by Deborah Levy
I considered the whiskery langoustines, pale grey with protruding, black, beady eyes. They were the professors of the ocean but they did not make me feel bolder. A huge tuna lay on a bed of ice. What if I slipped it into my basket? It wouldn’t fit. I would have to pick it up with both hands, clasp it to my chest and run with my eyes shut into the village and see what happened next. It was the most precious jewel in the market, the emerald of the sea. My hand reached towards it, but I couldn’t follow it through. A tuna was too ambitious, not so much bold as reckless.
Ingmar’s Swedish girlfriend, who owned one of the more expensive restaurants on the beach, walked in and shouted her greetings to the crowd. Someone complimented her on her turquoise suede shoes, which had a row of gold bells sewn across the toes. She was young and wealthy so everyone knew she was going to barter a good deal for her restaurant. She wore a pink crocheted dress and her lips were lined with pink pencil so they were just an outline. I don’t know why someone would want an outline for lips. She commanded the cashier to scoop up the three lobsters and the monkfish and heave the tuna on to the scales. Her voice was too loud. Perhaps she couldn’t hear herself, but we could hear her. The bells on her shoes jangled every time she changed the position of her feet. She was making her offer for the tuna, everyone was listening, and then she delivered her threat. As she barely made a profit, it stood to reason that if the price wasn’t friendly she would buy all her fish in Almería.
Obviously, raising the voice compels attention and incites fear, but was she bold? Did I want to be bold like her? What shade of bold was I after?
I moved away from her elbows to get a better look at the pile of slimy octopus, the polpo that Gómez had eaten with such relish. It would be relaxing to steal because it was shapeless and soft. I slipped my basket under the marble slab and mentally prepared myself to slide the polpo in with my hand. I paused. It did not make me feel bold so much as uneasy. If it was alive, it would change its identity and imitate its predator. It might even mimic the colour and texture of my human skin, which can also change colour, in excitement, in humiliation or fear. Its skin could express mood, it could blush like I always blush when I am asked to spell my name. I felt ashamed to look into its clever, dead, strange eyes with the pupils dilated, so I looked away and that’s when I saw my fish. It was looking straight at me and its eyes were furious. It was a plump dorado in a rage. I knew it was destined to be mine.
Ingmar’s girlfriend was helpful to me because everyone’s attention was on her. She did not inspire affection in her community. She was audacious but she was not bold.
To steal the dorado, I had to conquer my fear of being found out and shamed. I relaxed all my muscles until I was as still as a leaf – perhaps as still as a tea leaf, which is cockney rhyming slang for ‘thief’. Very slowly, I moved closer to the dorado, and with my left hand I touched the price tag on the langoustines to distract the cashier from my right hand, which was sliding the grumpy dorado into my basket.
As far as I could make out, this was the model that most politicians had adopted to run their democracies and dictatorships. If the reality of the right hand is being messed up with the left hand, it would be true to say that reality is not a stable commodity. Someone banged my back, quite close to my stings, but I took no notice and walked straight out of the door. I noted that I did not loiter and that I had a new sense of purpose and intention. My sense of purpose was quite loud. It had closed all the portals to my senses, nostrils, eyes, mouth, ears. I had become single-minded, blinkered to everything else going on. A sense of purpose requires the subject to lose some things and gain others, but I wasn’t sure it was worth it.
Standing in the kitchen in the beach apartment, I grasped the dorado by the tail and stared back at it. Yes, it was still furious. Its mood had not changed. It was heavy. Plump and shiny and sleek. It was a big fish. I took off my shoes and let my toes spread on the floor. The diving-school dog howled miserably while I felt all of gravity pulling me down. I held the fish by its head and scraped at the scales with a blunt knife. Pablo’s dog was going berserk, he did not leave a second of silence between one bark and the next. I placed the fish on its side, inserted the knife into its tail and slid it all the way to the head. The Greek side of my family, from Thessaloniki, did not need Google to tell them how to gut a fish. I opened its belly and cut away at the guts, which were white and slimy. The ancient Greek side of my family would have caught plaice in the shallows of the Aegean. The Yorkshire side of my family bought fish from the trawlermen at the docks, men who had survived the arctic seas and were on deck for ten hours in the raw winds.
There was a lot of blood in this fish. My hands were dripping with it. If someone had banged on the door to claim their stolen goods, I would literally have been caught red-handed.
The miserable Alsatian had found new howling energy. He was unstable and he was tipping me into complete lunacy. I threw down the knife and ran barefoot across the sand to the entrance of the diving school, pushing open the door with my blistered shoulder.
PABLO PABLO PABLO. Where is he?
Pablo was bent over his computer with a glass of vermouth in his hand. A heavy, middle-aged man with thick, greasy black hair parted at the side, he looked up at me with his big, sleepy brown eyes, and he flinched.
‘Untie your dog, Pablo.’
A mirror was hanging on the wall behind him. My cheeks were marked with streaks of fish blood and some of the entrails were caught in my hair, which had become a coarse tangle of knotted curls from swimming every day. I looked like some sort of sea monster rising from the shells and starfish that decorated the mirror’s frame. I was terrifying myself all over again and I was terrifying Pablo.
He moved his chair, as if preparing to run, and then he must have changed his mind because he sat down again and lifted his hand up to his eyes. He wore a gold ring on his little finger. His flesh seemed to be growing over the band of gold.
‘If you do not leave my property,’ he said, ‘I will call the police.’
I strained to hear the rest because the dog had accelerated his bid for freedom, but it was something like ‘The cop in this village is my brother and the cop in the next village is my cousin and the cop in Carboneras is my best friend.’
I grabbed his hand, with the gold embedded in it, and pressed my forehead to his forehead while his right hand groped for something under his desk. Perhaps it was a panic button wired to his extended family of cops. He asked me to get out of his way so he could walk up the stairs to the roof terrace.
I took a step backwards. He was a big man. To steady myself, I pressed my hand against the newly painted white wall while I waited for him to move. It left a bloody handprint, and so I made another. And then another. The wall of the diving school was starting to look like a cave painting.
Pablo shouted and cursed me in Spanish and made his way up the stairs. He was holding a bone, a yellow, stinking bone. That is what he had been reaching for under his desk.
Pablo was on the roof terrace with his bone and his dog. He was kicking a chair. The dog had stopped barking and started to snarl while Pablo made clicking sounds, which seemed to have a calming effect.
I heard a pot plant fall and shatter.
It was cool inside the diving-school reception. The phone was ringing on Pablo’s desk, next to a burning coil of citronella and his glass of vermouth. An answer-machine picked up the call: ‘We speak German, Dutch, English and Spanish and are able to teach beginners up to master diver.’
I lifted the glass to my cracked lips and calmly, slowly, took a tiny sip. In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and the spider crabs moving between weeds.
Austerity and Abundance
‘Zoffie! There is going to be a massacre!’
I called Ingrid and invited her to share the dorado with me to celebrate freeing Pablo’s dog. She said yes, she would come over at 9 p.
m.
I showered and oiled my hair and then walked over to the plaza to buy a watermelon from the woman in the truck who I had first thought was a man. She was sitting in the driver’s seat with her young grandson sprawled on her lap. They were eating figs. Purple dusty figs, the colour of twilight. She told the boy to choose me a melon, which he did, and when she took the money she put it in a cotton wallet that was strapped around the waist of her black dress. She had taken off her sandals and placed them in the compartment of the truck door. I noticed a ball of bone growing like a small island on the side of her right foot. Her arms were brown and strong, her cheekbones sun-lashed, her hips wide as she moved to make space for her grandson when he clambered back on to her lap. Her body. Who is her body supposed to please? What is it for and is it ugly or is it something else? She silently pressed another fig into the boy’s hand, resting her chin on his head. She was a farmer and grandmother running her own economy with her money bag pressed against her womb.
Ingrid Bauer walked through the open door without knocking, just as I had started to grill the dorado. She was wearing silver shorts and her silver Roman sandals were laced up her shins to just below the knee. She had painted her toenails silver, too. I showed her the table on the terrace, which I had laid for a feast. I had even found matching plates and cutlery and wine glasses. A bowl of chopped watermelon and mint was chilling in the fridge. I had made a cheesecake. Yes, this time I had baked my own bittersweet amaretto cheesecake with amaretti biscuits and sweet amaretto liqueur and the bitter peel of Seville oranges.
It was the start of a bolder life.
I offered Ingrid wine but she wanted water. I always have plenty of water ready for Rose, so it was not a problem. It was the right sort of water for Ingrid. She sat close to me.
And then closer.
‘So you freed the dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you look him in the eye?’
‘No.’
‘Did you give him meat?’
‘No.’
‘You just untied him?’
‘Pablo untied him.’
‘And the dog was calm and licked his leg?’
‘No.’
We both knew that Pablo had been seen in the village walking his dog that afternoon. It was a catastrophe. The dog had tried to bite off the hand of a woman from Belgium when she was waiting for change at the bar. He had to be muzzled and Pablo was shouting and kicking everything in his way. Pablo needed a muzzle but he was protected by his army of cops.
‘Congratulations, Zoffie!’
She gave me a gift, a yellow silk halter-neck top. She said the silk would soothe my medusa stings and she pointed to where she had sewn my initials on the left-hand corner in blue silken thread. SP. Underneath SP she had embroidered the word Beloved.
Beloved.
To be Beloved was to be something quite alien to myself. The silk sun-top smelt of her shampoo and of manuka honey and pepper. Neither of us spoke about the Beloved but we knew it was there and that her needle had authored the word. She told me she can sew on to any kind of material if she has the right needle – a shoe, a belt, even thin metal and various kinds of plastic – but it was silk she liked to work with most.
‘It is alive like a bird,’ she said. ‘I have to catch it with my needle and make it obey me.’
Sewing was her way of keeping things together. It pleased her to mend something that seemed beyond repair. She often worked with a magnifying glass to find solutions to a rip that was hidden in the weave. The needle was the instrument she thought with, she embroidered anything that surfaced in her mind. It was a rule she had made up for herself never to censor any word or image that revealed itself to her. Today she had embroidered a snake, a star and a cigar on two shirts and on the hem of a skirt.
I asked her to repeat what she had just said.
‘A snake. A star. A cigar.’
She said the idea for the word embroidered on my sun-top had been on her mind because she was thinking of her sister in Düsseldorf.
‘What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Hannah.’
‘Is she older or younger?’
‘I am her big, bad sister.’
‘Why are you bad?’
‘Ask Matty.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’
She gulped down her glass of water and slammed it on the table. Tears welled in her green eyes. ‘No, I won’t tell you. I was talking about my sewing.’
There were apparently piles of clothes from the vintage shop waiting to be transformed with her needle. It was the same in Berlin, and she now had a contact in China who was sending her parcels of clothes to redesign. She was mostly interested in geometry, that’s what she had studied at university, in Bavaria, and what she liked about the needle was its precision. Her taste was for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. Freer than Pablo’s dog would ever be.
She put her arm around my shoulders and her fingers were cold like a needle. I did not expect the weight of a word like Beloved to be delivered to me, written in blue silk with the initials of my name floating above it. She had let the word roam free, that’s what she said, whatever came to her mind became the design.
Ingrid wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and told me she couldn’t stay.
‘Don’t go, Ingrid.’ I kissed her wet cheek and whispered my thanks for her precious gift. Her ears were pierced with tiny lustrous pearls.
‘You are always working anyway, Zoffie. I don’t want to disturb you.’
‘How do you mean, I am always working?’
‘Everyone is a field study to you. It makes me feel weird. Like you are watching me all the time. What is the difference between studying anthropology and practising it?’
‘Well, I would get paid if I practised it.’
‘That’s not what I mean. Anyway, if you need some money, I can lend it to you. I have to go.’
Ingrid and Matthew were meeting friends at a tapas bar that night. Afterwards, they were going to a party in a field out of town given by a friend who was a DJ. Matthew was putting up lights there at the moment. She was supposed to have loaded bags of ice and some buckets in the car and driven them to the site but she had been embroidering my sun-top instead. The beer would still be warm by the time everyone arrived and it was sort of my fault.
‘Thanks for the water, Zoffie. I need it because I’m going to be wrecked later.’
When she walked out of the open door I watched her linger for a few seconds by the table set for two on the terrace. And then she moved on to her real life.
Is this what it is like to be beloved by Ingrid Bauer?
There were two sharp knives lying on the kitchen table next to a faux ancient Greek vase. I put them away in the drawer and looked more closely at the saffron-coloured vase. It was in the shape of an urn, with a frieze drawn on it in black resin of seven slave women balancing jugs on their heads while they queued by a fountain to collect water. Obviously the vase was a copy, but it did show a historically correct event in everyday life. It was difficult to channel water into the cities of ancient Greece, so it had to be collected at public fountains. Wealthy men would drink wine mixed with the water the female slaves had carried to their homes for them, but the women had no home of their own. Tonight was the first time I had invited someone to my temporary home in Spain. It had all gone wrong when I asked about Ingrid’s sister.
I turned off the heat on the dorado and found myself walking across the beach to the injury hut.
I was getting bolder.
I asked the student to join me for supper.
He looked surprised and then pleased. ‘You will want to know my name is Juan,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and I will need to know your date of birth, country of origin and your occupation.’
He was stapling the day’s forms together (fourteen stings recorded), but h
e would be with me in twenty minutes and he thanked me for the invitation. Did I know that Pablo’s dog had dug up a row of sun umbrellas on the beach? Pablo’s brothers had chased him, so he had run into the sea in a panic. He had swum far out and then he had disappeared. No one knew where Pablo’s dog had got to or if it had drowned. If the German shepherd was still alive, the injury hut was going to have to handle a bite that was fiercer than the jellyfish. The student was laughing and scooping up his brown hair with his fingers. His neck was long and graceful.
‘Pablo is saying you threatened him.’
‘Yes, with the blood of the fish you are about to eat with me.’
Our eyes met and I looked at him with all the power of someone who was beloved. I knew I had been rejected by Ingrid but I left that out of what my eyes were telling him.
When he arrived he was carrying four bottles of beer, which he said he kept in the fridge in the injury hut. He asked after my mother. I told him that she was sleeping and, for once, she had not drawn the curtains to hide from ‘the clapped-out stars’. We ate the dorado sitting opposite each other at the table laid for two on the terrace. Its white flesh was tender under its silver skin. He told me it was succulent because it had a layer of fat between the skin and the flesh. Later, we swam naked in the warm night and he kissed every medusa sting on my body, the welts and blisters, until I was disappointed there were not more of them. I had been stung into desire. He was my lover and I was his conqueror. It would be true to say that I was very bold.
She has ripped out my heart with her monster claws.
Bling
Rose sat limply at the wheel of the hire car while I washed the dust off the windows with a cloth. It was 11 a.m. and the sun was already burning my neck. My mother was about to drive us to a Sunday market near the airport to buy fruit and vegetables for the week. Juan had told me about a stall that sold sweet green grapes from North Africa, and I also had to find a can of coconut milk to take over to Ingrid’s later, because she has invited me to make ice cream. Rose was quiet for a change and not as resentful as usual. That was my mother’s main expression: slightly resentful, a whiff of resentment, not personally against me (though there was that, of course) but a vague sense of grievance against the world.