Читать книгу Fish Soup - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 7

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Living by the sea is both good and bad for exactly the same reason: the world ends at the horizon. That is, the world never ends. And you always expect too much. At first, you hope everything you’re waiting for will arrive one day on a boat; then you realise nothing’s going to arrive and you’ll have to go looking for it instead. I hated my city because it was both really beautiful and really ugly, and I was somewhere in the middle. The middle was the worst place to be: hardly anyone made it out of the middle. It was where the lost causes lived: there, nobody was poor enough to resign themselves to being poor forever, so they spent their lives trying to move up in the world and liberate themselves. When all attempts failed – as they usually did – their self-awareness disappeared and that’s when all was lost. My family, for example, had no self-awareness whatsoever. They’d found ways of fleeing reality, of seeing things from a long way off, looking down on it all from their castle in the sky. And most of the time, it worked.

My father was a pretty useless man. He spent his days trying to resolve trivial matters that he thought were of the utmost importance in order for the world to keep on turning. Things like getting the most out of the pair of taxis we owned and making sure the drivers weren’t stealing from him. But they were always stealing from him. His friend Felix, who drove a van for a chemist, always came griping to him: I saw that waste-of-space who drives your taxi out and about… Where? On Santander Avenue, burning rubber with some little whore. My dad fired and hired drivers every day as a matter of course and this helped him, 1) to feel powerful, and 2) not to think about anything else.

My mother also kept herself occupied, but with other things: every day she was involved in some family bust-up. Every day, that was her formula. As soon as my mother got out of bed she would pick up the phone, call my aunt, or my uncle, or my other aunt, and she shouted and cried and wished them dead; them and their damned mother, who was also her mother, my grandmother. Sometimes she also called my grandmother, and shouted and cried and wished her dead too, her and her damned offspring. My mother loved saying the word “damned”, she found it cathartic and liberating; although she would never have expressed it that way because she had a limited vocabulary. The third call of the day was to Don Hector, who she always sucked up to because he let her buy things on tick: Good morning, Don Hector, how are you? Could you send me a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs? Her face awash with tears. Her formula was the same as my father’s: making sure that there were no lulls, no dead time that might cause them to look around and realise where they were: in a tiny apartment in a second-rate neighbourhood, with a sewer pipe and various bus routes running through it.

I was not like them, I very quickly realised where I was, and at the age of seven I already knew that I would leave. I didn’t know when, or where I would go. When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I’d reply: a foreigner. My brother also knew that he wanted to get out of there, and he made the decisions he needed to achieve this: he quit high school to devote all his time to working out at the gym and making out with gringas he met on the beach. Because, for him, leaving meant someone taking him away. He wanted to live either in Miami or New York, he was undecided. He studied English because it would be useful in either city. Less so in Miami, that’s what his friend Rafa told him. Rafa had been out of the country once, when he was very young. I liked Rafa because he had got out, and that was something to be admired. But then I met Gustavo, who had not left but arrived, and not from one country, but several.

Gustavo. Gustavo was a man who lived in a house in front of the sea. More of a shack, really. Outside the shack there was a shelter propped up with four poles and a tarpaulin roof. Under the shelter, there was a worktable with a long bench, a double wooden seat, a hammock. My father used to go and buy fish from him on Sundays, and sometimes he took me with him. As well as fish, Gustavo had a pool full of enormous shellfish that he bred himself: crabs, lobsters, even sea snakes. He was Argentinian, or Italian, depending on the day. The first time my father took me to his shack (I must have been about twelve), Gustavo said to me: Do you want me to teach you how to descale them? To do what? To clean the fish. He was sitting on a step at the edge of the pool with his legs spread wide, a washing-up bowl full of fish on the ground next to him. A second bowl was for putting the clean fish in. I imitated the way he sat, but in front, with my back to him. He held my hands and showed me how to do it. Then he stroked me down there with two fingers: up and down, up and down, he said, while I cleaned the fish with a sharpened machete and he traced a vertical line on my magic button – that’s what my mother’s friend Charo used to call it, when she wanted to tell her some gossip that involved the word “pussy”, and I was within earshot. While Gustavo was doing that, my father was laying out some notes on the table: for fish guts and bellies, wrapped in newspaper, to make oil. Did you see what Gustavo did? I asked him when we were back in the taxi, on the way home. My father was driving slowly, a bolero by Alci Acosta was playing on the radio. He taught you how to clean the fish, he said. Yes, but, he also… He also what? Never mind. And after that I carried on going to Gustavo’s house, sometimes on my own, sometimes with my father, sometimes after school, sometimes instead of school.

I liked the sound of the waves…

Gustavo, will you take me to Italy? What for? To live. No. What about Argentina? What for? Same thing. No.

Then, his fingers.