“He would say ‘My back hurts’ and they’d help him lie down on his back, with his head propped up on a cushion, in case he coughed up phlegm. Lying there, he stopped listening to them. He watched the clouds slowly crawling by; he wondered if they were coming or going. And where to. Hours passed, days passed, clouds passed and Titi wished that one would stop and furiously empty itself onto him. Until he was swept away; until there was nothing left.”
All of Colombian author Margarita Garcia Robayo’s books linger in the mind after reading, stubbornly taking up space long after they should have gone, and it’s fitting that her story ‘Worse Things’, about a boy who takes up too much space, should be one of the most enduring of all.
Titi, the heartbreaking protagonist of the story, was born overweight and that only gets worse as he gets older, much to the chagrin of his sporty father and his despairing mother. By the age of fourteen, he is seventeen stone and has developed an unsightly allergic skin condition to boot. He is scorned by his peers and pitied by his teachers.
By sixteen, his obesity has progressed even further and Titi spends his days at home playing video games while being looked after by a nurse, excluded from mainstream school for being overweight, and rejected from the local “special” school as he doesn’t have any learning difficulties to speak of. He is now so overweight that he has developed a lung condition and a high voice due to his voice box being swallowed up in fat. He no longer leaves his room. This persists for years until, finally, he asks the nurse and his uncle to take him outside, something his mother would not approve of.
The two men take him to the park, drink beer with him, talk to him about girls and try to treat him as normally as possible. But Titi, trapped within his immense body and his miserable and isolated mind, cannot relate to them. He just lies on the ground and imagines the clouds above opening and the water washing him away.
Robayo writes best about characters isolated within themselves from those who love them, and Titi, whose isolation is mirrored in his physicality, is the prototypal Robayan protagonist. Inspiring both contempt and pity at once in the reader, Robayo successfully keeps the narrative balanced enough so that the narrative voice never comes down on one side or the other. She is one to learn from and one to watch as she inevitably gains the recognition she deserves in the English-speaking world.
First Published in Cosas Peores, 2014. First collected in English in Fish Soup, Charco Press, 2018
A Personal Anthology 