After the wedding in Malinalco, the group boarded a 1970s shuttle bus back to Mexico City. I hugged my friends before they boarded their flight back to Los Angeles. I, however, was in search of a good stake out spot. I was spending much of the day in the airport ahead of my redeye to Lima. In the middle of the terminal, an empty row of seats called to me. I selected a seat on the end, looped my arms through my bags, rested my head on top of my luggage, and fell asleep. Hours later, I woke to a family having dinner in takeout containers next to me. I felt like a zombie, punching a hand out of my grave. I had a crick in my neck and an enduring cough that went from dry to wet.
I landed in Lima in the early morning and smelled something I immediately identified as fish. Ceviche and other fish dishes were a famous part of Peruvian gastronomy, so I wondered if the airport was very near the coast, or if, perhaps, there was a large, fresh fish market nearby. Weeks later, while in Chile, I read the final third of “Little Bird” by Peruvian writer Claudia Ulloa Donoso. She named the quality I had identified in her short story, “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, so my childhood is marked by another smell: dead fish. Lima smells like fish.”
— Claudia Ulloa Donoso, Peruvian Writer of “Little Bird”
“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, so my childhood is marked by another smell: dead fish. Lima smells like fish.”
As a child, Ulloa Donoso spent time laughing about the smell with her friends. In elementary school, they heard a poet say, “Lima smells like a whore.” At recess the children wondered how fish could be connected to 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.”
As Ulloa Donoso became an adult, that sense of humor about the smell turned into a well-deserved rage. The smell came from a nearby fishmeal factory and the diseased, rotten fish that washed ashore in the morning. On the local news, people collected the fish in large buckets, to feast on at home. The smell, once a warm sensation of nostalgia, became a sad memory, “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.”