As if they were socks, hundreds of fish hung, held with clothespins, from the strings that the neighbors had stretched from one corner to the other of their unequal facades. Some still retained their silver shine; others, already brown, were completely consumed. The girl looked up: there were also fish on the clotheslines on the roofs, many fish.
“They are fliers,” his mother explained. Come on, let’s go.
—¿Volaores?
—Yes, they have wings.
I wasn’t lying: they were flying fish that crossed the Strait of Gibraltar around July. The fishermen of La Línea de la Concepción catch them, with traps or seines, and the neighbors dry them in the sun, preferably when the west wind blows because the east wind, which usually clouds the skies, leaves the fish more yellowish, because of the humidity.
Holding hands, they crossed a couple of streets: more fish, fish on every corner, but it didn’t smell bad. It was hot, and yet every so often a fresh wind stirred. They passed a man walking naked from the waist up and women carrying shopping bags. He smelled of stew and midday. The houses were one story; The sidewalks were narrow, and the cars thundered, leaving a trail of electronic or flamenco sounds, and a smell of fuel that made the girl’s nose itch. That year, Spain attracted millions of tourists, but along La Línea you couldn’t hear the wheels of the suitcases hitting the ground; In fact, Cádiz had not yet become fashionable, and Zahara de los Atunes was a small fishing village where the wind ruled.
They ended up on the beach, and the sensation of freshness intensified. The pounding of the waves. The mother took off her shoes, she said that she wanted to step on that dark sand. They walked a few meters towards the shore and, suddenly, the girl felt something similar to fear, because the unexpected always scares a little, and she did not expect that a very tall and pointed rock would rise above the sea like a gigantic crustacean. That didn’t enter his head: everyone knew that the mountains were in the countryside and that the fish lived in the sea, without flying, because when flying, the birds flew.
“Mistress, look,” the girl warned her, pointing to a syringe.
They had been about to step on it. It was the first time that she had warned an adult about a serious danger and she had warned none other than her mother, who had been so attentive to unforeseen events on the road that she had been in the car. His mother always traveled tensely, with her back leaning towards the dashboard, and every now and then, with an urgent cry, she would startle the father with indications of dangers that were, in reality, unlikely: a car that, in the distance, was slowing slightly. the speed, a truck coming in front, the warning of a traffic sign. Her intention was not bad, but she only served to generate nervousness. In any case, these situations did not upset the girl because she loved seeing her mother with glasses, and she only wore them when they got in the car.
—Nuria, don’t tell your father that we have come to the beach.
Back at the hospital, they once again occupied the same plastic chairs they had been sitting in before leaving.
-I liked it a lot.
-The fact that?
-The walk.
Afterwards, she busied herself with her bag. She sniffed every object she took out: a lipstick, a purse, a glasses case. From time to time you could hear a cough and, until it became muffled, the incessant tapping of the fans against the women’s chests. Apparently it was very hot in there; in fact, that was the reason they had gone out for a walk. Let’s get away from her, Nuria is going to get sick here, her mother told her aunts.
At some point, a voice asked about the Villanueva family. They went out into the corridor and gathered around a doctor with long blonde hair. She was holding up a clear plastic jar closed with a yellow lid. Inside, a stick about six inches long and thick like a marker. The woman explained that they had taken it out of the right eye of the patient – the girl’s uncle – and that she would be fine, but that she would not be able to recover the lost vision. They all looked at the stick and shook their heads.
“It doesn’t seem like he’s going to suffer any more consequences, he’s been lucky,” the woman added. Do you want the souvenir branch?
It was then when, for the first time that day, the girl felt the heat that the adults in that hospital had mentioned so much. She felt sweat on the back of her neck and in the palms of her hands and was afraid she would lose her balance. She did not know if anyone wanted to keep that boat, which seemed horrible to her.
Indeed, his uncle had been very lucky: the cork oak branch from which he fell was six meters and ninety centimeters high. They know exactly because, as soon as he recovered, he went to measure it himself. He was never afraid to climb trees and he continued being a cork-cutter for a few more years.
—Be careful, mistress, you’re going to trip over the curb.
It exasperated Nuria that Matilde was always stuck to the corners, to the tree pits, to the postboxes. Even though the street was wide, she was always around the obstacles. She walked lost in thought, with her head towards the ground. She never left her side if she crossed paths with someone, she did not take into account that it was better to separate herself from the bike path, she did not detect the raised tiles or the potholes in the asphalt. Her way of acting forced Nuria to remain in a constant state of alert.
—I’m not falling, don’t scare me anymore.
Nuria pursed her lips and shook her head. She only wanted to avoid new fractures, but, for a few weeks, her mother had been repeating to her that her fears were limiting, and she was getting on her nerves. She was convinced that she had discovered that self-help speech in some cheap magazine. She couldn’t help but remember that as a child she was always the last to get parental permission to go on trips with her class, that as a teenager she always had to be the first to return home, and that even as an adult, When they said goodbye at an intersection, her mother would wait for the traffic light to turn green so she could see her reach the other side of the street.
They had breakfast at the usual bar. Nuria paid, wiped herself well with a paper napkin to make sure there were no traces of tortilla in the corner of her mouth, and when she was pushing the suitcase towards the door she stopped because her mother had begun to give explanations about the trip to the two waiters who were tending the bar that morning. As his tone of voice was quite loud, the dozen people who were in the cafeteria at that moment ended up knowing about the stops they would make, about the heat that at that point in June was lulling the Ronda mountain range to sleep, about the date on which They planned to return. The waiters smiled at her mother and responded to her comments with good wishes for her vacation, while they checked out of the corner of their eyes to make sure there were no customers waiting to be served. Nuria recognized that they appreciated her and knew that they shared confidences with her. They knew her impatience—many times, upon entering, she would order without paying attention to whether anyone was in front of her—but they also sensed that she was interested in them, and that, normally, she was a happy person, possessed of a certain involuntary humor. Nuria waited outside the bar, with a serious expression, leaning on her large suitcase, for Matilde to conclude the conversation.
They waited on the platform much longer than necessary because Matilde argued that we had to go to the places with plenty of time. The train stopped, they looked for their car and, first of all, Nuria got on with the large suitcase. She didn’t want her mother to carry her own luggage, so she convinced her that it would be best to carry just one large bag instead of two small ones. In fact, she was worried that she could fall down the escalators at Chamartín or Atocha or María Zambrano and she thought it was good for her to travel with her hands free. After placing the suitcase, she helped Matilde get on, who, as soon as she entered the car, began to ask the first passengers she met about the location of her seats. Nuria hated that she behaved that way. On the one hand, she felt that he ignored her ability to resolve those situations, and on the other, she believed it was obvious that she betrayed her intention to engage in conversation. Normally, people were friendly, but from time to time her mother would run into people who were bitter, or weighed down by some kind of superiority complex, who ignored her or gave her a dirty look. When Nuria perceived this indifference, she felt like facing those strangers, and, at the same time, she became angry with her mother for exposing herself to such unpleasant situations; but Matilde did not get upset if someone did not answer her because she tended to think that they had not heard her, and if she detected, because it was obvious, that they had not wanted to answer her, she then seemed to feel sorry for the stupidity of others, a wise attitude, very far removed from impulse. Nuria’s confrontation.
They finally took their seats. Matilde adopted a certain air of worldliness — she put on her glasses, took a novel out of her bag and immersed herself in reading — because she was going on a long trip. Sometimes she would look up, look at the landscape through the window and seem absent. She Nuria thought she knew how she felt. The train trips, although it was not the first they took together, retained their exoticism because they, for many years – a period that covered Matilde’s early youth and maturity and Nuria’s childhood and early youth – did not travel; They simply went to town. Her father would load the car some early morning in the summer and they would set out, before dawn, to cross the peninsula from north to south. The journey along those national roads was exhausting, but the excitement kept them in good spirits. At that time they preferred to travel by car because it was cheaper and because they could carry suitcases, bags with gifts for cousins, a refrigerator with hard-boiled eggs and fresh water, a toiletry bag, boxes of shoes, packages of coffee that an acquaintance sent to relatives from Jimena de la Frontera, his father’s town, who often visited from his mother’s nearby town, where they had their house. They only allowed themselves to go to a beach on the Costa del Sol a couple of times. They ate at a beach bar and the vacation finally looked like the vacation of the advertisements and of Nuria’s classmates. Matilde, half an islander, closely linked to the sea, was happy during those days. She approached the shore and, after much fuss because the water always tasted cold to her, she crouched down for a moment to get wet. Although she grew up with one foot on the beach of Maspalomas and another in Estepona, where her father, who was a civil guard, was assigned, she never learned to swim. She traveled everything as a child, Matilde.
—It’s going well on the train, right? —Nuria asked.
—On the bus we would have gone better.
—I can’t last seventeen hours on the bus with these masks.
—Well, I do: you sit down and ignore it, and you don’t have to keep your suitcases up and down.
Nuria had promised not to argue during the trip and avoided telling her that she always found fault with everything she decided.
“Look,” he said, lowering his head and opening the book he had left on his lap, “when I read, the mask goes up to my eyes.” She wrinkled her nose several times, as if she were a small rodent.
Nuria smiled. Her mother often seemed like a little girl to him.
—Adjust it better, mistress.
Heather-roofed huts where Uncle Gabriel milked the goats, cured the cheeses, and kept the brass jugs; a green Land Rover behind a gigantic truck loaded with corks; rabbits hanging from men’s belts; a large room in which her aunt Pepa’s five male children took a nap, the thick smell of that room, which she associated with that of rancid milk, the boots at the foot of the cots; her cousin Reyes, with her black, curly hair, laughing on the back of a ram; the darkness of those leafy fields of Jimena de la Frontera in broad daylight; the rocks that made their way from the bottom of the earth; some peacocks that scared her; a bowl of stew soup with mint; crystal glasses scratched from use; a fountain with a spout — drink from the cup of your hand and always make sure there are no bugs before pouring the water into your mouth. Nuria remembered those images while the silhouette of the Sierra Salvada appeared imposing on the other side of the train windows.
He also remembered one night at the Jimena fair: his father was holding a glass of Sanlúcar manzanilla, as if he had forgotten that he could place it on the small round table they occupied. He couldn’t take his eyes off the singer who was entertaining the festival venue that night; However, Nuria understood that, in reality, her father was not looking at that man, sitting very upright on a cane chair; Her father looked towards some lost moment of his youth or his childhood or a past that did not even belong to him, because she knew that sometimes, when listening to the song, you can travel to the very center of the forests, and she knew that it was It is possible to lose your sight in the flames of a low bonfire, around which broken voices resonate that reveal the ultimate meaning of the blackness of the night. And she knew, without anyone having to explain it to her, that, in those moments, what really passes through hearts is a deep lament that has crossed time since ancient times.
They arrived in Malaga, after a tight transfer because the AVE stopped shortly after leaving Madrid behind: someone had stolen the copper from the tracks, something—stealing copper, like in the fifties—that ruined the impression of cosmopolitanism that had been created. Nuria’s representative.
They stayed in a downtown hotel. They shared a room, satisfied by the small adventure that sleeping away from home meant, as if they were not resting on those beds, but rather the women they were: the one who left behind her first youth without having barely traveled and the one who reached her first youth with hardly any. having traveled
