Читать книгу Fish Soup - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 10

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.

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.