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Praise for Margarita García Robayo
‘García Robayo is building one of the most solid and interesting oeuvres in Latin American literature.’
Juan Cárdenas
‘Margarita shows sharp insight into contemporary life. Her voice speaks with surreptitious irony and sophisticated psychological perception. She is the creator of an exceptional poetics of displacement.’
Juan Villoro
‘Her stories combine the atmosphere of Desperate Housewives, Hemingway’s iceberg theory and a memorable, bittersweet ending.’
Jorge Carrión
‘Margarita gathers memories as if they were flowers. She smells them. She plants them. And they hurt.’
La Voz del Interior (Argentina)
‘Full of everyday details that reveal the most vulnerable aspects of feminine subjectivity.’
La Nación (Argentina)
‘One of the most potent figures of contemporary Latin American literature.’
Inés Martín Rodrigo, ABC (Spain)
Margarita García Robayo
Fish Soup
Translated by
Charlotte Coombe
Contents
Praise for Margarita García Robayo
I am writing these poems
From inside a lion,
And it’s rather dark in here.
So please excuse the handwriting
Which may not be too clear.
Shel Silverstein, It’s Dark in Here
PART I
Waiting for a Hurricane
1
Living by the sea is both good and bad for exactly the same reason: the world ends at the horizon. That is, the world never ends. And you always expect too much. At first, you hope everything you’re waiting for will arrive one day on a boat; then you realise nothing’s going to arrive and you’ll have to go looking for it instead. I hated my city because it was both really beautiful and really ugly, and I was somewhere in the middle. The middle was the worst place to be: hardly anyone made it out of the middle. It was where the lost causes lived: there, nobody was poor enough to resign themselves to being poor forever, so they spent their lives trying to move up in the world and liberate themselves. When all attempts failed – as they usually did – their self-awareness disappeared and that’s when all was lost. My family, for example, had no self-awareness whatsoever. They’d found ways of fleeing reality, of seeing things from a long way off, looking down on it all from their castle in the sky. And most of the time, it worked.
My father was a pretty useless man. He spent his days trying to resolve trivial matters that he thought were of the utmost importance in order for the world to keep on turning. Things like getting the most out of the pair of taxis we owned and making sure the drivers weren’t stealing from him. But they were always stealing from him. His friend Felix, who drove a van for a chemist, always came griping to him: I saw that waste-of-space who drives your taxi out and about… Where? On Santander Avenue, burning rubber with some little whore. My dad fired and hired drivers every day as a matter of