Lety clears the empty mugs away and washes them up. She takes a bowl of salad leaves out of the fridge, another bowl containing tomatoes, and a glass jar of fat anchovies floating in a darkish liquid. She places it all on the counter. She picks up a knife that is too big for the job at hand: chopping lettuce leaves. Pablo imagines Lety on the train, carrying her bag full of giant knives, moving down the rows of seats, natural as can be.
The day he went to visit her, Lety was out at bingo. She told him off later for not letting her know, but he’d wanted to surprise her. Seeing as he was in Port Chester, he decided to make the same journey he used to make years earlier and took the train to New York. When he heard the tinny announcement of the station names – Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle – he felt a twinge of nostalgia, and it wasn’t long before he reached a state of meditative lightness that he rarely experienced sober, by repeating the list of names from the beginning every time the train stopped at the next station, like a mantra – Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle, Pelham… By the time he reached Grand Central Station he was groggy. He walked to Times Square and sat on a bench to gaze at the vast screens. A group of teenagers were taking photos with a hologram of Idris Elba. After a little while, he went back to the station, sat in a bar and ordered a coffee. He felt lost and he felt old. A sad old man. He could have started crying right there and nobody would have turned to look at him. He could just not go home that night and Lucía wouldn’t notice, until she needed to berate someone for something. His children would take even longer to notice. Or perhaps they would get used to his absence before they noticed it; they would move around the house, sidestepping the space his body no longer occupied, but which still had a shape. Even invisible, he would probably still get in their way.
‘Sir?’ There was a girl’s face in close-up.
‘Hi,’ replied Pablo, although he couldn’t manage to place her. Nor could he work out if she was twelve years old or twenty-three. His students had the ability to sap his critical faculties entirely. To dim his enthusiasm for anything at all. To turn his world into an abyss. He didn’t even need to have any kind of exchange with them, it happened as soon as he entered the classroom and stood in front of that bland mass of adolescents he was barely able to distinguish as individuals; every day he had to guess which acne-covered face belonged to whom.
‘It’s Kelly,’ she said, with a smile so broad it revealed all her teeth and reminded him of a crocodile.
Pablo taught in one of those high schools that claimed to support the Hispanic community. All the kids spoke Spanish. English too. But badly. Both languages, incredibly badly.
He invited her to sit down, asked her what she was doing there, where she’d come from, and as she rested her neon pink backpack on the table and nattered away about a hip-hop festival in Williamsburg, he managed to locate her in the classroom. Kelly sat at the front; she dressed and behaved like a bitch on heat: ‘Sir, may I…’ she said in English, and the pause was long enough for ‘suck your huge dick and swallow your sweet semen.’ But she never finished the sentence, changed her mind halfway through and shook her little bleach-blonde Puerto Rican head: ‘It’s nothing, sir, no es nada.’ Kelly didn’t have acne, just several generations of second-hand anomie piled up in her brain like a stack of pancakes.
Pablo sighed: ‘Kelly Jane.’
She let out a high-pitched giggle. That wasn’t even her name, she told him later, laughing again. But he didn’t care. From that moment on, he called her Kelly Jane. Because it was more vulgar like that. Like her, with her almond-shaped eyes, her puffy cheeks, her plump red lips: she was a shrine to vulgarity. Seeing her there in the station was captivating, which made sense given the frustrations built up over the course of that afternoon. The time he spent with Kelly Jane felt comfortable. He couldn’t say that she exuded freshness and optimism, not in the slightest: it was comfort, pure and simple. Like sinking into a soft armchair. As if that girl’s face offered his tired eyes – recently flooded with trashy imagery – a terrain they could naturally latch on to.
‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ Lety is now wearing a flowery nightdress.
Pablo had fallen asleep at the dining room table strewn with small dishes: bright red tomato salad, shiny anchovies, black olives, shredded greens, potatoes with cheese and cream sauce, mini sausages, fried pork rinds and yucca.
‘If I eat all this, my arteries will explode, tía.’
The sunlight bounces off something in the garden and dazzles him.
‘But it’s all from the farmers’ market…’
What time was it? Pablo serves himself some salad and hears the sound of the doorbell. Lety grumbles as she gets up from the table and goes to open the door. Elisa. It’s Elisa’s voice, but he can’t hear what she’s saying. Just a constant ‘mm-hmm’ from Lety. The door closes. He prays Lety hasn’t invited Elisa in. She hasn’t. She reappears in the kitchen, carrying a tray covered with foil.
‘Your neighbour says she made some bolas de fraile,’ Lety wrinkles her nose up as if something smells bad. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Leave them over there.’
Lety places the tray on the countertop, lifts the foil slightly and peeks inside.
‘Oh,’ she says disinterestedly, ‘they’re doughnuts’.
4
Nobody knows when the huge bank of seaweed formed along the seafront. When the sun came up, there it was: an enormous centipede, damp and dead. It isn’t the first time that seaweed has turned up on the beach, but the amount that gathered in one night is striking. Seaweed washes up when it’s very windy, and the sea churns it up and spits it out. It piles up on the shore, but there’s a tiny truck, the municipal beach cleaner, that comes along early in the morning and clears it all away; not a trace is left. Yes, the truck did do its round that morning, explains the hotel employee behind reception, but the man driving it didn’t feel capable of moving it all on his own.
‘Capable?’ Lucía interrupts him. ‘It’s algae, not anthrax.’
‘Yes, madam,’ he says, ‘and they’re clearing the rest of it now.’
‘But it’s too sunny now; we’ve missed the good hours.’
The employee looks at her blankly. Lucía adds:
‘The hours that don’t give you cancer.’
The employee takes a sheet of paper out of the desk, signs it and holds it out to her.
‘The hotel would like to apologise, and to make up for the inconvenience, invites you to enjoy our brunch today free of charge.’
‘Food?’ Lucía has her arms crossed; there’s no way she’s taking that voucher. She’s not even annoyed, she just wants to make her opinion known: that the hotel is second-rate and the guy dealing with her is an insect, buzzing nonsense. Rosa leans against her hip, causing her to lose her balance. Lucía pushes her away and continues:
‘Do you think you can make it up to me with food?’
Rosa leans more firmly against her and Lucía pushes her away again. ‘Who wants food?’
‘I want food,’ says Rosa.
Lucía leans down, presses a finger to Rosa’s lips. ‘Shh.’
Rosa complains, says that it hurts. And that she’s hungry.
The children are fed up. They wanted to go to the beach or the pool. They wanted Cindy to come, but Lucía didn’t think it was necessary.
‘Brunch