Fish Soup Read online

  When Titi turned twelve, he stopped wearing jeans. He no longer fitted into the largest children’s size, or even a small adult size. He was embarrassed to wear a medium adult size. ‘Embarrassed in front of who?’ screeched Fanny, and Titi looked at the saleswoman and shrugged. They went for cotton tracksuits in the end. Around that time, uncle Ernesto said that Titi should be given a little more independence: at twelve years old, all the boys went to and from school on the bus or by bike. Whereas Titi, with her permission, had only gone on his own a few times. Fanny was against the idea. Firstly, because Titi didn’t fit into the bus seats and, instead of being understanding and caring, people jostled him out of the way, forcing the boy to sit on the back step like a grubby piece of luggage. From there he couldn’t see his stop and ended up missing it. Titi didn’t find it that bad: sitting there, he could look up the women’s skirts and see their knickers. He liked that. Secondly, Titi’s bike was too cumbersome and he had never learned to ride it very well. He could fall and graze himself, and God forbid – said Fanny, her chin trembling – bleed to death before the ambulance arrived.

  The subject was never broached again.

  ‘How was your day, champ?’ Lately his uncle had taken to calling him champ, and Titi didn’t like it. It was obvious that he was not, and would never be, a champion at anything and it seemed insulting for someone to call him that. Titi shrugged and grunted something incomprehensible at his uncle in response.

  ‘It’s just adolescence,’ Fanny said, when her brother told her that Titi was behaving oddly: sullen, introverted. Fanny was annoyed by the excessive attention people paid to her son’s shortcomings: as if everything he did was related to his weight. And no, Fanny said to herself, some things just weren’t. Ernesto did not go on about it, but he felt bothered by it, uncomfortable. Because as he was growing up, Titi was becoming more and more absent as a person. He spent hours with his eyes glued to a videogame that involved hunting people with an enormous net, which self-generated from phlegm hawked up by the player: an avatar designed by Titi, in the image and likeness of Titi himself.

  *

  ‘His condition prevents him from socialising normally; he spends more time in the sick bay than in the classroom.’ The teacher was talking in a way Fanny found phony.

  ‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Fanny.

  Daniel, sitting next to her, looked at her as if he had only just noticed she was there.

  Titi was now fourteen and weighed seventeen stone. They had discovered a new problem: he was allergic. He wasn’t allergic to anything in particular, he was just allergic. Every so often, bumps would appear all over his skin. They were incredibly itchy and could only be controlled with an expensive injection.

  ‘And what would you recommend we do then, Miss?’ said Daniel, frowning, looking at the teacher with a gesture that sought to express concern, but which Fanny knew was lechery, plain and simple.

  ‘I would say that he needs a special school’, said the teacher, and Fanny felt as if she had been slapped in the face. She looked at Daniel, who was pensive: his forehead creased into three deep, straight lines. Fanny imagined that he was thinking of all the things he could do to the teacher with his tongue. The man was obsessed with tongues. It had been years, but she remembered perfectly. She stood up from her chair and breathed deeply, pressed her forefinger between her brows and moved it in circles.

  ‘Are you feeling alright?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘What you’re saying is unacceptable,’ she replied, ‘Do you know I can have you done for discrimination? They can’t throw Titi out of the school for being fat.’

  ‘It’s not that, Fanny, it’s…’ Daniel started to speak, but Fanny grabbed her handbag and left the room, the school, the block, the neighbourhood, and walked all the way home.

  This time, Ernesto was on her side:

  ‘No way.’

  Titi was in the room. ‘I want to go to a special needs school,’ he said, without looking up from his videogame. Fanny looked at him, forlorn. ‘But you’re not “special needs”.’ Her shoulders, which were normally upright and straight as a clothes hanger, slumped down. Ernesto looked down at the floor. Titi jabbed at the “shoot” button and killed three victims. He looked up and said to his mother, ‘Then I don’t want to go to any school.’

  *

  ‘Your son isn’t special,’ said the headmaster of the special needs school, and Fanny clenched her fists.

  ‘Of course he’s special, didn’t you see him? I can spend hours reeling off all the illnesses he suffers from because of his obesity. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the obesity is a symptom of the many deficiencies of his body. Although we’ll never know for sure.’

  That day, Titi was wearing a pair of baggy grey trousers and a very wide-fitting cotton shirt; his mum had sent him to a local seamstress to get it made. He was a little Buddha. Fanny thought that by exaggerating his size, he would be taken more seriously. Titi waited outside the headmaster’s office with his uncle Ernesto, who was praising the school’s wide-open spaces, and leafy gardens, and the chemistry lab with those little foetuses in jars of formaldehyde, as Titi reached the final level of his game. When he was engrossed in his game, Titi looked like he was in a trance: his pupils over-dilated, the vessels pumping blood into the yellowish cornea and the rest of his face distended. His jaw would slacken, letting whatever was in his mouth slide out. Drool, mostly.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Fanny came striding out of the headmaster’s office.

  Ernesto jumped up. ‘So? When do classes start?’

  ‘Never.’

  *

  By sixteen, he could only wear kimonos. His obesity, they found out, was progressive and by that point, uncontrollable. Over time he would deteriorate. First his motor functions and then his internal organs. It was difficult to predict how fast this would happen. For the moment, the hardest thing was walking, so they decided to limit that as much as possible. A nurse assisted him from nine o’clock to five o’clock, when Fanny arrived home and took over. In any case, Titi did not do much apart from playing on his computer, which was set up with controllers on a table in front of the bed; eating the small amounts of grains, soups and porridges that his diet permitted; and walking to the bathroom.

  ‘How’s my brave prince?’ When Fanny arrived home, the first thing she did was go to Titi’s room. She always found him in the same position; hunched over, mouth open, eyes fixed on the computer.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’

  ‘Great, mum, I had a fabulous day,’ he replied, sarcastically.

  ‘Do you want to play Monopoly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ludo?’

  ‘No.’

  Titi had advanced a lot with his video games; he now had a programme which enabled him to modify the initial design. Now the virtual Titi no longer hawked up phlegm, but instead carried a weapon that fired out children’s heads that burst open when they hit the target. The city he was moving around was made of rubble and human remains. The main street was paved with bones that crunched when he stepped on them.

  ‘Cards?’

  ‘…’

  At nine o’clock on the dot, his father would call. They saw each other very little: Daniel was very busy at work. It was a new job that, he told Titi, involved shouting at loads of useless people.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve been up to, my boy.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to tell you.’

  Titi tried not to lose his patience or concentration on the game: this was the time of day when he was at his best. In the mornings he woke up in a bad mood; after lunch he was sleepy: after his afternoon nap it was too hot. None of this helped him improve his high score. In the evening his mother came home, fussing over him, then his uncle would show up, looking all miserable, and just when they finally left him alone, his dad would call. All Titi wanted, for once in the day, was to clutch the controller and fire off those children’s heads.

  *

  ‘
Are you sure?’ Daniel’s voice wavered.

  ‘The doctor mentioned an alternative treatment, something experimental that they do in the States…’ Fanny was crying, whispering into the kitchen phone, while she kept an eye on the corridor, as if there was a possibility that Titi might get out of bed to come and spy on her.

  ‘If we have to take him there, we take him there.’ Sometimes Daniel adopted optimistic airs that Fanny detested. ‘Did the doctor say how much the whole treatment would cost?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will it stop the deterioration?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It can lengthen…’ Fanny was choking on her tears.

  ‘It can what?’

  Fanny hung up. She ran the tap and splashed her face with water. She made her way to Titi’s room and went in.

  *

  ‘No,’ said Titi, cutting her off.

  ‘But, darling, it’s a simple treatment, very safe. You’ll be able to do so many things that…’

  Titi did not even look at her, did not notice the seriousness of her voice. He was engrossed in the screen. And in his cough. It was a new symptom of his respiratory failure: one of the most dangerous, because if he coughed up phlegm, he could suffocate. That’s why it was better for him to stay sitting up.

  The air in the room was so thick with various odours that Fanny felt sick. She sat down on the corner of the bed, wept silently, wringing her hands. On the screen, she saw the avatar’s face, which was just like Titi’s but covered with scars. It had webbed feet, claws for hands, and long tits, like tongues hanging down to its knees.

  ‘You don’t have tits, Titi,’ she told him, in a tone that sounded more like a question than an affirmation.

  *

  ‘Does Titi have tits?’ Fanny asked Ernesto a few nights later, as they sat drinking herbal tea after dinner.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I reckon he thinks he has tits.’

  ‘He doesn’t have tits.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  They both took a sip from their mugs. They both thought that there wasn’t much more to say on the matter. It wasn’t something that was up for debate: does Titi have tits? Yes or no? No. That’s what they’d said, and that was that.

  *

  ‘I need to shit,’ said Titi.

  For a few months, he had been looked after by a beefy male nurse, because the previous female nurse could no longer handle his weight.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked, bringing his ear close to Titi’s mouth because his voice had weakened. Or not exactly: the disease had caused the body to gain weight, but some of the internal organs had remained the same size and were therefore insufficient. On an X-ray, it was possible to see how his vocal cords were lost within the immensity of his vocal apparatus. ‘He has the voice box of an elephant, with the capacity of a mosquito,’ was how Fanny had explained it once.

  The nurse sat him on the toilet, half closed the door and waited outside.

  ‘Finished,’ said Titi after a while, and the nurse went in.

  By that time, Titi had grown bored of his game. He could no longer move his thumbs very well. Also, he told the male nurse one afternoon, he had already smashed all the possible high scores. He had started playing against other players online and had beaten them. There were only a few of them: his game was so “customised” that nobody seemed to like it as much as he did. Even he grew to dislike it. One day, the virtual Titi let himself get killed by some flying children who fired acid out of their navels, and he did not regenerate. That was the day he discovered the window.

  ‘I want to go out.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  When he understood what Titi was saying, the nurse was speechless. After a moment he said, ‘I’ll check with your mum.’

  Fanny thought that Titi would be too embarrassed in front of the neighbours. So would she. She thought it was better not to make things more complicated than they were; this was what life had given them, and things were fine. Relatively fine. What could be worse? So many things. There were worse things.

  She looked into her son’s expectant eyes.

  ‘I think it’s a great idea.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ernesto.

  The nurse nodded.

  It took three days to arrange the outing. One Friday, at around eleven o’clock, in a wheelchair that the nurse had borrowed, they took him out to a nearby park at a time when it wouldn’t be very busy. After a week, it became a routine outing. Daniel took days off work and came to pick them up: off they went, Ernesto, the nurse and Titi in front. When they reached the park, they would lower him out of the chair, sit him on the grass, his back leaning against a stone bench. If Fanny had found out about that, she might have put a stop to the outings on account of his allergy, but none of them said anything to Fanny. The three men sat near Titi, shielding him from the dogs, and the kids, and the balls flying through the air. They sipped beers, making jokes, talking about women: they threatened to take Titi to a brothel. They laughed. Titi nodded, didn’t say much, smiled more for their sake than for his. Then he would say, ‘My back hurts,’ and they’d help him lie down on his back, with his head propped up on a cushion, in case he coughed up phlegm. Lying there, he stopped listening to them. He watched the clouds slowly crawling by; he wondered if they were coming or going. And where to. Hours passed, days passed, clouds passed and Titi wished that one would stop and furiously empty itself onto him. Until he was swept away; until there was nothing left.

  BETTER THAN ME

  ‘I’ve thought about it’, said Becky over the phone, ‘and it’s not really a good time.’

  The previous day, Orestes had told her he wanted to come and visit. She said no, she had a lot of work to do. He insisted, ‘Please think about it.’ And she had thought about it, she was telling him.

  ‘Rebecca, please.’ Becky hated being called Rebecca. As soon as he said it, Orestes regretted it. ‘There’s not going to be another chance: your mum and I don’t have the money to travel, I came especially to this conference because…’

  ‘I don’t want to see you,’ said Becky in a flat voice.

  Orestes was attending a week-long conference on education in the age of the internet, in a small town near Rome, where Becky lived.

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘You’re having a crisis and I’m not good at dealing with crises.’

  ‘But I want to see you. You’re my daughter.’

  ‘I don’t see how those two things are related.’

  ‘I’m coming, and that’s final.’

  Becky sighed.

  The conference was at a university that was very different to his own – there was no graffiti on the walls, no grimy hallways – but Orestes was not interested in the conference. He did not even know what it was about. He had asked around his colleagues about conferences in Italy and signed up for the cheapest one. He told the dean that if they sent him to that conference, he would progress up the academic ladder and this would help both the university and him. This was not true, he needed much more than a conference to climb the ladder, and in any case, there would be no point him climbing the ladder because in a few months he would be retiring. The dean looked at him in silence, his hands folded on the desk. Orestes told him that it was free and that the participants would be put up in university residences. He just needed the air fare. This was not true either: he was going to use some of his savings to pay the registration fee and for the accommodation in a student residence that was far from glamorous. The dean slowly shook his head. He picked up the phone and asked his secretary to arrange the trip.

  ‘Darling?’

  Becky was silent, but he could hear an irritating noise over the phone. Like marbles rolling around on a glass table, thought Orestes.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally. The noise stopped.

  Orestes gulped.

  ‘So, I can come?’

  ‘I’m not going to be there, but I can leave t
he key under the front door mat. There’s a microwave, some things in the freezer…’

  ‘Where are you going? Rebecca, don’t be silly.’

  ‘…there’s a theatre in the neighbourhood that puts on some interesting plays. I’ll leave my membership card on the bedside table.’

  ‘Becky.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  She hung up.

  A year earlier, Orestes’ youngest daughter Rosa had suffered a nervous breakdown: she was a schizophrenic. Rosa had studied to be a teacher, like her dad, but just before her first interview with a secondary school, she had a breakdown. Orestes checked her into a hospital, where she lasted two months: one night she escaped from her room, went up to the roof and threw herself off. His wife had been traumatised by it and had not spoken to him since. They lived in the same house – a nurse helped her with everything – but they rarely saw one another.

  Becky had lived in Rome for six years; Orestes did not understand what she did for a living, something to do with the stock exchange. In all that time, Becky had visited them a couple of times: first, when her mother broke her hip; and second, when Rosa killed herself. She stayed a week with them, and Orestes noticed how much she had changed. She looked unattractive, unkempt. Her face had a permanent sheen to it; she always wore her hair tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. She had become one of those pragmatic, diligent women. At the time, he did not think it was anything serious, because it had suited the circumstances: Becky quickly cleared out all her sister’s clothes, rearranged the bedroom, removed her photos from the living room. Within a week it was as if Rosa had never existed. There was no trace left of her, except for her graduate thesis, which Orestes kept in the study and would not hand over, despite Becky’s insistence: ‘We mustn’t give the ghosts anything to feed on.’