Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo

Author:Margarita García Robayo [Robayo, Margarita García]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: charco press, fish soup, Margarita García Robayo
ISBN: 9781999859350
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2018-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

FISH SOUP

Very early one morning, as Mr Aldo Villafora was sleeping, he was disturbed by the pungent smell of boiled fish. It was not yet the smell of soup, it still needed seasoning and herbs, and, of course, the aniseed that Helena added to everything. Or it was the smell of soup, but an insipid, watery soup. He thought he must be dreaming. After tossing and turning in bed for a while, even covering his head with the pillow, Villafora finally got up. He sat up and took a couple of deep breaths. The foul odour entered his nostrils, went down his gullet and settled in his stomach. It was like when dead fish washed up on the beach and nobody picked them up for weeks. They just lay there rotting, and the air would be filled with the stink of blackened, dead flesh.

The sand in the hourglass on the bedside table was still almost all at the top, with only a meagre pile at the bottom. It was the start of another hour: Villafora could not remember when the last one had finished, when he had turned the hourglass over. But he was not surprised by this. Lately he hardly noticed when night became day.

He got out of bed and wrapped the sheet around his waist. The mirror on the wall reflected the image of a man worn out by working late nights: thin and saggy, his skin transparent like tracing paper, with blue veins snaking all over his body like a hydrographic map of a country with an abundance of rivers. Villafora was the owner of an old bar, which was also his home. The bar was named “Helena” after his wife, who had died from a long and painful disease that took hold of every bone in her body and left her prostrate in bed, delirious. The bar was on the ground floor: it was a spartan place, an industrial drinking hole with wooden tables and chairs, and a large bar with high stools. It had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a side street – in the morning this alleyway was filled with grocery stalls and at night, with prostitutes who, for lack of clients, often came to hang out in the bar. The house was on the upper floor. It consisted of a small living room with a window, and an adjoining bedroom and bathroom. Through the living room window there was a view of the harbour, which was not much of a harbour. It was more of a dumping ground for clapped-out old fishing boats. The city was a tourist resort, the kind of place backpackers and young runaway couples passed through.

Helena’s death had changed the way the bar was run: for example, lately they only served fried sardines. When Helena was alive, however, she persuaded the market stall owners to keep the leftover fish heads for her and every evening she made soup. The soup was popular in the early morning, when the drunks started to feel hungry and all she had to do was warm it up.

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