Against God

On Sundays Charo put the cocido on before Mass and left it in the care of Saint Anthony, whose plastic picture had been stuck above the cooker hood since 1971.

Lucía knew because she could smell chickpeas from the first-floor landing. She would come out of the pool with her hair still damp under her woolly hat, chlorine up her nose, and the smell of bacon, chorizo and cabbage would land on her in the stairwell like a hand on the shoulder. Forty years she'd been climbing those stairs. The smell hadn't changed. The stairs had: they were worn hollow in the middle.

Charo lived on the second floor, in a building in Saint-Gilles where there had been no other Spaniards since Señora Paquita went off to die in Almería. Three rooms, tiles everywhere, doilies under anything that would take one. In the living room, Manuel's armchair, empty, his flat cap resting on the arm. Charo didn't touch it. Nobody sat in it. The first year, Zoé had called it ghost grandad's chair, and Charo had laughed so hard she'd had to sit down.

The door was open. It always was, on Sundays, between twelve and half past.

“You're wet,” Charo said from the kitchen, without turning round. “You'll catch your death.”

“Hello, Mum.”

“Hello, my love. Lay the table. The everyday plates, not the good ones. The good ones are for Easter.”

Charo was eighty. She stood one metre fifty-two, had once stood one metre fifty-six, and held herself straighter than her daughter. On Sundays she wore a black dress, a gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe, and slippers that she swapped for patent shoes the exact second the doorbell went. She had been a widow for three and a half years. She said it without complaint, the way she'd have said she was born in Triana: a fact, an address.

She had just come back from the Spanish Mass. Lucía hadn't been since she was fifteen, but she knew the scene by heart, because Charo described it to her every week. It was all white hair and Latin Americans now. The priest was Colombian, he talked too fast. The Ecuadorian women sang flat but with feeling. The old Spaniards of 1962 were dying one after another and their funerals were read out at the end, after the collection. This Sunday it had been a man called Ginés, from Jaén, who had worked with Manuel on a building site in Uccle.

“He had hands like shovels,” said Charo, tasting the broth. “Your father used to say he could carry a sack of cement in each hand and a wheelbarrow in his teeth.”

“Dad exaggerated.”

“Your father never exaggerated in his life. He was from Triana. He made things smaller than they were.”

Thomas and Zoé arrived at a quarter to one, with a tart from the bakery on the square and a bottle of Rioja that Charo pronounced too expensive before she'd even seen the label. She kissed Thomas on both cheeks, up on her toes, and told him he'd lost weight. She had told him so every Sunday since 2004. He had put on seven kilos.

They ate Charo's way, in three courses that were really one: the broth with vermicelli first, then the chickpeas and cabbage, then the meat, the bacon, the black pudding, the chorizo, piled on a big dish in the middle of the table, and everyone dug in with their forks, and Charo kept an eye on who wasn't having black pudding.

Zoé never had black pudding.

“You're too thin,” Charo told her.

“Granny, I've got something to tell you.”

Lucía saw it coming and did nothing to stop it. She was tired. She'd had four hours' sleep. She thought Zoé would bring up the test, Charo would roll her eyes, and that would be the story of the week.

“Mum's got her results. For the DNA. She's 98% Iberian.”

“Of course she's Iberian,” said Charo. “She's from Seville.”

“Yes, but now it's proven. Scientifically.”

“I proved it before they did. Nine months I spent proving it.”

Thomas laughed into his napkin. Zoé wouldn't let go. She explained the matches, the three hundred and twelve cousins, the centimorgans, how you could find people in your family you'd never met, and what a shame it was Granny hadn't done hers, because with hers they could have seen which cousins came from her side and which from Grandad's.

“You can still do it, Granny. Mum kept it. It's in her desk.”

Charo put down her spoon.

She didn't drop it, she put it down, flat, beside her plate, perfectly parallel to the knife, the way she did things when she wanted to buy time. Lucía knew that move. It was the move for the school report, the first cigarette, the boy who had phoned one night at ten o'clock. The spoon first. Then the sentence.

“You don't ask God where you come from,” said Charo. “He knows. That's enough.”

“But it's not God, it's a lab. In Texas, I think.”

“Then it's worse.”

She picked up her spoon again and helped herself to broth when everyone else was on the meat. Zoé looked at her mother. Lucía gave her a small look: leave it.

“Your grandfather,” Charo said after a while, “got to Charleroi in 1962 with a cardboard suitcase and a paper from the consulate. He went eight hundred metres underground the next Monday. Eight hundred metres. And do you know what he used to say? He used to say: I know where I come from. I come from up top. And up he came.”

“It wasn't eight hundred metres,” said Lucía. “It was six hundred.”

“It was eight hundred.”

“You said a minute ago he made things smaller than they were.”

Charo looked at her over her glasses. There was a second where it could have gone either way. Then Charo burst out laughing, her throaty laugh, an old Sevillian woman's laugh, the kind that brought tears to her eyes, and Lucía laughed with her, and Thomas, and even Zoé, who didn't know why.

“Six hundred, eight hundred,” said Charo, wiping her eyes. “For your father it was the bottom. The bottom's the bottom.”

After coffee, while Thomas dried up and Charo explained to him that he was drying up wrong, Lucía stayed on her own in the living room with the empty armchair.

On the sideboard was the wedding photo, 1961, Triana, two skinny kids in their Sunday best outside a church. And next to it, in a gilt frame, a photo of a baby in a christening gown too big for her, on the knee of a forty-year-old Charo who was smiling the way you smile at a miracle. That was the family word. Lucía was el milagro. Charo had had her at nearly forty, after years when nothing came. Lucía didn't know how many years, or what “nothing came” meant. You didn't ask Charo that sort of question. You asked Manuel even less, because he went out on the balcony for a smoke whenever the conversation headed that way.

She touched the frame with her fingertip. She had delivered two thousand babies. She knew what “nothing came” meant. Miscarriages. One, two, more. Sheets changed in the night. Pregnancies you stopped announcing. For the first time she wondered how many, and was ashamed of wondering like a midwife, with a number, and she stopped.

In the hallway Charo was humming a very old tune as she put away the everyday plates.

That night Zoé was asleep, Thomas was marking at the kitchen table with a green pen because he found red humiliating, and Lucía, in bed, opened Filiora again.

She hadn't touched it since Tuesday. She had slept, worked two nights, swum, forgotten. But there had been the spoon. The spoon laid flat. And something in those three hundred and twelve names had bothered her on Tuesday, in the kitchen, without her knowing what.

This time she searched. She knew exactly who she was looking for.

Nadia García. Her cousin. The daughter of Uncle Juan, Charo's brother, who had followed his sister to Belgium in 1964 and ended up a foreman at a printing works in Forest. Nadia was thirty-eight, with three kids, a voice that carried, and a passion for sharing everything. In 2024 she had done the test. Lucía remembered because Nadia had shouted it in the family group chat one Saturday night, with a screenshot and a row of emojis. Lucía scrolled back through the group on her phone until she found the message.

“Filiora!!! 89% Iberian, 6% North African, 5% Italian (??) dad says it's wrong, the Garcías aren't Italian”

Filiora. The same site. Lucía typed “García” into the search bar on her matches. There were eleven. A María García from Valencia, a Pedro García in Chile, Garcías from Murcia, from Madrid, from Granada. No Nadia. She typed “Nadia”. Nothing. She typed “Forest”, “Belgium”, “Brussels”. Two distant matches, in Antwerp and Namur, names she didn't know.

She tried initials, in case Nadia had used a username. She scrolled through the whole list, three hundred and twelve names, looking at every photo, every silhouette. She knew Nadia's face. She'd have recognised it however small, however blurred.

In the kitchen, Thomas's green pen scratched at the paper.

A first cousin. Her mother's brother's daughter. Lucía knew the figures, vaguely, the way you know figures you've never needed: a first cousin shares about an eighth. An eighth isn't nothing. It isn't a ghost in a list. It's a line at the top, in bold, with a label.

Lucía switched off the screen. She switched it back on. She raised her index finger to her right ear and stayed like that, in the dark, looking at the screen.

Nadia wasn't on the list.