Fiction by Fabiana Elisa Martínez
I never told you about the onion soup. How I craved it and how I came to abhor it. You asked about my aversion to white towels. This story is less sinister, though. I was never again able to approach a table displaying that dish since that late September in 1940, when ironically that was the only meal I would have, even if the crew had served it for breakfast. At first, I attributed the inexplicable craving to my permanent state of surprise and elation, to the waves of adrenaline swaying in my heart just as I recreated and foresaw the intrepid, ardent nights your grandfather and I were waving under the changing sky. The new constellations prying through our second-class porthole were not the only elements transitioning during our trip. The breeze had also dropped its autumn cloak once we passed the Canary Islands, and even its salty flavor preannounced the spring I would meet in Buenos Aires.
But my craving for onion soup did not respond to the changing parade of hours as we moved steadily into southwestern waters, and I detached myself from Lisbon, as Sarita’s polka-dotted handkerchief, waving her newlywed friend goodbye, faded in my memory. This was not the typical Portuguese onion broth that my grandmother used to prepare to enhance the flavor of our meager chickens in the Alentejo. This was a French dish your grandfather described to me with every atom of elegance and bad accent he could produce. I don’t remember it well. A brownish, thick, and sweet concoction, crowned by a golden piece of fried bread drowning in the golden magma of melting cheese. I wonder if my obsession with the soup sprouted when your grandfather decided to stop talking to me in my language and resort to Spanish so I would be ready for my new life. I sensed a change beyond the salty air.
Anyway, after the two first weeks of waves, wet recliners on a crowded deck, and late dinners in the second-class dining salon, I only wanted to have onion soup. None of the other delicacies tempted my appetite: the roasted meats, the yellow beets, the abundant selections of chocolate cakes and bonbons that were always sliced and tried before by the silent first-class travelers. That third week of my honeymoon, the boat took revenge on my happiness, and a stubborn sickness pushed away the new bride’s effusiveness. The tides in my heart were replaced by a whirlpool of vertigo that only the caramelized onions in the soup seemed to appease.
“Come on! We are wasting the music,” your grandfather would say pulling my arm while I resisted, anchored to my chair, and regarded the musicians with a hooded apologetic look. “I cannot dance, all is moving under my feet, darling,” I muttered every time, covering my mouth with a white napkin preluding an inelegant accident. I marked my muffled words with inappropriate hiccups more proper of the inferior classes sleeping already in the belly of the boat. Your grandfather always thought that a rumba, a cha-cha, or a tango never danced was a waste, an irretrievable killed opportunity. Perhaps due to my sickness or because of his metropolitan nature, he did not hesitate to ask any other available young lady. His young Portuguese wife could not understand the urgency of a handsome gentleman who knew how to play the keyboard of women’s spines better than all the Cole Porters they might be in love with.
The sea continued to rock us, the sky, the carefree dancing partners of your grandfather, and my uneasiness until we approached the new city. I had been told that it would look like a mix of Paris and New York inside a kaleidoscope. I had created in my mind a golem-like landscape with parts of big metropolises that I did not know. As tempted as I was, I tried to spare the image I fathomed of any lacy sections of Lisbon. But the sky got dark and darker, and when I was able to climb to the deck under the call of multiple sirens, I just saw a black, pervasive cloud of smog, factory chimneys, and an immense port. The countless accents of the arriving immigrants seemed to leave their print on a carpet of soot.
I craved one last time the sweetness of the onion soup, as a melancholic smile followed my vision that onions can also make you cry when you think about them. My husband was showing the profile of his city to his dance companion from the previous night, a Dutch beauty who did not understand a word he said but looked at him with the same awe that I felt when, only two months ago, he had rescued me from a broken shoe at the entrance of the café A Brasileira.
Our boat, my crib of love and dizziness, docked at three o’clock on a grey Friday afternoon. By then, I knew that the black cloud was an omen, that your grandfather was a spoiled soul in disguise, and that the real vessel had always been inside me. I was rocking your mother and half of your soul, my child, in her. All maternal grandmothers cuddle half of their granddaughters in their bellies like Russian dolls marching in a revolution of cells. I followed all the wrong temptations, and I am happy I did. You come from a sea of insane love, a broken map of constellations, and the breeze of an unknown hemisphere. You come from me.
Fabiana Elisa Martínez authored the short story collections 12 Random Words and Conquered by Fog, and the grammar book Spanish 360 with Fabiana. Other stories have been published in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder Review, The Halcyone, Hindsight Magazine, Libretto Magazine, and the anthology Writers of Tomorrow.
