Читать книгу Holiday Heart - Margarita García Robayo - Страница 8

4

Nobody knows when the huge bank of seaweed formed along the seafront. When the sun came up, there it was: an enormous centipede, damp and dead. It isn’t the first time that seaweed has turned up on the beach, but the amount that gathered in one night is striking. Seaweed washes up when it’s very windy, and the sea churns it up and spits it out. It piles up on the shore, but there’s a tiny truck, the municipal beach cleaner, that comes along early in the morning and clears it all away; not a trace is left. Yes, the truck did do its round that morning, explains the hotel employee behind reception, but the man driving it didn’t feel capable of moving it all on his own.

‘Capable?’ Lucía interrupts him. ‘It’s algae, not anthrax.’

‘Yes, madam,’ he says, ‘and they’re clearing the rest of it now.’

‘But it’s too sunny now; we’ve missed the good hours.’

The employee looks at her blankly. Lucía adds:

‘The hours that don’t give you cancer.’

The employee takes a sheet of paper out of the desk, signs it and holds it out to her.

‘The hotel would like to apologise, and to make up for the inconvenience, invites you to enjoy our brunch today free of charge.’

‘Food?’ Lucía has her arms crossed; there’s no way she’s taking that voucher. She’s not even annoyed, she just wants to make her opinion known: that the hotel is second-rate and the guy dealing with her is an insect, buzzing nonsense. Rosa leans against her hip, causing her to lose her balance. Lucía pushes her away and continues:

‘Do you think you can make it up to me with food?’

Rosa leans more firmly against her and Lucía pushes her away again. ‘Who wants food?’

‘I want food,’ says Rosa.

Lucía leans down, presses a finger to Rosa’s lips. ‘Shh.’

Rosa complains, says that it hurts. And that she’s hungry.

The children are fed up. They wanted to go to the beach or the pool. They wanted Cindy to come, but Lucía didn’t think it was necessary.

‘Brunch is our restaurant’s speciality, you won’t regret it,’ says the employee, shamelessly addressing Rosa. James López, reads his badge. She can’t work out where he’s from by his accent. At first, she thinks Costa Rica. Then she says to herself, he’s from Cali.

Lucía rests her elbows on the counter and rubs her temples with her fingertips.

Hearing a screeching of brakes outside the hotel entrance, she turns around. A black man, well over six-and-a-half feet tall and with his leg in a plaster cast, gets out of a Mercedes and chucks the car keys at the chest of the valet, a skinny boy with a cap perched on top of his head. He then hobbles into the lobby on his crutches and calls the lift.

‘Ouch,’ complains Lucía. Tomás is biting her thigh. It’s something he does to get her attention. ‘Isn’t he a bit old to be doing that?’ Pablo said to her a few months earlier. ‘Is there an age for doing that?’ she replied. Ending that dialogue and starting another, he asks: ‘Aren’t our kids a bit weird?’

‘Give it here,’ says Lucía, snatching the voucher from the guy on reception. She makes it clear that she’ll be back. If they haven’t cleared that seaweed in half an hour – she waggles a finger at him – she’ll be back.

Rosa’s mouth is stuffed full of cubes of cold, raw tuna.

‘You can’t eat all that, you’ll get a sore tummy,’ Lucía says to her.

That’s unlikely: the tuna is served on platters of ice and every so often somebody emerges from the kitchen wearing a hat, gloves and apron and replaces them with fresh platters. Lucía tried it; it’s perfect. That’s why she doesn’t nag Rosa too much, although she’d like her to show some restraint. She’s already refilled her bowl twice and scoffed the whole lot as if it were cornflakes.

Tomás served himself the same as Lucía: chilled tomato soup. He’s been engrossed in his book ever since he got up that morning. ‘Do you like it more now?’ Lucía asked him a while ago. He shook his head, ‘I’m finding it increasingly flawed.’ Tomás sure knows his words. He’s a miniature adult. And he’s so similar to her that sometimes she wonders if maybe he’s some kind of sick joke, an experiment carried out by her fertility doctor: let’s implant a clone in this woman, we’ll tell her it’s her son, but really it’ll be an exact copy of her DNA. What for? For information. Science doesn’t need immediate answers, it needs only to gather information which, one day, will be used to support a theory.

‘So, what happened in your story, Tommy?’ Lucía asks him. Rosa has gone over to the dessert station. ‘Did it end with the meteorite?’

‘No.’

‘What happens next?’

‘Disintegrated Benjamin travels via fibre optics.’

‘Where does he travel to?’

Tomás frowns and is about to say something else, but a waiter interrupts. He holds out a phone to Lucía and says she has a call.

Pablo’s aunt tells her that she’s in her house.

‘You’re where?’

Pablo is fine. Well, considering the circumstances: fine.

‘When did you arrive?’

She’s left him there, in the kitchen: his torso slumped over the table, sleeping like a baby. She’s taken a shower. It’s a hot day. She’s borrowed some flip-flops; she’s not sure whose they are. In the rush to leave her house, she left hers behind.

‘Yesterday,’ she replies, ‘I arrived yesterday.’

Pablo had called her on the phone. How long had it been since he’d called her? Months. That’s why she thought he might need her help, even though he didn’t ask her directly. When Pablo told her that she and the kids weren’t there, she got worried. But, well, now she was there to look after him. There was a pause, which Lucía didn’t fill.

‘So, you’re in Miami?’ says Lety. ‘How lovely; that’s great. Is it hot there?’

‘No,’ says Lucía.

The air is roasting. She’s gone out onto the terrace of the restaurant so she can talk out of earshot of the children.

She went to the farmers’ market, Lety tells her. She’ll leave the fridge full of nice healthy food.

‘What happened, Lucy?’ she asks then. Lucía hears her turn on a tap, the sound of running water.

‘What happened with what?’ says Lucía.

‘With Pablo,’ says Lety. ‘A heart attack is a serious matter.’

‘It wasn’t a heart attack.’

‘Oh, no? So, what was it?’

‘A warning.’

After a pause, Lety speaks again.

‘Why did you leave? Why’s he on his own?’

The Mercedes guy is sitting at a large table with some other people. They must be his family. All of them are black and are dressed in sportswear in garish colours. They are taking photos of each other with their phones and then showing one another. There’s a baby a few months old being passed from one person to the next. It’s wearing an electric blue bodysuit with silver letters on the chest that read: Number One.

The heat is too much for her. She sits down at an empty table with four chairs around it. Her reflection in the glass doors makes her feel sad: she needs to go to the hairdresser to get her greys done. When she sees other women her age, they look old to her, because they are old. But she rarely thinks of herself as part of that group. Beyond her reflection, she can just make out Tomás and Rosa tucking into a plate of cheesecake.

‘Lucy?’ Lety says.

She tells Lety she has to go, that the children are on their own, and that she’d better talk to Pablo, he can explain things to her. She hangs up without saying goodbye. She stands up and leans against the balcony railing. Below is the swimming pool. A Russian couple are sunbathing on a family-sized rattan lounger. She’s wearing a hot pink diamante bikini and he’s in tight black speedos and tiny mirrored sunglasses. Their three blond children are splashing around in the water with a woman who must be their grandmother – she has the same face as the mother, but it has drooped, a strong gust of wind has blown it downwards. The beach is now clear. So is the sky. No seaweed, no clouds. Beach umbrellas and loungers lined up in rows facing out to sea.