Fish Soup

  Salvador pulled on a pair of shorts and went to look for her. She had to be in the living room. Matías had moved out a month ago because Eileen was spending too much time in the apartment and he couldn’t stand her. ‘It’s her or me,’ he’d said. Salvador shrugged and looked down at the floor. That’s when he knew he was in love.

  He found her at the kitchen table, rolling one of her cigarettes that dropped strands of tobacco everywhere. They ended up in everything: food, water, coffee.

  ‘I think it’s going to be a silent play,’ said Eileen.

  ‘Silent?’

  ‘Yes, nobody will say anything, maybe there won’t even be any actors, it will be an empty stage, a blank script.’

  Salvador sighed. He missed Matías. It was Saturday, they could have been drinking beer, playing cards, in silence. Eileen lit her cigarette and walked towards the balcony. He followed her but stopped in the doorway. The view outside was of an empty lot, and beyond that, a grey wall. Next to theirs was another balcony, with a guy sitting on it, drinking beer.

  ‘Hi Eileen,’ said the guy.

  ‘Hi Ricardo.’

  Eileen was still naked.

  During the time he had been living there, Salvador had never interacted with any of the neighbours. He had passed some of them on the stairs; he had once rung the bell of the apartment below to ask them to turn down the music: they never opened the door. So, he had no idea who Ricardo was, or anybody else. Eileen knew exactly who was who.

  *

  Eileen considered ejaculation a very private thing, and something that should not be wasted, that’s what she told him. She suggested that from then on, he should wait until she’d gone, and then jerk off.

  ‘But I like it better when you’re here, because…’

  ‘Sshh—’ she put a finger to his lips. ‘You have to learn, Salvador.’

  But why did she say that? Salvador didn’t understand: a short while ago she had arrived, babbling, talking about how her script was progressing. ‘I’ll be the next David Mamet.’ She pulled her dress over her head and threw it on the floor. She had no underwear on. She tied up her hair with a band she had round her wrist. She jumped into bed, where Salvador was reading some photocopies and told him to watch her do it: she went down between his legs and sucked him off like she’d never done before, and he didn’t even have to recite anything.

  That’s why Salvador was surprised when she said what she said. Then, just like that, she got up off the bed and carried on talking about her script. Salvador didn’t move. He followed the sound of her movements around the apartment. They were minimal sounds. The fabric of the dress sliding over her skin; one wooden sandal stepping on the floor, then the other one, both sandals, clack clack clack, the fridge door opening; a swig of water or maybe Coke, which she glugged down; and clack clack clack, the notes sliding off the bedside table into her purse; the bony hands smoothing down her dress; the keys.

  ‘Bye, my love.’

  Salvador raised his hand, feeling weak.

  ‘Bye.’

  *

  Eileen became notorious at the university and gave a talk about her play. A journalism student asked her if her script was fatalistic.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because they all die.’

  ‘That’s a very simplistic view.’

  Salvador was in the audience, feeling awkward. Everyone was talking about how wonderful Eileen’s work was, when in reality there was no work: a group of actors came onstage, collapsed on top of one another and the curtain came down. Then it opened again, and they did exactly the same thing, and so on, several times. Nobody ever said anything.

  ‘…what I mean to say…’ the journalism student continued with his lengthy question, ‘is that the fact that civilization repeats itself throughout the course of history, reiterating its successes and failures, in a vicious cycle, is a way of condemning humanity to the idea of an unambiguous fate, which will lead people to the same tragic result, over and over again…’

  Perhaps he was a philosophy student, thought Salvador, and shifted in his chair. He was uncomfortable, twisted.

  ‘Could you be more precise?’ Eileen said to him, crossing and uncrossing her legs, looking at the student as if she wanted to jump on top of him and lick his face.

  ‘Sure, my question is whether your script postulates that nobody can be saved from their fate, and that this fate is, and always will be, the same tragic fate.’

  There was a murmur of approval. Salvador coughed and looked at his watch. The conference had started an hour and a half ago. He was hungry. Eileen replied:

  ‘My script doesn’t postulate anything, but if it did, then perhaps it would postulate something that Nietzsche hadn’t already postulated.’

  There was laughter in the audience, guffaws. People choking on their laughter, having to be patted on the back. Salvador didn’t understand anything: he gripped the arms of his chair, his jaw clenched. The student took a bow, raised his arms then let them drop in a gesture of defeat. He shook his head several times and sat down.

  When the talk was over, they went to the cafeteria, but everyone was crowding around Eileen, and Salvador had to move away. He ordered a soda and two empanadas and looked at her from a corner: Eileen was wearing a dress he had given her. It was blue, like her newly dyed hair. Salvador wolfed down the empanadas in two bites and ordered another. From the table where she was sitting with her fans, Eileen looked over at him every now and then and waved. She was going to leave him, it was obvious. He finished his third empanada, wiped his hands on his jeans and was on his way out, when he heard Eileen’s voice.

  ‘Wait for me.’ She ran over, jumped up on him and flung her arms round his neck. ‘Get me out of here. Let’s go for a drink.’

  They went to a bar. The weather was good, so they sat outside on the terrace. Eileen was in a good mood, and slightly tipsy: she was on her fourth beer.

  ‘So, what about that question this afternoon?’ said Salvador.

  ‘Which question?’

  ‘That guy… he was an idiot, right?’

  ‘You think?’

  Salvador shrugged. He downed his beer and asked the waiter for a cigarette.

  ‘My answer was idiotic,’ said Eileen, ‘not his question.’

  ‘But everyone loved your answer, they laughed, they applauded you.’

  ‘Nobody got it. They laughed because they thought it was a joke: it wasn’t a joke, but I said it in a way that seemed like it was. And people often get things wrong.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  Salvador wondered why the hell you would make a joke that wasn’t a joke. He finished his beer but didn’t order another one because he was almost out of money and he knew that Eileen wouldn’t offer to chip in. He wanted to go home. He wanted Eileen to take off that hideous dress. For the first time, he felt like breaking up with her, but he didn’t know how to do it. It would be better if she did it.

  ‘Are you pissed off?’

  Salvador shrugged.

  ‘Do you want me to explain what Nietzsche said?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s nothing special, I don’t even know why that guy mentioned it, it’s hardly related to my script.’

  Salvador rubbed his neck.

  ‘…and it’s not Nietzsche’s idea anyway, he got it from the Stoics.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  ‘Anyway, what he proposes is a repetition of the world, i.e. that the world ends and then rebuilds itself so that the same acts occur again, without any possibility of variation.’

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  ‘No, it’s a cycle. Simple. It’s like saying day and night, the moon and the sun, the seasons…’ Now she seemed irritated.

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  Eileen drank her beer, blinked slowly, then took his hand.

  ‘And Nietzsche said that it’s not only acts that recur, but feelings too.’ He had heartburn, it must have been the beer. Or the cigarette. ‘In other words,
if the world ended today, tomorrow you and I would fall in love again.’

  Salvador wanted to burp, but he held it in.

  *

  Eileen was snuggled up in one of Salvador’s hoodies, which looked like a sleeping bag on her. She was cold. Salvador wasn’t, but he closed the balcony door so that she would be more comfortable. Then he set about preparing an onion soup.

  ‘I haven’t seen Ricardo for days,’ said Eileen, who was lying on the living room sofa.

  ‘Who?’ Salvador added pieces of toasted bread to the soup.

  ‘Ricardo, the neighbour.’

  ‘Maybe he’s dead,’ said Salvador, and laughed. Eileen didn’t join in.

  Matías would have laughed.

  He served up two bowls of soup and carried them into the dining room. They ate, and afterwards, Eileen put her head down on the table, sighed heavily and closed her eyes. Salvador took the empty dishes back into the kitchen.

  ‘How much time has passed?’ said Eileen.

  He turned to look at her.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I fell asleep.’

  ‘When did you fall asleep?’

  Salvador returned to the table with an apple and a knife.

  ‘I wonder what happens to people when they spend too much time together,’ said Eileen, staring at him.

  Salvador shrugged and grimaced. ‘Um.’

  ‘They disappoint each other,’ said Eileen. ‘As you get to know someone, disappointment is inevitable.’

  ‘You reckon?’ Salvador was peeling the apple; he didn’t like the skin.

  ‘There are ways of pretending to be blind, but one day you’ll have to face up to reality, and reality is always disappointing.’

  Salvador popped a piece of apple into his mouth and said, ‘And which day might that be?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s different for everyone, I suppose in your case it will be the day you wake up with me by your side and wonder how that shrivelled old bean got there.’

  Salvador laughed. Eileen didn’t.

  ‘…and even if your own body deteriorates rapidly, and you end being a flabby, smelly old ape, which will certainly happen to you one day, the other body will always seem worse to you, because repulsion towards your own body is always more bearable than towards someone else’s.’

  Salvador wasn’t laughing anymore: he had grown bored. And a piece of apple had got lodged in his throat. He swallowed, and it went down, but it still hurt. He thumped his chest a couple of times, to help it move down his throat.

  ‘I’ll never be disappointed by you,’ he said afterwards. He thought that would resolve the issue.

  ‘Of course you will,’ said Eileen, ‘and vice versa.’ She got up from the table, said she was going for a cigarette. Salvador carried on eating his apple, thinking that yes, now she was going to leave him. There was no going back. It was better that way; Eileen was weird, Matías was right.

  ‘…insignificant people take longer to get disappointed because they are motivated by hope.’ Eileen was smoking. Her dishevelled blue hair looked like candy floss. ‘They spend a good part of their mediocre lives hoping that at some point, something amazing is going to happen to them, something that will change their life. But in the end, they’re all disappointed.’

  She was worked up, talking at a volume that Salvador would have liked to moderate with a blow to the head. He finished off the last piece of apple, chewing very slowly, counting each bite, focusing on the sound his teeth made.

  Then Eileen sat on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  ‘In the end, we all disappoint each other. All of us, the more we get to know each other.’ She kissed him.

  And he felt relieved.

  *

  ‘I don’t get it, Salvador, we had an agreement and it was pretty convenient, especially for you. I don’t think it’s fair or right or decent, but most of all I don’t think it’s logical for you to say you don’t want to see me anymore. You don’t even have a reason. You don’t have one, do you?’

  Salvador did not reply, he knew by now that when Eileen asked those kind of questions, they were never actually meant for him. They were on the pavement outside the front door of the building. It was cold out. He had drunk several rums to pluck up the courage to say what he had said to her.

  ‘What reason could you possibly have?’ Eileen was pacing up and down, and he was watching her from the front step. ‘If the agreement consisted of our relationship being built on the basis that there was no relationship, so that neither of us could impose the characteristics of the connection on the other…’

  ‘What connection?’

  ‘That was clear, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  If Matías had been there, he could have asked him if he understood. Perhaps he, looking at it as an outsider, might have understood. It seemed like centuries since he had last seen Matías.

  ‘The thing is, if we could only put this case to someone neutral, but trustworthy…’

  ‘That’s what I was…’ Salvador tried to say.

  ‘Someone like, like who?’ Eileen stopped, put her hands on her hips and looked at the ground.

  ‘Like Matías.’

  ‘Like Mikhail Bakunin, for example.’ Eileen started pacing again. ‘The man would choose to dismiss the case for being riddled with elementary errors. And the thing is, Salvador,’ she turned to look at him, ‘your problem is discursive: you always get stuck on the first proposition. For example, you say, “I don’t want to carry on with this”, but then you never put forward a convincing argument. Then we can’t talk, or discuss, let alone put an end to “this thing” that doesn’t exist.’ She came closer, stood with her arms folded in front of him. ‘You can’t expect us to stop being something we never were.’

  Salvador got up from the step, moved forward and took her by the shoulders. He held her shining gaze, looked at her half-open mouth and sighed deeply.

  ‘Eileen,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘Anything you say.’

  Eileen pulled away from him.

  ‘You don’t understand that the destruction of the non-condition is equivalent to the condition?!’ she roared.

  Salvador tried to hold her, to calm her down, but she dodged his grip. Salvador wanted to grab her by the neck and smash her face repeatedly into the pavement.

  ‘I need you to explain to me,’ said Eileen, out of breath. Rivulets of smudged black makeup were running down her face. When had she cried? ‘Explain to me,’ she insisted.

  Salvador’s head was pounding. He clenched his fists and inhaled the freezing night air, like ammonia in his nostrils. He wondered what they were doing outside in that weather. He took another breath and felt a sharp twinge between his eyebrows.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he said.

  Eileen slapped him. He didn’t even see it coming. For such a tiny hand, the blow was hard and painful, but the icy air numbed it instantly. Salvador turned and went into the building. Through the glass door he could see Eileen’s minute body: her strange little blue head shaking in confusion, as if trying to escape the thick cloud that hovered above her.

  SKY AND POPLARS

  Airports made her nervous, but it was not because of goodbyes. She did not have a single memory of saying goodbye to someone before a flight. What she didn’t like was the waiting, the uncomfortable seats, the pervasive smell of the toilets. And the people travelling, she hated them more than anything. Nor had she taken all that many flights. As a little girl she had never travelled by plane because her parents had no money, and now as an adult, she did not see the appeal. Perhaps it was an acquired taste, she thought, like eating blue cheese.

  ‘Have a good trip.’ Jerónimo handed over her suitcase, wrapped in fluorescent plastic.

  Emanuella got up from the seat where she had been waiting. One of her legs had gone to sleep. The last few months had left her very overweight and h
er circulation was poor. Jerónimo had insisted on paying extra to have her suitcase wrapped in plastic, even though she told him there was nothing valuable inside it, nor anything breakable. It was clearly an excuse to not have to wait with her, to get away from her, if only for ten minutes.

  In the meantime, a girl had spat on her. A hyperactive little girl wearing thick makeup. The mother was reading a Greece holiday brochure and paying sparse attention to her child’s acrobatics: the girl was leaping all over the seats like a chimpanzee. Then she sat down next to Ema, opened her mouth and fingered one of her wobbly teeth. ‘Look! It moves!’ Then she let a string of hot, thick drool fall from her mouth and land on Ema’s arm.

  Now, Ema picked up her suitcase and said thank you to Jerónimo, that he shouldn’t have bothered. She expected him to say something else, but he just glanced at his watch and said, ‘Right, it’s about time.’

  ‘Wait, please.’

  Jerónimo looked at her with his mouth contorted, that expression that made his double chin lopsided, as if one side of his face weighed more than the other.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ he said impatiently.

  He had also put on weight in the last few months. And he had no excuse.

  ‘I don’t know, I just don’t like airports. I’ve never said goodbye to anyone, I don’t know what it’s like.’ She felt like crying again.

  ‘It’s like this.’ Jerónimo moved his hands around dementedly, like a mime waving. ‘Bye.’

  ‘I’d like to call you when I get there, would that be okay with you? So we can talk properly. I think we need to talk properly, and maybe doing it over the phone will help.’

  Jerónimo now had his hands in his pockets and he raised his shoulders in that pose, the one that made his neck disappear. Jerónimo was full of tics, unnecessary movements, overdramatic gestures. Jerónimo was horrible. She was horrible too, and that shared characteristic should have been enough to make them revere one another.

  ‘Ema,’ he growled, ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again, do you understand?’ Ema shrugged, swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘Go on, off you go.’ He pointed towards the international departure gate.