Holiday Heart by Margarita García Robayo

Author:Margarita García Robayo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: holiday heart;Margarita García Robayo;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2020-05-06T16:08:54+00:00

11

Lucía had just tried to imply that what was happening to him was related to his mother’s death. But she didn’t say it like that; she called it ‘that unresolved issue.’

‘And what exactly is happening to me?’ Pablo was still denying it at that point. Actually, he didn’t think he had a serious problem. ‘A serious problem would be something else,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ said Lucía.

‘I don’t know.’ He felt cornered.

‘Give me an example,’ she insisted.

He thought about something with no solution: brain damage.

‘Cancer,’ he said.

‘You see?’ She looked triumphant.

They were having dinner at a restaurant called Adriana’s, both gazing at the pile of empty prawn shells in the middle of the checked tablecloth. They were waiting for the main course, putting off the next argument, slowly filling their enormous bubble of tension with silences, and with the insipid wine she’d chosen.

‘Pablo?’ A woman had stopped next to their table. Her name was Anna. She wore a ruffled dress that came to below the knee, her cheeks and neck flamingo pink, her cheekbones shiny. He recognised her by her voice. Although, once he got over the surprise, he confirmed that she actually still had the same face. Anna was like a Walkers biscuit – Pure Butter Highlanders Shortbread, 135 g. She was fat now, but she used to just be soft and squishy like a Miss Piggy stuffed toy. Whenever she entered a room, you’d be struck by the waft of Johnson’s talcum powder emanating from her skin and hair. She smelled like a giant, freakish baby, with dimpled cheeks and cleavage up to her neck. Pablo remembered that some of his colleagues thought she was a fat hottie. For some men, big tits and dimples were the required pairing. He’d always found her grotesque.

Pablo had stood up, introduced her to Lucía and asked about her life. Now, as she told him all about her family farm, recently featured in the Trip Advisor guide Things to Do in New Haven, he felt the same feeling of distance and strangeness as when he first set foot in that city, the day he arrived. The day he visited the university for the first time and saw the people who would be his colleagues. ‘Everyone here is pink-coloured,’ he’d told his mother, the first time they spoke on the phone. ‘Aren’t there any black people?’ she asked. There were, but they were different. ‘What are they like?’ His mother, like any brown-skinned woman, was obsessed with shades of blackness. ‘Ugly,’ replied Pablo, thinking about the groups he’d seen around campus: sticking together, walking as a unit, clinging to their books – and their women – as if under a self-imposed apartheid.

Anna was still standing next to the table, with a fixed smile. The conversation had reached a dead end.

‘Any children?’ Pablo asked her, as if to fill the silence.

Anna puffed up proudly like a peacock and her cheeks flushed even more. She rummaged in her handbag, took out her phone and showed them the screensaver: three boys and a girl clasped in an embrace.

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