the euphoria of discoveries

excerpt from quesadillas by juan pablo villalobos

in the united states there was no rubbish; everything gleamed, just like on tv. the people weren't dirty; they didn't leave their rubbish in the street; they all put it in the right place, in these brightly coloured bins for sorting waste. a bin for banana skins. a bin for red fizzy drinks cans. a bin for kentucky fried chicken bones. a bin for toiled paper covered in shit. some enormous bins for old objects that had gone out of fashion and become an embarrassment to their ex-owners. it was so impressive that even people like us, who were only on holiday, didn't leave our rubbish in the street.

what's more, it was impossible to get ill from eating in a restaurant there. it wasn't like here, where you went to get tacos and they gave you dog-meat tacos and the taco seller wiped his armpits with the same hand he picked up the tortillas with. there were restaurants in the states where you paid for a drink and then served yourself as many times as you liked. it was unbelievable: you had eighty coca-colas for the price of one. and they gave you free sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce; little sachets you could take back home to give as presents to your friends or to that poor little kid next door you'd been dying to humiliate because he'd never even been to leon, the peasant.

but you had to speak english. yes siree, even though there were fuckloads of mexicans over there, the important thing was to speak english so they knew you were on holiday and wanted to spend money, because the gringos knew perfectly well how to tell the difference between invaders and tourists. you could see their expression change when your dad got out his wallet full of dollars, because one thing's for sure, they weren't racists. it didn't matter if you were dark-skinned, the only thing that counted over there was money: if you were hard-working and had earned lots of money they respected you. that's why they were a proper country, not like here, where everyone was trying to screw you over the whole time.

to my disappointment, it turned out that rich people liked routine too. i knew we poor people were condemned to repeat every day the programme of events that guaranteed the greatest economic efficiency, but i had supposed that rich people's days were devoted to surprise, to experiencing continually the euphoria of discoveries, the frisson of first times, the optimism of new beginnings. i hadn't imagined the force of attraction imposed by the need to feel safe: a second law of gravity, the power of inertia calling its children to the warm bosom of boredom. in short, jarek liked to do the same things every day; the afternoons we spent together were identical. we played on the atari, had a snack, he talked about america, about puerto vallarta or his friends from silao. of all the disappointments of this friendship, the most depressing was that jarek turned out to be a couple of years behind me in terms of hormonal confusion. his world was still one of toys and cartoons, his insipid pranks those of an overgrown child.

my visits to jarek's house were a bottomless well of worries for my mother, who was terrified i would wreak havoc like i did at home, getting us into debt with the neighbors in similar proportions to the country's foreign debt. every time i set off for jarek's house she would warn me, 'don't break a vase, please.'

she didn't know that our lack of motor coordination and absent-mindedness, the source of so many domestic accidents, were not personality traits but rather the consequences of our family's chaotic interactions. our tendency to disaster was existentialist. i had never broken a vase, because we didn't have vases at home, but my mother had seen that kind of thing happen lots of times on tv, on programmes and films that use people tripping over as a gimmick to get a laugh. who knows why the reckless seem to be interested exclusively in vases when there are so many other receptacles and ornaments made of fragile materials that are fond of getting smashed to pieces.

in actual fact, don't break a vase was the metaphor my mother had chosen to disguise her innermost fears. behind this innocuous phrase lay a literal cruelty, the words my mother didn't dare say to me: don't steal anything. don't embarrass us. don't humiliate us.