Fish Soup

by Margarita García Robayo

  But as the same story kept on repeating, rumours started spreading about a nursery that they were going to have annexed to the school, exclusively for the children of ex-pupils. One resentful newspaper columnist – according to the headmistress – wrote an article blaming the school for the girls’ pregnant bellies, for putting it into their heads that taking contraceptives was the same as abortion, and it was clear that for a Catholic girl to have an abortion was equivalent to mutilating the baby Jesus with a pair of pliers. Then along came Teen Aid, spreading its militant message of abstinence. Honestly, I thought that it was better than the crazy teenage baby boom which left you no way out other than permanently giving up, firstly, your free will and choice (they wouldn’t let you even choose your own underwear after that), and secondly, your untimely offspring.

  Just as I was about to explain this to Blas, I heard the wooden mobile rattling and I glanced over: Dalia and J were coming out of the shop. Lucky, I thought, because I was only going to waste my breath. Guys like Blas would never understand something like that. Guys like Blas had brains that were fried by smoking weed and all they knew about women was that they had a hole between their legs: if that hole was closed, all that was left was a useless piece of flesh surrounding it. When it came down to it, Blas was only wasting his precious weed breath on me because he hoped to split me in half like a ripe papaya. His persuasive strategy was as dumb as the women from Teen Aid.

  Once, on Juana’s birthday, a similar discussion arose. When she told her friends which school I went to, there were sounds of general disapproval. And a long-haired guy with a face like a Border Collie piped up, saying that at my school they thought women were like buckets: if they were broken, they were useless. Juana and her friends – who had surely all been broken since the day they were conceived – applauded the comment and made faces like they felt redeemed. I felt embarrassed for them. I thought that if these girls needed some shaggy-looking halfwit to leap to their defence with an analogy like that, it was because deep down they felt flawed, incomplete, battered, crippled.

  Broken.

  Buckets.

  On the pavement outside, Dalia put her hands on J’s chest and laughed. She looked satisfied, smitten. She was hot to trot. She had changed out of her shirt and into a black T-shirt that was far too small for her: Tweety Pie’s face was stretched over her bust. I wondered if perhaps J had a daughter. They said goodbye with an over-the-top kiss. I imagined J’s tongue darting down her throat like a severed tentacle and I shuddered. Then Dalia beckoned me over to get in the truck.

  4. Lucía (and Mauricio)

  I woke with a start, from a dream that I immediately forgot. It took me a while to remember why I was sleeping there in that hammock strung up between two posts. Above me was a canopy of dry palm trees that let very little light through. Barely a few thin rays, like knitting needles. A buzzing insect was hovering very close to my face. Where was I? At Lucía’s place in the country. Why was I there? Because in the last few weeks Dalia and I had fallen out and Lucía had become my most loyal friend.

  Lucía and her boyfriend, Mauricio.

  I got up and went to the toilet. As I was about to leave the bathroom, I heard a noise from outside; it sounded like the rustle of clothing against clothing. I wiped the edge of the bidet with toilet paper, climbed up and grabbed the window frame. I peered out of the small high window with a screen over it, which looked out onto the verandah where Lucía and Mauricio were finishing off the game of Monopoly I had abandoned.

  Lucía’s shirt was pulled up, showing her incredibly white tits, bigger than I’d imagined, with tiny, pinkish nipples. Mauricio was sucking on one of her nipples with his eyes closed, using one hand to knead her tits and the other to touch her under her skirt. Lucía had her gaze fixed on the door through which her mother might appear if she woke up from her nap. She had her legs spread, hanging off the arm of the lounger. Her hands were clenched into fists, but then she pushed Mauricio’s head down and he went under her skirt and held her thighs open with his hands. I could hear what sounded like a dog licking something. Lucía was making short, sharp movements with her hips; she jerked up and down as if she was gnawing away down there with tiny chipmunk teeth, as if she was trying to swallow Mauricio’s entire head in little nibbling motions. I tried to stand on tiptoe to get a better look, but I almost lost my balance and was afraid I was going to fall. I carefully climbed down off the bidet and sat on the toilet.

  Two weeks earlier, the scene was radically different:

  My grandma was snoring in front of the TV. Armando Manzanero was playing piano on the theme tune to an afternoon TV soap that they repeated at midnight. When I turned the TV off, my grandma opened her eyes and raised her hand to her chest.

  ‘I dreamed about your mother,’ she got out of the rocking chair and headed for the phone. ‘I’m going to call her.’

  ‘My mum’s not there, grandma.’

  She turned to look at me.

  ‘Oh no?

  But she picked up the phone anyway, sat down on the sofa and dialled a number. Just one. Then she fell asleep again, with the phone to her ear.

  I had just got home from a night out with Dalia and other girls from my year. Dalia had talked us into going to one of J’s gigs at a bar in town called Zarathustra. It was one of those dingy dive bars that reek of piss. The crowd were, basically, skanks. I told Dalia that I thought J and his band were gross and she got annoyed.

  ‘You think everyone’s gross,’ and she turned away from me.

  I left. The other girls had gone to play on the slot machines at the end of the bar.

  On the way back to my grandma’s house I went over two bridges: the one that divided the centre from Manga, and Manga from La Popa; that part of the city was a succession of bridges that linked the neighbourhoods separated by inlets of the bay. I liked walking around there because it was like looking inside the city, with the lights on both sides of the water. But people said that at night, rapists hid in the mangroves and would pounce on you like jaguars at the slightest provocation. So, I ran as fast as I could over the bridges and kept on running until I reached the door of the house. I was panting, in a cold sweat.

  My room was the ironing room.

  I went into my room and stuck my head out of the window. There was nobody on the neighbouring balcony, which had bars around it. My window had a screen, but it was always open because otherwise the hot air got trapped inside and created a microclimate where the flies frazzled to death. A couple of years ago, the neighbouring balcony didn’t have any bars on it, and some retarded kid who lived there threw himself off. He hit his head so hard that he ended up more deranged than he was to begin with. Now he could no longer hurl himself off it, but he would come out onto the balcony, grip the bars and howl with laughter. Sometimes he spent hours sadly staring out at La Popa hill. Sometimes he shouted swear words and his mother would whack him over the head with a shoe. But today he wasn’t there. Where might he be? Sleeping, surely. Dreaming about dying and leaving that pathetic life he’d been dealt, to go straight to heaven. My grandma had told me that the boy’s mother consoled herself with the myth that her son was an angel on earth. This annoyed my grandma: ‘If heaven is full of retards, I’d rather go to hell.’

  The phone rang. My grandma didn’t hear it, although she was sitting right next to it, fossilised. I came out of my room to answer it:

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Bitch.’ It was Dalia.

  According to her, I’d left her in a dangerous situation, which meant I was despicable and selfish. Apparently, the gig had got out of control. Someone had thrown a chair at J’s back and they had ended up in Accident and Emergency. She had left him there, hugging an old woman in animal print leggings who, it turned out, was his mother.

  ‘What about the other girls?’ I yawned. I had sat down on the floor and was studying my grandma’s feet, which were covered in swollen veins and brown moles.

  ‘They cleared off as soon as it sta
rted getting rowdy in there.’

  ‘So go and give them a hard time; at least I told you I was leaving.’

  I took off my sandals and looked at my own feet, criss-crossed with veins that were still flat. My nails were long, they needed cutting. The skin on my feet was darker than on my calves, because I went round in flip-flops and jeans, so they caught the sun. Whenever I put shorts on, it looked like I had khaki-coloured ankle socks on.

  ‘…you’re my best friend, you should have stayed with me until the end.’ It sounded like Dalia was about to cry. In those days, nothing annoyed me more than people crying. I told her to think of it as a practice run.

  ‘A practice run for what?’

  ‘For your trip to Patagonia.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Or were you thinking of taking me as a chaperone for when you’re hooking up with your crusty boyfriends?’

  ‘Bitch.’

  ‘You’re going to be alone on that trip, dealing with the scum.’

  ‘You’ve got such a fucking chip on your shoulder.’

  ‘And you’re a skank.’

  I hung up.

  The situation got worse over the next few days. Dalia wasn’t talking to me and started hanging around with girls who spent all day slurping on a Snoopy thermos filled with rum and Coke. Then they went out to the playground and did burping competitions until they fell asleep. They slipped Mr Tomasito some money on the sly, to make sure that the teachers didn’t come and interrupt their nap.

  I threw myself into my studies, I was dreaming bigger than public university: I wanted a scholarship to join NASA and slide off the edge of the map forever. Ugh. I spent all my time alone, finding shady spots under trees, where I could lie down and read. That’s where I met Lucía.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  It was morning break, and I’d gone to the stands by the netball courts. I was holding a book right in front of me, which made Lucía’s question really dumb.

  ‘Reading,’ I said.

  Apart from an unfortunate-looking Korean girl who joined the school in the ninth grade and left in the tenth, and a girl called Susy del Río, who arrived in the sixth grade and left in the eighth, Lucía had never had any long-term friends. Especially after what happened with Susy del Río: she missed a couple of days of classes, and when the teachers called her house, they were told that her family had moved away. She was never seen again. Lucía was questioned about it several times, but she could not shed any light on her disappearance.

  ‘The Virgin told me that Susy del Río died,’ said Karina at the time, fuelling gossip that reached the ears of the headmistress. They called Karina in to explain where she had heard that, and she swore on the lives of her parents and her two little brothers that the Virgin had told her. Not even the headmistress was able to call Karina crazy; in fact, they encouraged her: ‘What else did she tell you?’ But Karina claimed she had a splitting headache and they sent her to the school nurse. Dalia and I went with her, and there she told us that the Virgin had said more things about Susy del Río, but she didn’t want to reveal them out of respect for the dead. According to Karina – or according to the Virgin - Susy del Río had bled to death on a filthy gurney, because her mother had taken her to a black woman in La Boquilla to get an abortion. ‘And whose baby was it?’ Dalia asked her. Karina shook her head, blinking slowly. ‘That’s all she said.’

  During our first ever chat down by the netball courts, Lucía talked to me about Mauricio. She told me he went to the public university and he really liked it; that he had got onto an Engineering course with really good marks.

  ‘Which university are you going to go to?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She bunched up her skirt between her legs. Then she leaned back on her elbows, looked at the sky and it was as if by looking at the clouds, she was able to talk more freely. She talked about the career advice tests – the results of which were far too vague to help you make a decision – and about the school psychologist who was called Jasmine – ‘like a bloody Cocker Spaniel’ – and who was over thirty and single, the ‘poor thing’.

  ‘…she’s one of those ones that can’t get married’, she went on, ‘a numerary, a supernumerary, I can’t quite remember.’

  ‘Numerary,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah, the supers are the ones who get married and give birth endlessly until they finally dry up.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Because they aren’t allowed to take the Pill.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Like Olga Luz.’

  Where was she going with this? I carried on with my reading, but then the bell went for the end of break. Lucía sat up.

  ‘I’m going to a birthday party tonight with my boyfriend,’ she said.

  What had that got to do with me?

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  I stood up and dusted down my uniform.

  ‘It’s at the Yacht Club. Do you know it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve seen it from the outside.’

  ‘Don’t you want to come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t.’

  I walked to the classroom at a fast pace. Lucía trailed behind. Before we went into the building, I saw Dalia lying under a tree; she had headphones on and was using her schoolbag as a pillow.

  It was too late to back out.

  There I was: sitting looking out at the bay, with a glass of beer in my hand and the humid breeze buffing my cheeks. I had dressed as if I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the party or the people there, which meant I had spent hours trying on different outfits in front of the mirror. Lucía had not arrived yet, I guessed her boyfriend hadn’t either, so I went straight to the bar, grabbed the first drink I saw and headed for the quayside.

  ‘The boats have a really hypnotic effect.’ A boy had come and stood next to me.

  ‘The boats or the beer?’ I said and he laughed.

  There was no denying that it was an incredible view: the lights of the buildings on the opposite shore framed the dark, still water with the moon reflected in it. But the smell was unbearable: the bay was stagnant water, and it smelled like it. And there were mosquitoes the size of cherry stones. I had just shooed one away, when my new friend suggested we move over to a table. He held out his hand to help me up and we went to sit on the terrace. I asked him what he was doing with his life, if he was studying, and if so, what. And then he started using words like hull, and starboard, and porthole, to try and show off his pointless knowledge of boats.

  ‘You don’t give a shit about anything I’m saying, do you?’ he said. I shook my head and we both laughed. I’d only had half a glass of beer, not enough alcohol to account for how cute I was finding this boy.

  ‘Nobody likes boats until they sail them. One day I’ll take you out sailing,’ he announced.

  And I travelled far, with him, in a boat that set sail from that very spot and crossed the Atlantic on a fast diagonal line to Portugal. On the long journey, we fell out three times and made up six. We had two children: a boy and a girl. And we stopped off at an island to buy them exotic birds, but we couldn’t take them with us, because somebody told us that they wouldn’t survive outside of the jungle.

  ‘There you are!’ Lucía had appeared. She sat down on his lap and kissed him on the lips, and her straightened hair slid across, forming an iron curtain in front of their faces. Next thing I knew, burning rocks came raining down on our boat, just a few miles off Cadiz. We exploded into a gazillion pieces that momentarily blinded me, and then vanished into thin air, like a foolish hope.

  5. The Silent Scream

  Olga Luz had decided to combine her two weekly classes into just one. Now it was three hours long with a break in the middle. One day she dedicated the whole three hours to abortion; we had to watch a film and discuss it. Teen Aid loved those films: the head of a foetus crushed by an enormous pair of forceps or burned by the effect
of a syringe that pumped out acid after it’d been shoved up the vagina. Babies came out disfigured, but whole; they put them in black bags and then straight in the rubbish.

  Every time they showed us one of those films, there would be one girl who would feel sick and would have to run out and throw up. In those days it was better not to even walk past the toilets because they were absolutely filthy: no amount of cleaning product could mask the smell. The films about abortion must have been the symbolic equivalent of the Hieronymus Bosch paintings we’d studied in Art, years earlier. The dead foetus and the rotten belly were, like Hell, invariably the consequence of sleeping with a boy. However, you couldn’t help thinking how little faith the catechists had in chastity. Their message was clear-cut: you must be chaste. But devoting the next lesson to abortion was like admitting they had failed.

  What this revealed was that sex was a redeemable sin; which is why trying to persuade girls not to do it was stupid. A redeemable sin, God knew full well, was the proven method used by many to become Saints. There is nothing more profitable to a religion than a repentant sinner. With chaste girls, it was the same: one day the miserable creature sins and sleeps with someone, gets pregnant, feels guilty and then gets married. From then on, she leads an impeccable life: the sin of sex is redeemed by entering into a life of holy matrimony.

  ‘Break time,’ said Lucía.

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, but I stayed where I was sitting, watching the classroom emptying of girls, and filling up with light: fragments of afternoon that filtered in through the window and wound their way among the desks until they landed on Olga Luz, who sat curved like a meat hook over her notebook.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ Lucía was about to leave the classroom. I didn’t really know why: once we got outside she would just say she was tired and sit on the ground to inspect her cuticles. Then she’d start on about Mauricio this, Mauricio that, and if you tried to change the subject even remotely, she would fall silent, as if someone had switched off her brain.