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  Praise for Margarita García Robayo

  ‘García Robayo is building one of the most solid and interesting oeuvres in Latin American literature.’

  Juan Cárdenas

  ‘Margarita shows sharp insight into contemporary life. Her voice speaks with surreptitious irony and sophisticated psychological perception. She is the creator of an exceptional poetics of displacement.’

  Juan Villoro

  ‘Her stories combine the atmosphere of Desperate Housewives, Hemingway’s iceberg theory and a memorable, bittersweet ending.’

  Jorge Carrión

  ‘Margarita gathers memories as if they were flowers. She smells them. She plants them. And they hurt.’

  La Voz del Interior (Argentina)

  ‘Full of everyday details that reveal the most vulnerable aspects of feminine subjectivity.’

  La Nación (Argentina)

  ‘One of the most potent figures of contemporary Latin American literature.’

  Inés Martín Rodrigo, ABC (Spain)

  Margarita García Robayo

  FISH SOUP

  Translated by

  Charlotte Coombe

  Contents

  Praise for Margarita García Robayo

  Fish Soup

  PART I

  Waiting for a Hurricane

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART II

  Worse Things

  Like A Pariah

  You Are Here

  Worse Things

  Better Than Me

  Fish Soup

  Something We Never Were

  Sky and Poplars

  PART III

  Sexual Education

  1. Moisture

  2. Catechism

  3. Broken Girls

  4. Lucía (and Mauricio)

  5. The Silent Scream

  6. The Morning After

  I am writing these poems

  From inside a lion,

  And it’s rather dark in here.

  So please excuse the handwriting

  Which may not be too clear.

  Shel Silverstein, It’s Dark in Here

  PART I

  WAITING FOR A HURRICANE

  1

  Living by the sea is both good and bad for exactly the same reason: the world ends at the horizon. That is, the world never ends. And you always expect too much. At first, you hope everything you’re waiting for will arrive one day on a boat; then you realise nothing’s going to arrive and you’ll have to go looking for it instead. I hated my city because it was both really beautiful and really ugly, and I was somewhere in the middle. The middle was the worst place to be: hardly anyone made it out of the middle. It was where the lost causes lived: there, nobody was poor enough to resign themselves to being poor forever, so they spent their lives trying to move up in the world and liberate themselves. When all attempts failed – as they usually did – their self-awareness disappeared and that’s when all was lost. My family, for example, had no self-awareness whatsoever. They’d found ways of fleeing reality, of seeing things from a long way off, looking down on it all from their castle in the sky. And most of the time, it worked.

  My father was a pretty useless man. He spent his days trying to resolve trivial matters that he thought were of the utmost importance in order for the world to keep on turning. Things like getting the most out of the pair of taxis we owned and making sure the drivers weren’t stealing from him. But they were always stealing from him. His friend Felix, who drove a van for a chemist, always came griping to him: I saw that waste-of-space who drives your taxi out and about… Where? On Santander Avenue, burning rubber with some little whore. My dad fired and hired drivers every day as a matter of course and this helped him, 1) to feel powerful, and 2) not to think 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 of the pick-up truck, adjusting his shorts. Behind him, a lady got out, rearranging her hair. Gustavo picked up the cooler and carried it to the pickup truck. The lady said to me: have you turned fifteen yet? No. Good. Why? Her: because lately, nobody splashes out on quinceañeras anymore. If it’s a buffet, they don’t serve seafood, forget it; and if it’s a sit-down affair, not even a whiff. And what do they serve? They serve rice and chicken and a potato salad packed full of onion, so that when the girls go and chat to the boys afterwards, they have dogshit breath. But not Melissa. Melissa’s going to have a party the way a quinceañera party should be.

  Melissa?

  Gustavo came back. The lady pulled out some notes that were tucked inside her bra and gave them to him. I’m going to serve them with tartar sauce, she said, what do you think of tartar sauce? He put the notes down on the table. I thought they might blow away.

  It makes me want to puke, I said.

  3

  There was a time when the weather completely changed. It rained all the time, every day it rained. That was bad for the ground because it got eroded; bad for the sea, because it got rough; bad for the TV because it lost signal. We still had the radio. The radio said that the city was going through a tragic situation; not in the modern parts, where the rich people lived, but in the shantytowns around the banks of the Ciénaga de la Virgen lagoon. Because it was full of crap, it overflowed, and the flimsy houses sank into the mud. It was around that time that people started talking about the Submarine Outfall, a metal pipe that would swallow all the shit built up in the Ciénaga, carry it out to sea and spew it out. It was the solution to all the city’s problems. They hadn’t built it yet because there was no money, and there was no money because it had been stolen. Who by? Nobody knew. On the radio everyone was talking about it. After that came the romantic programmes, playing a top ten of songs about rain.

  One day during that time, I dreamed that the wind carried off my brother and his friend Julián, who he used to go to the gym with. They were whisked away, clinging to one another, their teeth gritted like when they flexed their muscles in front of the mirror. I watched them float higher and higher until I couldn’t see them anymore. Another day, I dreamed that the wind blew away Willy’s kiosk: he sold beers near Gustavo’s shack. Willy hated me because one day I kicked a pig in the head as it was snuffling around my feet. The pig ran off, terrified and squealing like an old woman, and I laughed. Willy got angry: you’re evil, he told me. And I told him he was a black bastard. Gustavo grabbed me by the wrist and twisted my arm. I wrenched myself free and ran off. I didn’t go back for months.

  We had arrived at the kiosk half an hour before that, after a long walk on the beach. I’d been talking to Gustavo about Maritza Caballero, who’d sent me a postcard from Medellín, and a photo of her in the mountains; she was wearing a blue hoodie. I’d never worn a hoodie. I was thirsty, and Gustavo said, let’s go to Willy’s kiosk. He ordered an Águila beer for him, and a Coca-Cola for me. We sat on stools at the counter, and Willy started talking about a cruise ship full of gringos that had just come in. He said he was waiting for Brígida, the black fruit-seller who wore bright dresses. They were going to town to flog things to the gringos: beer, rum, shell necklaces. Got any oysters, boss? Willy only called Gustavo “boss” because he was white and a foreigner. Gustavo never tipped him, and even spat on the ground sometimes, but Willy still called him “boss”. That day, however, a black fisherman turned up, ordered a beer and after the first sip, let out a huge belch. Willy said to him: didn’t your mother teach you any manners, you black bastard?

  The rain was also bad
for my family, because the sewer pipe near our house overflowed, the pavements turned green and the air stank to high heaven. My dad lost a taxi: it filled up with water, right up to the engine, and had to be scrapped. That time, he sat everyone down around the table and declared: now we are poor, and started to cry like a little child. I looked around: my brother was checking his watch impatiently, because he was supposed to be going to the cinema with Julián and two women from Bogotá they had picked up at La Escollera. My mother was folding handkerchiefs, deep in concentration. Next to her was a wicker basket full of faded underpants and a load of single socks tangled up in a ball.

  Being poor was exactly the same as not being poor. There was nothing to worry about.

  4

  When I left school, I enrolled in a law degree. It was a public university but there was an enrolment fee to pay, which was based on the income of your father. In my case, it was a tiny fee, but my father said to me: hopefully you’ll get a scholarship, so you can carry on. But I don’t want to carry on, I replied. Of course you do, he said, and winked at me. One day a girl in my class told me: they’re giving out visas to go and live in Canada. I went to the consulate to find out. You had to know English and French, and they were giving priority to young professional couples, with plans to procreate. My friend told me that in Canada they were running out of young people, and that this was their plan to repopulate the country. Repopulate it with Latinos? Better than nothing, she said. But I was a long way from being a young professional with a husband and plans to procreate. Canada would not be my destiny. I didn’t even like Canada: not a single film actor was from Canada. There was nothing in Canada, apart from old people.

  In those days, the baby belonging to the maid Xenaida used to cry all night long.

  She’d got knocked up, nobody knew who by. My brother accused the janitor. But she gave nothing away. When she told my mother about the pregnancy, my mother fired her and Xenaida got down on her knees and begged: señora, just let me have the baby and then I’ll go. Now she’d given birth to the baby, and she was still here.