Fish
When people talk about the smells of their childhood, most of them talk about coffee, freshly baked bread, chocolate, new notebooks, and just-sharpened pencils. I could talk about those smells, too, but I was born and grew up (and once died) in Lima, and so my childhood is marked by another smell: dead fish.
Lima smells like fish.
I remember how the smell arrived before the sun, so strong that it woke me up some days. As we ate breakfast, the smell became thick, almost solid, turning the dark mornings the color of a cleaned fish, of steel hooks wrapped in gills and tripe. I remember looking at the fish-smell sky while my mother packed my lunch, an early-rising cuckoo singing in the background.
The smell touched everything. It got under our skin.
At school we made faces at each other, grimacing, revolted but laughing, since in childhood, disgust always leads to laughter. It’s only with age that we learn to treat disgust seriously, that sometimes the right response to disgust is rage.
Wrapped in our gray uniforms, we sat in the humid patio and talked about the smell. We said it came from a fishmeal factory, and that while we were at recess, somewhere else an infinite line of fish was getting chopped to bits with enormous knives, guts and scales flying from the conveyor belt into the factory workers’ eyes. Someone said no, the factory made the fish we had to eat at home, and we laughed again, flattening our child mouths in disgust.
I once heard a poet say that Lima smells like a whore. I was still in primary school, and after that our morning discussions of fish smell had a new component: whore smell. When you’re young it’s hard to imagine a whore. You can recognize them because you know they wear low-cut dresses and stand on street corners, but you can’t understand what they do. At recess we worked on our knowledge of prostitutes. Some of my classmates said the fish smell came from their mouths. Others thought it came from their sweat, and a few better-informed claimed it started between their legs.
I remember a morning one winter when the smell was so strong it was news.
The sea had spat out thousands of fish. They covered the shore, each one a scale of a giant fish beached on the Peruvian coast.
The fish were dark, and shone blue and silver, like metal. I remember how they looked on our JVC television, full-color, with a remote control. We’d gotten it brand-new that year.
I watched people in bright clothes go to the beaches with bright buckets to collect the fish. Everyone went home happy, buckets full, and I imagined them feasting for months, eating ceviche, sudado, escabeche, croquettes, fish with garlic…
“Mamá,” I said. “We should go get fish on the beach, too.”
My mother, when she replied, sounded very serious. “What are you thinking? When the sea spits out fish, it means they were sick. These fish are rotten inside.”
I kept watching the people on the news, smiling with their buckets of fish. Some were interviewed while standing barefoot among the fish, sweating and covered with scales. They said this was their second trip to the shore, that they’d eaten the fish and it was good, it was delicious, there was no danger at all.
I didn’t want to eat the fish anymore, but I wanted to know how it felt to bury my feet in them. I wanted to touch the rejected fish, slip on their fat bodies and sharp scales. I wanted to let the fish into my pores, to roll in them, breathe in their smell, which was the smell of Lima. I wanted the fish smell inside me for good. Mostly, I wanted to see them. I wanted to look at the miles of beached fish, stretching down the shore like the dead on D-Day. I wanted to see whether all the fish were truly dead. Maybe a few were alive, flapping their gills.
I never saw them. I never found out.
I never knew whether the city government cleaned up the fish or the people did. For a long time, I imagined them rotting, and later I imagined people picking up the skeletons to make bracelets or necklaces.
From then on my childhood smelled of fish and of whores. It’s marked by the day of the fish, which had such a big impact on me as a child. It thrilled me then, but as the years go by, it’s turned into a sad, dark story.
When I see the fish through adult eyes, I see a poor country that grinned through a crisis; a country that celebrated the chance to collect beached fish on a winter morning because those fish would feed so many families. The image of the fish returns in my head, and I disappear into a tangle of pain, picturing all the bodies beached by terrorism in the sierra, the poor and the dead who crossed the screen of the color television all those mornings of my childhood, and who return now, like a postcard from Lima, full of indifference and pain.
Plasticine Dreams
It seems the cold, dark winter has ended. Today, finally, it felt like spring. I sat on a park bench waiting for something to happen and, like always, something did: I heard a lawn mower.
A boy my age appeared suddenly and began cutting the grass with a machine I’d never seen before. It wasn’t the usual machine, the one you have to push while you walk across the lawn. This was more interesting. It was a tube with a propeller on one end, and as the propeller whirled it cut the grass at high speed. The kid was an artist, a grass stylist. He held the tube level and, with a firm hand, glided it slowly over the grass. His movements were so smooth and perfect that he seemed part of the machine. It seemed he extended his arm and, magically, the grass cut itself. He walked up and down the park, tracing his own path several times, like me pacing my house. At the end, he’d left the grass completely even. It looked like the head of a young soldier who’s just joined the army, his green hair newly buzzed.
I applauded from my bench. I wanted to thank him for his magic trick. He gestured to the machine, then put a hand on his stomach and bowed, like an actor before the curtain falls.
Then the second act began.
The kid returned with a similar machine, another tube, but this time he wore a strange sort of backpack. It was a vacuum. He collected the cut grass in the backpack, and I watched him trace his steps around the park, entertaining myself with the vision of the cut grass flying into the machine like green rain. When he was done, he emptied the contents of his backpack into a sack and twisted it shut.
I applauded again and he bowed like before, then disappeared.
I’d gone to the theater by mistake.
Then came the smell of cut grass, which I’ve always loved. Every time someone mows a lawn, that smell spreads everywhere, turning the whole world green and new. It’s like we’re all wrapped in the freshly clipped grass. I stayed a while, breathing deeply, storing the greenness inside me, like a line from a poem: Green body, green hair.
•
(Photosynthesis)
•
In the part of the year when it never gets dark, the plants are constantly active. They can’t rest. Sap flows through their veins and stems all day. Chlorophyll courses, sticks to their pores, spreads through the air. It happens to me, too. In spring, my blood moves violently, and my physical activity — and mental, which at times I still have — speeds to a wild gallop. Then my rampant insomnia begins.
The last time this happened, I stayed awake so long that the skin on my head went numb. When I looked in the mirror, I saw an illustration from the anatomy books I like so much. I saw my veins and arteries defined perfectly, and brilliant blood streaming through them while I moved. I saw my muscles holding back this torrent of blood, like dikes on the banks of a river. My thoughts filled with clouds and a thick veil of fog covered my eyes, obscuring the world around me. The vertigo kept going. Light entered me like a wave, and photosynthesis began. Fluid moved through the roots of my body, through every nerve and joint, filling me from stem to leaf. I was a plant. I moved myself into a stream of cold water for a few minutes, feeling the weight of each drop on my skull. The water ran down my neck and face, over my cold eyes, like it had turned into my own exhaustion, my prolonged vigil, like it had become liquid thought. I was soaked in thought. Thoughts sank into my pores and pooled in my feet, warm now, part of my blood, whirling through me in an eternal spiral.
In the park I can see the grass growing, sped-up and sleepless, like me in the spring.
A green plasticine giant appears in my head. His steps don’t make any sound, but his thick green footsteps appear in the grass, spreading like some dense, soft mass that sticks to the ground. He takes a lawn mower from his pocket, the same as the one I just saw, and I watch him begin to trim the other plants and trees. I lie on the bench and look closely at the grass, which has become a multitude of green humans, insomniacs, standing and praying for sleep. The giant walks over them, cutting off their heads one by one. With every slice, there’s a drop of blood.
A girl sees him from her bench and applauds. The giant takes her in his hands and rocks her until she falls asleep. The two of them breathe the smell of blood together.
The bench feels as soft as the giant’s belly, and I stretch and climb to my feet. I’ve seen a lot today. I think I’m ready to sleep.
•••
Claudia Ulloa Donoso is a Peruvian writer. In 1996 she won the Terminemos short-story competition organized by the Unión Latina, the Spanish Consulate in Lima, and El Comercio newspaper. In 1998 she won the El cuento de las 1,000 palabras competition, organized by the magazine Caretas (Lima). In 2016 she was selected as writer in residence at Villa Sarkia, a residence for translators and writers in Finland. Her stories have appeared in various Peruvian, Mexican, and Spanish magazines and anthologies. She currently teaches languages in northern Norway.
Lily Meyer is a writer and translator from Washington, DC. She’s a regular reviewer for NPR Books and a contributing writer for Electric Literature. Her work appears online in The Atlantic, Longreads, Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker, Tin House, and more.
“Fish” and “Plasticine Dreams” appear here in English by permission of the translator and author, and were originally published in Spanish in the collection Pajarito.