat if you’re not hungry?’
    ‘So it doesn’t go to waste.’
    Suspicion made Jarek shoot out a little dotted beam, like the ones fired by the Martian ships, between his eyes and mine. My answer didn’t fit in with his system of prejudices and he began to suspect I was a fraud, a pretend poor person, a middle-classer who pretended to be poor to steal from the rich. What if it turned out that, just as my mother said, we were middle class?
    ‘And why the hell didn’t you tell my mum you weren’t hungry?’
    ‘She wouldn’t let me, and anyway she said I was thin.’
    ‘But you’re not thin because you’re hungry, you’re thin because that’s just what you’re like.’
    It was my turn, but I kept my upper and lower molars clamped shut – what could I say, apologise for my genes?
    ‘Well, next time you tell her you’ve already eaten.’
    ‘The cake’s nice.’
    ‘My dad gets it from León.’ Telling the poor and the middle classes apart might be an esoteric riddle but it was the wealthy who were really easy to spot: they ate cakes imported from the lowlands.
    ‘Your dad goes to León to buy this cake?’
    ‘Don’t be an idiot. He buys it when his route takes him past León.’
    ‘What route?’
    ‘His route for the ranches.’
    ‘Have you been to León?’
    ‘Of course! We go there all the time to go to the cinema and the shopping centre.’ More defining characteristics of the rich: access to culture.
    There are only three things worth mentioning about León: they make shoes there, the people are unreasonably smug and they have a football team that is capable only of either winning the league or being relegated.
    ‘Haven’t you been to León?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Really? But it’s really close, just half an hour away!’
    ‘My dad doesn’t like travelling.’
    ‘What about Aguascalientes?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Irapuato?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Guadalajara?’
    ‘No.’
    I was losing points spectacularly in this socio-economic survey. I needed to do something quickly before I ended up out on the margins of society.
    ‘Guanajuato?’
    ‘I went to La Chona once.’
    ‘Where’s that?’
    Our family outing to La Chona had taken place during a burst of opportunism on the part of my father – he did have a genuine phobia of leaving the town’s limits. On Sunday evenings we used to drive down the hill to my grandparents’ house, where we got together with my aunts and uncles and cousins. Well aware of the incompatibility of our various traumas and paranoias – which reached its most dangerous manifestation in the militant division between ophidiophobes and ophidiophiles – my parents and aunts and uncles understood that they should only keep in touch infrequently, to prevent the friction in our relationships from causing actual lacerations. An hour a week seemed to be the limit: specifically, Sundays from four to five o’clock. They had even considered the advantages of this time from a biological point of view, as it was the period par excellence of laziness and docility, the hour after Sunday lunch, the time of a general decrease in the metabolic functions.
    That Sunday, after a bout of communal hibernation at my grandparents’ house, we found the road back home blocked by a milk truck that had ran out of fuel. We had to turn around and came out on to the highway leading to Aguascalientes, from where we could rejoin the road we needed a bit further on. My father, however, kept on going, driving very slowly and carefully, because all seven of us children were in the back of the truck, including the pretend twins, who at that point still deigned to grace us with their presence. Fifteen minutes later we entered La Chona and my father parked the truck in the main square, next to the parish church, which was smaller than