Fish Soup

by Margarita García Robayo

  Marcela, Dalia and I lay down in the grass and lit a Belmont menthol, which didn’t smell as strong as Marlboros.

  I never smoked again after I left school, but back then, lighting up a cig was like a rebellion hidden in my body, without running too much of a risk of being expelled. It was like saying: I swallow this poison and I exhale it back out into the world. Because the world deserves it.

  Marcela had spent ages trying to prove to us that the song ‘Angel’ by Aerosmith was riddled with subliminal messages, but she was having trouble flipping the phrase from the chorus around and saying it backwards:

  Thginot em evas dna emoc, legna ym er’uoy!

  When Karina came back from sprucing up the Virgin, she sat down cross-legged, her back straight, with that “it-wasn’t-me” look on her face. She smoothed down the folds of her skirt with her hands and said:

  ‘The Virgin spoke to me again yesterday.’

  I found it funny that she said it like it was something extraordinary. It wasn’t. According to Karina, the Virgin communicated with her practically every day.

  ‘I bet she was bad-mouthing Steve Tyler,’ Dalia said. Marcela and I laughed. Karina ignored her and continued:

  ‘So, I had asked her what I should do with Chubby Arias.’ As she talked, she scraped the pink varnish off her nails, creating a little heap of it on the grass. ‘He keeps on about us going to his island, just the two of us, but I think that if I say yes, I’m going to regret what happens there…’

  ‘His island is actual paradise,’ sighed Marcela.

  It was true, I’d been there once: a plot of land with the house in the middle of it, and huge picture windows overlooking the sea on one side and a forest of bamboo on the other. Half the girls in our year had gone out with Chubby Arias just because he had an island. And a yacht called Elvira. Elvira was his mother, a Chilean divorcee who all the other mothers said was too liberal. My mum attributed this to where she came from: she said that the further down the continent you went, the more shameless the women. Modesty was a virtue that existed on a sliding scale, starting out in Mexico and going to absolute pieces in Argentina. Colombia was located, conveniently, slap bang in the middle.

  A year ago, Chubby Arias had celebrated his eighteenth birthday on the island with a massive party. It kicked off early, in the morning, and went on all day. Dalia and I came back at midnight on a boat specially hired for the occasion. We had gone with Karina, but at the last minute we lost her in the forest. At that time, Chubby Arias was dating a girl in one of the years below; her name was Inés and she acted like she was royalty. But at the party, she must have been humiliated to see her boyfriend touching up every female who came over to him: ‘Hey Chubby!’ ‘Happy Birthday, Chubster!’ ‘You handsome devil, Chubby, get over here!’ Chubby Arias groped people here, kissed people there, swigging from a bottle of Old Parr the whole time. At one point, Inés went over to retrieve him, and Chubby showed her who was boss by giving her a couple of slaps on the cheek. Not hard, but forceful. The girl retreated into a corner clutching a tall, brightly coloured drink and that was the last we saw of her. Next thing we knew, Karina, as if she had been poised, waiting for that moment, suddenly took centre stage. We saw her absolutely going for it on the dance floor, bowing and scraping at Chubby Arias’ feet like he was the Holy Spirit incarnate.

  There was a DJ, and Elvira kept on going up to request songs he’d never heard of. The most disturbing thing about the party must’ve been the point when Elvira danced with her son, a kind of electronic courtship dance that required them to grind up and down, back to back, with their hips swirling like tornadoes. Although Dalia and I found it highly inappropriate, the rest of the guests, Karina included, seemed to find it funny. They clapped. They laughed so hard they choked. They flirted with Chubby, who was an absolute babe magnet on the dance floor. And off the dance floor. What was so charming about him? Honestly, I’ll never work it out. He had never been my boyfriend; I was not deemed worthy of being in his social circle. Also, the one and only time he tried to say hi to me, which was on the night of the party, I swerved out of his way and turned my back on him.

  ‘What’s the matter?!’ he shouted, ‘Do I smell, or what?’

  He grabbed my arm and swung me round to face him, blocking my way. In fact, he did smell terrible, but that was the least of his flaws.

  ‘Can’t we talk?’ he insisted. His speech was slurred, his breath toxic, his face sweaty like a greased pig.

  I said no. He asked why not.

  I thought about my reply. I tried to summon up some shred of tactfulness, weighing up the possibilities of that mansion in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, and the yacht Elvira, with its wooden deck and soft, velvet-cushioned seats; weighing up the advantages of having a friend who was repulsive but rich. Whether the lovely sailing trips for me and my friends would somehow make up for his absolute lack of manners.

  ‘Because talking to you is like dunking my head in a bucket of vomit.’

  So long, sucker!

  ‘…We’ve already done some stuff, but not all of it,’ Karina continued with her story, although nobody was paying much attention to her, ‘he knows that I believe in virginity and he respects that, but I like him so much that it’s become a really hard penance.’

  ‘What did the Virgin say to you?’ I asked her.

  Karina mumbled something that I couldn’t hear. Then she cleared her throat, as if she was about to say something, but didn’t.

  ‘What did she say?’ I repeated.

  I hate people who play at being mysterious, it was obvious that she was going to tell us, it was obvious that she was dying to tell us, but she wanted us to beg.

  ‘Well,’ she took a deep breath: ‘She told me that my virginity was very important, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t do other things…’

  ‘Blah blah,’ said Dalia, ‘tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marcela, ‘even my mum told me that, and she can’t even remember being a virgin.’

  ‘Your mum told you that?’ asked Dalia.

  Marcela took a drag of the Belmont and replied in a cloud of smoke:

  ‘It’s a figure of speech.’

  ‘…and she also told me,’ Karina continued, ‘that we must safeguard the hymen, but that there are other parts of the body we can make love with.’

  This left us speechless. I wasn’t sure if I had understood. I’m not sure if Dalia and Marcela had either.

  ‘She said “safeguard”?’ I asked her, just to break the silence. But also because I felt that the Virgin, even though Karina had made her up, wouldn’t talk like that.

  Karina shrugged. It was her turn to smoke: she inhaled deeply and blew it out. Her face was hidden behind a veil of smoke.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  The Virgin had told Karina that Chubby Arias could do her up the ass. Dalia confirmed this later, over the phone. I told her she was crazy. And she told me that it wasn’t the first time that Chubby had suggested doing that with girls. Some of them had told her: the ones who said no, the ones who thought that it was not only a sin, but that it was also disgusting. Chubby Arias insisted that it wasn’t a sin and even brought along a book of catechism to back up his argument. He had highlighted a quotation from Saint Ambrose about the virtues of chastity: “There are three forms of the virtue of chastity: the first is that of spouses, the second that of widows, and the third that of virgins.” From there, he drew an arrow to the margin, with a definition of virginity as: “the quality of possessing an intact hymen and not a perforated hymen.” A definition which he then interpreted: the only thing that must remain intact is the hymen, everywhere else has free reign, a blessed gift from our Lord God. Who are we to spurn God’s gifts? The body should be used to please Him, to say: Thank you, take this broken ass as a sign of my blessed devotion to you, Jesus Christ.

  Chubby Arias was like one of those psychos who came round knocking door-to-door spouting catechis
m, with their little annotated books, and their fake morals. He must have convinced Karina, or perhaps they’d already done it, and that’s why she was going around telling that story about the Virgin. The image of Karina in a submissive posture, with that greaseball delving into her from behind like a nosebag, was too much for me.

  ‘Ugh,’ I said to Dalia. ‘He’s such a perv.’

  ‘But his theory has merit.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. But I thought that if you pulled out any loose phrases from the catechism and stitched them together, any theory would have merit. I realised that this was the purpose of catechism. The darkest mysteries – the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Grail – all became much clearer after being doctored by some con man who wanted something in return: a bag of coins, divine grace, Karina’s ass. It was all the same.

  3. Broken Girls

  Dalia was becoming obsessed with her Latin America trip and it was pissing me off. She was constantly producing a fold-out map, which took up too much space on the desk in the library where I was studying. I asked her not to disturb me; I needed to concentrate. She used the fold-out map to tell me things, although a minute earlier I had expressly asked her to kindly shut up. She lifted it up by the top corners, over her head: behind it I could see the silhouette of her head as a backdrop to the Pacific Coast. She talked and talked, and when I complained, she said:

  ‘Just imagine that my voice is a buzzing insect.’

  ‘A cicada… no, a hornet. A horny hornet.’

  That wound her up after the weekend she’d had: she had been hanging around in Bocachica and met some guys who had travelled through Peru, Bolivia and Chile, playing in an Andean fusion band, and who now ran a tattoo shop. The singer was called Blas; I saw him for the first time at a gig that Dalia took me to. ‘Hey, babe,’ he said right into my ear, his hot breath reeking of weed. I didn’t like him. But Dalia insisted, and I went with her a couple more times to meet up with those guys.

  The second time we saw them was at the tattoo shop, which was where they rehearsed. She’d hooked up with a guy called J, who was the drummer and the guy in charge of everything: the band, the shop and the wasters that used to hang out there, smoking weed and generally kissing his ass. That time, J and Dalia flopped onto a grubby sofa and started kissing and fondling each other, and everyone seemed to think that it was totally normal. I went to sit on a bench outside on the pavement, because I was embarrassed at the display they were putting on. Blas followed me out.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said to him.

  The guy sat down next to me and started whistling a song by Los Enanitos Verdes. After a little while, I heard Dalia shouting, crying for help and hurling insults at J. When I went inside, she was standing in the middle of the shop, with her shirt ripped, one tit hanging out:

  ‘You son of a bitch, I told you to stop!’

  Dalia had hickeys all over her neck, chest and belly. She looked like she had been attacked by leeches. J had a scratch on his face and a bitemark with broken blood vessels on his arm.

  ‘Prick tease!’ he yelled at her.

  And the others? It was as if they were listening to rain falling. The guy on the maracas hadn’t missed a beat.

  I told Dalia we should go.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere until this fucker pays for my shirt.’ She stood there with her arms crossed, hips tilted. Her tit was like an accessory she was wearing; nobody seemed bothered by it. J looked at her furiously, but suddenly he smiled like a psycho and said that if he got her on her own one day, he would rape her.

  ‘Go to hell, the lot of you,’ I muttered, and I left.

  I thought that Dalia would follow me, but when I reached the corner I looked back, and she was nowhere to be seen. But who was there? That guy Blas. He gestured for me to wait, and he jogged up to me at a cool pace, one which seemed to say, ‘I could easily follow you for half a block without breaking a sweat, babe.’

  ‘Where’s Dalia?’ I said.

  Blas took a joint out of his pocket and tucked it behind his ear. Then he suggested we go to the kiosk to get something to drink.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Whatever, it’s hot.’

  Every time the guy opened his mouth, a waft of marijuana hit me. I didn’t like weed. I didn’t like any drugs, but above all, I’d rather dive head-first into a pool filled with anthrax than take a drag on some crusty hippy’s joint.

  The kiosk was on the other side of the street. I was thirsty, so I crossed over with Blas. I ordered a Sprite and he ordered a Coke. We said nothing for a while, watching the buses and the street hawkers going up and down San Martín Avenue. Nobody was in a hurry in that city, rather the opposite: everyone walked around as if their own shadows were weighing them down.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked me.

  I shrugged. ‘Somewhere over there.’

  In those days I was living with my grandma because my mum and my sister Juana were in Medellín. Juana had paid for the trip. Juana had money because she’d spent the last few months working as a secretary for an oil company; she had already given up on three different degrees and a language course and wasn’t going to study anymore. What was the point, she said, if she was already earning a salary? I, on the other hand, spent all day long with a book in my hands, though I wasn’t really studying that hard. I skim read, and that was enough to make my mum happy. She was always nagging me about my grades.

  The thing is, my family weren’t that well-off during those years, and although the most logical solution would have been for me to switch to a cheaper school – like the one Juana had gone to – my mum was set on me getting a scholarship. And they gave me one, the sole condition being that I had to maintain an average grade of 9 or above. That was no big deal, it was an easy school: the teachers were more concerned with what they called “spiritual education” than in any of us learning the periodic table. But all the same, I didn’t want to give my mum any reason to say it was my fault that we were poor, so I laid it on thick with the sacrifice I was making; constantly clutching my books and shutting myself away to study, to achieve the bare minimum to keep my average at 9.1: no more, no less.

  Our final year was a bit harder because I was going to enrol in a public university and I had to get good marks in the national exams. I had to study properly for that. Other classmates of mine were going off to study in the United States and were more concerned with their TOEFL scores. And others were going to Bogotá, to private universities where all you needed to get in was money. All those girls cared about was being skinny: they dedicated entire breaks to studying the calorific value of a Snickers bar. And they were skinny, and they were tanned. At the weekends they went to the islands to eat and to throw up. They got blind drunk, dabbled in drugs, boyfriend-swapped and safeguarded their hymens.

  I couldn’t stand them.

  But back then, I couldn’t really stand anyone.

  Not my friends, not my mum, not my sister Juana.

  My father got off lightly in that respect, because he had left a long time ago and you can’t pick fights with people who aren’t there. The thing with my sister was more complicated. In a nutshell: word was going around that my sister was a bit of a slut. Well, that’s what I heard people were saying at school. Actually, that’s what Dalia told me people were saying at school. Because nobody would dare say it to my face. Not because they were embarrassed or felt sorry for me, but because they were afraid of how I would react. If anybody came up to me and said, ‘I heard your sister’s a slut,’ I’d tell them, ‘Well, I heard that every morning your mum pops three unripe bananas up her pussy and when she takes them out they’re cooked, that’s how much of a horny bitch she is. And do you know what she does with them after? I heard she mashes them up and serves them to you for breakfast.’ If they tried to dob me in to any of the teachers, simple: I denied everything.

  ‘Can you explain it to me?’

  He was a real broken record, that guy. And so basic. He’d been
banging on at me about the same thing for ages: about why the girls from my school were such a bunch of prick-teasing princesses, so handsy but never putting out, such frigid clams. I’d decided to ignore him, so I didn’t end up swearing at him. I didn’t know him well enough to risk it; he could easily punch me in the face and break my nose, and I wasn’t about to make my grandma come rushing out to the hospital.

  ‘Well?’ said Blas.

  I downed my Sprite.

  The afternoon was like all afternoons: hot, humid, and it dragged.

  I looked over at the door of the shop. A Jamaican mobile hung in the doorframe: little black wooden figurines that knocked against one another, making a rattling noise. Dalia still hadn’t come out.

  Teen Aid was actually a measure that the school had been forced to take out of desperation, to stem the tide of pregnant pupils in recent years. The women who held our religious classes and retreats, who were from Opus Dei – the order that ran the school – were far too modest to dare talk about the things that Teen Aid could deal with so naturally, and in English, which made it all the more palatable. Everyone at our school had witnessed at some point or other some girl in tenth grade, ninth even, coming in to school after a few days of absence, dressed in home clothes, accompanied by her parents and with terrifying bags under her eyes like a concentration camp victim. We had all seen her going into the headmistress’s office, and her parents traipsing after her, tragic and resigned, as if she were about to be burned alive in there and there was nothing they could do about it. The headmistress, however, showed leniency: she demanded a swift, no-frills wedding and offered for the school to take care of the baby, at no cost. The future mother came out of there at peace with the world, ready to deliver the child into the care of Opus Dei. The End.