‘The girl in ninth grade,’ replied Lucía, slightly taken aback by the fact that Marcela didn’t know the girl’s name. I didn’t know her name either. Karina did, because she was a total gossip.
That morning, the parents of the raped girl showed up at the headmistress’s office. They emerged all tearful. Apparently, they were holding an envelope containing a piece of paper with the names and surnames of the rapists on it.
‘Everyone knows what will happen,’ said Karina.
The parents did not report it to the police, they didn’t even talk to the parents of the rapists, but they decided to apply a punishment that was about right for that city: expelling them. They went, with said envelope, to the boys’ school (which was the same as ours, but for boys), to the local parish church, and to the newspaper, where nothing would be printed because the editor was a relation of one of the boys. Most likely, all that would happen is that the boys would be sent abroad for a while. Then they’d come back, go off to study some second-rate degree course at a university in Bogotá, before returning to Cartagena to run their parents’ businesses, get married and have children who they’d name after themselves, and who would appear on the social announcements pages when they got baptised, when they took their first communion, when they got confirmed, when they graduated, and when they got married to some bilingual girl who talked to the Virgin, with her hymen intact, but her ass in tatters.
For Dianita it would be a very different story. For the moment, she would stay here, wandering the city, looking for a half-decent school to take her in – it was not easy to get accepted by a decent school if you’d been expelled from somewhere else.
‘It’s so awful,’ Lucía put her hands to her face.
For a very brief moment I saw us grown. Not grown up, but grown: adult, slightly old and pitiful, at the bottom of a well that I could peer down, shining a torch. I glimpsed into the future. A future that looked dull, bland, and dark. I tried to imagine us different; transformed into something else.
Atheist. Nympho. Lesbian. Adulterous. Wild.
Or sane.
I wasn’t able to.
Just then Dalia came in. He eyes were red, her pupils slightly enlarged. She was carrying the Snoopy thermos under her arm.
‘What are you lot up to?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
She had rum breath and her uniform was dishevelled.
Karina looked her up and down with that indignant face, the one that made you want to throw acid over it, to erase it.
‘We were talking about Dianita,’ said Lucía. ‘So awful.’
‘Who?’ said Dalia, but she didn’t wait for a reply. She just laughed and said, nodding in my direction, ‘Did she tell you yet?’
‘Huh?’ stammered Lucía.
‘Did she tell you that your boyfriend licked out her…’
I reacted just in time, stretching out my leg and kicking her in the cheekbone. She cried out, stumbled. The thermos flask rolled onto the floor. Dalia bent down to get it and fell over, howling with drunken laughter. Karina and Marcela ran over to help her. Lucía stayed where she was, still and quiet: a pale, expressionless mummy.
‘You’re disgusting,’ I said to Dalia, as she laughed on the floor, writhing around like a worm on the dirty tiles. I kicked her again, this time in the ribs, and I would have carried on kicking, if Marcela hadn’t bundled me out of the toilets.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked, once we were outside. Her eyes shone with nervous energy.
We sat on the ground, by the school exit: waves of pupils were trooping towards the car park and getting on buses, finding their seats, primping their hair, wiping the sweat from their top lips with a tissue. That, I thought, is what limbo must be like. All of them marching to the shared rhythm of an internal music that only existed there; that they would be incapable of reproducing on the outside.
I felt the sun beating down on my forehead, clouding my vision.
I felt thirsty and tired.
Marcela tucked my sweaty hair behind my ear.
‘Am I okay?’ I asked her. I was panting.
She just shook her head.
Director/Editor: Carolina Orloff
Director: Samuel McDowell
www.charcopress.com
The text was designed using Bembo 11 and ITC Galliard Pro.
Copyright
First published by Charco Press 2018
Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF
Copyright © Margarita García Robayo 2012, 2014, 2016
English translation copyright © Charlotte Coombe 2018
This book comprises two novellas and a collection of short stories that were originally published in Spanish under these titles: Hasta que pase un huracán (2012), Cosas peores (2014), Educación sexual (unpublished as a book).
The rights of Margarita García Robayo to be identified as the author of this work and of Charlotte Coombe to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 9998593 0 5
e-book: 978 1 9998593 5 0
www.charcopress.com
Edited by Fionn Petch
Cover design by Pablo Font
Typeset by Laura Jones
Table of Contents
Praise for Margarita García Robayo
Fish Soup
PART I
Waiting for a Hurricane
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
PART II
Worse Things
Like A Pariah
You Are Here
Worse Things
Better Than Me
Fish Soup
Something We Never Were
Sky and Poplars
PART III
Sexual Education
1. Moisture
2. Catechism
3. Broken Girls
4. Lucía (and Mauricio)
5. The Silent Scream
6. The Morning After
Fish Soup Page 17