Читать книгу Fish Soup - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 12

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.