Fish Soup. Margarita García Robayo

do you want me to do that? he asked. Because you did it before. And he said that he didn’t like it, that it wasn’t fun anymore. I thought he did like it, but it was Olga who didn’t. Olga would come and hang around occasionally, using any excuse. But eventually she left: she rolled her eyes at me and left. And Gustavo said:

      Once upon a time there was a ship that set sail from Corsica, destination unknown, and halfway through the voyage, most of the crew died.

      If the destination was unknown, how did they know they were halfway through the voyage?

      …some, the youngest, died of hunger; others died of disease, and others just died. They threw the dead overboard. They threw my mother into the sea, and my little sister Niní.

      Was she really called Niní, or was that her nickname?

      …those of us who survived reached a vast, lush, green country. We ate whole cows, raw.

      I hate raw things, I like things medium rare.

      …part of the meat would always go bad, because the cows were as big as hippopotamuses, and I used to think how much my mother and Niní would have loved that country. So green, so big, so full of fat raw cows.

      …sushi, for example, I can’t stand it.

      It was the best country in the world, but I couldn’t live there because it reminded me too much of the dead bodies we’d thrown into the sea. Of my mother and Niní. That’s why I left. First to Peru, then to Ecuador and so on up, until I reached the Caribbean, where you turn left to carry on north. But then I built this shack, and I decided to stay.

      And when do I appear?

      I didn’t appear in Gustavo’s story.

      In December, a strong wind swept away the houses in one of the poorer neighbourhoods, and they held a telethon for the victims. In December, Xenaida got sepsis, because of a botched C-section. It was two months since she’d given birth, the wound was already getting infected, and she hadn’t told anyone. They took her to a hospital and my mother was left to take care of the baby: he cried and cried and cried. After a week in hospital, Xenaida died. It was nearly Christmas. My mother called an aunt of Xenaida’s in a small village, but she had died too. There was nobody to take care of the wailing baby. Social Services said they would come and get him, but they didn’t. It was a very busy time, they said later, when my mother took him there herself. She handed him over, like a filthy little bundle, to a woman with glasses who pursed her lips as soon as she saw him. Hmm, he’s very skinny, but potbellied too, he must have worms.

      5

      One day, I fell in love. His name was Antonio, but everyone called him Tony. I called him sweetheart, and he called me sweetheart. Tony had a motorbike and he used to take me out on it; then we’d go to the beach, a beach far away, where only fishermen went. A beach with black sand, not like the ones you see in the movies. I had a towel in my gym bag, and I would shake it out and lay it on the sand. Tony also went to the gym and wanted to be an architect, he said, as we watched a sailboat almost touching the horizon, bobbing along like it was drunk. Drunk on champagne. I wanted a sailboat too, but only rich people had sailboats. Only rich people drank champagne.

      Then I said to Tony: if I was rich I wouldn’t want to leave, rich people can live well anywhere; I wouldn’t care about the heat or the black sand or the watery lentils my mother cooks. And Tony said: if you were rich, your mother wouldn’t cook watery lentils. What would she cook? Caviar. You don’t cook caviar. Whatever; that’s what you’d eat.

      When the sun started to sink from view and there were no fishermen left on the beach, Tony would take off my clothes and kiss me all over. He didn’t take his off. Sometimes he did. I closed my eyes and let him do everything to me: I imagined he was Gustavo and that we were in Venice. Tony was perfect, but he couldn’t take me to Venice. Sometimes, he took me to the cinema. One day we saw a romantic film that ended with a death, her death. And Tony cried and held me very tight: don’t die.

      What I liked most about having sex on the beach was the sky. Tony’s face would appear and disappear from my line of sight, alternating with the sky blue background. Up and down, up and down. I didn’t move; I just lay there, looking at the clouds. I put my hands behind the back of my neck, as if I was doing sit-ups, and waited for Tony to finish. Then he’d lie down next to me, all hot and bothered, and I’d talk to him:

      The first time I saw a sailboat was in the harbour. My father took me there, I was two and a half.

      But that was a lie. Another day, I told him something different:

      The first time I saw a sailboat was inside a bottle. My father bought it for me at the craft fair and told me: when you grow up, we’ll go sailing in one like that. And I said to him: As small as that?

      But this was a lie too.

      Once, Tony told me I was frigid, but then he regretted it. He knelt down in front of me, kissed my hands and kept saying sorry, sorry, sorry. What happens is that I get distracted looking at the gannets, I told him, because it seemed a bit lame to say the thing about the sky. Then he had the idea of doing it the other way around. He lay back on the towel and I climbed on top of him, so now I could only look at his face. Tony didn’t like looking at the sky. He liked grabbing my hair as if it were vines, and looking into my eyes, absorbed. I became addicted to this position. I became addicted to Tony.

      My routine went like this: go to the gym with Tony, go out on Tony’s bike, have sex with Tony either, 1) on the beach, 2) in a cheap motel room, or 3) on the deserted terrace of a city centre hotel, where we’d walk in wearing dark glasses, like tourists seeking a glimpse of a panoramic view. On the terrace we would do it at midday, when the sun had already scared everyone away; we would do it standing up, me in front, against the balcony railing, with Tony taking me from behind. We would leave again swiftly, jump back on the bike and head to a kiosk to buy Coca-Cola and cigarettes. We talked about old movies, salsa songs and things we wanted to buy ourselves. Tony liked Calvin Klein fragrances, but he’d never had one: his mother never quite had enough money to buy one for him. Now he worked at his uncle’s stationery shop, but he still didn’t have enough.

      Are you happy? he would ask, towards the end of the evening, as we lay beneath a tree in a park. I told him I was, because it was true. But something was missing. I knew what it was; Tony didn’t.

      My father was far from pleased about me leaving university, and he told me as much, every time we crossed paths. I’d be arriving home, and he’d be setting out, at six, seven in the morning. I explained to him: I want to leave, and a degree in law is only useful in the country where you study it. Study something else. What? Anything, but study something, you’re the bright one, you’re our great hope. And he’d wink at me. Hope of what? My brother told me I should become an air hostess, that they’d give me the visa automatically and I would have more chances of getting out of here, at least for periods at a time. We were in his bedroom, it smelled of the Mexsana talcum powder he used to put on his feet. He was lifting dumbbells in front of the mirror and counting backwards: 33, 32, 31, 30… Why do you count backwards? I asked him. He told me it was more motivating that way: because One did not move, did not get further away, it was there, where it had always been, at the beginning. I thought that my brother was the smart one, but I didn’t tell him.

      The next day, after the gym, I went to sign up for an air hostess course. If I liked it, I could carry on and get the diploma. Tony didn’t like the idea, because air hostesses aren’t shown any respect, he said. They are basically just trolley dollies, with men ogling their asses as they walk down those narrow aisles. If a guy grabs an air hostess’s ass, she just has to smile. And if they don’t let men grab their asses, it’s worse, because then they’re badly treated. If the toilet is out of order, they have to go and unblock it with a drinking straw. If the food is off, they have to eat it anyway, to keep up appearances. Tony had a lot of ideas about air hostesses, but I had just one: air hostesses could leave.

      6

      Brígida must have been pretty old, but she didn’t look it.