Fish Soup

  ‘No.’

  ‘Want me to stay with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You feeling alright?’

  Lucía sapped my energy.

  I laid my arms on the desk, leaned my body forward and closed my eyes. There was a moment of silence after that.

  ‘Hey.’

  I felt a light tap on my shoulder: it was Dalia. She no longer had such short hair, but it wasn’t very long either, so she had pulled it back into messy buns, with rogue hairs bursting out wildly at all angles.

  I sat up. She sat down at the desk next to mine, the one Lucía had been using since Dalia and I had fallen out.

  ‘Will miss goody-two shoes mind if I sit in her place?

  I snorted. ‘Don’t even think about getting up, please, I’m so sick of her.’

  ‘Oh really? I thought she was your girlfriend.’

  Making sure that Olga Luz was not looking, I stuck my middle finger straight up at her, in a perfect Fuck you.

  The film was called The Silent Scream and it was Olga Luz’s favourite. It was all about one Mr Bernard Nathanson, an abortion-doctor-turned-Catholic-convert, trying to convince the world that the foetus cried for help before it was killed, in other words, it could sense danger and feel pain. Or in other words, that it was a person. Then they showed the filming of an abortion where the foetus tried to dodge the forceps, the syringe, and when the acid hit it, was seen squirming like an insect doused in bleach. At one point, the camera zoomed in on the face of the foetus, a real close-up shot, and you could see its mouth opening and closing in a desperate gesture that Doctor Nathanson claimed was the word ‘mama’. During this part, Olga Luz’s nose would stream, and she shuddered as if she had received an electric shock up her ass. Once, in the middle of one of these spasms of anguish, she said that the worst thing about it was that these children would never see the face of God. Because by killing them before they were born, they would be left floating around in a limbo land of deformed babies screaming for their mothers.

  It would be years before I fully understood her reaction.

  The disturbed behaviour of the Opus Dei teachers was not just because they got off on instilling fear in their pupils, but also because they truly believed what they were saying. They weren’t acting, they really experienced the suffering. Bernard Nathanson must also have believed that the seventy-five thousand abortions or more that he carried out before converting to Catholicism had condemned him to this limbo land of deformed babies. And when he got ill with cancer, he must have thought that he deserved it. In that second before dying – when apparently you see your whole life flash before your eyes – he must have thought that this repentance was not enough to allow him to see the face of God. As a last resort, he must’ve clung to the hand of his wife Christine, and to divine mercy. Then he would’ve closed his eyes and let himself fall. In the end, to his relief and misfortune, he would not see his disintegrated particles mixed with the dust, floating in nothingness itself.

  That afternoon, Dalia came to pick me up from my grandma’s house. We cruised around the city in the truck, listening to “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, on repeat.

  She had fallen out with J.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Some slut from another school.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘One where they don’t show foetuses dying in agony to their students, so they have no issue spreading their legs for every stud they meet.’

  We parked up on a jetty.

  Before that, we’d bought ice creams that hadn’t lasted long: once they started melting everywhere we’d lobbed them into the sea.

  ‘What about the girls?’

  ‘Which girls?’ I had just realised that during those weeks I had not only drifted apart from Dalia, but also from Marcela and Karina. We were one of those groups that needed a core to stay together, and if that core broke apart, the group vanished. That made me sad. Suddenly I missed Karina’s horrible obsession with inspecting your face with her huge round eyes, in a kind of trance, trying to spot blackheads emerging from your skin.

  ‘I think Marcela’s going to do an exchange in Boston,’ said Dalia. But it sounded like she’d just made that up. Then she stretched her legs out and I saw that she had shaved. Too much time had passed between us.

  ‘And Lucía?’ she said.

  ‘What about Lucía?’

  ‘How did she go from being part of the furniture, to being your pet?’

  ‘For God’s sake, what do you mean…’

  ‘Is she still with that boyfriend?’

  ‘Which boyfriend?’

  ‘The dumbass one.’

  I didn’t answer. If I did, she would argue with me.

  If I argued, I lost.

  A couple of nights before, Mauricio had called me on the phone. We talked about nothing in particular: hi, how are you? / good, you? / good / that’s good / yeah, that’s good. Neither of us mentioned Lucía. We ended up in silence, almost asleep, which was a great achievement in my case, seeing as the phone was in the most uncomfortable little corner of my grandma’s living room, cluttered with figurines of saints and crucifixes. And just as we reached the climax of the conversation – that is, the only full sentence of the evening – a dry cough erupted in the air. ‘Decent girls don’t talk at this time of night.’ It was my grandma – or an apparition of her – swathed in her translucent dressing gown. Through it you could see her body, a suit made of creases, and saggy leathery skin. Layer after layer of sad skin.

  ‘A total utter dumbass, that’s what they say about that guy.’ Dalia was looking at the horizon, while I sat there feeling humiliated. I followed her gaze: the sun was a fistful of fire, about to be extinguished.

  I was hungry. I wanted to go back to my grandma’s house and eat some re-heated leftovers and then lie down on my bed and look at the cracks in the ceiling until I fell asleep. What a pointless day, I thought.

  Every so often, fragments of The Silent Scream flashed through my head.

  ‘So, is he a dumbass, or not?’ she insisted.

  ‘Who?’ she had managed to piss me off.

  ‘That Mauricio guy, the one who’s going out with that bitch Lucía.’

  I sighed, exasperated.

  ‘I don’t know, Dalia, he doesn’t seem like one to me.’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘You knew what?’

  ‘That you like Lucía’s boyfriend.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘Crazy and full of shit.’

  Dalia’s laughter really shook me up. It wasn’t a feeling of anger, it was more like a blade slowly being plunged into my chest. I stood up and walked to the street. I dried my tears on the sleeve of my shirt. When I looked up to carry on walking, it was night time.

  Mauricio came in a taxi.

  I was still sitting next to the phone box. I was watching the waves brimming with foam, furiously raging. Before, I had seen a boat coming in on the horizon. It was as big as a whale and must have had hundreds of tourists on board, cooped up like dogs in kennels.

  Mauricio sat down next to me and didn’t mention my puffy eyes. After a while, he stood up and held out his hand.

  ‘Let’s walk.’

  That seemed like a good idea, it was too hot to be sitting there, melting. We crossed to the beach and there was a guy with a cool box full of beers. Mauricio bought two. He took off his shoes, rolled up the bottoms of his jeans. I did the same. We passed by a shrimp and ceviche stand that was closing, a guy was sweeping up the shrimp shells scattered all over the sand, and piling them up behind a tin tank. We sat down. Mauricio opened a beer and passed it to me. I didn’t want it. He asked me what I wanted.

  ‘How do you mean, what do I want?’

  ‘A Coke, a lemonade… I can go and get you one.’

  I looked around. Everything was closed.

  ‘I
don’t want anything,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  But it was clear that I did.

  Mauricio put his arm around my waist, pulled me in and kissed my cheek. I turned my back on him. He hugged me from behind and drew me in close to him. We were in such a close embrace that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. He moved his hands up and touched my breasts, which were tiny, compared to Lucía’s. I pulled away again. But he persisted, this time he moved in front of me and kissed me on the lips. Seconds later, we were lying on the sand, feeling each other up under our clothes like a couple of dirty hippies.

  ‘On your feet, ladies and gents.’

  A policeman was shining a torch on us.

  We jumped to our feet, and I turned my back because I was embarrassed. I shook the sand out of my hair. Mauricio apologised to the man, who was pretending to be cross, but in the middle he laughed and made sexist jokes.

  ‘Very well, I understand young man, but do me a favour, be a gentleman and take the young lady to a hotel.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This is a tourist city, it’s full of hotels. Didn’t you see that one?’

  I presumed he was pointing at the Hotel Caribe. Mauricio couldn’t have afforded a room there in a million years.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And if that one isn’t to your liking, I’d recommend this one.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him hand Mauricio a card. I was sure it was some filthy motel where he and his colleagues took housemaids. I felt horrible.

  ‘Okay, buddy,’ said the policeman, nodding vigorously, ‘you two have fun.’

  The way back was even more humiliating: we sat far apart in the back seat of the taxi, not touching. A provincial vallenato was playing on the radio, it was about a woman with tiny, bewitching peasant’s eyes that sparkled like sapphires. I felt suffocated; something large, rough and alive was obstructing my throat.

  I had nowhere to go, nobody waiting me for anywhere.

  Mauricio did.

  As we crossed the bridge back into Manga I looked out of the window; the lighthouse in the bay cast out a beam of light that was swallowed up by the darkness, as if by the cavernous mouth of a wolf.

  6. The Morning After

  I didn’t like Father Tiago because when he gave you communion bread he touched your tongue with his thumb. This meant that you ended up swallowing, along with the body of Christ, the saliva of everyone who went up to take communion. Luckily, his masses were last thing on a Friday, so from there you could go straight home to gargle with mouthwash. Father Tiago was not a permanent priest at the chapel, he only came in for special occasions. The special occasion in this case was that we were about to graduate and, although he would be doing the mass for the ceremony, today would be the last time at school.

  After mass, the headmistress came to our classroom. We thought she would give us one of those talks about what awaited us on the outside, in the real world, where we should always remember that we were nothing more than an instrument of Our Lord God, ‘We are the clay, and He the potter’ – she would say, half-closing her eyes as if dazzled by a bright light. Everything that happened to us was part of His plan for us. ‘Then why bother getting out of bed in the morning?’ Marcela had asked once, mortified by the idea of being a puppet. The weirdest thing was that, after fifteen years of Catholic school education, she had only just realised this. The headmistress told her, ‘to please Him.’

  But today she hadn’t come to talk about that. Or not exactly.

  ‘A tragedy has occurred.’

  The headmistress had big teeth. This meant that she could never close her mouth properly.

  A girl in ninth grade had been admitted to hospital, with an uncertain prognosis:

  ‘… in the hands of God.’

  Her parents were sleeping, they heard the doorbell and when they went to the door they found her, unconscious and with her clothing torn. They heard the screech of car tyres disappearing around the corner.

  ‘Whatever happens, we must accept His will.’

  The girl had gone to a quinceañera party at a nightclub hired out for the occasion. At the venue, there was a specially designated mezzanine area for the parents. The girls and boys were on the ground floor, circling the European DJ and the drinks table. ‘They were soft cocktails,’ the mother of the birthday girl said later. It must have been true. According to the abridged versions, a group of bad boys who nobody wanted to name (it was a tiny city, we all knew who the bad boys were) had put Rohypnol in her drink. Then they took her out for a drive, parked up at a jetty, took their shoes off, strolled along the beach in their fancy suits.

  Up to that point: an advert for mentholated chewing gum.

  Up to that point: the start of an N Sync video.

  Up to that point: a bunch of posing gayboys.

  But there was a gap in the middle that none of the versions could fill in. All we knew was that the girl had appeared, dumped on her own doorstep, having been beaten up and raped. They found seven types of semen in her, and not just in the front.

  Yet all of this was incidental. For the headmistress – and that was why she had come to pay us a visit – the real dilemma was whether to expel her now, all damaged, or to wait for her hopefully speedy recovery, and then do it. Either way, she would have to be expelled, and not because of what had happened to her, poor thing, but because of how, blinded by pain, and tempted by the devil, her parents had acted.

  That must have been the first time I heard of the morning-after pill. The year was 1997, and I had never heard of that pill, which had been in use for nearly thirty years. I remember that I was sitting at the back of the classroom, with my headphones hidden inside my blazer: Oh no, I know a dirty word, Kurt was whispering in my right ear. The left ear was listening attentively to the headmistress, who was announcing the apocalypse, because the unknown potential of a creature with seven fathers had been snuffed out.

  In the afternoon I felt feverish.

  I slept so long that when I woke up, night was gnawing at my window.

  Outside, I could hear the voices of my grandma and the maid, embroiled in some domestic discussion. I went out. The house stank of onion and boiled fish. The maid was trying to convince my grandma to please let her finish her work. That woman was a saint: eight in the evening and she was still there, dealing with an old woman coughing her bad breath in her face. I carried on until I got to the dining room window that looked out onto the street. I leaned out. Some carts were going past, on the way back from the market, full of rotten stuff they’d been unable to sell. A fog surrounded them, but it wasn’t fog. It was the dirt that had been stuck to the pavement, which at that time of night was whipped up by the breeze.

  I thought about Mauricio.

  Nothing new there: I was always thinking about Mauricio.

  I imagined him with Lucía, licking her like a dog. I imagined him raping the girl in ninth grade. And with Father Tiago, receiving communion, chewing off his fingers, his hand, devouring his whole arm as he let out a carnal, cannibalistic groan. He’d called me every day lately, but I had given the maid instructions. I’d written a series of responses on the message pad: the girl doesn’t live here anymore / no, she didn’t leave a phone number / I think the girl moved to Houston / yes, Houston, she’s about to board a space shuttle, destination unknown. But she never managed to get to the last two sentences, she would get flustered and hang up nervously.

  My grandma huffed out of the kitchen and started shuffling towards her bedroom, but then she stopped in her tracks.

  ‘Grandma?’

  She did not reply. I got up from the dining table and went over to her, and took her by the shoulders:

  ‘Grandma, are you okay?’

  She looked at me as if she didn’t recognise me. Her eyes were watery, and she had eye gunk crusted in the corners. I was used to her sickly appearance and her sudden disorientation, but this time, she also loo
ked creased and dirty, like an old pillowcase. My grandma was short, with very pale, paper-thin skin and eyes a faded brown colour. And when she didn’t brush her hair, the hairs around her forehead formed a grey crown that made her look sad and unkempt. She made a rasping sound when she breathed, as if she had calluses in her airways.

  ‘Am I okay?’ she asked me.

  I felt trapped by her question: I had the sensation that this frail old woman I was holding by the shoulders was not her, but me. And her face was a mirror.

  Stray hairs.

  That’s what they called those dark, wiry hairs that grew out of the skull, sharp and erect, as a sign of rebellion compared to the docility of the others. At a certain time of day, generally the dead time between the last period and the end of school, a row of girls could be seen in front of the mirror in the toilets, plucking out those stray hairs and depositing them on the countertop. In the end, there were scattered heaps of hair left, which the cleaning lady would collect up in a bag. Genetic material thrown in the rubbish.

  Marcela, Karina and I were doing this when Lucía showed up. She came over to us like a small, timorous animal, and leaned her back against the wall. I looked at her from the mirror and said, ‘What’s up?’ She shook her head, to say not a lot, she was just watching.

  Then she said, ‘Poor Dianita, what do you think will happen to her?’

  ‘Who is Dianita?’ asked Marcela.

  I had been grappling with a hair that I couldn’t quite manage to pull out by the root, and each time the hair was just getting shorter and shorter, and more difficult to pull out. I had had enough of looking for stray hairs and I sat down on the side by the sinks. Karina had moved on to plucking her eyebrows. I thought it was sad, but above all pointless, our obsession with eradicating our hair. They said that every time you removed a hair, the root got stronger and another even tougher one started to grow. We were fighting a losing battle of the will against nature. And when it came down to it, who really cared about our hairs? Girls. Men would never look at us scrupulously as we did ourselves.