Foreigners like black women, my mother used to say.
Olga swept the shack and wore a thin, dirty dress. Olga would put her hands down the front of her dress to hoik up her breasts, and that made me nervous. Olga didn’t understand what I was always doing there, and she didn’t like it: next time you come sniffing around I’ll slash your face with the machete. Gustavo heard her but would say nothing. Once, Olga heated up a banana with the skin on and everything, then she sat down on a stool, lifted her skirt and put it right inside her. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Gustavo and I saw her from the worktable: he was filleting a sea bass, I was descaling a tarpon. The sea was calm, the sun burning bright.
That’s when Gustavo began telling his stories. This was the first story Gustavo told me:
When I was young, I had a motorbike and lots of hair on my head. I had blond hair, before it turned white and straggly. It was impossible to drag a comb through it, but some of my girlfriends insisted on brushing it for me. That would really piss me off. And when I got pissed off, I’d get on my bike and go far away.
Far away from what?
I finished my first year of law and I was awarded the scholarship. It was easy to get it, I reckon I could’ve got any scholarship I wanted. But I said that I didn’t want any scholarship, that what I wanted was to go far away. But where? the professor of Roman Law asked me, taken aback. I shrugged. He had gone away once, but had come back, he told me. Why? Because I missed it. What did you miss? The food, the culture. I hardly ate anything and didn’t give a shit about culture. I shook the teacher’s hand, then turned my back on him and left. Left his class, and everything else, and started going to the gym with my brother.
Gustavo. What? Do you think I’m pretty? Yes. Do you want me to take off my clothes? No. Gustavo. What? Don’t you like me anymore? Don’t you have some legal code you’re supposed to be reading? I’ve already read them all. Well, in that case I’ll tell you a story.
We lay down in the hammock, but Gustavo would no longer touch my magic button. Instead, he stroked my head. One day, I asked him to. But why do you want me to do that? he asked. Because you did it before. And he said that he didn’t like it, that it wasn’t fun anymore. I thought he did like it, but it was Olga who didn’t. Olga would come and hang around occasionally, using any excuse. But eventually she left: she rolled her eyes at me and left. And Gustavo said:
Once upon a time there was a ship that set sail from Corsica, destination unknown, and halfway through the voyage, most of the crew died.
If the destination was unknown, how did they know they were halfway through the voyage?
…some, the youngest, died of hunger; others died of disease, and others just died. They threw the dead overboard. They threw my mother into the sea, and my little sister Niní.
Was she really called Niní, or was that her nickname?
…those of us who survived reached a vast, lush, green country. We ate whole cows, raw.
I hate raw things, I like things medium rare.
…part of the meat would always go bad, because the cows were as big as hippopotamuses, and I used to think how much my mother and Niní would have loved that country. So green, so big, so full of fat raw cows.
…sushi, for example, I can’t stand it.
It was the best country in the world, but I couldn’t live there because it reminded me too much of the dead bodies we’d thrown into the sea. Of my mother and Niní. That’s why I left. First to Peru, then to Ecuador and so on up, until I reached the Caribbean, where you turn left to carry on north. But then I built this shack, and I decided to stay.
And when do I appear?
I didn’t appear in Gustavo’s story.
In December, a strong wind swept away the houses in one of the poorer neighbourhoods, and they held a telethon for the victims. In December, Xenaida got sepsis, because of a botched C-section. It was two months since she’d given birth, the wound was already getting infected, and she hadn’t told anyone. They took her to a hospital and my mother was left to take care of the baby: he cried and cried and cried. After a week in hospital, Xenaida died. It was nearly Christmas. My mother called an aunt of Xenaida’s in a small village, but she had died too. There was nobody to take care of the wailing baby. Social Services said they would come and get him, but they didn’t. It was a very busy time, they said later, when my mother took him there herself. She handed him over, like a filthy little bundle, to a woman with glasses who pursed her lips as soon as she saw him. Hmm, he’s very skinny, but potbellied too, he must have worms.
5
One day, I fell in love. His name was Antonio, but everyone called him Tony. I called him sweetheart, and he called me sweetheart. Tony had a motorbike and he used to take me out on it; then we’d go to the beach, a beach far away, where only fishermen went. A beach with black sand, not like the ones you see in the movies. I had a towel in my gym bag, and I would shake it out and lay it on the sand. Tony also went to the gym and wanted to be an architect, he said, as we watched a sailboat almost touching the horizon, bobbing along like it was drunk. Drunk on champagne. I wanted a sailboat too, but only rich people had sailboats. Only rich people drank champagne.
Then I said to Tony: if I was rich I wouldn’t want to leave, rich people can live well anywhere; I wouldn’t care about the heat or the black sand or the watery lentils my mother cooks. And Tony said: if you were rich, your mother wouldn’t cook watery lentils. What would she cook? Caviar. You don’t cook caviar. Whatever; that’s what you’d eat.
When the sun started to sink from view and there were no fishermen left on the beach, Tony would take off my clothes and kiss me all over. He didn’t take his off. Sometimes he did. I closed my eyes and let him do everything to me: I imagined he was Gustavo and that we were in Venice. Tony was perfect, but he couldn’t take me to Venice. Sometimes, he took me to the cinema. One day we saw a romantic film that ended with a death, her death. And Tony cried and held me very tight: don’t die.
What I liked most about having sex on the beach was the sky. Tony’s face would appear and disappear from my line of sight, alternating with the sky blue background. Up and down, up and down. I didn’t move; I just lay there, looking at the clouds. I put my hands behind the back of my neck, as if I was doing sit-ups, and waited for Tony to finish. Then he’d lie down next to me, all hot and bothered, and I’d talk to him:
The first time I saw a sailboat was in the harbour. My father took me there, I was two and a half.
But that was a lie. Another day, I told him something different:
The first time I saw a sailboat was inside a bottle. My father bought it for me at the craft fair and told me: when you grow up, we’ll go sailing in one like that. And I said to him: As small as that?
But this was a lie too.
Once, Tony told me I was frigid, but then he regretted it. He knelt down in front of me, kissed my hands and kept saying sorry, sorry, sorry. What happens is that I get distracted looking at the gannets, I told him, because it seemed a bit lame to say the thing about the sky. Then he had the idea of doing it the other way around. He lay back on the towel and I climbed on top of him, so now I could only look at his face. Tony didn’t like looking at the sky. He liked grabbing my hair as if it were vines, and looking into my eyes, absorbed. I became addicted to this position. I became addicted to Tony.
