Fish Soup Read online

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  The chef looked at the barman and the barman shook his head.

  ‘You can’t.’

  The chef shrugged. Pedro clutched his head. He wanted to fall into bed and go to sleep. He wouldn’t even unpack. Tomorrow morning, he’d shower and put on the same clothes and spend the day on the terrace, drinking sickly sweet cocktails with little paper umbrellas in them. In the evening he would go to the airport and fly home, to his bed, to sleep beside Jimena.

  The glow of a lighter flame illuminated his face: the barman had taken pity on him.

  ‘Just one, and if anyone comes, you put it out,’ he said, with an accent that reminded Pedro of a soap opera his mother used to watch when he was young: Renzo, the Gypsy. He must be Andalusian, not Arab.

  Pedro swung his bar stool round to face the dance floor and took a deep drag of his cigarette: he closed his eyes, holding in the smoke. When he opened his eyes, he saw the Ecuadorian dancing with one of the girls who had been in the restaurant. The chef was still sitting next to him.

  ‘Did you see the accident?’ the chef asked him, his voice slurred.

  Pedro wondered how long the guy had been drinking for: less than an hour ago he’d been serving the buffet. Maybe he was always drunk. Maybe he spat in the food. Pedro shook his head.

  ‘I heard a lot of people died,’ said the chef.

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The chef knocked back the rest of his drink.

  ‘So, what do you do?’ he asked.

  ‘I sell things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  Pedro shrugged. ‘Appliances.’

  ‘Household appliances?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  It had nothing to do with household appliances.

  ‘Right.’

  The chef topped up his glass from a bottle of vodka that the barman had left on the bar a few minutes ago.

  ‘So, is this really the biggest hotel in Europe?’ Pedro asked him, and the chef raised his eyebrows, nodding vigorously.

  At one end of the bar, the barman was chatting up the other girl, the friend of the one dancing with the Ecuadorian. They looked Dominican, or something like that: dark-skinned, ample-bottomed. A song was playing that seemed completely out of place in the soulless atmosphere of the bar: Your dark eyes in the sunshine, light up your smile.

  ‘Is it ever full?’ asked Pedro.

  The chef shook his head doubtfully. Then he frowned.

  ‘Is what ever full?’

  ‘The hotel.’

  ‘Oh yeah, when there are conferences.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And all the businessmen and hostesses come.’ The chef made a gesture of licking his lips. Just then, the Ecuadorian appeared. The girl he was dancing with had gone to the toilet.

  ‘Are the hostesses European?’ asked the Ecuadorian.

  ‘Sometimes,’ replied the chef.

  ‘Ufff,’ said the Ecuadorian, as if a hostess were there right now, on her knees in front of him.

  ‘…sometimes they are Asian.’

  The Ecuadorian shook his head.

  ‘I don’t like that type.’

  Pedro’s leg had gone to sleep. He straightened up, putting one foot on the floor. It felt the same as it always did, but more intense: like tiny needles pricking his skin. The chef and the Ecuadorian went on talking about hostesses. Pedro thought about the people who died in the accident and he had an urge to hug his children. Hug all three of them so tight that they’d protest and push him away, gasping for air.

  ‘Charge the drink to room 1439 please,’ he told the barman, who waved him away, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  *

  They had told him to use the lift at the end of the corridor, and that he would have to walk the equivalent of two city blocks. Pedro stood at the door to the bar, looking at the enormous space in front of him. He could not imagine a convention that could fill that whole space. Perhaps three conventions at the same time might, though not if they were Asians, because they are so small. The opening through which the sky could be seen was behind him, in the opposite direction to the lift. Inside the bar, the Ecuadorian was saying something in the girl’s ear and she was laughing. The barman had returned to his seat across from the chef and the other girl had disappeared. He wondered what time it was.

  ‘Excuse me,’ came a voice from behind Pedro.

  It was the barman’s girl. She wanted to leave the bar, but he and his suitcase were blocking her way. He moved aside, and the girl stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘What’ve you got in there, a dead body?’ She laughed.

  Pedro forced a smile. ‘Appliances,’ he replied, ‘I sell appliances for…’ There was no point explaining; nobody understood anyway.

  ‘Cool.’ She stood there in front of him.

  She was young, and not exactly a looker. She could have been pretty if her cheeks hadn’t been covered in acne scars.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ Pedro asked her.

  She nodded. He told her that there was an opening where you could see the sky, that it was back there – he pointed – and asked if she wanted to go there and smoke a cigarette. She said she did.

  *

  The girl’s name was Rosario and she wasn’t Dominican. She didn’t say where she was from: the Caribbean, in any case. She didn’t ask where he was from either, only saying, ‘Here in Europe it’s all the same.’ Pedro told her that it was his first time in Spain and that he’d hardly left the hotel. He had come to attend some company training, which was being held right there, where he was staying.

  ‘It’s better like that,’ said Rosario. Pedro nodded, but didn’t understand what she meant. He didn’t mind staying in the hotel, he told her, he wasn’t a very curious kind of guy. He liked the simple things: peace and quiet, sleeping well, eating well.

  ‘When I travel, I always have issues with the food, my stomach gives me a lot of problems.’ He was talking too much, it must have been the wine, the gin and tonic.

  Rosario laughed, revealing an abundance of large, white teeth.

  The opening in the roof was a black circle. The fountain was turned off and they had to speak quietly because there was a slight echo. Before, when they got there, they had sat down next to one another, leaning their backs against the fountain. Pedro took out his cigarettes but then remembered that he didn’t have a lighter. Rosario lay on the floor, her hair spread out above her head like a halo of curls. Pedro lay down next to her.

  ‘At the training,’ he was saying to her now, ‘one of the guys showed us a black circle on a screen and zoomed right in so we could see the state of the pixels.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  Because images lost their clarity when the pixels died.

  At the training, there were discussions about dead pixels and stuck pixels, which were not dead, but which were almost impossible to fix. Stuck pixels were in limbo inside the black circle, red, shining.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Pedro. He didn’t want the conversation getting too technical.

  ‘OK,’ said Rosario. Then she added, ‘There’s no moon tonight.’

  ‘No.’

  Rosario pointed to the black opening.

  ‘But I think I can see a star.’

  There was nothing there.

  Pedro smelled the sweat of her underarms and got a slight erection. He had heard that mixed-race women sweated more than white women. Jimena was as white as a sheet of paper, and had blue veins running over her body like circuit boards. And she did not have a scent. Though sometimes she had a stale smell about her.

  His erection had gone.

  ‘The guy who’s with Vivian,’ said Rosario, ‘is he your friend?’

  ‘Vivian?’

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘Oh, no, we’re not friends. I met him just now, in the restaurant.’

  ‘He’s a creep.�
�

  Pedro didn’t know what to say to that.

  He was thinking about dead people again. He had not seen the bodies. His plane was evacuated quickly; nobody explained what was going on. Outside, they heard about the accident and a woman started crying, screaming, and he remembered the dead body on the motorway, remembered Jimena. Someone asked if the screaming woman knew someone on the plane involved in the accident, but she didn’t, she was just upset by it. The image of so many dead bodies on the runway, the night falling around them and all the sirens wailing outside; it must have all been too much for her.

  ‘Are you scared of dying?’ Rosario asked him, as if reading his mind.

  ‘No,’ he replied, perhaps too quickly.

  Rosario stretched out on the floor, and the odour of her armpits intensified.

  ‘Me neither. They say that death happens in less than a second, you can’t be scared of something as brief as that!’

  Pedro found this funny.

  ‘Vivian: she’s afraid of death, and she’s convinced that today we were very close to dying. That’s why she’s with that idiot friend of yours.’

  ‘No, he’s not my friend, I mean…’

  ‘Oh, don’t make excuses for him, you must be thinking the same thing, but you don’t dare say it.’

  ‘Say what?’ Pedro was losing track. He wanted to smoke. He didn’t have a light.

  ‘You guys are all the same. You act the big man, and then something happens and you shit your pants, and all you want is a woman to lick them clean for you.’ Rosario laughed.

  ‘What?’ Pedro looked at her again. She was sitting up now, her jeans clung tightly to her hips, and some flesh bulged out at the sides.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask me directly? Why not save yourself the bother of the whole story about the opening in the roof, the sky and the cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to…’

  ‘Come here.’ Rosario placed a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him towards her.

  *

  Pedro had muted the volume on the news, which was replaying images of the accident. It showed bodies on the runway, covered in white sheets, and the stretchers whisking them away as if they were props. Rosario was asleep next to him, naked: her bare flesh was much more attractive out of the jeans. Pedro was particularly interested in the crease of her waist: a line in her skin like the slot of a piggy bank. A while ago he would have sworn that Rosario was one of those plump women who, when they wore certain clothing, men would fantasise about taking it off, but then find the result to be disappointing. She had not been much of a disappointment, however. Or perhaps she just looked good lying down. Rosario opened her eyes, and they met his as he was scrutinising her. She made no move to cover herself up.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ she said with a smile.

  Pedro looked back at the screen. A reporter was saying something, but he couldn’t hear what.

  ‘What were you looking at?’ said Rosario. And almost immediately, ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Were you watching the news?’ she insisted.

  Pedro changed the channel several times until he landed on one where nothing was happening: snow.

  ‘Are those pixels?’ Rosario asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They look like pixels.’

  The conversation was boring him.

  ‘…I would’ve said those were pixels.’ Rosario put her hand on his leg and stroked it. Pedro felt uncomfortable. Why hadn’t they gone to her room instead? Then all he would have to do was leave. He had left his suitcase downstairs, propped against the fountain.

  ‘What is it that you sell?’

  Why couldn’t she just be quiet? He liked Rosario when she was asleep, and even then, not that much.

  ‘Pixels die,’ said Pedro.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She rolled over onto her front, hugging a pillow, feigning interest. Pedro placed his open hand on the cheek of her bare bottom. It was warm. He pinched it and she slapped his hand away.

  ‘Hey!’ She pulled the sheet over herself.

  Earlier, Pedro hadn’t come. He had just watched Rosario’s movements on top of him, as he lay on his back, right at the edge of the bed. Rosario kept one foot on the floor and grabbed the headboard. She’d made the usual circular movement with her hips, as if she were kneading something, or moulding a piece of clay.

  Pedro got up off the bed, located his trousers on the floor and started to pull them on. He thought he really should go and get his suitcase. He felt tired, impatient, he wanted to shower, to call Jimena. Rosario had lit a cigarette. On the bedside table there was a box of matches, with a small map of the hotel drawn on it, and a cross showing the location of the hotel: You are here. This had made him anxious: being there, underneath that cross, in such a vast and strange place. Stuck.

  ‘Want some?’ Rosario held out her cigarette.

  Pedro stopped getting dressed and took it. He went to the window and opened the curtains. The window had a view of a large internal courtyard connecting their building to another one, and beyond that, slightly to the left, there was another one, and then another one, and so on: a succession of buildings forming a semicircle.

  You are here.

  So where was everyone else?

  ‘What does a dead pixel look like?’ asked Rosario.

  Pedro turned around to look at her, but she was nowhere to be seen. She had turned off the TV, and the room was in darkness, except for the corner with the window. He looked back out at the enormous courtyard and took a drag of the cigarette.

  ‘It’s a red dot on a black background.’

  WORSE THINGS

  Titi was called Ernesto, after his maternal uncle, who was like a father to him. Titi’s dad lived in another city with his other family, but he came to visit him every couple of weeks. It was not far, the city, only an hour by car, and his dad had a really fast car. Titi used to wait for him on the pavement outside his house, dressed in dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, which made him hot. His mum liked to dress him like that when his dad came. Standing on the pavement, Titi could hear the roar of the engine from streets away; and a few seconds later, there was a screeching sound and a cloud of yellow dust was thrown up, covering everything.

  In his head – as he used to explain it to himself, or sometimes to his uncle Ernesto – Titi liked seeing his dad, but in real life he didn’t enjoy his visits. They didn’t have much in common. Titi’s dad, who was called Daniel, was an athletic guy. He played all kinds of sports and jogged every morning with a group of people who ran in those marathons sponsored by sports brands. Titi hadn’t inherited a single one of those genes. He was an anomaly: his mum, whose name was Fanny, was not as athletic as his dad, but she was slender as a willow: that’s what her friends from book club, who met every Tuesday at their house, used to say. Every time they said that, she glanced sideways at Titi, who pretended to be watching TV, lying on the floor belly-up, like a baby mammoth. Then she would gesture to her friends, using hand signals, to kindly change the subject.

  ‘You were born that way, my love, there’s nothing we can do to change that,’ his mum explained, the first time Titi asked her why he was so fat.

  Titi had been born uncommonly overweight, and his condition, according to the doctors, couldn’t be treated early on. At first, Fanny did not see much of a problem with her baby being fat; on the contrary, she saw it as a sign of good health. Daniel, on the other hand, insisted that they put him on a diet and go to see a nutrition specialist.

  ‘Do you want him to have liposuction?’ Fanny said to him, ‘Do you want your son to look as scrawny as that tart of yours?’

  By that time, Titi’s dad was already living with his lover. She was just like him: athletic. She was also much younger than Fanny and worked for a big multinational, instead of in a public library. When Titi was five years old a little sister arrived, who at the age of six months was winning crawling rac
es at her nursery; by nine months she was walking and by fourteen months she could run as fast as a hare. At least that’s what his dad told him; he’d had T-shirts made with a photo of the little girl clutching a trophy shaped like a baby bottle, which read ‘I’m speedy’. When Titi put the T-shirt on, his little sister’s face stretched out at the sides. He did not wear it very often, because as soon as Fanny spotted it in the laundry basket, she started using it as a cleaning cloth.

  His dad spent a good part of their evenings together trying to convince him that he should take up a sport or that, at least, every morning he should go for a walk around the block.

  ‘On the first day, walk to the corner and back. Then increase it to the next block, and that way, every day you’ll be setting yourself new goals.’

  Titi listened to him attentively, looking straight ahead, as he sucked on the straw of his sugar-free fruit juice, which was the only thing his dad allowed him to drink when they were together.

  ‘Will you do it, my boy?’ he asked, finally, with a look of desolation that made Titi nod enthusiastically, although he knew he would never do anything of the sort; he couldn’t do it, because of his respiratory insufficiency. He thought it was odd that his father didn’t know that, but he didn’t feel like explaining it to him either.

  *

  There was a period when Titi’s classmates used to sneak up on him; they would move gradually closer to him, and then, all of a sudden, they would stab him in the belly with sharpened pencils, to see if he would deflate. Sometimes they drew blood, and that was serious, because Titi had a blood clotting disorder. He would then run, with difficulty, to the sick bay, so they could treat him and call his mum or his uncle. The children played other jokes on him: like filling his desk with leftover food. They normally did that last thing on a Friday, so when Titi came back to school on Monday he would find a cloud of bees and flies swarming above his desk, which was stuffed with rotting food. That’s why he never left his schoolbooks in there. He carried all of them with him, every day, even though it made his back ache. Fortunately, his uncle Ernesto took him to school every morning and picked him up every afternoon and helped him carry his schoolbag. Some of his female teachers invited him to eat with them, so Titi could put his bag down and sit down for a while to rest. Titi always liked his teachers, although he didn’t understand why they couldn’t get his classmates to leave him alone.