Fish Soup

  Rosa specialised in Piaget and her thesis analysed the egocentrism of the child. Orestes had read it many times and liked it. More than that: he thought it was brilliant. In his day, he had also written a brilliant thesis that the university had published. After that he had tried to write, but it would not come. He shut himself away in his cubicle, took out his notebook and transcribed his notes onto the computer. He typed slowly, and so the days went by. Two years later he had managed to finish a short essay, which he presented to the university publications department, but they did not want it. When they returned the manuscript, the editor in charge winked at him and said, ‘Are you being funny, or trying to be clever?’ He showed his horrible yellow-toothed smile. Orestes did not understand the joke, but days later he had an inkling. He hunted for the essay within his graduate thesis and found it there. Identical. It was an extract of a longer chapter. What did that mean? That he had gone mad? No, it meant that he had already used up all the ideas in his head, and all that was left was a permanent echo. He became depressed.

  ‘It happens,’ said a colleague who had published around twenty books. He sat down next to him on an old wooden bench at the university. ‘Don’t put pressure on yourself, read some crime novels, go to the cinema, grow some tomatoes on your balcony.’ And he slapped him on the back.

  Apart from the tomatoes, Orestes had done all of those things. He was still depressed.

  *

  ‘Becky? Please pick up.’ Voicemail again. Orestes hung up and lay back on the bed.

  The residence had low ceilings and the rooms were small and badly ventilated. Every time he moved around that room, he felt he was hopping about like a little bird.

  That afternoon would be the first closing session of the conference, but Orestes was not going. A colleague from the faculty had put him in touch with a friend of hers who lived in a nearby town: ‘You’re going to get on so well,’ she insisted. That evening he was going to meet her at a roadside diner. He would take the train. He didn’t really feel like going, but he didn’t feel like staying in either.

  *

  ‘But why do they hate you?’ The woman was called Yara and worked for a body at the United Nations. A voluminous afro surrounded her head.

  Orestes shrugged. He didn’t feel like explaining.

  Yara ordered pasta with a strongly flavoured, pungent sauce. Orestes did not order anything to eat, only wine. He had just told her that sometimes he imagined not going home.

  ‘Perhaps you just need some “time off”.’ Yara was Venezuelan, but her language was littered with English words because she had studied in the United States. ‘Perhaps it’s you who hates them, and they can sense it.’

  Orestes shook his head. Then he told her that Becky made him feel something that was akin to the pain of a distant death. Not the death of someone close: he already knew what that felt like. The other, distant kind, was more like a feeling of over-tiredness that paralyzed him. Yara listened to all of this as if she was genuinely interested: they had been sitting there for three hours, so she could only have been bored stiff, or drunk.

  ‘And what would you do if you didn’t go back?’ she asked him.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Yeah, where would you go? Where is your “wonderland”?’

  In reality, now that he thought about it, Orestes had never imagined not going back. He had imagined going back, but to a life that wasn’t his. It was similar, but it was not the same. He lived in the same house, but he didn’t have a wife, or a dead daughter, or a living one. He kept tropical fish in the living room and lots of books in his study: very respectable books, written by him, and he was no longer called Orestes. Nobody called Orestes writes respectable books.

  He looked out of the window at the sky: it was covered with clouds. The threat of rain had been hanging in the air for days, but it was not raining. Beyond the road, there was a hill and the ruins of a castle. Yara yawned, said something about a project she was working on and mentioned the expression “digital inclusion”. Orestes nodded. He thought her hair was looking slightly droopier. A while ago, the curls had been tighter.

  ‘We still don’t know what the priorities are, the world grew too fast and the Millennium Goals are a joke,’ Yara was saying.

  Orestes used to think that the reason his head had grown empty of ideas had something to do with his family. Now he saw Yara and thought the same thing again: people who had no family could devote themselves more to ideas and less to people. Emotional proximity to certain people, to children, for example – knowing what was going on with them, whether it was good or bad, or dull or intense – took up a lot of space in one’s mind. And the important ideas ended up being pushed out.

  ‘…the organisations are as inefficient as the governments.’ Her mop of hair continued to deflate. Yara was clearly one of those women who, as a feminist, flaunted how little she cared about her appearance. She would not denigrate herself by running a comb through her hair, she would never relax her tangled mop to make it tamer, more pleasing to the male gaze. Or perhaps, Yara did the opposite: every morning she knotted it all up using one of those lice combs, so that nobody would accuse her of having combed her hair. Orestes wondered if Becky was a feminist.

  ‘…don’t you think, Orestes?’ Yara brought a spoonful of food to her mouth and chewed. Her eyes were open very wide, looking at him. He nodded.

  *

  After the restaurant they went to an old music hall, with the face of Lucio Battisti plastered all over the walls. Yara propped her elbows on the table, leaning forward slightly, her cleavage revealing heavy-hanging breasts. She was not wearing a bra.

  ‘I lost them both,’ said Orestes, self-absorbed.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Yara.

  ‘There’s not even a word to describe my situation,’ he went on. ‘Children without parents are orphans, but parents without children, what are they? Bad parents?’

  Yara shook her head doubtfully. She didn’t seem interested anymore. Orestes drank his wine and stopped talking.

  ‘And how was the conference?’ said Yara.

  ‘Awful.’

  ‘Why?’

  He took another sip of wine and his chest hurt.

  ‘Really bad, everything was so mediocre.’

  ‘I heard there was an interesting lecture.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘A friend of mine went.’

  Orestes sipped his wine, savouring it.

  Yara was talking about some school of thought or other based on using the marketing concept of “bisociation” to deal with the most pressing educational issues. Orestes shook his head. ‘Those concepts are just a distraction; the ideas are there, they’ve always been there, and we must use them.’ Orestes had not attended the lecture, so he didn’t have much else to say.

  Orestes had not attended any lectures.

  ‘No, darling, I think that the ideas ran out a while ago.’

  They probably wouldn’t give him the attendance certificate. A few days ago, he had talked to one of the organisers, an abrasive woman in her twenties. ‘A minimum level of attendance is required to issue the certificates, sir.’

  ‘But I am more qualified than the actual lecturers.’

  The girl raised an eyebrow dismissively. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Yara poured herself more wine.

  Orestes felt a wave of intense heat, and suddenly wanted to take off his clothes.

  He had a disgusting body: a showcase of loose, sagging skin. He had not looked at his body naked in a mirror for a long time, because he now slept in Rosa’s old room, and there was no mirror in there. There had been one until Becky took it away.

  ‘“…new approaches to old issues”,’ Yara was saying, in English.

  There was no mirror in Rosa’s bathroom either. There was a window, through which you could see a rooftop, a sliver of sky, mould, lizards. You could also see tree branches. Before he got into the shower, Orestes looked at his reflection in
the window, superimposed over the green of the branches. He liked looking at himself from all angles. It was not a clear reflection of him, but almost: the white hair forming a halo on his head, his face blurred, his chest sunken, his tummy and backside flabby, his cock hanging flaccidly over his balls. Orestes barely had balls anymore: they had been crushed, consumed. When he went back to his bedroom after showering, he could feel the water dripping off them under his robe and thought, they’re empty sacks, an old woman’s sunken cheeks.

  ‘Talk to her about something, Orestes, make up a story that involves both of you.’

  Orestes looked at Yara, puzzled.

  ‘Talk to who?’

  Yara shook her head with some annoyance, put her hands on the table and stood up. Her top revealed even more cleavage: Orestes could see the beginnings of a nipple, an enormous areola.

  ‘To Becky!’ she replied.

  *

  The following morning, Orestes did not take a shower.

  He had not showered for some time.

  He only showered when he started to smell strongly, and people at the university began looking at him oddly. He rarely smelled his own scent, what he did notice was a change in the texture of his skin: a shiny layer that he worried would become a layer of dirt that was impossible to wash off. Then he set about scrubbing himself with a loofah, turning his skin red.

  The previous night, he’d got in after midnight, with a stomach ache. He vomited up bile because he hadn’t eaten anything. He turned on the TV and watched a documentary about a tribe in Indonesia in which the women ate their placenta after giving birth. By the time it finished, it was almost daylight and he couldn’t get to sleep.

  He then went out into the hallway where there was a computer connected to the internet. He had not heard anything from home in days; he had tried to call, but there was no answer. He had only spoken once to the nurse, who answered all his questions dismissively. He had two new messages on his voicemail. One from a student asking about his grade, and another from the dean of the faculty asking how the conference went and saying that they had a frame ready and waiting for his ‘honourable certificate’. Then he asked Orestes to bring him some cigars they sold in duty free at Rome airport. There were a lot of instructions, and they were numbered: 1. Squeeze it gently between thumb and forefinger to test its condition: it should be firm, but not hard. 2. The colour should be uniform throughout the whole cigar, and the leaves must have a certain shine…

  The hot feeling came back. He had a hazy image of his daughter’s face smashed against the ground. But it was not Rosa’s, it was Becky’s.

  He went back to his room and dialled her number.

  ‘Becky?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Going out, I came back in to answer the phone. Right now, I can’t…’

  ‘I just thought perhaps you’d like me to send you my itinerary.’

  ‘No, what for? I can’t come and meet you, I told you, I’m going to be out.’

  ‘Darling, I want to tell you a story about when you were a little girl.’

  ‘Dad, please.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t remember, and if you ask your mum about it she’ll deny it, just to punish me…’

  Becky sighed.

  ‘Your poor mother. But she wasn’t always like that. What happened was, when she had both of you, she expelled all of the good she had inside her, and was left with just the remains of that disgusting placenta… Did you know that some females eat it after giving birth?’

  ‘Okay, well I really have to go.’

  ‘Wait, please.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Two minutes, darling.’

  ‘I’ve got people waiting for me.’

  ‘I want to tell you about a conversation we had when you were really little.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘You can’t have been more than three when I told you who Manuel Sotomayor was, your great-grandfather, and you looked at me as if you knew. We were alone in your room, you’d been crying, yelling and stamping your feet. And I didn’t understand what was the matter with you and didn’t know any of the songs your mum used to sing to you, so I picked you up and told you about my grandfather, that is, your great-grandfather. I talked to you for a long time because I didn’t know what else to do, and you made those strange noises that babies make when they seem to be content. What I remember most is your eyes, which were fixed on my mouth, without blinking. You had these enormous eyes that filled your whole face.’

  Becky said nothing. He could not even hear her breathing. Orestes began to think she had hung up, but he didn’t care.

  ‘…that day you made me feel like there was nothing in the world you were more interested in than that badly-told story. And I thought: I have the power to fill her little empty head with ideas that someday she’s going to transform into something else, into something better than what I’m telling her, into something better than the original story and something better than me.’ He stopped talking. He let out a deep and – he thought – clumsy sob. Like a drill through concrete. This story was true. It had actually been Rosa, not Becky, but nobody was going to know.

  ‘Becky?’ He was still crying.

  ‘What?’ she replied.

  They were silent for a moment, as Orestes’ breathing gradually returned to normal. Then she spoke again:

  ‘Send me your itinerary again.’ And she hung up.

  FISH SOUP

  Very early one morning, as Mr Aldo Villafora was sleeping, he was disturbed by the pungent smell of boiled fish. It was not yet the smell of soup, it still needed seasoning and herbs, and, of course, the aniseed that Helena added to everything. Or it was the smell of soup, but an insipid, watery soup. He thought he must be dreaming. After tossing and turning in bed for a while, even covering his head with the pillow, Villafora finally got up. He sat up and took a couple of deep breaths. The foul odour entered his nostrils, went down his gullet and settled in his stomach. It was like when dead fish washed up on the beach and nobody picked them up for weeks. They just lay there rotting, and the air would be filled with the stink of blackened, dead flesh.

  The sand in the hourglass on the bedside table was still almost all at the top, with only a meagre pile at the bottom. It was the start of another hour: Villafora could not remember when the last one had finished, when he had turned the hourglass over. But he was not surprised by this. Lately he hardly noticed when night became day.

  He got out of bed and wrapped the sheet around his waist. The mirror on the wall reflected the image of a man worn out by working late nights: thin and saggy, his skin transparent like tracing paper, with blue veins snaking all over his body like a hydrographic map of a country with an abundance of rivers. Villafora was the owner of an old bar, which was also his home. The bar was named “Helena” after his wife, who had died from a long and painful disease that took hold of every bone in her body and left her prostrate in bed, delirious. The bar was on the ground floor: it was a spartan place, an industrial drinking hole with wooden tables and chairs, and a large bar with high stools. It had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a side street – in the morning this alleyway was filled with grocery stalls and at night, with prostitutes who, for lack of clients, often came to hang out in the bar. The house was on the upper floor. It consisted of a small living room with a window, and an adjoining bedroom and bathroom. Through the living room window there was a view of the harbour, which was not much of a harbour. It was more of a dumping ground for clapped-out old fishing boats. The city was a tourist resort, the kind of place backpackers and young runaway couples passed through.

  Helena’s death had changed the way the bar was run: for example, lately they only served fried sardines. When Helena was alive, however, she persuaded the market stall owners to keep the leftover fish heads for her and every evening she made soup. The soup was popular in the early morning, when the drunks started to feel hungry and all she had to do w
as warm it up. But as soon as Helena died, Villafora decided that food would be the lowest priority in that place: if he was eating meagre, insipid meals, why should he slave away to fill other people’s bellies?

  So, on that morning which smelled of fish, Mr Aldo Villafora got out of bed, wrapped the sheet around his waist, checked that he looked the same as he always did in the mirror on the wall, and got ready to go downstairs. He was outraged to think that Wally, the barman, or Grace, the cleaning lady, might be making fish soup. Because that meant they were going against his orders, ignoring his wishes. So, that fish swimming in the cooking pot, how did it get there, then? Villafora imagined himself scolding them, and them just insolently shrugging their shoulders at him. Oh, maybe it came leaping up from the harbour all by itself and dived into the boiling water, like some kind of kamikaze fish, maybe that’s it? But when Villafora reached the kitchen, neither Wally nor Grace were making soup. Then he remembered that they weren’t even there: they had gone to a bar down by the harbour to watch the final of the Super Bowl. A local talent nicknamed Chichi Pimiento was playing.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said Villafora in a firm voice. Nobody answered. He straightened himself up and walked around the kitchen, his chest puffed out, shoulders pulled back. ‘Who’s th-’

  But he didn’t finish his sentence, because suddenly he heard the pathetic mewing of Penelope, that cat that Wally had given Helena. He had brought the little scruff ball in off the street one day, saying ‘I’ve brought you a present, Doña Helena.’ Villafora saw that as an affront. ‘Nobody gives my wife presents apart from me.’ But as soon as Helena saw the cat, she fell in love with it. Penelope meowed again and Villafora realised where she was. He ran to the oven, opened it and took out the cat, who was exhausted and caked in old grease. The oven was turned off, but it was one of those industrial machines that shuts like a vacuum seal when the door is closed. He poured some milk out into a little dish and carried Penelope into the bar. He set her down on the floor and sat behind the counter, propped his elbows on the bar and looked at the empty room: the chairs stacked up on the tables, the filthy floor, the mildewed walls hung with pictures of places he would never go – Paris, New York, Tokyo, London, Granada. Helena had put those pictures up; she was a big fan of Travel and Living.