Tajo eats the little dolphin
During those months, Marcela not only made Tajo eat more fish, but also taught them how to fish. Next to the booth there was a small beach, Marcela's personal universe. They spent long nights in silence with the rods stuck in the sand, waiting for something to bite, while they looked at the stars. They rarely spoke (talking was not Marcela's formative style). One night they had a big bite. It was a little dolphin. It was impossible not to be aware that the little animal was a child, and that it was a mammal, a cousin if they wanted to see it like that. Marcela did not give up and told Tajo that it was good to eat. Tajo hesitated, but ended up agreeing to watch the little animal die on the shore, cut it open and roast it. When they ate its meat it tasted different from that of other fish, they didn't know if it was due to scruples or because its organic structure and flavor really were different. Melancholy invaded Tajo. Back home at night they went to the big beach to rinse their mouth profusely, and before the moon, the waves and the stars they cried loudly to the fish kid. They ran back on the bike and did many laps around the town before going to sleep. In bed they also tossed and turned, and many dreams invaded them as their eyes closed. In one of them, which seemed to have lasted for hours and hours, Tajo was on the beach and the sea began to roar. The frequency of the sound was low and wide, as if it came from the bottom of the ocean. There were a lot of people on the beach, and the waves began to get bigger and rounder. They knew it was not a tsunami because the sea had not receded. Then all the animals of the sea came out to the shore forming a huge line, the biggest ones on the side where Tajo was, the smallest ones on the other end of the sandbank. Tajo felt that the whales and dolphins knew what they have done, and that they were killing themselves as revenge. Tajo woke up in sweat in the middle of the night, the cat's paws on their face, purring loudly. Tajo pushed the cat away complaining. They went back to sleep. They dreamed of the sea again. This time they were on a small beach between sharp cliffs, inside a small stone house carved into the rock at the top of the cliff. It was their little hermit refuge, and there they had lived forever, according to the dream. In the house there was only a table and a chair, and a small kitchen, in which making a fire was almost impossible, due to the humidity. Tajo took from their sleep the strong smell of wetness that was their natural state there. Wet like the fish. In the dream, they felt their own juicy flesh due to the constant presence of a great density of water. Their muscles softening from the habit of sleeping next to the waves. The foam fringes always slipping through the small window, which had no glass. Their hair was heavy and shiny, and their porous skin looked like a bag of grease. Tajo gave the feeling that the only thing that separated their body from rotting was its own internal heat. And that is why in the dream there was no bed in the small room of the small house at the top of the cliff, because if they had slept in it, surely the corpse would have taken possession of their body.
