Quesadillas Read Online Free

Quesadillas
Book: Quesadillas Read Online Free
Author: Neel Mukherjee Rosalind Harvey Juan Pablo Villalobos
Tags: spanish, Mexico, Family, Satire, Twins, Contemporary Fiction, translation, Literary Fiction, Novel, Brothers, politicians, Comedy, Novella, Elections, Corruption, Middle class, Translated fiction, Rite of passage, pilgrims, electoral fraud, Guardian First Book Award, Mexican food, quesadillas, tortillas, Greek names, bovine insemination, Polish immigrants, Mexican politics, Synarchists, PRI, PEN Translates!, PEN Promotes!, watermelons, acacias, Jalisco, Lagos, Orestes, Winner English Pen Award, Pink Floyd, Aristotle, Archilocus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, Pollux
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was an apocalypse taking place. Never-ending queues of haggard, badly dressed beings surged towards the opening doors, as if instead of buying supplies they wanted to be crushed to death and put an end to so much senseless damned suffering once and for all. We split into two units: four of my siblings went with my father to the tortilla bakery and the rest of us, the pretend twins and I, stayed to accompany my mother on her suicide mission. The division obeyed a logic imposed in principle by our age, but in effect mainly by the distinction between hysterical and melancholy personalities: Aristotle with my father, as he was the eldest and the most hysterical and violent, so my father could control him better; me, the second eldest at thirteen, with my mother, for being the second and the saddest, and also because my survival strategies were verbal, which meant (at most) potential psychological damage for my victims – a matter of little importance when we left the house and the aim was to avoid massive loss of life, our own or other people’s; Archilochus, Callimachus and Electra went with my father, for being at ages that carried high risks of vandalism and self-inflicted injury – eleven, nine and seven respectively; the pretend twins, together, with my mother and under my supervision, which they didn’t need because they were five years old and absent from the world the whole time, concentrating on photosynthesising and concerned only with staying next to each other, as if they were Siamese rather than pretend twins.
    My mother wasn’t afraid of crowds: they were her natural habitat. She herself had grown up in a large family, a genuine one, like they used to be, with eleven legally acknowledged brothers and sisters, plus three more who materialised when my grandfather died to claim their microscopic portion of the estate. She was a specialist in multitudes, capable of pushing in so as to be third in line at the deli when there were hundreds of people yelling at the pig slaughterer. I guarded the trolley into which my mother was gleefully throwing cheese, ham and mortadella. My mother’s skill at getting them to cut her the most ethereal slices ever had to be seen to be believed: thinner, thinner, she ordered the assistant menacingly. When we’d finished our cold-meat purchases, we confirmed that for every measly little victory in this life you get a real bastard of a disaster: the pretend twins had disappeared.
    The search grew incredibly complicated due to the pretend twins’ appearance. We had to explain what they looked like to the police and the staff of the ISSSTE shop, and my mother insisted on starting off her description in an irresistibly polemical fashion.
    ‘They’re twins, but they don’t look the same. They’re nothing like each other.’
    ‘If they don’t look the same, then they’re not twins,’ they objected, ignorantly deducing that our entire story was a lie, as if we enjoyed playing hide-and-seek with non-existent family members.
    I tried to put a stop to the investigators’ attempts to uphold the iron defence of Aristotelian logic before starting to look for the twins, completing my mother’s explanation with the help of an attack of nervous hiccups, the aim of which was to fracture my breastbone.
    ‘They are twins, but they’re just not real ones.’
    ‘Not real? So they’re invented?’ replied a bold officer who seemed to have decided it would be simpler to expose our falsehoods than to find the twins.
    ‘They’re biovular twins, dizygotic twins!’ my mother shouted, tearing at her hair, fully involved with the tragedy now, given that the situation had ended up in ancient Greece.
    The officer took me aside, stared at me with immense pity and, stroking my back like a little dog, asked me, ‘Is your mum crazy?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I wasn’t absolutely sure. I’d never really had to consider it.
    Since there still wasn’t enough excitement, we added
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