Fish Soup Read online

  The baby cried like it was possessed.

  One night my brother went into her room and shook her by the shoulders: Xenaida! She was fast asleep, dead to the world. The tiny wrinkled baby was screaming its lungs out on the floor, on top of a pile of clothes, its arms and legs flailing around, like a turtle stranded on its back. Xenaida used to put him there so he wouldn’t fall off the bed.

  Gustavo. What? Is Olga your girlfriend? No.

  Gustavo was seeing a woman called Olga.

  Foreigners like black women, my mother used to say.

  Olga swept the shack and wore a thin, dirty dress. Olga would put her hands down the front of her dress to hoik up her breasts, and that made me nervous. Olga didn’t understand what I was always doing there, and she didn’t like it: next time you come sniffing around I’ll slash your face with the machete. Gustavo heard her but would say nothing. Once, Olga heated up a banana with the skin on and everything, then she sat down on a stool, lifted her skirt and put it right inside her. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Gustavo and I saw her from the worktable: he was filleting a sea bass, I was descaling a tarpon. The sea was calm, the sun burning bright.

  That’s when Gustavo began telling his stories. This was the first story Gustavo told me:

  When I was young, I had a motorbike and lots of hair on my head. I had blond hair, before it turned white and straggly. It was impossible to drag a comb through it, but some of my girlfriends insisted on brushing it for me. That would really piss me off. And when I got pissed off, I’d get on my bike and go far away.

  Far away from what?

  I finished my first year of law and I was awarded the scholarship. It was easy to get it, I reckon I could’ve got any scholarship I wanted. But I said that I didn’t want any scholarship, that what I wanted was to go far away. But where? the professor of Roman Law asked me, taken aback. I shrugged. He had gone away once, but had come back, he told me. Why? Because I missed it. What did you miss? The food, the culture. I hardly ate anything and didn’t give a shit about culture. I shook the teacher’s hand, then turned my back on him and left. Left his class, and everything else, and started going to the gym with my brother.

  Gustavo. What? Do you think I’m pretty? Yes. Do you want me to take off my clothes? No. Gustavo. What? Don’t you like me anymore? Don’t you have some legal code you’re supposed to be reading? I’ve already read them all. Well, in that case I’ll tell you a story.

  We lay down in the hammock, but Gustavo would no longer touch my magic button. Instead, he stroked my head. One day, I asked him to. But why 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.

  Black women don’t age, my mother used to say.

  Brígida had dense hair in her armpits, stuck together with white clumps because of the bicarb she applied to stop herself smelling. She smelled anyway. A cruise ship had come in and Brígida stopped by Gustavo’s shack for some oysters. It was Thursday. I didn’t have to go to the Institute on Thursdays, and since I wasn’t going out with Tony anymore, sometimes I went to visit Gustavo. I lounged in the hammock reading magazines in English, for practice.

  That Thursday, Brígida asked me the same thing she always asked me: whether I had a husband yet. No. If I had a boyfriend yet. I don’t know. And she laughed.

  Lately, Brígida was going around with a granddaughter in tow, who frowned at me, her lips pursed. I ignored her, flipping the pages of my magazine, yawning now and again. Lately, it was Olga who saw to Brígida: she dealt with the oysters, negotiated the price, gulped one down and then talked to her about the product as if she was an expert on the matter. Brígida didn’t like oysters, only once did I see her swallow one. She screwed up her face – you could really see her age then – and then she spat it out and said: that’s like chewing on a pussy.

  While Olga dealt with Brígida and I read in English and the granddaughter silently cursed me, Gustavo, at the worktable, told a story. The story would start with a precise anecdote and would end up god-knows-where. For example:

  When I lived in Valparaíso, father had various market stalls and he had me peeling prawns until my fingers were swollen. He taught me how to peel a prawn: you grab it firmly by the tail, carefully pull off the head so that that it doesn’t bring all the meat with it, and then you take off the legs. The shell comes off on its own. And you leave the tail.

  What do you leave it for? I interrupted sometimes, because if not, it would be like he was talking to himself, and I felt sorry for him.

  So that the shape of the animal stays intact, it’s more elegant like that.

  I don’t see anything elegant about it.

  All the flavour’s in the tail, that’s why you have to suck it.

  Suck it? Gross.

  The tail holds the elixir of the animal, the soul of the animal, the essence of the animal.

  Right.

  It’s all there: in the tail.

  Mm-hm.

  After a while, Olga also tried to get involved, but she would say things that were completely irrelevant. Things like: the day before yesterday I saw a group of gringos walking through the city centre, their legs were covered in pus-filled blisters. And, as nobody replied, she would get bored and grumble her way into the shack and switch on the little TV that her sister had sent over from Venezuela.

  And her in there and us out here.

  I opened a beer, fanned myself with the magazine. Later I opened another beer, and one for Gustavo. The sun would get really strong, and it was hard to find a position in the hammock where I wouldn’t be blinded it by it. Gustavo went on:

  …I remember that about Valparaíso, and I also remember Silvina. Silvina had thick, shiny hair that she wore in a high ponytail, and a colourful dress that she wore at weekends.

  Just one?

  I liked that dress because every time she wore it, she would bend down to me and ask, Do I look pretty, guagüita?

  Gua-what?

  Silvina was the last girlfriend of father’s that I met, because after that summer I never saw him again. He took a job on a ship and never came back. I went to Argentina.

  Why Argentina?

  Because that’s where mother was.

  Hadn’t she been thrown into the sea?

  …and once, father sent a letter, saying he was in Brazil, and that he had a girlfriend, not Silvina, but Mary-Erin, who was young and pretty.

  And where was Niní?

  …in the letter, father told me to get on a bus and go see him, that mother could pay for my journey and he would pay her back from there.

  Why do you always say mother and father?

  How else should I refer to them?

  My mother, and my father, like everyone else does. Otherwise you sound like a character in a badly dubbed movie: like when you say luncheon, or valise or stockings, or motorcar, or galoshes.

  I don’t say any of those things.

  Yes, you do.

  7

  My first flight was to Miami. It was the city’s busiest international route, and the most sought-after. I went for it, and I got it. I wanted to go to Miami because it was cheap to buy things there, the weather was good, and the men weren’t gringos. The young air hostesses didn’t like gringos because they were bad in bed; the old ones did, because they took whatever they could get.

  Do you know Miami? I asked Julián. He said he did, but I could tell he was lying. Julián was watching TV in our living room: there was a boxing match on. My brother was in the shower, getting ready to go to a party. My mother, on the phone to my grandmother: the cousin of a relative had died. My father had gone out to pay some traffic fines.

  Do you know Miami? I asked Gustavo. He didn’t reply. Olga snorted. He was drinking rum in the hammock, looking out to sea. Olga was grating coconut for a rice dish. She had a long white skirt and red knickers on, her tits spilling out of a tight, low-cut black Lycra top.

  I had gone to say goodbye.

  In Miami, I stayed in a hotel near the airport. I had already arranged for a friend of a friend from the gym to come and meet me. He was married
but he turned up without his wife. Probably for the best, seeing as lately I had not been getting on with anybody’s wives: young air hostesses were notorious for spreading their legs in any airport toilet. Old air hostesses were notorious for spitting in the plane food, among other things. My colleague Susana said that the old air hostesses suffered from terrible flatulence – a result of so many years eating that shrink-wrapped food – which became uncontrollable at certain altitudes.

  This friend of a friend was called Juan, but he was known as Johnny, and he was a huge, green-eyed, mixed race guy. His car still had that “new car” smell. He took me out to eat some spicy food and then he took me for a ride along Ocean Drive. Before going back to the hotel, we went into a bar owned by Johnny’s friend – an associate, he said, then corrected himself: a buddy, and slapped him on the back. We drank Negronis. I’d never had a Negroni, but I didn’t say so. Do you like it? asked Johnny, and I nodded: I like strong drinks. He clinked his glass with mine and breathed into my ear, me like you, beibi.

  Johnny smelled of expensive cologne.

  I had to get back to the hotel by midnight because the Captain said he didn’t want any of us staying out all night. Our flight was at seven. Thanks, Johnny, I had a great time. He lunged in for a kiss, but I dodged it. Johnny wasn’t bad looking, but if he got his way now, I wouldn’t have anyone to call next time I came to Miami. I was planning to go to Miami often, until I found a way to stay there for good.

  When I got back, the rain started. Again, like it had not rained for years. Days and days of torrential rain, which meant we were unable to fly: the airport was closed, and I was bored, watching films about people who were happy for the first half an hour and who then got sad, and that’s what it was all about, getting over the sadness. Then something would happen, and they ended up even happier than they were at the start.