Fish Soup. Margarita García Robayo

about anything else.

      My mother also kept herself occupied, but with other things: every day she was involved in some family bust-up. Every day, that was her formula. As soon as my mother got out of bed she would pick up the phone, call my aunt, or my uncle, or my other aunt, and she shouted and cried and wished them dead; them and their damned mother, who was also her mother, my grandmother. Sometimes she also called my grandmother, and shouted and cried and wished her dead too, her and her damned offspring. My mother loved saying the word “damned”, she found it cathartic and liberating; although she would never have expressed it that way because she had a limited vocabulary. The third call of the day was to Don Hector, who she always sucked up to because he let her buy things on tick: Good morning, Don Hector, how are you? Could you send me a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs? Her face awash with tears. Her formula was the same as my father’s: making sure that there were no lulls, no dead time that might cause them to look around and realise where they were: in a tiny apartment in a second-rate neighbourhood, with a sewer pipe and various bus routes running through it.

      I was not like them, I very quickly realised where I was, and at the age of seven I already knew that I would leave. I didn’t know when, or where I would go. When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I’d reply: a foreigner. My brother also knew that he wanted to get out of there, and he made the decisions he needed to achieve this: he quit high school to devote all his time to working out at the gym and making out with gringas he met on the beach. Because, for him, leaving meant someone taking him away. He wanted to live either in Miami or New York, he was undecided. He studied English because it would be useful in either city. Less so in Miami, that’s what his friend Rafa told him. Rafa had been out of the country once, when he was very young. I liked Rafa because he had got out, and that was something to be admired. But then I met Gustavo, who had not left but arrived, and not from one country, but several.

      Gustavo. Gustavo was a man who lived in a house in front of the sea. More of a shack, really. Outside the shack there was a shelter propped up with four poles and a tarpaulin roof. Under the shelter, there was a worktable with a long bench, a double wooden seat, a hammock. My father used to go and buy fish from him on Sundays, and sometimes he took me with him. As well as fish, Gustavo had a pool full of enormous shellfish that he bred himself: crabs, lobsters, even sea snakes. He was Argentinian, or Italian, depending on the day. The first time my father took me to his shack (I must have been about twelve), Gustavo said to me: Do you want me to teach you how to descale them? To do what? To clean the fish. He was sitting on a step at the edge of the pool with his legs spread wide, a washing-up bowl full of fish on the ground next to him. A second bowl was for putting the clean fish in. I imitated the way he sat, but in front, with my back to him. He held my hands and showed me how to do it. Then he stroked me down there with two fingers: up and down, up and down, he said, while I cleaned the fish with a sharpened machete and he traced a vertical line on my magic button – that’s what my mother’s friend Charo used to call it, when she wanted to tell her some gossip that involved the word “pussy”, and I was within earshot. While Gustavo was doing that, my father was laying out some notes on the table: for fish guts and bellies, wrapped in newspaper, to make oil. Did you see what Gustavo did? I asked him when we were back in the taxi, on the way home. My father was driving slowly, a bolero by Alci Acosta was playing on the radio. He taught you how to clean the fish, he said. Yes, but, he also… He also what? Never mind. And after that I carried on going to Gustavo’s house, sometimes on my own, sometimes with my father, sometimes after school, sometimes instead of school.

      I liked the sound of the waves…

      Gustavo, will you take me to Italy? What for? To live. No. What about Argentina? What for? Same thing. No.

      Then, his fingers.

      2

      One day, I went to school, waited for them to take the register and then left. I used to do this with Maritza Caballero, a friend who didn’t live there anymore because her dad, who was a soldier in the Marines, had been posted to Medellín. I didn’t understand what she was going to do in Medellín, which was all mountains. The soldiers lived in Manzanillo, a gated community at the edge of the bay, in prefab houses that smelled of damp because of the humidity there.

      Water and wood are not good friends, that’s what Maritza would say about her house.

      So that day they took the register and I left, but without Maritza. I left school at quarter to eight, I was hungry and didn’t have much money. I wandered around the city centre for a while. It was full of people hurrying to work at the law courts or going to sit in Plaza Bolívar to read the newspaper. I sat down in the square and was bored.

      When Maritza was there, we used to sit on the city wall to look at the avenue, the boardwalk, and beyond that, the sea. She wanted to be a lawyer and work in the courts; I told her I did too, but that was a lie. I didn’t want to be anything. Maritza said that I could be anything I wanted, because I did well at school. Maritza would look me straight in the eyes when she talked, which made me uneasy: she had yellow hair and yellow eyes and very pale skin. She was the most washed-out person I knew.

      I was one chromosome away from being an albino, that’s what Maritza used to say about herself.

      But she was beautiful, especially at night, because in the daytime, in the sunlight, her veins were really visible.

      I caught a bus to Gustavo’s house and found him with a far-away look in his eye. When I found him like this, it was because he had an easy order to deliver that day. For a lobster, all he had to do, for example, was reach into the pool and grab one when he needed it.

      Make me a little prawn cocktail, I said, handing him the bag of limes I had picked up at a fruit stall by the road, before I got on the bus. It was only then that he turned to look at me, squinted and said: this morning, there was a cold draught of air coming through the crack under the door and running up my legs. Oh? And he went on talking: that made me get out of bed. I had a rum to warm myself up and chewed on a piece of old bread that was so hard it practically broke my jaw. What did you do then? Then I went fishing, but I didn’t catch anything, the sea was too choppy. Mm-hm.

      It was nine thirty.

      Gustavo peeled some prawns and told me to fetch some onion, mayonnaise and chilli from the kitchen. The kitchen in that shack was filthy, the whole shack was filthy, and I hated going inside.

      I told him I didn’t want a prawn cocktail after all. What? I don’t want any-fucking-thing now. He replied: I’ll wash that mouth of yours out with bleach. So I went to get what was needed and Gustavo made me a delicious cocktail, I wolfed it down in one go. I sipped the pink juice at the bottom of the glass, and it tasted spicy. Wake me up at one, I told him, and went to sleep in the hammock.

      Another day I did the same thing, but I didn’t bring any limes, so I went straight to the hammock to have a snooze. Gustavo didn’t pay me much attention as he was peeling a mountain of prawns, which he was putting into a Styrofoam cool box filled with ice. In the evening he had to deliver several kilos for a big quinceañera party.

      Wake me up at one, I told him, and shut my eyes.

      It took me a while to fall asleep: it was hot, it smelled of salt, my skin felt clammy.

      When I opened my eyes, they met Gustavo’s.

      What are you doing? Nothing. He was studying me, sitting on a stool in front of the hammock. The sun streamed in through one side of the roof where the tarpaulin was ripped, and it illuminated part of his face. I told him he was going to get burned just on one side, like a carnival mask. My brother had a carnival mask he had bought in Barranquilla. “Night and day”, it was called. I used to put it on sometimes, but it was too big for me. Gustavo got up off the stool and went back to his prawns. Is it one yet? No. What time is it? Half past eleven.

      The next time I opened my eyes, Gustavo wasn’t there. The mountain of prawns was on the table and there was a four-door pick-up truck parked on the beach. I sat up in the hammock and looked at the sea: a boat, a man with a net in the distance. Somewhere a dog was barking.

      After a while, Gustavo got out